Involvement in sustainable development is a voluntary activity. Organizations apply the principles of sustainable development only when they identify several benefits. These benefits are identified, especially with the financial ones. The involvement of organizations in sustainable organizations has different intensity levels. These intensity levels are influenced by psychosocial factors, attitudes toward organizational risks, and organizational and urban policies. The present paper identifies the key psychological factors involved in applying organizational sustainability principles within organizations. For this research, five groups were created (...) for in-depth interviews with key people from Romania’s innovative companies. To identify the importance of the framework analysis factors, the Delphi method was used, in which 20 experts from different fields of activity were involved. Following the rounds involved in the Delphi method, the ranking of PF on four levels of importance was accepted, based on planned behavior and reasoned action theory. These levels were correlated with the intensity levels of involvement in sustainable development. The entire market study was conducted during COVID-19, which significantly impacted specific directions. As a result, it could be observed that motivation, learning attitude, behavior, and intention to take precedence are essential in the organizational sustainability approach. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEvaluative conditioning procedures change people’s evaluations of stimuli that are paired with pleasant or unpleasant items. To test whether influence awareness allows people to resist such...

Not so long ago, a well institutionalized predatory journal exposed itself by publishing a hoax article that blew the whistle for its devastating influence on the academic affairs of a small country. This paper puts that experiment in context, gives all the important details and analyzes the results. The experiment was inspired by well-known cases of scientific activism and is in line with recent efforts against predatory publishers. The paper presents the evidence in detail and uses it to analyze the (...) publishing practices of the offending journal, using established criteria for assessing predatory publications. That journal somehow acquired an impact factor and charged money to publish thousands of “scientific” papers without any peer review. Since the impact factor is the major official evaluation criteria for scientists in Serbia, these papers disturbed the whole academic evaluation process. Credentials acquired by those publications form a strong obstacle to institutionalized reasoned efforts against such practices. This case warns the whole community of the long lasting damage when journals with low publishing ethics are taken seriously. (shrink)

In this paper it is analyzed from the informational perspective the relation between mind and body, an ancient philosophic issue defined as a problem, which still did not receive up to date an adequate solution. By introducing/using the concept of information, it is shown that this concept includes two facets, one of them referring to the common communications and another one referring to a hidden/structuring matter-related information, effectively acting in the human body and in the living systems, which determines the (...) dynamic inter-change of information between specific structures of the organism by electric/electronic/chemical agents and genetic/epigenetic processes. It is shown that the maintenance of body, permanently and obligatory depending on the external matter (foods, air, water) resources, needed to provide both the structuring/restructuring basic material and energy, determines the necessary existence of an info-managing system, administrating the internal mechano-chemical/physical processes. As a natural consequence, such a system should organize and assure own survival by an effective informational operability to detect the external food resources, to select the appropriate interest information and to decide as a function of circumstances. One important component in such an informational system is memory, allowing to dispose of the reference informational data for analysis/comparison and the selection between good and bad binary possible decisions. The memory receives and stores therefore signals from external reality and from the body itself, referring to the emotional reaction, digestion status, creation, and inherited predilections, within specific info-neural communication circuits between the brain and body execution/sensitive organs, the human body appearing as an integrated info-matter self-managed dynamic system. The specific body components memorize information with different degrees of info-integration: short/long-term integration, emotive/action reaction, info-abilities, culminating with the integration in the chromosomal structures by epigenetic processes. The new acquired information is transgenerationally transmissible, and is manifested as new traits, showing the adaptation capability of the human and close relation between mind and body. Analyzing the results of such a mind-body informational model in comparison with the earlier assumed/proposed/asserted archaic, Greek and Occidental philosophies, which represent only partial aspects of this relation, it is shown that this informational model, elaborated in terms of information on the basis of scientific reasons and arguments, constitutes a general, realist, and coherent model of the mind-body relation, able to integrate and/or explain most of the others. (shrink)

Emotions can have both enhancing and impairing effects on various cognitive processes, from lower to higher level processes. The present article discusses emerging brain imaging evidence linking these opposing effects of emotion, which points to overlapping and dissociable neural systems involving both bottom-up and top-down mechanisms. The link between the enhancing and impairing effects is also discussed in a clinical context, with a focus on posttraumatic stress disorder, where these opposing effects tend to co-occur, are exacerbated, and are detrimental. Overall, (...) the present review highlights the need to consider together enhancing and impairing effects of emotion on cognition in studies investigating emotion–cognition interactions. (shrink)

Les espaces urbains de Belfast sont encore aujourd’hui marqués par des murs de sécurité construits, pour les premiers, après les violents affrontements civils de la fin des années 1960. Cet article se penche sur les paradoxes de la construction et de la pérennisation de ces dispositifs, notamment le décalage apparent entre la multiplication des murs et le processus politique de résolution du conflit dans les années 2000.Belfast’s urban areas still bear the marks of division created by the walls that were (...) first erected after the violent civil conflicts of the late 1960s. This article explores the paradoxes that emerge from the construction and perpetuation of these security barriers, and especially the obvious discrepancy between the increasing number of walls and the political process of conflict resolution since the year 2000. (shrink)

The main intention of the work that deals with the Nicolo Machiavelli thought is to point out the obvious paradox between the high political goal and the legitimating of all possible means for its realization. Are evil deeds inevitable in the sphere of politics and under what circumstances the immorality contained in political acts could be transformed into common good? The text asks additional questions such as about the accomplishments of ambitious political projects, the relationship among the ideologist and the (...) representative of political power, the transformations of the means into the ends, the use of violence and indoctrination in political acts, revolutionary and evolutionary political methods, etc. The author claims that political technologies recommended by Machiavelli basically haven't diminished, but have taken on more modern and more adequate forms. Osnovna namera teksta je da prateci misao Nikola Makijavelija ukaze na ociti paradoks izmedju visoko postavljenog cilja i opravdanja svih sredstava da bi se taj cilj realizovao. Da li je cinjenje zla neminovni ulog u sferi politike i pod kojim uslovima se amoralnost sadrzana u politickim cinovima moze transformisati u opste dobro? Tekst postavlja i dodatna pitanja, poput ostvarljivosti ambicioznih politickih projekata, odnosa ideologa i nosioca politicke moci, transformacije sredstava u ciljeve, koriscenja nasilja i indoktrinacije u politickim preokretima, revolucionarne i evolutivne metode politickog postupanja i sl. Autor iznosi zakljucak da politicke tehnologije koje je Makijaveli preporucavao u osnovi nisu iscezle, vec su zadobile samo zadobile modernije i adekvatnije oblike. (shrink)

The present study represents a preliminary theoretical attempt to analyse the socio-political influence and impact of the Romanian Orthodoxy within the Romanian public life and political culture since 1990, both through the relation between the Orthodox Church and the state, and its impact on the wider society. An open-ended reflection on a constantly unfolding reality, the approach focuses on demonstrating the profound “modernity”—not backwardness—of Orthodoxy’s implicit political theology and derived ideologies and their “modern” destructiveness. The pivotal segment of the study (...) is the relation between modernity and a theory of exclusion derived from a rather unorthodox (brief) interpretation of its emergence from the main carriers of modernity, namely Enlightenment and humanism. Instead of conclusion, the final section compiles and comments a few reformist initiatives and some possible philosophical-theological ways out of the deadlock of ideological self-centrism that still dominates our Orthodoxy. (shrink)

This paper argues that we should take into account the process of historical transmission to enrich our understanding of material culture. More specifically, I want to show how the rewriting of history and the invention of tradition impact material objects and our beliefs about them. I focus here on the transmission history of the mechanical calculator invented by the German savant Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz repeatedly described his machine as functional and wonderfully useful, but in reality it was never finished (...) and didn't fully work. Its internal structure also remained unknown. In 1879, however, the machine re-emerged and was reinvented as the origin of all later calculating machines based on the stepped drum, to protect the priority of the German Leibniz against the Frenchman Thomas de Colmar as the father of mechanical calculation. The calculator was later replicated to demonstrate that it could function ‘after all’, in an effort to deepen this narrative and further enhance Leibniz's computing acumen. (shrink)

The Map of Observing the Mysteries of the Heaven and Earth is a world map in eight panels created in 1603 by the Ming dynasty military official Li Yingshi 李應試. The map is a variant of the known work by the Italian Jesuit savant Matteo Ricci and the scholar Li Zhizao 李之藻. This essay focuses on one copy of this 1603 world map, which was in the possession of the Manchus of the Later Jin state, the precursor of the Qing. (...) This essay argues that the map was used in the Shenyang palace before 1644, the year when the Manchus conquered Beijing and established the Qing, China’s last ruling imperial dynasty, and that it was inscribed with selective translations of the map’s cosmological elements and place-names in a version of the Old Manchu script. The Map of Observing the Mysteries of the Heaven and Earth matters because it prompts us to rethink the process of knowledge circulation between China and early modern Europe. The map shows that the Manchus accessed and used the products of Western learning even before their conquest of China and sought to adapt them to their needs through translation. (shrink)

The 2001 terrorist attacks on USAmarked a crucial moment in the debates referring to the provocations of the new millennium, concerning the rapport between civilizations. The characterization of our time as « the age of terror » reflects more than a rapport “barbarism” - “civilization”, “culture” - “inculture”, “sacred” - “lay”, a clash of ethic and religious fundamentalisms. Literally analyses, born from the ashes of the twin towers, were and are confined to look at the rapport between the Occidental and (...) the Oriental world as one between two incompatible cultures. Their meeting, in the postcolonial and deteritorialisation epoch, is seen as one exclusively violent. But literature offers another battle field, one that proves that beyond our crushing world people, no matter what their culture is, are living the same anguishes of the meeting with the Other and feel the same threats of difference. The literary perspective, by sublimating reality, offers a fresh image of the man at the beginning of the new millennium and the enantiomorphic clash between fundamentalisms. The disease of our times, denounced by the 9/11 texts, is malign and is called over-simplification. (shrink)

The first part of this paper explores the kinship in diagnosis of contemporaneity of Hugo Ball and Martin Heidegger. Both thinkers recognize leveling as an important trait of their age. In Ball?s terms, leveling is identified with the apocalyptic abolishment of humanity. That happens by equalizing all of human creation, which becomes possible only after the abolishment of the hierarchy of values, thanks to which it was previously possible to distinguish a work of art from an average work. With Heidegger, (...) leveling is equated with the perverted forms of curiosity. Unlike the former forms of curiosity, coupled by the common desire for deeper insight, modern curiosity is fairly superficial, let loose with no boundaries to all the impressions which supersede the expected and already seen. In the second part of the paper, Husserl?s term of passive synthesis is examined, so we can observe the intervention of phenomenology from the perspective of deconstruction of the effects of leveling. I conclude with a warning that we cannot protect ourselves from the world to which we are exposed by natural subjectivity and conventional forms of knowledge. Which insight leads us to revert to the sources of subjectivity, the idea common to both the avant-garde and the phenomenologists. (shrink)

Human nature, regardless of how we perceive it, whether from an ethical or psychological standpoint, is arguably such that it prevents the overwhelming majority of people from killing other humans....

Information was a frequently used concept in many fields of investigation. However, this concept is still not really understood, when it is referred for instance to consciousness and its informational structure. In this paper it is followed the concept of information from philosophical to physics perspective, showing especially how this concept could be extended to matter in general and to the living in particular, as a result of the intimate interaction between matter and information, the human body appearing as a (...) bipolar informed-matter structure. It is detailed on this way how this concept could be referred to consciousness, and an informational modeling of consciousness as an informational system of the human body is presented. Based on the anatomic architecture of the organism and on the inference of the specific information concepts, it is shown that the informational system of the human body could be described by seven informational subsystems, which are reflected in consciousness as corresponding cognitive centers. These results are able to explain the main properties of consciousness, both the cognitive and extra-cognitive properties of the mind, like that observed during the near-death experiences and other similar phenomena. Moreover, the results of such a modeling are compared with the existing empirical concepts and models on the energetic architecture of the organism, showing their relevance for the understanding of consciousness. (shrink)

With the purpose to understand better the role of information not only in communication systems, but actually in our environmental reality, this paper presented the model of Universal Triangle of Reality, composed by Matter, Energy and Information, as fundamental constitutive components of this reality. Arguments coming from the field of physics, both at the cosmic and microparticles scale are presented, showing undoubtable conclusions that information is a fundamental component of reality in our material world. At the cosmic level, where the (...) unusual high concentration of mass in the black holes constitutes a special state of matter, suitable for analysis of their special properties, the problem of the conservation principle of information is discussed. At the quantum level, the special unusual characteristics derived from the non-localization principle are also highlighted, together with information-involved problems and solutions. The Universal Triangle of Reality in the living systems reveals the high role of the involved information, both as the informational common organization on the entire evolution scale, and as the info-dynamics processes inside of own structure and resulted from interaction with the environment. The relevant advances in the approaching and understanding of the functionality of the living systems from informational point of view are highlighted, showing the high contribution of information concepts in understanding/solving of various older/recent problems in philosophy, neuroscience/neurology/psychiatry, neuro-physics/neuropsychology/behavior sciences, geriatrics/gerontology, biology and life sciences. Keywords: information-matter-energy, universal triangle of reality in non-living and living systems, informational system of human body and living structures, neurosciences and life sciences. (shrink)

Review of Mircea Flonta, The Solitary Thinker. Criticism and Practice of Philosophy in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Works, (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2008).

I first attempt a taxonomy of meditation in traditional Indian Buddhism. Based on the main psychological or somatic function at which the meditative effort is directed, the following classes can be distinguished: (1) emotion-centered meditation (coinciding with the traditional samatha approach); (2) consciousness-centered meditation (with two subclasses: consciousness reduction/elimination and ideation obliteration); (3) reflection-centered meditation (with two subtypes: morality-directed reflection and reality-directed observation, the latter corresponding to the vipassanā method); (4) visualization-centered meditation; and (5) physiology-centered meditation. In the second part (...) of the essay I tackle the problem of the epistemic validity and happiness-engendering value of Buddhist meditation. In my highly conjectural view, the claim that meditation represents an infallible tool for realizing the (Supreme) Truth as well as a universally valid method for attaining the highest forms of happiness is largely based on the crēdō effect, that is, a placebolike process. I do not deny that meditation may have some positive effects on mental and physical health or that its practice may bring changes to the mind. Meditation may be a valuable alternative approach in life and clinical treatment, but it is far from being a must or a panacea. (shrink)

Dissociation is commonly regarded as a disruption in the normally integrated functions of memory, knowledge, affect, sensation or behavior. The present study utilized behavioral genetics’ methodology to investigate genetic and environmental basis of the relationship between dissociation and Cloninger’s temperament and character traits. A sample of 83 monozygotic and 65 dizygotic twins were administered self-report measures which assessed dissociative experiences along with personality dimensions. Significant correlations and high loads of common genetic variance between dissociative experiences and personality traits of novelty (...) seeking, self-directedness, cooperativeness and self-transcendence were identified. Heritability of dissociative experiences was estimated at 62%. The study shows that there exists a considerable amount of genetic variance overlap between dissociation and personality dimensions. It also supports the hypothesis that propensity to dissociate is highly heritable. (shrink)

Study in the period of coronavirus disease 2019 lockdown and the effect of different exercise training programs on the quality of life dimension are limited. This randomized control study as a part of which the impact of an 8-week neuromuscular training program on the 90 healthy young individuals’ QoL after COVID-19 lockdown was assessed using a short form of the WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire comprising of four domains. The intervention group took part in a neuromuscular training program consisting of dynamic neuromuscular stabilization (...) and whole-body vibration training. In contrast, the control group did not participate in any programmed physical activity. From pre- to post-intervention test, the NT group significantly and substantially improved [mean change ] all the QoL domains, physical for 12.78 scores, psychological for 13.12 scores, social relationships for 20.57 scores, and environmental for 24.40 scores. These results suggest that the NT program could enhance QoL in young and healthy participants following COVID-19 lockdown. (shrink)

The postmodernist view, with its emphasis on the nature of discursive practices in constructing subjectivity and reality, has found many applications. This book develops a critically informed psychoanalytic semiotic view derived from Lacan, and applies it to the study of law. It also integrates some of the central concepts of chaos theory in describing how the legal text is constructed and how it may be read. Postmodern feminist analyses focusing on a possible ecriture feminine provide key insights, and the notion (...) of an empowered democracy is offered as a potentially generating milieu for a revolutionary replacement discourse. (shrink)

Starting from an unorthodox account of conceptual idealism as represented (going backwards historically) by Thomas Hofweber, Nicholas Rescher and Robin George Collingwood (mainly with regard to its potential use in historical understanding), this short study attempts to couple it with the important cognitive finding that emotions inform judgment and regulate thought.1 In my search for a bridge between the cognitive and emotional contents of conceptual understanding, LBT appears to offer the long sought after interfacing, through its take on emotional and (...) behavioral reasoning. Although this study is in its early stages, the idea can gain pace and produce evidence that LBT is not only a beneficiary of academic achievements but also an important provider of solutions to crucial philosophical puzzles such as the nature of understanding in epistemology of history. (shrink)

Alexander Sokurov’s latest film, Francofonia (2015), produced by the Louvre and filmed in France, takes up the issue of the Louvre in the middle of World War II and the Nazi occupation of Paris. This quasi-documentary, filmed along the lines of Sokurov’s signature documentary “elegies,” also encompasses the history of the Louvre up to the present day. Francofonia follows in the long line of Sokurov’s other films set in museums. Sokurov is an author who has worked more than any other (...) filmmaker to translate paintings into a cinematic medium. While engaging with art history and great museums, however, Sokurov also gives a poignant interpretation of the violence of history that often surrounds great works of art. Thus the museum, in Sokurov’s cinematic interpretation, is both an archive of the most valuable products of civilization, as well as a material monument to the founding cultural and political violence that produced and surrounds it. The overt scrutiny and hypervigilance with which Sokurov films museums affects the very mode of his filming: his camera operates as if it were a museum itself, each film becoming an attempt to save civilization from its own ruination, and from its own blindness. Every frame in Sokurov’s films is thus a freeze-frame, born out of the paralyzing tension between external historical nihilism and the beauty of art. (shrink)

Religious marketing is a process of making decisions related to what should and should not be done so that the church could fulfill its mission and serve the parishioners. Religious marketing focuses upon the way the parishioners behave and their satisfaction, because these aspects are very important so that the Orthodox Church could fulfill its mission. A small number of active parishioners is usually interpreted as a sign of incompetence to attract and keep the existing members. Considering this aspect, it (...) is necessary to do the analysis of perceived quality, perceived value and the expectations of the Orthodox related to the religious services. These factors determine the level of their satisfaction and the active involvement in the activities of the church. Motivating and determining the Orthodox parishioners to become loyal to the Orthodox Church would be a great advantage for the fulfillment of its mission, but in order to achieve this it is necessary to know a few marketing elements. (shrink)