Collection of research papers on various aspects of Hindu philosophy, Puranas and Sanskrit literature.

Meditation hasrecently emerged as a topic of interest for the medicinal scientists as well as for the neuropsychological scientists for different reasons. The methods used by both of these approaches have been mostly objective. This quest of objectification has led to vigorous use of tools like EEG and ERP, which has definitely led to revealing of marvellous aspects of meditation. However, the subjective states of meditation have been much less explored, especially when seen in contrast to the objective states. The (...) need of the hour is to use the qualitative methods for exploration of these states because these methods better depict the unique experiences of meditation. In this context, we conducted a qualitative study in the form of Interpretative phenomenological analysis to explore the subjective experiences associated with the inner-light perception of a group of meditators practising the meditation technique of Vihangam Yoga. It is an ancient meditation technique of India, initiated by HH Sadguru Sadafal Deoji Maharaj in the year 1924 and now being propogated by HH Sadguru Swatantra Deoji Maharaj. When asked in detail, the practitioners often report of many mystique experiences. This particular Yoga group was chosen because in a survey of among four groups, the maximum number of confident mediators reporting of perceiving some sort of luminance during meditation was found in this group. For this study, the inner-light perception experience of this meditation was chosen because of the divine value attached to this experience across all the cultures and religions. This experience was also chosen because of the great impact on their lives that Vihangam Yogis attributed to this experience. As the results of the study, four major themes were obtained which were: Uniqueness of the nature of light Experiences during light perception Explanations of the source of light Change in outlook towards world and associated changes in thinking. (shrink)

Pring-Mill's study depicts the prevalent, but often neglected worldview of the Middle Ages, according to which the macrocosm is a chain of created being ascending from the four elements of the material world to the numerologically structured celestial spheres up to the creator himself. Pring-Mill's work reveals a fundamental correspondence between the three major religions: medieval Christians, Jews and Muslims all sought to describe their religious beliefs using the structures of the macrocosm. Ramon Lull's (1232-1316) philosophy makes use (...) of this idea in order to render Christian doctrine intelligible. In his dynamic conception, man is depicted as a microcosm, thus becoming the archetype of the macrocosm and, at the same time, the image of divine trinity. Pring-Mill's study, therefore, is not only a guide to Llull's complete oeuvre, but also an introduction to medieval thinking in general. Pring-Mills Studie beschreibt das herrschende, aber oft vergessene Weltbild des Mittelalters: die Vorstellung vom Makrokosmos als einer Kette des geschaffenen Seins, die von den vier Elementen der materiellen Welt uber die Himmelsspharen nach numerologischen Strukturen zum Schopfer selbst aufsteigt. Dabei kann er eine fundamentale Ubereinstimmung der drei grossen Religionen aufzeigen: Durch die Strukturen des Makrokosmos suchten Christen, Juden und Muslime gleichermassen, ihre religiosen Uberzeugungen darzustellen. Auch die Philosophie Ramon Llulls (1232-1316) bedient sich dieser Vorstellung, um die christliche Lehre verstandlich zu machen. Der Mensch wird in einer dynamischen Auffassung als Mikrokosmos beschrieben. Dadurch wird er zum Urbild des Makrokosmos und zum Abbild der gottlichen Dreifaltigkeit. Die Studie Pring-Mills ist damit nicht nur ein Wegweiser in das Gesamtwerk Llulls, sondern auch eine Einfuhrung in das mittelalterliche Denken uberhaupt. (shrink)

Edició d'una important sèrie de treballs sobre el pensament i la literatura de Ramon Llull que es compten entre les peces fonamentals per a la moderna interpretació de Llull. La primera part recull íntegrament «El microcosmos lul lià», una obra ben coneguda.

Seminal studies of Spain's greatest dramatist on his fourth centenary.

Hegel introduced the Phenomenology of Mind as a work on the problem of knowledge. In the first chapter, entitled “Sense Certainty, or the This and Meaning,” he concluded that knowledge cannot consist of an immediate awareness of particulars ). The tradition discusses sense certainty in terms of this failure of immediate knowledge without, however, specifically addressing the problem of reference. Yet reference is distinct from knowledge in the sense that while there can be no knowledge of objects without reference, there (...) may be reference without knowledge. If that is the case, then the failure of immediate knowledge does not entitle us to conclude anything about the success or failure of reference. It is not surprising, then, that a few scholars have begun to examine sense certainty primarily as a thesis about reference. (shrink)

This handbook provides detailed philosophical analysis of the life and thought of Socrates across fifteen in-depth chapters. Each chapter engages with a central aspect of the rich tradition of Socratic studies and, after surveying the state of scholarship, points the way forward to new directions of interpretation. A leading team of scholars present dynamic readings of Socrates, extracted from the historical context of Plato's dialogues, covering elenchus, irony, ignorance, definitions, pedagogy, friendship, politics and the daemon. Building on these core Socratic (...) topics, this edition includes new accounts of Socrates in the work of philosopher and historian, Xenophon, the comic playwright, Aristophanes, as well as important scholarship on topics such as emotions, the afterlife, motivational intellectualism and virtue intellectualism. Fully revised and updated, the Bloomsbury Handbook of Socrates elucidates the complex landscape of Socratic thought and interpretation. (shrink)

Reading is one of the most common everyday activities, yet research elucidating how affective influence reading processes and outcomes is sparse with inconsistent results. To investigate this question, we randomly assigned participants (N = 136) to happiness (positive affect), sadness (negative affect), and neutral video-induction conditions prior to engaging in self-paced reading of a long, complex science text. Participants completed assessments targeting multiple levels of comprehension (e.g. recognising factual information, integrating different textual components, and open-ended responses of concepts from memory) (...) after reading and after a week-long delay. Results indicated that the Sadness (vs. Happiness) condition had higher comprehension scores, with the largest effects emerging for assessments targeting deeper levels comprehension immediately after reading. Eye-tracking analyses revealed that such benefits may be partly driven by sustained attentional focus over the 20-minute reading session. We discuss results with respect to theories on affect, cognition, and text comprehension. (shrink)

Teaching medical ethics and law has become much more prominent in medical student education, largely as a result of a 1998 consensus statement on such teaching. Ethics is commonly taught at undergraduate level using lectures and small group tutorials, but there is no recognised method for transferring this theoretical knowledge into practice and ward-based learning. This reflective article by a Sheffield university undergraduate medical student describes the value of using a student-selected component to study practical clinical ethics and the use (...) of a clinical ethics checklist. The ethical checklist was proposed by Sokol as a tool for use by medical staff during the ward round to prompt the consideration of important ethical principles in relation to care. This paper describes additional uses for the checklist as a tool for teaching and learning about the practical application of ethical principles and for observing professional behaviours within a critical care and acute care environment. Evidence suggests that putting ethical behaviour into practice offers a far greater challenge to a newly qualified doctor than has been appreciated, and that more needs to be done at an undergraduate level to help combat this. This paper argues from a personal standpoint of an individual student experience that this can best be done in a clinical medical setting. (shrink)

This is French version of John Stuart Mill's essay "On Nature" accompanied by a introduction by the translator and a lexicon of English words (used in moral philosophy) often wrongly translated into French and a short reflection on the two senses of the word "law" that often cause confusion.

Diseases caused by Salmonella species are characterized by bacterial invasion of host cells. Salmonella invasion requires a genetic locus (inv) with homology to bacterial systems involved in specific protein export and organelle assembly. Until recently, the actual Salmonella invasion factors exported or assembled by the inv system remained unidentified. It now appears that Salmonella produces novel appendages upon contact with host cells. These appendages are transient, appearing and disappearing rapidly from the bacterial surface. Appendages are altered in strains unable to (...) invade due to mutations within the inv/spa locus. Therefore, a role for the invasion locus has been identified, providing another example of bacterial pathogens responding to signals provided by the host cell surface. (shrink)

The attitude that ordinary language description of experience is in fact a description of the world is called “naïve realism.” There is an entire branch of modern Western philosophy that is devoted to critically examining the assumptions behind the everyday language we use to describe the macroscopic world in which we live and the validity of naïve realism as an adequate description of the world. This branch of philosophy is called “ordinary language philosophy.” Surprisingly, it has something in common with (...) quantum physics: insight into the inadequacy of ordinary language to describe observable reality. It is this connection between ordinary language philosophy and quantum physics that we shall explore in this article. In the process, we shall also offer a basic introduction to both basic philosophy and basic quantum theory. (shrink)

White matter tracts are known to be susceptible to injury following concussion. The objective of this study was to determine whether contact play in sport could alter white matter metabolite levels in female varsity athletes independent of changes induced by long-term exercise. Metabolite levels were measured by single voxel proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy in the prefrontal white matter at the beginning and end of season in contact and non-contact varsity athletes. Sedentary women were scanned once, at a time equivalent to (...) the Off-Season time point. Metabolite levels in non-contact athletes did not change over a season of play, or differ from age matched sedentary women except that non-contact athletes had a slightly lower myo-inositol level. The contact athletes had lower levels of myo-inositol and glutamate, and higher levels of glutamine compared to both sedentary women and non-contact athletes. Lower levels of myo-inositol in non-contact athletes compared to sedentary women indicates long-term exercise may alter glial cell profiles in these athletes. The metabolite differences observed between contact and non-contact athletes suggest that non-contact athletes should not be used as controls in studies of concussion in high-impact sports because repetitive impacts from physical contact can alter white matter metabolite level profiles. It is imperative to use athletes engaged in the same contact sport as controls to ensure a matched metabolite profile at baseline. (shrink)

An increasing amount of data is now available from public and private sources. Furthermore, the types, formats, and number of sources of data are also increasing. Techniques for extracting, storing, processing, and analyzing such data have been developed in the last few years for managing this bewildering variety based on a structure called a knowledge graph. Industry has devoted a great deal of effort to the development of knowledge graphs, and knowledge graphs are now critical to the functions of intelligent (...) virtual assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. The goal of the Ontology Summit 2020 was to understand not only what knowledge graphs are but also where they originated, why they are so popular, the current issues, and their future prospects. The summit sessions examined many examples of knowledge graphs and surveyed the relevant standards that exist and are in development for knowledge graphs. The purpose of this Communiqué is to summarize our understanding from the Summit in order to foster research and development of knowledge graphs. (shrink)

Critical analysis of the commercialization and malpractice current in the profession of medicine.

Advances in machine learning and the development of very large knowledge graphs have accompanied a proliferation of ontologies of many types and for many purposes. These ontologies are commonly developed independently, and as a result, it can be difficult to communicate about and between them. To address this difficulty of communication, ontologies and the communities they serve must agree on how their respective terminologies and formalizations relate to each other. The process of coming into accord and agreement is called “harmonization.” (...) The Ontology Summit 2021 examined the overall landscape of ontologies, the many kinds of ontology generation and harmonization, as well as the sustainability of ontologies. The Communiqué synthesizes and summarizes the findings of the summit as well as earlier summits on related issues. One of the major impediments to harmonization is the relatively poor quality of natural language definitions in many ontologies. The summit surveyed the state of the art in natural language definition development, based on lexicographic principles, as well as examples of ongoing projects that are explicitly dealing with harmonization and sustainability. (shrink)

s view of free will. He also offers detailed justifications that he hopes are philosophically and scientifically respectable. While Hodgson doesn't state anywhere what would count as a "scientifically respectable" proposition, he seems to expect that any scientific theory of consciousness and free will must fully account for his nine propositions, not just explain them away. Or, alternatively, any scientific theory of free will that is incompatible with his nine propositions cannot serve as a possible framework for developing a scientific (...) theory of conscious free will. (shrink)

Through case studies that highlight the type of information that is seldom reported in the news, Faces of Environmental Racism exposes the type and magnitude of environmental racism, both domestic and international. The essays explore the justice of current environmental practices, asking such questions as whether cost-benefit analysis is an appropriate analytic technique and whether there are alternate routes to sustainable development in the South.

Through case studies that highlight the type of information that is seldom reported in the news, Faces of Environmental Racism exposes the type and magnitude of environmental racism, both domestic and international. The essays explore the justice of current environmental practices, asking such questions as whether cost-benefit analysis is an appropriate analytic technique and whether there are alternate routes to sustainable development in the South.