The Irish poet W. B. Yeats once wrote, with great sapience and perception: Nor dread, nor hope attend A dying animal; A man awaits his end Dreading and hoping all. That death has ever been a problem to man is attested as far back as we can trace our species in the archaeological record—indeed, it seems to have been a problem even for that immediate precursor of homo sapiens, the so-called Neanderthal Man; for he buried his dead.

G Reddiford; Sociology, Psychology and the Study of Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 3, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 81–103, https://doi.org.

What Is a Person: Untapped Insights from Africa, a new book by Nancy Jecker and Caesar Atuire, offers an appealing and fresh perspective into ongoing debates surrounding personhood.1 The bioethics literature has, largely, drawn from Western/global North thought or (as arguably with the case of principlism) amalgamations of those traditions.2 3 This leaves substantial room for enriching current debates through insights from and engagement with understudied traditions. Just such an approach is taken by Jecker and Atuire, who in particular bring (...) African philosophical theories of personhood into dialogue with Western ones. Their critical appraisal ably identifies flaws with a range of theories across different traditions, and their book attempts to put forward a new theory of personhood that aims to draw from the best and discard the worst of those theories: Emergent Personhood. The book’s early sections indeed are very useful in terms of critical comparative analysis, resulting in insights such as the finding that both traditional African and traditional Western (or more specifically, Greco-Roman) thought actually overlap in terms of how personhood is conceptualised: extrinsic, earned, scalar and changing. Modern Western thought, though, eschewed those concepts first through the introduction of Christian moral equality, then Enlightenment systematic secular theories like deontology and utilitarianism that claim non-theological basis for such moral personhood. By contrast, the contemporary African theories Jecker and Atuire cite largely align with the traditional, relational accounts. So does their theory of Emergent Personhood succeed where African and Western thought have fallen short? While the theory’s contours are promising, several aspects are in need of further development. In this brief commentary, I will highlight three somewhat inter-related issues: (1) The criteria by which theories of personhood are evaluated are never given firm normative justification; (2) The normative force of Emergent Personhood’s relational foundations are not explicated; …. (shrink)

In this unique work, Professor G.A. Powell Jr. writes: "Thinkers are different from writers—writers are prostitutes. Thinkers desire to be prostitutes." Daily Conversations with My Interloper is first and foremost a celebration of the narrative paradigm, its evolution, latitude of expression, and radical subjectivity in the forms of aphorisms and feuilletons. Following in the literary tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Albert Camus, John Cage, Emile Cioran, and Susan Sontag, et al., the text chronicles Professor Powell's reflections about the ongoing metamorphoses (...) of cultures, influential literary figures, travel, film, history, ennui, quotidian, and the mundane day-to-day existence in which all people participate. Daily Conversations with my Interloper, is a provocative read for the public and private intellectual interested in a panoply of ideas. (shrink)

This study, originally published in 1959, traces the origin of Buddhism in Brahmanism, and fixes its relationship to Hinduism, describing and stressing the basic importance of Buddhist contemplation. The first half of the book introduces the very heart of Buddhism, while the second part presents the Teaching itself, as handed down in the canonical writings of the ancient East.

For the past two decades, my research has primarily focused on two interrelated questions: 1)What do the data from mysticism and non-ordinary states of consciousness imply about the nature of consciousness understood broadly? 2) In what ways does a careful examination of the nature of consciousness illuminate the processes that undergird mysticism and non-ordinary states of consciousness? In my attempts to offer coherent, cogent, and compelling answers to these questions, I have been helped, immeasurably, by the work of William James (...) and Henri Bergson. I have already written a book on each figure,1 so I am keenly aware that this essay will be unable to encapsulate, even partially, the richness and depth of their respective perspectives on this provocative subject matter. Nonetheless, I am delighted to have been given the opportunity to underscore some of the insights offered by James and Bergson that over the years have continued to inspire me. (shrink)

In the case of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) imaging, image processing is crucial. In the medical industry, MRI images are commonly used to analyze and diagnose tumor growth in the body. A number of successful brain tumor identification and classification procedures have been developed by various experts. Existing approaches face a number of obstacles, including detection time, accuracy, and tumor size. Early detection of brain tumors improves options for treatment and patient survival rates. Manually segmenting brain tumors from a significant (...) number of MRI data for brain tumor diagnosis is a tough and time-consuming task. Automatic image segmentation of brain tumors is required. The objective of this study is to evaluate the degree of accuracy and simplify the medical picture segmentation procedure used to identify the type of brain tumor from MRI results. Additionally, this work suggests a novel method for identifying brain malignancies utilizing the Bagging Ensemble with K-Nearest Neighbor (BKNN) in order to raise the KNN’s accuracy and quality rate. For image segmentation, a U-Net architecture is utilized first, followed by a bagging-based k-NN prediction algorithm for classification. The goal of employing U-Net is to improve the accuracy and uniformity of parameter distribution in the layers. Each decision tree is fitted on a little different training dataset during classification, and the bagged decision trees are effective since each tree has minor differences and generates slightly different skilled predictions. The overall classification accuracy was up to 97.7 percent, confirming the efficiency of the suggested strategy for distinguishing normal and pathological tissues from brain MR images; this is greater than the methods that are already in use. (shrink)