This paper rehabilitates the Stoic conception of blending from the ground up, by freeing the Stoic conception of body from three interpretive presuppositions. First, the twin hylomorphic presuppositions that where there is body there is matter, and that where there is reason or quality there is an incorporeal. Then, the atomistic presupposition that body is absolutely full and rigid, and the attendant notion that resistance (antitupia) must be ricochet. I argue that once we clear away these presuppositions about body, (...) the foundations of Stoic corporealism fall into place. Body is fundamental (not hylomorphic). The two fundamental principles (archai) are bodies: divine active reason (logos) and passive matter (hulē); and these two bodies are two, not matter and form all over again, nor actual and potential, but agent and patient. The independence of the two archai is no threat to the unity of the cosmos, however, because the Stoic theory of body allows for the complete coextension of the archai. The hylomorphic thinker rightly asks, what relation could be tighter than that of the wax and its shape? The Stoic replies: a causal relation, the interaction of agent and patient completely coextended in a through and through blend. (shrink)

Nurses are experiencing new ethical issues as a result of global developments and changes in health care. With health care becoming increasingly sophisticated, and countries facing challenges of graying population, ethical issues involved in health care are bound to expand in quantity and in depth. Blended learning rather as a combination of multiple delivery media designed to promote meaningful learning. Specifically, this study was focused on two questions: (1) the students’ satisfaction and attitudes as members of a scenario-based learning process (...) in a blended learning environment; (2) the relationship between students’ satisfaction ratings of nursing ethics course and their attitudes in the blended learning environment. In total, 99 senior undergraduate nursing students currently studying at a public nursing college in Taiwan were invited to participate in this study. A cross-sectional survey design was adopted in this study. The participants were asked to fill out two Likert-scale questionnaire surveys: CAAS (Case Analysis Attitude Scale), and BLSS (Blended Learning Satisfaction Scale). The results showed what students felt about their blended learning experiences — mostly items ranged from 3.27—3.76 (the highest score is 5). Another self-assessment of scenario analysis instrument revealed the mean scores ranged from 2.87—4.19. Nearly 57.8% of the participants rated the course ‘extremely helpful’ or ‘very helpful.’ This study showed statistically significant correlations (r = 0.43) between students’ satisfaction with blended learning and case analysis attitudes. In addition, results testified to a potential of the blended learning model proposed in this study to bridge the gap between students and instructors and the one between students and their peers, which are typical of blended learning, and to create meaningful learning by employing blended pedagogical consideration in the course design. The use of scenario instruction enables students to develop critical analysis and problem solving skills through active learning and social exchange of ideas. (shrink)

The “dynamic turn” in the field of second language acquisition catalyzed scholarly devotion to the complex dynamic relationships between learner and teacher variables and various academic emotions. As such, the present study examined the varying effects of the aforementioned variables on the constructs of positive and negative flow, and determined their strongest predictors, respectively. This study used a mixed-method approach to collect data from 607 Chinese English-as-a-Foreign-Language learners. In stage one of the research, the researcher first assessed the participants’ levels (...) of positive flow and negative flow in a blended learning context, then performed Pearson correlation analysis to confirm a significant, but weak positive relationship between positive flow and negative flow. Then, significant difference tests were run to determine the varied effects of those variables on flow. Finally, two multiple regression analyses were conducted to identify five predictors of positive flow, with the biggest contribution coming from learners’ attitudes toward the foreign language, and three predictors of negative flow, with the learners’ major accounting for the majority of variance. In the second stage of the research, a qualitative corpus was constructed, based on accounts of classroom experiences from 71 participants of the total sample, and further illustrated the quantitative findings. Pedagogical implications for educational psychologists and teachers of second and/or foreign languages are addressed. (shrink)

Despite the central importance of Alexander of Aphrodisias to later Greek, Medieval, and Renaissance philosophy, little attention has been given to his work in modern times. Only one of his writings, the De fato, has been available in English translation. Todd’s study and translation of Alexander’s De mixtione is therefore a welcome contribution. His book not only contributes to the study of Alexander but also presents a critical analysis of the evidence concerning the theory of the "total blending" (...) of bodies attributed to the Stoics by Alexander and by other ancient sources. By investigating the polemical character of such reports concerning Stoicism, Todd attempts to develop a means of evaluating the evidence, the consequence of which is a revision of not a few aspects of what has been thought to be Stoic doctrine. (shrink)

Gravitational interactions allowed astronomers to conclude that dark matter rings all luminous galaxies in gigantic halos, but this only accounts for a fraction of the total mass of dark matter believed to exist. Where is the rest? We hypothesize that some of it resides in dark galaxies, pure dark matter halos that either never possessed or have totally lost their baryonic matter. This article explores methodological challenges that arise because of the nature of observation in astrophysics and examines how (...) the blend of observation, simulation, and theory we call the Observing the Invisible approach might make detecting such dark objects possible. (shrink)

Jerzy Perzanowski s ideas were based on an original blend of logic and ontology in what he called onto/logic, where the slash is meant to suggest a quotient of ontology by logic. Perzanowski began as a logician, his early works being on modal logic, then gradually shifted his interest to logical philosophy, meaning not so much philosophy of logic as philosophy informed by logic. Perzanowski was a rare breed of analytical philosopher who thought that a philosophical theory of everything was (...) worthwhile. In this systematic spirit, he began with method. He presented his method of total analysis and synthesis quite simply: reduce the object of research to its simplest possible constituents, and then combine them in some way. Better still, combine them in every possible way, thereby producing a space of possibilities analogous to (and in certain cases identical with) the logical space. Thus, analysis and synthesis differ from a trivial disassembly and reassembly.". (shrink)

The Chinese character, he (和), “harmony,” occurs more than 100 times in the Liji (禮記; the Book of Rites). This accounts for over one‐third of the term's total number of occurrences in the 13 pre‐Qin Confucian classics. In this study, we engage with existing scholarship on the concept of “harmony” in Chinese culture and contribute to the discussion by analyzing the variety of senses that “harmony” has in the pre‐Qin Confucian classics, especially the Liji. We find that usages of (...) the term “he” (“harmony”) in the Liji fall into six categories, namely, self, external things, music, human relations, politics, and the universe. We hold that the ways in which harmony features in the Liji and other Confucian classics can help us understand the Chinese cultural presupposition that there exists “only one world,” meaning that this world encompasses both the natural and the supernatural, and that human beings are a holistic blend of body and heart‐mind, which does not give rise to any dualistic tension between body and mind. Based on our understanding of the unique Chinese worldview and the corresponding view on life, this study aims to give an account for the importance of harmony as a guideline within various areas of Chinese life. (shrink)

For music students, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a great impact, forcing them to adapt to certain coronavirus regulations laid down by the state. In this study, the experiences of music students in three consecutive semesters under different coronavirus-related conditions are investigated. At the end of three semesters, the lockdown semester [SS 2020: April – July], a partially opened semester [WS 2020/21: October – February] and a mostly opened semester, a total of 152 music students at the University of (...) Music Freiburg were asked to fill in an online survey. A mixed-methods approach was used, with results showing that the qualitative statements of the students support the quantitative data. The results of the cross-sectional study demonstrate that self-regulated learning improved during the lockdown semester, through new time management and focused practice with regular breaks. During the partially opened semester, the use of blended learning formats led to organizational problems, such as travel time and change of locations. Furthermore, music students were challenged by the social distancing, which improved during the partially opened, and mostly opened semester. New technologies regarding digital communication formats were emerged, which have evolved over the course of the three semesters. Concerning the overall experience, students stated that the partially-opened semester was most challenging, since distances and change of locations had to be combined with quickly changing public COVID-19-regulations. These findings during different stages of the COVID-19 pandemic provide constructive starting points for future teaching. (shrink)

The Ottoman legal system is built on religious (sharīʿa) and customary (ʿurfī) laws. The customary law consists of the rules that are not in contrast to the sacred law. Collection of regulations (qānūnnāme) were the most effective way for the execution of the customary laws. The qānūnnāme included the sultan’s orders and edicts (farman). Ottomans regulated and evaluated the taxes through measurements of lands specific times of the year. These measurements would be recorded into the taḥrīr books (written survey of (...) immovable prop-erties). And the administrative qānūnnāme were included in these books. In the qānūnnāmes, we can find information about the taxes, and the unlawful executions of the customary actors (ahl al-ʿurf) as well as the tax regulations. The qānūnnāmes on sanjak are composed accord-ing to the economic, social, and geographical characteristics of the administrative district it is written about, and with this, they provide us information on these issues. In this article, three sanjak qānūnnāmes are taken as the central topic and Kamah, Āmid, Pojega are evaluated in terms of the execution of customary law in these districts. These qānūnnāmes include record-ings of various taxing regulations, altered and cancelled executions, amounts of taxes, and punishments. We can compare the three districts in their economic and social characteristics.Summary: The Ottoman legal system consists of sharia and customary law. Ordinary law is based on some regulations which the sultan deems necessary and is composed of laws. The Ordinary law should not contradict sharia. When the Ottomans conquered a place, they generally protected the current laws (such as Uzun Hasan's laws), except for necessary changes or cancellations. When the Ottomans conquered a place, they used to make census to determine taxes. As a result of this census, Sanjak qānūnnāmes were placed in taḥrīr books. It also involves issues such as public and criminal law, customary tax regulations, and amounts of market taxes, which are approved by the emperor. In this article, the Sanjak qānūnnāmes of different regions belonging to the period of Suleiman the Magnificent, whose dates are close to each other, were selected. The Sanjak qānūnnāmes which are studied on are Kemah sanjak of Erzurum province belonging to (937/1530) and Āmid sanjak of Diyarbekir province belonging to (947/1540) and Pojega sanjak of Budin province belonging to (950/1545). The reason for this is to be able to compare the differences or stableness in tax and practices in the mentioned date range. At the same time, attention has been paid to the effectiveness of customary practices and the parts that are linked to sharīʾa. Some of the laws of Uzun Hasan are in force in Kemah and Amid. In these two sanjaks, some of the bâc taxes and some other taxes were removed. It is seen that the complaints made by the public due to the excess of taxes are taken into consideration. For example, in Kemah, the akche of murahhasiyye paid by the villagers for Armenian priests and bishops is one of them. The taxes that are abolished include kulluk and blend tax and taxes from various business lines. The tax, which was collected by the governors of the sanjak and the castle beys under the name of custom, which was imposed by some local administrators, was cancelled by seeing bidat. When three of the sanjaks are taken together, there are cautions that unfair and unlawful tax collections made by local administrators during tax collection have been abolished and these are accepted as bidat. Kemah sanjak qānūnnāme is 13 pages in total. Kemah, which has a geographical position and military transit route, has commercial relations with cities such as Trabzon and Hasankeyf. In Kemah, there are candle mill (şemhane), creamery (bezirhane) and tavern (meyhane). Kemah is one of the places where the climate has an impact on agriculture. Kemah's economy is based on trade, agriculture, small livestock, beekeeping. In Kemah, where caravan trade is important, trade goods are of value due to its location on the transit road. The Kemah qānūnnāme also contains various taʿzīr for unjust killing, wounding, and adultery. In the city, there are some arcs have ownership in common. The fact that there are mills indicates that the rivers in Kemah are utilized. Âmid Sanjak qānūnnāme consists of two pages. The title that attracts our most attention is that there is vitality and economic activity in the market since Âmid is on the Aleppo-Mosul Silk Road. The high number of weaving looms is due to the production of cotton. Amid has dye house and saphane. Indigo and Amid's red dye sold in the market shows the importance of weaving. Pojega sanjak qānūnnāme is composed of seven pages. Among the qānūnnāmes we have mentioned, this is the most legible one. In addition to the old practices, there are some new regulations in this qānūnnāme. The pig tax is only here because of the non-Muslim population. Transit tax fees indicate trading viability. Based on the studies made on these three sanjaks, it can be said that in the qānūnnāme, the rights of the raia (reaya) were tried to be protected by the rescript of the Sultan himself. Therefore, the most remarkable things in the qānūnnāme are not allowed unfair practices of local administrators and without the need to collect taxes from the public. The dates of the qānūnnāme are close to each other and Despite geographical differences, there is no remarkable change in taxation. Although there are non-Muslim populations in all three sanjaks, it is mostly in the Pojega sanjak. The fact that the pig tax is collected only from this sanjak is evidence of this situation. The presence of meyhane in Kemah, Amid and Pojega sanjaks point to the non-Muslim population. It is also used as a place where the villagers sell their grape juice. The mill tax on Kemah and Pojega show that rivers are used in common. (shrink)

1 Introduction1 In the 1980s, hermeneutics was often incorporated into deconstructionism and literary theory. Rather than focus on authorial intentions, the nature of writing itself including codes used to construct meaning, socio-economic contexts and inequalities of power,2 Gadamer introduced a different perspective; the interplay between effects of history on a reader’s understanding and the tradition(s) handed down in writing. This interplay in which a reader’s prejudices are called into question and modified by the text in a fusion of understanding and (...) topic revitalized the study of the printed word. Gadamer’s turn to language for understanding the meaning of Being also appealed to the post-modern antipathy toward modernity and metaphysics.3 If the truth and validity of interpretations are limited to communities of language, then our mode of being in history cannot but be historical. This point of view rendered Gadamer’s phenomenological hermeneutics vulnerable to the critique of moral and epistemological relativism. However, Gadamer’s theory of interpretation also stems from re-examination of the beginning of knowledge in the Pre-Socratics and Plato, and on this basis, is receptive to another dimension of inquiry than that which was trending in North America. -/- At the East-West Center, University of Hawai’i at Manoa in 1982, Chung-ying Cheng for the first time introduced onto-hermeneutics to an audience of esteemed philosophers including Li Zehou, Ren Jiyu, Feng Youlan, and Zhang Liwen.4 In contrast to schools of deconstruction and literary theory that had disengaged the interpreter from trans-historical sources of meaning and truth, Cheng explained that interpreters exist within a cosmological order inextricable from responsibility to harmonize Heaven and Earth in creative acts of interpretation. By integrating Chinese cosmology into hermeneutics through ontology, he tacitly challenged philosophers in the West to re-examine assumptions about humanity’s place in nature and by implication, Gadamer’s recovery of the beginnings of knowledge in Western philosophy. -/- Cheng’s Neo-Confucianism is inspired by the method and goals of Thomé H. Fang. The following words by Fang seem to prefigure, although in an indistinct and bundled way, aspects of Cheng’s philosophy including a Mencian theory of human nature, comprehensive observation, and creativity: “In the very process of living in concord with creative Nature, Man is charged with an ideal to be fully realized in the light of the principle of comprehensive harmony.”5 Like Fang, Cheng reinvigorates Chinese culture and language, but not solely in order to vindicate the insights of Neo-Confucianism. He has studied Western thought, from pragmatism and the analytic school to German idealism and phenomenology, to unlock and clarify philosophical concepts within the Yijing tradition and thereby render them intelligible to Anglophones. The result has been an awakening of Western scholars to the moral and cultural consequences of decoupling their thought from metaphysical foundations that are neither dogmatic nor doctrinal. -/- Not unlike the dialectic of Gadamer’s dialogue form, onto-generative hermeneutics integrates contrary positions on the same topic in order to blend both sides into a world philosophy, or as Cheng says, a “totalizing or integrative theory,”6 not to be confused with a theoretical rewording of a theory. On the contrary, the universal scope and relevance of hermeneutics stems from personal experience. Just as Gadamer, in response to faction and strife, immersed himself in Plato during the war years, and developed a method with which to harmonize opposites, so too, according to On-cho Ng, was Cheng moved by faction, strife and political persecution to develop a path toward unity.7 Gadamer taught at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and Cheng at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa among other institutions in North America. They facilitated trans-continental educational and cultural ties. Similar experiences yield similar insights irrespective of differences of time and place. Hence, authors in this issue who reside in Europe, China and North America, delineate the differences between Gadamer and Cheng, yet also, in light of Cheng’s onto-generative method and cosmology, develop integrative theories. Due to the page-budget restriction of the publisher, certain articles of this special theme will be subsequently published in the next issue. -/- 2 Integrative Theory This special issue of The Journal of Chinese Philosophy confirms a dimension of hermeneutics that Cheng has both motivated and inspired. The contributors do not abide by the conviction that since thought is mediated by language, interpretations cannot transcend culture. On the contrary, their research exemplifies the fruits of trans-historical onto-dialogical hermeneutics within limits defined by their field inquiry, organized into Parts I and II, around three themes: language, the philosophy of history and ethics. -/- Andrew Fuyarchuk introduces the theme of ontology in relation to Gadamer’s turn to language. Fuyarchuk argues that Chung-ying Cheng’s criticism of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is informed by Heidegger’s concept of Dasein and thereby overlooks how Gadamer’s Platonic-Pythagorean problem of the division between the One and Many is harmonized in the event of language, which in turn positions Gadamer in proximity to the presupposed grounds of receptivity in Cheng’s onto-generative hermeneutics. Lauren Pfister’s contributing article addresses the year 2000 meeting between Cheng and Gadamer in Heidelberg and expands the transhistorical grounds of meaning in Gadamer to matters of theology. Pfister’s summary of the written Chinese record of their conversation indicates that Cheng does not address the role of Christian philosophy and hence, the role of the inner word in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. This is important not only for detecting changes in Cheng’s philosophical development, but also for modifying his hermeneutics along the lines of a living conversation, possibilities explored by Pfister in a sequel to the article submitted to this issue. Nevertheless, by raising the issue of how Gadamer’s turn to language for understanding the meaning of Being extends possibilities in Cheng’s thought, Pfister anticipates the article by Katarina Gajdosova. She returns to the roots of Chinese thought during the Warring States period and broadens the meaning of names in recently excavated texts. Contrary to the conventions about how to understand terms, she appeals to both Heidegger’s ontology and Cheng’s notion of receptivity and creativity to reinterpret naming in relation to cosmology. Along the same lines, insofar as the event of Being is lingual, Jay Goulding captures its emergent structure in an evolving community of scholars and scholarship. He recalls his philosophical journey toward Cheng’s philosophy that begins in conversations with Gadamer at McMaster University in Hamilton, leads to Heidegger and Asian thought, expands into turning points with teachers and colleagues from various backgrounds that by increments contributed to Goulding’s formulation of “Daoist phenomenology.” -/- Although differing traditions guide their inquiries and research, Cheng and Gadamer recall the wisdom of the past to ameliorate the fragmentation in contemporary life. This leads them to re-examine the origins of philosophy; historical roots and thus sources of creative re-interpretations East and West whose affinities are developed in contributions by Hyun Höchsmann and Friederike Assandri. Höchsmann assesses convergences and divergences in the origins of Chinese and Western philosophy (Confucius and Socrates, the Yijing and Pre-Socratics) that culminates in pairing Gadamer’s understanding of paideia in the context of Plato’s political cosmology in the Timaeus with moral and social cultivation in The Western Inscription. She delineates the limits of this comparison which in turn justifies introducing Vattimo’s notion of locality. Assandri’s comparative analysis moves between India and China, Buddhism and Tang Daoism. Based on Gadamer’s argument that writing detaches concepts from their cultural moorings, she defines and applies three levels of understanding in onto-generative hermeneutics to Buddhist terms that were assimilated into the Benji Jing and in so doing clarifies essential dimensions of Daoism. -/- Contributions by Stephen Palmquist and Nicholas Brasovan position Cheng in relation to Kant and Gadamer by way of Aristotle’s ethics respectively. On the one hand, Palmquist plots Cheng’s evolving criticism of Kant’s moral philosophy and draws on crucial dimensions of Gadamer’s hermeneutics to reposition that criticism in a constructive relation to Kant’s emphasis on the philosophical conditions of morality while also indicating how religious dimensions of his thought answer Cheng’s concerns for lived moral action. For Palmquist, Gadamer enables a constructive criticism of Cheng. On the other hand, Brasovan compares Cheng’s Yijing-based account of moral deliberation with Gadamer’s Aristotelian-based ethics and reasons that in contrast to Cheng, Gadamer’s hermeneutical consciousness is disengaged from practical knowledge. For Brasovan, Cheng is a constructive critic of Gadamer. Palmquist and Brasovan’s divergent angles on Gadamer and Cheng map onto a dialectic of contrast and complementarity that constitutes the inner logic of Cheng’s philosophy. In other words, Gadamer and Cheng ought to be read alongside one another for the sake of removing discrepancies and contradictions, which constitutes the organic structure of their thinking. -/- 3 Our Mode of Being in History Is Not Historical The conversations between Cheng and Gadamer in this issue of The Journal of Chinese Philosophy pivot on language, philosophy of history and ethics within a comparative framework of analysis, but also explore the grounds that make the comparisons possible. Those grounds are informed by Chinese cosmology, and function to wrest Gadamer from the shadow of Heideggerian facticity and reposition him within the range of Cheng’s ideas about our place in nature that is embedded in his question about how mind emerges from inorganic matter.8 -/- For Gadamer scholars of Heidegger, human finitude, our ownmost individuating death ensures that hermeneutics is always open to the other as other, always on the way toward understanding the meaning of Being. To arrest the process in a concept of “the Absolute” cannot but represent someone’s point of view, and thereby render hermeneutics indistinguishable from ideology. However, insofar as finitude is defined by them in terms of an onto-theological concept of immorality, finitude is a metaphysical concept consistent with epistemologies and confuse beings with the meaning of Being. As a result, the celebrated political value of hermeneutics to always be on the way toward an understanding of the meaning of Being admits subtle variations on the same worldview that are insufficiently self-critical. -/- Gadamer scholars of Heidegger are right. A transformation in ethos and opening to the meaning of Being depends on awareness of finitude. Yet this awareness does not yield openness to more of the same, i.e., discourse structurally incapable of coming to unity but instead, for both Gadamer and Cheng, openness to a distinctly different ontological dimension of reality. As Sandra Wawrytko and So-Seong Park indicate,9 this ontological dimension is prefigured in the experience of being-as-a-whole or the totality of all possible relations in both Chinese totemic shamanistic rituals,10 and Greek Dionysian festivals.11 Through these religious experiences human ethos and therefore consciousness is expanded and elevated from being centered on one’s ownmost concerns toward an affinity with all sentient beings from insects and plants to animals. The channel for this affinity is an auditory disposition and hence, the emotions, compassion, and feeling response. -/- The capacity for an auditory disposition, or as Gadamer calls it, listening consciousness to respond to the inter-relationality and therefore inherent balance of nature is developed through music, song and dance of the religious rituals and festivals. They facilitate the unity of mind with nature. This use of music, that transforms ordinary consciousness, explains Cheng’s emphasis on the receptivity of feeling response in comprehensive observation, and Gadamer’s emphasis on openness to the other in attunement. However, an auditory disposition characteristic of pre-literate oral cultures that reveals the “All” need not rely on religion. As theorists about the evolution of language have explained,12 modern languages preserve their pre-historical past in music or prosody. That is to say, the song and dance that revealed the totality of inter-related beings to an ethos of comprehensive observation and attunement toward beings in classical civilizations is retained in the back-and-forth movement or rhythm of the dialogue form. Our mode of being in history is a mode of being in nature – through the music of language. -/- While alerting the reader to the limits of a nominalist interpretation, Gadamer expresses the inner law of the nature as follows: “in perishing there is always becoming, and in becoming there is always perishing.”13 Considered in process, opposites generate and blend into each other. This law of nature applies to everything.14 Hence, in a manner comparable to Pfister’s concluding insights, onto-dialogical hermeneutics is not only open to discrete events of otherness but moreover, to the moving structure of reality expressed, as Gajdosova suggests, in the existential moment of naming. Considered as interplay of tension and resolution with a life of its own, the dialectic of a dialogue is self-similar to the way in which an organism grows (by instinct). There is, therefore, a sense in which the art of interpretation extends the human mind into the eternal cycles of nature such that we participate in the articulation of the inner telos/homeostasis toward which all beings strive and importantly for Gadamer scholars of Heidegger, within the material limits of energy to which our embodied minds are self-evidently subject. In mortality there is always immortality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.1 (2003) 64-76 [Access article in PDF] The Sign System in Chinese Landscape Paintings Cliff G. Mcmahon Paintings emerge from a culture field and must be interpreted in relation to the net of culture. A given culture will be implicated by the sign system used by the painter. Everyone agrees that in Chinese landscape paintings, the most important cultural bond is to ancient Chinese (...) Taoism, and to a lesser degree, to Confucianism. Obviously, then, the key for these landscapes is an alert understanding of Taoism, and the primary source is the book the Tao Tê Ching.Some of the most crucial elements in Taoist beliefs are often ignored in the analysis of the Taoist landscapes, and this deserves more attention. The core of Taoism lies in a philosophic and religious guess, and the guess is made as an effort to reach a high-order explanatory theory of the origin of the universe, the structure of the universe, and the best path for human life. The guess of the ancient Chinese sages goes something like this: The universe is created by an Ultimate One whose nature remains mysterious, beyond the power of words, an Absolute pervaded by the spirit of motherhood, and thus moved to the acts of creation, using two agents of creation. These two agents are invisible but real forces that operate by the tension of polarity, the dynamic interplay of negative and positive energies, much like male and female forces. The female power is called Yin, the male power Yang. The female power is seen wherever there is fluidity, softness, openness, receiving, emptiness, or darkness. The male power is at work in hardness, assertiveness, force, and light. Everything that is made is a blending of the Yin and Yang polarities, and the dynamism and flux of reality is based on the tendency of Yin and Yang to advance and retreat, the tendency of one to become the other, just as summer changes into winter, and day changes into night. In order for a man to be complete, he must learn to put on the way of woman, to be receptive. This is a very intelligent principle. [End Page 64] When we take in all our impressions of nature, and take in all the books we have read, we are in the receptive mode. The Yin female principle of emptiness has a priority over Yang in that there must be an empty space before any concrete thing comes to occupy the space. The Yin female force is seen in the low and quiet valley, and in the fluid receptivity of water. Yang is in the bold assertive mountains and in the hardness of stone. Yin appears in the graceful and flexible bending of bamboo, while Yang is in the hardness and strength of bamboo. Since Yin is associated with water, all forms of cloud and mist are symbols of Yin. Yang is action, Yin is wisdom.One of the most important aspects of Taoism is the principle that the mysterious Absolute One has permeated all of reality and serves the good of all creatures in every passing minute, asking nothing in return and offering no favoritism to any age or any group. This is obviously a sophisticated and intelligent principle for a theology. On this point, Taoism is superior to Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Christianity might have taken a similar stand in that the gospel of John declares that the eternal logos dwells in all created things in a timeless manner, and was fully embedded in the world before the coming of the historical Jesus, but so far, Christians have almost totally ignored the opening lines of John.This philosophic core of Taoist belief compares to the great Western idea that Godhead creates by the use of cosmic agents. In the gospel of John, the logos is the agent. In chapter eight of Proverbs, Wisdom is the agent. In Plotinus, Nous is the agent. In Heraclitus, the polarities of love and hate are this agent. Sometimes the idea of cosmic agent is used to protect... (shrink)

While the recognition of ambiguous emotions is crucial for successful social interactions, previous work has shown that they are perceived differently depending on whether they are viewed on male or female faces. The present paper aims to shed light on this phenomenon by exploring two hypotheses: the confounded signal hypothesis, which posits the existence of perceptual overlaps between emotions and gendered morphotypes, and the social role hypothesis, according to which the observer's responses are biased by stereotypes. Participants were asked to (...) categorise blended faces (i.e. artificial faces made ambiguous by mixing two emotions) in a forced-choice task. Six emotions were used to create each blend (neutral, surprise, sadness, fear, happiness, anger), for a total of 15 expressions. We then applied signal detection theory – considering both the morphotype of the stimuli and the participants’ gender – to distinguish participants’ perceptual processes from their response biases. The results showed a perceptual advantage for anger on male faces and for sadness on female faces. However, different strategies were deployed when labelling emotions on gendered morphotypes. In particular, a response bias towards angry male faces establishes their special status, as they resulted in both excellent detection and a tendency to be over-reported, especially by women. (shrink)

This paper aims at emphasizing several elements that give shape to the syncretism of the alchemic work Atalanta Fugiens, which represents one of the classic texts of alchemy and continues the hermetic and theosophical trends of the Renaissance. Atalanta Fugiens is of current interest because of its flavor of multimedia essay avant la lettre, as it gathers a series of emblems, epigrams, and al- chemic comments on the mythological Greek-Ro- man corpus in an attempt to order in an emblem- atic (...) book the entire knowledge of humanity, to reformulate in alchemic terms the totality of the spiritual experience of humanity. The book may be compared both with a palimpsest and with a blending of elements of different natures (visual and auditory). However, what is most important is that the book exits the “Gutenberg galaxy” and enters territories that only today – thanks to computers and the Internet – are we able to explore. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Fragments THE GENEALOGY OF PRAGMATISM by Anthony J. Cascardi At SEVERAL POINTS in Philosophy and the Minor ofNature (1979) and in.the essays collected as Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), Richard Rorty mentions John Dewey as one of a group of "edifying" philosophers whose tutelary presence and audiority are invoked in the project which he elsewhere describes as die "circumvention" of Western metaphysics.1 Dewey joins the ranks of his (...) fellow American pragmatiste James and Peirce as well as those of two odier rather disparate groups: on die one hand, those philosophers like Davidson, Sellars, and Quine, who demonstrate from within diat analytical philosophy eventually transcends and cancels itself; and on the other, those "continental" philosophers like Foucault, Gadamer, and Derrida, who comfortably accept the image of philosophy as a subgenre of "literature" or "writing," a discourse with no privileged insights into the nature of rationality or claims to truth. Rorty's own project is a blend of all diree. Widi James he claims that truth is simply "what is good in die way of belief," not the proper or even fruitful object of theoretical speculation ("truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting dieory about.... Pragmatiste think that the history of attempts to isolate the True or the Good, or to define die word 'true' or 'good,' supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area.... The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive wim the history of that literary genre we call 'philosophy' — a genre founded by Plato," Consequences ofPragmatism, pp. xiii-xiv). Yet he shares widi Davidson, Sellars, and Quine the will to demonstrate the limits of analytical phdosophy while framing his own propositions in the language ofanalysis. 295 296Philosophy and Literature Foucault and Derrida in their turn complete the image of life in a "postphilosophical " culture, where the designation of "post" indicates a final refusal to regard pragmatism as yet another metanarrative ofthe history of philosophy. In this case, die historicist part of the Hegelian teaching, which is dieir common inheritance, the assimilation of logic to history, is accepted, while the assimilation of history to logic, which completes the Hegelian syndiesis, is rejected on account of its totalizing designs and its reliance on die notion of Absolute Spirit. So seen, the genealogy of pragmatism is of considerably broader scope than die initial intentions of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature would suggest. In diat book, Rorty claimed to be marshalling the various forces named above not so much in response to Platonism as in reply to a single episode in the history of philosophy — viz., that which begins in Descartes and receives its fullest expression in Kant, and considers truth as a matter of the accurate correspondence of ideas held inforo intemo to objects in the external world, and accordingly regards die world as a representation of the mind. Heidegger articulated a similar complaint when he spoke of the Cartesian age as that in which die world was first determined as a "picture" ("Die Zeit des Weltbildes") and noted diat from this time forward epistemology was determined as "first philosophy": "a dieory ofknowledge had to be erected before a theory of the world."2 Pragmatism is on mis more limited view primarily a response to the conditions of a technological age and to the conception ofreason as mathematical representation which sustains modern science. Thus Rorty should well be surprised at Dewey's claim to have applied a scientific and empirical method in die study of metaphysics, whose proper objects consist, in Dewey's description, of"die large and constant features of human sufferings, enjoyments, trials, failures, and successes together with the institutions of art, science, technology, politics, and religion,"3 for to have done so would have been to have countered the Cartesian division between science on the one hand and qualities and values ("experience") on die other. Instead, Rorty imputes a different claim to Experience and Nature and sees it as a way-station on the pam toward that hypothetical book called Nature and Culture, in which die idea of an empirical method... (shrink)

As coronavirus disease 2019 swept the world in early 2020, all the Chinese universities and colleges adopted online learning to fulfill the directive saying “classes suspended but learning continues.” Understanding the impact of this large-scale online learning experience on the future online learning intention of Chinese university students can help design better blended-learning activities. This study applies flow experience and theory of planned behavior to construct a theoretical framework for assumption making and the assumptions made are validated by data gained (...) from questionnaires. A total of 6,933 students from 54 institutions in China participated in the investigation, with 5,456 valid questionnaires returned. This study employs partial least squares regression and confirmative factor analysis to analyze and estimate the measurement model and the structural model. The results indicate that the experience of home-based learning significantly influenced the attitudes of Chinese university students, which in turn had a positive influence on their intention to continue online learning. The research findings provide a theoretical framework and practical guidelines on building a scientific online learning platform with appropriate online learning environments and tasks for a post-COVID-19 era blended-learning in Chinese universities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.1 (2003) 64-76 [Access article in PDF] The Sign System in Chinese Landscape Paintings Cliff G. Mcmahon Paintings emerge from a culture field and must be interpreted in relation to the net of culture. A given culture will be implicated by the sign system used by the painter. Everyone agrees that in Chinese landscape paintings, the most important cultural bond is to ancient Chinese (...) Taoism, and to a lesser degree, to Confucianism. Obviously, then, the key for these landscapes is an alert understanding of Taoism, and the primary source is the book the Tao Tê Ching.Some of the most crucial elements in Taoist beliefs are often ignored in the analysis of the Taoist landscapes, and this deserves more attention. The core of Taoism lies in a philosophic and religious guess, and the guess is made as an effort to reach a high-order explanatory theory of the origin of the universe, the structure of the universe, and the best path for human life. The guess of the ancient Chinese sages goes something like this: The universe is created by an Ultimate One whose nature remains mysterious, beyond the power of words, an Absolute pervaded by the spirit of motherhood, and thus moved to the acts of creation, using two agents of creation. These two agents are invisible but real forces that operate by the tension of polarity, the dynamic interplay of negative and positive energies, much like male and female forces. The female power is called Yin, the male power Yang. The female power is seen wherever there is fluidity, softness, openness, receiving, emptiness, or darkness. The male power is at work in hardness, assertiveness, force, and light. Everything that is made is a blending of the Yin and Yang polarities, and the dynamism and flux of reality is based on the tendency of Yin and Yang to advance and retreat, the tendency of one to become the other, just as summer changes into winter, and day changes into night. In order for a man to be complete, he must learn to put on the way of woman, to be receptive. This is a very intelligent principle. [End Page 64] When we take in all our impressions of nature, and take in all the books we have read, we are in the receptive mode. The Yin female principle of emptiness has a priority over Yang in that there must be an empty space before any concrete thing comes to occupy the space. The Yin female force is seen in the low and quiet valley, and in the fluid receptivity of water. Yang is in the bold assertive mountains and in the hardness of stone. Yin appears in the graceful and flexible bending of bamboo, while Yang is in the hardness and strength of bamboo. Since Yin is associated with water, all forms of cloud and mist are symbols of Yin. Yang is action, Yin is wisdom.One of the most important aspects of Taoism is the principle that the mysterious Absolute One has permeated all of reality and serves the good of all creatures in every passing minute, asking nothing in return and offering no favoritism to any age or any group. This is obviously a sophisticated and intelligent principle for a theology. On this point, Taoism is superior to Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Christianity might have taken a similar stand in that the gospel of John declares that the eternal logos dwells in all created things in a timeless manner, and was fully embedded in the world before the coming of the historical Jesus, but so far, Christians have almost totally ignored the opening lines of John.This philosophic core of Taoist belief compares to the great Western idea that Godhead creates by the use of cosmic agents. In the gospel of John, the logos is the agent. In chapter eight of Proverbs, Wisdom is the agent. In Plotinus, Nous is the agent. In Heraclitus, the polarities of love and hate are this agent. Sometimes the idea of cosmic agent is used to protect... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Quest for the Historical Abstract ExpressionismDaniel A. SiedellAbstract Expressionism:The International Context, by Joan Marter and David Anfam. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007, 320 pp. $26.95, paper.Abstract Expressionism, by Debra Bricker Balken. London: Tate, 2005, 80 pp. $9.60, paper.Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique, by Ellen Landau. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005, 768 pp. $45.00, paper.What makes any definition of a movement in art dubious is (...) that it never fits the deepest artists in the movement—certainly not as well as, if successful, it does the others.—Harold Rosenberg, 1952From the moment of its inception in the 1940s, "Abstract Expressionism" has been the subject of reframings, redefinitions, and revisions. This is because it is more than the sum total of artworks and artists traditionally recognized as part of the movement. It is a constitutive part of postwar American cultural life, and it has shaped how we understand art and the role of the artist. It has also shaped the practice of art criticism and defined the role of the art critic. Because it is part of the United States' creation myth of a distinctive postwar "American identity," it also possesses significant symbolic value. And this symbolic value is why it has been such a popular subject for art museum exhibitions for nearly half a century. The fact that in the last ten to fifteen years, major art museums have mounted major exhibitions of the work of key figures in the movement, like Jackson Pollock (including a feature film starring Ed Harris), Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Barnett Newman, and that auction prices for these artists reach tens of millions of dollars, suggest that, no matter how contested and complicated the concept of "Abstract Expressionism" is, the artists associated with the movement remain relevant.1Abstract Expressionism is not merely big business for museums, collectors, and auction houses. It has also been big business for scholars. The symbolic power of Abstract Expressionism and its influence on shaping and [End Page 107] forming contemporary artistic and critical practice has made the movement an important subject for historical and critical scrutiny. The publication of Irving Sandler's The Triumph of American Painting in 1970 was the first book-length study on Abstract Expressionism, and it marked the gradual beginning of the movement's transformation from a living entity to a more reified subject palatable for academic inquiry. Blending Alfred H. Barr's formalism with an historian's interest in subject matter and iconography and a critic's access to the artists, The Triumph of American Painting provided a taxonomy of sources and influences. Sandler's book, in part, provoked the publication of Serge Guilbaut's How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art in 1983 (written in 1978 as a doctoral dissertation), which initiated nearly fifteen years of serious and provocative scholarship on Abstract Expressionism. Guilbaut's radical revisionist approach to the subject—which sought to reinterpret the entire development of Abstract Expressionism as an aesthetic weapon of the Cold War—provoked a slew of responses from art historians eager to either jump on the careening bandwagon of Marxist social histories of modern art or hunker down in the trenches to protect hard-won scholarly turf. The latter was the response of a loose federation of art historians eager to forge a scholarly orthodoxy. This emergent paradigm is revealed in a 1988 special issue of Art Journal called "Abstract Expressionism: New and Improved," coedited by Stephen Polcari and Ann Gibson. This issue included essays by those art historians who understood themselves as part of a "new generation" of scholars characterized by their collective desire to transcend the polemics and limitations of those critics and curators whose distorted picture of the movement would be restored to clarity through scholarly distance, a distance that a "new synthesis" of Abstract Expressionist "art, culture, history, and society together, not separately" would produce.2 Sandler and Guilbaut were swiftly dismissed by these art historians of the "new and improved," the former because of his formalism and close proximity to the artists—many of whom he knew personally—the latter because of his Marxism... (shrink)

continent. 2.3 (2012): 218–223 Vijay Prashad. Arab Spring, Libyan Winter . Oakland: AK Press. 2012. 271pp, pbk. $14.95 ISBN-13: 978-1849351126. Nearly a decade ago, I sat in a class entitled, quite simply, “Corporations,” taught by Vijay Prashad at Trinity College. Over the course of the semester, I was amazed at the extent of Prashad’s knowledge, and the complexity and erudition of his style. He has since authored a number of classic books that have gained recognition throughout the world. The Darker (...) Nations , a peoples’ history of the Third World, sent defibrillating shockwaves through an academic world that had almost forgotten the epic scope and historic dignity of the non-aligned movement and post-colonial struggles. In his recent, award-winning work, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter , Prashad delves into his capacious knowledge of the Third World to excavate the discourses and narratives surrounding the upheavals of 2011. “Revolutions have no specific timetable,” states Prashad in the opening line of this exciting and provocative look at contemporary events. Instantly, an atmosphere of suspense emerges. The reader is alerted to the problem of history. Does the making of history then involve a suspension of historical time, or is it a continuous narrative structure into which events must eventually be integrated? Arab Spring, Libyan Winter shows that the answer to the question, “How is history made?” lies just as easily in the asking. The first half of the book works through the events that transpired to bring about the explosive popular uprisings of Arab Spring: Tunisia and Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain. But the events are not put together in a cohesive, chronological fashion. Using an uncommonly gripping style more akin to the folk-story motif of the djeli than to traditionally Orientalist academia, Prashad suspends a given situation, points out its components, and traces back the characters and genealogies that define each link before resuming a narrative. Every moment is an end to itself, and an origin of something different. Thus, the making of history becomes the suspension of its own progress, it’s catastrophic 'stability,' in a process of differentiation through inclusion. Empirically, one might suggest that history is a condition of time, and by extension, of the subject, but history is also an eminent producer of the Subject and her concept of time through memory and narrative. Hence, history is often overdetermined by a dominant narrative of the sovereign. The apparently chaotic composition of Prashad’s historicity is, then, an interstitial morphology of resistance. It illustrates that the time to act for the revolutionary lies in the gaps within the dominant historical realities. It points out the sorties of signifiers constituting nothing in the obliterated ruins of history. Through such illuminations, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter breaks through “the surface of history” to elaborate revolution’s snapping synapses, exploding interruptions and breaches, connecting flows. Messianic Politics It is tempting to think, 'History is either singular, or it is diffuse. It is either one coherent factual narrative, or it is comprised of the aletheia of the multitude.' Yet the reader finds Prashad examining the structure of history on multiple levels. For Prashad, world history is shaped by geographically defined political movements, such as communism or national liberation, with historical agents like the working class for the former and the nationalist militant for the latter. Religion, however, is another matter: “Religion has an unshakable eschatology which a post-utopian secular politics lacks.” Within the telos of religion, there appears on the horizon the image of Benjamin’s thoughts on messianic time—time as “a small fissure in the continuous catastrophe,” a break with history, may contain an ultimate redemption of the human beyond the political power struggle. Succoring the split between geo-political and utopian-religious (messianic) time in the context of Arab Spring, Prashad indicates that the base of “the deep desire and commitment to some form of democracy” is forged by the affinity between eschatological Islamist politics with the People. To think about the Subject of messianic time in the context of the lack of a “coherent timetable” for emancipatory politics, it is perhaps best to return to the modern tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose prefigurative blending of liberation theology and emancipatory politics became most important during his works of 1963, the climactic year of “The Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the March on Washington, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. In “The Letter,” King states the point bluntly: Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” The timing of rebellious action must not be a part of history. It must change history. The kairos appears spontaneous and untimely in its convulsive, shocking presence, yet it is, deeper still, a path, a longue durée , forged through diligent and rigorous praxis. King put a finer point on the path of historic liberation in his declaration in his 1963 speech at Western Michigan University: “[T]ime is neutral.... Somewhere along the way we must see that time will never solve the problem alone but that we must help time. Somewhere we must see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels on inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social stagnation. We must always help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.” Time, then, exists in “the neutral,” while action must turn to the kairos , not only of taking time, but taking the right time. By turning our relation to time into kairos , we move time from its context within history to a duration between histories—the longue dure?e of Messianic time. The implementation of neutrality in this context suggests a broad space of time to extend through the valley of positive and negative. In Roland Barthes’s lectures from 1978, the neutral takes place in this minimal distance of non-conflict that exists outside of two extremes. It is, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, “the non-general, the non-generic, as well as the non-specific.” For Blanchot, the neutrality of time permeates life as death, impassive and beyond control; such is the neutrality of messianic time, which permeates the charge of history, changing the "I" into the "one." The neutrality of time therefore implicates history in a case against extremism, showing that the work of the radical is not to tend to any particular side, but to have the time to navigate through the terrible terrain of history by altering its course, its patterns and rhythms of movement, connection, sociality. Hence, one does not simply “make history,” one alters the course of history in accordance to “the right time.” The historical path toward emerging power is transmitted as a gesture to the outside of history, against history; a gesture as simple as reaching out. Thus a counterhistory, to use Foucault’s term, is brought forward as the guide of time past a point of no return, a Rubicon, the point where the normal path of history falls to the past. The subject, who must be the only true agent of history, facilitates time through helpfulness, and both the Subject and her history become decentered in relation to one another. Yet history negates the neutrality of time. As Barthes discloses, although the neutral is the “thought and practice of the nonconflictual, it is nevertheless bound to assertion, to conflict, in order to make itself heard.” Engaged with history, time is charged with a destiny, and becomes an opposition. As Prashad insists, “For Arab lands, the events of early 2011 were not the inauguration of a new history, but the continuation of an unfinished struggle that is a hundred years old.” The emergence of the Subject during Arab Spring did not conceive of a new history, but changed the path of history toward a different destiny. “Historical grievances combined with inflationary pressures now met with the subjective sense that victory might be at hand—this was not simply a protest to scream into the wind, but a protest to actually remove autocrats from their positions of authority. The facts of resistance had given way to the expectation of revolutionary change.” The negativity of this charge toward “revolutionary destiny” rendered control, as a positive force, seriously lacking. The lack of control lies in the problem that the Subject is not totally detemporalized or timeless, but untimely in her presence. The Subject is untimely, because her work is visionary, and it is only through such visionary work that the Rubicon can be crossed. Still, the crossing of this border is haunted by anxiety over an impending disaster that lays in wait. It is only through the form of what Benjamin calls divine violence, captivated not with the justice of the means, but the ends—the transformation of history—that a revelation of history’s traumatic foundations can be liberated, and patterns and rhythms of time developed throughout obscured traditions awakened. In this situation, the Subject appears to be outside of right, but setting the state to rights. Because her position is correct, in-so-far as the rebelling subject rebels due to a lack of recognition, her representation appears outside of the norm, which is mistaken as right. Therefore, such visionary work must be carried out through obscured traditions, underground, away from the surveillance of empire. Explaining his method from the start along the lines of Marx’s metaphor of the mole, Prashad insists, “It is the burrowing that is essential, not simply the emergence onto the surface of history.” Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a book on uncharted networks of time, spread out over the 252 pages like an elaborate spider’s web of passages intertwining with and overwhelming the machinery of the state. Although untimely, Arab Spring was not a flash in the pan, or a Facebook or Twitter revolution. Prashad notes that the government’s suspension of these tools led to further radicalism by furthering communications through face-to-face encounters. In existential terms, Arab Spring might be thought of as a revolution of Being over techne , an uprising of the unchartable, infinite potential of the Other. The name of this Other is found in Chance. The faith of the revolution lies in the proper decentering of the subject, its giving to the Other of time, for only with respect to time does history actually appear on the horizon of the subject, rather than as an imposition. This time of historical agency appears as a moment when anything can happen—a revolutionary truth event where everything comes into question while being realized in its Otherness as a community of the people begins anew in the streets amidst discourse, friendship, reconfigurations of hegemony, and a becoming of a constituent power. Throwing a wrench into the gears of the “cobwebbed tradition” of Orientalism, the decentering of history in Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a defining quality of its impassioned revolutionary cry. But perhaps the most paradigmatic points of the book emerge from the unexpected voices. To make the connection between the particular manifestations of revolutionary demands to the general historic terms of revolution, Prashad quotes an anonymous young Egyptian in Tahrir Square, who reminds us, “[T]he French Revolution took a very long time so the people could eventually get their rights.” Far from timelessness, the historicization of Arab Spring must exist precisely within the most uncanny appearance of time, as something that does not appear to come from the natural state of time as we know it, but in arriving has completely transformed the way that we understand time. Strange Monsters Revolution is never as simple as a revolt from below against a rusting structure of elites trying to remain in power. As with the French Revolution, Arab Spring consisted of complex familial ties, outside interests, and religious factions fighting alongside, often in awkward juxtaposition to, liberals, working class parties, farmers, and students. It is perhaps because of this historically difficult and incongruous composition that the Arabic word for revolution is thawra , referring to the image of the bull, or thawr , which has religious significance as a pagan deity for the Ancient Semitic tribes and Cartheginians. If Daniel Guérin was correct in saying, “Anarchism and Marxism drink from the same spring,” then it is quite a different oasis that drove the thirsty beast of revolution through what Prashad calls, “the Libyan labyrinth.” Recalling Bataille’s Acéphale, the intestinal labyrinth gains significance as the mode of metabolism and rumination in which, “(the Acephale) has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words, as a monster.” Unraveling the discourse of the revolution, the flows of power and hegemony—from Qaddafi’s nationalist coup in 1969 to the wars with Chad from 1978 to 1987, the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s to, finally, the War on Terror—we find that the metabolic process of Libyan Winter ends in the production of oil. In a process of what Prashad calls “involution,” Qaddafi’s bellicose policies, along with his attempts to nationalize Islam together with oil, mutated the source of his power, turning his house against itself. Already a divided nation, with its two major cities on opposite geographic sides of the country, Libya became split between two opposed political powers—liberal reformists and staunch nationalists—as Qaddafi’s political disengagement manifested through what can only be described in psychoanalytic terms as a recursive passage a l’act (mysteriously calling Wikipedia “Kleenex,” declaring that opponents drank hallucinogens with their instant coffee, and so on). Prashad declares, “The mercurial style that Qaddafi adopted was not about his personality alone, but also a leader’s natural response to a system that relied upon power brokers whose own loyalty… did not have any ideological commitment to the system.” As in the case of other nations during Arab Spring, the true expression of revolt was an outward exposition of what had inwardly been happening in microcosmic societies throughout the realm—from indigenous tribes to political parties, for a century, the people, partly motivated by (and in resistance to) economic impositions of development, had been changing the traditional social compositions and participating in what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls, “the relative autonomy of the movement from the leaders.” It was this empowerment of political reconfigurations taking place under the context of new democratic assemblages that shocked the elites and evoked such a powerful response. Unlike Qaddafi’s awkward policy choices and rants, real acts of power from the West were clear and decisive. Prashad sets the stages of war and diplomacy, far removed from the deserts, mountains, and cities that forged the backdrop of popular politics. Taking place under the now-classic architecture of the “four pillars” of US interests—oil, the War on Terror, Israel, and the circumvention of Iranian hegemony—we find elites rubbing elbows in “Heliopolist cocktail parties and hushed conferences in Kasr al-Ittihadiya” as well as the Concorde-Lafayette hotel in Paris, which provides the setting for a meeting of anti-Qaddafi figures consolidating their power. These scenes are buttressed with the careful portraiture of key historical actors. As Prashad brings the stage of history to life, we find the diplomats and liberals like Frank Wisner, whose career has brought him from Enron in the late 1990s to the Obama Administration, under the aegis of which he was meeting with Mubarak about military support during Arab Spring. We spy the provocateurs, for instance, gauche cavalier , Bernard Henri-Levy, who telephones Sarkozy from Benghazi about the need for more NATO air strikes. We follow the rebel military establishment as it suffers mysterious deaths and even more mysterious assents (like that of apparent CIA cohort, Khalifa Hifter). In each of these intriguing characters, we find different representations of the security state biopolitique: an oil-injected reification that drives Arab Spring from the resentment of rising food prices to the brink of implosion in Libyan Winter. Reminiscent of the scenes of Cold War soirées represented in old Bond films, the aristocratic fight for oil against democracy that was Libyan Winter presents a harsh truth that the new global crisis is simply the continuation of the old history: the global exploitation of capitalism waged against the imagination of the people. As Benjamin laments, “The labyrinth is the right path for the person who always arrives early enough at his destination. This destination is the marketplace.” Yet, “(t)he labyrinth is the habitat of… a humanity (a class) which does not want to know where its destiny is taking it.” Thus, the labyrinth leads, like the desert, only further into itself. As Blanchot explains, “The desert is even less certain than the world; it is never anything but the approach to the desert.” Only the visionary can take time out of the involution toward oblivion. It is here, in this approach to and escape from history, that we find ourselves within Benjamin’s Golgotha, Blanchot’s desert: A space of indeterminate uncertainty where we become familiar only with our own exile. Blanchot writes, “For the moderated and moderate man, the room, the desert, and the world are strictly determined places. For the man of the desert and the labyrinth, devoted to the error of a journey necessarily a little longer than his life, the same space will be truly infinite, even if he knows that it is not, all the more so since he knows it.” The desert, as allegory, provides an eschatology, a mortality in the destiny of Arab Spring. But any allegory of nature might lead to a labyrinthine eschatology (for example, in Bachelard, the forest presents "a limitless world"); the prescience of the untimely is always an uncanny acceptance of the infinite within the finite—the outside of what is understood. Transgenerational and occupied with the image of the future, the untimely makes otherness its home as it proceeds toward liberation. In the work of helping time navigate this dangerous passage of history, Prashad illustrates that the more violent break with history may have occurred in the peaceable struggles of Tahrir Square, and not in the military clashes of Qaddafi with his former Generals who defected to the CIA and NATO countries. It might be possible to suggest, then, that in the case of Tunisia and Egypt, the historical subject of the people was drawn together in a Dionysian dance of different rhythms in the marvelous realm of the ancients, while we fear that the case of Libya suggests an Apollonian future where time, itself, may lay dying under the machinic hand of history. The properly Nietzschean inversion would follow: time is dead, for history has killed it. Yet, if time is dead, struck down in Golgotha, exposed in the desert, mauled by the thawra , it is only in the present sense that it is rendered impossible outside of the context into which the untimely has thrown us. Thus, if history becomes an art of revolution, life as being-towards-death (death as the provocation of the neutrality of time) becomes what Benjamin calls “the allegory of resurrection” through the glorious ruins of history. Prashad ends his work with a rousing finale: “The time of the impossible has presented itself. In Egypt, where the appetite for the possibilities of the future are greatest, the people continue to assert themselves into Tahrir Square and other places, pushing to reinvigorate a Revolution that must not die… For them the slogan is simple: Down with the Present. Long live the Future. May it be so.&rdquo. (shrink)

Eames has given us what is perhaps the best introduction to the pragmatic philosophies and the pragmatic philosophy of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead. He has succeeded in describing the thought of these four thinkers in such a way that both their individual distinctness and shared concerns and characteristics emerge. This masterful exposition is presented under four major headings: "Nature and Human Life," "Knowledge," "Value," and "Education." These are then further subdivided into a total of twenty chapters focussing on (...) more specific questions which are presented with clarity and economy. Eames does not mechanically list the views of each thinker on every issue but rather each chapter is comprised of a fine integration and blending of their relevant views resulting in an organically unified response to fundamental questions. Since this is an expository rather than a critical introduction, Eames quite properly makes the views of the pragmatists themselves central and dominating. Using direct citation sparingly but effectively, he, for the most part, expresses their doctrines in his own language while maintaining a striking fidelity to the substance, tone, and texture of each philosopher's thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cultural Transactions: Nature, Self, SocietyRoger SeamonCultural Transactions: Nature, Self, Society, by Paul Hernadi; ix & 156 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995, $27.50 paper.Thinkers have often found the world rather Gaulish—or, if you prefer, have carved it up to make it so. In Cultural Transactions Paul Hernadi starts from the premise that “We typically experience ourselves as objectively existing organisms, players of intersubjectively assigned and evaluated roles, or (...) as subjective selves” (p. 3), which correspond to the nature, society, and self of his subtitle. He then collects and creates triads which are meant to be homologous with the foundational trio. Some of these are traditional (truth, justice, beauty), others are cobbled out of folk psychology (desire with, desire that, desire for), some are taken from other thinkers (Martin Buber’s It, Thou, and I), but most are based on linguistic concepts. Thus, Hernadi sums up at one point by saying, “In the preceding sections I suggest that all discourse involves action, production, and signification, and that doing, making, and meaning tend respectively to predominate in speaking, writing, and thinking—the prime vehicles of communication, expression, and representation in our culture” (p. 28). The process culminates in the postulation of three triangles (discourse, awareness, and value) whose apices and sides constitute two triads. Each side is itself then divided into three, which makes for a total of five triads per triangle (pp. 111, 120, 130), to which we should add about twenty or so spelled out earlier. This is an argument by accumulation for a triadic human universe.Hernadi sees life (and Cultural Transactions is about nothing less) as a complex dance both within and between these cooperative triads: “Yet the natural domain of Its (to be individuated as such by one of Buber’s two Is) and the social domain of Buber’s I-Thou relations would not be what they are without self-conscious individuals who are able to pick out themselves as [George Herbert] Meadian Mes and other particulars as Its or Thous from what [End Page 535] thereby becomes someone’s natural and social environment” (p. 88). Again: “Consensus, coherence, and correspondence have sometimes been invoked as rival criteria of truth. From the present book, they should emerge rather as mutually supportive goals in our lifelong pursuit of interactive doing, self-expressive making, and world-oriented meaning” (p. 109). Sometimes the triads run parallel to each other, and at other times they are nested. Thus, the triad within beauty consists of Dionysian “world-absorbed engulfment” (nature), “ludic” imitation (the social dimension of art), and Apollonian “self-controlled detachment” (self) (pp. 130–31). In the next triad up, Beauty is parallel to self, goodness is the value analogous to society, and truth corresponds to the world.Some of the triads are indeed “quite clever” (p. 142) (Hernadi’s own phrase from a self-reflexive “Epilogue”), as when he writes, “Natural must gives way to social should only to make room, eventually, for personal may as well” (p. 99). This nicely captures our sense that freedom has degrees, but more often there are dubious appropriations and stretched similes. For example, Hernadi uses a mere pronoun to make his case for the possibility of a seamless blending of the three realms—“the ecumenical ‘we’ recombines the first-, second-, and third person perspectives of communication”—and he continues with a very unpersuasive simile—“just as a rapidly spinning top turns the three cardinal colors painted on it into the whitish hue of unrefracted light” (p. 75). This is not an argument, but the expression of a wish.Although each triad is meant to be homologous with the foundational trio, there are quite a few uncomfortable fits. For example, I don’t see how “being with” is the apex formed by truth and beauty, while “being of” comes between justice and beauty, and “being toward” belongs between beauty and truth (p. 130). There are also odd omissions. Hernadi rejects Freud’s id, ego, and superego as insufficiently fine-grained to capture our complex subjectivity (p. 90) (which they were never meant to do), but the parallel to his major triad of nature, self and society seems... (shrink)

This collection of gracefully written essays can serve as an excellent introduction to the major trends in recent analytic ethics. Though most of Aiken's positive theses have been developed in detail by others, he blends them into a unique total outlook. Throughout, he is concerned to show the practical significance of the analytic temper in moral philosophy and gives eloquent expression to the tension between individual choice and commitment to the rule-regulated behavior of the community.--R.J.B.

I discuss the apparent discrepancy between the qualitative diversity of consciousness and the relative qualitative homogeneity of the brain's basic constituents, a discrepancy that has been raised as a problem for identity theorists by Maxwell and Lockwood (as one element of the ‘grain problem’), and more recently as a problem for panpsychists (under the heading of ‘the palette problem’). The challenge posed to panpsychists by this discrepancy is to make sense of how a relatively small ‘palette’ of basic qualities could (...) give rise to the bewildering diversity of qualities we, and presumably other creatures, experience. I argue that panpsychists can meet this challenge, though it requires taking contentious stands on certain phenomenological questions, in particular on whether any familiar qualities are actual examples of ‘phenomenal blending’, and whether any other familiar qualities have a positive ‘phenomenologically simple character’. Moreover, it requires accepting an eventual theory most elements of which are in a certain explicable sense unimaginable, though not for that reason inconceivable. Nevertheless, I conclude that there are no conclusive reasons to reject such a theory, and so philosophers whose prior commitments motivate them to adopt it can do so without major theoretical cost. (shrink)

Totalism is the view that one distribution of well-being is better than another just in case the one contains a greater sum of well-being than the other. Many philosophers, following Parfit, reject totalism on the grounds that it entails the repugnant conclusion: that, for any number of excellent lives, there is some number of lives that are barely worth living whose existence would be better. This paper develops a theory of welfare aggregation—the lexical-threshold view—that allows totalism to avoid the repugnant (...) conclusion, as well as its analogues involving suffering populations and the lengths of individual lives. The theory is grounded in some independently plausible views about the structure of well-being, identifies a new source of incommensurability in population ethics, and avoids some of the implausibly extreme consequences of other lexical views, without violating the intuitive separability of lives. (shrink)

We explore the implications of a hierarchical structure, consisting of the higher order dimensions of nonspecific Positive Activation and Negative Activation and multiple specific negative affects and positive affects at the lower level. Emotional blends of the same valence are an essential part of this structure and form the basis of the higher order Negative and Positive Activation dimensions. Mixed cross-valence emotions are not central to this hierarchical scheme but are compatible with it. We examine the frequency of pure emotional (...) states, same-valence emotional blends, and cross-valence mixed emotions in a large momentary mood sample. (shrink)

This contribution is an attempt to integrate the notion of conceptual blending (Fauconnier and Turner 1998; Fauconnier and Turner 2002; and Fauconnier and Turner 2003) and Linda Hutcheon’s (1985) view of parody as a form of repetition maintaining a critical distance, through the analysis of a multimodal Internet meme. The case study chosen is a parodic music video of the Knack’s classic hit My Sharona, showing the absurdity in everyday life during the times of the Covid-19 pandemic. The study (...) is thus based on two conceptual paradigms: Blending Theory and Pragmatic Studies of Parody. (shrink)

This article revisits the age-old question of the sources of Matthew’s fulfilment quotations (FQs), specifically Matthew 12:17–19. Despite the presence of numerous studies on this topic, this study was necessitated by the need to incorporate insights from conceptual blending in order to explore how the source(s) of the quote was used. In addition, this study was also done with a possible view to complementing the textual criticism of Old Testament (OT) texts which happen to be quoted or referred to (...) in the New Testament (NT). The study dwells on intertestamental and cognitive linguistics studies. It was found that Matthew may have composed the Matthew 12:17–19 FQ, and possibly the other FQs as well, aided by conceptual integration mechanisms.Contribution: The source of Matthew’s quotation need not wholly be found in a specific historical text but should also include the cognitive operations in the author’s mind and intentions, thus resulting in a text that might not have existed in the form represented in the quotation. (shrink)

This article examines instances of the pu relative construction in Modern Greek in which the semantic role of the head is underspecified by the syntax. Such cases include sentences whose nominal head corresponds to some complement of the relative clause predicate and sentences in which the head does not have any sort of syntactic relationship with the relative. The latter, which are characteristic of oral, informal discourse, have been completely ignored in the previous literature, which has defined relatives on the (...) basis of exclusively structural criteria. It is argued that a unified account of the pu-construction (including gapped and gapless relatives) can be achieved if we analyze it as a conventional instruction for a particular kind of conceptual integration. Semantic and pragmatic factors influencing successful construal (one which leads to the construction of a unique blend) are systematically examined. The lack of a clear cut-off point in acceptability for such utterances tallies with the conclusion reached here, namely that the constraints governing such uses are constraints on interpretability. (shrink)

Blended social impact investment transactions, in which multiple types of capital are combined to support attainment of social impact, are a pervasive, yet not closely examined, feature of the SII market. This paper seeks to describe and understand blended SII transactions through the lens of institutional theory. Specifically, we use the institutional logics theoretical frame to shed light on the implications of combining several institutional logics in SII transactions. Consistent with other SII research, we find that parties to blended SII (...) transactions combine financial/commercial and social welfare logics. However, in blended SII transactions, different combinations of these logics are enacted by different stakeholders in a multi-hybrid-logic structure. As such, we propose that blended SII transactions are hybrids-of-hybrids. We argue that it is this hybrids-of-hybrid characteristic that differentiates blended SII transactions from other forms of SII and increases the potential for significant logical misalignment and resultant conflict and contestation. From a business ethics perspective, blended SII transactions cast light on the critical and often unrecognized role that grants and concessionary capital frequently play in enabling SII in not-for-profit, charitable ventures. We speculate that this can distort understanding of SII with adverse implications at the transaction and field levels. (shrink)

The Neuroethics of Memory is a thematically integrated analysis and discussion of neuroethical questions about memory capacity and content, as well as interventions to alter it. These include: how does memory function enable agency, and how does memory dysfunction disable it? To what extent is identity based on our capacity to accurately recall the past? Could a person who becomes aware during surgery be harmed if they have no memory of the experience? How do we weigh the benefits and risks (...) of brain implants designed to enhance, weaken or erase memory? Can a person be responsible for an action if they do not recall it? Would a victim of an assault have an obligation to retain a memory of this act, or the right to erase it? This book uses a framework informed by neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy combined with actual and hypothetical cases to examine these and related questions. (shrink)

Cet article a pour objet de mettre en perspective, selon une approche épistémologique, les théories du _blending _(ou « intégration conceptuelle ») et de l’analogie. Il se situe dans le cadre de la sémantique cognitive (Fauconnier, 1985 ; Fauconnier et Turner, 1996, 1998 et 2002), de la linguistique analogique (Monneret 2004, 2014, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2023) et de la psychologie cognitive (Gentner 1983 ; Gentner _et al_., 2001 ; Hofstadter 2001 ; Hofstadter et Fluid Analogies Research Group 1995; Hofstadter (...) et Sander 2013). Plus spécifiquement, la question posée est celle de savoir si le processus analogique est sous-jacent à la formation et à la structuration de l’IC ou si ce dernier n’est qu’un cas particulier de processus analogique. L’article se développera en trois points i) une introduction aux espaces mentaux et à l’IC visant à examiner la place de l’analogie dans le modèle ; ii) une présentation du modèle analogique en linguistique ; iii) une comparaison entre les deux modèles. (shrink)

The Second World War put an end to America's historical isolationism. Three American thinkers -- Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau, and Kenneth Waltz -- developed a modern strategic framework that sought to introduce Americans to the harsher realities of international politics. Yet even as the United States began to embrace this new Realism, atomic weaponry threatened to make it absurd. This engrossing story of how the three chief architects of a powerful ideology struggled with the implications of their own creation offers (...) crucial context for contemporary debates about the resort to war and weapons of mass destruction. (shrink)

The Stoics’ guiding principle in ontology is the Eleatic principle. Their existents are bodies that have the power to act and be acted upon. They account both for the constitution of material objects and the causal interactions among them in terms of such dynamic bodies. Blending is the physical mechanism that explains both constitution and causation; and is facilitated by the fact that for the Stoics all bodies exist as unlimited divided. In this paper I offer a novel analysis (...) of this Stoic stance, and of the role it plays in their metaphysics. I argue that when blended, the substances involved become sharing subjects of qualities and structural features. (shrink)

This essay is a cut-up / remix / montage of the work of Slavoj Žižek. It is a recombination of materials from his critical publications, including The Sublime Object of Ideology, For They Know Not What They Do, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, The Parallax View, In Defense of Lost Causes, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism, and (...) Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism. The section headers are all direct quotations from Žižek’s texts, as are the individual sentences in the essay’s first section. All other sentences are splicings-together of syntactic fragments from his texts. This essay is part of A Recombinant Theory Project. Micro-reports from this project are regularly published on Twitter: @remixtheory. (shrink)

Synaesthesia is a strange sensory blending: synaesthetes report experiences of colours or tastes associated with particular sounds or words. This volume presents new essays by scientists and philosophers exploring what such cases can tell us about the nature of perception and its boundaries with illusion and imagination.

This paper is a culmination of our new foundations for recursive analysis through recursive topology as reported in Kalantari and Welch 125; 98 87). While in those papers we developed groundwork for an approach to point free analysis and applied recursion theory, in this paper we blend techniques of recursion theory with those of topology to establish new findings. We present several new techniques different from existing ones which yield interesting results. Incidental to our work is a unifying explanation of (...) various schools of study for recursive analysis. (shrink)

Generally, the solutions based on information and communication technologies provide positive outcomes for both companies and employees. However, the process of digital transformation can be the cause of digital transformation stress, when the work demands caused by fast implementation of ICT are elevated and employees’ resources are limited. Based on the Job Demand-Resources Model we claim that DT, rapidly accelerating in the COVID-19 pandemic, can increase the level of DTS and general stress at work. To reduce these negative effects of (...) DTS, we propose the online intervention aimed to strengthen employees’ resources, such as self-efficacy. In this article we evaluate the effectiveness of the blended intervention, based on cognitive behavioral therapy and social cognitive therapy, composed of a prototyped online training and series of interactive online workshops. In a longitudinal study, we examined the change in DTS, perceived stress at work, attitudes toward DT, self-efficacy and burnout in two time points, before and after the intervention. We compared five groups of participants, three groups not qualified, and two groups qualified to intervention. Our results revealed that the designed blended intervention decreased DTS and one of the dimensions of burnout, namely disengagement. More specifically, the results showed that in the group of active participants of the blended intervention DTS significantly decreased [MT1 = 3.23, MT2 = 3.00, t = 1.96, p = 0.051], and in the group of ineligible participants DTS significantly increased [MT1 = 1.76, MT2 = 2.02, t = 4.17, p < 0.001]. This research paves way for the creation of blended online intervention which could help in addressing employee digital transformation stress before it starts having adverse effects on employee performance and well-being. (shrink)

PARLOUR R and MCCORMACK B. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 308–321 Blending critical realist and emancipatory practice development methodologies: making critical realism work in nursing researchThis paper examines the efficacy of facilitation as a practice development intervention in changing practice within an Older Person setting and in implementing evidence into practice. It outlines the influences exerted by the critical realist paradigm in guiding emancipatory practice development activities and, in particular, how the former may be employed within an emancipatory practice development (...) study to elucidate and increase understanding pertinent to causation and outcomes. The methodology is based upon an emancipatory practice development approach set within a realistic evaluation framework. This allows for systematic analysis of the social and contextual elements that influence the explication of outcomes associated with facilitation. The study is concentrated upon five practice development cycles, within which a sequence of iterative processes is integrated. The authors assert that combining critical realist and emancipatory processes offers a robust and practical method for translating evidence and implementing changes in practice, as the former affirms or falsifies the influence that emancipatory processes exert on attaining culture shift, and enabling transformation towards effective clinical practice. A new framework for practice development is proposed that establishes methodological coherency between emancipatory practice development and realistic evaluation. This augments the existing theoretical bases for both these approaches by contributing new theoretical and methodological understandings of causation. (shrink)

Present day anti-refugee and anti-immigrant rhetoric both in European countries and in the USA makes reference both to shared tropes and to culture-specific rhetoric devices. The paper analyzes four instances of Polish rabid anti-refugee rhetoric that is eminently country specific: they invoke Holocaust scenario as the means of dealing with the refugee question, should they appear on Polish soil, and specifically suggest exterminating them in former Nazi death camps. The analysis is carried out within the Conceptual Integration Theory, amended by (...) the Author with the notion of parasitic blends: these are said to occur when audiences recruit into the blend some elements of the two input spaces that were not intended to be recruited and come up with an emergent meaning that differ from the intended one. It is claimed that such possibility is actually built into CIT and explains why some of the criticism of CIT claims blends’ non-predictability and generally ex-post character of most analyses found in relevant literature. (shrink)