On Sādhanāpañcaka, work on Advaita philosophy by Śaṅkarācārya; includes text with translation and explanation.

The aim of the present paper is to describe three different attempts, which have been made by philosophers, to define what quality of life is; and to spell out some of the difficulties that faces each definition. One, Perfectionism, focuses on the capacities that human beings possess: capacities for friendship, knowledge and creative activity, for instance. It says that the good life consists in the development and use of these capacities. Another account, the Preference Theory, urges that satisfying one's preferences, (...) or desires, is what improves one's quality of life. And a third account, Hedonism, sees life-quality as consisting in the enjoyment of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. The paper describes and evaluates objections to each of these views, thereby displaying their weaknesses and strengths. Since no view comes out as the right one there is a choice to be made. At the end of the paper it is being discussed how well each of the views cohere with different methodologies used in quality of life research. Also it is suggested that considerations about what the research is to be used for are relevant. (shrink)

Mula sa iisang lahi ang Pilipinas at Malaysia sang-ayon sa pag-aaral na may kinalaman sa paksaing Austronesyo. May mahabang kasaysayan ng ugnayan ang dalawang bansang ito, di lámang sa ekonomikong aspekto, kundi lalo’t higit sa kultural na batayan, at isa na rito ang paggamit ng mga simbolo sa pagbabatik/pagtatatu na nakaugat pa sa relihiyon ng pag-aanito sa mundong Austronesyo. Bagamat naging parehong kolonya ang dalawang bansa ng mga Kanluranin na nagpalawak di lámang ng kapangyarihan kundi maging ng merkado, hindi tuluyang (...) naalis/nakalimutan ang kalinangang nakaugat sa mga bansang ito. Sa kasalukuyan, nagpapatúloy pa rin ang iláng tradisyonal na pang-araw-araw na búhay ng ilang bahagi ng mga bansang ito gaya ng pagbabatik. Nariyan pa rin ang pagpupukpok o tapping process sa pagbabatik na sa kasalukuyan ay dinarayo pa sa kabundukan ng Cordillera ng mga tagasiyudad upang makapagpatatu kay Whang Od. Gayundin, mayroon pa ring kahalintulad na ganitong paraan ng pagbabatik sa Malaysia, sa kaso halimbawa ng mga Iban, Kayan at Dayak. Hindi kataka-taka sa kasalukuyan na kahit nariyan pa rin ang tradisyonal na paraan ng pagbabatik, naghahalinhinan ang tradisyonal at modernong pagbabatik sa mga bansang ito na ang pinakanag-uugnay ay ang mga simbolismong nakaugat sa kanilang malalim na kasaysayan. (shrink)

L'Althusser antihumaniste, ou de la coupure: Le problème de la "philosophie de Marx" -- Du côté de Staline -- Les thèses de l'antihumanisme -- Spinoza l'antihumaniste -- Louis Althusser entre déterminisme et liberté -- Althusser de la lecture: Le détour par Spinoza -- Le Traité théologico-politique, une politique du discours -- Lire Le Capital avec Spinoza -- Althusser de la structure: Du "marxisme structuraliste" à l'immanentisme spinoziste : un parcours philosophique -- Déterminisme et coupures -- Coupure et lecture symptômale -- (...) Althusser, de la conjoncture au retour du sujet: Penser la conjoncture -- Le détour par Machiavel -- Spinoza Machiavellianus -- Interpellation et constitution du sujet -- Est-il simple d'être spinoziste en philosophie? -- Althusser et l'aléatoire: -- Entre la nécessité et l'aléatoire -- La crise du marxisme -- Les "manifestes" du matérialisme aléatoire -- À quoi s'oppose le matérialisme aléatoire? -- Une conjoncture sans politique. (shrink)

A commentary on al-Yazdī's gloss on al-Taftāzānī's Tahdhīb al-manṭiq wa-al-kalām; logic, Arabic logic; early works to 1800.

Many domains, notably the one involving predicates of personal taste, present the phenomenon of apparent faultless disagreement. Contextualism is a characteristically moderate implementation of the relativistic attempt to endorse such appearances. According to an often-voiced objection, although it straightforwardly accounts for the faultlessness, contextualism fails to respect “facts about disagreement.” With many other recent contributors to the debate, I contend that the notion of disagreement—“genuine,” “real,” “substantive,” “robust” disagreement—is indeed very flexible, and in particular can be constituted by contrasting attitudes. (...) As such, contextualism is clearly straightforwardly compatible with facts about the existence of disagreement. There is, however, a genuine prima facie worry for contextualism involving facts about the expression of disagreement in ordinary conversations. Elaborating on a suggestion by Lewis :113–138, 1989), I argue that the presupposition of commonality approach in López de Sa shows that there are versions of contextualism that are in good standing vis-à-vis such facts about the expression of disagreement. (shrink)

According to the simple proposal about rigidity for predicates, a predicate is rigid (roughly) if it signifies the same property across the relevant worlds. Recent critics claim that this suffers from a trivialization problem: any predicate whatsoever would turn out to be trivially rigid, according to the proposal. In this paper a corresponding "problem" for ordinary singular terms is considered. A natural solution is provided by intuitions concerning the actual truth-value of identity statements involving them. The simple proposal for predicates (...) is then defended, by exploiting corresponding intuitions concerning statements involving their nominalizations, in an analogous manner. (shrink)

Given the centrality of English as a Foreign Language students’ wellbeing in their academic success, identifying factors that may be influential in fostering students’ well-being is of high importance. As such, several studies have delved into the role of various personal and interpersonal factors in increasing EFL students’ well-being. However, little attention has been devoted to the function of teacher-student rapport. Besides, no systematic or theoretical review has been conducted in this regard. To address these gaps, the present study intends (...) to illustrate different definitions of student well-being and teacher-student rapport, their sub-components, and their theoretical relations. Building upon the theoretical and empirical bases, the facilitative function of teacher-student rapport in increasing EFL students’ well-being was proved. Some beneficial implications are also discussed. (shrink)

Vaishnava philosophical work, in verse; critically edited.

The simple proposal for a characterization of general term rigidity is in terms of sameness of designation in very possible world. Critics like Schwartz (2002) and Soames (2002) have argued that such a proposal would trivialize rigidity for general terms. Martí (2004) claims that the objection rests on the failure to distinguish what is expressed by a general term and the property designated. I argue here against such a response by showing that the trivialization problem reappears even if one pays (...) attention to such a distinction. (shrink)

In recent years, some people have held that a radical relativist position is defensible in some philosophically interesting cases, including future contingents, predicates of personal taste, evaluative predicates in general, epistemic modals, and knowledge attributions. The position is frequently characterized as denying that utterance-truth is absolute. I argue that this characterization is inappropriate, as it requires a metaphysical substantive contention with which moderate views as such need not be committed. Before this, I also offer a more basic, admittedly less exciting (...) alternative characterization of the position, in terms of departing from the Kaplan–Lewis–Stalnaker two-dimensional framework. (shrink)

According to the simple proposal, a predicate is rigid iff it signifies the same property across the different possible worlds. The simple proposal has been claimed to suffer from an over-generalization problem. Assume that one can make sense of predicates signifying properties, and assume that trivialization concerns, to the effect that the notion would cover any predicate whatsoever, can be overcome. Still, the proposal would over-generalize, the worry has it, by covering predicates for artifactual, social, or evaluative properties, such as (...) 'is a knife,' 'is a bachelor,' or 'is funny.' In defense, it is argued that rigidity for predicates as characterized plays the appropriate theoretical role, and that the contention that "unnatural" properties are not to be rigidly signified is ungrounded. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a new nonconceptual reading of the B-Deduction. As Hanna correctly remarks :399–415, 2011: 405), the word “cognition” has in both editions of the first Critique a wide sense, meaning nonconceptual cognition, and a narrow meaning, in Kant’s own words “an objective perception”. To be sure, Kant assumes the first meaning to account for why the Deduction is unavoidable. And if we take this meaning as a premise of the B-Deduction, then there is a gap in (...) the argument since the categories are certainly not conditions for non-conceptual cognition. Still, I believe it is not this wide meaning but rather the narrow one that figures in any premise of the B-Deduction. Thus, in the reading that I am proposing, categories are not conditions for representing something, or even conditions for representing something objectively. Instead, they are conditions for the recognition that what we represent through the senses exists mind-independently. In the first step of the B-Deduction, this cognition in the narrow sense takes the form of the propositional thinking that the nonconceptually represented object of the sensible intuition exists objectively. In contrast, in the second step of the B-Deduction, this cognition in the narrow sense takes the form of the apprehension of what our human senses represent nonconceptually as existing objectively. (shrink)

Grammatical gender processing during language production has classically been studied using the so-called picture-word interference (PWI) task. In this procedure, participants are presented with pictures they must name using target nouns while ignoring superimposed written distractor nouns. Variations in response times are expected depending on the congruency between the gender values of targets and distractors. However, there have been disparate results in terms of the mandatory character of an agreement context to observe competitive gender effects and the interpretation of the (...) direction of these effects in Romance languages, this probably due to uncontrolled variables such as animacy. In the present study, we conducted two PWI experiments with European Portuguese speakers who were asked to produce bare nouns. The percentage of animate targets within the list was manipulated: 0, 25, 50, and 100%. A gender congruency effect was found restricted to the 0% list (all targets were inanimate). Results support the selection of gender in transparent languages in the absence of an agreement context, as predicted by the Gender Acquisition and Processing (GAP) hypothesis (Sá-Leite et al.,2019), and are interpreted through the attentional mechanisms involved in the PWI paradigm, in which the processing of animate targets would be favored to the detriment of distractors due to biological relevance and semantic prioritization. (shrink)

Study on Brahmasūtrārthadarśinī, a commentary by Ananta Dāmodara Āṭhavale on Brahmasūtra by Bādarāyaṇa, work on Vedanta philosophy.

Study on Brahmasūtrārthadarśinī, a commentary by Ananta Dāmodara Āṭhavale on Brahmasūtra by Bādarāyaṇa, work on Vedanta philosophy.