Ethical dilemmas affect several essential elements of humanitarian aid, such as the adequate selection of crises to which to provide aid and a selection of beneficiaries based on needs and not political or geostrategic criteria. Other challenges encompass maintaining neutrality against aggressors, deciding whether to collaborate with governments that violate human rights, and managing the allocation and prioritization of limited resources. Additionally, issues arise concerning the safety and protection of aid recipients, the need for cultural and political sensitivity, and recognition (...) of the importance of local knowledge, skills, and capacity. The appropriateness, sustainability, and long-term impact of actions; security risks for aid personnel; and the need for transparency and accountability are also crucial. Furthermore, humanitarian workers face the duty to report and engage in civil activism in response to human rights violations and the erosion of respect for international humanitarian law. Lastly, the rights of affected groups and local communities in the decision-making and implementation of humanitarian aid are vital. The traditional foundations and approaches of humanitarian aid appear insufficient in today’s landscape of disasters and crises, which are increasingly complex and divergent, marked by a diminished capacity and shifting roles of various actors in alleviating suffering. This article reviews the historical evolution of the conceptualization of humanitarian aid and addresses some of its ethical challenges and dilemmas. (shrink)

Learn the tips and tricks used by a top photographer in the digital photography industry in Rick Sammon's Top Digital Photography Secrets. Filled with beautiful photographs and the techniques Rick Sammon used to capture them, this book offers you motivation to capture stunning photographs and the tools and tricks you need to capture them. With more than 100 techniques for use behind the camera, this book will improve the camera skills of both amateur and experienced photographers. Additionally, this (...) book includes a chapter on post-production secrets, and a Rick Sammon DVD Guide lighting, camera, and digital photography basics. In this 1-hour DVD, Rick shows you how to get great photos using a variety of lighting sources, camera-specific techniques, and basic rules of photography. (shrink)

Portion of Pratyakṣakhaṇḍa of Tattvacintāmaṇi, compendium of Navya Nyāya philosophy by Gaṅgeśa, 13th century with Dīpikā commentary.

Portion of Tattvacintāmaṇi dealing with syllogism (avayava); includes commentaries and supercommentary.

This paper presents a diagrammatic notation for visualizing epistemic entities and relations. The notation was created during the Visualizing Worldviews project funded by the University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute and has been further developed by the scholars participating in the university’s Research Opportunity Program. Since any systematic diagrammatic notation should be based on a solid ontology of the respective domain, we first outline the current state of the scientonomic ontology. We then proceed to providing diagrammatic tools for visualizing the (...) epistemic entities and relations of this ontology. These basic diagramming techniques allow us to construct diagrams of various types for both synchronic and diachronic visualizations. The paper concludes by highlighting some future research directions. As the notation presented here is de facto accepted and used in scientonomy, the paper suggests no modifications. (shrink)

This essay presents a reading of the use of wonder in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. In this essay, I argue that not only did Hobbes incorporate the ancient conception of wonder into his design for the emotional apparatus of the modern sovereign state, but that when he did so he also transformed it and other concepts. Previous scholars have paid close attention to Hobbes’s confrontation with ancient philosophy, but there has been no sustained study of Hobbes’s use of (...) wonder, which was a concern of his over the entire course of his authorship. More broadly, this study opens up a place for the study of wonder in contemporary political theory as part of the broader reassessment of emotion. (shrink)

It may be that the appropriate demographic objective of Israel as a country in which the Jewish people realize their right to self-determination is the existence of a Jewish public in Israel in numbers sufficient to allow its members to live in the framework of their culture. It may also be that the appropriate demographic objective of Israel should be the existence of a Jewish majority within it. While I discussed this issue elsewhere; here I discuss the legitimate means for (...) the realization of these goals. Israel’s principal means for realizing these objectives thus far has been its Law of Return and its Citizenship Law. These laws afford every Jew anywhere in the world the right to immigrate to Israel and become a citizen of the State of Israel. Many liberals and left-wingers consider these laws to be tainted with racism, because they regard any nationally-based preference with regard to immigration to be a form of racism. In the first part of my paper I argue against this position. I offer three justifications for nationality-based preferences in immigration. However, the fact that nationality-based priorities in immigration are not necessarily racist and that there are legitimate human interests justifying such priorities, does not entail that the specific priorities manifested by Israel’s Law of Return and its other immigration and citizenship policies are just. These policies in effect mean that all Jews and only Jews have the right to immigrate to Israel and to become fully integrated in Israeli life. In the second part of the paper, I argue that these two aspects of Israel’s immigration policies, namely, its almost categorical inclusion of all Jews and its almost categorical exclusion of all non-Jews, are somewhat problematic. In addition to the Law of Return, a number of additional ways to ultimately increase the number of Jews in relation to the number of Arabs have been proposed and even adopted in Israel in recent years. During the incumbency of the fifteenth Knesset, right-wing Member of Knesset Michael Kleiner tabled a draft bill intended “to encourage people that do not identify with the Jewish character of the state [i.e., Palestinian citizens of Israel C.G.] to leave.” The Israeli Government later tabled a bill—that was eventually passed—to amend the Israeli Citizenship Law in a manner that would deny Arabs who are Israeli citizens and have married Palestinian residents of the Occupied Territories the right to live in Israel with their spouses and children. In the third part of the paper, I clarify why in contrast to granting Jews priority in immigration, both the aforementioned laws, namely, Kleiner’s law and the law pertaining to family unification are racist and are therefore morally unacceptable. (shrink)

This book discusses the justifications and limits of cultural nationalism from a liberal perspective. Chaim Gans presents a normative typology of nationalist ideologies, distinguishing between cultural liberal nationalism and statist liberal nationalism. Statist nationalisms argue that states have an interest in the cultural homogeneity of their citizenries. Cultural nationalisms argue that people have interests in adhering to their cultures and in sustaining these cultures for generations. Gans argues that freedom- and identity-based justifications for cultural nationalism common in literature can only (...) support the adherence thesis, while the historical thesis could only be justified by the interest people have in the long-term endurance of their personal and group endeavors. The Limits of Nationalism examines demands often made in the name of cultural nationalism, such as claims for national self-determination, historical rights claims to territories and demands entailed by cultural particularism as opposed to cultural cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

Sanskrit text, portion of Tattvacintāmaṇi dealing with syllogism (avayava) ; with commentary and supercommentary, of the Navya-Nyaya school in Indic philosophy.

Søren Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript has provoked a lively variety of divergent interpretations for a century and a half. It has been both celebrated and condemned as the chief inspiration for twentieth-century existential thought, as a subversive parody of philosophical argument, as a critique of mass society, as a forerunner of phenomenology and of postmodern relativism, and as an appeal for a renewal of religious commitment. These 2010 essays written by international Kierkegaard scholars offer a plurality of critical approaches to (...) this fundamental text of existential philosophy. They cover hotly debated topics such as the tension between the Socratic-philosophical and the Christian-religious; the identity and personality of Kierkegaard's pseudonym 'Johannes Climacus'; his conceptions of paradoxical faith and of passionate understanding; his relation to his contemporaries and to some of his more distant predecessors; and, last but not least, his pertinence to our present-day concerns. (shrink)

Those who are already familiar with Henry Bugbee's written work will almost invariably have encountered it first through his 1958 text The Inward Morning, subtitled A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form. This book, which originally appeared with an introduction by the French existential philosopher Gabriel Marcel, was reissued in a 1999 edition thanks to Edward F. Mooney, who served as editor and added a new introduction of his own. In the volume under review, David W. Rodick brings more of Bugbee's (...) work back into print, a development that will surely be appreciated by admirers and newcomers alike. Or, in Rodick's own words, the aim of Wilderness in America is "to remove... (shrink)

The first thorough examination of C. Wright Mills's intellectual roots, this book also is the first to present Mills's full analysis in his unpublished as well as published writings of the work of his precursors, mentors, and critics. Mills' intellectual line of descent is traced from the American institutional economists, especially Thorstein Veblen and Clarence Ayres, and the American pragmatists, especially John Dewey and George H. Mead—an evolution influenced though not determined by ideas from Europe. Always the critic and gadfly, (...) Mills subjected all theories to his special brand of analysis and synthesis. For example, his books on U.S. social stratification are seen by Tilman as a trilogy updating Veblen with ideas from the pragmatists, spiced with a good bit of Max Weber but very little Man. Power, his other chief concern, also was subjected to his creative American eclecticism. As a lifelong seeker of knowledge, Mills studied the great European social thinkers—notably Marx, Mosca, Pareto, Michels, Weber, Mannheim, and Freud—until his untimely death. Explaining Mills's self-description as a "plain Marxist," Tilman writes that it "amounted to little more than a willingness to use Marx's values, vocabulary, and model when these seemed relevant and to ignore them when they did not." Regarding alleged affinities between Freud and Mills, Tilman argues these were "tenuous at best and, although the linkage with the neo-Freudians was stronger, Mills remained critical of Homey and Fromm because they had "not succeeded in entirely overcoming Freud's biological metaphysic." Although the American radical tradition is complex and varied, the heritage that most influenced Mills, Tilman contends, contains elements of evangelical Protestantism and of liberal pragmatism. "It was Charles Wright Mills more than any other thinker in recent years," he concludes, "who synthesized these strands of thought and then wove them into an authentic American radical theory.". (shrink)

The question of whether time is its own best representation is explored. Though there is theoretical debate between proponents of internal models and embedded cognition proponents (e.g. Brooks R 1991 Artificial Intelligence 47 139–59) concerning whether the world is its own best model, proponents of internal models are often content to let time be its own best representation. This happens via the time update of the model that simply allows the model’s state to evolve along with the state of the (...) modeled domain. I argue that this is neither necessary nor advisable. I show that this is not necessary by describing how internal modeling approaches can be generalized to schemes that explicitly represent time by maintaining trajectory estimates rather than state estimates. Though there are a variety of ways this could be done, I illustrate the proposal with a scheme that combines filtering, smoothing and prediction to maintain an estimate of the modeled domain’s trajectory over time. I show that letting time be its own representation is not advisable by showing how trajectory estimation schemes can provide accounts of temporal illusions, such as apparent motion, that pose serious difficulties for any scheme that lets time be its own representation. (shrink)

One of America’s most influential social critics, Thorstein Veblen authored works deeply rooted in evolutionary biology and American philosophical naturalism—both of which help explain his institutional economics and radical sociology. Now, one of today’s preeminent Veblen scholars ranges widely over the man’s writings to show how evolutionary naturalism underlies his social theory and criticism, shapes his satire, and binds his work together. Rick Tilman’s study focuses on the intersections of social theory and social psychology, political economy and political theory, (...) and modern philosophy and intellectual history in Veblen’s thinking. It links evolutionary naturalism for the first time to Veblen’s aesthetics, secular humanism, sociology of control, sociobiology, and sociology of knowledge, and it makes groundbreaking observations regarding the relationship of Veblen’s own life to his thinking; his place as a cultural lag theorist; and his analysis of sports, gambling, and religion. Drawing on textual exegesis of Veblen’s work, unpublished correspondence, and selected archives, Tilman argues that only evolutionary naturalism could provide the philosophical foundations of Veblen’s thought. He also emphasizes Veblen’s role in the enhancement and embellishment of the social sciences and cultural studies, as well as his insights into the processes of change in the sociopolitical order. Veblen’s evolutionary naturalism, with its unflattering evaluation of America’s self-selected special place in the international arena, casts doubt on today’s foreign interventions, and it also provides a much-needed antidote to the resurgence of creationist thought in American culture. Tilman shows that Veblen’s ideas are still valuable to contemporary social scientists—indeed, that his method of analysis and values are sorely needed to help us avoid wasteful consumption, predation, and the persistence of religious superstition. This work offers readers a new appreciation of Veblen and the many issues he addressed, and of Tilman’s own masterful facility in bringing them to light. (shrink)

Nothing is more obvious than the fact that we are able to experience events in the world such a ball deflecting from the cross-bar of a goal. But what is the temporal relation between these two things, the event, and our experience of the event? One possibility is that the world progresses temporally through a sequence of instantaneous states – the striker’s foot in contact with the ball, then the ball between the striker and the goal, then the ball in (...) contact with the cross-bar, and so forth –, while the perceiver’s experience is likewise a sequence of experience states, each one of which corresponds to, or is experience of, a corresponding state of the world – for example, a perception of the foot in contact with the ball, followed by a perception of the ball in the air, following by a perception of the ball in contact with the cross-bar. This way of understanding the relationship between experience and the world is very natural, and nearly universal. However, it rests on two assumptions that can be brought into question. (shrink)

Semi-compatibilists intend to reconcile moral responsibility with causal determinism, even if determinism is incompatible with freedom to do otherwise. For them, moral responsibility does not require free will, which is not a necessary condition for moral responsibility. They agree with the view that causal determinism is incompatible with free will. Free will is incompatible with determinism as well as moral responsibility. Both compatibilists and semi-compatibilists argue for the compatibility between determinism and moral responsibility. However, the latter fails to prove sufficiently (...) the reason why determinism is compatible with moral responsibility. (shrink)

According to Stoic moral psychology, emotions are cognitive responses to perceived value in the contingent world. This dissertation begins by defending a contemporary version of this descriptive theory; it then proceeds with a critique of the Stoics' normative thesis that emotions involve amorally deplorable kind of cognitive error. I distinguish two senses in which this thesis is historically put forward, and show that both are thematically pertinent. The structural variant, as I call it, is a qualified critique of the particular (...) cognitive flaws to which emotions are liable; the fundamental argument, on the other hand, is that emotions are categorically unreliable. My goal in the rest of the dissertation is to respond to each aspect of normative Stoicism with a positive account of how it might be possible for a moral agent to avoid false emotion without doing away with emotion altogether. This means explaining how a person's emotional perception might become reliable rather than sentimental within a given moral context, and indicating what axiological conditions must generally obtain if emotion is justifiable in any case. In doing so, I draw largely upon Kierkegaard's pseudonymous and signed writings, while also engaging with other relevant philosophical texts along the way. I argue that a morality of virtue and narrative awareness is necessary for accurate emotional perception; then, I attempt to define the conditions on which a qualified value realism might be tenable. It is one thing to argue for the importance of emotion in human life, as a number of recent studies have done, but it is quite another to show how we might cultivate truthful, and avoid false, emotion. The outcome of this inquiry into the possibility of reliable emotion is a positive account of the ideal state in which one could trust oneself to be rational in being passionate. (shrink)

Inherent in the self–other dynamic structure are the mechanisms to reduce the other to the self, to surrender the self to the other, to place an insurmountable wedge between them, and to effect a harmonious, mutually beneficent relationship. In this paper, I explore the varied self–other relations between the self in hope, confronting the prospect of its death as other. I also endeavour to unravel a possible eclipse of the above self–other patterns, which can serve as an indication of the (...) uniqueness and perhaps the mystery that surround our attempts to come to terms with the reality of our own mortality. (shrink)

Gene Sharp passed away on January 28, 2018, two days before the anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. His influence in the field of nonviolence has been immense, and much of the work in nonviolence that has been done in the last forty years has had to address Sharp’s work. The direction in which Sharp took the field of nonviolence differed from that of Gandhi. Gandhi based his life around a metaphysics and an ethic that, for him, dictated his (...) nonviolent practices. Sharp preferred to emphasize the practical benefits of nonviolent practices in the field of politics, and he believed that tying nonviolent political action to a metaphysical, religious, or ethical view would reduce the numbers of people likely to adopt such methods. (shrink)

In 1960, in "The Problem of Method," which serves as the introduction not only to Critique of Dialectical Reason but to all of his recent work, Sartre enrolls himself solemnly under the banner of Marxism, which he considers the unsurpassable philosophy of our era. Today, a dozen years later, the Sartrean position has become open to challenge, it is true, because its deconstruction is underway, but it has not yet been dismissed as absurd. Existentialism, by immolating itself on the altar (...) of praxis, has taken with it phenomenology and the Existenzphilosophie that emerged from it. Heidegger, for example, can be read as the last defender of the bourgeois order fetishized as Being, forced by the triumphal march of the... (shrink)

本书分两个部分：第一部分通过对神仙信仰的文化、心理根源的发掘揭示神仙信仰的来源、变化，介绍神仙信仰的内容，如成仙的境界、成仙的方术等等；第二部分则根据对历代的神仙传说和这些被尊为神仙的历史、传说人物的 真实史实的照片，介绍了这些在民间影响巨大的神仙。.

It is an under-appreciated fact that we have no significant understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms supporting any aspect of cognition, broadly construed. The limited understanding we do have is a combination of a multitude of enticing empirical fragments, scattered sparsely on a background of noise, and a number of vastly underdetermined theoretical frameworks. But however incomplete the answers, the questions posed by cognitive neuroscience are compelling. Indeed, it is nothing less than ourselves -- our decision making abilities, our command of (...) language, our own consciousness -- that we are seeking to understand. (shrink)