THE IMMORTAL SOLIPSIST

Think ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 10 (27) ◽  
pp. 73-76
Author(s):  
Christian H. Sötemann

Philosophers have been known to sometimes conjure up world-views which seem dazzlingly at odds with our everyday take on the world. Among the more, if not most drastic ‘-isms’ to be found in the history of philosophy, then, is the standpoint of solipsism, derived from the Latin words ‘solus’ (alone) and ‘ipse’ (self). What is that supposed to mean? It adopts a position that only acknowledges the existence of one's very own mind and opposes that there is anything beyond the realm of my mind that could be known. What a drastic contradiction to the way we normally view the world, indeed. Allow me to emphasize some implications that would arise were one really to take the solipsist view for granted. The aim is to briefly adumbrate how a solipsist view would cut us off from the social world and from the existential dimension of our own death.

2021 ◽  
pp. 389-410
Author(s):  
Anjali Albuquerque ◽  
Neha P Chaudhary ◽  
Gowri G Aragam ◽  
Nina Vasan

Stanford Brainstorm, the world’s first lab for mental health innovation, taps into the combined potential of academia and industry—bridging medicine, technology, and entrepreneurship—to redesign the way the world views, diagnoses, and treats mental illness. Convergence science has facilitated Brainstorm’s emergence as a pivotal protagonist in the history of the mental health innovation field. In turn, Brainstorm has catalyzed innovation within mental health by applying convergent approaches to tackle the scope, immediacy, and impact of mental illness. Stanford Brainstorm’s thinking about mental health represents a shift in the discipline of psychiatry from a focus on one-to-one delivery to collaborative and sustainable solutions for millions.


Author(s):  
Eric Hobsbawm

This chapter discusses Marxist historiography in the present times. In the interpretation of the world nowadays, there has been a rise in the so-called anti-Rankean reaction in history, of which Marxism is an important but not always fully acknowledged element. This movement challenged the positivist belief that the objective structure of reality was self-explanatory, and that all that was needed was to apply the methodology of science to it and explain why things happened the way they did. This movement also brought together history with the social sciences, therefore turning it into part of a generalizing discipline capable of explaining transformations of human society in the course of its past. This new perspective on the past is a return to ‘total history’, in which the focus is not merely on the ‘history of everything’ but history as an indivisible web wherein all human activities are interconnected.


Author(s):  
Colin Brown

The study of sport – its social, political, cultural and economic aspects – is a well-established academic field, scholars widely acknowledging its significance in understanding how a society is organized and understood. As Perkin (1992:211) puts it: The history of societies is reflected more vividly in the way they spend their leisure than in their politics or their work […] the history of sport gives a unique insight into the way a society changes and impacts on other societies it comes into contact with and, conversely, the way those societies react back to it. Sport has a particular resonance in considerations of the emergence of modern nation-states out of colonialism, given the connections between the diffusion of modern sports around the world and the colonial experience. Although virtually all societies played games of various kinds, competitive, rule-based sports are essentially modern, western phenomena, dating back no further than the nineteenth century. Their spread through the world coincided with, and in many respects was an inherent part of, the expansion of western colonialism. In the British Empire in particular, sport was seen as reflecting the essential values and characteristics of the British race which justified the existence of colonialism. Wherever the British went, they took their sports with them, together with the social mores they represented.


1995 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Basheer Nafi

This issue of AJISS provides a multidimensional perspective of today’sIslamic intellectual experience. What seems to contribute markedly to theshaping of this experience is the ongoing creative process of integrating thecontemporary with the historical and the particular with the universal. TheMuslims’ commitment to humanity’s persistent struggle for meaning andharmony is, in essence, deeply linked to their belonging to the social anddiscursive manifestations of the Islamic historical epoch.Similarly evident is that neither studying Islam nor seeking the constructionof an Islamic view of our times can be conducted coherently withoutinvoking human history and intellectual achievements located outsideof the traditionally defined boundaries of the Islamic intellectual venture.Examples abound. Western epistemological tools and concepts are nowused widely, with little hesitation, by an increasing number of Muslimsocial scientists. On another level, the emergence of world global systemshas left its imprint on the Muslims’ perceptions of universal justice. Theinfluences of non-Muslim suffering and struggle are becoming part of theMuslim consciousness. In a startling reflection of this development, thetragic history of Native Americans has recently been sought as an allegoricalwell-spring by Arab anti-imperialist poets. For Islam and the world,despite many pitfalls and dangers, this process of integration is ultimatelybound to transfer the Muslims’ worldview to an era that is fundamentallydisctinctive from the preceding “centuries of the Islamic experience.”Charles Hirschkind’s “Heresy or Hermeneutics: The Case of NasrHamid Abu Zayd” provides a lucid example of how modem Islamic intellectualismand its image, the discipline of Islamic studies, are predicated ona wide variety of sources, whether historical or contingent, traditional orotherwise. The case of Abu Zayd and his prolonged conflict with Islamiccircles in Egypt has been of particular interest to the western and Arab secularmedia alike. Emerging from the halls of the University of Cairo, thecontentious debate surrounding his ideas has marched all the way to theEgyptian judiciary. But Hirschkind is not a judge, and AJISS is not a courtroom.The focus here is on “the contrastive notions of reason and history,” ...


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-71
Author(s):  
Selma Köksal

As we know, the European-American Western civilization and authority has started to form with the Greek civilization, and strengthened itself through the advent of monotheistic religions. After the Renaissance era and industrial revolutions, the transition from feudalism to industrialization and then to capitalism, made Europe a center of the world. Yet, today, the center has been shifted to the line of Europe-America. In the art of painting, the concept of apocalypse is as old as the first paintings that depict the narrations about human existence. Yet, we can see this concept in an intensified way in the film arts. Finding its inspiration from the social world we live in, film art has been deeply affected by the social class struggles, income inequality, cold war period followed by two major wars, and environmental disasters. By analyzing examples from the history of art and directors from film arts (such as Tarkovsky, Iñárritu, Lars von Trier, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan) who use metaphorical sceneries in dystopian /utopian contents, this article will focus on decoding the signification of the concept of apocalypse throughout the history of humanity.


1997 ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
Borys Lobovyk

An important problem of religious studies, the history of religion as a branch of knowledge is the periodization process of the development of religious phenomenon. It is precisely here, as in focus, that the question of the essence and meaning of the religious development of the human being of the world, the origin of beliefs and cult, the reasons for the changes in them, the place and role of religion in the social and spiritual process, etc., are converging.


This book examines the way schizophrenia is shaped by its social context: how life is lived with this madness in different settings, and what it is about those settings that alters the course of the illness, its outcome, and even the structure of its symptoms. Until recently, schizophrenia was perhaps our best example—our poster child—for the “bio-bio-bio” model of psychiatric illness: genetic cause, brain alteration, pharmacologic treatment. We now have direct epidemiological evidence that people are more likely to fall ill with schizophrenia in some social settings than in others, and more likely to recover in some social settings than in others. Something about the social world gets under the skin. This book presents twelve case studies written by psychiatric anthropologists that help to illustrate some of the variability in the social experience of schizophrenia and that illustrate the main hypotheses about the different experience of schizophrenia in the west and outside the west--and in particular, why schizophrenia seems to have a more benign course and outcome in India. We argue that above all it is the experience of “social defeat” that increases the risk and burden of schizophrenia, and that opportunities for social defeat are more abundant in the modern west. There is a new role for anthropology in the science of schizophrenia. Psychiatric science has learned—epidemiologically, empirically, quantitatively—that our social world makes a difference. But the highly structured, specific-variable analytic methods of standard psychiatric science cannot tell us what it is about culture that has that impact. The careful observation enabled by rich ethnography allows us to see in more detail what kinds of social and cultural features may make a difference to a life lived with schizophrenia. And if we understand culture’s impact more deeply, we believe that we may improve the way we reach out to help those who struggle with our most troubling madness.


GIS Business ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 202-206
Author(s):  
SAJITHA M

Food is one of the main requirements of human being. It is flattering for the preservation of wellbeing and nourishment of the body.  The food of a society exposes its custom, prosperity, status, habits as well as it help to develop a culture. Food is one of the most important social indicators of a society. History of food carries a dynamic character in the socio- economic, political, and cultural realm of a society. The food is one of the obligatory components in our daily life. It occupied an obvious atmosphere for the augmentation of healthy life and anticipation against the diseases.  The food also shows a significant character in establishing cultural distinctiveness, and it reflects who we are. Food also reflected as the symbol of individuality, generosity, social status and religious believes etc in a civilized society. Food is not a discriminating aspect. It is the part of a culture, habits, addiction, and identity of a civilization.Food plays a symbolic role in the social activities the world over. It’s a universal sign of hospitality.[1]


Apeiron ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Proios

Abstract Plato’s invention of the metaphor of carving the world by the joints (Phaedrus 265d–66c) gives him a privileged place in the history of natural kind theory in philosophy and science; he is often understood to present a paradigmatic but antiquated view of natural kinds as possessing eternal, immutable, necessary essences. Yet, I highlight that, as a point of distinction from contemporary views about natural kinds, Plato subscribes to an intelligent-design, teleological framework, in which the natural world is the product of craft and, as a result, is structured such that it is good for it to be that way. In Plato’s Philebus, the character Socrates introduces a method of inquiry whose articulation of natural kinds enables it to confer expert knowledge, such as literacy. My paper contributes to an understanding of Plato’s view of natural kinds by interpreting this method in light of Plato’s teleological conception of nature. I argue that a human inquirer who uses the method identifies kinds with relational essences within a system causally related to the production of some unique craft-object, such as writing. As a result, I recast Plato’s place in the history of philosophy, including Plato’s view of the relation between the kinds according to the natural and social sciences. Whereas some are inclined to separate natural from social kinds, Plato holds the unique view that all naturalness is a social feature of kinds reflecting the role of intelligent agency.


1988 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 593-606
Author(s):  
John Villiers

The numerous and voluminous reports and letters which the Jesuits wrote on the Moro mission, as on all their missions in Asia, are perhaps of less interest to us now for what they reveal of the methods adopted by the Society of Jesus in this remote corner of their mission field or the details they contain about the successes and failures of individual missionaries, than for the wealth of information they provide on the islands where the Jesuits lived and the indigenous societies with which they came into contact through their work of evangelization. In other words, it is not theprimary purpose of this essay to analyse the Jesuit documents with a view to reconstructing the history of the Moro mission in narrative form but rather to glean from them some of the informationthey contain about the social and political conditions in Moro during the forty years or so in the sixteenth century when both the Jesuit missionaries and the Portuguese were active in the regio Because the Jesuits were often in close touch with local rulers and notables, whether or not they succeeded in converting them to Christianity, and because they lived among their subjects for long periods, depending upon them for the necessities of life and sharing their hardships, their letters and reports often show a deeper understanding of the social, economic and political conditions of the indigenous societies and, one suspects, give a more accurate and measured account of events and personalities than do the official chroniclers and historians of the time, most of whom never ventured further east than Malacca and who in any case were chiefly concerned to glorify the deeds of the Portuguese and justify their actions to the world.


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