The public transport sector in the urban landscape in Nigeria is a prominent social site for the spatial distribution of automobile graffiti signatures. Transporters have various kinds of symbolic tags on their vehicles that convey different messages which represent their local attitudes, beliefs, religious identities, folk psychology, and safety precautionary measures to recipients (other road users and passers-by). This article, based on two case studies, examines the practice of automobile graffiti on trucks and lorries in Calabar metropolis, Cross River State, (...) south-eastern Nigeria. It investigates the motivations, thematic categories, and subjective semiotic interpretations of these verbal signatures from the perspectives of visual semiotics theory using participant observations, semi-structured interviews, and informal conversations. The study demonstrates that truck drivers/owners use their vehicles as visible artistic platforms in the public space to express their thoughts and sentiments on personal, social, and religious issues affecting the society. The study concludes that these inscriptions and imageries are artistic subcultures that mirror wide ranging value categories and provide outlets for spatial transformation, creative agencies, and social commentaries. (shrink)

In our book, Arms and Daggers in the Heart of Africa, Michael Olisa noted that external intervention in an internal conflict could be problematic even if carried out on humanitarian grounds. All sides of the conflict must see the intervening force as indeed neutral for it to succeed in its mission. The conflicting forces must also accept, separately and individually, that intervention is in their interest. In turn, the act of intervention must be precise and clear in objective, with the (...) capability to be implemented in accordance with a program endorsed by all parties. (shrink)

This article approaches Confucianism as a lost art of living and asks how we can make it relevant again for us. Central to this approach is the cultivation of heart-mind designed to help cure ourselves of self-oblivion and self-centeredness so prevalent in our culture today. It is based on the idea of Li, the same as Spinoza’s God, the absolute Being that has nothing to do with human aspirations at all. To seek this, Li is therefore to gain true freedom. (...) Two preeminent Neo-Confucians of Joseon Korea, Yi Hwang and Yi I, discuss the method of Jing, paying full attention and being watchful, for that end. (shrink)

By melodic landscape, this paper points to natural milieus such as mountains whose motifs are caught up in contrapuntal relations. With Merleau-Ponty, the structure of the world is a symphony, and the production of life which implicates both organism and environment as unfurling of Umwelt is ‘a melody that sings itself’. For the Chinese culture, mountains have been deemed virtuous in Confucianism, immortal by Daoists, and spiritual for a Buddhist to reach a substrate level of pure stream of a-subjective consciousness. (...) A Chinese painter-poet within the ‘mountain-water’ genre would consider mountains as performance of events, a concert of vibration of light, shape and sound, movement and rest. Insofar as art is to create energy transfer, Chinese artists of mountains aim at concerting with nature as organised by rhythms and conspecifics, unfolding contrapuntal melodies with all kinds of counterpoints. As Deleuze and Guattari's notion of refrains are the three forces or tempos of chaos, earth and world confronting/converging one another, this paper endeavours to find out, first, how Deleuze and Guattari's geological, organic and alloplastic stratifications can be put alongside mountains, animals, plants and arts, and second, how this notion can contribute to our new appreciation of the way Chinese mountains in arts can give out music. (shrink)

We study the class of all strongly constructivizable models having \(\omega \) -stable theories in a fixed finite rich signature. It is proved that the Tarski–Lindenbaum algebra of this class considered together with a Gödel numbering of the sentences is a Boolean \(\Sigma ^1_1\) -algebra whose computable ultrafilters form a dense subset in the set of all ultrafilters; moreover, this algebra is universal with respect to the class of all Boolean \(\Sigma ^1_1\) -algebras. This gives a characterization to the Tarski-Lindenbaum (...) algebra of the class of all strongly constructivizable models with \(\omega \) -stable theories. (shrink)

The book is a collection of essays written by Gustavo Esteva over the last 20 years. In this book, Gustavo Esteva, renowned in Mexico as a philosopher on education and on developmentalism, collects four major areas of his writings: on learning, development, autonomy, and interculturality. A memorial to a great thinker, this book stimulates thoughts on developmentalism across the global south.

ABSTRACT ‘Mind moment analysis’ is a professional counselling technique rooted in early Buddhist teachings. Employing the process of cognition discussed in Madhupiṇḍika Sutta as its theoretical foundation, mind moment analysis takes form in seven iterative steps for the therapeutic practitioner to help clients deconstruct disturbing mental phenomena, detach from mental turbulence and discern wholesome and unwholesome mind acts. After cultivating stability and clarity of mind, practitioners collaborate with clients to investigate the root causes of craving beneath conceptual proliferations and mindfully (...) choose constructive thoughts, thereby resulting in reduced suffering. This paper introduces the theoretical background of mind moment analysis, uses a case example of this therapeutic intervention with sample transcript verbatim to illustrate each step, and discusses the treatment components of the intervention. (shrink)

The seventeenth-century Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards has become popular again in contemporary theological discussion. Central to Edwards' theology is his concept of beauty. Delattre wrote the standard work on this topic half a century ago. However, Delattre approaches Edwards mainly as a philosopher, and he does not address how Edwards employs the concept of beauty to explain and defend traditional Reformed doctrines. Recent writings by McClymond, Holmes, and others have shown that defending the Reformed tradition is a fundamental concern of (...) Edwards. This work reveals how Edwards, starting with the common notion that beauty means the appropriate proportional relationship, develops a theological aesthetic that contributes to a rational understanding of major doctrines such as the Trinity, Christology, and eschatology. It shows that Edwards is both an innovative speculative theologian and a staunch defender of Reformed orthodoxy. (shrink)

This paper takes Deleuze's idea ‘to green’ as a qualitative predicate which becomes a rhizomatic event where Jesper Hoffmeyer's ‘plant being’ contemplates through waves and rhythms, hence affects and percepts. The article then brings forward an intertwined group of Chinese ideograms which are designed with plant-radicals, making up an ecosystem towards the establishment of a new Chinese ecocriticism under the banner of biosemiotics. Such an effort will, hopefully, widen the scope and dimension of the new field of environmental humanities, with (...) an emphasis on the scenario of affective attuning to the agency of vegetal life. The main purpose is to put Deleuze and Guattari's form-event assemblage within the stratification of regimes of signs in A Thousand Plateaus, in order to establish a ‘natureculture’ continuity not only between science and art, but also between a Western rethinking of language/culture and a Chinese ecosystem/ecocriticism. (shrink)

The Yijing has been used as a book of divination for more than three thousand years in China and still is by some people today. In this book the wisdom of leadership within the framework of the Yijing is used to indicate how a leader should act in different situations, be they good or bad. Critical analysis of the 64 hexagrams, the first of its kind, comes across with lucid explanations of the hexagram statements. Reinterpreted in a logical and scientific (...) manner, this Chinese classic provides modern leaders with food for thought. (shrink)

This series publishes outstanding monographs and edited volumes that investigate all aspects of Kant's philosophy, including its systematic relationship to other philosophical approaches, both past and present. Studies that appear in the series are distinguished by their innovative nature and ability to close lacunae in the research. In this way, the series is a venue for the latest findings in scholarship on Kant.

This brief essay introduces the work of three contemporary Ukrainian writers whose poems appear here in English translation. The introduction situates their work in the context of modernist and contemporary Ukrainian poetry as well as in the context of Russian invasions of Ukraine in 2022 and 2014.