Background: Meditation is gaining recognition as a tool to impact health and well-being. Samyama is an 8-day intensive residential meditation experience conducted by Isha Foundation requiring several months of extensive preparation and vegan diet. The health effects of Samyama have not been previously studied. The objective was to assess physical and emotional well-being before and after Samyama participation by evaluating psychological surveys and objective health biomarkers.Methods: This was an observational study of 632 adults before and after the Isha Samyama retreat. (...) All participants were invited to complete surveys. Controls included household significant others. Surveys were completed at baseline, just before Samyama, immediately after Samyama, and 3 months later to assess anxiety, depression, mindfulness, joy, vitality, and resilience through validated psychometric scales. Voluntary blood sampling for biomarker analysis was done to assess hemoglobin, HbA1c, lipid profile, and C-reactive protein. Primary outcomes were changes in psychometric scores, body weight, and blood biomarkers.Results: Depression and anxiety scores decreased from T1 to T3, with the effect most pronounced in participants with baseline depression or anxiety. Scores at T4 remained below baseline for those with pre-existing depression or anxiety. Vitality, resilience, joy, and mindfulness increased from T1 to T3. Body weight decreased by 3% from T1 to T3. Triglycerides were lower from T2 to T3. Participants had lower HbA1c and HDL at T2, and lower CRP at all timepoints compared with controls.Conclusions: Participation in the Isha Samyama program led to multiple benefits. The 2-month preparation reduced anxiety, and participants maintained lower anxiety levels at 3 months post-retreat. Physical health improved over the course of the program as evidenced by weight loss and improved HbA1C and lipid profile. Practices associated with the Samyama preparation phase and the retreat may serve as an effective way to improve physical and mental health. Future studies may examine their use as an alternative therapy in patients with depression and/or anxiety.Clinical Trial Registration:www.ClinicalTrials.gov, Identifier: 1801728792. Registered retrospectively on 4/17/2020. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that scientists and technologists associated with the nuclear industry are building support for small modular reactors by advancing five rhetorical visions imbued with elements of fantasy that cater to various social expectations. The five visions are as follows: a vision of risk-free energy would eliminate catastrophic accidents and meltdowns. A vision of indigenous self-energization would see SMRs empowering remote communities and developing economies. A vision of water security would see SMR-powered desalination plants satisfying the world’s (...) water needs. A vision of environmental nirvana would see SMRs providing waste-free and carbon-free electricity to preserve the earth’s biosphere. A vision of space exploration would see SMRs assisting in the colonization of the moon, Mars, and possibly other worlds. These visions help create a symbolic convergence among promoters, serving to attract political and financial support, and erasing previous nuclear failures from public discourse. Moreover, underlying these visions is a technological utopian ideal world where SMRs would generate plentiful energy of multiple kinds, offering the necessary means for a life of comfort for all people by meeting various needs and without any environmental externalities or cause for concern about accidents. (shrink)

This essay aims to reconstruct and defend Pascal’s account of divine hiddenness. In the first section I explain Pascal’s view that divine hiddenness is primarily a function of human volitional aversion and only secondarily a result of God’s intentional action. In the following section I evaluate the primary sense of hiddenness by considering Pascal’s response to the objection that divine goodness requires and divine power makes possible God’s provision of evidence sufficient to overcome human volitional indisposition. While Pascal does think (...) it possible for God to provide such evidence, he argues that this would unjustly harm human freedom and endanger human intellectual understanding. I conclude by addressing a weaker form of the objection through consideration of the second sense of divine hiddenness and Pascal’s surprising view that God’s intentional “hiding” is in fact a progressively deeper entry into the particulars of human history. (shrink)

The name of Pavel Ivanovich Novgorodtsev is not very widely known to the reader at large. It has only been in the last ten or twelve years that isolated studies of particular problems in his creative works have begun to appear.

The study of orders as a product of spiritual creativity has its long and rich history. In addition to ethnographers, religious scholars, psychologists, philosophers, as well as scientists who carried out their research on the brink of several sciences - M. Bachtin, J. Frezer, K. Levy Briul, worked on their analysis. The orders helped find the keys to the style of thinking of primitive tribes, the peculiarities of their worldview, language, remedies, regulation of social relations.

Книга выходит к 150-летию со дня смерти первого русского культуролога А. С. Хомякова, актуализации наследия которого посвящены многолетние авторские исследования.

In this book, the extend to which we can equip artificial agents with moral reasoning capacity is investigated. Attempting to create artificial agents with moral reasoning capabilities challenges our understanding of morality and moral reasoning to its utmost. It also helps philosophers dealing with the inherent complexity of modern organizations. Modern society with large multi-national organizations and extensive information infrastructures provides a backdrop for moral theories that is hard to encompass through mere theorising. Computerized support for theorising is needed to (...) be able to fully grasp and address the inherent complexity. Using moral reasoning capacity will help us addressing the challenges that technological artefacts pose. They do not only contain information about us, they start to act on our behalves.With the increasing autonomy comes an increased need to ensure that their behaviour is in line with what we expect from them. To investigate and address these issues a laboratoy for philosophy is outlined: SophoLab. It consists of a methodology; a framework of modal logic, DEAL; and multi-agent software systems. SophoLab provides the basis for an experimental, computational philosophy. Its viability and usefulness are demonstrated through several experiments. (shrink)

The article characterizes post-folklore as a cultural phenomenon of the network society and defines various aspects of its functioning − sociocommunicative, cultural and psychological. The research methodology consisted of a set of basic approaches, principles and methods of scientific research. To achieve the goal, a set of general scientific and special methods was used, including the methods of logical analysis, problemchronological, generalization, synthesis, induction, and analogy.Research results. It has been proven that post-folkloric creativity is important for the development of social (...) communications, as it promotes the exchange of information between users of social networks, conveys people’s knowledge, moods, feelings, and emotions. In the cultural aspect, the works of post-folklore appear as cultural heritage of modern urbanized society and are represented by various types and genres. From the point of view of psychology, post-folklore has an impact on individual and social consciousness, on the development of cognitive processes, etc. The emergence of post-folklore in the field of education is separately mentioned, which indicates its important importance for the formation of the worldview of school youth.Conclusions. Today post-folklore is the subject of scientific research as a phenomenon of mass culture and network society, as a means of social communication, as a phenomenon that has an impact on public and individual consciousness and is gradually being established in the field of education. In the era of accelerated development of information and communication technologies, everyone has the opportunity to become a collector or author of post-folkloric creativity. Further research is planned to be carried out in the direction of studying the prospects for the development of post-folklore in Ukrainian and foreign cultures. (shrink)

The issues related to the multilingual situation in modern Bashkiria are discussed in the article, configuration of multilingualism is given on the basis of extensive and representative data of the latest census. Multilingual issues are discussed in the context of the social functions of philology, as well as a set of measures of a regulatory nature undertaken by the government and society to ensure social, ethno-cultural and inter-ethnic stability. The author believes that the language situation with multilingualism depends on a (...) number of sociolinguistic variables, but the invariant feature of all modifications of multilingualism in Bashkiria should be considered as a factor of the maximum level of language loyalty towards the Russian language. This factor provides a comprehensive and decisive impact on the conditions and status of multilingualism in the republic. (shrink)