This essay explores the inherent blankness of life, describing it as devoid of fixed meaning, purpose, or morality. It discusses how humans struggle with this blankness, often attempting to avoid or fill it through various activities and pursuits. The essay distinguishes between natural biological activities and those driven by fear and anxiety, emphasizing how societal conditioning contributes to the latter. It delves into the role of rationality in avoiding blankness, the discomfort of silence, and the vibrancy that this blankness holds. (...) Ultimately, it advocates for embracing this blankness as a source of freedom, vitality, and profound insight into the nature of existence. (shrink)

The concept of the mind in philosophy encompasses a diverse range of theories and perspectives, examining its immaterial nature, unitary function, self-activity, self-consciousness, and persistence despite bodily changes. This paper explores the attributes of the mind, addressing classical materialism, dualism, and behaviorism, along with contemporary theories like functionalism and computational functionalism. Key philosophical debates include the mind-body problem, the subjectivity of mental states, and the epistemological and conceptual challenges in understanding other minds. Contrasting views from Aristotle, Descartes, Wittgenstein, and modern (...) philosophers like U.T. Place, Gilbert Ryle, and Hilary Putnam are analyzed. The paper also discusses the implications of these theories on our understanding of mental phenomena, consciousness, and the nature of human experience. (shrink)

In this volume the editors gather diverse perspectives on one agreed-upon condition: that the computational power of today's world has fundamentally transformed all aspects of this very world. This requires the investigation and questioning not only of the possible sites of critique but also of the concept of critique as such. If there used to be a critical subject constituted in the cultural techniques of modernity, and if digitality, as a condition, indicates itself as a product of modernity while at (...) the same time somehow being its very ending, what are the determinable ramifications? Digitality severely alters the critical subject and its spatio-temporal relations, and therefore interferes with its potentiality to be a critical subject. The authors of this volume therefore do not proclaim a crisis of critique, but rather ask how and what critique in the digital might be, to then look at specific settings of critique and critical practices. With contributions by Clemens Apprich, Timon Beyes, Mark Hansen, Erich Hörl, Holger Kuhn, Luciana Parisi, Ying Sze Pek, Claus Pias, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, Judith Sieber, Lotte Warnsholdt. (shrink)

We present a cosmological model (RL+) that offers exact predictions for the Hubble constant, the cosmological constant, the total energy density of the universe, and a curvature that matches current observational constraints. The model predicts a cosmological constant energy density that constitutes approximately 64% of the total energy budget, in agreement with current estimates from the standard LCDM model. Furthermore, the model addresses several longstanding cosmological problems—namely, the problem of infinite initial density, the coincidence problem, and the flatness problem—all with (...) the introduction of a single temporal parameter. (shrink)

Araştırma, ilahiyat fakültesi hazırlık sınıfı öğrencilerinin Arapça dersine dair görüş ve tutumlarını değerlendirmektedir. Değerlendirme sonucunda Arapça öğretiminin daha verimli olması için çözüm önerileri sunmayı ve bu suretle ilahiyat fakültelerinde Arapça öğretiminin kalitesinin iyi yönde arttırılmasına katkı sunmayı amaçlamaktadır. Araştırmanın önemi, Arapça öğrenimini daha etkili kılmak için öğrencilerin düşüncelerinden hareketle çözüm üretmesidir. Örneklem olarak Tekirdağ Namık Kemal Üniversitesi İlahiyat Fakültesi Hazırlık Sınıfı öğrencileri seçilmiştir. Araştırma verilerini toplamak için Aydoslu tarafından geliştirilen “İngilizce Dersine Yönelik Tutum Ölçeği” Arapçaya uyarlanarak kullanılmıştır. Araştırmanın bağımsız değişkenleri (...) cinsiyet, öğretim türü, mezun olunan lise türü ve Arapçaya ayrılan zamandır. 2018-2019 eğitim öğretim yılı bahar yarıyılında 166 öğrenci-nin katılımıyla toplanan veriler SPSS yazılımı kullanılarak analiz edilmiştir. Elde edilen bulgulardan hazırlık öğrencilerinin çoğunun Arapça dersine yönelik olumsuz tutumlara sahip olmadığı ancak Arapçayı zor bir dil olarak gördükleri anlaşılmaktadır. (shrink)