This book overviews how different special sciences could be applied in everyday life. The book was published as part of a nonfiction agricultural series written and edited in part by Nikolai Borodin (1861-1937). In the pre-revolutionary period, Borodin and fellow scholar B. Bakhmetiev visted the USA to obtain a loan and ensure the execution of order for supply of military and agricultural equipment. During the Civil War Borodin joined the White movement and Kolchak's government which sent him (...) to the United States to purchase the agricultural machinery and equipment for educational institutions in Sberia. When the Bolsheviks won the war, Borodin remained abroad. (shrink)

Samantha Vice’s proposal on how to live in ‘this strange place’ of contemporary South Africa, includes an appeal to the concepts of shame and silence. In this paper, I use Emmanuel Levinas and Giorgio Agamben to move the discussion of shame from a moral to an existential question. The issue is not about how one should feel, but about the kind of self that whiteness in South Africa makes possible today. Shame desubjectifies. Vice’s recommendation of silence is then taken as (...) witnessing/listening, which I argue grounds the possibility of a recovery of the self. (shrink)

Bridging the gap between the world of science and the realm of the spiritual, B. Alan Wallace introduces a natural theory of human consciousness that has its roots in contemporary physics and Buddhism. Wallace's "special theory of ontological relativity" suggests that mental phenomena are _conditioned_ by the brain, but do not _emerge_ from it. Rather, the entire natural world of mind and matter, subjects and objects, arises from a unitary dimension of reality that is more fundamental than these dualities, as (...) proposed by Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung. To test his hypothesis, Wallace employs the Buddhist meditative practice of _samatha_, refining one's attention and metacognition, to create a kind of telescope to examine the space of the mind. Drawing on the work of the physicist John Wheeler, he then proposes a more general theory in which the participatory nature of reality is envisioned as a self-excited circuit. In comparing these ideas to the Buddhist theory known as the Middle Way philosophy, Wallace explores further aspects of his "general theory of ontological relativity," which can be investigated by means of _vipasyana_, or insight, meditation. Wallace then focuses on the theme of symmetry in reference to quantum cosmology and the "problem of frozen time," relating these issues to the theory and practices of the Great Perfection school of Tibetan Buddhism. He concludes with a discussion of the general theme of complementarity as it relates to science and religion. The theories of relativity and quantum mechanics were major achievements in the physical sciences, and the theory of evolution has had an equally deep impact on the life sciences. However, rigorous scientific methods do not yet exist to observe mental phenomena, and naturalism has its limits for shedding light on the workings of the mind. A pioneer of modern consciousness research, Wallace offers a practical and revolutionary method for exploring the mind that combines the keenest insights of contemporary physicists and philosophers with the time-honored meditative traditions of Buddhism. (shrink)

Burgess, J.P. and Rosen, G. Subject with No ObjectElliott, R.Faking Nature.

Burgess, J.P. and Rosen, G. Subject with No ObjectElliott, R.Faking Nature.

" Medieval Thought provides a clear and authoritative introduction to an important period in intellectual history. It studies the course of medieval intellectualisation, analysing how tension between the religious and non-religious components of medieval culture resulted in its sophisticated development. The most influential vehicle for medieval intellectualisation was philosophy. Philosophy became the mode of expression in religion, providing religious thinkers with a unifying vocabulary and means of reasoning. In turn philosophers found in religion fertile ground for metaphysical discussion. The initial (...) alliance between philosophy and religion did not, however, hold, for Christianity's necessity for theological strength through uniformity inevitably clashed with the dissenting questioning of philosophy. This book will be accessible to even those with little knowledge of Christian theology. Appendices have been included to help the reader surmount possible difficulties, and no prior knowledge of Latin is assumed. Each chapter ends with a select bibliography to direct the reader toward further study, and an additional, more comprehensive, annotated bibliography is included at the end of the book. (shrink)

Do psychological traits predict philosophical views? We administered the PhilPapers Survey, created by David Bourget and David Chalmers, which consists of 30 views on central philosophical topics (e.g., epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language) to a sample of professional philosophers (N = 314). We extended the PhilPapers survey to measure a number of psychological traits, such as personality, numeracy, well-being, lifestyle, and life experiences. We also included non-technical ‘translations’ of these views for eventual use in other (...) populations. We found limited to no support for the notion that personality or demographics predict philosophical views. We did, however, find that some psychological traits were predictive of philosophical views, even after strict correction for multiple comparisons. Findings include: higher interest in numeracy predicted physicalism, naturalism, and consequentialism; lower levels of well-being and higher levels of mental illness predicted hard determinism; using substances such as psychedelics and marijuana predicted non-realist and subjectivist views of morality and aesthetics; having had a transformative or self-transcendent experience predicted theism and idealism. We discuss whether or not these empirical results have philosophical implications, while noting that 68% of our sample of professional philosophers indicated that such findings would indeed have philosophical value. (shrink)