The Cham Balamon people in Vietnam are an ethnic group with long religious and cultural traditions, who give a great importance to preserving their own cultural identity through generations. However, in recent years there are many economic, cultural and social changes in the life of the Cham Balamon community. One of the significant changes in the spiritual life of this community is the conversion of belief from Hinduism to Christianity. We think that this is an outstanding problem that (...) needs to be addressed by formal and comprehensive scientific research projects. We have dispatched several research groups to conduct field trips, deep interviews and sociological surveys on the spiritual life of the Cham Balamon community. This paper is the first step of those researches pointing out the problems and challenges to the Cham Balamon community in Ninh Thuan Province, Vietnam. These are cultural and belief conflicts among people in the community or even among family members. However, we would predict that the biggest challenge is the risk of losing cultural identities that the Cham Balamon community is facing today due to religious conversion. (shrink)

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10: [Review] Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani, editors. Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 341 pp.

Across cultures, in most parts of the world, one come across traditions that employ unique and unusual pedagogies as skilful means to powerfully craft and re-craft our lives and in realizing the self. Using creative meaning-making, individuals evoke wholesome ideas and then motivate their personal selves to perform to them. The Vajranŕtyam or Cham is one of the unique expressions that has been employed from immemorial times to holistically convey the phenomenon of the dance form as a skilful spiritual (...) tool. While the authors recognize that other cultures too engage in spiritual dances as skilful means, here they dwell in greater length on Cham dance or the Tibetan Lama dance, which is performed in the traditional Vajrayana or Tantric schools of Buddhism in India, Bhutan, Mongolia, Nepal, and Tibet. With the advent of various contemporary influences, there is an observable change in the attitude towards the traditional, impacting its pure form. Whether it is undesirable or acceptable is a matter of reflection in another place, yet there are some observations that authors choose to share in the last section of this paper. Also, arising from several yet similar cultural influences, the purists voice accusation of dilution and warn that the traditional Cham dance may be slowly dying and morphing into tourist-friendly theatrics that is pleasing to the eye. In this paper, the authors attempt to elucidate its historical and contemporary role and place, to instigate an inquiry that hopefully provides a robust narrative, rich in value, and with a substantive interpretation from which lessons could be culled or harvested. Authors look at Vajranŕtyam in a generic wisdom-method space cutting across religious and social-cultural spaces. They also seek possible alignments and connect with science, essentially to study, explore, propagate core beneficiaries of the Dharma dance in terms of a sacred mindful and meditative art form. (shrink)

This compact booklet addresses informal logical aspects of infinite regress arguments. We know what infinite regress arguments are from such examples as Plato’s Third Man problem. It is presented here for tradition sake in its original formulation, where for convenience ‘man’ does duty for ‘human being’. Plato’s theory of abstract Ideas or Forms, in order to explain how it is that Phaedo and Meno are both men, posits their belonging to, participating in or falling under a higher ideal abstract universal (...) Man. The theory thereby takes the first irreversible step toward an infinite regress of ideal abstract universal men of increasingly higher order, beginning with the third MAN, for which there seems to be no legitimating explanatory rationale. A further example, to have several on hand, is the infinite regress that occurs on the assumption that every occurrent event has a temporally prior cause, or, simply, that every event has a cause that is also an event. The logical structure, class .. (shrink)

Originally published in 1992 in Portuguese, the English translation of the 2015, updated edition of Kósmos Noetós will open Ivo Ibri's fine book to a wider audience. The book ventures into the most difficult territory of Peirce's body of work. The topics of Prof. Ibri's study include the more recondite matters of Peirce's objective idealism, synechism, tychism, cosmology, and the accounts of reality. Starting with the phenomenology, Ibri attempts a coherent picture of Peirce's metaphysics, using the results to provide an (...) interesting interpretation of Peirce's pragmatism.The book is divided into three major sections: the World as Appearance, the World as Reality, and the Knowable World. In a very nice exegesis of... (shrink)

Rewiew of Hausmannn, M., & Noller, J... Free Will. Historical and Analytic Perspectives. Cham: Springer; Palgrave Macmillan.

Review of Smith, P. (2022). Sextus Empiricus’ Neo-Pyrrhonism: Skepticism as a Rationally Ordered Experience. Cham: Springer.

The studies of the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka has been flourishing recently. Martin Ritter’s book Into the World: The Movement of Patočka’s Phenomenology offers an important contribution to the debate and a long-awaited critical presentation of Patočka’s asubjective phenomenology as well as creative re-reading of Patočka's central doctrine of the movements of existence.

Văn khắ c Chămpa tại Ba̓ o tàng ̃ Điêu khắ c Chăm–Đà Nă ̃ ng. The Inscriptions of Campā at the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Đà Năng. By Arlo Griffiths, Amandine Lepoutre, William A. Southworth, and Thành Phn. Published in collaboration between École française d’Extrême-Orient, Hanoi, and Center for Vietnamese and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University H̀ô Chí Minh City. H̀ô Chí Minh: VNUHCM Publishing House, 2012. Pp. 288, 67 pl., (...) 38 photos. VND 170.000. (shrink)

Reflections on Theoretical Issues in Argumentation Theory Frans H. van Eemeren and Bart Garssen Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2015. Pp. xiv, 1-293. ISBN 978-3-319-21102-2. eBook US$139.00, €118,99; Hardcover US$179.00, €147,69.

In my review I argue that this book is more than just a history of the way in which Husserl’s work was studied and taught in the United States and Canada from the early XXth Century on since it shows that what started as a “reception” soon became a local interpretation and appropriation of the phenomenological perspective which ended up blossoming as an autochthonous movement with its own concerns, issues, and schools. The book clearly shows the different phases in the (...) development of the phenomenological movement in North America, the numerous institutions participating in it, and the variety of local perspectives. (shrink)

Review of Thompson, J. W. (2022). The Metaphysics of Resurrection in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

Review of Hashas, M. (Ed.). (2021). Pluralism in Islamic Contexts - Ethics, Politics and Modern Challenges. Cham: Springer.