This article presents an initial analysis of Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, a variety of ‘modern postural yoga’. The article theorizes the embodied experience of a¯sana (‘yoga postures’), drawing on ethnographic research with Western practitioners in India and Australia and on the author’s own practice. Building on phenomenological and cultural theories of embodiment, it is suggested that the experience of yoga practitioners has particular somatic foundations, and that this somatic basis helps explain the cross-cultural effectiveness of yoga.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 203 Seiten: 203-226.

Political life is and ought to be entirely autonomous from theology; religion belongs to the private sphere and political community is ruled by the sovereign power of the state in accordance with “secular reasons.” This is commonly referred to as the modern settlement over the vexed relationship between politics and religious faith, and many have characterized it as one of the greatest legacies of the Enlightenment. Against this positive assessment, I shall argue that in hisearly De Regno, Thomas Aquinas offers (...) compelling theological and philosophical reasons to doubt the coherence of the modern settlement and its compatibility with Christian tradition. According to this view, political practice must be reinterpreted according to a distinctly Christian understanding of the human person. Political life is not autonomous; rather it essentially requires theological reorientation. (shrink)

Political life is and ought to be entirely autonomous from theology; religion belongs to the private sphere and political community is ruled by the sovereign power of the state in accordance with “secular reasons.” This is commonly referred to as the modern settlement over the vexed relationship between politics and religious faith, and many have characterized it as one of the greatest legacies of the Enlightenment. Against this positive assessment, I shall argue that in hisearly De Regno, Thomas Aquinas offers (...) compelling theological and philosophical reasons to doubt the coherence of the modern settlement and its compatibility with Christian tradition. According to this view, political practice must be reinterpreted according to a distinctly Christian understanding of the human person. Political life is not autonomous; rather it essentially requires theological reorientation. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a renewed debate over the importance of groupselection, especially as it relates to the evolution of altruism. Onefeature of this debate has been disagreement over which kinds ofprocesses should be described in terms of selection at multiple levels,within and between groups. Adapting some earlier discussions, we presenta mathematical framework that can be used to explore the exactrelationships between evolutionary models that do, and those that donot, explicitly recognize biological groups as fitness-bearing entities.We show a fundamental set (...) of mathematical equivalences between these twokinds of models, one of which applies a form of multi-level selectiontheory and the other being a form of ``individualism.'' However, we alsoargue that each type of model can have heuristic advantages over theother. Indeed, it can be positively useful to engage in a kind ofback-and-forth switching between two different perspectives on theevolutionary role of groups. So the position we defend is a``gestalt-switching pluralism.''. (shrink)

Altruism is generally understood to be behavior that benefits others at a personal cost to the behaving individual. However, within evolutionary biology, different authors have interpreted the concept of altruism differently, leading to dissimilar predictions about the evolution of altruistic behavior. Generally, different interpretations diverge on which party receives the benefit from altruism and on how the cost of altruism is assessed. Using a simple trait-group framework, we delineate the assumptions underlying different interpretations and show how they relate to one (...) another. We feel that a thorough examination of the connections between interpretations not only reveals why different authors have arrived at disparate conclusions about altruism, but also illuminates the conditions that are likely to favor the evolution of altruism. (shrink)

Wilson et al. focus on one class of AGL tasks: the cognitively demanding task of detecting non‐adjacent dependencies (NADs) among items. They provide a typology of the different types of NADs in natural languages and in AGL tasks. A range of cues affect NAD learning, ranging from the variability and number of intervening elements to the presence of shared prosodic cues between the dependent items. These cues, important for humans to discover non‐adjacent dependencies, are also found to facilitate NAD learning (...) in several nonhuman animal species. (shrink)

Wilson et al. focus on one class of AGL tasks: the cognitively demanding task of detecting non‐adjacent dependencies (NADs) among items. They provide a typology of the different types of NADs in natural languages and in AGL tasks. A range of cues affect NAD learning, ranging from the variability and number of intervening elements to the presence of shared prosodic cues between the dependent items. These cues, important for humans to discover non‐adjacent dependencies, are also found to facilitate NAD learning (...) in several nonhuman animal species. (shrink)

Formal methods developed for modeling levels of selection problems have recently been applied to the investigation of major evolutionary transitions. We discuss two new tools of this kind. First, the ‘near-variant test’ can be used to compare the causal adequacy of predictively equivalent representations. Second, ‘state-variable gestalt-switching’ can be used to gain a useful dual perspective on evolutionary processes that involve both higher and lower level populations.

A number of recent discussions have argued that George Price's equationfor representing evolutionary change is a powerful and illuminatingtool, especially in the context of debates about multiple levels ofselection. Our paper dissects Price's equation in detail, and comparesit to another statistical tool: the calculation and comparison ofaverage fitnesses. The relations between Price's equation and equationsfor evolutionary change using average fitness are closer than issometimes supposed. The two approaches achieve a similar kind ofstatistical summary of one generation of change, and they (...) achieve thisvia a similar loss of information about the underlying fitnessstructure. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

A model of “ephemeral” population structure is presented that applies not only to biological systems in which discrete groups form but also to networks without group boundaries. The evolution of altruistic behaviors is discussed. Nonrandom interaction and nonlinear fitness structures are modeled; together, these factors can produce stable polymorphisms of altruistic and selfish types, as well as bistability. Empirical applications of the model may be found in microbes, marine invertebrates, annual plants, and other organisms.

We argue that the evolutionary function of reasoning is to allow us to secure more accurate beliefs and more effective intentions through collective deliberation. This sets our view apart both from traditional intellectualist accounts, which take the evolutionary function to be individual deliberation, and from interactionist accounts such as the one proposed by Mercier and Sperber, which agrees that the function of reasoning is collective but holds that it aims to disseminate, rather than come up with, accurate beliefs. We argue (...) that our collectivized intellectualism offers the best explanation of the range of biases that human reasoning is prone to, and that it does better than interactionism at offering a function of reasoning that would have been adaptive for our distant ancestors who first evolved this capacity. (shrink)

Wright’s “adaptive landscape” has been influential in evolutionary thinking but controversial, especially because the landscape that organisms encounter is altered by the evolutionary process itsel...

Volume 19, Issue 9, September 2019, Page 64-66.

Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) in healthcare raise pressing questions about how much users should trust AI/ML systems, particularly for high stakes clinical decision-making. Ensuring that user trust is properly calibrated to a tool’s computational capacities and limitations has both practical and ethical implications, given that overtrust or undertrust can influence over-reliance or under-reliance on algorithmic tools, with significant implications for patient safety and health outcomes. It is, thus, important to better understand how variability in trust (...) criteria across stakeholders, settings, tools and use cases may influence approaches to using AI/ML tools in real settings. As part of a 5-year, multi-institutional Agency for Health Care Research and Quality-funded study, we identify trust criteria for a survival prediction algorithm intended to support clinical decision-making for left ventricular assist device therapy, using semistructured interviews (n=40) with patients and physicians, analysed via thematic analysis. Findings suggest that physicians and patients share similar empirical considerations for trust, which were primarilyepistemicin nature, focused on accuracy and validity of AI/ML estimates. Trust evaluations considered the nature, integrity and relevance of training data rather than the computational nature of algorithms themselves, suggesting a need to distinguish ‘source’ from ‘functional’ explainability. To a lesser extent, trust criteria were also relational (endorsement from others) and sometimes based on personal beliefs and experience. We discuss implications for promoting appropriate and responsible trust calibration for clinical decision-making use AI/ML. (shrink)

Leo Strauss once called the theologico-political problem ‘the theme of my investigations’ from the 1920s on. What justified this remark is by no means obvious. This article examines the origins of Strauss’s concern with political theology in his earliest writings on Zionism and Jewish thought during the Weimar period. Here we see Strauss, at the outset of his career as a young Zionist committed to a programme of political atheism, slowly begin to develop the idea that the conflict between unbelief (...) and belief (Unglauben und Glauben) was the ‘deepest theme of world history’. This awareness, I argue, slowly led Strauss to reassess the adequacy of political Zionism as an answer to the Jewish question and to justify his later claim about the centrality of the theologico-political problem. (shrink)

The fruits of knowledge—such as books, data, and ideas—tend to generate far more attention than the ways in which knowledge is produced and acquired. Correcting this imbalance, Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe brings together a wide-ranging yet tightly integrated series of essays that explore how knowledge was obtained and demonstrated in Europe during an intellectually explosive four centuries, when standard methods of inquiry took shape across several fields of intellectual pursuit. Composed by scholars in disciplines ranging from the history (...) of science to art history to religious studies, the pieces collected here look at the production and consumption of knowledge as a social process within many different communities. They focus, in particular, on how the methods employed by scientists and intellectuals came to interact with the practices of craftspeople and practitioners to create new ways of knowing. Examining the role of texts, reading habits, painting methods, and countless other forms of knowledge making, this volume brilliantly illuminates the myriad ways these processes affected and were affected by the period’s monumental shifts in culture and learning. (shrink)