The doctrine that there is no permanent creator who superintends creation and takes care of his creatures accords quite well with each of the principles known as the four noble truths of Buddhism. The first truth, that distress is universal, is traditionally expounded in terms of the impermanence of all features of experience and in terms of the absence of genuine unity or personal identity in the multitude of physical and mental factors that constitute what we experience as a single (...) person. As we saw above, the principal Buddhist arguments against the existence of God focus on the impossibility of permanence and unity in the causal structure of the universe. The second noble truth, that distress is the outcome of one's own unrealistic aspirations, is traditionally seen as ruling out the erroneous view that distress is something inflicted upon creatures by a cosmic superintendent or by other circumstances completely beyond their control. The third noble truth, that distress can be eliminated by divesting oneself of all unrealistic aspirations, rules out the view that sentient beings, as powerless victims of a divine will, have no alternative to a life of constant frustration. And the fourth noble truth, that the best means of removing unrealistic desires is to follow a methodical course of self-discipline, counters the view that the road to happiness lies in obedience to divine will or in trying to manipulate the sentiments of a cosmic intelligence through prayer or ritual. (shrink)

Religious doctrines and the philosophical arguments supporting them often become more clearly defined as a result of being challenged by opposing views and counterarguments. Conversely, ideas that are never challenged often remain relatively obscure and poorly defined. The process of encountering rival ideas and alternative theories requires people to re-examine their own assumptions and provide reasons for holding views that could previously be taken for granted. It is not surprising, therefore, that a number of important notions within Buddhist philosophy became (...) better defined in the centuries after they became more widely dispersed in the Indian subcontinent; for it was only after coming into contact with opposing theories that many of the ideas articulated by the Buddha, and the presuppositions underlying those ideas, were seriously examined. Once these doctrines were challenged, later Buddhist philosophers had the task of either offering solid arguments in their support or revising the doctrines to a form in which they could be supported. Among the most important doctrines of early Buddhism, and one that remained unexamined for a relatively long time, was the doctrine of rebirth (punarbhava). It appears that most other philosophical systems in India were, like Buddhism, based on the notion that the foremost predicament for all living beings is that they are bound to experience the consequences of actions performed in previous lives; therefore, few philosophers challenged the Buddha in his statement of this as the problem most in need of a solution. Eventually, however, philosophers did arise who began to question the doctrine of rebirth and to pose strong arguments against it. Once this opposition had been stated, it was no longer possible for Buddhist apologists to take the doctrine of rebirth for granted. It became necessary to defend their position by finding evidence in support of it and by finding flaws in the arguments adduced against it. (shrink)

An account of how certain presuppositions led the author astray in previous attempts at interpreting a key metaphor in Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra 1.10.

It is true for many disciplines within the humanities that there are numerous excellent works that introduce the beginner to the basic building blocks of the discipline, and also many advanced studies for the accomplished scholar, but few works that help the student get from the beginning stage to the advanced level. That has certainly been true of the discipline of Sanskrit. Once a student has devoted a couple of years to working through one of the excellent introductions to the (...) language by Ashok Aklujkar, Michael Coulson, Madhav Deshpande, Robert Goldman, or Walter Maurer, there have been hardly any intermediate texts to help the student systematically progress to more advanced levels. Now, however, with the publication of Scholastic Sanskrit, an important step has been taken toward filling that lacuna. This book assumes that the student has learned enough about Sanskrit grammar and syntax to be ready to begin plunging into the vast corpus comprising the many genres of Sanskrit literature. It is built on the conviction that even a student at the early stages of exploring Sanskrit literature can benefit from the work of traditional commentators; it is also built on the observation that until now there have not been reliable guides to help the student make intelligent use of Sanskrit commentaries. (shrink)

For as long as scholars have been presenting Asian thinkers to readers of European languages, efforts have been made to present the presumably less familiar Asian thinkers as having points of commonality with the presumably more familiar European thinkers. In presenting classical Indian Buddhist philosophers to his readers in the 1920s and 1930s, for example, Stcherbatsky portrayed them as anticipating important features of European philosophers. In his study of Madhyamaka, Nāgārjuna and Candrakīrti are depicted as adumbrating the philosophy of Kant (...) and Hegel. In the works of other scholars, the presentation of early Buddhism as an anticipation of aspects of Hume became commonplace. A number of scholars have... (shrink)

Buddhism currently enjoys the reputation of being one of the leading voices in a chorus that sings the praises of religious tolerance and perhaps even of pluralism. It is open to question, however, whether this reputation is deserved. The purpose of the present article is to examine whether the teachings of classical Buddhism have a contribution to make to the jubilation over religious pluralism that has become fashionable in some quarters in recent years. It is hoped that this examination might (...) shed some light both on some of the implications of religious pluralism and on the spirit of the teachings of classical Buddhism. A task preliminary to dealing with this question is to clarify what is meant by religious pluralism. For the purpose of this discussion, let us take “pluralism” to signify not the mere acknowledgment that there is variety but the celebration of this variety. Whereas tolerance might be described as the attitude of being resigned to the fact that a variety exists, pluralism will be taken to mean the attitude that variety is healthy and therefore something to be desired. And religious pluralism, of course, will be taken as the attitude that it is salubrious to have a variety of religions. Such an attitude might be founded, for example, on an analogy with biology. The health of each living organism, it could be argued, is enhanced by the general health of the organism’s wider environment, and the health of this wider environment is in turn enhanced by the rich variety of species of organisms living therein. The value of variety, if one follows this biological analogy, is not merely aesthetic, not merely a pleasant respite from the monotony of too much uniformity; rather, variety is what makes life of any kind possible. Similarly, it could be argued by a devoted religious pluralist, the variety of religious beliefs and practices and experiences and modes of expression is vital to human survival and self-understanding. And just as the health of an individual organism, such as a cow, might actually be enhanced by the presence of other apparently annoying organisms, such as gadflies and mosquitoes, the health and perhaps even the very survival of any one religious tradition might actually be enhanced by the presence of other apparently antagonistic traditions, or by the presence of heresies within the same tradition.. (shrink)

This chapter discusses canonical views of Buddhist philosophers on the relation of physical and mental events, including Nāgārjuna, Vasubandhu, Dharmakīrti, and Śāntideva. Over the course of the first fifteen centuries of Buddhist philosophy one finds several positions taken on the relation of mental events to physical events. In some quarters one finds a robust mind‐body dualism in which the physical world and consciousness are ontologically independent of one another but interactive; in other quarters one finds a view that consciousness is (...) the ultimate source of the physical world; in other quarters one finds a tendency to reject the reality of the physical world as anything other than a figment of imagination; and in yet other quarters one finds an anti‐intellectual tendency to regard this very problem as a distraction from more important tasks. (shrink)

Everyone, with the possible exception of those who are really good at it, is personally familiar with the phenomenon of self-deception. Anyone who has been conscious of struggling with a temptation to do what goes against her own better judgment and has then found justification for yielding to temptation is familiar with self-deception. So if I may be allowed to begin with the assumption that most of us have experienced a phenomenon that we would identify as some form of self-deception, (...) what I shall try to do in this paper is to examine how one particular theory of personal identity can account for the phenomenon. Having done that, I shall look into the question of one of the mechanisms of self-deception and then into the question of whether there are occasions in which the mechanisms of self-deception may be regarded as producing more positive results. (shrink)

In the svārthānumāna chapter of his Pramāṇavārttika, the Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti presented a defense of his claim that legitimate inference must rest on a metaphysical basis if it is to be immune from the risks ordinarily involved in inducing general principles from a finite number of observations. Even if one repeatedly observes that x occurs with y and never observes y in the absence of x, there is no guarantee, on the basis of observation alone, that one will never observe (...) y in the absence of x at some point in the future. To provide such a guarantee, claims Dharmakīrti, one must know that there is a causal connection between x and y such that there is no possibility of y occurring in the absence of x. In the course of defending this central claim, Dharmakīrti ponders how one can know that there is a causal relationship of the kind necessary to guarantee a proposition of the form “Every y occurs with an x.” He also dismisses an interpretation of his predecessor Dignāga whereby Dignāga would be claiming non-observation of y in the absence of x is sufficient to warrant to the claim that no y occurs without x. The present article consists of a translation of kārikās 11–38 of Pramānavārttikam, svārthānumānaparicchedaḥ along with Dharmakīrti’s own prose commentary. The translators have also provided an English commentary, which includes a detailed introduction to the central issues in the translated text and their history in the literature before Dharmakīrti. (shrink)

Can ethical character be stimulated and enabled? Cognitive understanding of organizational ethics issues is important and necessary, but not sufficient. Ethical behavior does not emerge automatically. Effective political method is necessary. While it may be difficult to teach ethical character, nonetheless, skill development with respect to joined ethics understanding and action-learning methods can help us develop the skills and confidence we need to actualize our ethical characters and social concerns. An action-learning approach to organizational ethics can help stimulate and enable (...) ethical character. (shrink)

In this ground breaking and controversial work Richard Bentall shatters the myths that surround madness. He shows there is no reassuring dividing line between mental health and mental illness.

An integrative explanation proposes that culture and gender interact to produce fundamentally different patterns of association between positive and negative emotions. People in independent-based cultures (e.g. the United States) experience emotions in oppositional (i.e. bipolar) ways, whereas people in interdependent-based cultures (e.g. China) experience emotions in dialectic ways. These patterns are stronger for women than men in both cultures. In support of the theory, Study 1 showed that positive and negative emotions are strongly correlated inversely for American women and weakly (...) correlated inversely for American men, but strongly correlated positively for Chinese women and weakly correlated positively for Chinese men. In Study 2, findings for Koreans, although mixed, were closer to the results for Chinese. (shrink)

There has been an exponential growth in research examining the neurological basis of human cognition and learning. Little is known, however, about the extent to which sports coaches are aware of these advances. Consequently, the aim of the present study was to examine the prevalence of pseudoscientific ideas among British and Irish sports coaches. In total, 545 coaches from the United Kingdom and Ireland completed a measure that included questions about how evidence-based theories of the brain might enhance coaching and (...) learning, how they were exposed to these different theories, and their awareness of neuromyths. Results revealed that the coaches believed that an enhanced understanding of the brain helped with their planning and delivery of sports sessions. Goal-setting was the most frequently used strategy. Interestingly, 41.6% of the coaches agreed with statements that promoted neuromyths. The most prevalent neuromyth was “individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style (e.g., auditory, visual, or kinesthetic)”, which 62% of coaches believed. It is apparent that a relatively large percentage of coaches base aspects of their coaching practice on neuromyths and other pseudoscientific ideas. Strategies for addressing this situation are briefly discussed and include changing the content of coach education programs. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 13, Issue 1, Page 63-78, January 2021.

An integrative explanation proposes that culture and gender interact to produce fundamentally different patterns of association between positive and negative emotions. People in independent-based cultures (e.g. the United States) experience emotions in oppositional (i.e. bipolar) ways, whereas people in interdependent-based cultures (e.g. China) experience emotions in dialectic ways. These patterns are stronger for women than men in both cultures. In support of the theory, Study 1 showed that positive and negative emotions are strongly correlated inversely for American women and weakly (...) correlated inversely for American men, but strongly correlated positively for Chinese women and weakly correlated positively for Chinese men. In Study 2, findings for Koreans, although mixed, were closer to the results for Chinese. (shrink)

While many people outside India find the images, sounds, and practices of Indian performing arts compelling and endeavor to incorporate them into the "global" repertoire, few are aware of the central role of religious belief and practice in Indian aesthetics. Completing the trilogy that includes Darsan: Seeing the Divine and Mantra: Hearing the Divine in India and America, this volume focuses on how rasa has been applied in a range of Indian performance traditions. "Rasa" is taste, essence, flavor. How is (...) it possible that a word used to describe a delicious masala can also be used to critique a Bharata Natyam performance? Rasa expresses the primary goals of performing arts in India in all the major literary, philosophical, and aesthetic texts, and it provides the cornerstone of the oral traditions of transmission. It is also essential to the study and production of sculpture, architecture, and painting. Yet its primary referent is cuisine. This book articulates the religious sensibility underlying the traditional performing arts as well as other applications of rasa and examines the relationships between the arts and religion in India today. (shrink)

This research explores the role of emotions in goal-directed behaviour. A model is provided for an emotional goal system whereby appraisals of the consequences of achieving or not achieving a goal are hypothesised to elicit anticipatory emotions; the anticipatory emotions are expected, in turn, to contribute to volitions in the service of goal pursuit (namely, intentions, plans, and the decision to expend energy); goal-directed behaviours next arise in response to volitions and lead to goal attainment; and the latter then functions (...) as the basis for a new set of appraisals and accompanying goaloutcome emotions. The model was tested in a longitudinal study of the responses of 406 adults (243 women, 163 men) in The Netherlands. The context for the study was the regulation of one's bodyweight via exercising and dieting. (shrink)

The institutions of science arecomposed of communities with conflicting andoverlapping interests. In the United States,the internal governance of science resemblesthe structure of republican government,particularly in its fragmentation,representation, and extension. This articlecalls upon Michael Polanyi's metaphor of a`Republic of Science' in the context ofAmerican history and political theory, toexamine the ways in which these interests arerepresented. Using the metaphor obliges us toask about rules of citizenship in the`Republic', and to determine whether those whopay for science should also be represented inits institutions.

Using everyday language, spatial concepts, visualizations and his renowned "Feynman diagrams," the author clearly and humorously communicates the substance and spirit of QED (quantum electodynamics).

Human control of action in routine situations involves a flexible interplay between (a) task-dependent serial ordering constraints; (b) top-down, or intentional, control processes; and (c) bottom-up, or environmentally triggered, affordances. In addition, the interaction between these influences is modulated by learning mechanisms that, over time, appear to reduce the need for top-down control processes while still allowing those processes to intervene at any point if necessary or if desired. We present a model of the acquisition and control of goal-directed action (...) that goes beyond existing models by operationalizing an interface between two putative systems—a routine and a non-routine system—thereby demonstrating how explicitly represented goals can interact with the emergent task representations that develop through learning in the routine system. The gradual emergence of task representations offers an explanation for the transfer of control with experience from the non-routine goal-based system to the routine system. At the same time it allows action selection to be sensitive both to environmental triggers and to biasing from multiple levels within the goal system. (shrink)

A wide variety of clinical situations can lead to the implementation of assisted nutrition and hydration (ANH). Both enteral ANH and parenteral assisted nutrition and hydration (PNH) serve to nourish and hydrate those who are incapable of normal eating and drinking. Although PNH via the intravenous (IV) route is comparable to enteral ANH in its intention, IV PNH bypasses the relevant body system—the digestive tract—entirely. Consequently, IV PNH is ethically comparable to mechanical ventilation and thus can be withheld or withdrawn (...) following the ethical criteria that apply to any other extraordinary therapeutic measure. However, other alternatives to oral and enteral hydration that are proportionately less challenging than IV PNH (i.e., hypodermoclysis and proctoclysis) should be further evaluated as potentially ordinary means of keeping patients adequately hydrated at the end of life. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 11.4 (Winter 2011): 649–659. (shrink)

Leader-managers face a myriad of competing values when they engage in ethical decision-making. Few studies help us understand why certain reasons for action are justified, taking precedence over others when people choose to respond to an ethical dilemma. To help address this matter we began with a qualitative approach to disclose leader-managers' moral motives when they decide to address a work-related ethical dilemma. One hundred and nine military officers were asked to provide their reasons for taking action, justifications of their (...) reasons, and to explain these justifications. We used network analysis techniques to identify a hierarchical motive structure. The motive structure is a cognitive map that identifies ethical motives and perceptions of how these ethical motives relate to each other. The motives identified represent classic conceptualizations of moral behavior; namely, virtue theories, consequentialism, and deontological theories, along with another category that expressed the emotional significance of the moral judgment, which we refer to as emotional empiricism. (shrink)

Surveys over the last twenty years have seen an ever-growing number of Americans disclaim religious affiliations and instead check the "none" box. In the first sociological exploration of organized secularism in America, Richard Cimino and Christopher Smith show how one segment of these "nones" have created a new, cohesive atheist identity through activism and the creation of communities. According to Cimino and Smith, the new upsurge of atheists is a reaction to the revival of religious fervor in American politics (...) since 1980. Feeling overlooked and underrepresented in the public sphere, atheists have employed a wide variety of strategies-some evangelical, some based on identity politics-to defend and assert themselves against their ideological opponents. These strategies include building and maintaining communities, despite the absence of the kinds of shared rituals, texts, and laws that help to sustain organized religions.Drawing on in-depth interviews with self-identified atheist, secularist, and humanist leaders and activists, as well as extensive observations and analysis of secular gatherings and media, Cimino and Smith illustrate how atheists organize and align themselves toward common goals, and how media-particularly web-based media-have proven invaluable in connecting atheists to one another and in creating a powerful virtual community. Cimino and Smith suggest that secularists rely not only on the Internet for community-building, but on their own new forms of ritual.This groundbreaking study will be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the growing atheist movement in America. (shrink)

It has been suggested that the enterprise of developing mechanistic theories of the human cognitive architecture is flawed because the theories produced are not directly falsifiable. Newell attempted to sidestep this criticism by arguing for a Lakatosian model of scientific progress in which cognitive architectures should be understood as theories that develop over time. However, Newell's own candidate cognitive architecture adhered only loosely to Lakatosian principles. This paper reconsiders the role of falsification and the potential utility of Lakatosian principles in (...) the development of cognitive architectures. It is argued that a lack of direct falsifiability need not undermine the scientific development of a cognitive architecture if broadly Lakatosian principles are adopted. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the Lakatosian concepts of positive and negative heuristics for theory development and of general heuristic power offer methods for guiding the development of an architecture and for evaluating the contribution and potential of an architecture's research program. (shrink)

We consider approaches to explanation within the cognitive sciences that begin with Marr's computational level or Marr's implementational level and argue that each is subject to fundamental limitations which impair their ability to provide adequate explanations of cognitive phenomena. For this reason, it is argued, explanation cannot proceed at either level without tight coupling to the algorithmic and representation level. Even at this level, however, we argue that additional constraints relating to the decomposition of the cognitive system into a set (...) of interacting subfunctions are required. Integrated cognitive architectures that permit abstract specification of the functions of components and that make contact with the neural level provide a powerful bridge for linking the algorithmic and representational level to both the computational level and the implementational level. (shrink)

Núñez et al. (2019) argue that cognitive science has failed either “to transition to a mature inter‐disciplinary coherent field” (p. 782) or “to generate a successful [Lakatosian] research program” (p. 789). We argue that the former was never the intention of many early researchers within the field, while the latter is an inappropriate criterion by which to judge an entire discipline. However, we concur with Núñez et al. (2019) that the individual disciplinary balance within cognitive science has changed over time. (...) Of particular concern is the fact that the use of computational methods appears to be on the wane. (shrink)

Automatic imitation or “imitative compatibility” is thought to be mediated by the mirror neuron system and to be a laboratory model of the motor mimicry that occurs spontaneously in naturalistic social interaction. Imitative compatibility and spatial compatibility effects are known to depend on different stimulus dimensions—body movement topography and relative spatial position. However, it is not yet clear whether these two types of stimulus–response compatibility effect are mediated by the same or different cognitive processes. We present an interactive activation model (...) of imitative and spatial compatibility, based on a dual-route architecture, which substantiates the view they are mediated by processes of the same kind. The model, which is in many ways a standard application of the interactive activation approach, simulates all key results of a recent study by Catmur and Heyes (2011). Specifically, it captures the difference in the relative size of imitative and spatial compatibility effects; the lack of interaction when the imperative and irrelevant stimuli are presented simultaneously; the relative speed of responses in a quintile analysis when the imperative and irrelevant stimuli are presented simultaneously; and the different time courses of the compatibility effects when the imperative and irrelevant stimuli are presented asynchronously. (shrink)

The past 25 years have witnessed an increasing awareness of the importance of cognitive control in the regulation of complex behavior. It now sits alongside attention, memory, language, and thinking as a distinct domain within cognitive psychology. At the same time it permeates each of these sibling domains. This introduction reviews recent work on cognitive control in an attempt to provide a context for the fundamental question addressed within this topic: Is cognitive control to be understood as resulting from the (...) interaction of multiple distinct control processes, or are the phenomena of cognitive control emergent? (shrink)

Blokpoel reminds us of the importance of consistency of function across Marr's levels, but we argue that the approach to ensuring consistency that he advocates—a strict relation through exact implementation of the higher level function at the lower level—is unnecessarily restrictive. We show that it forces overcomplication of the computational level (by requiring it to incorporate concerns from lower levels) and results in the sacrifice of the distinct responsibilities associated with each level. We propose an alternative, no less rigorous, potential (...) characterization of the relation between levels. (shrink)

Blokpoel reminds us of the importance of consistency of function across Marr's levels, but we argue that the approach to ensuring consistency that he advocates—a strict relation through exact implementation of the higher level function at the lower level—is unnecessarily restrictive. We show that it forces overcomplication of the computational level (by requiring it to incorporate concerns from lower levels) and results in the sacrifice of the distinct responsibilities associated with each level. We propose an alternative, no less rigorous, potential (...) characterization of the relation between levels. (shrink)

The problem this article focuses on is not the isolated individual act of corruption, but the systematic, pervasive sub-system of corruption that can and has existed across historical periods, geographic areas, and political-economic systems. It is important to first understand how corrupt and unethical subsystems operate, particularly their network nature, in order to reform and change them while not becoming what we are trying to change. Twelve key system elements are considered that include case examples from Asia, Latin America, the (...) Mediterranean, and North America. A key operating feature of corruption sub-systems is that they are relatively stable networks rather than exceptional, independent, individual events. Drawing on social network, social movement, and action-learning theories, six theory building propositions concerning ethical corruption reform are developed. (shrink)

Introduces the spiritual ideas of three major American philosophers.

Michael Ruse's rejection of religious belief is questioned at two levels. First, on the metaethical level of analysis, evolutionary ethics cannot account for moral behavior that is based on a “strong version” of the Love Command. Second, agnosticism is discussed as a form of belief. Insights from religious forms of life that are inclusive, pluralistic, and expansive are contrasted with exclusivistic, closed, and fundamentalist forms of religion in order to develop criteria for “genuine religion.” Theistic agnosticism is presented as a (...) prolegomena to belief. (shrink)