This collection of essays explores the history of the book in pre-modern South Asia looking at the production, circulation, fruition and preservation of manuscripts in different areas and across time. Edited by the team of the Cambridge-based Sanskrit Manuscripts Project and including contributions of the researchers who collaborated with it, it covers a wide range of topics related to South Asian manuscript culture: from the material dimension and the complicated interactions of manuscripts with printing in late medieval Tibet (...) and in modern Tamil Nadu, to reading, writing, editing and educational practices, from manuscripts as sources for the study of religious, literary and intellectual traditions, to the creation of collections in medieval India and Cambodia, and the formation of the Cambridge collections in the colonial period. The contributions reflect the variety of idioms, literary genres, religious movements, and social actors of ancient South Asia, as well as the variety of approaches, interests and specialisms of the authors, and their impassionate engagement with manuscripts. (shrink)

Every year, the Vietnamese people reportedly burned about 50,000 tons of joss papers, which took the form of not only bank notes, but iPhones, cars, clothes, even housekeepers, in hope of pleasing the dead. The practice was mistakenly attributed to traditional Buddhist teachings but originated in fact from China, which most Vietnamese were not aware of. In other aspects of life, there were many similar examples of Vietnamese so ready and comfortable with adding new norms, values, and beliefs, even contradictory (...) ones, to their culture. This phenomenon, dubbed “cultural additivity”, prompted us to study the co-existence, interaction, and influences among core values and norms of the Three Teachings –Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism–as shown through Vietnamese folktales. By applying Bayesian logistic regression, we evaluated the possibility of whether the key message of a story was dominated by a religion (dependent variables), as affected by the appearance of values and anti-values pertaining to the Three Teachings in the story (independent variables). Our main findings included the existence of the cultural additivity of Confucian and Taoist values. More specifically, empirical results showed that the interaction or addition of the values of Taoism and Confucianism in folktales together helped predict whether the key message of a story was about Confucianism, β{VT ⋅ VC} = 0.86. Meanwhile, there was no such statistical tendency for Buddhism. The results lead to a number of important implications. First, this showed the dominance of Confucianism because the fact that Confucian and Taoist values appeared together in a story led to the story’s key message dominated by Confucianism. Thus, it presented the evidence of Confucian dominance and against liberal interpretations of the concept of the Common Roots of Three Religions (“tam giáo đồng nguyên”) as religious unification or unicity. Second, the concept of “cultural additivity” could help explain many interesting socio-cultural phenomena, namely the absence of religious intolerance and extremism in the Vietnamese society, outrageous cases of sophistry in education, the low productivity in creative endeavors like science and technology, the misleading branding strategy in business. We are aware that our results are only preliminary and more studies, both theoretical and empirical, must be carried out to give a full account of the explanatory reach of “cultural additivity”. (shrink)

Bribing doctors for preferential treatment is rampant in the healthcare system of developing countries like Vietnam. Although bribery raises the out-of-pocket expenditures of patients, it is so common to be deemed an “envelope culture.” Given the little understanding of the underlying mechanism of the culture, this study employed the mindsponge theory for reasoning the mental processes of both patients and doctors for why they embrace the “envelope culture” and used the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics to validate (...) our reasoning. Analyzing responses from 1042 Vietnamese patients, we discovered that bribing doctors can help patients reduce the destitution risk induced by treatment. Such effect of doctor bribery remains consistent among patients that have to pay high daily costs (e.g., accommodation and subsistence fees) regardless of their employment status. Nevertheless, for patients with no or unstable jobs, their risks of destitution increase if they have to pay more thank-you money. These findings suggest that doctor bribery is an adaptive strategy for patients in an environment where the healthcare supply cannot meet the actual demand. Moreover, healthcare equity is greatly exacerbated due to the envelope culture, as vulnerable individuals are exposed to a greater threat of poverty. At the same time, those with good economic conditions get preferential treatment by paying a higher amount of thank-you money. Healthcare workers’ ethics must be the top priority for an equitable and proper healthcare system. (shrink)

Effective stakeholder engagement and inclusive governance are essential for effective and equitable ocean management. However, few cross-national studies have been conducted to examine how stakeholders’ economic and cultural benefit perceptions influence their support level for policies focused on ocean preservation. The current study aims to fill this gap by employing the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics on a dataset of 709 stakeholders from 42 countries, a part of the MaCoBioS project funded by the European Commission H2020. We found that economic (...) and cultural benefit perceptions are generally negatively associated with the policy support level. Regarding economic aspects, stakeholders considering transportation and shipping, renewable energy generation, and oil and gas provision as the most crucial benefits their countries’ oceans provide tend to obtain less support for policies focusing on ocean preservation. Meanwhile, for cultural aspects, perceiving recreation and tourism, aesthetic pleasure, mental health and well-being support, and sense of identity provision as the most important benefits provided by the country’s ocean are negatively associated with the policy support level. The perceived economic, cultural, and environmental tradeoffs when supporting policies focused on ocean preservation were discussed. Recommendations for improving the effective management of multi-use marine space are also provided to reduce the perceived competing interests among stakeholders. (shrink)

If culture is defined as variation acquired and maintained by social learning, then culture is common in nature. However, cumulative cultural evolution resulting in behaviors that no individual could invent on their own is limited to humans, song birds, and perhaps chimpanzees. Circumstantial evidence suggests that cumulative cultural evolution requires the capacity for observational learning. Here, we analyze two models the evolution of psychological capacities that allow cumulative cultural evolution. Both models suggest that the conditions which allow the (...) evolution of such capacities when rare are much more stringent than the conditions which allow the maintenance of the capacities when common. This result follows from the fact that the assumed benefit of the capacities, cumulative cultural adaptation, cannot occur when the capacities are rare. These results suggest why such capacities may be rare in nature. (shrink)

Coastal protection is crucial to human development since the ocean has many values associated with the economy, ecosystem, and culture. However, most ocean protecting efforts are currently ineffective due to the burdens of finance, lack of appropriate management, and international cooperation regimes. For aiding bottom-up initiatives for ocean protection support, this study employed the Mindsponge Theory to examine how the public’s perceived economic and cultural values influence their willingness to support actions to protect the ocean. Analyzing the European-Union-Horizon-2020-funded dataset (...) of 709 respondents from 42 countries, we discovered that perceived economic values have negative effects on the tendency of ocean protection supports (i.e., food, transportation, renewable energy, oil and gas, and recreation). In contrast, certain perceived cultural values can help increase the willingness to do so (i.e., mental well-being and sense of identity). However, the effects of perceived cultural values are only moderately reliable. These findings suggest that designing cultural information delivery campaigns can help promote coastal reserve supports, such as fundraisings and preserving the oceans from the community. (shrink)

If culture is defined as variation acquired and maintained by social learning, then culture is common in nature. However, cumulative cultural evolution resulting in behaviors that no individual could invent on their own is limited to humans, song birds, and perhaps chimpanzees. Circumstantial evidence suggests that cumulative cultural evolution requires the capacity for observational learning. Here, we analyze two models the evolution of psychological capacities that allow cumulative cultural evolution. Both models suggest that the conditions which allow the (...) evolution of such capacities when rare are much more stringent than the conditions which allow the maintenance of the capacities when common. This result follows from the fact that the assumed benefit of the capacities, cumulative cultural adaptation, cannot occur when the capacities are rare. These results suggest why such capacities may be rare in nature. (shrink)

Evolutionary theory relevant to the question of human cooperation is reviewed and compared to other theoretical perspectives. A compound explanation is distilled as a plausible account of human cooperation and selfishness. This account leans heavily on group selection on cultural variation but also includes lower-level forces driven by both micro-scale cooperation and purely selfish motives. It is proposed that innate aspects of human social psychology coevolved with group-selected cultural institutions to produce just the kinds of social and moral faculties originally (...) proposed by Darwin. This is termed the “tribal social instincts” hypothesis. The account is systemic in the sense that human social systems are functionally differentiated, conflicted, and diverse. A successful explanation of human cooperation has to account for these complexities. For example, a tribal-scale cultural group selection process alone cannot account for human patterns of cooperation because, on one hand, much conflict exists within tribes and, on the other, people have proven able to organize cooperation on a much larger scale than tribes. Multilevel selection and gene-culture coevolution effects are included to account for some of these complexities and empirical tests of the resulting hypotheses are discussed. In particular, it is argued that strong support for the tribal social instincts hypothesis comes from the structure of modern social institutions. These institutions have conspicuous “work-arounds” that shed light on the underlying instincts. (shrink)

For the purposes of this enquiry—an account of what Equiano’sa modernity was, and which particular historical ‘demarcations’ of modernity provided for an enslaved man to achieve freedom through great fortune and great cunning, I will assume a definition of ‘modernity’ as defined by Kathleen Wilson: “. . . not one moment or age, but a set of relations that are constantly being made and unmade, contested and reconfigured, that nonetheless produce among their contemporaneous witnesses the conviction of historical difference.” By (...) adopting this definition, modernity in the times of Equiano refers to, “the cultural practices and representations that produced certain kinds of subjects and objects of knowledge, upheld widely-shared notions of space and time, or facilitated the formation of cultural identities that resulted in pluralities and contradictions as well as unities and coherences,” which provided for a slave to acquire freedom amidst eighteenth-century imperialism, slave-trade, and emerging abolitionist sentiments within bourgeois culture. (shrink)

In medieval studies, philology is the matrix out of which all else springs. So we scarcely need to justify the choice of philology as a topic for the special forum to which Speculum, in a historic move, has opened its pages. On the other hand, if philology is so central to our discipline, why should one postulate a “new” philology, however ironically? While each contributor answers this question in a different, though complementary, way, the consensus seems to be that medieval (...) philology has been marginalized by contemporary cognitive methodologies, on the one side, while within the discipline itself, a very limited and by now grossly anachronistic conception of it remains far too current. This version, formulated under the impulse of political nationalism and scientific positivism during the second half of the nineteenth century, continues to circumscribe the “discipline” of medieval studies. The forum presented here undertakes to explore and interrogate presuppositions underlying current philological practices. (shrink)

This short piece of communication has the sole purpose of identifying some evidence, supporting our view regarding a possible missing environment-nurturing cultural value. Here, we attempt to examine the presence of cultural studies within the boundary of climate change research.

Scientists in anthropology, geography, and other fields within social sciences and humanities have long suggested that the environments in which people live deeply influence their cultural value systems and practices. Shota Shibasaki, Ryosuke Nakadai, and Yo Nakawake have built on this idea, demonstrating that local ecological characteristics shape the appearance of trickster animals in folklore. Based on their finding and the SM3D (Serendipity-Mindsponge-3D) knowledge management framework, we discuss how the individuals’ or groups’ ability to create cultural products depends on the (...) availability and accessibility of information from the surrounding environment. Due to biodiversity loss and climate change, such valuable resources for cultural creativity have been diminished. Thus, it is crucial to adopt biodiversity preservation and climate action as fundamental values of a progressive and humane culture. Only then can we continue to preserve and enhance the creative cultural capacity of society. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that a basic problem in philosophical discussions of culture is what I call the “integration problem”: the need to provide an account of how distinctive considerations of culture can be integrated within practical deliberation in general. I then show how the failure to resolve this problem generates three paradoxes, which I call the “cosmopolitan paradox,” the “inclusion paradox,” and the “representation paradox.” I argue that these paradoxes arise from a common source, the attempt (...) to separate out determinations of worth from demands of recognition, and both from socially contested deliberative practices. I conclude by suggesting that resolving these paradoxes probably requires not a theoretical solution but the achievement of a fully inclusive, cosmopolitan culture. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that a basic problem in philosophical discussions of culture is what I call the “integration problem”: the need to provide an account of how distinctive considerations of culture can be integrated within practical deliberation in general. I then show how the failure to resolve this problem generates three paradoxes, which I call the “cosmopolitan paradox,” the “inclusion paradox,” and the “representation paradox.” I argue that these paradoxes arise from a common source, the attempt (...) to separate out determinations of worth from demands of recognition, and both from socially contested deliberative practices. I conclude by suggesting that resolving these paradoxes probably requires not a theoretical solution but the achievement of a fully inclusive, cosmopolitan culture. (shrink)

Climate change and environmental degradation are threatening the existence of humanity. The youth have the potential and capability to play a pivotal role in tackling these challenges. Therefore, the current study aims to examine how school and family environmental education can enhance environmental knowledge, willingness to take action, and pro-environmental behaviors among children and young people. The Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics was utilized on a nationally representative dataset of 2069 Vietnamese primary, secondary, and high school students. The analysis results (...) suggest that school and family environmental education is beneficial for improving students’ environmental knowledge and willingness to take environmental actions. Notably, the effect of school education is more substantial for cultivating environmental knowledge, whereas family education has a stronger impact on raising students’ willingness than school education. Students with higher levels of environmental knowledge are more likely to conduct pro-environmental behaviors only when they are willing to take environmental actions. If students are unwilling to act, higher environmental knowledge is negatively associated with the likelihood of pro-environmental behavior. Following these findings, we call for coordinated education efforts of schools and families to cultivate students’ eco-surplus culture. The education efforts should be implemented along with exposing students to environmental settings and encouraging them to read environmental books. (shrink)

This short piece of communication has the sole purpose of identifying some evidence, supporting our view regarding a possible missing environment-nurturing cultural value. Here, we attempt to examine the presence of cultural studies within the boundary of waste management research.

This short piece of communication has the sole purpose of identifying some evidence, supporting our view regarding a possible missing environment-nurturing cultural value. Here, we attempt to examine the presence of cultural studies within the boundary of water pollution research.

We review the evolutionary theory relevant to the question of human cooperation and compare the results to other theoretical perspectives. Then, we summarize some of our work distilling a compound explanation that we believe gives a plausible account of human cooperation and selfishness. This account leans heavily on group selection on cultural variation but also includes lower-level forces driven by both microscale cooperation and purely selfish motives. We propose that innate aspects of human social psychology coevolved with group-selected cultural institutions (...) to produce just the kinds of social and moral faculties originally proposed by Darwin. We call this the “tribal social instincts” hypothesis. The account is systemic in the sense that human social systems are functionally differentiated, conflicted, and diverse. A successful explanation of human cooperation has to account for these complexities. For example, a tribal-scale cultural group selection process alone cannot account for human patterns of cooperation because, on one hand, much conflict exists within tribes and, on the other, people have proven able to organize cooperation on a much larger scale than tribes. We include multilevel selection and gene–culture coevolution effects to account for some of these complexities and discuss empirical tests of the resulting hypotheses. In particular, we argue that strong support for the tribal social instincts hypothesis comes from the structure of modern social institutions. These institutions have conspicuous “work-arounds” that shed light on the underlying instincts. (shrink)

Social institutions are the laws, informal rules, and conventions that give durable structure to social interactions within a population. Such institutions are typically not designed consciously, are heritable at the population level, are frequently but not always group benefi cial, and are often symbolically marked. Conceptualizing social institutions as one of multiple possible stable cultural equilibrium allows a straightforward explanation of their properties. The evolution of institutions is partly driven by both the deliberate and intuitive decisions of individuals and collectivities. (...) The innate components of human psychology coevolved in response to a culturally evolved, institutional environment and refl ect a prosocial tendency of choices we make about institutional forms. (shrink)

This short piece of communication has the sole purpose of identifying some evidence, supporting our view regarding a possible missing environment-nurturing cultural value. Here, we attempt to examine the presence of cultural studies within the boundary of biodiversity research.

This short piece of communication has the sole purpose of identifying some evidence, supporting our view regarding a possible missing environment-nurturing cultural value. Here, we attempt to examine the presence of cultural studies within the boundary of air pollution research.

Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is therefore commonly thought that elements of culture evolve through natural selection. However, natural selection was proposed to explain how change accumulates despite lack of inheritance of acquired traits, as occurs with template-mediated replication. It cannot accommodate a process with significant retention of acquired or horizontally (e.g. socially) (...) transmitted traits. Moreover, elements of culture cannot be treated as discrete lineages because they constantly interact and influence one another. It is proposed that what evolves through culture is the mind; ideas and artifacts are merely reflections of its current evolved state. Interacting minds transform (in part) through through a non-Darwinian autopoietic process similar to that by which early life evolved, involving not survival of the fittest but actualization of their potential. (shrink)

This paper explores the potential of integrating ancient educational principles from diverse eastern cultures into modern AI ethics curricula. It draws on the rich educational traditions of ancient China, India, Arabia, Persia, Japan, Tibet, Mongolia, and Korea, highlighting their emphasis on philosophy, ethics, holistic development, and critical thinking. By examining these historical educational systems, the paper establishes a correlation with modern AI ethics principles, advocating for the inclusion of these ancient teachings in current AI development and education. The proposed integration (...) aims to provide a comprehensive education that not only encompasses foundational knowledge but also advanced learning, thereby equipping future AI professionals with the necessary tools to develop AI systems that are ethically responsible, culturally aware, and aligned with human values such as fairness, safety, transparency, and collaboration. This approach not only addresses the AI alignment problem but also fosters cultural harmony and global understanding, which are crucial in an increasingly interconnected world. The paper posits that the wisdom of ancient educational systems, when harmonized with modern AI ethics, can guide the development of AI technologies that are beneficial for humanity, ensuring these advancements are not just technologically sound but also ethically and culturally informed. (shrink)

Thesis: With the end of the cold war, ideological conflicts have faded. In their stead, we have witnessed the rise of cultural strife. On the borders of the great civilizations conflicts involving basic cultural values have arisen. These have given increased emphasis to the ethical imperative of cross cultural understanding. How do we go about understanding different cultures? What are the grounds and premises of such understanding? How does such understanding tie into the basic ethical theories that have marked the (...) West? The premise of this paper is that such understanding requires a new paradigm, one fundamentally different from that animating Western, scientific rationality. What is required is a rethinking of what constitutes our ethical selfhood. After proposing a concept of such selfhood, this essay shows that it is an implicit premise of Plato’s, Kant’s, Freud’s and Darwin’s thoughts about ethics. It makes some practical suggestions for increasing cross-cultural understanding and then concludes with a brief description of the normative, ethical ideal of such understanding. (shrink)

This chapter surveys a few of the central questions about philosophical perspectives on the ethics of belief, focusing especially on (1) questions about whether doxastic involuntarism is consistent with the normative approach to epistemology characteristic of any ethics of belief; (2) the status and interpretation of William Clifford's famous injunction against belief on "insufficient" evidence, and broader questions about the role of negative versus positive doxastic norms; (3) whether norms governing belief are distinctively epistemic norms, or are instead moral or (...) practical ones; and (4) how moral and political questions about belief bear on epistemic norms, including a discussion of doxastic wronging, racist beliefs, skepticism and rape culture, and epistemic partiality—whether, for instance, friendship requires beliefs that violate epistemic norms. (shrink)

The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is -- second only to American political campaigns -- the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time.

1.- Introduction: articulating Hayek’s evolutionary argument with his socialist calculation dispute I completely agree with Bruce Caldwell (Caldwell 1988b: 74-75; Caldwell 1988a) that it is precisely within the conceptual and theoretical framework of the debate on the possibility of socialist calculation that Hayek definitively breaks with the standard static equilibrium approach to the market economy and finds out that the central problem of economics is related to the complex question of social coordination. From the Hayekian standpoint, this problem cannot be (...) solved without articulating a genuine theory about the role and the use of knowledge in society.1 This forms the hard core of what I will call the Hayekian theoretical argument. But one can find a much different kind of argument in Hayek, i.e. an evolutionary argument. I will characterize this argument as the Hayekian empirical argument. Hayek first exposed the essential elements of this genuine argument systematically in Law, Legislation and Liberty (see especially Hayek 1973). But in Hayek’s last book (Hayek 1988), socialism is still analyzed from this evolutionary standpoint , and as such socialism is considered by Hayek to be the major problem not only of economic theory but also, more globally, of Western civilization itself. In that book, published the year before the Soviet Union collapsed, Hayek showed himself to be absolutely confident that economic analysis could prove that socialism was not only a social blunder and a political failure, but above all a formidable scientific error. My reading of Hayek’s work is that this evolutionary argument has to be linked to the first one, which is of a more theoretical nature as far as economics is concerned. Indeed, while the evolutionary argument puts forward a completely different conceptual framework tightening the theoretical argument, it first of all displaces the gist of Hayek’s claim against socialism.. (shrink)

Upon what philosophical foundation are semantic network graphs based? Does this foundation allow for the legitimization of other semantic networks and ontological diversity? How can we design our computational and informational systems to accommodate this ontological diversity and the variety of semantic networks? Are semantic networks segmentations of larger semantic landscapes? This paper explores semantic networks from a Heideggerian existentialist and phenomenological perspective. The analysis presented uses cultural schema theory to bridge the syntactic and lexical elements to the semantic and (...) conceptual dimensions of semantic network graphs and offers reasons why the viability of such graphs as they are currently constructed are insufficient for creating semantic interoperability for our informationtechnologies. Reconceptualizing semantic networks as cultural landscapes offers us. (shrink)

Introduction. The enimatic case of the Zhongshuo -- Part One. Assessing textual authority -- The transmission history of the Zhongshuo, seventh through eleventh centuries -- Features, problems, and puzzles in the received Zhongshuo -- Part Two. Interpreting cultural authority -- Appropriations of the Master's legacy.

As the euro crisis unfolds, political discourse on both sides of the European Union (EU)’s internal divide—“North” and “South”—becomes ever more exasperated, distant and untranslatable. At the root lies a weak pan-European sense of belonging—a common political identity thanks to which European citizens may regard each other as equals, and therefore as deserving recognition, trust, and solidarity. This paper describes some of the culture-related problems that impact directly on the formation of an eventual political identity for EU citizens. It (...) then suggests that the enacting of an interculturalist paradigm can help untie some of the nuts—political but also cultural—that Europe faces in order to solve the economic crisis. A few remarks are dedicated in the conclusive part to cultural pluralism in Singapore, a key player in any future progress towards the integration of the Asia Pacific Region. (shrink)

Paper 6 A personal voyage through the seminal tunnel of language made up of 20,000 names embedding male-bias.

Cultural evolutionary theory, like other evolutionary theories, links individual-level and population or society-level phenomena. It provides numerous bridges between social psychology and other disciplines and sub-disciplines. The theory uses mathematical models to understand the population-level consequences of the individual-level processes of individual and social learning. The theory has been used to explain group-level behavior such as cooperation, altruism, and the cross-cultural variation associated with social institutions. The empirical study of social psychological assumptions of such models and experimental tests of cultural-evolutionary (...) hypotheses are in their infancy. (shrink)

Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, constitutes one of the earliest reflections on the way in which the cultural experience and interpretation is transformed by the advent of what were then the ‘new’ media technologies of photography and film. Benjamin directs attention to the way in which these technologies release cultural objects from their unique presence in a place and make them uniformly available irrespective of spatial location. The way in which old (...) media technologies apparently obliterate the place of cultural objects is also a feature of new media. However, the apparent obliteration of place that occurs in this way is itself problematic, in giving rise to a loss of the sense of spatial and temporal distance, and so of the relative locatedness of both experiencing subject and interpreted object. The loss of a sense of the place of the object threatens a loss of the sense of place of the subject, and with it, a loss of a proper sense of heritage as such. (shrink)

Recent research into human origins has largely focused on deducing past events and processes from current patterns of genetic variation. Some human genes possess unexpectedly low diversity, seemingly resulting from events of the late Pleistocene. Such anomalies have previously been ascribed to population bottlenecks or selection on genes. For four species of matrilineal whale, evidence suggests that cultural evolution may have reduced the diversity of genes which have similar transmission characteristics to selective cultural traits, through a process called cultural hitchhiking. (...) Cultural evolution is characteristic of human societies and so should be considered as a potential determinant of human genetic diversity. A stochastic simulation of gene and cultural dynamics in an array of hunter-gatherer tribes shows that cultural selection has the potential to severely reduce genetic diversity if: inter-tribe gene flows are reasonably low (<~0.6-15 genes/tribe/generation); cultural evolution changes fitness by >~0.3-3%/generation; and fitness is changed more by cultural innovation within a tribe than cultural assimilation from neighboring tribes. Thus cultural hitchhiking may explain low diversity and short coalescence times in mitochondrial and, especially, Y-linked human genes. (shrink)

I approach these questions in the step-by-step, unnuanced manner of the philosopher. In the first section, I characterise the republican tradition in its broad historical sweep, drawing on an earlier book on republicanism, and then, in the second section, I give an account of what the system of culture should be..

This study adds to the existing literature on meaningful work by offering a cross-cultural perspective. Since work shapes the kind of person that we are and plays an important role in our well-being, some theorists have adopted a virtue theory approach to meaningful work using an Aristotelian-MacIntyrean framework. For lack of a better term, I will call this a western virtue theory. This paper presents a contemporary virtue-focused Buddhist perspective on the topic. While a virtue-ethics interpretation of Buddhism is now (...) widely accepted and has been applied to several issues, not much has been written about meaningful work using a Buddhist-Aristotelian comparative framework. Buddhism is an important cultural component not only of countries that are predominantly Buddhist, but of other societies that have come in contact with it. To develop a Buddhist framework, I draw heavily from the works of Buddhist scholars, particularly in the West who use a virtue framework in interpreting Buddhism. The aims of my essay are dual. The first is to articulate a straightforward application of Buddhism on the contemporary ethical discussion of meaningful work. The second is to discuss the similarities, clarify the differences, and demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses relative to each other of the Buddhist and the Western virtue theory perspectives. In my analysis, I will argue that consideration of Buddhist perspective will enable us to construct a cross-cultural, inclusive, and pluralistic conceptual model for the deliberation of meaningful work that complements the Western virtue theory. (shrink)

This chapter argues that there are multiple adaptations underlying the distinctiveness of the human mind. Careful analysis of the capacities that are involved in the creation, acquisition, and transmission of culture and cultural products suggests that it is very unlikely that these could all be underlain by just one, or a few, novel cognitive systems. On the contrary, there are at least a handful of such systems, each of which is largely independent of the others.

This research employs the Bayesian network modeling approach, and the Markov chain Monte Carlo technique, to learn about the role of lies and violence in teachings of major religions, using a unique dataset extracted from long-standing Vietnamese folktales. The results indicate that, although lying and violent acts augur negative consequences for those who commit them, their associations with core religious values diverge in the final outcome for the folktale characters. Lying that serves a religious mission of either Confucianism or Taoism (...) (but not Buddhism) brings a positive outcome to a character (βT_and_Lie_O= 2.23; βC_and_Lie_O= 1.47; βT_and_Lie_O= 2.23). A violent act committed to serving Buddhist missions results in a happy ending for the committer (βB_and_Viol_O= 2.55). What is highlighted here is a glaring double standard in the interpretation and practice of the three teachings: the very virtuous outcomes being preached, whether that be compassion and meditation in Buddhism, societal order in Confucianism, or natural harmony in Taoism, appear to accommodate two universal vices—violence in Buddhism and lying in the latter two. These findings contribute to a host of studies aimed at making sense of contradictory human behaviors, adding the role of religious teachings in addition to cognition in belief maintenance and motivated reasoning in discounting counterargument. (shrink)

No one owns 'culture' [i]: anyone with a viable theoretical proposal can contend for the right to determine that concept's fate. Not everyone agrees with this view. Throughout its century long struggle for academic respectability, anthropology has regularly insisted on its unique role as the proprietor of 'culture.' Its variety of approaches and feuding factions notwithstanding, it is this proprietary claim that unifies anthropology to an extent sometimes unrecognized even by its own (post modernist) practitioners. The history of (...) anthropology has witnessed at least three important moments in the case for autonomous cultural phenomena based, first, on traditional ontological and methodological presumptions, second, on the hermeneutic turn, and third, on postmodern analyses of discourses and their influences. Historically, anthropologists cite two closely related bases for these proprietary presumptions. The first, which we shall not belabor here, hearkens to inevitably vague discussions about culture's autonomy (with various passes at making sense of the ontological foundations of that alleged autonomy). Cultural anthropologists have advanced such claims for a century, but Geertz' gloss on this topic is representative both in what it endorses and in the vagueness of the grounds for the endorsement. While advancing a host of claims about culture's ontological status (for example, (1) that culture is "ideational," (2) that it, nonetheless, "does not exist in someone's head," (3) that it has the same status -whatever that is -as a Beethoven quartet, and (4) that it is "public"), Geertz insists that "the thing to ask . . . is not what . . . [its] ontological status is." (Geertz 1973: 10 12.) Unfortunately for Geertz and cultural anthropology generally, any convincing case for the autonomy of culture must account for its relations to the things that constitute it. Moreover, because Geertz never relinquishes anthropology's scientific aspirations, the issue of clarifying such ontological questions.... (shrink)

The ongoing debate over multiculturalism involves, among other issues, what might be called the quest for cultural validation: the desire of racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities to be seen as legitimate in their own right. Black, feminist, and gay subcultures, among others, wish to assert their particular differences from prevailing social norms and want to be accepted by the larger culture they are challenging. Legitimacy will be achieved when society incorporates the subcultural differences as normal social variation and (...) when minorities secure the same rights and protections enjoyed by those in the mainstream. This process of validation and acceptance, slow though it may be, is characteristic of our liberal western democracy, so that the indigenous cultural "repertoire" or "palette" has become increasingly diverse. (shrink)

This brief paper distinguishes between two intuitive concepts of what an exotic culture is. The first concept applies when the customs and beliefs of others are very different. The second concept applies when there is a significant departure from a natural baseline.

The movement of cultural studies that has been a global phenomenon of great importance over the last decade was inaugurated by the University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1963/64 led at the time by Richard Hoggart (1958) and Stuart Hall. During this period, the Centre developed a variety of critical approaches for the analysis, interpretation, and criticism of cultural artifacts. Through a set of internal debates, and responding to social struggles and movements of the 1960s and the (...) 1970s, the Birmingham group came to focus on the interplay of representations and ideologies of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality in cultural texts, including media culture. They were among the first to study the effects of newspapers, radio, television, film, and other popular cultural forms on audiences. They also focused on how various audiences interpreted and used media culture in varied and different ways and contexts, analyzing the factors that made audiences respond in contrasting ways to media texts. (shrink)

Human societies are extraordinarily cooperative compared to those of most other animals. In the vast majority of species, individuals live solitary lives, meeting to only to mate and, sometimes, raise their young. In social species, cooperation is limited to relatives and (maybe) small groups of reciprocators. After a brief period of maternal support, individuals acquire virtually all of the food that they eat. There is little division of labor, no trade, and no large scale conflict. Communication is limited to a (...) small repertoire of self-verifying signals. No one cares for the sick, or feeds the hungry or disabled. The strong take from the weak without fear of sanctions by third parties. Amend Hobbes to account for nepotism, and his picture of the state of nature is not so far off for most other animals. In contrast, people in even the simplest human societies regularly cooperate with many unrelated individuals. Human language allows low-cost honest communication of virtually unlimited complexity. The sick are cared for, and sharing leads to substantial flows of food from the middle aged to the young and old. Division of labor and trade are prominent features of every historically known human society, and archaeology indicates that they have a long history. Violent conflict among sizable groups is common. In every human society, social life is regulated by commonly held moral systems that specify the rights and duties of individuals enforced, albeit imperfectly, by third party sanctions. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Kathleen Stock’s book Material Girls, by way of imitation. I have attempted to write a faux chapter in the book’s style, identifying four moments in overcoming the low-high culture divide in responses to the arts.

Recently, several authors have argued that the Pleistocene climatic fluctuations are responsible for the evolution of human anatomy and cognition. This hypothesis contrasts with the common idea that human language, tools, and culture represent a revolutionary breakthrough rather than a conventional adaptation to a particular ecological niche. Neither hypothesis is satisfactory. The “Pleistocene hypothesis”, as proposed, does not explain how Pleistocene fluctuations favor the particular adaptations that characterize humans. The alternative hypothesis does not explain what has prevented many animal (...) lineages in the remote past from evolving a similar adaptive complex of tools, language and culture. Theoretical models of the cultural evolutionary process suggest some answers to these questions. Learning, including social learning, is rather generally a useful adaptation in variable environments. The progressive brain enlargement in many mammalian lineages during the last few million years suggests that climatic deterioration has had the general effect predicted by the Pleistocene hypothesis. Increased dependence on simple social learning was a preadaptation to the evolution of a capacity for complex traditions. The evolution of a costly capacity to acquire complex traditions is inhibited because, initially, complex traditions will be rare. Having the capacity to learn things that are far too complex to invent for oneself is not useful until traditions are common, but traditions cannot become complex before the capacity to acquire them is common. This problem may explain why many animals became more sophisticated learners in the Pleistocene, but why complex, cumulative cultural traditions are so rare. The history of our lineage must have included unique preadaptations that permitted us to evade the useless-when-rare problem. (shrink)

Introductory Remarks Why Paradigm Variation is Ensuant upon Contradiction How Externalistic Warrant Parries the Threat of [Truth] Relativism Why Not to Ward Relativism off by Means of Foundationalistic Justification Defending a relativistic View of Warrant A Transcendental Argument against [Truth] Relativism Towards [Partial] convergence A Gradualistic Paraconsistent Way to Convergence 7.1. - Perspectivism and Non Copulative Paraconsistent Logics 7.2. - The Strength and Weakness of Two Copulative Approaches to Paraconsistent Logic 7.3. - The Logic of Contradictorial Gradualism 7.4. - Implementing (...) the Notion of Relative Truth Bibliographic References.. (shrink)

Dissanayake is an ethologist. She is interested in human behavioral predispositions that are universal and innate because they have proved to enhance survival, which is defined as reproductive success (1995:36, 2000:21), and, hence, became selected for at the genetic level. Such behaviors must date back at least to the late Pleistocene (20,000 years ago) since it is then that human biological evolution reached its present condition. Subsequent changes involved cultural evolution, a predisposition that is itself based on evolutionary characteristics of (...) the human species (1988:23, 1995:14, 2000:xiv). Dissanayake holds that art behavior, which she characterizes first as patterns or syndromes of creation and response (1988) and later as rhythms and modes of mutuality (2000), displays the hallmarks of a biological adaptation (1988:6, 1995:33–4): it is universal, innate, old (being present from at least 100,000 BCE, depending on what is counted as the first evidence), and is a source of intrinsic pleasure. Indeed, she claims that art is essential to the fullest realization of our human nature. Art is not something added to us but is the way we are, "Homo aestheticus, stained through and through" (1995:xix). (shrink)

Communities of nuclear workers have evolved in distinctive contexts. During the Manhattan Project the UK, USA and Canada collectively developed the first reactors, isotope separation plants and atomic bombs and, in the process, nurtured distinct cadres of specialist workers. Their later workplaces were often inherited from wartime facilities, or built anew at isolated locations. For a decade, nuclear specialists were segregated and cossetted to gestate practical expertise. At Oak Ridge Tennessee, for example, the informal ‘Clinch College of Nuclear Knowledge’ aimed (...) to industrialise the use of radioactive materials. ‘We were like children in a toy factory’, said its Director: ‘everyone could play the game of designing new nuclear power piles’. His counterpart at Chalk River, Ontario headed a project ‘completely Canadian in every respect’, while the head of the British project chose the remote Dounreay site in northern Scotland because of design uncertainties in the experimental breeder reactor. With the decline of secrecy during the mid-1950s, the hidden specialists lauded as ‘atomic scientists’ gradually became visible as new breeds of engineers, technologists and technicians responsible for nuclear reactors and power plants. Mutated by their different political contexts, occupational categories, labour affiliations, professional representations and popular depictions, their activities were disputed by distinct audiences. This chapter examines the changing identities of nuclear specialists and the significance of their secure sites. Shaped successively by Cold War secrecy, commercial competition and terrorist threats, nuclear energy remained out of site for wider publics and most nuclear specialists alike. The distinctive episodes reveal the changing working experiences of technical workers in late-twentieth and early twenty-first century environments. (shrink)