The competent and detailed introduction to this book traces out the origin and rudiments of religions, their essential nature and the causes of their conflicts. It emphasises the truth that all religions are trying to say the same thing in different ways. Religions are meant to bring out the spiritual in man and to make him live a full and virtuous life. Despite the rapid progress in science and medicine, the mysteries of life and death remain as unknown as before. (...) Religions try, in their myriad ways, to explain these and to venture into the unknowable. They bring comfort to human beings in their suffering, and consolation in their bereavement. The author's belief is that if, while following their own religion, men respected the faiths of others too, much of the religious conflicts and bloodshed which debases mankind would be avoided. The fundamental concepts of Hindu religion and philosophy have exhaustively been narrated in a clear manner. This is followed by selected passages from the main scriptures and philosophical books of the Hindu religion-the Vedas, Puranas, Upanisheads, brahma-sutras, Bhagavadgita, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana of Tulsidasa. In each case there is a synopsis of the book giving its subject matter and a reading list consisting of the main texts and criticisms which will be invaluable to those who wish to know more about it. The passages have been selected to provide interesting reading, particularly connected with the problems and conditions of our own times. The book aims at providing a mine of information about Hinduism and is also an in-depth study of religion in general. It has been written in down-to-earth language and is of interest to all those who are wish to know about matters vital to life and living. (shrink)

This study adopted a change detection task to investigate whether and how recognition intent affects the construction of orthographic representation in visual word recognition. Chinese readers and nonreaders detected color changes in radical components of Chinese characters. Explicit recognition demand was imposed in Experiment 2 by an additional recognition task. When the recognition was implicit, a bias favoring the radical location informative of character identity was found in Chinese readers , but not nonreaders . With explicit recognition demands, the effect (...) of radical location interacted with radical function and word frequency . An estimate of identification performance under implicit recognition was derived in Experiment 3. These findings reflect the joint influence of recognition intent and orthographic regularity in shaping readers’ orthographic representation. The implication for the role of visual attention in word recognition was also discussed. (shrink)

According to the World Bank review, National Oil Companies control approximately 90% of the world’s oil reserves and 75% of production and many major oil and gas infrastructure systems. However, NOCs fall behind many smaller companies in terms of innovation. The reason is the closed nature of their business, which constrains innovations. It has been suggested that this problem can be solved by the application of an “Open Innovation” paradigm. The concepts of Open Innovation suggest firms who would like to (...) be more innovative to use internal as well as external sources for their idea generation.. However, this is not easy to deploy due to these organizations’ traditions, values, and institutional culture, which act as innovation obstacles in those companies. Innovations should be “Open” to find better solutions but should be “Closed” to fit with the cultural requirements of NOCs. This contradiction needs to be solved quickly for the sake of innovation, which is the key to ensure environmental and societal benefits and to prevent further harm. This article stresses the importance of Open Innovation in the petrochemical industry and discusses the difficulties for the industry to embrace it, especially in light of the advances in intelligent robotic systems applications in the sector. The questions are: How should large NOCs adopt innovations and become more open to innovation so that the best intelligent automatic solutions are adopted in such contexts? Is there a theory of knowledge and innovation that can solve the contradictions between Closed versus Open Innovation? This paper posits that a solution to the contradictions surrounding innovations in NOCs could be found in Teorija rezheniya izobretatelskih zadach, which has been used for decades to overcome contradictions and to develop inventive solutions, in a variety of similar sectors. In this paper, TRIZ theory has been suggested as a tool to deploy the “Open Innovation” paradigm to solve the above-mentioned contradictions, i.e., how to make things “Open” while keeping them “Closed” where necessary. Real-life examples from the oil industry, and recent applications from Azerbaijan specifically, are analyzed and interviews with the industry players used to test TRIZ theory as a tool for the Open Innovation paradigm in the oil sector. The paper sets out innovative solutions in intelligent robotic pipeline inspection systems, which operate in hazardous conditions unsuitable for humans, and which, for example, ensure that pipelines do not degrade to the extent, where they create environmental and societal damage. The problems, paradigms, and TRIZ praxis as applied in the oil sector examples given here offer important lessons for the global oil industry and other high hazard sectors globally; however, examples in the paper chosen from Azerbaijan and Caspian Region which is also the hometown of TRIZ. (shrink)

A questionnaire survey of 408 households explored the role of socio-economic and cultural factors in rice (Oryza sativa L.) varietal diversity management on-farm in two contrasting eco-sites in Nepal. Multiple regression outputs suggest that number of parcels of land, livestock number, number of rice ecosystems, agro-ecology (altitude), and use of chemical fertilizer have a significant positive influence on landrace diversity on-farm, while membership in farmers’ groups linked to extension services has significant but negative influence on landrace diversity. Factors with significant (...) positive influence on diversity of modern varieties on-farm were number of parcels of land and of rice ecosystems, access to irrigation, membership in farmers’ groups, and use of insecticide. Within communities, resource-endowed households maintain significantly higher varietal diversity on-farm than resource-poor households and play a significant role in conserving landraces that are vulnerable to genetic erosion and those with socio-cultural and market-preferred traits. Resource-poor households also contribute to local diversity conservation but at lower richness and area coverage levels than resource-endowed households. Households where a female had assumed the role of head of household due to death or migrant work of her husband had less diversity due to lower labor availability. Landraces with socio-cultural and market-preferred traits are few in number but have potential to be conserved on-farm. (shrink)

Complete works of Maṇḍanamiśra, Indian philosopher; includes study on his work also.

Articles on the philosophy of history and historiography.

Resumo: A filosofia é um sistema que analisa as crenças, os conceitos mais básicos e a calma de temperamento e julgamento próprios de um filósofo. Os filmes de animação chineses fizeram grandes incursões nos mercados mundiais, nos últimos anos, apesar do fato de o setor de animação da China ser apenas um adolescente em comparação com o seu homólogo de décadas, na filosofia japonesa. Embora alguns estúdios de animação criem conteúdos especificamente para o público internacional, a indústria de animação chinesa (...) está principalmente preocupada com o mercado interno, porque acredita que a animação chinesa de alta qualidade tem potencial para se expandir. Artistas, filósofos e aqueles que trabalham nas indústrias criativas diretamente ligadas a isto têm um incentivo e um desafio para descobrir as histórias que podem ter sucesso nos mercados chinês e internacional. Neste artigo, analisam-se e se contrastam as características das filosofias de animação cinematográfica chinesas. Examinam-se tanto o contexto social quanto o cultural, o desenvolvimento econômico do mercado e o avanço tecnológico que moldaram o design filosófico da animação chinesa. As abordagens filosóficas avaliadas neste estudo são Donghua e Manhua, além da filosofia taoísta, exemplificada em Zhuangzi. (shrink)

Editing human germline genes may act as boon in some genetic and other disorders. Recent editing of the genome of the human embryo with the CRISPR/Cas9 editing tool generated a debate amongst top scientists of the world for the ethical considerations regarding its effect on the future generations. It needs to be seen as to what transformation human gene editing brings to humankind in the times to come.

With _Relationscapes_, Erin Manning offers a new philosophy of movement challenging the idea that movement is simple displacement in space, knowable only in terms of the actual. Exploring the relation between sensation and thought through the prisms of dance, cinema, art, and new media, Manning argues for the intensity of movement. From this idea of intensity--the incipiency at the heart of movement--Manning develops the concept of preacceleration, which makes palpable how movement creates relational intervals out of which displacements take form. (...) Discussing her theory of incipient movement in terms of dance and relational movement, Manning describes choreographic practices that work to develop with a body in movement rather than simply stabilizing that body into patterns of displacement. She examines the movement-images of Leni Riefenstahl, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Norman McLaren, and explores the dot-paintings of contemporary Australian Aboriginal artists. Turning to language, Manning proposes a theory of prearticulation claiming that language's affective force depends on a concept of thought in motion. _Relationscapes_ takes a "Whiteheadian perspective," recognizing Whitehead's importance and his influence on process philosophers of the late twentieth century--Deleuze and Guattari in particular. It will be of special interest to scholars in new media, philosophy, dance studies, film theory, and art history. (shrink)

Grammatical gender agreement has been well addressed in language comprehension but less so in language production. The present article discusses the arguments derived from the most prominent language production models on the representation and processing of the grammatical gender of nouns in language production and then reviews recent empirical studies that provide some answers to these arguments.

English translation of the commentary on Tattvatrayam of Piḷḷai Lokācāryar, treatise on Viśiṣṭādvaita philosophy.

Lives and work of Veṅkaṭanātha (Vedantadesika), 1268-1369, and Maṇavāḷa Māmun̲i, 1370-1444, Vaishnavite leaders and exponents of the Viśiṣṭādvaita school in Hindu philosophy from Tamil Nadu.

First published in 1983. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Behavioural welfare economics has lately been challenged on account of its use of the satisfaction of true preferences as a normative criterion. The critique contests what is taken to be an implicit assumption in the literature, namely that true preferences are context-independent. This assumption is considered not only unjustified in the behavioural welfare economics literature but unjustifiable – true preferences are argued to be, at least sometimes, context-dependent. This article explores the implications of this ‘critique of the inner rational agent’. (...) I argue that the critique does not support a wholesale shift away from the use of true preferences as an evaluative standard in normative economics; instead, the critique implies that behavioural welfare economists need to inquire into and establish the ‘source’ of particular context-dependent choices in individuals’ decision-making. The source determines the permissibility of correcting individuals’ context-dependent choices and can, in some situations, support decisive welfare judgements. (shrink)

This last work by Paul de Man before his death in 1983 brings together what is essentially his complete work on the study of European Romanticism and post-Romanticism.

Finally, our argument suggests that the relationship and the distinction between literature and philosophy cannot be made in terms of a distinction between aesthetic and epistemological categories. All philosophy is condemned, to the extent that it is dependent upon figuration, to be literary and, as the depository of this very problem, all literature is to some extent philosophical. The apparent symmetry of these statements is not as reassuring as it sounds since what seems to bring literature and philosophy together is, (...) as in Condillac's argument about mind and object, a shared lack of identity or specificity. Contrary to common belief, literature is not the place where the unstable epistemology of metaphor is suspended by aesthetic pleasure, although this attempt is a constitutive moment of its system. It is rather the place where the possible convergence of rigor and pleasure is shown to be a delusion. The consequences of this lead to the difficult question whether the entire semantic, semiological, and performative field of language can be said to be covered by tropological models, a question which can only be raised after the proliferating and disruptive power of figural language has been fully recognized. Paul de Man, Tripp Professor in the humanities and chairman of the comparative literature department of Yale University, is the author of Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Political Allegory in Rousseau," appeared in the Summer 1976 issue and appears in his book Allegories in Reading. (shrink)

'Manning successfully argues that theory and ethics should once again be reunited...thorough and provocative...'—THE MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW.

This last work by Paul de Man before his death in 1983 brings together what is essentially his complete work on the study of European Romanticism and post-Romanticism.

Counterfactual imaginings are known to have far reaching implications. In the present experiment, we ask if imagining events from one's past can affect memory for childhood events. We draw on the social psychology literature showing that imagining a future event increases the subjective likelihood that the event will occur. The concepts of cognitive availability and the source monitoring framework provide reasons to expect that imagination may inflate confidence that a childhood event occurred. However, people routinely produce myriad counterfactual imaginings (i.e., (...) daydreams and fantasies) but usually do not confuse them with past experiences. To determine the effects of imagining a childhood event, we pretested subjects on how confident they were that a number of childhood events had happened, asked them to imagine some of those events, and then gathered new confidence measures. For each of the target items, imagination inflated confidence that the event had occurred in childhood. We discuss implications for situations in which imagination is used as an aid in searching for presumably lost memories. (shrink)

On Tibetan Buddhist doctrines and philosophy according to Sa-skya-pa tradition.

Criticism and interpretation of Akhlāq-i Jalālī, a work of Muḥammad ibn Asʻad Dawwānī, 1426 or 7-1512 or 13, on Islamic ethics.

First published in 1983. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

“Every practice is a mode of thought, already in the act. To dance: a thinking in movement. To paint: a thinking through color. To perceive in the everyday: a thinking of the world’s varied ways of affording itself.” —from _Thought in the Act _Combining philosophy and aesthetics, _Thought in the Act_ is a unique exploration of creative practice as a form of thinking. Challenging the common opposition between the conceptual and the aesthetic, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi “think through” a (...) wide range of creative practices in the process of their making, revealing how thinking and artfulness are intimately, creatively, and inseparably intertwined. They rediscover this intertwining at the heart of everyday perception and investigate its potential for new forms of activism at the crossroads of politics and art. Emerging from active collaborations, the book analyzes the experiential work of the architects and conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins, the improvisational choreographic techniques of William Forsythe, the recent painting practice of Bracha Ettinger, as well as autistic writers’ self-descriptions of their perceptual world and the experimental event making of the SenseLab collective. Drawing from the idiosyncratic vocabularies of each creative practice, and building on the vocabulary of process philosophy, the book reactivates rather than merely describes the artistic processes it examines. The result is a thinking-with and a writing-in-collaboration-with these processes and a demonstration of how philosophy co-composes with the act in the making. _Thought in the Act_ enacts a collaborative mode of thinking in the act at the intersection of art, philosophy, and politics. (shrink)

We are far removed, in this section of the Encyclopedia on memory, from the mnemotechnic icons described by Francis Yates in The Art of Memory and much closer to Augustine's advice about how to remember and to psalmodize Scripture. Memory, for Hegel, is the learning by rote of names, or of words considered as names, and it can therefore not be separated from the notation, the inscription, or the writing down of these names. In order to remember, one is forced (...) to write down what one is likely to forget. The idea in other words, makes its sensory appearance, in Hegel, as the material inscription of names. Thought is entirely dependent on a mental faculty that is mechanical through and through, as remote as can be from the sounds and the images of the imagination or from the dark mine of recollection, which lies beyond the reach of words and of thought[…]No wonder, then, that Hegel's Aesthetics turns out to be a double and possibly duplicitous text. Dedicated to the preservation and the monumentalization of classical art, it also contains all the elements which make such a preservation impossible from the start. Theoretical reasons prevent the convergence of the apparently historical and the properly theoretical components of the work. This results in the enigmatic statements that have troubled Hegel's readers, such as the assertion that art is for us a thing of the past. This has usually been interpreted and criticized or, in some rare instances, praised as a historical diagnosis disproven or borne out by actual history. We can now assert that the two statements "art is for us a thing of the past" and "the beautiful is the sensory manifestation of the idea" are in fact one and the same. To the extent that the paradigm for art is thought rather than perception, the sign rather than the symbol, writing rather than painting or music, it will also be memorization rather than recollection. As such, it belongs indeed to a past which, in Proust's words, could never be recaptured, retrouve. Art is "of the past" in a radical sense, in that, like memorization, it leaves the interiorization of experience forever behind. It is of the past to the extent that it materially inscribes, and thus forever forgets, its ideal content. The reconciliation of the two main theses of the Aesthetics occurs at the expense of the aesthetic as a stable philosophical category. What the Aesthetics calls the beautiful terms turns out to be, also, something very remote from what we associate with the suggestiveness of symbolic form.Paul de Man, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, is the author of Blindness and Insight and Allegories of Reading and is currently completing a book tentatively titled The Resistance to Theory. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Political Allegory in Rousseau", "The Epistemology of Metaphor", and "A Letter". (shrink)

Drawing on social information processing theory and a career development perspective, we examined the effect of transformational leadership on the perceived overqualification via career growth opportunities, and how the supervisor–subordinate guanxi moderates the relationship between transformational leadership and perceived overqualification. We tested this proposal using three waves of lagged data collected from 351 company employees in the Yangtze River Delta region in China. The results revealed that transformational leadership had an indirect effect on perceived overqualification through career growth opportunities, and (...) supervisor–subordinate guanxi moderated the positive association between transformational leadership and career growth opportunities. In addition, the mediating effect of transformational leadership on perceived overqualification through career growth opportunities was stronger when the level of supervisor–subordinate guanxi was high and weaker when it was low. The findings have theoretical and practical implications for reducing employees’ perceptions of overqualification in the organizational context. (shrink)

Each of the following papers gives an account of a different UK clinical ethics committee. The committees vary in the length of time they have been established, and also in the main focus of their work. The accounts discuss the development of the committees and some of the ethical problems that have been brought to them. The issues raised will be relevant for other National Health Service (NHS) trusts in the UK that wish to set up such a committee.

In today’s business world, the phenomenon of overqualification is widespread. Organizations need to consider – how to motivate the overqualified employees to utilize their qualifications, for example, promoting creative performance. Based on person-organization fit theory, this study explored when and how employees, who feel overqualified can engage in creative performance. Data were collected from 170 supervisor-subordinate dyads of 41 groups in 10 manufacturing companies across two timepoints in China. Results revealed that perceived overqualification is positively related to organizational identification when (...) employee development-oriented organizational culture is strong but negatively related to organizational identification when employee development-oriented organizational culture is weak, organizational identification is positively related to creative performance, the indirect relationship between perceived overqualification and creative performance via organizational identification is moderated by employee development-oriented organizational culture. We provide several theoretical contributions to the overqualification literature and make some suggestions to motivate the overqualified employees to use their surplus qualifications within the organizations. (shrink)

A growing number of contributors to environmental philosophy are beginning to rethink the field’s mission and practice. Noting that the emphasis of protracted conceptual battles over axiology may not get us very far in solving environmental problems, many environmental ethicists have begun to advocate a more pragmatic, pluralistic, and policy-based approach in philosophical discussions abouthuman-nature relationships. In this paper, we argue for the legitimacy of this approach, stressing that public deliberation and debate over alternative environmental ethics is necessary for a (...) culture of democracy to be upheld in decision making and policy formulation. Then we argue for a democratically tempered environmental ethics that is grounded in a practical understanding of the character of moral claims regarding the natural world. We offer the results of an empirical study of environmental ethics held by the public to illustrate the diversity in their moral commitments to nature. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the implications of this ethical pluralism for policy discussions about the management of American public lands. (shrink)

In _Always More Than One_, the philosopher, visual artist, and dancer Erin Manning explores the concept of the "more than human" in the context of movement, perception, and experience. Working from Whitehead's process philosophy and Simondon's theory of individuation, she extends the concepts of movement and relation developed in her earlier work toward the notion of "choreographic thinking." Here, she uses choreographic thinking to explore a mode of perception prior to the settling of experience into established categories. Manning connects this (...) to the concept of "autistic perception," described by autistics as the awareness of a relational field prior to the so-called neurotypical tendency to "chunk" experience into predetermined subjects and objects. Autistics explain that, rather than immediately distinguishing objects—such as chairs and tables and humans—from one another on entering a given environment, they experience the environment as gradually taking form. Manning maintains that this mode of awareness underlies all perception. What we perceive is never first a subject or an object, but an ecology. From this vantage point, she proposes that we consider an ecological politics where movement and relation take precedence over predefined categories, such as the neurotypical and the neurodiverse, or the human and the nonhuman. What would it mean to embrace an ecological politics of collective individuation? (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology is the first collection to consider the full breadth of natural theology from both historical and contemporary perspectives and to bring together leading scholars to offer accessible high-level accounts of the major themes. The volume embodies and develops the recent revival of interest in natural theology as a topic of serious critical engagement. Frequently misunderstood or polemicized, natural theology is an under-studied yet persistent and pervasive presence throughout the history of thought about ultimate reality (...) - from the classical Greek theology of the philosophers to twenty-first century debates in science and religion. Thirty eight new essays trace the transformations of natural theology in different historical and religious contexts, the place of natural theology in different philosophical traditions and diverse scientific disciplines, and the various cultural and aesthetic approaches to natural theology to reveal a rich seam of multi-faceted theological reflection rooted in human nature and the environments within which we find ourselves. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the claim that a corporation cannot be held to be morally responsible unless it is a person. First, I argue that this claim is ambigious. Person flags three different but related notions: metaphysical person, moral agent, moral person. I argue that, though one can make the claim that corporates are metaphysical persons, this claim is only marginally relevant to the question of corporate moral responsibility. The central question which must be answered in discussions of corporate (...) moral responsibility is whether corporations are moral agents or moral persons. I argue that, though we can make a case for saying corporations are moral agents, they are not moral persons, and hence, we can hold them responsible. In addition, we need not treat them the way we would be obligated to treat a moral person; we needn't have the same scruples about holding a corporation morally responsible as we would a moral person. (shrink)