This book tells a compelling story about love, friendship, and the Divine that took over a thousand years to unfold. It argues that mind and feeling are intrinsically connected in the thought of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus; that Aristotle developed his theology and physics primarily from Plato’s Symposium (from the “Greater” and “Lesser Mysteries” of Diotima-Socrates’ speech); and that the Beautiful and the Good are not coincident classes, but irreducible Forms, and the loving ascent of the Symposium must be interpreted (...) in the light of the Republic, as the later tradition up to Ficino saw. Against the view that Platonism is an escape from the ambiguities of ordinary experience or opposed to loving individuals for their own sakes, this book argues that Plato dramatizes the ambiguities of ordinary experience, confronts the possibility of failure, and bequeaths erotic models for the loving of individuals to later thought. Finally, it examines the Platonic-Aristotelian heritage on the Divine to discover whether God can love us back, and situates the dramatic development of this legacy in Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, and Dionysius the Areopagite. (shrink)

This book explores the intimate connections, conflicts and discontinuities between religion and philosophy in the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions from Antiquity to the early Medieval period. It presents a broader comparative view of Platonism by examining the strong Platonist resonances among different philosophical/religious traditions, primarily Jewish, Christian, Islamic and Hindu, and suggests many new ways of thinking about the relation between these two fields or disciplines that have in modern times become such distinct and, at times, entirely separate domains.

A review of the literature indicates that linear models are frequently used in situations in which decisions are made on the basis of multiple codable inputs. These models are sometimes used normatively to aid the decision maker, as a contrast with the decision maker in the clinical vs statistical controversy, to represent the decision maker "paramorphically" and to "bootstrap" the decision maker by replacing him with his representation. Examination of the contexts in which linear models have been successfully employed indicates (...) that the contexts have the following structural characteristics in common: each input variable has a conditionally monotone relationship with the output; there is error of measurement; and deviations from optimal weighting do not make much practical difference. These characteristics ensure the success of linear models, which are so appropriate in such contexts that random linear models may perform quite well. 4 examples involving the prediction of such codable output variables as GPA and psychiatric diagnosis are analyzed in detail. In all 4 examples, random linear models yield predictions that are superior to those of human judges. (shrink)

Since its inception as an international requirement to protect patients and healthy volunteers taking part in medical research, informed consent has become the primary consideration in research ethics. Despite the ubiquity of consent, however, scholars have begun to question its adequacy for contemporary biomedical research. This book explores this issue, reviewing the application of consent to genetic research, clinical trials, and research involving vulnerable populations. For example, in genetic research, information obtained from an autonomous research participant may have significant bearing (...) on the interests of family members who have not consented to the study. This casts doubt on the adequacy of consent for such studies. This book also questions the assumptions that informed consent is essential and that it satisfactorily protects the principle of individual autonomy. It reviews recent empirical studies that challenge the possibility of truly informed consent and highlights the extent to which consent is governed by social norms and expectations. It also investigates how consent might be of secondary importance in some circumstances, for example when a research project appears to protect a public or community interest. (shrink)

In this paper I describe a novel application of contemplative techniques to software engineering with the goal of augmenting the intellectual capabilities of knowledge workers within the field in four areas: flexibility, attention, creativity, and trust. The augmentation of software engineers’ intellectual capabilities is proposed as a third complement to the traditional focus of methodologies on the process and environmental factors of the software development endeavor. I argue that these capabilities have been shown to be open to improvement through the (...) practices traditionally used in spiritual traditions, but now used increasingly in other fields of knowledge work, such as in the medical profession and the education field. Historically, the intellectual capabilities of software engineers have been treated as a given within any particular software development effort. This is argued to be an aspect ripe for inclusion within software development methodologies. (shrink)

The range of topics in this volume covers a multitude of historical periods and topics, which in turn figure in the new media environments of contemporary life. These include discussions of the Aristotelian and classical models of a "good life" that inform animated fairy tales today, 1930s French and Hollywood films which respond to the dire need for productive human relationships in a turbulent decade, the polemical positions of black film criticism through the lens of James Baldwin's work, a discussion (...) of contemporary filmic quests for happiness, the challenges for women filmmakers today in mapping the values of their own world, landscapes of austerity and poverty in the cinematic homelands today, the scientific, psychological, and philosophical base for human value, and the shifting media frames of modern society and selves. (shrink)

The term research subject has traditionally been the preferred term in professional guidelines and academic literature to describe a patient or an individual taking part in biomedical research. In recent years, however, there has been a steady shift away from the use of the term 'research subject' in favour of 'research participant' when referring to individuals who take part by providing data to various kinds of biomedical and epidemiological research. This article critically examines this shift, reflecting on the different meanings (...) evoked by the terms 'subject' and 'participant', as well as examining recent examples of patient activism in research. It concludes by suggesting that the wholesale unreflective adoption of the term 'participant' is inappropriate and provides instead a guide on how to determine the circumstances in which the terms subject, participant and activist should legitimately be used. (shrink)

The nature of experience cannot be truly understood unless the form of experience is first seen clearly. -/- “An Introduction to Awareness” is a philosophical journey that takes the reader into the heart of the presence of nondual reality – a reality in which the “spiritual” world and the “actual” world are not separate; in which the “physical” reality of science is a practical yet imaginative construction of causal mechanisms imposed by us upon the spontaneously creative, uncaused, manifestation of Nature (...) – a way of thinking about the world that is useful for manipulating it, yet which is not truly real. -/- This mechanistic way of seeing Reality comes at a great cost; one that we suffer from every day because we see ourselves as causal mechanisms too. We have accepted the mythology of science that asserts that we are separate from what we experience, that the forms of phenomenal existence are the serendipitous concretions of haphazard activity, and that the nature of a thing is nothing more than the mathematical expression of its statistical probabilities – that Nature has no soul. We have allowed this tool of practical reason – science – and this simplification of reality – mathematical modeling – to overwhelm the truth of our presence – this alive presence that we are. -/- This book shows another way to view the world, another way to construct your thoughts about it, in order to realize the wholeness of absolute reality, while still retaining the practical means of living that the modern world has given us. It explains how to use concepts in a way that does not endanger a truer understanding of reality and our participation in it. (shrink)

Provides a guide to Plato in an unexpected key with well-grounded views of Plato's works (particularly major middle to late dialogues). The reader meets important questions of perception, embodiment, mimetic art, imagination, divine inspiration, the Forms and the Good, beauty, myth and logos, and generative epistemic art.

Describing Cinema is part theory, part rhetoric, and part pedagogy. It examines and demonstrates acts of describing scenes, shots, and sequences in films, as probably the most common and the most underestimated way viewers respond to movies. Practiced energetically and carefully, descriptions become exceptionally rich ways to demonstrate and celebrate the activities, varieties, and challenges of a central generative movement in the viewing and interpretation of films. My motto might be an inversion of one character's tongue-in-cheek remark in Jean-Luc Godard's (...) First Name, Carmen (played by Godard himself), "badly seen, badly said," rephrased for this project as "badly said, badly seen." Here, that phrase becomes an indication how acts of describing films or parts of films can measure and instantiate complex ways of seeing that are partly about accuracy but also about the mobility of understanding and interpretation. At its best, describing films never simply denotes actions, images, sounds, or styles but rather produces the orchestration of one or more of those dimensions as an often creative and intersubjective movement between images, viewers, and a rhetorical language. Here, especially, writing about film becomes thinking about film. Part I provides a theoretical basis for this argument. Part II features sixteen short essays from landmarks of post-war cinema that demonstrate the energy and movement of precise descriptions. (shrink)

The Objective of “Tranquillity’s Secret” Is To Present A New More Veridical Way Of Understanding The World, And The Meditation Technique And Its Unexcelled Support That Directly Leads One To See The World Differently. -/- In our rational attempts to understand ourselves and our world today, it is the case that in comparison to matter, which is so definite, measurable, actual, and sometimes literally concrete, we have ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’, which is exactly the opposite: it is indefinite, unmeasurable, undiscoverable, and (...) abstract. And yet, it is the reverse within our lived experience in which it is our being aware that is actual, indisputable, irrefutable, true, and well-grounded, while matter is only an abstraction from our experiences, that is wholly contingent, and about which everything is unsure. So why do we search for ‘consciousness’ by reasoning about the world, rather than meditating upon our immediate lived experience? ‘Consciousness’ is an abstraction taken from our experience, so we cannot use ‘consciousness’ to explain experience. A contemplative science would. -/- The meditation technique that Tranquillity’s Secret presents uses Inner Spontaneous Sound as its support. These uncaused sounds which are always available to meditate with, have no material basis, and so their very presence calls into question our faith that only matter matters. These sounds appear in different forms in the myriad of contemplative traditions which have employed them for millennia and have universally acknowledged them as the most efficacious path to a direct experience of the nature of Reality. Unfortunately, during modern times, the correct use of these sounds has been almost lost, along with the reasons why they were claimed to be so highly effective. The primary condition for this loss is the mechanical materialism which frames what is allowable for thought, and constrains our reasoning to only consider reductionist mechanical explanations in every case. Even those who believe they have escaped from the limitations of this understanding, continue to be enframed because our language has been structured by it, so that there is no true escape via a simple substitution or redefinition of concepts. Instead, Tranquillity’s Secret presents a new understanding that supersedes mechanical materialism and its paradigm of physical causality. It begins with an acceptance that Time is only a formalism, and does not exist in the sense of either an arrow or a stream. This leads to a radical reorientation of what it means to be aware and conscious, and the discovery of a revolutionary understanding of coherent Responsive Naturing that supplants the never-solved paradoxes of ‘consciousness’ and ‘causal change over time’ with coherent and immediate processual reconfigurations based upon contextual conditions, potentials, and probabilities — and the recognition of each reconfiguration. -/- Thus, Responsive Naturing provides a sound foundation for veridical science, so that both science and spirituality can be founded upon a common understanding of ‘how things work’. This empowers us in ways that our disjointed and parochial schools of thought lock us out of completely, while opening up new possible methods of looking at problems and finding solutions across disciplines. (shrink)

This article examines how perceptions of what semen is thought to contain affect its value as a marketable product. I explore how donor altruism, intelligence and ethnicity traits thought to be transmitted in sperm are perceived and transacted among representatives of the sperm banking industry, as well as among women who purchase semen for insemination and show how the linkages between the reproductive industry and the sex industry further heighten the commodity-quality of semen donation. I argue that the emphasis placed (...) on altruism, is an attempt to redefine the commodity quality of semen as gift, in order to imbue it with higher emotional and moral value. (shrink)

This book brings together a selection of Kevin Corrigan's works published over the course of some 27 years. Its predominant theme is the encounter with otherness in ancient, medieval and modern thought and it ranges in scope from the Presocratics through Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and the late ancient period, on the one hand, and early Christian thought, especially Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine and, much later, Aquinas, on the other.

This article argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson employs metempsychosis (reincarnation or the transmigration of the soul into successive bodies) as a figurative template for human consciousness. Mapping various traditions from Hinduism, Pythagoreanism, Platonism, and Neoplatonism onto the vastness of the geological and biological records, Emerson translates metaphysics for modernity: he depicts the soul's journey through the chronological sequence of history as a poetic process that culminates in a tenuous form of self-knowledge.

This book explores the intimate connections, conflicts and discontinuities between religion and philosophy in the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions from Antiquity to the early Medieval period. It presents a broader comparative view of Platonism by examining the strong Platonist resonances among different philosophical/religious traditions, primarily Jewish, Christian, Islamic and Hindu, and suggests many new ways of thinking about the relation between these two fields or disciplines that have in modern times become such distinct and, at times, entirely separate domains.

Concern about the ethics of clinical drug trials research on patients and healthy volunteers has been the subject of significant ethical analysis and policy development—protocols are reviewed by Research Ethics Committees and subjects are protected by informed consent procedures. More recently attention has begun to be focused on DNA banking for clinical and pharmacogenetics research. It is, however, surprising how little attention has been paid to the commercial nature of such research, or the unique issues that present when subjects are (...) asked to consent to the storage of biological samples. Our contention is that in the context of pharmacogenetic add-on studies to clinical drug trials, the doctrine of informed consent fails to cover the broader range of social and ethical issues. Applying a sociological perspective, we foreground issues of patient/subject participation or ‘work’, the ambiguity of research subject altruism, and the divided loyalties facing many physicians conducting clinical research. By demonstrating the complexity of patient and physician involvement in clinical drug trials, we argue for more comprehensive ethical review and oversight that moves beyond reliance on informed consent to incorporate understandings of the social, political and cultural elements that underpin the diversity of ethical issues arising in the research context. (shrink)

In the ninth book of his Ἀτθίς the Athenian historian and religious expert Philochorus related an omen about which he had himself been consulted in the late fourth centuryb.c.e.(FGrHist328 F 67).When this year was done and the next was beginning, there occurred on the Acropolis the following prodigy: a female dog, having entered the temple of Athena Polias and made its way into the Pandroseion, got up on the altar of Zeus Herkeios, which is under the olive tree, and lay (...) down. It is an ancestral custom among the Athenians that no dog go up on the Acropolis. Around the same time, a star was evident for a while even in the daytime sky, when the sun was out and the weather was clear. And when we were asked about what the portent and the phenomenon meant, we said that both predicted the return of the exiles and that this would happen not as a result of a political change but rather in the existingpoliteia. And this interpretation actually came to pass. (shrink)

In Humanity Without Dignity, Sangiovanni offers an interesting new approach to human rights theory called the “Broad View” of human rights. The BV involves an innovative attempt to overcome th...

Relying on more expansive criteria for defining “mass shootings” than much existing research, we examine a subset of a unique dataset incorporating 7,048 news documents covering 2,170 shootings in the United States between 2013 and 2019. We analyze the descriptive language used to describe incidents and perpetrators and discover significant racial disparities in representation. This research enables a critical examination of the explanatory frames utilized by news media to tell the public who mass shooters are and journalistic attempts to explain (...) why they occur. Data were analyzed utilizing a mixed methods approach, relying on content analysis to inductively code emergent categories of descriptions of shooters and binary logistic regressions to analyze the preponderance of descriptive categories when comparing news articles reporting on shootings committed by differently racialized shooters. Our results confirm some recent research showing that mass shooters racialized as white are more likely to be described with kind and compassionate language. With our larger sample, however, we also find that mass shooters racialized as white are additionally more likely to be described with negative language as “bad” or “evil” in comparison to shooters of color. We discuss how these data demonstrate that media reports present a more complex picture of white mass shooters for the public than shooters of color. (shrink)

This paper investigates the effects of relative position and proxemics in the engagement process involved in Human-Robot collaboration. We evaluate the differences between two experimental placement conditions for an autonomous robot in a collaborative task with a user across two different types of robot behaviours. The study evaluated placement and behaviour types around a touch table with 80 participants by measuring gaze, smiling behaviour, distance from the task, and finally electrodermal activity. Results suggest an overall user preference and higher engagement (...) rates with the helpful robot in the frontal position. We discuss how behaviours and position of the robot relative to a user may affect user engagement and collaboration, in particular when the robot aims to provide help via socio-emotional bonding. (shrink)

Part I. Gnosticism and other religious movements of antiquity -- part II. Crossing boundaries : Gnosticism and Platonism.

v. 1. From Plato and the old academy to middle platonism -- v. 2. Middle platonic and gnostic texts.

In September this year the Nuffield Council on Bioethics held a meeting to disclose and discuss the main findings of their newly published report on the ethical issues associated with developments in pharmacogenetics research. The basics of pharmacogenetics science is briefly outlined, and then the extent to which the report was successful in addressing the attendant social, ethical, and policy implications of pharmacogenetics research is evaluated.

This paper investigates the effects of relative position and proxemics in the engagement process involved in Human-Robot collaboration. We evaluate the differences between two experimental placement conditions for an autonomous robot in a collaborative task with a user across two different types of robot behaviours. The study evaluated placement and behaviour types around a touch table with 80 participants by measuring gaze, smiling behaviour, distance from the task, and finally electrodermal activity. Results suggest an overall user preference and higher engagement (...) rates with the helpful robot in the frontal position. We discuss how behaviours and position of the robot relative to a user may affect user engagement and collaboration, in particular when the robot aims to provide help via socio-emotional bonding. (shrink)

The contributors to this volume offer, in the light of specialised knowledge of leading philosophers of the ancient world, answers to the question: how are we to read and understand the surviving texts of Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Augustine?

The contributors to this volume offer, in the light of specialised knowledge of leading philosophers of the ancient world, answers to the question: how are we to read and understand the surviving texts of Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Augustine?

This volume collects essays under four categories: religious traditions, religious life, emotional states, and historical and theoretical perspectives. These essays describe the ways in which emotions have played a role in various world religions, and analyze the manner in which key components of religious life ritual, music, gender, sexuality and material culture represent and shape emotional performance.

Rights of nature is an idea that has come of age. In recent years, a diverse range of countries and jurisdictions have adopted these norms, which involve granting legal rights to nature or natural objects, such as rivers, forests, or ecosystems. This book critically examines the idea of natural objects as right-holders, and analyses legal cases, policies, and philosophical issues relating to this development. -/- Drawing on contributions from a range of experts in the field, Rights of Nature: A Re-examination (...) investigates the potential for this innovative idea to revolutionize the concepts of rights, standing, and recognition as traditionally understood in many legal systems. Taking as its starting point Stone’s influential 1972 article ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’, the book examines the progress rights of nature have made since that time, by identifying central themes, unifying principles, and key distinctions in how rights of nature discourse has been operationalized in the disciplines of law, philosophy, and the social sciences. These themes and principles are illustrated through a wide variety of examples, including ecosystem services, indigenous thinking, and ecological restoration, demonstrating how the relationship between humanity and the natural world may be transforming. -/- Taking a philosophical, political, and legal perspective, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental law and policy, environmental ethics, and philosophy. (shrink)