A historical investigation of the exclusion of Africa and Asia from modern histories of philosophy.

This Book Focuses On The Evolution Of Philosophy In India With Reference To Socio-Political And Economic Conditions, Through Which One Can Learn That Life And Thought Are Invariably Interconnected With Polity And Persons, Economy And Environment. This Book Is Unique In The Sense That It Contains A Review In The Conclusion; And The Philosophical Heritage Has Been Evaluated In Its Introduction.

This authoritative volume, written by two well-known psychologist-philosophers, presents a model of the person and its implications for psychological theory and practice. Professors Ramakrishna Rao and Anand Paranjpe draw the contours of Indian psychology, describe the methods of study, explain crucial concepts, and discuss the central ideas and their application, illustrating them with insightful case studies and judicious reviews of available research data and existing scholarly literature. The main theme is organized around the thesis that psychology is the study of (...) the person and that the person is a unique composite of body, mind and consciousness. The goal of the person is self-realization. Self-realization consists in the realization of one's true self as distinct from the manifest ego and it is facilitated by cultivating consciousness. Cultivating consciousness leads to a kind of psycho-spiritual symbiosis resulting in personal transformation, altruistic value orientation and flowering of the hidden human potential. (shrink)

In this short but meaty book, Peter Unger questions the objective answers that have been given to central problems in philosophy. As Unger hypothesizes, many of these problems are unanswerable, including the problems of knowledge and scepticism, the problems of free will, and problems of causation and explanation. In each case, he argues, we arrive at one answer only relative to an assumption about the meaning of key terms, terms like "know" and like "cause," even while we arrive at an (...) opposite answer relative to quite different assumptions, but equally arbitrary assumptions, about what the key terms mean. (shrink)

Ancient Indian philosophies consider self-realization as a fundamental concept and aim of human life, which appears theoretically similar to the self-actualization concept of the West. This article compares and contrasts the self-actualization concept with the views of ancient Indian wisdom to create a model. Both ideas strive for a more elevated Self, unleashing our potential or the realization/actualization of the true Self. From the Indian Vedanta philosophy emerged the Panchakosha theory of personality, which provides a structural framework for human states (...) of consciousness leading to higher development and transcendental identity. According to the scriptures, any form of stress is due to an underdeveloped state of consciousness at these levels or due to disconnection from the true Self; once an individual comes in contact with the ‘true Self’, the problems of life are eliminated. Yoga is a systematic process and way of human development, and applying the principles of Yoga philosophy in life will help in transcending one from the lower Self to the higher Self, awakening human potential, and becoming self-actualized. Yogis, who practice Yoga, could be responsible for a positive shift towards sustainable communities or transformative environments through enhanced mindfulness, self-actualization, and social capital demonstrated by enhanced moral values, trust, engagement, and acceptance. This theoretical model from classical Indian thought has the potential to provide the needed guidelines to create more self-actualized people. The dimension of well-being and prescriptions on how to reach this state of highest well-being is the essence of Indian philosophy. (shrink)

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a (...) compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. (shrink)

[T. 1] Interpretationen zu den frühen und mittleren Dialogen -- T. 2. Das Bild des Dialektikers in Platons späten Dialogen.

What is interest and how has it been conceptualized and studied? -- What explains the power of interest? : Why are students who have an interest for content more likely to continue to reengage and develop more conceptual sophistication? -- What is known about assessing existing interest? How do new interests develop? How can the phase of a person's interest be identified and measured? -- What is the relation between the development of interest and other motivational variables? -- Is it (...) a paradox that interest declines as subject matter gets more developed? What is "interest driven learning"? Does it matter if interests are taken up in rather than out of school? How different is an interest in one versus another subject matter, or domain? -- What we can now say about interest, its generation and development? What are the implications of knowing that interest can be developed? What could further research help us to understand? (shrink)

Ē chartographēsē tou anthrōpinou genetikou ylikou anoixe to dromo gia tē diereunēsē tou phainomenou tēs zōēs. Ē katanoēsē tou tropou leitourgias tōn gonidiōn anamenetai oti tha dōsei apantēseis gia ta aitia ekdēlōsēs sēmantikōn astheneiōn alla kai tha prospherei tropous prolēpsēs ē therapeias tous. Enō etsi einai dynatē ē diagnōsē sēmantikōn astheneiōn, eite progennētika eite meta tē gennēsē tou anthrōpou, sto ameso mellon tha einai dynatē ē epharmogē apotelesmatikōn therapeutikōn agōgōn me tēn anaptyxē tēs gonidiakēs therapeias. Ē epistēmonikē euphoria pou synodeuse (...) tis diavevaiōseis kai tis yposcheseis tōn genetistōn metatrapēke euloga se skeptikismo mprosta stous kindynous pou egkymonei ē kakē chrēsē tōn genetikōn diagnōstikōn methodōn. Etsi, ē allē opsē tēs analysēs tou anthrōpinou gonidiōmatos einai ē dēmiourgia mias "genetikēs tautotētas" kai ē synakolouthē dēmiourgia genetika perithōriopoiēmenōn atomōn. Antistoicha, ē dynatotēta progennētikēs ereunas olo kai perissotero genetikōn "meionektēmatōn" prokalei syneirmous peri "poiotikou elenchou" tēs zōēs. To "phantasma" tēs eugonikēs provallei xana. Ston tomo auto epicheireitai o entopismos tōn krisimōn provlēmatōn pou thetoun oi genetikes exetaseis sto dikaio, ē anadeixē tōn krisimōn isorropiōn kai ē symmetochē se mia syzētēsē pou diexagetai diethnōs me oloena kai megalytero endiapheron. (shrink)

Während die bisherige Forschung überwiegend auf Rekonstruktion und Analyse des philosophischen und pädagogischen Werkes von Theodor Litt bezogen war, konzentrieren sich gegenwärtige Untersuchungen bedingt durch die Zunahme von ...

The Art of War application to education is about solving problems to improve student and school success. The Art of War describes the significance of a leader and his knowledge and prudent application of the strategies. At the core of theses strategies is the non-negotiable moral purpose of the leader to be reinforced by other fine qualities as wisdom, commitment, discipline, and courage.

Mitos ve Logos kavramları Antik Yunan uygarlığında söz kavramına karşılık gelen sözcükleri karşılamak için kullanılmıştır. Felsefe tarihinin başlangıcı için yapılan tanımlamalarda ise mitos kavramının yerine logos kavramının tercih edilmesi iki kavram arasında bir farklılığı ortaya koymak için yapılmaktadır. Bu ayrımın nedeni ise mitos’un daha çok dinsel içerikle anılması logos’un ise içerisinde bir tür akılsallık barındırması şeklindeki yorumlarda kendini göstermektedir. Ancak söz konusu ayrımın ilk doğa filozofu/ilk felsefeci olarak nitelendirilen Thales için geçerli olup olmadığı geçmişte olduğu gibi günümüzde de halen tartışılmaktadır. (...) Felsefe tarihi yazımlarında ilk sıraya konan Thales’in anılan kavramları gerçekten farklı şekilde yorumlayıp yorumlamadığı bizce de tartışmaya açık bir husustur. Bu açıdan bakıldığında Thales, söz konusu kavramları iki farklı problemler alanı olarak mı görmüştür? Onun düşüncelerinde kendinden önceki mitolojik mirasın izleri bulunabilir mi? O, katışıksız bir rasyonel midir, yoksa henüz felsefenin yeni filizlendiği bir toplumda bir ara basamağı mı temsil etmektedir? Bu makalenin içerisinde tartışacağımız bu sorular, felsefe tarihinin başlangıcına ilişkin kavramsal arka planın ne olduğu hakkında bize katkı sağlayacaktır. (shrink)

Aggregating individuals’ consistent attitudes might produce inconsistent collective attitudes. Some groups therefore need the capacity to form attitudes that are irreducible to those of their members. Such groups, group-agent realists argue, are agents in control of their own attitude formation. In this paper, however, I show how group-agent realism overlooks the important fact that groups consist of strategically interacting agents. Only by eliminating group agency from our social explanations can we see how individuals vote strategically to gain control of their (...) groups and produce collective attitudes we cannot make sense of if we treat groups as agents. (shrink)

We sometimes strive to achieve difficult goals when our evidence suggests that success is unlikely – not just because it will require strength of will, but because we are targets of prejudice and discrimination or because success will require unusual ability. Optimism about one’s prospects can be useful for persevering in these cases. That said, excessive optimism can be dangerous; when our evidence is unfavourable, we should be at most agnostic about whether we will succeed. This paper explores the nature (...) and rational significance of agnostic practical commitments. Most importantly, the rationality of striving against the odds can depend on investing in a plan for failure: a plan B. I aim to make headway on an account of what backup plans are, how they are related to primary plans, and whether the standard norms of plan rationality apply to our agnostic commitments. (shrink)

This article revisits the hope of the First and Fourth Missiological Institute (MI) consultations in 1965 and 1967 regarding the survival of African Spirituality as relevant to the daily life of South African churches. African Spirituality has played a significant role in the cultural context of Africans. In the African context, African Spirituality is intertwined with life, death, and health, which co-exist with material aspects and the economy as gracious gifts from God. The churches in South Africa and elsewhere in (...) Africa have been challenged by the African worldview of healing and culture. Thus, Africans mostly prefer the African-centred church with more African Christianity, instead of Western Christianity. This has been a serious challenge in African church circles for centuries, even in the current 21st century. The question therefore arises whether this is a matter for the Africanisation, indigenisation, and decolonisation of the church in Africa. CONTRIBUTION: The article analyses the two MI consultations and whether the church in the 21st century has Africanised and decolonised itself in service of its African members. The study is a historical approach given the history of the MI's contribution in South Africa. The concept of African Spirituality is unpacked and contextualised within the African Independent Churches' (AIC) Zionist type churches such as the Zion Christian Church (ZCC), the St John's Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM), and other Ethiopian type churches such as Lutheran Bapedi Church and others in South Africa and African Traditional Religions (ATR). The article engages the importance of how African Spirituality differs from other spiritualities within the context of Christian spirituality. (shrink)

Studies of epistemic communities and collaborative research in the social sciences have deepened the understanding of how science works, and more specifically how the social dimensions of scientific practice both enable and impede social scientists in realizing their epistemic goals. Two types of studies of epistemic communities are distinguished: general theories of epistemic communities aim to construct accounts of theoretical change applicable to all social scientific specialties, whereas historical studies emphasize the contingencies that affect specific social scientific disciplines, subfields, or (...) institutions. Although collaborative research plays a less pronounced role in the social sciences than in the natural sciences, collaboration has enabled social scientists to investigate topics that would otherwise be difficult to investigate. (shrink)

Gaze cueing effect (GCE) refers to attention orienting towards the gazed-at location, characterised by faster responses to gazed-at than non-gazed-at stimuli. A previous study investigated the effects of affective priming on GCE and reported that threatening primes enhanced GCE. However, it remains unknown whether the threat or heightened arousal potentiated GCE. We investigated how highly arousing threatening and positive primes, compared to low arousing neutral primes modulate GCE. After a brief exposure to an affective prime (pictures of threat or erotica) (...) or a neutral prime, participants detected an asterisk validly or invalidly cued by the gaze direction of a neutral face. The results showed that the threatening primes diminished the magnitude of GCE. The highly arousing positive primes did not have an effect on GCE. Further analyses showed that, as compared to neutral priming, the reaction times after threatening primes were shortened on invalid trials. This finding was interpreted to suggest that the threatening primes enhanced goal-directed target detection and attenuated attention orienting by irrelevant gaze cues via improving executive control. In sum, the present findings indicate that threat priming modulates GCE, not because of heightened arousal but because of the threat. (shrink)

“Doğal din” terimi, bazen doğanın kendisinin ilahi olduğu bir panteistik doktrine atıfta bulunur. “Doğal teoloji” terimi ise aksine, başlangıçta gözlemlenen doğal gerçekler temelinde (ve bazen) Tanrı’nın varlığını savunmaya yönelik projeye atıfta bulunur. Bununla birlikte çağdaş felsefede, hem “doğal din” hem de “doğal teoloji” genel olarak, dinî veya teolojik konuları araştırmak için insana, “doğal” olan bilişsel yetilerini – akıl, algı, içgözlem- kullanma projesini ifade eder. Doğal din veya teoloji, mevcut anlayış üzerine, doğayla ilgili ampirik araştırmalarla sınırlı olmamakla birlikte ayrıca panteistik bir (...) sonuçla da bağlantılı değildir. Bununla birlikte o, özel doğal olmayan yetilere (ESP, telepati, mistik deneyim) veya doğaüstü bilgi kaynaklarına (kutsal metinler, vahiy teolojisi, inanç otoriteleri, doğrudan doğaüstü iletişim) hitap etmekten kaçınır. Genel olarak, doğal din veya teoloji (bundan böyle “doğal teoloji” olarak anılacaktır), diğer felsefi ve bilimsel girişimlerle aynı rasyonel inceleme standartlarına uymayı amaçlamaktadır ve aynı değerlendirme ve eleştiri yöntemlerine tabidir. (shrink)