The Great Perfection (rDzogs Chen in Tibetan) is a philosophical and meditative teaching.

A rDzogs-chen interpretation of the sense of self is presented that is grounded in the disciplined method of shamatha-vipashyana meditation. This model of self/non-self agrees with Strawson's analysis as far as the discontinuity of self, but elaborates the momentary self not as any kind of ‘thing', but as an energy process having both particle-like and field-like aspects. The moment-by-moment appearance of a sense of self is described as arising in stages over a finite duration from a background of non-dual (...) intelligence and energy. There are implications for further scientific research into the structure of self-consciousness as well as for the cultivation of individual wisdom and compassion. (shrink)

According to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition ‘The Great Perfection’, we can distinguish between two basic dimensions of mind: an intentional dimension that is divided into perceiver and perceived and a non-dual dimension that transcends all distinctions between subject and object. The non-dual dimension is evident through its intuitional characteristics; an unbounded openness that is free from intentional limitations, a spontaneous luminosity which presences all phenomena, and self-awareness that recognizes the original resonance of beings. Owing to these characteristics, the descriptions of (...) this dimension exemplify an integrative way of speaking about primordial reality, which resolves the assumed dichotomy between kataphatic and apophatic discourses by pointing to a dimension that pervades all phenomena without being identified with any of those. In this article, I intend to discuss the characteristics of the non-dual dimension and their implications for our understanding of human consciousness and the inherent co-emergence of positive and negative perceptions of reality. (shrink)

Sellected collection of tantric canonical texts of the Nyingma order on Rdzogs-chen philosophy.

Commentary on Yon tan rin po cheʼi mdzod text of ʼJigs-med-gliṅ-pa Raṅ-byuṅ-rdo-rje, 1729 or 30-1798, dealing on Rdzogs-chen doctrine of Rñiṅ-ma-pa sect.

This book deals in narrative form with the theme of recovering lost wholeness—with the perennial question of beginnings and what role a human being must play in order to find meaning in his or her life.

‘Ju Mipham Rinpoche, (1846-1912) an important figure in the _Ris med_, or non- sectarian movement influential in Tibet in the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries, was an unusual scholar in that he was a prominent _Nying ma_ scholar and _rDzog_ _chen_ practitioner with a solid dGe lugs education. He took dGe lugs scholars like Tsong khapa and his followers seriously, appreciated their arguments and positions, but also sometimes took issue with them directly. In his commentary to Candrak¥rti’s _Madhyamakåvatåra, _Mi (...) pham argues that Tsong khapa is wrong to take Candrak¥rti’s rejection of the reflexive character of consciousness to be a rejection of the _conventional _existence of reflexive awareness. Instead, he argues, Candrak¥rti only intends to reject the reflexivity of awareness _ultimately_, and, indeed, Mipham argues, it is simply _obvious _that conventionally, consciousness is reflexive. (shrink)

The Essential Jewel of Holy Practice is a vibrant philosophical and ethical poem by one of Tibet’s great spiritual masters. Patrul Rinpoche presents a complete view of the path of liberation from the perspectives of the Madhyamaka understanding of emptiness and the Mahāyāna ideal of compassionate care refracted through the Dzogchen perspective on experience. This yields a sophisticated philosophical approach to practice focusing on the cultivation of clear, open, luminous, empty awareness and of liberation leading to the transformation of one’s (...) moral capacity and sensitivity. Patrul Rinpoche’s verses speak intimately and directly to the reader and inspire one to develop one’s mind for the sake of ethical perfection and liberation. -/- The translators’ introduction provides a foundation for reading the poem and their commentary to the verses assists the reader in understanding Patrul Rinpoche’s allusions and technical terms. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the theory of perceptual cognition laid out by the 7th century Buddhist scholar, Dharmakīrti, in his magnum opus, the Pramāṇavārttika. Like most theories of perception, both ancient and modern, the sensory cognition of ordinary objects is a topic of primary concern. Unlike other theorists, however, Dharmakīrti advances a technical definition of “perception” as a cognition which is both nonconceptual and non-erroneous. Dharmakīrti’s definition of perception is thereby deliberately inclusive of three additional types of “perceptual” cognition, in addition (...) to veridical sensory awareness: the nonconceptual mental apprehension of an immediately-preceding cognition (“mental perception”), the vivid appearance of soteriologically efficacious objects of contemplative practice (“yogic perception”), and the sheer unmediated presence of the contents of cognition—whatever these might be—to the cognizing mind (“reflexive awareness”). Through the logical examination of what it means to be aware of an object, Dharmakīrti demonstrates that the awareness of an object is just the awareness of a phenomenal form or cognitive image produced by that object. Pursuing this analysis further, however, Dharmakīrti argues that the very notion of an object of cognition that exists “externally” or outside the mind is incoherent. Additionally, Dharmakīrti maintains that the phenomenological structure of subject and object—that is, the “first-personal” sense of one’s own cognitions as pertaining to oneself (“for-me-ness”), together with the inseparably concomitant sense that the objects of cognition exist “out there” in an extramental world—is strictly a form of cognitive error. Therefore, because ordinary sensory cognition is inherently structured by this subject-object duality, ordinary sensory cognition must in the final analysis be understood as erroneous. According to Dharmakīrti, in other words, ultimately only the nondual “luminosity” of reflexive awareness is genuinely perceptual, because only reflexive awareness is undistorted by nature. In this way, Dharmakīrti’s epistemology provides a theoretical foundation for the advanced nondual contemplative practices of Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, particularly Mahāmudrā and rDzogs chen. (shrink)

Concept of meditation in Tibetan Buddhism.

Review of Douglas S. Duckworth (2019). Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy of Mind and Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jin Yuelin 金嶽霖 was a Chinese philosopher and logician. From 1914 to 1920 he studied at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University, and received his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia in 1920. From 1921 until 1925, he studied in Europe and visited Great Britain, Germany, France, and Italy, among other countries. During these years, he studied at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences and at the University of Cambridge. At the end of 1925, Jin returned to (...) China and soon became a professor at Tsinghua University, where he began teaching logic in 1926. In 1931–1932, Jin went to Harvard University as a visiting scholar to study logic with the logician Henri M. Sheffer... (shrink)

There are two problematic assumptions in Kripke’s semantic argument against descriptivism. Assumption 1 is that the referential relation of a name to an object is only an objective or metaphysical relation between language and the world; it has nothing to do with the understanding of the name by our linguistic community. Assumption 2 is that descriptivism has to hold that, if name a has its meaning and the meaning is given by one description or a cluster of descriptions, the description (...) should supply a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for determining what a designates; and that it is possible for us to find out such a setof conditions. Emphasizing the sociality, intentionality, conventionality and historicity of language and meaning, this paper rejects Assumption 1, and argues that Assumption 2 is an unfair interpretation of descriptivism, and it is not necessary for descriptivists to hold Assumption 2. This paper finally concludes that Kripke’s semantic argument against descriptivism fails. (shrink)

Cet article reprend la question de la traduction de la racine qrn dans le texte d’Habacuc 3. Le terme hébreu qui désigne à la base les « cornes » semble également pouvoir décrire un phénomène lumineux dans deux textes de la Bible hébraïque : Habacuc 3 et Exode 34. Le présent article propose, premièrement, d’analyser l’usage polysémique de qrn en Ha 3 en étudiant le rôle de cette racine comme attribut divin dans la Bible hébraïque ainsi que dans le Proche-Orient (...) ancien. Deuxièmement, il replace l’utilisation polysémique de qrn dans le cadre socio-historique de rédaction du texte d’Ha 3. L’article propose enfin d’associer cette lecture à l’iconographie royale séleucide, qui utilise notamment les cornes rayonnantes dans leur propagande impériale, comme attesté dans la numismatique. (shrink)

This paper divides the sophisms and paradoxes put forth by Chinese thinkers of the pre-Qin period of China into six groups: paradoxes of motion and infinity, paradoxes of class membership, semantic paradoxes, epistemic paradoxes, paradoxes of relativization, other logical contradictions. It focuses on the comparison between the Chinese items and the counterparts of ancient Greek and even of contemporary Western philosophy, and concludes that there turn out to be many similar elements of philosophy and logic at the beginnings of Chinese (...) and Greek civilizations. (shrink)

Background: Ethical challenges are common in clinical nursing practice, and an infectious environment could put nurses under ethical challenges more easily, which may cause nurses to submit to negative emotions and psychological pressure, damaging their mental health. Purpose: To examine the ethical challenges encountered by nurses caring for patients with the novel coronavirus pneumonia and to provide nurses with suggestions and support regarding promotion of their mental health. Research design and method: A qualitative study was carried out using a qualitative (...) content analysis. The participants were 18 nurses who agreed to attend an interview and describe their own experiences of providing care to COVID-19 patients in China. They were purposively sampled, and structured, in-depth interviews were performed. Data were iteratively collected and analyzed from February to March 2020. Ethical considerations: The proposal was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Second Hospital of Shandong University, China. Findings: The findings revealed three main themes and 10 categories. The themes were the following: ethical challenges ; coping styles ; and impacts on career. Conclusion: Nurses faced ethical challenges on multiple fronts in caring for COVID-19 patients. The results may help nurses with more safety, ethics, and humanistic care in nursing practice. (shrink)

This paper investigates the relationships among board gender diversity, firm performance, and firm size. Our paper provides new insights into the relationship between board gender diversity and firm performance by examining whether firm size alters the impact of board gender diversity on firm performance. We use a panel data from A‐share‐listed non‐financial firms in China to examine the relationship during the period of 2007–2012. Our finding demonstrates that the gender diversity on the board has a positive impact on firm performance (...) if and only if the value of firm size is less than some critical value. In addition, we also find that firm size may undermine the positive impact of board gender diversity on firm performance. This paper contributes to the literature by offering a contingency approach to examine the relationship between board gender diversity and firm performance as well as shedding light on the relationship in the context of a developing economy. (shrink)

Eddy Nahmias, with various collaborators, has used experimental data to argue for the claim that folk intuition is generally compatibilist. We try to undermine this claim in two ways. First, we argue that the various formulations of determinism he uses are not conceptually equivalent, jeopardizing the kinds of conclusions that can be drawn from the resulting data. Second, prompted by these conceptual worries we supplement the typical quantitative surveys that dominate the extant literature with short qualitative interviews. This, in turn, (...) guides us to make a minor modification to the quantitative survey that provides better access to the relevant folk intuitions. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives toward internal and external stakeholders can independently contribute to employee attitudes and behaviors. However, little is known about the joint effects of (in)congruent internal-external CSR strategies on employee outcomes. Drawing from social exchange theory, we argue that when employees perceive that their organizations excessively favor CSR efforts to external rather than internal stakeholders, it can trigger a psychological contract breach, resulting in increased employees' turnover intention. We utilized a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis method and the (...) data of 511 employee from various industries in the Philippines to investigate the interaction effects. The results revealed that a congruent CSR strategy with high internal and external CSR perceptions is critical in fulfilling employees' psychological contracts and retaining employees. However, for employees with low perceived internal CSR, a high incongruent CSR perception led to a psychological contract breach and ultimately to high turnover intention. Psychological contract breach weakened the negative joint effect of high perceived internal and external CSR on turnover intention and strengthened the positive effect of high perceived incongruent CSR on turnover intention. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

Gene editing in the environment must consider uncertainty about potential benefits and risks for different populations and under different conditions. There are disagreements about the weight and balance of harms and benefits. Deliberative and community‐led approaches offer the opportunity to engage and empower diverse publics to co‐create responses and solutions to controversial policy choices in a manner that is inclusive of diverse perspectives. Stories, understood as situated accounts that reflect a person's life experiences, can enable the articulation of nuanced perspectives, (...) diversify how perspectives are communicated, encourage wider participation, open dominant perspectives to challenge, and invite participants to assess appropriate empathy and precaution in collective positions. An emphasis on storytelling in deliberations on gene editing of organisms emphasizes carefully designed recruitment and facilitation to support hearing from a range of perspectives, including those that present a different set of assumptions than those that may be held by experts or other stakeholders, among these, consideration of how to understand our relationships to nature. (shrink)

After a brief review of the notions of necessity and a priority, this paper scrutinizes Kripke's arguments for supposedly contingent a priori propositions and necessary a posteriori propositions involving proper names, and reaches a negative conclusion, i.e. there are no such propositions, or at least the propositions Kripke gives as examples are not such propositions. All of us, including Kripke himself, still have to face the old question raised by Hume, i.e. how can we justify the necessity and universality of (...) general statements on the basis of sensory or empirical evidence? (shrink)

We provide an introduction to network theory, evidence to support a connection between molecular network structure and neuropsychiatric disease, and examples of how network approaches can expand our knowledge of the molecular bases of these diseases. Without systematic methods to derive their biological meanings and inter‐relatedness, the many molecular changes associated with neuropsychiatric disease, including genetic variants, gene expression changes, and protein differences, present an impenetrably complex set of findings. Network approaches can potentially help integrate and reconcile these findings, as (...) well as provide new insights into the molecular architecture of neuropsychiatric diseases. Network approaches to neuropsychiatric disease are still in their infancy, and we discuss what might be done to improve their prospects. (shrink)

This paper aims to defend the use of the notion of experimental individuation, which has recently been developed by Ruey-Lin Chen, as a criterion for the reality of theoretical entities. In short, when scientists experimentally individuate an entity, a realist conclusion about that entity is warranted. We embed this claim regarding experimental individuation within a framework that allows for other criteria of reality. And we understand so-called retail arguments regarding the reality of a particular theoretical entity as arguments that concern (...) choosing an appropriate criterion of reality for that entity and determining whether the relevant first-order scientific evidence satisfies that criterion. We argue that such retail arguments are philosophical because defending criteria of reality, and showing that they are or are not satisfied in particular cases, involves work that is distinctively philosophical. And we illustrate this philosophical work by applying our criterion of experimental individuation to three historical cases: Davy’s potassium, Lavoisier’s muriatic radical, and Thomson’s electrified particles. (shrink)

This paper argues for a hybrid and alternative theory of names—Socio-historical Causal Descriptivism, which consists of six claims: (1) the referring relation between a name and an object originates from a generalized “initial baptism” of that object. (2) The causal chain of the name N firstly and mainly transmits informative descriptions of N’s bearer. (3) The meaning of N consists of an open-ended collection of informative descriptions of N’s bearer acknowledged by a linguistic community. (4) With respect to practical needs (...) of agents there is s weighted order in the collection of descriptions of N’s bearer. (5) The meaning or even partial meaning of N, together with the background of a discourse, the network of knowledge, speaker’s intention, etc., determines the referent of N. (6) All names have their own referents, including physical individuals, and parasitic, fictional, or intensional objects; there are few names absolutely without reference. (shrink)

With a previous paper (Niu & Wang, 1995), a general, hypothetical outline of the mechanism of carcinogenesis was proposed. With reference to the fact of starvation-induced hypermutation in micro-organisms, we propose that the hypoxia commonly seen in the cells at the centre of solid tumours might also result in hypermutation, and then p53-dependent programmed cell death. Like the apparently adaptive mutations in micro-organisms, only those genes (e.g. p53) that enable the cells to escape from apoptosis may be selected.

Division of labour is a marked feature of multicellular organisms. Margulis proposed that the ancestors of metazoans had only one microtubule organizing center (MTOC), so they could not move and divide simultaneously. Selection for simultaneous movement and cell division had driven the division of labour between cells. However, no evidence or explanation for this assumption was provided. Why could the unicellular ancetors not have multiple MTOCs? The gain and loss of three possible strategies are discussed. It was found that the (...) advantage of one or two MTOC per cell is environment-dependent. Unicellular organisms with only one MTOC per cell are favored only in resource-limited environments without strong predatory pressure. If division of labour occurring in a bicellular organism just makes simultaneous movement and cell division possible, the possibility of its fixation by natural selection is very low because a somatic cell performing the function of an MTOC is obviously wasting resources. Evolutionary biologists should search for other selective forces for division of labour in cells. (shrink)

This paper introduces valuation structures associated with preferential models. Based on KLM valuation structures, we present a canonical approach to obtain injective preferential models for any preferential relation satisfying the property INJ, and give uniform proofs of representation theorems for injective preferential relations appeared in the literature. In particular, we show that, in any propositional language (finite or infinite), a preferential inference relation satisfies INJ if and only if it can be represented by a standard preferential model. This conclusion generalizes (...) the result obtained by Freund. In addition, we prove that, when the language is finite, our framework is sufficient to establish a representation theorem for any injective relation. (shrink)

In two eye-tracking studies we investigated the influence of Mandarin numeral classifiers – a grammatical category in the language – on online overt attention. Mandarin speakers were presented with simple sentences through headphones while their eye-movements to objects presented on a computer screen were monitored. The crucial question is what participants look at while listening to a pre-specified target noun. If classifier categories influence Mandarin speakers' general conceptual processing, then on hearing the target noun they should look at objects that (...) are members of the same classifier category – even when the classifier is not explicitly present. The data show that when participants heard a classifier they shifted overt attention significantly more to classifiermatch objects than to distractor objects, but when the classifier was not explicitly presented in speech, overt attention to classifier-match objects and distractor objects did not differ. This suggests that although classifier distinctions do influence eye-gaze behavior, they do so only during linguistic processing of that distinction and not in moment-to-moment general conceptual processing. (shrink)