The author has found in Sri Aurobindo a unique synthesis of the Eastern Wisdom and Western Rationalism, and a perfect reconciliation of ancient spirituality and modern thought. This work is essentially a collection of essays on Sri Aurobindo's thought and Yoga, based upon his major works. Brief life-sketches of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are included to give a sense of fullness to it. A sampling of the contents exemplifies the wide sweep covered by the essays: The Philosophy of Life (...) Divine, All Life is Yoga, The Ideal of Human Unity, Education, and Future Poetry and 'Savitri'. (shrink)

This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.

The author presents and defends three theses: (1) "the first is that it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology." (2) "the second is that the concepts of obligation, And duty... And of what is morally right and wrong, And of the moral sense of 'ought', Ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible...." (3) "the third thesis is that (...) the differences between the well-Known english writers on moral philosophy from sidgwick to the present day are of little importance." (staff). (shrink)

This book offers an introduction to the Sophists of fifth-century Athens and a new overall interpretation of their thought. Since Plato first animadverted on their activities, the Sophists have commonly been presented as little better than intellectual mountebanks - a picture which Professor Kerferd forcefully challenges here. Interpreting the evidence with care, he shows them to have been part of an exciting and historically crucial intellectual movement. At the centre of their teaching was a form of relativism, most famously expressed (...) by Protagoras as 'Man is the measure of all things', and which they developed in a wide range of views - on knowledge and argument, virtue, government, society, and the gods. On all these subjects the Sophists did far more than simply provoke Plato to thought. Their contributions were substantial and serious; they inaugurated the debate on many central philosophical questions and decisively shifted the focus of philosophical attention from the cosmos to man. (shrink)

With the growing call for private sector actors to address global challenges, it is necessary to first assess whether regions with the greatest needs are accessing corporate philanthropy. In this paper, we ask whether corporate philanthropy is reaching those with the greatest health-care needs. Drawing on economic geography and corporate homophily, we argue that corporate philanthropy tends to exacerbate health inequality as grants are destined for counties with fewer health problems. We test and find support for this hypothesis using data (...) on health grants made by US corporate foundations and county-level health data. Our results that corporate health grants are less likely to go to counties which have a lower proportion of medical service providers and insured citizens suggest that corporate foundations are unwittingly complicit in worsening the resource gap between small, poor, rural counties and large, wealthy, urban counties. From an ethical perspective, we provide some guidance as to how this may be corrected. (shrink)

This article examines the stance held by a Meccan-Indonesian exegete in the 13 AH or 19 AD century, Muḥammad Nawawī al-Bantānī (d. 1230–1314 H/1813–1897 AD), in dealing with Ṣifāt verses in his exegetical work, Marāḥ Labīd li Kashf Ma’nā al-Qur’ān al-Majīd. As an established term, Ṣifāt verses refer to Quranic expressions that ostensibly ascribe anthropomorphic dimensions to God. Interpretation of such ambiguous verses has been bitterly contended since the 2/8th century and remains one of the most debated topics in the (...) pre- and postmodern era. This study applies literature and document analysis focused on many of al-Bantānī’s works. The results show that al-Bantānī actively applied ta’wīl [figurative interpretation] in dealing with Ṣifāt verses without totally discarding amodality position [tafwīḍ].Contribution: Although al-Bantānī never mentioned Wahhabism in any of his works, his interpretation of Ṣifat verses alludes to his indirect response to the Wahhabi’s literalism and anti-ta’wīl approach. In addition, by accepting both of ta’wīl and tafwīḍ solutions, al-Bantānī underpinned the wasaṭī [moderate] stand, which later became the most distinctive tradition in Malay–Islamic discourse. (shrink)

The ongoing coronavirus 2019 pandemic caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 has resulted in a severe ramification on the global healthcare system, principally because of its easy transmission and the extended period of the virus survival on contaminated surfaces. With the advances in computer-aided diagnosis and artificial intelligence, this paper presents the application of deep learning and adversarial network for the automatic identification of COVID-19 pneumonia in computed tomography scans of the lungs. The complexity and time limitation (...) of the reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction swab test makes it disadvantageous to depend solely on as COVID-19’s central diagnostic mechanism. Since CT imaging systems are of low cost and widely available, we demonstrate that the drawback of the RT-PCR can be alleviated with a faster, automated, and reduced contact diagnostic process via the use of a neural network model for the classification of infected and noninfected CT scans. In our proposed model, we explore the benefit of transfer learning as a means of resolving the problem of inadequate dataset and the importance of semisupervised generative adversarial network for the extraction of well-mapped features and generation of image data. Our experimental evaluation indicates that the proposed semisupervised model achieves reliable classification, taking advantage of the reflective loss distance between the real data sample space and the generated data. (shrink)

Normal propositional modal systems This first chapter has two main aims. One is to give a general account of the propositional modal systems that we shall ...

An examination of verbal hallucinations and thought insertion as examples of "alienated self-consciousness.".

This book traces the intellectual revolution initiated by Thales in the sixth century BC to its culmination in the metaphysics of Parmenides.

This paper is a historically based approach to the topic of contemporary political and religious status of Nigeria. Recently, the secular administration by Islamists has generated violence between Muslims and Christians. The latter view Islamism as a gradual Islamisation of the country. Modern Islamists plead for a re-introduction of shari’a and OIC membership. They reject the secular status of Nigeria, the Islamic banking and educational system, etc. The meaning and purpose of these are not different from hijrah, and mahdism of (...) early 20th century. The is- sue is about restoring the ousted Caliphal system, and about rejecting the Western system and secularism, which were introduced by imperialists. The spirit of Islamism is increasing, especially among the grass-roots, elite, and politicians. In these circumstances, the phe- nomenon has to be assessed in an interdisciplinary way. (shrink)

This entirely new work guides the reader through the most basic systems of modal propositional logic up to systems of modal predicate with identity, dealing with both technical developments and discussing philosophical applications.

On countering slander, religious hate speech, and blasphemy from Islamic perspectives to build religious harmony in Indonesia.