The Korean Buddhist Empire: A Transnational History, 1910–1945 by Hwansoo Ilmee Kim. Harvard University Asia Center, 2019. 358pp. HB. $45.00, ISBN-13: 9780674987197.

Nietzsche’s Eternal Return (ER) is interpreted in many ways, including by him. I present it as a hermeneutic device, a way of reading texts, especially those whose influence threatens one’s authorial autonomy and/or are later difficult to take ownership of due to philosophical growth. It returns past texts with new interpretations, similar to the way ER leads one to embrace one’s past without changing anything, which radically changes everything from a resented painful burden into a celebrated enhancement of freedom and (...) power. I show how he could have derived the idea from Schopenhauer, his own embarrassing past, by performing the technique on Schopenhauer. The same attitude toward past texts of recreating them according to one’s present interests and concerns simultaneously releases one’s present texts for future readers to impose their readings onto them, just as Zarathustra tells his followers not to follow him. Heidegger takes the idea up in a far more nuanced account than he is usually given credit for and applies it, among other places, to the history of philosophy. All philosophers say the same as it keeps returning. Derrida then recreates this as iterability, the deconstruction of the no/change dichotomy that Nietzsche began. (shrink)

Guided by principles of life history strategy development, this study tested the hypothesis that sexual precocity and violence are influenced by sensitivities to local environmental conditions. Two models of strategy development were compared: The first is based on indirect perception of ecological cues through family disruption and the second is based on both direct and indirect perception of ecological stressors. Results showed a moderate correlation between rates of violence and sexual precocity (r = 0.59). Although a model incorporating direct and (...) indirect effects provided a better fit than one based on family mediation alone, significant improvements were made by linking some ecological factors directly to behavior independently of strategy development. The models support the contention that violence and teenage pregnancy are part of an ecologically determined pattern of strategy development and suggest that while the family unit is critical in affecting behavior, individuals’ direct experiences of the environment are also important. (shrink)

This is a linguistic study of two primary metaphors with the same target-domain concept, “IMPORTANCE IS SIZE” and “IMPORTANCE IS WEIGHT,” in English and Chinese. It is suggested that these two primary metaphors are derived from the OBJECT image schema, abstracted from our embodied, sensorimotor experience, especially our visual and tactile perception, in dealing with physical objects in everyday life. The study focuses on size and weight adjectives in both languages and on linguistic evidence in two areas: their lexicalizations of (...) the importance senses as found in the dictionaries, and their roles in the instantiation of the two primary metaphors in natural discourse as found in the corpora. Our further analysis also shows that the primary metaphors can be manifested without explicit use of size and weight words when relevant conceptual frames in the source, evoked by other words or images, are mapped onto the target domain, thus activating the relevant region of our encyclopedic knowledge and triggering off the primary metaphors in our conceptual system. We also construct a hypothetical mapping scheme for primary metaphors based on the OBJECT image schema, in which OBJECT is mapped onto its target via three of its fundamental dimensions: SIZE, WEIGHT, and SOLIDITY. It is hoped that this mapping scheme will benefit future comparative studies of primary metaphors across languages and cultures in a more systematic way. (shrink)

Popper Proposed the criterion of falsifiability as a solution to the problem of demarcation i.e. of distinguishing science from pseudo-science and not, as many of his contemporaries in the Vienna Circle mistook it to be, a solution to the quite different problem with which they themselves were preoccupied, viz. of providing a criterion of meaning to distinguish the meaningful from the meaningless. While the positivists were concerned to damn metaphysics and exalt science, by identifying the empirically verifiable with the meaningful, (...) Popper was concerned to separate science from scientism, to damn astrology and to extol astronomy. In other words his preoccupation belongs not to the philosophy of language but to the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Here I wish to report on developments on three fronts concerning ‘religion’ in expanding global debates about the ‘the end of the world’ and ‘the ways we know it’, concerning: the word ‘religion’ itself, as half of the religion-science binary, and its marginalization–or complete absence–in the construction of the modern scholarly disciplines and university departments, and influencing of ‘modern’ culture and politics; proliferating doubts about the positivist epistemology of modern ‘science’; and the growing sense that we are caught up in (...) epochal transitions, in which we are significant actors, and that, far beyond what we can know ‘scientifically’, our responses involve leaps of hope and faith which contribute to tipping the balance among divergent possible futures. (shrink)

Given that the benefits of Corporate Political Activity (CPA) are usually granted in the form of favorable industry regulation that benefits all industry participants rather than a single firm, small politically inactive firms are often able to take advantage of the benefits from CPA without investing in them. We argue that the free‐riding problem is context specific. Situations of extreme uncertainty create institutional voids that enable individual firms to more fully appropriate the returns from their CPA. In this paper, we (...) examine the influence that CPA had on the U.S. government’s disbursements of TARP funding in 2008. We find that politically active firms were able to avoid the free‐rider problem by obtaining more instances of TARP funding when compared to firms that were not politically active. In addition to being more likely to receive TARP funds, politically active firms received larger amounts of TARP funding than those firms who were not politically active. (shrink)

Lymphangiogenesis is an important developmental process that is critical to regulation of fluid homeostasis, immune surveillance and response as well as pathogenesis of a number of diseases, among them cancer, inflammation, and heart failure. Specification, formation, and maturation of lymphatic blood vessels involves an interplay between a series of events orchestrated by various transcription factors that determine expression of key genes involved in lymphangiogenesis. These are traditionally thought to be under control of several key growth factors including vascular growth factor‐C (...) (VEGF‐C) and fibroblast growth factors (FGFs). Recent insights into VEGF and FGF signaling point to their role in control of endothelial metabolic processes such as glycolysis and fatty acid oxidation that, in turn, play a major role in regulation of lymphangiogenesis. These advances have significantly increased our understanding of lymphatic biology and opened new therapeutic vistas. Here we review our current understanding of metabolic controls in the lymphatic vasculature. (shrink)

This essay is a reflection on the ways we understand East Asia, as well as how East Asia is related to our knowledge construction. In spite of the personal tone, which I use strategically to formulate arguments in a carefully designed narrative flow, the article remains critical throughout and its conclusion is clear: exploration of the essence of East Asian civilization can constitute a meaningful effort to reevaluate and even restructure our current world of knowledge.

In this summary of my recent book , I outline a general theoretical approach for the psychology of religion and develop one component of it in detail. First I review arguments and research demonstrating the utility of attachment theory for understanding many aspects of religious belief and behavior, particularly within modern Christianity. I then introduce evolutionary psychology as a general paradigm for psychology and the social sciences, arguing that religion is not an adaptation in the evolutionary sense but rather a (...) byproduct of numerous psychological systems that evolved for other adaptive purposes, of which the attachment system is just one example. I conclude by summarizing numerous advantages of this framework over other extant approaches to the psychology of religion. (shrink)

African Philosophy is a collection of previously unpublished essays that address epistemological and metaphysical concerns that have emerged from the sub-Saharan regions of Africa. The primary focus of the book is on traditional African conceptions of mind, person, personal identity, truth, knowledge, understanding, objectivity, and reality. The collection also discusses traditional African conceptions of causation, destiny, and free will.

Atran & Norenzayan (A&N) are correct that religion is an evolutionary by-product, not an adaptation, but they do not go far enough. Once supernatural beliefs are enabled by processes they describe, numerous social-cognitive mechanisms related to attachment, social exchange, coalitional psychology, status and dominance, and kinship are crucial for explaining the specific forms religion takes and individual and cultural differences therein.

Cool Characters tells the story of American political irony from World War II to the present: how irony came to seem politically subversive for American countercultural rebels; how mainstream culture allegedly co-opted countercultural irony; how irony became part of major critical theories of postmodernism; and how -- starting in the late 1980s -- innovative writers developed an idea of "postirony" with the hope of overcoming the political limitations of postmodern irony. To chart the shift from irony to postirony, and show (...) what relationship culture has to politics, the book offers intensive analyses of important American countercultural figures: the hipster, the punk, a figure the author calls "the believer," the coolhunter, and the occupier; and new interpretations of important works by Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Michael Muhammad Knight, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Alex Shakar, William Gibson, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Lethem, and Rachel Kushner."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Many Bayesians such as White and Silins have argued that Moorean reasoning is defective because it is a case where probabilistic support fails to transmit across the relevant entailment. In this paper, I argue against their claim. On the Bayesian argument, a skeptical hypothesis is that you are a brain in a vat that appears to have hands. To disclose the defect in Moorean reasoning, the Bayesian argument is supposed to show that its appearing to you as if you have (...) hands does not increase the probability of a non-skeptical hypothesis such that you are not a brain in a vat. But what their argument really shows is rather a trivial fact that acquiring theses handlike experiences eliminates the possibility of not having these experiences, and so your having these experiences lowers the probability of the disjunctive claim that you are not a brain in a vat or it does not appear as if you have hands. Along these lines, I argue that what the Bayesian proof establishes has nothing to do with the defect in Moorean reasoning. (shrink)

This essay discusses how ontological commitments within modern Western culture are no less problematic than those within traditional African cultures. Each posits unobservable entities to explain the experiential world, and neither has ready access to those posits held as grounding or as otherwise determining what is experienced. It looks at the conceptions of persons in Western and African traditions and suggests that each tradition can learn from the other.

Robert C. Scharff has written what we might call, after Nietzsche, a timely meditation. It is timely in that it is aimed at our particular time , and it is a meditation on timeliness, on what it means to do philosophy within time and history . These two topics meet in his depiction of our time as one that is either not fully aware of or that actively suppresses its own timeliness, its own determination by its time and historical context, (...) due largely to analytic philosophy’s remaining caught in the vestigial grips of positivism and the dominance of science. We may be “After Positivism,” but we are not wholly past positivism. Scharff considers this ahistorical approach untenable because, as he informs us in the book’s second sentence, all meditations are timely: time and historical context inescapably determine how and what we meditate on, especially the attempts to escape them.Scharff identifies our place in history as “after posi .. (shrink)

The odyssey of twentieth-century philosophy has produced a number of ventures to find a way between the Scylla of continental and Charybdis of analytic philosophy. The pairing of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, arguably the greatest figures of each tradition, has been a particularly strong siren song to many on this quest, who have approached it from different angles.Egan uses Heidegger's explicit discussion of authenticity in his early work to bring out a similar idea implicit in Wittgenstein's later. Given their many parallels, (...) Egan reasons, chances are good that an idea so central to the former could be found in the latter, were one to look at it in the right way. Thus, Egan uses Being and Time to enter previously... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Literary Common GroundLee Rust BrownLet me make note of a few things that have occurred to me during this conference. Some of these will be observations; some will be practical inferences. One of them, though, involves the crossing of an expectation, or maybe a fear, I had brought with me to Minneapolis. Since this has to do with the whole tone of the conference, we might as well (...) begin with it.It, of course, was the question of the polemical nature of this gathering. Would this conference be diagnostic and denunciatory in nature, or would it seek to start something truly new? Certainly we all feel the need of something new—not new, either, in the sense that movements or ideological positions claim to be new, but in the sense of a fresh gathering of common attention in the place where literature is, the place where each of us who loves literature already goes alone. This would be a possibility for something original rather than just another novelty—which makes the question of polemics all the more urgent. An association that founded itself in complaint would be only one more identity-group making a virtue out of its grudge. And the grudge, in that case, would have been a sad reflex of feeling superseded and powerless.But where have the polemics against current orthodoxies been? I am delighted not to have heard them in any strenuous capacity. Even their relative absence hasn’t commanded any extended attention, and that may be an even more telling point. I take this to be partly the result of foresight and good sense. But the clean air here has been more than a reward for our mutual constraint. Instead, it seems evidence of the fact [End Page 193] that, when literature occupies our attention, there is no need for self-defense. Justice, or justification, happens by itself when we “do our own work,” as Socrates recommended.What is our own work, then? This association has made a point, it seems, of declining to prescribe what it should be. The only thing we are absolutely sure of is that its subject is literature, and that its standards and rewards should be of a literary nature. From there the field opens up—and this conference has succeeded in keeping it open in some very concrete ways.Let’s think briefly about the two panels we attended yesterday. The morning panel on “Intellectual Craftsmanship” seemed unified in its concern with the disciplined ways by which we commit ourselves to literary experience. Literature itself, as well as what we do with it, teaches us this discipline, which is “aesthetic” in every sense of that word. Roger Shattuck set the tone when he described the discipline of reading as an issue of preparation and assimilation on the one hand, and as a kind of complete perceptual openness on the other. Such openness, in our normal experience, allows us to be surprised, to see actual things, perhaps, instead of their institutional categories. But literature also requires that we craft our receptivity. The surprises we prepare ourselves to undergo are achieved breakthroughs, which makes them no less unpredictable but all the more deeply affecting.Criticism cultivates such surprising experience. (I think experience is the crucial word, by the way, since everyone on that first panel seemed to be devoted to a kind of free empiricism.) The spectacular moments of visionary power that Robert Alter isolated in Dickens are places that startle and disturb us—and we track our own surprise, and intensify it, when we look closely at how those dark places of power emerge from Dickens’s refiguring of a world where darkness otherwise tends toward an entirely unredeemable opacity. We have to read “synesthetically,” as Shattuck says, “with both eyes open,” to let ourselves be for a moment blinded by such literary places.Once again, the discipline of reading—devotedly and resistantly—frees us for the achieved experience. Slowing down, in Sven Birkerts’s sense of “retardation and deceleration,” is precisely a matter of stepping into a field of experience shaped (or, in an auditory sense, fostered and conserved) by the special demands of literature. It... (shrink)

Although there are compelling reasons for believing otherwise, compassion cannot provide a basis for grounding a viable theory of civil and political society. Firstly, it is often irrational or personally irresponsible to be compassionate. Secondly, relations based on compassion do not require characteristics that are essential for a viable civil and political society. Thirdly, the unpredictable consequences of compassion are such that compassion alone is not sufficient for grounding a viable civil and political society. Finally, obligating people to be compassionate (...) is antithetical to what is required for being compassionate. (shrink)

In most general terms, my paper is about the mixture of agendas in the recording industry, where documentation, with its apparently educational implications, becomes difficult to distinguish from a range of distinct, even opposed, goals—which I group under the heading "fabrication." After a few historical remarks, I develop the concept of what I call works of phonography —that is, sound-constructs created by the use of recording machinery. I detail their ontological characteristics, as contrasted the features of ordinary musical works. WPs (...) are—I claim—replete. They are autographic. And they are phono-accessible—that is, accessible only through playbacks of authentic instances of their record artifacts, e.g., cassette tapes, CDs, etc. I then turn to Theodore Gracyk's recent study of rock music, arguing that his account is formally similar to my account of WPs. This raises the question of whether there be counter-examples to Gracyk's account—particularly of the sort that show his view to be too broad. I bring this to a focus finally by a comparison of rock recordings with jazz recordings—two classes that Gracyk tries to keep ontologically distinct. I argue that many classic jazz recordings are artifacts of the recording studio, no less than those Gracyk identifies as pure cases of rock music. In the same vein, I argue that, once recorded, the improvisational music of jazz is deformed—indeed, that it acquires features of WPs. This has the further implication that Gracyk cannot preserve his sharp distinction between rock and jazz records that he want's to maintain. (shrink)

This paper approaches the ‘Drexler-Smalley’ debate on nanotechnology from a neglected angle – the common denominator of ‘the frontier’ as a metaphor for scientific exploration. For Bensaude-Vincent, the debate exemplifies the clash of ‘two cultures’ – the ‘artificialist’ and biomimetic’ schools. For us, the portrayal of nanosphere as ‘new frontier’ stymies the prospect of genuine inter-cultural debate on the direction of molecular engineering. Drawing on Brandon, the‘dominium’ impulse of European imperialism is contrasted to the ‘communitas’ tradition of Native America. Proposing (...) a single label – hybridist – for both schools, we juxtapose to this approach the holistic disposition of indigenous North American science. (shrink)

This paper approaches the ‘Drexler-Smalley’ debate on nanotechnology from a neglected angle – the common denominator of ‘the frontier’ as a metaphor for scientific exploration. For Bensaude-Vincent, the debate exemplifies the clash of ‘two cultures’ – the ‘artificialist’ and biomimetic’ schools. For us, the portrayal of nanosphere as ‘new frontier’ stymies the prospect of genuine inter-cultural debate on the direction of molecular engineering. Drawing on Brandon, the‘dominium’ impulse of European imperialism is contrasted to the ‘communitas’ tradition of Native America. Proposing (...) a single label – hybridist – for both schools, we juxtapose to this approach the holistic disposition of indigenous North American science. (shrink)

Medical education provides many examples of the development of functional features, but as a response to deliberate instruction. These features require so much specificity and context sensitivity that they seem likely to require the development of new categories of appearances rather than just reweighting old features. A suggested implication is that feature development may help to explain the problematic noticing of features in diagnosis.

Research has found many positive benefits to person‐organization (PO) fit, for both individuals and the organization. However, PO misfit has received far less attention in the literature. In this article, we look specifically at PO misfit caused by the differing political values and beliefs of the CEO and employee. We argue that CEO activism influences employee perceptions of ideological misfit (IM), whereby differing political beliefs between employees and their activist CEO can impact workplace outcomes. We consider how peer group reactions, (...) ethical climate, external needs fulfillment, and moral identity serve as boundary conditions for perceptions of PO misfit and related organizational outcomes. We also examine antecedents of CEO activism. Drawing on academic literature from both the micro and macro perspectives of management research, we introduce a conceptual model and discuss implications for the firm and its employees. (shrink)

The Unity of Science movement is directed primarily toward the further advancement of science, but a second phase is entered when the assessment of its significance for various aspects of civilization is undertaken. In this second phase would fall investigations of the utility of its resources in relation to educational problems.

Debate over the curricula of Black colleges and universities dates back to before the turn of the century and involved such noted Black leaders as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. The 1890 Land-Grant Colleges eventually established in 17 southern and border states were created to provide institutions for the teaching of the agricultural and mechanical arts to African-Americans. However, due to their being chronically underfunded and understaffed during the early decades of their existence, they focused mainly on teacher training (...) and to a large extent became state normal schools or teacher colleges for Blacks. I argue that the improvements in public education of southern Blacks at the primary and secondary levels during the 1920s and 1930s induced many graduates of the 1890 institutions to become teachers. At the same time the growing numbers and higher quality of these individuals lead to an increase in the returns to time spent in school and induced increasing numbers of Black parents to send their children to school. During the 1930s expenditures per pupil in Black public schools increased, as did the real wages of Black teachers, while average classroom size fell. At the same time both literacy and school attendance of southern Blacks rose. In no small part these changes were due to 1890 colleges and their students. (shrink)