The establishment of the Common European Asylum System by 2012 remains a key policy objective for the European Union. According to the Council of the European Union, the development of a Common Asylum Policy should be based on a full and inclusive application of the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and other relevant international treaties. In the European Pact on Immigration and Asylum attention is brought to the persistence of wide disparities amongst Member States in the (...) granting of protection and the form of protection granted. This is seen as one of the main problems to be addressed in building the CEAS. It is fairly obvious that existing divergences in policy have a substantial impact upon the aims of the CEAS. It can be assumed that the difference in governmental practices involving recognizing asylum seekers on refugee grounds or subsidiary protection grounds may be a substantial factor in the decision-making process on where to apply for international protection. The European Commission stressed the importance, during the second phase of the CEAS, of paying particular attention to subsidiary and other forms of protection. (shrink)

Internal protection alternative (further—IPA) as the element of refugee definition is interpreted very differently in the practice of the State Parties to the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees (further—Geneva Convention). Thus it is important to regulate this concept clearly in the EC directive 2004/83/EB (further—Qualification directive) and its coming amendments. The definition of the IPA concept does not contain adequate criteria for assessing the level and effectiveness of protection required, in line with the (...) Geneva Convention and the ECHR, thus allowing Member States to reject claims and return applicants to their country of origin despite the lack of effective protection. Moreover, this concept is defined in a broad and vague manner which creates a risk of diverse recognition practices. (shrink)

Upaniṣatsvadvaitabrahmavādaḥ.-Brahmasūtrāṇāmadvaitānuguṇyam.-Pūrvamīmāṁsānyāyānāṃ Vedāntārthanirṇayopayogaḥ.

Dass der heutigen Literaturwissenschaft der anthropologische wie transzendentale Akzent im Begriff der Poesie abhanden zu kommen scheint, soll weder verwundern noch alarmieren. Friedrich Schlegel bezeichnete seine Zeit als eine "entgeistete", der er vorwiegend auf den Wegen der Poesie und Philosophie und ihrer Verbindung durch das menschliche Vermögen der Einbildungskraft zu begegnen versuchte. Warum gilt die Philosophie noch immer als eine "hilfsbedürftige" Wissenschaft, die zu ihrer "Vervollkommnung" einer Ergänzung bedarf? Das Buch rekonstruiert in systematischer Weise, indem es sich sowohl in die (...) Nähe als auch in Distanz zum theoretischen Friedrich Schlegel begibt, die Geschichte einer solchen Verbindung. Es ist jene vielversprechende Geschichte, in der sich Fantasie und Vernunft im Bewusstsein des Menschen wieder gleichermaßen einzufinden haben. (shrink)

A diversidade do pensamento filosófico sobre as transformações modernas e contemporâneas que cercam a produção artística desdobra-se nos quinze textos que compõem o livro, os quais abordam os mais variados gêneros: cinema, poesia, escultura, pintura e fotografia. Além disso, os textos dialogam ora com autores consagrados - de Winckelmann e Schelling a Benjamin e Rancière -, ora com os próprios artistas - de Glauber Rocha a Joseph Kosuth - e ora com contextos socioculturais mais amplos - desde o capitalismo estético (...) até a estética dos gêneros. Os principais problemas filosóficos que balizam a história da estética e se mantém no cerne dos debates modernos e contemporâneos atravessam esta coletânea: temas tradicionais como a educação do gosto, o conceito de beleza, o princípio da imitação da natureza e a relação entre aparência e verdade são atualizados com acuidade. Temas fundamentais do século XX como a autonomia da arte, o papel da arte na invenção de um povo, a liberdade e a experiência estética, a perda da materialidade das obras de arte e a função da crítica de arte também recebem atenção cuidadosa. Temas que dialogam diretamente com a situação atual das artes são igualmente contemplados, como a subsunção da arte pelo consumo, o possível caráter transgressor e revolucionário do gesto artístico e o papel das imagens na contemporaneidade. (shrink)

On the life and philosophy of Gautama Buddha.

Introduction on various aspects of Buddhist philosophical concepts.

Study on the fundamentals of Mimamsa philosophy.

As a topic, organization design is poorly understood. While it is featured in most management books as a chapter dedicated to organizational structures, it is unclear whether organization design is a one-off event or an ongoing process. Thus, it has traditionally been understood to be the same as an organizational configuration, with neat lines of communication and distribution of responsibilities following pre-set typologies. Yet what can be said to constitute organizational structure in this first half of the 21st century? The (...) extraordinary growth of digital communications, the decreasing relevance of hierarchical bureaucracies, and the general demise of command-and-control have all but decimated the traditional notion of organizational structure. Organization design needs a theoretical revamping. Using a mix of design and social science theories and concepts, Rodrigo Magalhães outlines a new human-centric interpretation of design, design principles, and design culture. He puts forward a paradigm where the organization, for purposes of its design, is considered to be a social actor in a permanent state of transformation, with significant repercussions for social and economic life. He also proposes a model of 'leaderful organization design', distinguished as practice-based, guided by values of democratic participation, and driven by design logics which places meaning-making and meaning-taking at the center of organizational life and can be adopted and adapted to suit different environments. (shrink)

Exhaustive work on fundamentals of Mimamsa philosophy.

On Yoga philosophy and Siddha system in Indic medicine; by a Tamil Siddha.

Collection of texts on philosophical positions (sidhānta) of Vaibhāṣika, Sautrāntika, Yogācārya, and Mādhyamika schools of Buddhism with Hindusim.

Doutrina criteriológica de Lenine.--Reflexões a partir do Materialismo e empiriocriticismo.

The free energy principle (FEP) portends to provide a unifying principle for the biological and cognitive sciences. It states that for a system to maintain non-equilibrium steady-state with its environment it must minimise its (information-theoretic) free energy. Under the FEP, to minimise free energy is equivalent to engaging in approximate Bayesian inference. According to the FEP, therefore, inference is at the explanatory base of biology and cognition. In this paper, we discuss a specific challenge to this inferential formulation of adaptive (...) self-organisation. We call it the universal ethology challenge: it states that the FEP cannot unify biology and cognition, for life itself (or adaptive self-organisation) does not require inferential routines to select adaptive solutions to environmental pressures (as mandated by the FEP). We show that it is possible to overcome the universal ethology challenge by providing a cautious and exploratory treatment of inference under the FEP. We conclude that there are good reasons for thinking that the FEP can unify biology and cognition under the notion of approximate Bayesian inference, even if further challenges must be addressed to properly draw such a conclusion. (shrink)

The free energy principle is sometimes put forward as accounting for biological self-organization and cognition. It states that for a system to maintain non-equilibrium steady-state with its environment it can be described as minimising its free energy. It is said to be entirely scale-free, applying to anything from particles to organisms, and interactive machines, spanning from the abiotic to the biotic. Because the FEP is so general in its application, one might wonder whether this framework can capture anything specific to (...) biology. We take steps to correct for this here. We first explicate the worry, taking pebbles as examples of an abiotic system, and then discuss to what extent the FEP can distinguish its dynamics from an organism’s. We articulate the notion of ‘autonomy as precarious operational closure’ from the enactive literature, and investigate how it can be unpacked within the FEP. This enables the FEP to delineate between the abiotic and the biotic; avoiding the pebble worry that keeps it out of touch with the living systems we encounter in the world. (shrink)

Autism research is increasingly moving to a view centred around sensorimotor atypicalities instead of traditional, ethically problematical, views predicated on social-cognitive deficits. We explore how an enactivist approach to autism illuminates how social differences, stereotypically associated with autism, arise from such sensorimotor atypicalities. Indeed, in a state space description, this can be taken as a skewing of sensorimotor variables that influences social interaction and so also enculturation and habituation. We argue that this construal leads to autism being treated on a (...) par with other sensorimotor atypicalities such as blindness or atypical height. This leads to our conclusion that, insofar there is an ethical call to inclusion in our public sphere regardless of contingent bodily difference, an enactivist take on autism naturally leads to extending such inclusion to autism. Moreover, our analysis suggests a concrete way forward to achieve inclusion of autistics: by being more attentive to autistic sensorimotor specifics. (shrink)

Predictive processing is an increasingly popular approach to cognition, perception and action. It says that the brain is essentially a hierarchical prediction machine. It is typically construed in a representationalist and inferentialist fashion so that the brain makes contentful inferences on the basis of representational models. In this paper, I argue that the predictive processing framework is inconsistent with this epistemic position. In particular, I argue that the combination of hierarchical modeling, contentful inferentialism and representationalism entail an internal inconsistency. Specifically, (...) for a particular set of states, there will be both a representation requirement and not. Yet a system cannot both be required to represent a certain set of states and not be required to represent those states. Due to this contradiction, I propose to reject the standard view. I suggest that predictive processing is best interpreted in terms of reliable covariation instead, entailing an instrumentalist approach to the statistical machinery. (shrink)