These are the pictures you'll never see in Nike ads or car ads or perfume ads. These are the majority of Americans, picking up their broken identities and trying to scrape together a living, a culture, an identity, a life. Most of the images we see are advertisements, trying to sell us a euphoria and prestige we could never achieve. We look around us and are disappointed, we struggle but don't measure up. These photos show us--real and valuable--just as we (...) are. (shrink)

“Looking for Asian America shows real people engaged in the full range of human activity. This is no small accomplishment for the photographer or his subjects. For Asian Americans it is extraordinary to be merely ordinary. To others, even if not to themselves, Asian Americans appear to be contradictions of identity—a Chinese-Yankee is a knockoff.” —Frank H. Wu, from the Foreword In search of contemporary Asian America, celebrated photographer Wing Young Huie—the only member of his family not born in (...) China—traveled with his wife Tara through nearly forty states to explore and document the funny, touching, and sometimes strange intersection of Asian American and American cultures. Looking for Asian America illustrates their rich and surprising journey across the United States. Through Huie’s eyes, keenly aware of his own Midwestern roots and perspective, we witness such images as a Vietnamese Elvis, Miss Congeniality on her cell phone in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a Hmong street sign in rural North Carolina, a meditating Falun Gong protestor in Washington, D.C., a bubble tea Valley Girl, and a Chinese theme park in Orlando. Huie’s camera captures ABCs, FOAs, and a self-described “redneck” Chinese restaurant owner near the Okefenokee Swamp. Taken together the photographs reveal a complex portrait of the U.S. cultural landscape, and their dignified elegance invites a closer, deeper look. Accompanied by the personal reflections of both Wing and Tara Huie, the nearly one hundred spectacular photos tell a story that both mirrors and contradicts stereotypes of Asian Americans, ultimately questioning what it means to be ethnic and American in the twenty-first century. Wing Young Huie has received widespread acclaim for his works, including Lake Street USA, documenting the cultural landscape of his native Minnesota. He is a recipient of a Bush Artist Fellowship and two-time recipient of the McKnight Photography Fellowship. He lives in Minneapolis. Frank H. Wu is dean of Wayne State University Law School and the author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White. Anita Gonzalez teaches in the Master of Liberal Studies Program at the University of Minnesota. (shrink)

Frogtown is a discerning portrait of an ethnically mixed neighbourhood that lies within the shadow of the Minnesota State Capital near downtown St. Paul. Wing Young Huie combines 130 compelling black-and-white photographs, some 50 quotes from talks with residents, and his own commentary to produce a powerful depiction of life on Frogtown's streets and front porches, in its kitchens and backyards, shops and churches. The images are documentary in nature, but the perspective is that of an artist who leaves (...) meanings open to interpretation. Drawn to Frogtown by his own abiding curiosity, Huie spent two years photographing and getting to know its people -- working class whites, Southeast Asian immigrants, African Americans, American Indians, and Latinos. These exquisitely rendered images of Frogtown show the multiple realities that make up a dynamic urban neighbourhood. At the same time, they reflect the changing faces of American cities. (shrink)

A behind-the-scenes look at the most significant art exhibit of the year.

Some philosophers have thought that life could only be meaningful if there is no God. For Sartre and Nagel, for example, a God of the traditional classical theistic sort would constrain our powers of self-creative autonomy in ways that would severely detract from the meaning of our lives, possibly even evacuate our lives of all meaning. Some philosophers, by contrast, have thought that life could only be meaningful if there is a God. God and the Meanings of Life is interested (...) in exploring the truth in both these schools of thought, seeking to discover what God could and couldn't do to make life meaningful (as well as what he would and wouldn't do). Mawson espouses a version of the 'amalgam' or 'pluralism' thesis about the issue of life's meaning – in essence, that there are a number of different legitimate meanings of 'meaning' (and indeed 'life') in the question of life's meaning. According to Mawson, God, were he to exist, would help make life meaningful in some of these senses and hinder in some others. He argues that whilst there could be meaning in a Godless universe, there could be other sorts of meaning in a Godly one and that these would be deeper. (shrink)

T. A. Cavanaugh's Hippocrates' Oath and Asclepius' Snake: The Birth of the Medical Profession articulates the Oath as establishing the medical profession's unique internal medical ethic - in its most basic and least controvertible form, this ethic mandates that physicians help and not harm the sick. Relying on Greek myth, drama, and medical experience (e.g., homeopathy), the book shows how this medical ethic arose from reflection on the most vexing medical-ethical problem -- injury caused by a physician -- and argues (...) that deliberate iatrogenic harm, especially the harm of a doctor choosing to kill (physician assisted suicide, euthanasia, abortion, and involvement in capital punishment), amounts to an abandonment of medicine as an exclusively therapeutic profession. The book argues that medicine as a profession necessarily involves stating before others what one stands for: the good one seeks and the bad one seeks to avoid on behalf of the sick, and rejects the view that medicine is purely a technique lacking its own unique internal ethic. It concludes noting that medical promising (as found in the White Coat Ceremony through which U. S. medical students matriculate) implicates medical autonomy which in turn merits respect, including honoring professional conscientious objections. (shrink)

Previous studies have examined the outcome evaluation related to the self and other, and recent research has explored the outcome evaluation of the self and other with pro-social implications. However, the evaluation processing of outcomes in the group in need remains unclear. This study has examined the neural mechanisms of evaluative processing by gambling for the self and charity, respectively. At the behavioral level, when participants make decisions for themselves, they made riskier decisions following the gain than loss in small (...) outcomes and engage in more risky behaviors following the loss than gain in large outcomes. However, magnitude and valence did not affect the next risky behavior when participants made decisions for the charity. At the neurophysiological level, the results found that the FRN was larger for the charity outcome than for the self-outcome. For FRN, the valence difference of small outcomes was smaller than that of large outcomes. The P3 response was larger for the self-outcome than for the charity outcome. Meanwhile, compared with the small outcome, the self-charity discrepancies have a significant difference in large outcomes. In addition, the FRN amplitude for self in large outcomes was negatively correlated with the upcoming risky choices, regardless of outcome valence. The behavioral results suggest that people are more likely to optimize strategies for themselves than for the charity. The ERP findings indicated that people focus more on charity outcome than self-outcome in the early stage. In the middle and late stages, people turn attention to their outcomes, and the difference between self’s and charity’s outcome varies with the magnitude. Specifically, it is only in large outcomes that people engage more emotional attention or motivation in their outcomes, but self and charity outcomes had a similar emotional engagement in small outcomes. (shrink)

How do we think about animals? How do we decide what they deserve and how we ought to treat them? Subhuman takes an interdisciplinary approach to these questions, drawing from research in philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, law, history, sociology, economics, and anthropology. Subhuman argues that our attitudes to nonhuman animals, both positive and negative, largely arise from our need to compare ourselves to them.

Exegesis, with text, on the Nyāyasūtra of Gautama, basic aphoristic text of Nyāya.

Kit Fine (2000) breaks with tradition, arguing that, pace Russell (e.g., 1903: 228), relations have neither directions nor converses. He considers two ways to conceive of these new "neutral" relations, positionalism and anti-positionalism, and argues that the latter should be preferred to the former. Cody Gilmore (2013) argues for a generalization of positionalism, slot theory, the view that a property or relation is n-adic if and only if there are exactly n slots in it, and (very roughly) that each slot (...) may be occupied by at most one entity. Slot theory (and with it, positionalism) bears the full brunt of Fine's (2000) symmetric completions and conflicting adicities problems. I fully develop an alternative, plural slot theory (or pocket theory), which avoids these problems, key elements of which are first considered by Yi (1999: 168 ff.). Like the slot theorist, the pocket theorist posits entities (pockets) in properties and relations that can be occupied. But unlike the slot theorist, the pocket theorist denies that at most one entity can occupy any one of them. As a result, she must also deny that the adicity of a property or relation is equal to the number of occupiable entities in it. By abandoning these theses, however, the pocket theorist is able to avoid Fine's problems, resulting in a stronger theory about the internal structure of properties and relations. Pocket theory also avoids a serious drawback of anti-positionalism. (shrink)

_Purpose._ This paper aims to investigate the phenomenon of a human being within the Confucian tradition as well as its interpretations from intercultural perspective. _Theoretical basis._ One of the ways to understand the deepest level of the intercultural dialogue is to reveal the interpretations of a human being in philosophical traditions, since they refer to the formation of personality and identity within a given culture including interpersonal, intergroup, and intercultural relations. Humanism based on the unity of Human and Heaven runs (...) like a red thread through the philosophical teachings of Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Zhu Xi, Wang Yangming defining the ideas of human nature, his/her duties, his/her place and roles in society that shaped the Chinese mentality. _Originality._ Quite often, Chinese concepts (for example, human dignity beyond the ideas of democracy and mass political participation, guanxi, mianzi) are incomprehensible to the representatives of the Western civilization, which leads to the challenges in intercultural communication. The interpretation of these ideas in the context of Confucianism allows to understand them from the perspective of Others and expand the set of patterns of cultural perception. This ultimately leads to the awareness that there are many social, political, cultural realities, which we perceive through the lens of our own concepts and attitudes. The participants of an intercultural dialogue realize that each of them has a unique experience, own way of posing a problem and resolving it, and no one is better or worse. _Conclusions._ Confucian philosophy shaped the worldview of Chinese people, defined values, goals, meanings, attitudes, communication models, which affected all spheres of Chinese life and culture. The study of the philosophical heritage of the great Chinese civilization enhances the cultural competence of the intercultural communicators and expands the field of dialogue to the level of global communication. (shrink)

Commentary on Hetvābhāsasāmānyanirukti, portion of Tattvacintāmaṇi of Gaṅgeśa, dealing with the definition of fallacies middle term in Navya Nyāya philosophy.

This robust, clear, and well-researched textbook for classes in logic introduces students to both formal logic and to the virtues of intellectual inquiry. Part 1 challenges students to develop the analytical skills of deductive and inductive reasoning, showing them how to identify and evaluate arguments. Part 2 helps students develop the intellectual virtues of the wise inquirer. The book includes helpful pedagogical features such as practice exercises and a concluding summary with definitions of key concepts for each chapter. Resources for (...) professors and students are available through Baker Academic's Textbook eSources. (shrink)

Knowledge, theory of; Islamic philosophy; philosophy, Arab; interpretation and construction.

Logic; Islamic philosophy; Islam--doctrines.

This book includes critical editions, Turkish translations and short studies of two treatises by Taşköprüzade, one of the most important Ottoman philosophers of the sixteenth century.

This book includes a critical edition and a Turkish translation and a study of an Arabic treatise by Taşköprüzade, one of the most important Ottoman philosophers of the sixteenth century.

Modernism; influence; social and economic aspects; Arab countries; 21st century.

Thinking about Animals in the Age of the Anthropocene makes connections between the Anthropocene discourse and human-animal studies, thus facilitating further interdisciplinary work on the topic of animals in the Anthropocene.

Entry on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A summary of the literature on whether externalism about thought content precludes non-empirical knowledge of one's own thoughts.

From the time of Locke, discussions of personal identity have often ignored the question of our basic metaphysical nature: whether we human people are biological organisms, spatial or temporal parts of organisms, bundles of perceptions, or what have you. The result of this neglect has been centuries of wild proposals and clashing intuitions. What Are We? is the first general study of this important question. It beings by explaining what the question means and how it differs from others, such as (...) questions of personal identity and the mind-body problem. It then examines in some depth the main possible accounts of our metaphysical nature, detailing both their theoretical virtues and the often grave difficulties they face. The book does not endorse any particular account of what we are, but argues that the matter turns on more general issues in the ontology of material things. If composition is universal--if any material things whatever make up something bigger--then we are temporal parts of organisms. If things never compose anything bigger, so that there are only mereological simples, then we too are simples--perhaps the immaterial substances of Descartes--or else we do not exist at all (a view Olson takes very seriously). The intermediate view that some things compose bigger things and others do not leads almost inevitably to the conclusion that we are organisms. So we can discover what we are by working out when composition occurs. (shrink)

Arabic literature; history and criticism.

In this new explanationist account of epistemic justification, Poston argues that the explanatory virtues provide all the materials necessary for a plausible account of justified belief. There are no purely autonomous reasons. Rather reasons occur only within an explanatory coherent set of beliefs.

Can an ugly experiment be a good experiment? Philosophers have identified many beautiful experiments and explored ways in which their beauty might be connected to their epistemic value. In contrast, the present chapter seeks out (and celebrates) ugly experiments. Among the ugliest are those being designed by AI algorithms. Interestingly, in the contexts where such experiments tend to be deployed, low aesthetic value correlates with high epistemic value. In other words, ugly experiments can be good. Given this, we should conclude (...) that beauty is not generally necessary or sufficient for epistemic value, and increasing beauty will not generally tend to increase epistemic value. (shrink)