Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom: First Nation Know-How for Global Flourishing’s contributors describe ways of being that reflect a worldview that has guided humanity for 99% of human history; they describe the practical traditional wisdom stemming from Nature-based relational cultures that were or are guided by this worldview. Such cultures did not cause the kinds of anti-Nature and de-humanizing or inequitable policies and practices that now pervade our world. Far from romanticizing Indigenous histories, Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom offers facts about how human beings, (...) with our potential for good and evil behaviors, can live in relative harmony again. Contributions cover views from anthropology, psychology, sociology, leadership, native science, native history, native art. (shrink)

Introductory chapter to the book, Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom.

Cohesion may be based primarily on interpersonal ties or rely instead on the connection between member and group, while groups may cohere temporarily based on the immediate alignment of interests among members or may be tied together more permanently by socio-emotional bonds. Together, these characteristics define four prototypical group types. Cliques and coalitions are based primarily on dyadic ties. Groups of comrades or colleagues rely instead on the connection of members to the group for cohesion, which reduces the marginal (...) cost of increasing group size. The strong glue of socio-emotional cohesion binds cliques and comrades, while coalitions and groups of colleagues are often based on weaker forms of cohesion. The mix of strong and weak adhesives and the greater scalability offered by the member-group bond provide the building blocks for assembling very large societies without overtaxing the social brain. (shrink)

The arrow paradox is an argument purported to show that objects do not really move. The two main metaphysics of motion, the At–At theory of motion and velocity primitivism, solve the paradox differently. It is argued that neither solution is completely satisfactory. In particular it is contended that there are no decisive arguments in favor of the claim that velocity as it is constructed in the At–At theory is a truly instantaneous property, which is a crucial assumption to solve the (...) paradox. If so the At–At theory faces the threat that most of our physical theories turn out to be non-Markovian. Finally it is considered whether all those threats and paradoxes are dispelled if only a new metaphysics of persistence is taken into account, namely four-dimensionalism. (shrink)

This paper extends the classical extension theorem established by Edward Szpilrajn (Fundamenta Mathematicae, 16, pp. 386–389, 1930). Szpilrajn's theorem states that every quasi‐ordering has an ordering extension. Because of its usefulness in various themes of economics, it has been applied by many researchers. Important generalizations have been presented by two authors, Kenneth Arrow and Kotaro Suzumura, among others. First, we provide concise proofs of four extension theorems by Szpilrajn, Arrow and Suzumura. We then show an extension of their extension (...) theorems. (shrink)

The problem of the direction of electromagnetic time, i.e., the complete dominance of retarded electromagnetic radiation over advanced radiation in the universe, is considered in the context of a generalized form of the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory in an open expanding universe with a singularity atT=0. It is shown that the application of a four-vector reflection boundary condition at the singularity leads to the observed dominance of retarded radiation; it also clarifies the role of advanced and retarded waves in the (...) emission of very weakly absorbed radiation such as neutrinos. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a heated debate about how to interpret findings that seem to show that humans rapidly and automatically calculate the visual perspectives of others. In the current study, we investigated the question of whether automatic interference effects found in the dot-perspective task (Samson, Apperly, Braithwaite, Andrews, & Bodley Scott, 2010) are the product of domain-specific perspective-taking processes or of domain-general “submentalizing” processes (Heyes, 2014). Previous attempts to address this question have done so by implementing inanimate (...) controls, such as arrows, as stimuli. The rationale for this is that submentalizing processes that respond to directionality should be engaged by such stimuli, whereas domain-specific perspective-taking mechanisms, if they exist, should not. These previous attempts have been limited, however, by the implied intentionality of the stimuli they have used (e.g. arrows), which may have invited participants to imbue them with perspectival agency. Drawing inspiration from “novel entity” paradigms from infant gaze-following research, we designed a version of the dot-perspective task that allowed us to precisely control whether a central stimulus was viewed as animate or inanimate. Across four experiments, we found no evidence that automatic “perspective-taking” effects in the dot-perspective task are modulated by beliefs about the animacy of the central stimulus. Our results also suggest that these effects may be due to the task-switching elements of the dot-perspective paradigm, rather than automatic directional orienting. Together, these results indicate that neither the perspective-taking nor the standard submentalizing interpretations of the dot-perspective task are fully correct. (shrink)

The literature on the compatibility between the time of our experience--characterized by passage or becoming--and time as is represented within spacetime theories has been affected by a persistent failure to get a clear grasp of the notion of becoming, both in its relation to an ontology of events tt"spreadtt" in a four-dimensional manifold, and in relation to temporally asymmetric physical processes.In the first part of my paper I try to remedy this situation by offering what I consider a clear (...) and faithful explication of becoming, valid independently of the particular spacetime setting in which we operate. Along the way, I will show why the metaphysical debate between the so-called tt"presentiststt" and tt"eternaliststt" is completely irrelevant to the question of becoming, as the debate itself is generated by a failure to distinguish between a tensed and a tenseless sense of tt"existencett". After a much needed distinction between absolute and relational becoming, I then show in what sense classical spacetime physics presupposes both types of becoming, for the simple reason that spacetime physics presupposes an ontology of events. As a consequence, not only does it turn out that using physics to try to provide empirical evidence for the existence of becoming amounts to putting the cart before the horses, but also that the order imposed by tt"the arrow of becomingtt" is more fundamental than any other physical arrow of time, despite the fact that becoming cannot be used to explain why entropy grows, or retarded electromagnetic radiation prevails versus advanced radiation. (shrink)

In Physics VI.9 Aristotle addresses Zeno's four paradoxes of motion and amongst them the arrow paradox. In his brief remarks on the paradox, Aristotle suggests what he takes to be a solution to the paradox.In two famous papers, both called 'A note on Zeno's arrow', Gregory Vlastos and Jonathan Lear each suggest an interpretation of Aristotle's proposed solution to the arrow paradox. In this paper, I argue that these two interpretations are unsatisfactory, and suggest an alternative interpretation. In particular, (...) I claim that what seems on the face of it to be Aristotle's solution to the paradox raises two puzzles to which my interpretation, as opposed to Lear's and Vlastos's, provides an adequate response. (shrink)

Dirac's equation is reviewed and found to be based on nonrelativistic ideas of probability. A 4-space formulation is proposed that is completely Lorentzinvariant, using probability distributions in space-time with the particle's proper time as a parameter for the evolution of the wave function. This leads to a new wave equation which implies that the proper mass of a particle is an observable, and is sharp only in stationary states. The model has a built-in arrow of time, which is associated with (...) a restriction to positive-energy solutions. The usual solution for a Coulomb field is retained, though it now implies a slightly different charge distribution. The conventional nonstationary solutions become invalid. The new formulation appears to offer a resolution of difficulties that have been associated with Dirac's equation. It also predicts the occurrence of virtual pairs at a level that may be experimentally testable, and suggests a mechanism for self-cancellation of the vacuum energy. (shrink)

Background: Clinical trials involving children previously considered unethical are now considered a necessity because of the inherent physiological differences between children and adults. An integral part of research ethics is the informed consent, which for children is obtained by proxy from a consenting parent or guardian. The informed consent process is governed by international ethical codes that are interpreted in accordance with local laws and procedures raising the importance of contextualizing their implementation.DiscussionThe Zimbabwean parental informed consent document for children participating (...) in clinical research is modeled along western laws of ethics and requires that the parent or legally authorized representative provide consent on behalf of a minor. This article highlights the experiences and lessons learnt by Zimbabwean researchers in interpreting and obtaining informed consent for orphaned children participating in a collaborative HIV clinical trial involving the Medical Research Council, United Kingdom and four centers, three of which are in Uganda. Researchers were faced with a situation where caregivers of orphaned children were not permitted to provide informed consent for trial participation if the Zimbabwean courts had not legally appointed them. The situation contrasted with general clinical practice where legal papers where not required for providing consent for surgical procedures for example.SummaryExperiences gained from this clinical trial revealed that while there may be internationally established guidelines governing the process of obtaining informed consent for children participating in research, there may be need to be cognizant of the culture within which the research is taking place. This may call for the development of an ethico-legal framework that governs research-involving children in Zimbabwe that would facilitate their participation in clinical research, while ensuring that they are protected from exploitation. The Medical Research Council of Zimbabwe has since started developing that framework in a process that is expected to involve critical stakeholders namely the community including children, ethicists, the legal fraternity and researchers. (shrink)

The aim of this doctoral dissertation is to closely explore the nature of Einstein’s block universe and to tease out its implications for the nature of time and human freedom. Four questions, in particular, are central to this dissertation, and set out the four dimensions of this philosophical investigation: (1) Does the block universe view of time follow inevitably from the theory of special relativity? (2) Is there room for the passage of time in the block universe? (3) (...) Can we distinguish past from future in the block universe? (4) Is there room for human freedom in the block universe? Although the answer of most philosophers would be yes, triple no, my own answer, controversially, is no, triple yes. -/- I thereby challenge the status quo with respect to each of these metaphysical questions, and argue that none of these questions can be answered from looking at physics alone. Physics may constrain our metaphysics, but it certainly does not settle it. What is needed in order to answer these questions, are additional metaphysical assumptions that fall outside the scope of modern physics. My primary goal in this dissertation, therefore, is not to settle the debates on the nature of time and human freedom, but to clarify them by expliciting the metaphysical assumptions that are otherwise left implicit. (shrink)

BackgroundClinical trials involving children previously considered unethical are now considered essential because of the inherent physiological differences between children and adults. An integral part of research ethics is the informed consent, which for children is obtained by proxy from a consenting parent or guardian. The informed consent process is governed by international ethical codes that are interpreted in accordance with local laws and procedures raising the importance of contextualizing their implementation.FindingsIn Zimbabwe the parental informed consent document for children participating in (...) clinical research is modeled along western laws of ethics and requires that the parent or legally authorized representative provide consent on behalf of a minor. This article highlights the experiences and lessons learnt by Zimbabwean researchers in obtaining informed consent from guardians of orphaned children participating in a collaborative HIV clinical trial involving the Medical Research Council, United Kingdom and four centers, three of which are in Uganda. Researchers were faced with a situation where caregivers of orphaned children were not permitted to provide informed consent for trial participation. The situation contrasted with general clinical practice where consent for procedures on orphans is obtained from their caregivers who are not legal guardians.ConclusionThe challenges faced in obtaining informed consent for orphans in this clinical trial underscores the need for the Zimbabwe ethics committee to develop an ethical and legal framework for pediatric research that is based on international guidelines while taking into account the cultural context. The Medical Research Council of Zimbabwe has since started the process that is expected to involve critical stakeholders namely the community including children, ethicists, the legal fraternity and researchers. (shrink)

Previous research suggests that implicit sequence learning is superior for believers in the paranormal and individuals with increased cerebral dopamine. Thirty-five healthy participants performed feedback-guided anticipations of four arrow directions. A 100-trial random sequence preceded two 100-trial biased sequences in which visual targets on trial t tended to be displaced 90° clockwise or counter-clockwise from those on t − 1. ISL was defined as a positive change during the course of the biased run in the difference between pro-bias and (...) counter-bias responses. It was hypothesized that this difference would be greater for believers in the paranormal than for skeptics, for those who received dopamine than for those who received placebo, and for believers who received dopamine than for the other groups. None of the hypotheses were supported by the data. It is suggested that a simple binary guessing task with a focus on prediction accuracy during early trials should be considered for future explorations. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:An Episcopal priest reflects on the spiritual practices and perspectives that guide her work to mobilize a Spirit-filled, faithful response to climate crisis. After considering how Buddhist meditation informs the author's understanding of Christianity, the essay acknowledges that versions of Christianity have inflicted, and continue to inflict, enormous harm on human beings, the land, and the other creatures with whom we share this planet. Yet Christianity, like other religious traditions, can sift through its teachings, practices, and rituals to locate the (...) gold, the elements of deep ecological wisdom that the human community so desperately needs. Every religious tradition must ask itself: How does this unprecedented moment in human history challenge us to evolve so that we truly serve the common good? Our need to "think outside the box" is illustrated by the puzzle of nine dots that can only be connected by four lines if the lines extend beyond the borders of the box. Similarly, four lines of thought or four arrows of prayerful intention disclose an underlying, sacred reality: the love that created all things, connects all things, and sustains all things. The four arrows: (i) We cultivate an interior relationship of love, learning contemplative practices that quiet our minds and deepen our inner stability; (ii) We awaken to the expansive love that dissolves our tightly gripped sense of self and asserts moral values quite different from those of late-stage capitalism—in particular, intersectional justice and reverence for the natural world; (iii) We practice both sorrow and joy, making room for expressive, visceral forms of prayer, lament, and emotional release; and (iv) We take bold action for healing. Love's four arrows pull us out of the box of ordinary consciousness, the box of business as usual, and into a larger, more connected space: a space of healing and transformation. (shrink)

Suppose that the members of a group each hold a rational set of judgments on some interconnected questions, and imagine that the group itself has to form a collective, rational set of judgments on those questions. How should it go about dealing with this task? We argue that the question raised is subject to a difficulty that has recently been noticed in discussion of the doctrinal paradox in jurisprudence. And we show that there is a general impossibility theorem that that (...) difficulty illustrates. Our paper describes this impossibility result and provides an exploration of its significance. The result naturally invites comparison with Kenneth Arrow's famous theorem (Arrow, 1963 and 1984; Sen, 1970) and we elaborate that comparison in a companion paper (List and Pettit, 2002). The paper is in four sections. The first section documents the need for various groups to aggregate its members' judgments; the second presents the discursive paradox; the third gives an informal statement of the more general impossibility result; the formal proof is presented in an appendix. The fourth section, finally, discusses some escape routes from that impossibility. (shrink)

A platitude that took hold with Kuhn is that there can be several equally good ways of balancing theoretical virtues for theory choice. Okasha recently modelled theory choice using technical apparatus from the domain of social choice: famously, Arrow showed that no method of social choice can jointly satisfy four desiderata, and each of the desiderata in social choice has an analogue in theory choice. Okasha suggested that one can avoid the Arrow analogue for theory choice by employing a (...) strategy used by Sen in social choice, namely, to enhance the information made available to the choice algorithms. I argue here that, despite Okasha’s claims to the contrary, the information-enhancing strategy is not compelling in the domain of theory choice. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with selecting an appropriate perspective from which to understand and evaluate social-decision procedures. Distinguishing between "agent rationality" and "option-rationality", the author argues that a rational agent may choose a social-decision procedure that is not itself agent-rational (but merely option-rational). The argument puts the voter's paradox in a context allowing evaluation of (a) its general import and (b) practical proposals for avoiding it in particular cases. Arrow's four conditions for a social-decision procedure are shown to have (...) little relevance to the understanding or evaluation of constitutions. The author concludes that the more fruitful perspective for discussing social-decision procedures is that of option-rationality rather than (as Arrow, Wolff, and others have supposed) that of agent-rationality. (shrink)

Zeno of Elea's paradoxes of motion are one of the most successful provocations in the history of philosophy. There are exactly four paradoxes, namely, the dichotomy, the arrow, Achilles, and the moving rows. This chapter presents the paradoxes in such a way that their strength, fascination, and profoundness are apparent. After providing some basic information about Zeno, the chapter sketches the research program that is the context of Zeno's paradoxes. It goes back to Parmenides and may be called Parmenideanism. (...) The dichotomy and the Achilles paradox are rather two variants of one thought than two different arguments. The moving rows are complicated and not much can be learned from them. Their presentation in the chapter is restricted to some rough outline after the discussion of reactions to the dichotomy and the Achilles. (shrink)

Two radically different views about time are possible. According to the first, the universe is three dimensional. It has a past and a future, but that does not mean it is spread out in time as it is spread out in the three dimensions of space. This view requires that there is an unambiguous, absolute, cosmic-wide "now" at each instant. According to the second view about time, the universe is four dimensional. It is spread out in both space and (...) time - in space-time in short. Special and general relativity rule out the first view. There is, according to relativity theory, no such thing as an unambiguous, absolute cosmic-wide "now" at each instant. However, we have every reason to hold that both special and general relativity are false. Not only does the historical record tell us that physics advances from one false theory to another. Furthermore, elsewhere I have shown that we must interpret physics as having established physicalism - in so far as physics can ever establish anything theoretical. Physicalism, here, is to be interpreted as the thesis that the universe is such that some unified "theory of everything" is true. Granted physicalism, it follows immediately that any physical theory that is about a restricted range of phenomena only, cannot be true, whatever its empirical success may be. It follows that both special and general relativity are false. This does not mean of course that the implication of these two theories that there is no unambiguous cosmic-wide "now" at each instant is false. It still may be the case that the first view of time, indicated at the outset, is false. Are there grounds for holding that an unambiguous cosmic-wide "now" does exist, despite special and general relativity, both of which imply that it does not exist? There are such grounds. Elsewhere I have argued that, in order to solve the quantum wave/particle problem and make sense of the quantum domain we need to interpret quantum theory as a fundamentally probabilistic theory, a theory which specifies how quantum entities - electrons, photons, atoms - interact with one another probabilistically. It is conceivable that this is correct, and the ultimate laws of the universe are probabilistic in character. If so, probabilistic transitions could define unambiguous, absolute cosmic-wide "nows" at each instant. It is entirely unsurprising that special and general relativity have nothing to say about the matter. Both theories are pre-quantum mechanical, classical theories, and general relativity in particular is deterministic. The universe may indeed be three dimensional, with a past and a future, but not spread out in four dimensional space-time, despite the fact that relativity theories appear to rule this out. These considerations, finally, have implications for views about the arrow of time and free will. (shrink)

This paper is a survey of recent results concerning connections between relation algebras , cylindric algebras and polyadic equality algebras . We describe exactly which subsets of the standard axioms for RA are needed for axiomatizing RA over the RA-reducts of CA3's, and we do the same for the class SA of semi-associative relation algebras. We also characterize the class of RA-reducts of PEA3's. We investigate the interconnections between the RA-axioms within CA3 in more detail, and show that only (...) class='Hi'>four implications hold between them . In the other direction, we introduce a natural CA-theoretic equation MGR+, generalization of the well-known Merrry-Go-Round equation MGR of CA-theory. We show that MGR+ is equivalent to the RA-reduct being an SA, and that MGR+ implies that the RA-reduct determines the algebra itself, while MGR is not sufficient for either of these to hold. Then we investigate how different CA's a single RRA can 'generate' in the general case. We solve the first part of Problem 11 from the 'Problem Session Paper' of [2].While proving some of the statements, for others we give only outline of proof. The paper contains several open problems. A full version of this paper is under preparation.Keywords: relation algebras, cylindric algebras, polyadic algebras, algebraic logic, arrow logic, proof theory, finite variable fragments, provability with 3 variables, non-finitizability, twisting, non-standard models, neat reducts, representability. (shrink)

This paper proposes a cognitive linguistic explanation of the unusual narrative construal of time as moving backwards. It shows that backwards time in narrative involves setting up an alternative space in which a second narrative is constructed simultaneously, resulting in a viewpoint hierarchy which postulates four viewpoints on each discourse statement. The paper draws together research on conceptual metaphor, mental spaces theory and viewpoint multiplicity, bringing it to bear on discourse fragments. The majority of these are taken from Martin (...) Amis’s Time’s Arrow (Amis, Martin. 2003 [1991]. Time’s Arrow. London: Vintage.) (a logically consistent and linguistically revealing text), but the discussion is contextualised with further examples. It is argued that the causal construal implied by narrative is not limited by our phenomenological experience, as other studies (e.g., Evans, Vyvyan. 2013. Language and time: A cognitive linguistics approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) might suggest, but is instead prompted by conceptual re-interpretation of deictic markers in the discourse. The analysis focuses on causal construal, negation (especially causal catachresis), and alternativity. It shows how linguistic features at the sentential level generate top-down reorganization of both episodic structure and discourse meaning, and how this relies on multiplicity of viewpoint and a conceptual “zooming out” prompting the perception of irony. (shrink)

Prompted by Hasok Chang’s conception of the history and philosophy of science (HPS) as the continuation of science by other means, I examine the possibility of obtaining scientific knowledge through philosophical criticism and reflection, in the light of four historical cases, concerning (i) the role of absolute space in Newtonian dynamics, (ii) the purported contraction of rods and retardation of clocks in Special Relativity, (iii) the reality of the electromagnetic ether, and (iv) the so-called problem of time’s arrow. In (...) all four cases it is clear that a better understanding of such matters can be achieved —and has been achieved— through conceptual analysis. On the other hand, however, it would seem that this kind of advance has more to do with philosophical questions in science than with narrowly scientific questions. Hence, if HPS in effect continues the work of science by other means, it could well be doing it for other ends than those that working scientists ordinarily have in mind. (shrink)

This introduces the symposium on judgment aggregation. The theory of judgment aggregation asks how several individuals' judgments on some logically connected propositions can be aggregated into consistent collective judgments. The aim of this introduction is to show how ideas from the familiar theory of preference aggregation can be extended to this more general case. We first translate a proof of Arrow's impossibility theorem into the new setting, so as to motivate some of the central concepts and conditions leading to analogous (...) impossibilities, as discussed in the symposium. We then consider each of four possible escape-routes explored in the symposium. (shrink)

This paper examines collective decision-making with an infinite-time horizon setting. First, we establish a result on the collection of decisive sets: if there are at least four alternatives and Arrow’s axioms are satisfied on the selfish domain, then the collection of decisive sets forms an ultrafilter. Second, we impose generalized versions of stationarity axiom for social preferences, which are substantially weaker than the standard version. We show that if any of our generalized versions are satisfied in addition to Arrow’s (...) axioms, then some generation is dictatorial. Moreover, we specify a very weak stationarity axiom that guarantees a possibility result. (shrink)

I present a comparative and holistic method for qualitatively measuring sound ecological practice in chemistry. I consider chemicals developed and used by man from cradle to grave, that is, from the moment they are extracted from the earth, biomass, water or air, to their transportation, purification, mixing and elaboration in a factory, to their distribution by means of the market, to waste products both from the factory, packaging, transportations and by the consumer. I divide the locations of the ‘life’ of (...) the chemical into four spatio-temporal areas accordingly. I then use the ‘instituional compass’ method to determine a qualitative reading of the ecological soundness of the practice, where practice means the research, the adoption by industry and the distribution at scale on the market. The qualitative reading is in the form of an arrow on a trisected circle. The arrow holistically represents a table of data. The data can be economic, social or environmental. The arrow has a measurement: a degree and a length. The degrees, represent qualities spaning through: harmony, discipline and excitement. The length represents the importance, momentum or amplitude with which the quality is present. We use the compass method to compare the same product over time, or inter-substitutable, chemicals developed in different places, using different equipment or processes. In the conclusion, I discuss objectivity and science as they apply to the compass. (shrink)

The volume starts with the paper of Lynn Maurice Ferguson Arnold, former Premier of South Australia and former Minister of Education of Australia, concerning the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life) that was held from 25 May to 25 November 1937 in Paris, France. The organization of the world exhibition had placed the Nazi German and the Soviet pavilions directly across from each other. Many papers are devoted (...) to the interpretation of this opposition. Arnold’s paper considers the differences in the two totalitarian states’ architectural and design discourse styles. Although each of them communicated a totalitarian language of purposes, permissions, and boundaries, they essentially differed in the styles of discourse represented by the architecture and design of their respective pavilions. They were opposites of each other and the liberal ideals they contested. The internationalist viewpoint reflecting the multi-ethnic mix of the USSR is contrasted to the ein Volk homogeneity represented in the German pavilion. The Soviet pavilion opted for a utopian future to be arrived at by “benign” leadership, whereas the German pavilion anchored itself in the myth of Teutonic history with the nostalgic pride protected by the swastika-bearing eagle. Jean-Yves Béziau is best known as a logician and founder of Universal Logic. However, in this paper, he poses a new philosophical question: why philosophical discourse does not use images? The paper begins with a general analysis of different types of philosophical discourses. Then, he focuses on why images have been and are still rejected in philosophical discourse. He explains various ways to use images in a fruitful way to develop philosophical thinking and discourse and illustrates his view by providing several examples. He concludes with a promising programmatic declaration about founding a new journal entitled World Journal of Pictorial Philosophy to stimulate the usage of images for developing philosophical thinking. Although complaints about the obscurity of many philosophers’ discourse are widespread, Tatiana Denisova, ex-professor of the Surgut University and a research associate of the University of the Aegean undertakes a positive attitude to this problem. She explains that the reasons for the obscurity of philosophical texts, the subsequent complexity in communicating philosophers’ meanings and their eventual incomplete understanding is not a sign of their inferiority. On the contrary, it is a sign of the fruitfulness of philosophical discourse, which can generate new meanings. Thus, the darkness of philosophical discourse is like the life-giving chaos, and the obscurity that it inevitably contains can be the keeper of implicit meanings and even their generator. Katarzyna Gan-Krzywoszyńska and Piotr Leśniewski, authors of a monograph on Polish philosopher Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890 – 1963), make a comparative analysis of his educational style with that of Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (1921 – 1997). The authors highlight that these scholars have distinctly different backgrounds. The former was an educator, philosopher and a leading advocate of critical pedagogy connected with the dialogical Latin-American tradition. The latter was a philosopher and logician, a notable representative of the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic with significant contributions to semantics, model theory and the philosophy of science. Despite their apparent difference, the authors identify some striking similarities regarding their attitudes towards education; notably, their approaches are essentially dialogical. Gilah Yelin Hirsch is a multidisciplinary artist who works as a painter, writer, curator, educator, and filmmaker. In her experiential paper, he explains how and why she uses four channels of communication in her creative expression: writing, painting, filmmaking, and teaching, as dialogic inquiry. She considers that these channels compose a continuum of discourse styles, each reaching a different facet of kaleidoscopic consciousness. She claims that her choice of medium is prompted by a need to communicate her insights profoundly. Thus, for instance, she created painted allegories to express narratives based on dreams and visions emerging from her subconscious. Art and healing is another Tibetan-rooted type of discourse practised by the author. Creating and observing a healing image produces a positive psychophysiological change in both the artist and the viewer. The discourse here is tripartite between creator, image, and viewer. Filmmaking is another type of discourse she practices between the filmmaker/artist as shaman or healer and the viewer as respondent or participant. These films are meant to be experienced frame by frame, physically and emotionally in both the body and mind. Jocelyn Ireson-Paine is a cartoonist and programmer. His paper offers an original attempt to use category theory in cartooning. Category theory is a branch of mathematics that provides concepts and methods to describe general abstract structures in terms of a labelled directed graph called category, whose nodes are called objects, and whose labelled directed edges are called arrows (or morphisms or transformations or mappings). The author explores different ways to define “style” in art using category theory and a relational view of art. Moreover, he examines how “translation” (transformation) between styles could be defined and reveals the difficulties of how it could be implemented in a computer using special software. Jens Lemanski is a philosopher who has revived research in Arthur Schopenhauer’s legacy by exploring his work on mathematical evidence, logic diagrams, and problems of semantics. In this paper, he advances a new approach to eristic as an art of protecting oneself from the one who deliberately violates norms of discourse ethics to win an argument. The author attributes the origins of this view to Schopenhauer, suggesting a new reading of his work. According to the author, eristic is a prohibitive technique that takes effect when the norms of discourse ethics are transgressed and violated. Thus, eristic is viewed as a discipline of Enlightenment philosophy and a correlate of discourse ethics. Roshdi Rashed is an authority on the history of Arabic mathematical sciences. Proceeding from Gilles-Gaston Granger’s definition of mathematical style, he studies the question of whether a mathematical work can be characterized by a single style or by a multitude of styles. This question is explored within the style of a single work, namely Menelaus’s Sphaerica, and through the study of the development of a single problem over time, namely the isoperimetric problem. He indicates Menelaus’s divergence from the Euclidean style of (plane and stereometric) geometry caused by the drop of the Parallel Postulate, which associated it with hyperbolic geometry. Hence, the author concludes that Menelaus’s Sphaerica incorporates the well-known Euclidean style with a variation of the non-Euclidean one. On the other hand, examining the isoperimetric problem reveals another interesting historical picture. A succession of different styles (cosmological, geometric, infinitesimalistic, style of the calculus of variations, of synthetic geometry) can be observed due to the transformation of the research object over time. Boris Shalyutin, a Russian social philosopher, and Ombudsman for Human Rights in the Kurgan Region, explores the origins of discourse in combination with the birth of society and law. He claims that legal discourse marks the historical emergence of discourse in general. Homo Juridicus generated Homo Sapiens, which have created new spheres of discourse, notably moral discourse and further philosophical, political, and scientific discourse. Petros Stefaneas, a logician, computer scientist and novelist, suggests an alternative to the traditional narratology approach for studying (interactive) social media discourse. He claims that style describes how the parts of a narrative are blended into a whole. The author relies upon Goguen’s and Harrel’s concept of style as a choice of blending principles and transfers to the study of the social media narratives elements from the methodology of studying Web-based collaborative search for mathematical proofs like those implemented within the Polymath project. The last paper belongs to Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, a linguist, language revivalist, and proponent of a model of the emergence of Israeli Hebrew, according to which Hebrew and Yiddish were the primary sources of Modern Hebrew. This paper explores the fascinating and multifaceted Yiddish language and its survival in Israeli. Yiddish is characterized by a unique style that embeds psycho-ostensive expressions throughout its discourse. The author highlights the cross-fertilization between Hebrew and Yiddish as it manifests itself in any aspect of the Israeli language. He claims that Yiddish survives beneath Israeli phonetics, phonology, discourse, syntax, semantics, lexis, and even morphology, although traditional and institutional linguists have been most reluctant to admit it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.2 (2001) 193-210 [Access article in PDF] Zeno Against Mathematical Physics Trish Glazebrook Galileo wrote in The Assayer that the universe "is written in the language of mathematics," and therein both established and articulated a foundational belief for the modern physicist. 1 That physical reality can be interpreted mathematically is an assumption so fundamental to modern physics that chaos and super-strings are examples (...) of physical theories developed on the basis of success in mathematics. The mathematics came first, then the physical theory. Quantum theory is an awkward and similar case in point. Despite the fact that there is much agreement among physicists about the mathematical theory, its physical interpretation remains a matter of controversy. There are several interpretations, all of which challenge our everyday assumptions about reality. This led Bohr in 1935 to call for "a radical revision of our attitude towards the problem of physical reality." 2 Arthur Fine, originally a staunch defender of realist interpretations of quantum theory, saw the success of Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation as the end of Einsteinian realism, and subsequently Fine declared that "realism is well and truly dead." 3 Mathematical operators simply do not correspond with real entities in any conceivable way.Ilkka Niiniluoto has argued convincingly, however, that realism is alive and well in quantum theory. 4 The problem is that Bohr is right: quantum theory can be considered to concern the real only upon radical revision of ordinary conceptions of reality. Quantum theory does not describe the real in any meaningful sense of "the real." Rather, it is mathematical projection: ideal rather than real. [End Page 193]Aristotle did not hold that the physicist deciphers nature mathematically. He distinguished the physicist from the mathematician at Physics 2.2 by analogy to the definitions of "snub nose" and "curved." 5 The definition of "snub nose" requires the mention of a nose, that is, of matter which is inseparable from motion, whereas "curved" and other mathematical concepts like " 'odd' and 'even', 'straight'... 'number,' 'line,' and 'figure,' " which are separable from matter and from motion, are investigated by the mathematician. 6 Aristotle claims that physics is different from mathematics because the mathematician investigates physical lines, but not qua physical, and the physicist investigates mathematical lines "but qua physical, not qua mathematical." 7A peculiar consequence of my argument is that it establishes a common principle between two thinkers whose beliefs are otherwise so fundamentally in opposition. Zeno's paradoxes are commonly read as a denial of motion. For Aristotle, that move is axiomatic to the physicist. At 185a15 he considers arguments against this assumption outside the realm of objections to which the physicist must reply. If I am right that Zeno's paradoxes of motion challenge the very notion of mathematical physics, then he and Aristotle agree, contra Galileo, that the universe is not written in the language of mathematics. They simply come to this point from opposite directions, Zeno from an Eleatic thesis that physical reality is illusion, Aristotle from the natural scientist's pragmatic commitment to a truth about nature.I intend to use Zeno's paradoxes of motion to argue that the application of mathematical concepts to the physical world results in paradox. Zeno's arguments are limited within mathematics to geometry. This paper is accordingly a beginning from which I hope more work can be done later. Furthermore, Zeno's paradoxes are standardly read as directed against anyone who disagrees with Parmenides' thesis that there is but one thing which is motionless and indivisible. The paradoxes achieve this end by means of a reductio against the possibility of dividing space and time. That there are four paradoxes is accordingly explicable by the fact that there are four possibilities for the divisibility of space and time. The Achilles argues against the possibility that space and time are both infinitely divisible; the Dichotomy, against the infinite divisibility of space and finite divisibility of time; the Arrow, against the infinite divisibility of time and the finite divisibility of space; and finally, the Stadium shows that time and space cannot both... (shrink)

What is the relationship between degrees of belief and binary beliefs? Can the latter be expressed as a function of the former—a so-called “belief-binarization rule”—without running into difficulties such as the lottery paradox? We show that this problem can be usefully analyzed from the perspective of judgment-aggregation theory. Although some formal similarities between belief binarization and judgment aggregation have been noted before, the connection between the two problems has not yet been studied in full generality. In this paper, we seek (...) to fill this gap. The paper is organized around a baseline impossibility theorem, which we use to map out the space of possible solutions to the belief-binarization problem. Our theorem shows that, except in limiting cases, there exists no belief-binarization rule satisfying four initially plausible desiderata. Surprisingly, this result is a direct corollary of the judgment-aggregation variant of Arrow’s classic impossibility theorem in social choice theory. (shrink)

Before the twentieth century, the Universe was usually imagined as a large spatially extended thing unfolding in time. The past was fixed and the future was open; unfolding was conceived as an asymmetric process of coming into being. Relativity introduced a new vision in which space and time are presented together as a single four-dimensional manifold of events. That, together with the fact that the fundamental laws of our classical theories are symmetric in time, made understanding why the past (...) and future present themselves so differently in our experience one of the central challenges of physics. The last two centuries have seen a great deal of progress in understanding various of the so-called arrows of time: the thermodynamic arrow, the cosmological arrow, the arrow of knowledge or information. There remains an outstanding piece of this puzzle that has seen little progress, one that Roger Penrose described in his beautiful paper Singularities and Time-Asymmetry in 1979 as: “The arrow most difficult to comprehend … namely the feeling of relentless forward temporal progression, according to which potentialities seem to be transformed into actualities.”I will propose that the insight needed to resolve the problem involves taking into account that we are part of the universe and that any attempt to model it as a totality involves self-reference. I will argue specifically that self-reference, against the background of a thermodynamic gradient, creates an instability in an embedded agent’s ability to know the future or even treat it as a potential object of knowledge. That instability captures the sense in which the future remains for her perpetually open and the passage of time resolves openness into the fixity of fact. (shrink)

In this paper we will consider the existing notions of bilateralism in the context of proof-theoretic semantics and propose, based on our understanding of bilateralism, an extension to logical multilateralism. This approach differs from what has been proposed under this name before in that we do not consider multiple speech acts as the core of such a theory but rather multiple consequence relations. We will argue that for this aim the most beneficial proof-theoretical realization is to use sequent calculi with (...) multiple sequent arrows satisfying some specific conditions, which we will lay out in this paper. We will unfold our ideas with the help of a case study in logical tetralateralism and present an extension of Almukdad and Nelson’s propositional constructive four-valued logic by unary operations of meaningfulness and nonsensicality. We will argue that in sequent calculi with multiple sequent arrows it is possible to maintain certain features that are desirable if we assume an understanding of the meaning of connectives in the spirit of proof-theoretic semantics. The use of multiple sequent arrows will be justified by the presence of congruentiality-breaking unary connectives. (shrink)

The scientific conception of change and motion raises two fundamental questions: Is there any evidence that the temporal order of events cannot legitimately be postulated to be continuous in Cantor's sense? Is it possible to account for such distinguishing properties of time as its possession of an "arrow" on the basis of assuming that events constitute a continuous type of order in Cantor's sense, and providing a coordinating definition for the ordering relation "later than"? We must raise these questions, since (...) at least four philosophers of the present century have denied the compatibility of the temporal structure of actual events with the order defined by Cantor's linear continuum and have held that a description of physical change which is based on the latter type of order is incompetent to account for the "arrow" of time and for such features of actual events as the latter involves. The philosophers in question are Henri Bergson, William James, Alfred North Whitehead and Paul Weiss. Each of these thinkers makes reference to Zeno's paradoxes of motion in setting forth his arguments. (shrink)

We consider several thought and practical experiments, and variations thereof, from which the existence can be inferred of retroactive effects on the assumptions of conservation of linear and angular momentum and of realism defined in a wide sense. Such conclusion is made less counterintuitive by research into the proper physical background of the relativistic length contraction of a moving arrow, viz. the fact that the universe is four-dimensional indeed. In one of the experiments considered, the evidence of retroactivity is (...) more striking and can more easily be actually demonstrated than was the case in earlier proofs. (shrink)

Dede Korkut Stories are a national cultural heritage that narrates about events and challenges of Oghuz Turks in 10th-11th centuries. This period of time is important, as it was the times when Turks became Muslims. In this work, heroism, customs, habits and traditions, socio-cultural and moral life of the Turks before and after becoming Muslims are analysed. One of the topics addressed in this work is religious beliefs and worships of the Turks after became Muslims. In this context, the belief (...) in Allah appears to be the most emphasized type of belief in the stories. The theme of fate, which is included in the subjects of Tawḥīd (oneness of Allāh) is another theme mentioned in the stories. The stories also includes some expressions regarding particularly the Prophet Muḥammad as well as some other prophets. Jibrīl and ʿAzrāʾīl angels are also mentioned. As for the Divine Books, only the Qur’ān is namely addressed and other divine books are not mentioned. The beliefs regarding afterlife, such as death, resurrection, heaven, hell, pool of al-Kawthar (abundance) are also referred to in the stories. The Book of Dede Korkut is not a didactic work written to teach Islam. On the contrary, in the stories, Islam is discussed as an element of the spirit/essence of individual and society. The aim of this study is to investigate the representations of the beliefs of tawḥīd, prophecy and hereafter of the Turks, especially the Oghuz Turks with reference to narrations in Dede Korkut stories. It aims to discuss them in the context of six pillars of faith and evaluate from the Islamic belief point of view.Summary: The Book of Dede Korkut consists of twelve epic stories created within the oral tradition of Turkish Folk Literature. It is said that the origins of these stories, which are one of the oldest works of Turkish Folk Literature, went as far as 7th century. It is generally accepted that the Book of Dede Korkut, which narrates about Oghuz Turks who lived in 10th-11th centuries was transferred to writing after 15th century. There is no information found about writer/s of the Book. Dede Korkut, who considered being the narrator of the stories, is in fact a character in the stories. Dede Korkut plays qobuz, reads poetry, names children, mediates in marital affairs, resolves disputes, and leads religious rituals in the stories. Therefore, he stands out as a saint figure and considered to be wise man of the Oghuz Turks in almost every story, especially regarding social events. In this work, there are many expressions about heroism, customs, habits and traditions, socio-cultural and moral experiences of the Turks before and after becoming Muslims. The stories bear many traces from the earlier Turkish beliefs. However, these are not the issues of this study. The dates of the emergence of the stories, 10th and 11th centuries, coincides with the times when the Turks became Muslim. This situation makes the stories more important as they include rich narratives about the fundamental beliefs of Islam. Especially the belief in Allāh, which is one of the six pillars of faith, appears to be the most emphasized in the stories. In these stories, Turkish and Persian names of Allāh as well as His Arabic names and attributes are mentioned directly or indirectly.The belief in predestination and casualty related with Allāh's eternal knowledge and determination is another faith object that takes place in the stories. The issues regarding the predestination discussed in the stories as follows: the deeds occur with the wish of Allāh; Allāh decides whether the child male or female; Allāh predestines human lifetime, livelihood, time of death and calamities.There are also narrations about the belief in the prophets in the stories. Particularly the Prophet Muhammad's prophecy is prioritised. Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses are the other prophets mentioned in the stories. The successive authority of Adam and His story with Iblīs; the wife and donkey of Noah, not burning of Abraham when he was thrown into the fire, the speaking of Allāh with Moses and the staff of Moses are some of the expressions related with prophecy in the stories. Nimrod against Abraham and Pharaoh against Moses are described as negative personalities in the stories. In the stories, the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) is handled in a position that intercession is demanded from Him. Greetings and prayers are read for Him. His intercession is sought for forgiveness of sins and acceptance of prayers. He is exalted with some attributions, such as the holly Prophet Peace be upon Him, friend of Allāh, the leader of religion and the headman of religion. When the Prophet Muhammad is mentioned, it is felt that there is a high respect and an enthusiastic love. When he is addressed, the expressions indicating respect and affection, such as "His name is magnificent Muhammad" and "His name is magnificent Muhammad Mustafa" are used in the stories.In the stories, only the Qur’ān is mentioned among the divine books, none of the Torah, the Zabūr and the Injīl is mentioned. It is referred that the Qur’ān descended from the heavens and it is the word of Allāh and His knowledge, and it was copied (collected) by Uthman. It is described as "Magnificent Qur’ān".It is seen in the stories that there is also a place for the belief in angels and only two of the four great angels are mentioned. One of them is ʿAzrāʾīl, the death angel. It is one of the main heroes in the story of Deli Dumrul. ʿAzrāʾīl is described as an angel from the sky, who has red-winged, who takes the souls of living beings by the command of Allāh and kill them. It is also narrated that ʿAzrāʾīl takes the form of human and pigeon, and the struggle of ʿAzrāʾīl with Deli Dumrul. The other great angel mentioned in the stories is Jibrīl. In the story of Emre, the Son of Begil, it is described as an angel fulfilling the commandments of Allāh. Apart from these, there is no information about other angels and their characteristics, such as not being gendered, not to sin, and being created from light. Within the scope of invisible beings, the Devil is also narrated in the stories as it did not prostrate itself to Adam, and therefore it was repelled and cursed.The principle of the belief in Hereafter, which is one of the pillars of faith, is also dealt with in the stories. The ending, death, resurrection, reckoning, Heaven, Hell, seeing Allāh's face in Heaven, drinking water from the pool of al-Kawthar are some of the topics addressed in relation to this principle. While talking about Heaven in the stories, the words "Uçmak" (flight) in Turkish and "Behesht" (paradise) in Persian are mentioned in addition to Arabic "Jannah" (heaven).The Book of Dede Korkut is not a religious book written to teach the ʿaqāʾid (beliefs) of Islam or its practices. On the contrary, it is a work that narrates about people’s lives and social experiences. There is neither any specific verse from the Qur’ān nor sayings or the deeds of the Prophet (ḥadīth) included in the stories. However, the contents of many issues stated in the Qur’ān and ḥadīth are expressed in the stories. For instance, the statements from the surah (chapter) al-Ikhlāṣ (sincerity), such as al-Aḥad (the one), Allāh begets not, nor was He begotten, and not being any equivalent to Him are mentioned in the stories. Likewise, not burning of the Prophet Abraham when thrown into the fire, speaking of Allāh with Moses and giving the stuff to him as a miracle are also stated in the Qur’ān. As for the pool of al-Kawthar, the believers’ seeing Allāh in Heaven, ineffectiveness of the deeds without saying in the name of Allah are mentioned in ḥadīths. However, some information that is not rooted in the Qur’ān and ḥadīths, such as the stinging of Nimrod's arrow is also encountered in the stories. Based on the narrations in the stories, it seems possible to draw the conclusion that the Oghuz Turks mentioned in the Book of Dede Korkut adopted Ahl al-Sunnah (people of Sunnah) interpretation of Islam. However, it should be reminded that this implication will lose its meaning if it is proved that the original versions of the stories were redesigned according to the interpretation of Ahl al-Sunnah in the process of transferring them into writing. (shrink)

I propose a relevance-based independence axiom on how to aggregate individual yes/no judgments on given propositions into collective judgments: the collective judgment on a proposition depends only on people’s judgments on propositions which are relevant to that proposition. This axiom contrasts with the classical independence axiom: the collective judgment on a proposition depends only on people’s judgments on the same proposition. I generalize the premise-based rule and the sequential-priority rule to an arbitrary priority order of the propositions, instead of a (...) dichotomous premise/conclusion order resp. a linear priority order. I prove four impossibility theorems on relevance-based aggregation. One theorem simultaneously generalizes Arrow’s Theorem (in its general and indifference-free versions) and the well-known Arrow-like theorem in judgment aggregation. (shrink)

Intended as an introduction to Aristotle's philosophy, this book succeeds in presenting and defending a unified conception of Aristotle's philosophy while at the same time making the discussion accessible to the student approaching the Aristotelian corpus for the first time. Taking Aristotle's mention of a distinctively human desire to understand as the starting point, Lear tackles the analysis of this desire from two perspectives--that of the object of understanding and that of the subject. The first perspective leads to the study (...) of Aristotle's physics and metaphysics, the latter to the study of his psychology and ethics. The discussion of each area centers on three or four topics; for instance, the topics for physics are change, infinity of space and time, and motion. From Zeno's arrow to incontinence, Lear manages to cover many of the questions that have exercised recent commentators on Aristotle's philosophy. Ultimately, both perspectives are seen to be different ways of looking at a single reality, namely, the actualization of essences in the mind reflecting on them. The final chapter with a mighty crescendo brings nature, man, and God together. As Lear explains, "'human mind contemplating form,' 'substantial form,' 'primary substance,' and 'God thinking himself' may be various ways of describing the same thing--form at the highest level of actuality". In the end, nature achieves its highest form in making itself intelligible and the human mind, its highest form in apprehending essences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World by Adrienne MayorAlison KeithAdrienne Mayor. The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. xiv + 519 pp. Cloth, $29.95.Adrienne Mayor is a historian of classical folklore and ancient science and the author of several books whose subjects lie at the intersection of classical myth and ancient history (...) with archaeology and the history of science: an exploration of monsters and heroes in the repertoire of classical myth as a response to the discovery of fossils in The First Fossil Hunters (Princeton 2000); a wide-ranging collection of evidence for biological and chemical warfare in the ancient world, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs (New York: Overlook Press, 2003); and a sympathetic biography of Mithradates VI Eupator of Pontus in The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (Princeton 2009); as well as an investigation of indigenous North Americans’ accounts of fossils, in Fossil Legends of the First Americans (Princeton 2005). Like her earlier volumes, The Amazons brings together an extraordinarily wide array of evidence, uncovered through prodigious research across such diverse fields as classical mythology, ancient history, and contemporary archaeology of the central Asian steppes, and the results are presented with her trademark narrative brio. As with these earlier volumes, moreover, Mayor has an agenda in The [End Page 174] Amazons: here she seeks the historical reality that lies behind the ancient Greek myths of barbarian warrior women; and she finds it in the recent archaeological discoveries of female warriors interred on the central Asian steppes from the Caucasus to western China.Mayor sets out her premise in a prologue that takes its bearing from the myth of Atalanta, whom she dubs “the Greek Amazon” (1–13): her project is to investigate where the Greeks might have encountered real women warriors like Atalanta, capable of besting men in footraces, on the battlefield, and in the hunt. Her study falls into four parts: Part 1 (17–59) asks, “Who were the Amazons?” and identifies ancient Scythia, with its many horse-riding and horse-herding nomadic tribes, as the homeland of the Amazons. Part 2 (63–246) surveys the archaeological and scientific evidence for female warriors among the nomadic tribes of the central Asian steppes in prehistoric and historic times. In this section, Mayor considers the evidence afforded by the bones of buried nomad warriors misidentified as male (because of the weaponry and horses accompanying the burial) when they were originally excavated but recently recognized as female as a result of newer scientific techniques of examination (chap. 4); the body armor found in the steppe graves, in a discussion which has recourse to comparative ethnography, yielding a rich history of breast suppression (chap. 5); the tattooing practices of the historical nomadic tribes of the steppes in relation to the iconography of Amazons’ tunics and leggings on classical vase paintings (chap. 6); ancient accounts of Amazons’ dress (chap. 7), including their partiality for trousers (chap. 12), sexuality and reproduction (chap. 8), drugs, dance and music (chap. 9), hunting technologies (chap. 11), weapons and warfare (chap. 13), all in relation to the archaeological and historical evidence of steppe women’s practices in these arenas. She even presses into service ethnolinguistics in order to argue that the names of the Amazons can be traced back to a common origin in the Eurasian steppes (chap. 14; cf. Appendix of Names of Amazons and Warrior Women in Ancient Literature and Art from the Mediterranean to China). In Part 3 (249–353), Mayor turns back to “Amazons in Greek and Roman Myth, Legend, and History.” Here she retells the most famous Amazon myths, of Hippolyte and Heracles [sic] (chap. 15), Antiope and Theseus (chap. 16), Penthesilea and Achilles (chap. 18), and the Athenian Amazonomachy (chaps. 17, 19); and classical accounts of their historical counterparts—the dalliance of Thalestris and Alexander the Great (chap. 20) and the love of Hypsicratea and Mithradates (chap. 21). Part 4 (358–429) abandons the Hellenocentric perspective of Part 3 to investigate the evidence for Amazonian women “Beyond the Greek World... (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN SPACE & PLACE thread: April Vannini, Those Between the Common * Laura Dean & Jesse McClelland, Ballard: A Portrait of Placemaking * Amara Hark Weber, Crossroad * Isaac Linder & Berit Soli-Holt, The Call of the Wild: Terro(i)r Modulations * Ashley D. Hairston, Momma taught us to keep a clean house * Sean Smith, The Garage (Take One) * * * * Preface: Variations of Archiving the Anarchive Through Editorial Witnessing by April Vannini “a diagram is a map, or rather several superimposed maps.” 1 What do we do with essays, art, artefacts, and practices that go against, resist, challenge and reject archival capture or documentation since they do not fit within the screen or manage to move beyond conventional scales? What do we do with an essay or artefact that is the event of the event becoming-event itself, or how do we move from volumetric space to two-dimensional space? How do editors, curators, participants, etc. become witness to an anarchive? And most importantly, what are the potential and unanticipated ways in which a volumetric submission can be diagrammed within a two- dimensional space? In short, how do we archive the anarchive? These are questions that have emerged and have been consciously and purposely activated by Sean Smith’s thinkpiece for this issue, The Garage (Take One) . Sean, as part of his contribution to the special issue of drift within the thread in between space and place , created an artefact that emerged out of an event held during May 2013, titled Cottage University: Topology and Immanence . The visual documentation of The Garage (Take One) is not an archive but an anarchive due to its multimodal form, non-representational diagramming, and its reactivation of non-representational folding which animates its non-representational or more-than -representational condition. In short, The Garage (Take One) stymies attempts to be translated into digital text, representationally. As a reader of Sean’s submission you will only have access to a portion of the original submitted contribution (see “Take One”). At this time, I remain the only witness of The Garage (Take One) in its entirety: I was present at the original event, Cottage University: Topology and Immanence , and I was the sole receiver of the original package because of my role as editor for the thread, in between space and place . However, I would like to stress that I was unaware of what Sean would submit as his contribution to the special issue. What is presented here is an emergent rippling of the event that was not predetermined or arranged in advance ... a drifting of sorts! As for now, the artefact sits here on my desk next to a pile of books—folded, creased and somewhat lost in its translation into digital form. Questions of transcribing, translating and converting volumetric space to two-dimensional space have been considered throughout this process. And more importantly this artefact and its processes raise the issue of not what has been saved and included but what has been left out in each conversion of the original into the academic publication. What follows this preface are various “cuts” or “takes” from The Garage: Take One . Each take or cut is merely an interpretive and representational rendering of the original volumetric submission. Although with that said I would like to propose they are more than just representations or interpretations: each take or cut works as rippling variations of the event itself . It is important to acknowledge that much has been lost in the creases and much still lingers which will never be archived within an academic journal. Hence, a discussion of how to archive the anarchive is so crucial to para-academic “scholarship”. I will sum up the process that has emerged from The Garage (Take One) with a final word from Brian Massumi, written in his foreword to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus : Each 'plateau' is an orchestration of crashing bricks extracted from a variety of disciplinary edifices. They carry traces of their former emplacement, which give them a spin defining the arc of their vector. The vectors are meant to converge at a volatile juncture, but one that is sustained, as an open equilibrium of moving parts each with its own trajectory. The word 'plateau' comes from an essay by Gregory Bateson on Balinese culture, in which he found a libidinal economy quite different from the West's orgasmic orientation. In Deleuze and Guattari, a plateau is reached when circumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of intensity that is not automatically dissipated in a climax. The heightening of energies is sustained long enough to leave a kind of afterimage of its dynamism that can be reactivated or injected into other activities, creating a fabric of intensive states between which any number of connecting routes could exist. 2 The Garage (Take One) Double Take 2:31pm/5:31pm Sean Smith You there? I just wanted to emphasize a couple of things about the process of the submission: 2:31pm/5:31pm April Warn-Vannini Yes, listening. 2:36pm/5:36pm Sean Smith 1.When you describe feeding forward from the CU (Cottage University) event, it is a WALKING ACTIVITY that reinvests/reactivates the intensive energies of the event. that is what my photos are in Take One......it connects the intensive state of CU to my "one-take" writing on construction paper experience. i'm not sure if i adequately conveyed that or not, or if you did, or how important that is. 2. In doing so, it ruptures open the "space" and "place" of material practice ...and how these may enter into the mediated production of academic journal work...and its flattened two-dimensional experience. 3. the abstract machines of CU (i.e.coming out of silence) are invested with a new diagramming practice (the photo walk) to produce a new text that is neither-nor: "spaced" as a content of that walk (garages), but "placed" as a technical question (coming out of silence to language). 4. the new text is precisely diagrammatic, non-representational, anarchival. ....multimodal. ok, that's all that comes to mind right now. appreciating your efforts. 5. oh, finally, i think you might need a better definition of "anarchive" here..... it was hard to pin them down in montreal on what this is, so you wouldn't be wrong, per se, but more require a working definition for the reader. obviously, as you say, without getting too academic/citations, etc. know what i am saying? 2:46pm/5:46pm April Warn-Vannini 1. Totally got it but I think I did because of our many past conversations about how to archive the event 2. Yes this is what I love about this. And I think you speak to this very carefully in your writing on the Garage. Now whether others pick up on this I don't know. This is why I wanted to see what it would look like if I flattened it (take 3). 5. I agree that a better definition is needed. This is where I've been stumbling because I have not found anything that clearly defines what is meant by anarchive. 2:47pm/5:47pm Sean Smith "with take one being the only remainder of the original submission left to reveal...." precisely because of its digitality!!! yeah, i would probably just append an edited version of what we are saying here, as if the editing process was still a ripple of the event. me "adding" new text later i think defeats the purpose, but if you were to take snippets of this dialogue as part of the anarachive/ 2:48pm/5:48pm April Warn-Vannini Totally! 2:49pm/5:49pm Sean Smith and just *use them*, i think that's fair game. that way i won't be crafting my words with intent. you can even use this profile pic. 2:50pm/5:50pm April Warn-Vannini Okay perfect. With that said, do you think I should just discuss your process further in the preface or include an introduction that would be in take one? 2:51pm/5:51pm Sean Smith could it be Take Two in its own right, like an atemporal ripple that coexists with the others and bumps them to Three, Four and Five? Or could it be called "Double Take" and leave the others as Two, Three, Four? 2:53pm/5:53pm April Warn-Vannini Perfect. I like double take 2:53pm/5:53pm Sean Smith and it's us hashing through this discussion 2:53pm/5:53pm April Warn-Vannini Double take will follow take one. i like this. The Garage (Take Two) Folded, taped (scotch and duct), folded recycled chart paper previous emergent thoughts: performed, inscribed and made anew Red jiffy, black jiffy, blue ink pen cursive writing/block writing diagramming amplification dilated » » » » directional arrows « « « « Moistened, torn, crinkled Ruptures Anarchive of thought events Deciphering language/writing Exchanged as a volumetrics of new spaces Performing tactics of “writing off the page” on the page Enclosed [OPEN THE DOORS, MOVE FROM SURFACE TO VOLUME…AND THE CONVERSATION JUST MIGHT BEGIN ANEW. *stamped* SEAN SMITH] Drifting Drifting Drifting The Garage (Take Three) 6 Sean Smith video from April Vannini on Vimeo . The Garage (Take Four) The Garage (Take Five). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rembrandt and Collections of His Art in America: An NEH Curriculum ProjectJoseph M. Piro (bio)IntroductionI have asked myself whether the short time given us would be better used in an attempt to understand the whole of the universe or to assimilate what is within our reach.—Paul CézanneThis issue of the Journal of Aesthetic Education features an arts education curriculum project that was designed to use the oeuvre of Rembrandt (...) van Rijn—seventeenth-century Dutch painter, etcher, and draftsman extraordinaire—as a teaching resource. A partnership of scholars, university professors, museum educators, and classroom teachers designed the project, which uses Rembrandt as the prism through which to diversify teaching of the core content areas of social studies and visual art. Members of this team attempted to expand the boundaries of themes traditionally found in art and other humanities disciplines by linking these with the social sciences, thereby forming what might be called “humanistic social studies.” The final product is a Web site to which teachers and those interested in using this type of instructional approach in their classroom teaching will have access. Funding for this project derived from a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Curriculum Materials Development grant designed to promote the teaching of the humanities and support projects that can serve as national models.1In the eyes of many, Rembrandt is viewed primarily as a “European” artist. Although it is true that many of his major works are found in museums across Europe, he is generously represented in the holdings of collections across America. Yet for many teachers in the United States he remains an enigmatic figure; knowledge about his art is limited, and the U.S. museum collections of his work remain untapped for classroom application. To broaden the appeal and teaching potential of his work, the project team [End Page 1] mined this collection of “American” Rembrandts. Specifically, the project, targeted at secondary art and social studies teachers (grades 6 through 12), is committed to building and increasing the capacities of teachers to network knowledge of Rembrandt’s art with their classroom practice. Further, with its grounding in aesthetic education theory within a humanities framework, the project endeavors to promote instructional innovation and encourage teachers to break new ground in high-impact classroom pedagogy. The timing of the project and its ongoing development was not accidental. They converged with events held in 2006 to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth. These events ranged from worldwide museum exhibitions to publications of books containing new insights on Rembrandt, all of this aimed at celebrating an artist whose achievements many consider to be a zenith of world culture.Why Rembrandt: The Rationale for the ProjectWhy is Rembrandt the artist at the center of this project? There are any number of good reasons, but the project’s rationale centers around three in particular. First, to borrow a term from Peter Kivy, Rembrandt is the ultimate “aesthetic symbol,”2 an indisputably blue-chip figure who produced some of the greatest masterworks of world art, many of which students find both intellectually engaging and psychologically insightful. Traditionally, teachers have striven to enrich the aesthetic lives of their students with exemplars of the human mind, and the genius of Rembrandt provides a potent opportunity to do so.3 By studying an artist of such stature teachers can develop students’ cultural intelligence and visual literacy and present opportunities to observe and decode substantive, challenging masterworks of art. In this context, Rudolf Arnheim describes a painting by Rembrandt as containing a network of “visual arrows” that communicate multiple experiences about the human condition, including love, tenderness, and desire, among others. Arnheim speaks of the additive nature of the experience, how the viewer—almost like a mathematician—needs to learn how to add up the clues and arrive at a solution. He does not intend, of course, for the viewer to have an impersonal, “clinical” experience. Rather, he writes, “art... is one of the most powerful instruments available to us for the fulfillment of life. To withhold this benefit from human beings is to deprive them indeed.”4Second, there is a cognitive complexity embedded in... (shrink)

In [1] we have characterized four types vagueness related to negation, and constructed the corresponding propositional calculi adequate to formalize each type of vagueness. The calculi obtained were named V0; V1; V2 and C1 . The relations among these calculi and the classical propositional calculus C0 can be represented in the following diagram, where the arrows indicate that a system is a proper subsystem of the other V0 V1 C0 V2 C1 6 1 PP PP PP PiP 1 (...) PP PP PP PiP In this paper we present a two-valued semantics for each of these sys- tems. The semantics used here is the Henkin-style semantics which has proven fruitful in treating other paraconsistent logics. (shrink)

Is the traditional understanding of cause and effect in aetiology so certain that Arthur Eddington therefore proposed in 1927 "the arrow of time, or time's arrow" involving "the 'one-way direction' or 'asymmetry' of time", such that "a cause precedes its effect: the causal event occurs before the event it affects. Thus causality is intimately bound up with time's arrow"? (WK 2014) This certain view on cause and effect can be contrasted with an opposing view by Michael Dummett, who suggested instead, (...) back in 1957, that "there was no philosophical objection to effects preceding their causes", or what is now known as "retrocausality". (WK 2014a) Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), aetiology (in relation to cause and effect) are neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe. Of course, this questioning of different opposing views on cause and effect does not mean that the study of aetiology is useless, or that those diverse fields (related to aetiology) -- like physics, engineering, biology, philosophy, medicine, epidemiology, government, geography, spatial analysis, psychology, statistics, mathematics, economics, management, history, law, sociology, theology, and so on -- are worthless. (WK 2014b & 2014c) In fact, neither of these extreme views is plausible. Rather, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of aetiology in regard to the dialectic relationship between cause and effect -- while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favouring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the pluralist theory of aetiology) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way, and is organised in four chapters. (shrink)

Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist, is one of the outstanding figures in modern African literature whose works can be taken as early attempts in literature to move toward de-colonization. Achebe provides an alternative discourse which can depict not only an authentic picture of the native African life with all its complexity, but also dynamic native characters in such a context: real-life black characters with humane existential conflicts who can contemplate on what has been affecting their African pre-colonial identity. What makes (...) Achebe’s novels different from other novels is the way he relies on the notions of ‘Otherness’ and ‘hybridity’ in constructing his alternative non-Eurocentric discourse. This book studies four novels by Chinua Achebe i.e. Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God, and A Man of People, so as to investigate how he has constructed his alternative discourse; a discourse which has been successful in providing a room where the colonized are given voices to speak and the reader has a chance to understand better their world and what they have confronted because of colonization. Since each novel focuses on a different colonial or postcolonial phase in Nigeria and Achebe has made use of different discursive strategies in each of them, it can be claimed that taking them as a tetralogy and studying them together can result in providing a vivid picture of Achebe’s discourse and what his novels seek to mirror about the Nigerian hybrid identity and the colonized man’s struggles in the way of dealing with ‘otherness’ and difference. (shrink)

The first attempt to represent the Periodic system graphically was the Telluric Helix presented in 1862 by Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois, in which the sequence of elements was wound round a cylinder. This has hardly been attempted since, because the intervals between periodic returns vary in length from 2 to 32 elements, but Charles Janet presented a model wound round four nested cylinders. The rows in Janet’s table are defined by a constant sum of the first two quantum numbers, (...) n and l, so that they end with the s-block, headed by hydrogen and helium. By combining Janet’s table, Edward Mazurs’ version, in which each row represents an electron shell and Valery Tsimmerman’s use of a half square for each element, I have produced a representation that can be printed out and wound round to make a cylinder with manageable dimensions. In the unwound version, I have placed the s-block in the middle, to emphasise its pivotal nature, since it both ends each row and contributes electrons to the valence of elements in the next row; it thus does not necessarily belong either on the left or the right side of a table. The downward arrows that link subshells within each series graphically illustrate the Janet Effect. To acknowledge my debt to Chancourtois, Janet, Mazurs and Tsimmerman, I call my design the ‘Telluric Remix’. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Chapter One: Wrong Question, Right Answer -- Exercise 1: Getting right into it -- Exercise 2: Watching your hand -- Exercise 3: Marking practice -- Chapter Two: Realistic Drawing -- Exercise 4: Picking an object to draw -- Exercise 5: Attentive looking -- Exercise 6: Noticing awareness -- Exercise 7: Marking from the sense of sight -- Exercise 8: Simple rendering -- Exercise 9: Try perspective -- Exercise 10: Working inward -- Chapter Three: Systematic Drawing -- (...) Exercise 11: The circular arrow - a visual mantra -- Exercise 12: Improvising between two points and finding the world in between -- Exercise 13: Thought as art -- Exercise 14: All four pixel images -- Exercise 15: Book of compositions -- Chapter Four: Improvisational Drawing -- Exercise 16: Going outside the box -- Exercise 17: Not-breath awareness -- Exercise 18: Growing improvisation -- Exercise 19: Chasing the Coltrane Effect -- Exercise 20: Drawing to reveal inner conditions -- Exercise 21: Noticing Intuition -- Exercise 22: You are the universe drawing -- Chapter Five: Reading the Drawings -- Exercise 23: An exact physical description -- Exercise 24: Feeling the meaning -- Exercise 25: The story we tell ourselves -- Exercise 26: Connecting our story to a larger story -- Chapter Six: The Search for the Source of Creativity -- Exercise 27: Priming the source -- Exercise 28: Sitting still at the origin -- Exercise 29: Embedded sources -- Exercise 30: Mindful of the path -- Chapter Seven: Meta-Drawing -- Exercise 31: Sharing with yourself -- Exercise 32: Sharing with a trusted friend -- Exercise 33: Sharing with the world. (shrink)

In 1978, Yu. F. Borisov presented an axiom system using a few basic assumptions and four explicit axioms, the fourth being a formulation of the relativity principle; and he demonstrated that this axiom system had (up to choice of units) only two models: a relativistic one in which worldview transformations are Poincaré transformations and a classical one in which they are Galilean. In this paper, we reformulate Borisov’s original four axioms within an intuitively simple, but strictly formal, first-order (...) logic framework, and convert his basic background assumptions into explicit axioms. Instead of assuming that the structure of physical quantities is the field of real numbers, we assume only that they form an ordered field. This allows us to investigate how Borisov’s theorem depends on the structure of quantities. We demonstrate (as our main contribution) how to construct Euclidean, Galilean, and Poincaré models of Borisov’s axiom system over every non-Archimedean field. We also demonstrate the existence of an infinite descending chain of models and transformation groups in each of these three cases, something that is not possible over Archimedean fields. As an application, we note that there is a model of Borisov’s axioms that satisfies the relativity principle, and in which the worldview transformations are Euclidean isometries. Over the field of reals it is easy to eliminate this model using natural axioms concerning time’s arrow and the absence of instantaneous motion. In the case of non-Archimedean fields, however, the Euclidean isometries appear intrinsically as worldview transformations in models of Borisov’s axioms and neither the assumption of time’s arrow, nor the rejection of instantaneous motion, can eliminate them. (shrink)

As in every religious issue, the two main resources of Islām which are the Qur’ān and the Sunnah/ḥadīths are the first reference sources for deciding the things that are forbidden by Islam. There is no evidence in the Qur’ān that suggests specific types of animals are forbidden to eat except pork. Other than pork, only the animals which are slaughtered without the name of Allah, their blood and their carcass are forbidden to consume. Except these restricted ill-gotten meats, in the (...) Qur’ānic verses there are no other limitations referring to different animals. However, in Ḥadīth sources there are some narratives referring to the Prophet Muḥammad, implying that He named some other forbidden animals beside the ones specified in the Qur’ān. Collecting the narratives and evaluating them as a whole will contribute for a better understanding of the rules and principles of prohibitions that the Prophet Muḥammad imposed on this issue. Moreover, it will help to identify whether those rulings on some animals are unconditional and world-wide or cause-related and thus changeable according to the conditions. Furthermore, in this matter, although some animals‘ meat are not mentioned as forbidden in the Qur’ān, they are banned by the Prophet Muḥammad. This brings the need to highlight the importance of the capacity of the Prophet Muḥammad on deciding what is permissible (ḥalāl) and forbidden (ḥarām) in the religion.SummaryWhile the authority for determining what is ḥalāl (lawful) and what is ḥarām(forbidden) belongs essentially to Allah, the Prophet Muḥammad is also authorized to appoint what is ḥalāl-ḥarām by Allah.Authority of the Prophet Muḥammadrelated to the issue is not absolute and stems from the Qur’ān. Ḥalāland ḥarāmin the Qur’ān prescribed by Allah can be included in the concepts of maʿrūf (right) - munkar (wrong) andṭayyibāt (clean) - hkabāis (filthy). It is understood that the Prophet Muḥammadgrounded his commands in the concept of hkabāis.Prohibitions related to animal meats in the Qur’ānare limited to four: carcass, blood, pork and animals, which are not slaughtered in the name of Allah. However, in the Ḥadīth resources there are some narratives about the Prophet’s prohibition on consuming some types of animals other than the forbidden animals specified in the verses. These narratives can be classified in three titles:1. Animals, which are prohibited to be eaten 2. Animals, which are prohibited because of the way they are fed and slaughtered3. The matter of prohibition of the animals, which are commanded or forbidden to be slaughtered by the Prophet Muḥammad.At the end of the studies conducted based upon ḥadīth resources, in particular Kutūb al-Sittah (the well-known six ḥadīth books), it has been discovered that the animals, which are mentioned as not being permissible in the narratives, they are limited to domesticated donkey and the species of “predatory animals, predatory birds”, namely wolf, fox and cat. Even though the narratives about hyena imply as eatable, hyena is included in this article as it’s a predatory animal.The narratives regarding the prohibition of meat of domesticated donkey were transferred by approximately twenty Companions in respect to the time of the Battle of Khyber. This prohibition is generally stated in the ḥadīthresources as: “We were having dire hunger at the nights of Khyber. When the day for Khyber came, we encountered domesticated donkeys. We immediately slaughtered them. When we put the meat in the pot and started to boil it, crier of the Prophet Muḥammadcalled “Knock over the pots and don’t eat any of the donkey meat”. Regarding the issue there are such statements of some Companions like “we were banned from eating domesticated donkey”, “The Prophet banned the meat of domesticated donkey” among the narratives about the ban. In addition to a large number of narratives about the prohibition of domesticated donkey meat, there are two narratives related to permission of the Prophet for eating domesticated donkey and a narrative that Ibn ‘Abbās did not accept the ban. One of the said narratives is not among the narratives in the Kutūb al-Sittah while the other one is stated solely in the Sunanof Abū Dāwūd and thought to be acceptable by the traditionists. Even though this narrative’s authenticity is accepted, it is understood that there is an implication for the permission based on a necessity. According to the narrative, Ibn ʿAbbās referred to 145thverse of the surah al-An’am as a proof to his view saying “What ḥalālis what Allah allowed, what ḥaramis what Allah forbidden and the things about which there is no judgement of Allah are mubāḥ (permissible)”. As for us, the fact that Ibn ʿAbbās did not accepted the prohibition implies that he did not recognize the Prophet’s command related to the prohibition as an absolute prohibition. The conveyances of many Companions, which are consistent with each other, about the Prophet’s prohibition on eating domesticated donkey during the Battle of Khyber, proved that the prohibition was applied. Even though there is no dispute about prohibiting domesticated donkey, it is controversial whether the prohibition is absolute, constant or provisional based on certain reasons. It is more reasonable to accept that this prohibition was provisional and it was based on certain reasons. Because there are many narratives bearing information that this prohibition was due to several reasons and this is a situation which needs to be considered. Accordingly, there are three reasons, nearly all of which are attributed to judgement of the Companions. These were the facts that domesticated donkey was used in transportation; it used to eat filth and it was slaughtered/consumed without distributing booty/paying taxes. The seeking of the Companions for any reason for this prohibition indicates that they needed to comprehend this prohibition and that the prohibition is not absolute and constant.There is no explanation neither in the resources where the narratives are included nor in the annotation about when, where, why and in which context the prohibition regarding the predatory animals was realized. It is highly possible to assume that the Prophet prohibited these animal as they eat carcass. Another interesting issue within this regard is the fact that there are narratives and views indicating permissibility of eating hyena, which is a predatory, while predatory animals are forbidden in the narratives. Statements of the Prophet related to permissibility of eating hyena, which are considered authentic by traditionists and information about the Arabs who used to eat hyena and some of the Companions who praised eating hyena indicate that urf (custom) has a primary and decisive role about permissibility of eating meats. Regarding this matter about the hyenas, the narratives pointing out some Companions like ʿĀʾisha bint Abī Bakr and Ibn ‘Abbās who viewed prohibition of animals other than the prohibited animals in the Qur’an as inapplicable and other issues referring to the dispute indicate that prohibition of the Prophet Muḥammadfor predators can not be accepted as an absolute and unquestionable prohibition. Some of the prohibitions mentioned in ḥadīth narratives, except these animals, stem from the way of feeding and slaughtering of some animals. It is understood that consuming meat and milk of the animals that eat filth is prohibited in order to abstain from the things harming human health and mujassam (killing an animal with an arrow, etc. by fastening it as a target) is prohibited as carcass is banned and it is not permissible to torture and harm animals. Some of the prohibitions are related to the some animals, which were allowed and banned to slaughter by the Prophet. As the Prophet commanded some animals to be slaughtered and some animals not, meat of these animals was considered as forbidden. There is a dispute among the scholars, whilst there is not any statement of the Prophet about whether the animals included in this group can be eaten or not. It is seen that the Prophet ordered to slaughter some of the animals and prohibited to slaughter some other animals based on several reasons. (shrink)

Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God and A Man of the People, the first four novels by Chinua Achebe, the contemporary Nigerian novelist, are among the most outstanding works of African postcolonial literature. As a matter of fact, each of these four novels focuses on a different colonial or postcolonial phase of history in Nigeria and through them Achebe intends to provide an authentic record of the negative and positive impacts of ‘hybridity’ on different (...) aspects of the life of native subjects. Briefly stated, Achebe is largely successful in taking advantages of variable discursive tools he structures based on the potentials of the hybrid, Igbo-English he adopts. Thus, it might be deduced that reading these four novels in line with each other, and as chains or sequels of Tetralogy, might result in providing a more vivid picture of the Nigerian (African) subjects and the identity crises emerging in them as a result of colonization. To provide an account of the matter, the present study seeks to focus on one of the discursive strategies Achebe relies on in those four novels: Igbo Naming Cosmology and Name-symbolization. (shrink)

The sequential patterns of the sixty-four hexagrams in the Yijing, variously known as I Ching (the Book of Changes) are structured to embrace the universe of possibilities, scenarios and probabilities. Each hexagram equates to each moment in space-time. With the arrow of time, a string of hexagrams represent a string of moments. A probability curve can be formed from the string of hexagrams. Physicists call this mathematical entity a wave function which is constantly changing and proliferating. A wave function (...) is mathematical representation of all possibilities that can happen to an observed entity when it interacts with an observer. The form of the wave function can be calculated by the Schrodinger wave equation for any part of the range of moments. The string of hexagrams deal with probabilities. Physicists deal mainly with two wave forms and functions – dynamic wave that follows the Schrodinger wave equation and the second phenomenon is the “collapse of the wave function” which is abrupt and discontinuous. Which part of the wave collapses is a matter of probability and chance. The wave transition from the first to the second is call the quantum jump. This exhibited phenomenon is very similar to how the hexagram in the Yijing. When unobserved, the sequential formation of the hexagrams, moment by moment, form a probability wave but when it is observed, it abruptly collapses. It is the abrupt collapse of all the development aspects of the wave function except the one that actualizes and that particular hexagram is therefore the mathematical representation of the observed entity. What spurs all the changes is the energy that flows through the system and all the interacting waves are interconnected and interdependent and they form the energy fields. Emphasis is on the stringed hexagrams, each possesses a sophisticated mathematical structure, suggesting at the same time that it would hold great significance as an integral part of the whole of the wave or energy field. The subject of this paper is on the quantum- informational theoretical framework of Yijing. (shrink)

Independent on Sunday October 2nd One of the country's lead­ing philosophical counsellers, and chairman of the Society for Philosophy in Practice (SPP), Tim LeBon, said it typically took around six 50 ­minute sessions for a client to move from confusion to resolution. Mr LeBon, who has 'published a book on the subject, Wise Therapy, said philoso­phy was perfectly suited to this type of therapy, dealing as it does with timeless human issues such as love, purpose, happiness and emo­tional challenges. `Wise (...) Therapy, is part of a series aimed at promoting an integrative attitude as its ethos. Among all the many perspectives of psychotherapists and counselors, philosophy needs to take its place and needs to find its voice. Tim LeBon has provided an effective means by which counselors can bring philosophy into their work with clients' - APPA journal `Tim Le Bon's Wise Therapy is a comprehensible and well argued book dealing with the practical therapeutic applications of philosophical research that may well be of interest to philosophers but -- as the author himself intends -- will be of most obvious benefit to therapists and counselors, both by informing their dialogue with clients in new ways and by helping them become more informed about ways to resolve the ethical dilemmas arising within the context of their own work' - Metapsychology `A fascinating workshop for therapists and clients, backed up a thorough degree if philosophical acuity' - Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis `I strongly recommend the book for philosophers as well as practitioners, teachers, students and supervisors in counselling and psychotherapy' - Self and Society `Provides some additional and valuable arrows for the therapist's quiver' - Irvin Yalom, author of Love's Executioner `Like Aristotle, Tim LeBon examines what is said and extracts what is best from it…. There are many fascinating exercises designed to bring out and enlighten the client's values, conception of the good life, well-being, happiness, pleasure, and the proper place of reason in life…. Wise Therapy is well written and engaging. The case histories are illuminating examples of therapeutic techniques at work, the thought experiments are well designed, and the philosophical position adapted from the internal debates of the philosophers is level headed…. I recommend it highly to philosophers with an interest in counselling, and psychological counsellors with an interest in philosophy' - Jeff Mason, The Philosophers' Magazine `Tim LeBon has… authored a text which should become a staple on the philosophical counsellor's bookshelf…. Wise Therapy is a concise, well-written book…. His ability to relate philosophical concepts to counselling concerns is admirable and attests to the skill and knowledge he possesses as a working counsellor. But, by far the most important part of Tim LeBon's book to PC is the last chapter, "The Counsellor's Philosophical Toolbox"' - Craig Munns in The Examined Life ` Tim LeBon has done a good job of offering practical approaches to some of the most important and vexing issues that arise in counselling…. Tim LeBon's book contains helpful suggestions, practical information, and useful examples, and would make a good addition to the library of any counsellors willing to allow philosophy to turn mere client sessions into wise therapy' - Peter Raabe, Practical Philosophy Wise Therapy is an original and practical guide to how philosophy can benefit counselling and psychotherapy. Tim LeBon argues that therapy, informed by philosophy, can help clients make better decision and achieve emotional wisdom. He uses philosophical approaches to explore issues of right and wrong, the emotions and reasons, well-being and the meaning of life, and develops a 'counsellor's toolbox' of techniques that can help practitioners apply the wisdom of philosophy to good therapeutic practice. For counsellors who may find philosophical approaches to therapy useful, this work addresses key philosophical topics - the emotions, free will, the meaning of life and ethics. It is jargon-free where possible and assumes no previous philosophical training. From The Independent, 16th November 2004 Plato is my agony aunt It was the end of a love affair that broke her heart. Could the wisdom of the great philosophers show her how to be happy again? Claire Smith tries a novel form of therapy "The unexamined life is not worth living," Socrates said. Nor is the life you're left with after your boyfriend has left you for another woman - at least, that's how it felt in October last year when mine broke rank and went off with an art student from Cleveland, Ohio. We were over there for the opening of his new art exhibition. He'd flown over four days before me and had met her at a party. Supposedly, they "connected". The five months that followed were a roller-coaster of confusion, vitriol and despair. I knew there'd been problems in our relationship. We saw the world very differently; he delighted in the charm of the ordinary, I wanted maximum divinity. He walked; I galloped. He drank tea; I loathed the stuff. But, along the banks of the Thames, we'd made a promise to always stick together. Our love was something unique: "transcendental", I called it. And besides, we recycled. Surely a commitment to save the world would save our relationship? Alas, no. So there I was, a woman scorned. Hell truly hath no greater fury. And what made it worse was that I still believed in our transcendental love. If I wanted to change the way I was feeling, I needed to alter the way I was thinking. But how? A few bottles of wine and a sharp blow to the head might have done the trick. Fortunately, there's an older, more trusted way of turning your head on its head that counsellors are starting to use: philosophy. The idea of employing Plato as an agony aunt was begun in 1981 by the German philosopher Gerd Achenbach. Although philosophy spends a lot of its time asking real-life questions that affect real-life people - What is happiness? And is it always wrong to lie? - most of the debate goes on in ivory towers. What Achenbach and subsequent philosophers including Tim LeBon, the chairman of the UK's Society for Philosophy in Practice, wanted to do was "give practical application" to this gigantic library of great thoughts. So how does it work? Like most types of therapy, you sign up for a set of sessions. "Two would give you a new perspective on one issue; six would help you to make a major life-decision, like a career change; with 12 you can start to rethink your entire life philosophy," explains LeBon. Each session lasts 50 minutes and costs £50 - and, no, you don't have to have any previous knowledge of philosophy. "If you think of Friends, it would suit Ross and Chandler more than Joey," LeBon says. "It's for anyone who wants to make their emotions more intelligent. Or for those who have tried other kinds of therapy, and want something more cerebral." The first session begins with the patient venting off about whatever's troubling them. The rant over, the counsellor then picks out some key concepts that are crucial to the problem - in the case of heartbreak, it is love and happiness that come hurtling to the fore - and then gets the patient to define what they mean. So, what is love? What is happiness? To kick-start the patient's thinking, LeBon describes what a great philosopher had to say about it. In my case, he tells me what Plato wrote about love in his Symposium: that to stop man fighting the gods, Zeus decided to cut each human in two, so they would lose their strength. "This, then, is the source of our desire to love each other," Plato said. "Each of us is a 'matching half' of a human whole, because each was sliced like a flatfish, two out of one, and each of us is always seeking the half that matches him." This method of probing what we might think are "obvious" ideas, such as love and happiness, was devised by Socrates in the squares of Athens. "The only I thing I know is that I know nothing at all," he boasted. What Socrates showed was that although many of the thinkers of his time thought they knew what justice, happiness and goodness meant, their understanding was tied in to their personal agenda and world view, and, what's more, when pushed, their ideas often contradicted themselves. A bit like me on love. Whereas part of my understanding of love was something that gave life meaning, made it worth living and bound us together, I also believed that true love was "transcendental": that it was out of this world, and it didn't matter if the two people who loved each other couldn't get along in the day-to-day. Love was bigger than the mundane. But when it came to the next stage of the therapy, critical thinking - "to check out whether your assumptions stand up to examination" - I walked head first into a contradiction. If I think love's purpose is to make life worth living, but then say it's irrelevant to daily life, surely my two ideas of love are not compatible? As the cogs in my brain start to creak into motion, I feel myself taking a step back from my predicament: thinking about how I've been thinking. This idea I had of transcendental love might have started off as a romantic dream. But when the relationship stopped working, and I found myself feeling trapped and frustrated, I used it to justify the mechanics of a relationship that just didn't work in the daily grind. I used it to lie to myself. In the final stage, LeBon gets me to start thinking about how to go forward. "You can't change what has happened," he says. "You can't change that he's left you, or how you behaved in the relationship. So, as the Stoics did, let's work on controlling the controllables: the things that you can change." To work out what can be changed, he gets me to try out a thought experiment, a method often used in philosophy to imagine other worlds where people can have different codes of behaviour. Thought experiments shatter your preconceived ideas of how the world should be and let your imagination run wild to how the world could be. "I find Viktor Frankl very useful here, the Austrian psychiatrist and concentration-camp survivor who actually believed that everything in life happens for a purpose," LeBon says. "Suppose this break-up did happen for a reason that will work to your benefit," he suggests. "What might that be? The answer might be that you can now focus on something important that was denied in the relationship. Or - the Hollywood version - so you'll meet someone who is really right for you." Temporarily freed of any sense of responsibility for the relationship that was, and its sorry demise, the list came fast. I could now travel more; he didn't like me travelling on my own, but too often he didn't want to go anywhere, preferring to stay in his studio and make art. I'd love to meet someone with a similar sense of adventure to mine. For the first time in two years, I was being honest with myself about what I really wanted - listening to those voices that we all have inside our heads, and too often try to muzzle. So did philosophy save me? Well, I'm now dating a travel writer I have to run to keep up with. I still haven't got over the fact that my replacement came from Cleveland, Ohio. But I guess I never will. Tim LeBon can be reached by e-mail at [email protected] A FEW WORDS FROM THE WISE Compiled by Ed Caesar · "At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet" - Plato · "There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness" - Friedrich Nietzsche · "That man shall live as his own master and in happiness who can say each day 'I have lived'" - Horace · "The good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue... Moreover this activity must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy" - Aristotle · "There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than friendship" - Thomas Aquinas · "Whatever you do... love those who love you" - Voltaire · "Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination" - Immanuel Kant · "Happiness is a state of which you are unconscious. The moment you are aware that you are happy, you cease to be happy" - Jiddu Krishnamurti · "Love is an ideal thing. Marriage is a real thing" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe I shrink, therefore I am Therapy has many answers, but some questions require the help of a philosopher, says Clint Witchalls Sunday November 21, 2004 The Observer Danny had worked in the City of London for 10 years. As a research analyst, stockbroker and fund manager, he'd made a lot of valuable contacts, earnt a lot of cash, and learnt some important business skills. However, as he approached his mid-thirties, he no longer felt good about himself or what he did for a living, and he found his colleagues cold and unfriendly. A chronic illness made him realise his mortality, and he began to reassess his priorities. Danny had been struggling with his career conundrum for nearly five years when he met David Arnaud, a philosophical counsellor. After a few soul-searching sessions, Danny arrived at a decision. Today, he teaches economics to sixth-formers, and he loves it. 'It's a much better lifestyle,' he says. Many people are turning to philosophical counsellors to get answers to questions such as: 'How do I make sense of myself?' 'What is important to me?' 'Where am I going?' These are perhaps not the sort of questions that require psychiatric intervention, but Arnaud, who recently completed the first empirical study of philosophical counselling in the UK, has found that within just five sessions the majority of clients, with important decisions to make, tend to move from a state of concern and confusion to a resolution. Modern philosophical counselling can be traced back to 1981, when the philosopher Gerd Achenbach opened the first practice near Cologne. Achenbach referred to the new discipline as 'therapy for the sane.' Today, there are hundreds of philosophical counsellors around the world, with the movement particularly strong in the US, Britain and the Netherlands. 'The dilemmas people face aren't always primarily psychological,' says Alex Howard, a philosophical counsellor from Newcastle. 'If people face problems that are social or economic, it doesn't make sense to define their problems in purely psychological terms.' Tim LeBon, a founder member of the Society for Philosophy in Practice (SPP) and author of Wise Therapy, adds: 'We are faced with far more life choices than our grandparents, yet have far fewer resources to deal with them. Our grandparents may have gone to a priest or to other family members for advice; most people don't trust these solutions any more and so want to make their own well-informed, well thought-out choices. Philosophical counselling can help these people - people in mid-life crises who are wondering how to make the most of the rest of their life. People who want to take stock of their values.' Where stressed executives might once have been prescribed a course of tranquillisers or antidepressants, they can now get a dose of Bertrand Russell instead: 'Success is too dearly purchased if all the other ingredients have been sacrificed to obtain it.' While some philosophical counsellors do recommend books for their clients to read, most sessions are about helping the client identify faulty thoughts. For example, a briefing in Aristotelian logic might show a client why their beliefs are erroneous. The person might infer that they're a screw-up because they've screwed up. The counsellor could point out that they're making an error called 'fallacy of composition' - that is, what's true of the part isn't necessarily true of the whole. In philosophical counselling, problems aren't pathologised as they are by the psychiatric profession, and the dialogue between client and counsellor is more like a meeting of equals, compared to many therapies where the client is treated like a patient and seen as someone who is, in some way, inadequate. 'Anybody can benefit from philosophical counselling,' says Howard. 'But it does require someone who is willing to take stock.' Lou Marinoff, author of international bestseller Plato Not Prozac! has done much to promote philosophical counselling. 'Some people who have stabilised their neurochemistry and validated their emotions now wish to examine or re-examine the criteria of their beliefs, the principles of their conduct, or the meaning of their lives,' he says. 'With whom shall they do this? Psychologists and psychiatrists can shed light on such issues - as can rabbis, priests, imams and gurus. Philosophers are now rejoining the ranks of helpers.' LeBon believes certain therapies (such as cognitive behavioural therapy) don't go far enough in helping their clients. 'For instance, if you are anxious about your relationship, a cognitive therapist would try to dispute your catastrophising and jump to conclusions to make you feel less anxious,' says LeBon. 'A philosophical counsellor would do this, but would also look for existential meaning in your anxiety - perhaps you really don't want to be in the relationship and that is what your anxiety is telling you.' LeBon also gives short shrift to psychoanalysts. 'There's very little evidence for the Freudian unconscious, and it's time to move on to more intellectually satisfying and helpful therapies,' he says. However, Alain de Botton, the man who popularised philosophy as self-help, isn't ready to bury psychologists and their ilk just yet. 'The truth is that psychoanalysis grew out of philosophy - it's not some completely new idea, and in fact, done properly, psychoanalysis is philosophical anyway. It may even be dangerous to the mental health of some people to suggest a philosopher rather than a properly trained analyst. The knowledge of analysts when it comes to many emotional problems is now much greater than that of most philosophers.' Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004. (shrink)

Macroscopic irreversible processes emerge from fundamental physical laws of reversible character. The source of the local irreversibility seems to be not in the laws themselves but in the initial and boundary conditions of the equations that represent the laws. In this work we propose that the screening of currents by black hole event horizons determines, locally, a preferred direction for the flux of electromagnetic energy. We study the growth of black hole event horizons due to the cosmological expansion and accretion (...) of cosmic microwave background radiation, for different cosmological models. We propose generalized McVittie co-moving metrics and integrate the rate of accretion of cosmic microwave background radiation onto a supermassive black hole over cosmic time. We find that for flat, open, and closed Friedmann cosmological models, the ratio of the total area of the black hole event horizons with respect to the area of a radial co-moving space-like hypersurface always increases. Since accretion of cosmic radiation sets an absolute lower limit to the total matter accreted by black holes, this implies that the causal past and future are not mirror symmetric for any spacetime event. The asymmetry causes a net Poynting flux in the global future direction; the latter is in turn related to the ever increasing thermodynamic entropy. Thus, we expose a connection between four different “time arrows”: cosmological, electromagnetic, gravitational, and thermodynamic. (shrink)