Philosophy Commons^™

Two Dimensions Of A Bodhisattva, Douglas Duckworth

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

This paper presents two dimensions of a bodhisattva, the ideal of Maha- ya- na Buddhism. One dimension involves contemplative practices that disclose a pure nature that is always already present; this reality is unveiled after the obscurations that cloud it are removed. I refer to this as a “top-down” approach because it is based on qualities of awakening that are already there, yet lie beyond an ordinary being’s comprehension. The second dimension, which I refer to as a “bottom-up” approach, involves directed training and discipline. Unlike the top-down approach, this is not about “going with the flow” or simply letting …

Authentic Mindfulness Within Mindfulness-Based Interventions: A Qualitative Study Of Participants' Experiences, Supakyada Sapthiang, Edo Shonin, Paul Barrows, William Van Gordon

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

There are concerns that participants of some modern mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) are receiving a superficial form of mindfulness training. However, empirical investigation of this issue according to participants’ first-hand experiences has been limited. Thus, this qualitative study aimed to capture the first-hand perspectives relating to authentic mindfulness of participants who had recently attended an MBI in the UK. Ten adults completed a recorded, online semistructured interview. Based on a thematic analysis, the following four master themes were identified: (a) authentic mindfulness as a construct, (b) positive aspects of the training, (c) something missing, and (d) recommendations for authenticity. Although all …

Mindfulness Traps And The Entanglement Of Self: An Inquiry Into The Regime Of Mind, Richard Dixey, Ronald E. Purser

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

Mindfulness meditation can provide salutary therapeutic benefits, as well as lead advanced practitioners to states of calm and equanimity. In this paper, we argue that such forms of meditation may subtly entrap practitioners in circular, self-reflexive feedback loops. Because these meditation traps fail to clearly discern the operations of mind, they offer a temporary oasis of peace within an unaltered dualistic realm of mind that leaves the root delusion of self-identity intact. Drawing upon Tarthang Tulku’s seminal book Revelations of Mind, we present what he refers to as the “regime of mind,” the processes of cognition, identification and re-cognition in …

Cognitive Illusion, Lucid Dreaming, And The Psychology Of Metaphor In Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen Contemplative Practices, Michael R. Sheehy

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

A classic set of eight similes of illusion (sgyu ma’i dpe brgyad) are employed recurrently throughout Indian and Tibetan Buddhist literature to illustrate the operations of cognition, its correlative perceptions, and experiences that emerge. To illustrate a Buddhist psychology of metaphor, the fourteenth century Tibetan scholar and synthesizer of the Dzogchen (rdzogs chen) or Great Perfection system, Longchen Rabjam Drimé Ödzer (1308-1363), composed his poetic text, Being at Ease with Illusion. This work on illusion is the third volume in Longchenpa’s Trilogy of Being at Ease (Ngal gso skor gsum) in which he presents a series of Dzogchen instructions on …

Heightened Technology In The Care Of Type 1 Diabetes: An Ethical Symbiosis?, Susanna Larsen

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

This paper explores the common negative consequences and ethical issues associated with the evolving medical technology used in the care of Type 1 diabetes. In this paper, I will discuss the ethical impacts of technology on diabetic youth: their view of self, their mechanical requirements, and their health priorities. In order to define the scope of the issues, I will use the following intellectual tools: feminist theory, care ethics, and philosophical discussions of control. This paper will also outline some possible solutions to these ethical issues.

On The Ethics Of Selling Psychic Services, Jeffrey Moriarty

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In many places, it is possible to buy psychic services, including tarot card, palm, and mediumship readings. Yet we have powerful evidence that psychic abilities do not exist. This paper asks whether psychic services should be for sale. I begin by considering whether psychics deceive or mislead buyers. Next, I consider a harm-based argument against the sale of psychic services. Finally, I consider an argument in favor of their sale that appeals to expressive considerations. I conclude with a tentative policy recommendation: the sale of psychic services should be permitted. This is so even though much of the money spent …

A Miracle Through An Ymage: Gautier De Coinci’S Retouched Legend Of Theophile, Isabella Williams

Quidditas

This article examines the use of the Old French word “ymage” in Gautier de Coinci’s early thirteenth-century Legend of Theophile. Gautier is the first author to write a version of the legend that includes an ymage, designating a material representation of the Virgin. Far from a subtle insertion, he mentions the term ten times, during every pivotal moment of the story, when terrestrial and celestial spheres collide. Critics acknowledge the centrality of Gautier in representing this revolutionary French period, during which time attitudes concerning ritualistic images were in a state of flux; yet, Gautier’s repetitive and groundbreaking use of …

Review Of Marcus Byrne And Helen Lunn's Dance Of The Dung Beetles: Their Role In Our Changing World, Jennifer Schell

Between the Species

This review examines Marcus Byrne and Helen Lunn’s Dance of the Dung Beetles: Their Role in Our Changing World, tracing the interdisciplinary connections between human history, ecological science, and cultural symbolism surrounding dung beetles.

Gnosticism, Political Theory And Apocalypse: Jacob Taubes And Günther Anders, Tracy Strong And Carl Schmitt, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Beginning with Jacob Taubes and Günther Anders on eschatology, apocalypse and political theology, including Saint Paul and Frankfurt School critical theory along with bombs and power plants (energy/climate), this essay parallels a re-reading of Tracy B. Strong’s political reading of Nietzsche on Jesus (and love) with Taubes, Anders and Carl Schmitt on politics (and technology). Highlighted throughout is the politically charged (and inherently esoteric) context of Gnosticism for philosophy and theory for Taubes but also for Anders.

Unraveling Controversies Over Civic Honesty Measurement: An Extended Field Replication In China, Qian Yang, Weiwei Zhang, Shiyong Liu, Wenjin Gong, Youli Han, Jun Lu, Donghong Jiang, Jingchun Nie, Xiaokang Lyu, Rugang Liu, Mingli Jiao, Chen Qu, Mingji Zhang, Yacheng Sun, Xinyue Zhou, Qi Zhang

Community & Environmental Health Faculty Publications

Cohn et al. (2019) conducted a wallet drop experiment in 40 countries to measure "civic honesty around the globe," which has received worldwide attention but also sparked controversies over using the email response rate as the sole metric of civic honesty. Relying on the lone measurement may overlook cultural differences in behaviors that demonstrate civic honesty. To investigate this issue, we conducted an extended replication study in China, utilizing email response and wallet recovery to assess civic honesty. We found a significantly higher level of civic honesty in China, as measured by the wallet recovery rate, than reported in the …

Lakota Language Revitalization And The Meaning Of Life, Gabriel Bruguier

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Presentations

Lakota Language Revitalization and the Meaning of Life

Thesis: Indigenous languages reveal information about that peoples’ conception of the meaning of life.

Notes/working document from a presentation given at the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy conference, 2023.

Nadezhda Krupskaya And The Reinvention Of Culture In Revolutionary Russia: Populism, Women, And Education In The New Socialist Society, Michael Anthony Iasilli

Theses and Dissertations

Most historiography of the Russian Revolution underestimates the impact of the populists of the nineteenth century in shaping political decision-making that led to early Soviet national development as well as the women brought up within the movement. Populism and the legacy of the narodniki is often a separate body of research, or explained within a distinct political category of its own. Likewise, most scholars see the socialist movement at the turn of the century as a divergence away from the populists. However, through the writings and legacy of Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, she demonstrates a political and cultural transcendence of …

Scurvy And The Ontology Of Natural Kinds, P.D. Magnus

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

Some philosophers understand natural kinds to be the categories which are constraints on enquiry. In order to elaborate the metaphysics appropriate to such an account, I consider the complicated history of scurvy, citrus, and vitamin C. It may be tempting to understand these categories in a shallow way (as mere property clusters) or in a deep way (as fundamental properties). Neither approach is adequate, and the case instead calls for middle-range ontology: starting from categories which we identify in the world and elaborating their structure, but not pretending to jump ahead to a complete story about fundamental being.

Towards A Feminist Theory Of Distrust, Hale Demir-Doğuoğlu, Carolyn Mcleod

Philosophy Publications

We use feminist insights about institutional distrust to critique the most general and well-developed theory of distrust in philosophy—Katherine Hawley’s commitment account—and to learn from this exercise about what a feminist theory of distrust should be like. Though not designed to explain institutional distrust as we understand it, Hawley’s theory is meant to apply to people’s relationships with institutional representatives as well as to friendships or intimate relationships whose contours are shaped by informal institutional structures. It should therefore be able to explain the institutional distrust that is prevalent among socially marginalized people. However, we argue that the account falls …

Context And Coherence, By Una Stojnic, Robert Stainton, Arthur Sullivan

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Are Saviour Siblings A Special Case In Procreative Ethics?, Elizabeth Finneron-Burns, Caleb Althorpe

Political Science Publications

Children conceived in order to donate biological material to save the life of an already existing child are known as 'saviour siblings'. The primary reasons that have been offered against the practice are: (i) creating a saviour sibling has negative impacts on the created child and (ii) creating a saviour child represents a wrongful procreative motivation of the parents. In this paper we examine to what extent the creation of saviour siblings actually presents a special case in procreative ethics. Although we do not deny that there is a unique feature present in the saviour sibling case—namely, that the child …

Caring In Wonder: A Defense Of The Epistemic And Motivational Value Of Wonder, Tim Lin

Bouwsma Paper Contest

That wonder is somehow highly significant and essential to the human experience is an intuition many seem to share, from Socrates who claimed that the love of wisdom itself “begins in wonder” to the high aesthetic and moral value given to it by Romantics, artists, and poets across traditions. A substantial philosophical conversation has also interpreted wonder not in its colloquial sense as a curious searching for answers prompted by a gap in our understanding and thus antithetical to knowledge, but as itself a ‘way of seeing’ essentially disrupting our ‘ordinary’ experience and meanings and taking us in more direct …

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Quidditas

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Langland, Father Of American Literatures, John M. Bowers

Quidditas

Geoffrey Chaucer’s position as “father of English literature” has been steadily challenged in recent years. This paper both proposes and interrogates the other fourteenth-century English poet William Langland’s possible claims as the origin for the Puritan tradition of New England and, hence, the later traditions of American literatures—in the plural. We know that the first copy of his satirical, theological dream-vision Piers Plowman arrived in New England in 1630 with the father of Anne Bradstreet, and as a result any patriarchal genealogy is already problematic because the first author in the American family-tree was a woman. Rather than the linearity …

Hamlet In Cinema: Oedipus Lives On, Keolanani Kinghorn

Quidditas

I have often questioned why Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a play more than 400 years old, remains tied to a century-old Freudian concept. Since Freud’s Oedipus Complex has been disproven, what purpose does it still serve and why are directors still intrigued by this interpretation of Hamlet? In 1949, Dr. Ernest Jones published his book, Hamlet and Oedipus (1949),1 but at the time he was also collaborating with Laurence Olivier to create the first movie adaptation of Hamlet to embrace the Oedipus Complex. I believe that because of Jones and Olivier Shakespeare’s Hamlet will always be connected to psychoanalysis. While …

Critical Theory And Poverty, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This chapter explores the contributions that the Frankfurt School of critical theory has made to philosophical discussions about the meaning and injustice of poverty. Critical theorists interpret poverty to mean more than material deprivation, and they see its injustice as 2 extending beyond wrongful suffering and the threat to a human right to life to encompass psychological impoverishment and dehumanization. The chapter begins by examining critical theory’s historical roots in the Marxist critique of capitalism. The next section discusses early efforts by critical theorists to extend this critique to state-administered economies (capitalist and socialist) that have succeeded in sharply reducing …

Ix. Remembering Tasting Thinking: Unfinished Conversations Friedrich Hölderlin’S Andenken, Poetry Being, Anaximander Heraclitus, Rilke Heidegger, Charles S. Taylor

Wine Journey: Tasting Dwelling Learning at The Kitchen Table

My conversations with Friedrich Hölderlin arose unexpectedly from a first reading of his poem Andenken / Remembrance. The poem begins with memories from a visit he made at age 31 to Bordeaux, France in 1801. His memories almost immediately took me to similar memories of a year-long visit I made to Europe as a study-abroad student when I was 20. Our conversations continue through looking at the connections between our memories. Early in my European travels, in Paris, were visits to the Musée du Louvre and the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume. They were my real introduction to fine …

Re-Dress As Redress: Shakespeare’S Comedy Of Errors, Jane Foster Woodruff

Quidditas

DELNO C. WEST AWARD WINNER

Writing near the end of a century-long ‘explosion’ of Tudor theatre, Shakespeare benefitted from a variety of influences, both sacral and secular. Among his literary influences were the works of classical dramatists (Sophocles, Seneca, Plautus, and the like), who had used their plays to editorialize on contemporary societal issues. To this same end, in his early historical play Richard III Shakespeare chose to address a multiplicity of problematic themes, the most obvious being that, although Richard’s ambition and his lethality had been sufficient to win him a crown, they were insufficient to preserve it: power …

Many Healings Of The Woman With The Flow Of Blood, Ekaterina Lomperis

Faculty Publications - Portland Seminary

With the emergence of the modern quest for the historical Jesus, theologians began increasingly questioning traditional views of Jesus as a healer of human bodies. While a growing suspicion of Jesus’s role as a literal healer of the body is commonly traced to the influence of the Enlightenment, in this essay, I will suggest that the roots of this theological marginalization run deeper, in the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformations, when supernatural did not yet equal superstitious. The essay will examine two representative exegeses of the healing of the woman with the flow of blood in Mark 5:25–34, offered by Martin Luther …

11. Dreamers: Adventures In Dreams And Dreams Of Adventures ... By David Kennedy, David Kennedy

Middle School Curriculum

Dreamersis a philosophical adventure novel for ages 12 and beyond, told through the eyes of four pre-adolescent children of varying ethnic and racial backgrounds living in a small town in the American Southwest, who embark together on a school inquiry project centered on the phenomenon of dreaming. Not only do they record and share their dreams with each other, they inquire together into the role and status of dreaming in cultures past and present, the interpretation of dreams, the scientific analysis of dreaming, and the role of dreams in mythology and religion. The dramatic events of the novel are …

Narratives Reflecting Theory Of Mind Among Bilingual Lyuli Children Of Uzbekistan, Hristo Kyuchukov, Jill De Villiers, Bahodir B. Mamurov, Gulbahor R. Akramova

Philosophy: Faculty Publications

This is the first known study of the socio-cognitive development of Lyuli children, a Roma-type group living in Bukhara in Uzbekistan. The research was conducted in schools in Bukhara serving both Lyuli children and Uzbek children, both of whom are multi-lingual but whose sociolinguistic circumstances are somewhat different. There has been less cross-cultural work on later stages of Theory of Mind development, in which children have to make inferences about the mental states of characters in a complex narrative. The research here shows that the children from both groups do remarkably well on these tasks, and their multilingualism is hypothesized …

On Respect For Robots, Daniel Tigard

Philosophy: Faculty Scholarship

We spend a lot of time with robotic and artificially intelligent (AI) technologies today. At the same time, it appears that we are growing more accustomed to interacting with AI and robots as if they were fellow human beings. Such trends have aptly brought about increasing ethical discussions concerning how we should treat technological devices. Do we owe robots some degree of respect, and how could respecting robots be justified? With this article, I put forward a new way of answering these questions. I invoke a revisionist account of Kant’s ethics that amends the usual priority of dignity before respect …

What Could Jesus Do?, Harriet Baber

Philosophy: Faculty Scholarship

According to many orthodox Christian theologies Jesus is not merely sinless but impeccable: he not only did not sin but could not. This is puzzling because one can only sin by doing something else and, prima face, Jesus can do actions that you or I could do by which we would sin. I suggest that appearances to the contrary, Jesus cannot do a variety of actions that a merely human duplicate could do. His doing sinful actions is compossible with a range of empirical facts about his physical abilities and circumstances of the sort we ordinarily take into account in …

The Primacy Of Openness In Ecological Complexity Theory, Colby Clark

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

Five principles are at the foundation of complex systems theory: emergence, openness, contingency, historicity, and indeterminacy. Of those five, the principle of emergence is easily the most prevalent. Simply put, emergence refers to the idea that some wholes cannot be properly accounted for by appealing to individual explanations of the parts that compose it. In ecological complexity theory, the principle of emergence is strongly associated with the self-organizing feedbacks that often identify the structural framework of ecosystems.

Within the last half century, the intense focus on the principle of emergence has engendered the development of many conceptual distinctions that have …