People dedicate significant attention to others’ facial expressions and to deciphering their meaning. Hence, knowing whether such expressions are genuine or deliberate is important. Early research proposed that authenticity could be discerned based on reliable facial muscle activations unique to genuine emotional experiences that are impossible to produce voluntarily. With an increasing body of research, such claims may no longer hold up to empirical scrutiny. In this article, expression authenticity is considered within the context of senders’ ability to produce convincing (...) facial displays that resemble genuine affect and human decoders’ judgments of expression authenticity. This includes a discussion of spontaneous vs. posed expressions, as well as appearance- vs. elicitation-based approaches for defining emotion recognition accuracy. We further expand on the functional role of facial displays as neurophysiological states and communicative signals, thereby drawing upon the encoding-decoding and affect-induction perspectives of emotion expressions. Theoretical and methodological issues are addressed with the aim to instigate greater conceptual and operational clarity in future investigations of expression authenticity. (shrink)

This article is about Mircea Eliade’s rapport to exile, both his and other Romanians’. His approach of the exilic experience allows an incursion into the “diaspora” semantic field in the study Theorizing Diaspora by Jana Evans Braziler and Anita Mannur and a look at Eliade as a “diasporic subject”. To Eliade, the relationship with homeland and the diasporic identity assume religious significance. He urges members of the Romanian diaspora to hold the native country sacred as a ‘Jerusalem in the (...) Sky’. A strong believer in the salvaging power of cultural creation over the political factor, he wanted his work to be a response to the communist regime in Romania. (shrink)

As Mircea Eliade’s translator and biographer Mac Linscott Rickett states, Eliade involved the whole discipline of the history of religions in the quest for meaning. The paper examines Eliade’s approach of religious documents, with benefits and shortcomings as appraised by some of his American critics, and looks closely at the Eliadean creative hermeneutics and the ambitious mission he envisaged for the discipline he has founded in the United States.

Mircea Eliade, often described by scholars and in the popular press as the world's most influential scholar of religion, symbolism, and myth, was trained as a philosopher, received his Ph.D. in philosophy, and taught in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bucharest in the 1930s. Although he became a historian and phenomenologist of religion within the field of religious studies, his approach, methodology, and analysis are informed by philosophical assumptions and philosophical normative judgments. In several of his (...) writings, he goes far beyond the history and phenomenology of religion and presents a strong critique of contemporary Western philosophy as part of his larger critique of contemporary Western culture. He submits that contemporary philosophy,as a development of the Enlightenment, claims to be universal, but is in fact ethnocentric and provincial; claims to be innovative and creative, but is in fact increasingly trivial, insignificant, and uncreative. Eliade repeatedly charges that contemporary philosophy is bankrupt and desperately in need of renewal. I shall provide his philosophical critique of dominant Western philosophy, his analysis of self-other encounters, and his alternatives for philosophical renewal through the emerging confrontations, engagements, and creative dialogues between Asian, other non-Western, and Western philosophical perspectives. (shrink)

Eliade and the Doctrine of Mystic Lights Eliade believed that in every religion there are reports about an experience of mystic light. Furthermore, all such reports mention that the person who experienced the light subsequently underwent a deep transformation of her or his spirit and began a new life, the life of a holy man or homo religiosus, which is identical – in its purest form – with the life of a mystic. A clear example of one such transformation is (...) Saul turning into Paul. But a closer analysis indicates, says the Author, that these changes can be of two kinds. They either come suddenly to an unsuspecting and unprepared individual, and that was the case of Saul, or they are a result of concentrated spiritual training, and such a case was described by Gregory Palamas. The former transformation leads to a religious conversion, the latter is the beginning of a new, mystic life. The Author argues that these forms of experience are seeing without using eyes, and as such, they may have served as a paradigm of vivid mental understanding. He quotes Plato and Heidegger to support these views. (shrink)

This is the first book on the provocative and innovative contributions to philosophy of language, metaphysics, the philosophy of mathematics, and logic made by Kit Fine, one of the world's foremost philosophers. Topics covered include meaning and representation, arbitrary objects, essence, ontological realism, and the metaphysics of modality.

Mircea Flonta, Hans-Klaus Keul si Jorn Rusen (coord.), Religia si societatea civilã Ed. Paralela 45, Pitesti, 2005.

In this landmark book, first published in English in 1958, renowned scholar of religion Mircea Eliade lays the groundwork for a Western understanding of Yoga.

The religious consciousness functions symbolically. As the orientation towards the sacred belongs to consciousness, human existence is constituently symbolic. For Eliade, symbolism is an immediate given of consciousness, an essential object of intelligence that belongs to human beings and can be found in any existential situation of man in cosmos. If, according to Eliade, the religious history of humanity begins with the existence of the sacred, with those infinite hierophanies which organize the world and fill it with significances, then we (...) are entitled to state the anthropological importance invested by Eliade into the religious symbolism. (shrink)

For the History of Religions as a discipline, Mircea Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion represents a fundamental paper. By carefully analyzing each chapter, we try to catch the accuracy proved by Mircea Eliade in building his arguments and to decipher the meaning of the archetypes dominating the human existence and the way in which the sacred forms are perceived.

This anthology is a collection of key essays by and about the Romanian-American Historian of Religions, Mircea Eliade. It introduces the beginning student to the terms and categories of Eliade's understanding of religious behaviour as a universal phenomenon: apprehension of the sacred by homo religiosus, humanity's religious mode, through hierophanies, revelatory events and objects. The analysis of religious behaviour as the restoration of illud tempus, an alternative continuum of sacred time, through myth, ritual, and symbol is a central feature (...) of that understanding, assumed to have an authentic application in the struggle for freedom from the human condition. As well as Eliade's own understanding and its implication for the study of Religions, the collection alerts the reader to the critical response to the problems of his thought. This includes the issues raised by Eliade's biography, politics, and career as one of the most successful and influential historians of religion of the late 20th Century. Moving from inter-war Romania, through India during the struggle for independence, to war-time London and Lisbon, post-war Paris, and finally to America in the 60s and 70s, Eliade's career traces a complex trajectory involving many problems central to the academic study of religion and culture. (shrink)

This paper examines philosophical foundations of Mircea Eliade's creative hermeneutics. Analyzing his concept of “terror of history” and autobiography, I will argue that his philosophy of religion is useful for Korean scholars to recognize the meaning of Korean religions, which have been overlooked by Western scholars of religions. Paying attention to the continuities between his life and thought, I will explain Eliade’s “primitive ontology” and defend recent criticisms of his method and theory. His views on “new humanism” and “cosmic (...) religion” are also included in the paper. (shrink)

The debate over the authorship of the allegorical interpretation of Heliodorus’ novel extant in codex Marc. Gr. 410 bequeathed to subsequent scholarship the assumption that the text belongs to the Neoplatonic allegorical tradition of reading Homer. This essay aims to revisit this philosophical attribution and argue that the terms and philosophical categories alluded in this allegory are characteristic of a long tradition of Patristic analysis, and more specifically of Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus Confessor’s exegesis. Setting forth new textual evidence, (...) it argues that the exegetical practice displayed in the allegory reflects Maximus Confessor’s anagogical exegesis and Gregory of Nyssa’s pedagogy of desire and doctrine of spiritual progress as set forth in the Homilies on the Song of Songs and The Life of Moses. (shrink)

His philosophical thinking was influenced by his legal knowledge, but when reading carefully his articles and papers we can notice a detachment from the philosophical premises in the development of the concepts of law. Like Del Vecchio, Djuvara makes no difference between law and philosophy and therefore the legal philosophy looks like a completion of law, these two concepts being comprehended only by a general, epistemological and philosophical approach; the issues related to the philosophy of law are not only isolated (...) from the big philosophical issues but there are closely related to them so that the philosophy of lawintegrates completely in the general philosophy. (shrink)

We upgrade the light Dialectica interpretation [6] by adding two more light universal quantifiers, which are both semi-computational and semi-uniform and complement each other. An illustrative example is presented for the new light quantifiers and a new application is given for the older uniform quantifier. The realizability of new light negative formulations for the Axiom of Choice and for the Independence of Premises is explored in the new setting.

Concerning the investigation method adopted by Mircea Eliade, we can talk about certain tendencies the Chicago scholar used in his studies. The hermeneutics, the phenomenology or the history of religion are parts of what we can call “the Eliade method”. If this method is still actual or not, remains to be discussed but the way in which the Romanian scholar revolutionized the research of the religious deeds at least for a few decades, represent a truth upon which it has (...) to be reflected permanently, for a better understanding of what really means the religious phenomena. (shrink)

In view of an enhancement of our implementation on the computer, we explore the possibility of an algorithmic optimization of the various proof-theoretic techniques employed by Kohlenbach for the synthesis of new effective uniform bounds out of established qualitative proofs in Numerical Functional Analysis. Concretely, we prove that the method of “colouring” some of the quantifiers as “non-computational” extends well to ε-arithmetization, elimination-of-extensionality and model-interpretation.