A theme of abiding interest in religious studies is the sharp contrast between cultures with a monotheistic paternal deity and cultures with pluralistic maternal deities. These two principles for organizing religious life are vast; attempts to understand their implications lead to an overwhelmingly diverse set of facts and their meanings. In Freud's India, Alf Hiltebeitel takes up this enormously engaging question, focusing on the thinking of two spokespeople for the inner life of their culture-- Sigmund Freud and Girindrasekhar Bose. Alf (...) Hiltebeitel considers the attempts of these two men to communicate with and understand each other and these issues, in the heated context of emotionally divisive allegiances. The book is elegant in its nuanced attention to these two thinkers, and its tightly controlled exploration of what their interactions indicate about their contributions and limitations as representatives of the psychology and religion of their respective cultures. Anxieties about mothers separate Eastern from Western imaginations. They separate Freud from Bose, and they separate Hindu foundational texts from the Hebrew foundational texts. (shrink)

Que cherchent les écrivains qui, au risque de passer sous les radars médiatiques, n'empruntent pas l'autoroute du récit linéaire et du reportage romancé? La voie étroite de la poésie débouche sur des formes minoritaires et sur des consistances bizarres de prose. Comme s'il fallait d'urgence ranimer, redessiner les mots en troublant leur usage. Mais dans quel but, au juste? De temps à autre, on m'invite à exposer des idées. Mon choix du sujet est toujours intéressé. Il concerne ce que je (...) pratique : la poésie et la prose narrative surtout, un peu le montage et le dessin. Il s'agit de parler en s'adressant à des gens en particulier. La dispute n'est jamais loin. Le ton n'est pas toujours sérieux. Limité par le temps, je procède quelquefois par simples assertions, qui se lisent alors comme les têtes de chapitres manquants. Esquisses d'une réflexion que d'autres prolongeraient, ces brefs discours sont ensuite laissés en l'état. Ils portent, donc, sur des inventions marginales : poèmes prosaïques, visuels ou animés, récits digressifs ou hétérogènes, figures de monstres, films dansants, fantômes tracés. Ils suggèrent une certaine politique des formes. Ils plaident pour une imagination technique assez négligée — ou mal vue — en littérature. (shrink)

We prove that for every Scott set S there are S-saturated real closed fields and S-saturated models of Presburger arithmetic.

O-minimal structures have long been thought to occupy the base of a hierarchy of ordered structures, in analogy with the role that strongly minimal structures play with respect to stable theories. This is the first in an anticipated series of papers whose aim is the development of model theory for ordered structures of rank greater than one. A class of ordered structures to which a notion of finite rank can be assigned, the decomposable structures, is introduced here. These include all (...) ordered structures definable in o-minimal structures. The principal result in this paper, Theorem 5.1, asserts roughly that a decomposable structure [Formula: see text] can be partitioned into finitely many definable subsets such that on each set the restriction of < is a "twisted lexicographic" order. As a consequence, for all n and linear orders ≺ definable on a subset X ⊆ Mn in an o-minimal structure [Formula: see text], there is a definable partition of X such that the restriction of ≺ to each set in the partition is "lexicographic". (shrink)

We develop a new notion of independence (þ-independence, read "thorn"-independence) that arises from a family of ranks suggested by Scanlon (þ-ranks). We prove that in a large class of theories (including simple theories and o-minimal theories) this notion has many of the properties needed for an adequate geometric structure. We prove that þ-independence agrees with the usual independence notions in stable, supersimple and o-minimal theories. Furthermore, we give some evidence that the equivalence between forking and þ-forking in simple theories might (...) be closely related to one of the main open conjectures in simplicity theory, the stable forking conjecture. In particular, we prove that in any simple theory where the stable forking conjecture holds. þ-independence and forking independence agree. (shrink)

Ross, Alf Loar, Brian, Editor.Directives and Norms. New York: Humanities Press, [1967]. ix, 188 pp. Reprint available April 2009 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN-13: 978-1-58477-961-2. ISBN-10: 1-58477-961-6. Cloth with dust jacket. $65.00 * Reprint of the first American edition. One of the most interesting jurists of the post-World War II era, Ross [1899-1979] was a legal and moral philosopher, scholar of international law and the leading representative of Scandinavian Legal Realism. This book and On Law and Justice (1958) are (...) his principal works. In Directives and Norms Ross asks whether imperatives (or, to use his term, 'directives') are subject to logic in the same way as indicatives. He shows the difference between indicative and directive discourse and explains the concepts 'directive' and 'norm' as they function in the social sciences, especially in the study of law. A contemporary essay in the Modern Law Review (32:544), though critical of this work, was still impressed by its "clear and convincing account" of these processes. (shrink)

Ross, Alf. On Law and Justice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959. xi, 383 pp. Reprint available December 2004 by the Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.

The existing literature treats of several investigations with a certain bearing on the question which is roughly indicated by the title “Imperatives and Logic.” Some of those investigations, however, are entirely outside the scope of the present work.Mally sets himself the task of developing a “Logik des Willens” constituting a parallel to the usual logic, the “Logik des Denkens". In order to emphasize its independence, the author also calls this “Logik des Willens” “Deontik”, and he conceives it as being based (...) on the “Wesensgesetze” of will in the same way as the usual logic is conceived as being based on the “Wesensgesetze” of thought. The author develops a formalistic deductive system on the basis of 5 axioms of demands, including the axiom that there is at least one fact which is unconditionally demanded, and through a lengthy series of theorems he arrives at the sentence that what is unconditionally demanded is identical with what is actually the case: “was sein soll, ist Tatsache”. Similarly, the author develops a system of axioms for “right” volition, including the axiom that right volition is non-contradictory. (shrink)

ABSTRACT It is a common contention that education done uncritically and unreflectively may serve to sustain and justify the status quo, in terms of mechanisms of cultural or racial privileging and marginalization. This article explores an argument made from within anti-oppressive education theory and advocated by theorist Kevin Kumashiro, namely that transformative education must entail altering harmful citational practices. I see two shortcomings in relation to this argument: first, its focus on discursive practice entails a prerequisite of high discursive literacy. (...) Second, it may lead to a failure to give credit to people’s intentions, risking a conflation of honest mistakes and wilful ignorance, and depriving us of theoretical nuance. While a well-argued and important call, I argue in this article that both shortcomings lead to the risk of a polarized conversation. Focusing on cultural, ethnic, and racial categorization, and using social studies as an illustration, it is suggested that applying notions from the theoretical concept of epistemic injustice may open up a space for granting nuanced credit to people’s intentions, thereby mitigating the risk of polarization. Rather than viewing attention to outcome and attention to intention as oppositional to one another, it is argued that both theoretical perspectives may benefit from the insights of the other. By applying needed context-specificity and nuance to categorizations of dominance and marginalization in individual discursive exchange, this can be done without granting priority to the experience of dominantly situated knowers. (shrink)

Release of the ATP hydrolysis product ortophosphate (Pi) from the active site of myosin is central in chemo‐mechanical energy transduction and closely associated with the main force‐generating structural change, the power‐stroke. Despite intense investigations, the relative timing between Pi‐release and the power‐stroke remains poorly understood. This hampers in depth understanding of force production by myosin in health and disease and our understanding of myosin‐active drugs. Since the 1990s and up to today, models that incorporate the Pi‐release either distinctly before or (...) after the power‐stroke, in unbranched kinetic schemes, have dominated the literature. However, in recent years, alternative models have emerged to explain apparently contradictory findings. Here, we first compare and critically analyze three influential alternative models proposed previously. These are either characterized by a branched kinetic scheme or by partial uncoupling of Pi‐release and the power‐stroke. Finally, we suggest critical tests of the models aiming for a unified picture. (shrink)

A review of the scanty Gestaltist literature on motor behaviour indicates that a genuine Gestalt theoretic approach to motor behaviour can be characterized by three research questions: (1) What are the natural units of motor behaviour? (2) What characterizes the self-organization in motor behaviour? (3) What are the conditions for invariance in motor behaviour? Tentative answers to these questions can be found by analysing the parallels between Gestalt theory and Bernstein's theory of motor actions and by showing that Gestalt theory (...) can be regarded as a specific approach to non-linear dynamics as exemplified by synergetics (Haken, 1991). The congruence between the Gestalt theoretic approach and synergetics becomes apparent in the analysis of how a complex motor task is learned [1]. (shrink)

This essay proposes that management is too often seen as problem solving, and that the equally important art of ignoring problems has not received enough attention. With reference to the thinking of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the essay argues for letting go, and attempting to leave thoughts at rest.