Modes and Composite Material Things According to Descartes and Locke

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Brandt Bolton
Keyword(s):  
Composite Material ◽  
Physical Theory ◽  
Mercury Salt ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Living Things ◽  
Material Things ◽  
The Many ◽  
Principal Attribute

This chapter deals with the ontology of bodies in Locke’s Essay. In Descartes’s ontology, a created substance, or its principal attribute, unifies the many modes that belong to that substance; by contrast, Locke’s ontology includes not only substances and their qualities, but also composite entities which contain substances but are unified by modes. Locke, it is argued, seeks to adapt the apparent unity of living things, e.g. oaks, horses, and human beings, to the (Cartesian) mechanistic doctrine that matter is a substance. His concepts of inner constitution and identity are designed to give a metaphysical account of the unity of the ordinary entities that are salient in our experience. There is nothing corresponding to this in the Cartesian texts. They purport to explain the unity among qualities of mercury, salt, etc., and the processes carried on by plants and animals on the basis of physical theory, not metaphysics.

The Measure of Greatness

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Nature ◽  
Complex Trajectory ◽  
The Many ◽  
Human Excellence ◽  
Ethical Perspectives

Magnanimity is a virtue that has led many lives. Foregrounded early on by Plato as the philosophical virtue par excellence, it became one of the crown jewels in Aristotle’s account of human excellence and was accorded an equally salient place by other ancient thinkers. One of the most distinctive elements of the ancient tradition to filter into the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds, it sparked important intellectual engagements there and went on to carve deep tracks through several later philosophies that inherited from this tradition. Under changing names, under reworked forms, it continued to breathe in the thought of Descartes and Hume, Kant and Nietzsche, and their successors. Its many lives have been joined by important continuities. Yet they have also been fragmented by discontinuities—discontinuities reflecting larger shifts in ethical perspectives and competing answers to questions about the nature of the good life, the moral nature of human beings, and their relationship to the social and natural world they inhabit. They have also been punctuated by moments of controversy in which the greatness of this vision of human greatness has itself been called into doubt. This volume provides a window to the complex trajectory of a virtue whose glitter has at times been as heady as it has been divisive. By exploring the many lives it has lived, we will be in a better position to decide whether and why this is a virtue we might still want to make central to our own ethical lives.

The Chronology of Sudanese Arabic Genealogical Tradition

2000 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 325-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Spaulding
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Nile Valley ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Old Kingdom ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Islamic Faith

Modern nationalisms first arose during the later eighteenth century around the wide periphery of the ancient heartland of western culture and gnawed their way inward during the course of the nineteenth century to the core, culminating in World War I, Each new nationalism generated an original “imagined community” of human beings, part of whose ideological cohesion derived from a sense of shared historical experience. Since the actual historical record would not necessarily satisfy this hunger, it was often found expedient to amend the past through acts of imagination aptly termed the “invention of tradition.”One of the many new “imagined communities” of the long nineteenth century took shape in the northern Nile-valley Sudan between the final disintegration of the old kingdom of Sinnar (irredeemable after the death of the strongman Muhammad Abu Likaylik in 1775) and the publication of Harold MacMichael's A History of the Arabs in the Sudan in 1922. The new national community born of the collapse of Sinnar, strongly committed to Arabic speech and Islamic faith, was tested by fire through foreign conquest and revolution, by profound socio-economic transformation, and by the challenges attendant on participation in an extended sub-imperialism that earned it hegemony—first cultural, and ultimately political—over all the diverse peoples of the modern Sudan.One important response of the nascent community to the trials of this difficult age was the invention of a new national historical tradition, according to which its members were descended via comparatively recent immigrants to the Sudan from eminent Arabs of Islamic antiquity.

scholarly journals Development of painting in Maratha area

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (9) ◽  
pp. 198-202
Author(s):  
Sushma Jain
Keyword(s):  
Madhya Pradesh ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Many

The painting tradition in the Maratha region dates back to prehistoric times. Human beings have left examples of paintings with a very careful reflex of behavior. In the primitive tendons of Madhya Pradesh, we are surprised today by the many linear signs of the human and the aesthetic form of the weapons, following the craving to be cultured and ornate on that barbar. मराठा क्षेत्र में चित्रकला परंपरा का प्रारंभ प्रागैतिहासिक काल से होता है। मानव ने बहुत ही प्रांरभ में व्यवहार की सजगता के साथ चित्रों के उदाहरण छोड़े हैं। मध्यप्रदेश की आदिम कंदराओं में हमें उस बर्बर पर सुसंस्कृत और सुअलंकृत होने की लालसा के अनुगामी मानव के रचे अनेक रेखीय चिन्ह तथा अस्त्र शस्त्रों के सौंदर्य प्रधान रूप आज हमंें आश्चर्य चकित करते है।1

Distributed Recommender Systems for Internet Commerce

2005 ◽  
pp. 907-911 ◽  
Author(s):  
Badrul M. Sarwar ◽  
Joseph A. Konstan ◽  
John T. Riedl
Keyword(s):  
Recommender Systems ◽  
Nearest Neighbor ◽  
Clustering Algorithms ◽  
Weighted Average ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Internet Commerce ◽  
Rule Based ◽  
Evaluation Approach ◽  
The Many

Recommender systems (RSs) present an alternative information-evaluation approach based on the judgements of human beings (Resnick & Varian, 1997). It attempts to automate the word-of-mouth recommendations that we regularly receive from family, friends, and colleagues. In essence, it allows everyone to serve as a critic. This inclusiveness circumvents the scalability problems of individual critics—with millions of readers it becomes possible to review millions of books. At the same time it raises the question of how to reconcile the many and varied opinions of a large community of ordinary people. Recommender systems address this question through the use of different algorithms: nearest-neighbor algorithms (Resnick, Iacovou, Suchak, Bergstrom, & Riedl, 1994; Shardanand et al., 1994), item-based algorithms (Sarwar, Karypis, Konstan, & Riedl, 2001), clustering algorithms (Ungar & Foster, 1998), and probabilistic and rule-based learning algorithms (Breese, Heckerman, & Kadie, 1998), to name but a few. The nearest-neighbor-algorithm-based recommender systems, which are often referred to as collaborative filtering (CF) systems in research literature (Maltz & Ehrlich, 1995), are the most widely used recommender systems in practice. A typical CF-based recommender system maintains a database containing the ratings that each customer has given to each product that customer has evaluated. For each customer in the system, the recommendation engine computes a neighborhood of other customers with similar opinions. To evaluate other products for this customer, the system forms a normalized and weighted average of the opinions of the customer’s neighbors.

How Do We Communicate

2020 ◽  
pp. 104-211
Keyword(s):  
Visual Communication ◽  
Electromagnetic Waves ◽  
Animal Communication ◽  
Background Information ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Living Things ◽  
Principles Of Design ◽  
Visualization Techniques ◽  
Learning Projects

This chapter examines our modes of imparting or exchanging facts and opinions. After discussion of the role of electromagnetic waves in our sensory perception, further text describes the ways we and other living beings gain information through the senses, especially when enhanced with technology. Finally, communication between people, with computers, and with other living things is described, especially when animal communication involves senses unavailable to human beings. Emphasis is put on visual communication, some basic notions about semantics, and also visualization techniques and domains. Basic art concepts, elements of design in art, and principles of design in art serve as background information, followed by learning projects.

scholarly journals The Modernity of Aristotle’s Ethics

MANUSYA ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-38
Author(s):  
Charles Freeland
Keyword(s):  
Political Discourse ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Philosophical Discourse ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
Aristotle's Ethics ◽  
The Many ◽  
Theoretical Science

Aristotle understood ethics to be a practical rather than a theoretical science. It is a pragmatics, if you will, concerned with bringing about a good life . But the problem and the question from which Aristotle’s ethics begins arid to which it constantly returns concerns the relation of the theoretical to the practical: his concern is for the type or mode of discourse one could use in providing an account of the good life (Eudaimonia). Is this a propositional, apophantic discourse, a discourse claiming to represent the truth and what is true and from which one could then go on to prescribe a course of action, or, and this may be closer to Aristotle, is the philosophical discourse on ethics rather a descriptive one which takes humankind for what it is, not what it ought to be? This relation between theory and practice, between description and prescription, between science and action, is a question and a problem for Aristotle. It is my purpose to take up this question in connection with Aristotle’s texts on Eudaimonia. Another question shall be raised here: What is the relevance of Aristotle’s treatment of Eudaimonia to our contemporary, “modern” concern for ethics and the good life? I would assume, naively perhaps, that even today we are not indifferent to this question of what is a good life, and that we are not indifferent to the many ways in which the “good life” has been described. It would seem, then, that Aristotle’s texts have a particularly striking importance for us today insofar as we prolong the philosophical questioning of the possibilities for ethical and political discourse today and continue to ask who and what we are as human beings.

Darwin's Straw God Argument

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-88
Author(s):  
Jonathan Wells ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Geographical Distribution ◽  
Fossil Record ◽  
Intelligent Design ◽  
Scientific Explanation ◽  
Darwinian Evolution ◽  
Positive Case ◽  
Living Things ◽  
The Many ◽  
Young Earth Creationism ◽  
Theology And Philosophy

In the controversy between Darwinian evolution and Intelligent Design, the fonver is commonly portrayed as science and the latter as theology or phitosophy. Yet Charles Darwin's "one long argument" in The Origin of Species was heavily theological. In particular, Darwin argued that the geographical distribution of living things, the fossil record, vestigial organs, and homologies were "inexplicabte on the theory of creation," but made sense on his theory of descent with modification. In this context, "The theory of creation" did not imply young-earth creationism, but a God conceived by Darwin to create all species separately, arbitrarily, and perfectly. In the many instances when the evidence was not sufficient to support his positive case for descent with modification, Darwin would simply declare that the only altemative-the "theory of creation"-was not a scientific explanation. Darwin's followers often argue similarly. Thus, arguments for Darwinian evolution, in both its ordinal and modem forms, are commonly bound up with arguments from theology and philosophy.

scholarly journals The grounds of worship

2006 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
TIM BAYNE ◽  
YUJIN NAGASAWA
Keyword(s):  
Human Beings ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Necessary Truth ◽  
The Many

Although worship has a pivotal place in religious thought and practice, philosophers of religion have had remarkably little to say about it. In this paper we examine some of the many questions surrounding the notion of worship, focusing on the claim that human beings have obligations to worship God. We explore a number of attempts to ground our supposed duty to worship God, and argue that each is problematic. We conclude by examining the implications of this result, and suggest that it might be taken to provide an argument against God's existence, since theists generally regard it is a necessary truth that we ought to worship God.

Rollo May and the Search for Being: Implications of May’s Thought for Contemporary Existential-Humanistic Psychotherapy

2015 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juanita Ratner
Keyword(s):  
Human Beings ◽  
Existential Psychotherapy ◽  
Presenting Problems ◽  
Therapeutic Presence ◽  
Inner Work ◽  
Humanistic Psychotherapy ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Many

Rollo May left a body of profound and incisive written work, laying a foundation for existential psychotherapy for years to come. His insightful reflections on the cultural, philosophical, and psychological dilemmas of contemporary human beings raise themes of which psychotherapists need to remain mindful and address in our practices. This article explores the implications of Rollo May’s thought for effective psychotherapy, therapy that does not content itself with simply managing symptoms but touches the root causes of the many dilemmas clients bring with them as their “presenting problems.” Underlying all these is the search for being. Rollo May viewed contemporary times as an age of anxiety; yet he also normalized anxiety as encountered in living any life. However, not knowing who one really is, not being able to engage in life from the depths of one’s being, inevitably creates conflicts that surface in psychotherapy. Effective psychotherapists must do their own inner work, inhabiting a therapeutic presence in the encounter with clients, helping them wrestle with the daimon with which they contend. May states succinctly, “A life is at stake.” This is the seriousness of the call of the psychotherapist. This article highlights meanings one student has gleaned from May’s contribution.

Aesthetic Discrimination Against Persons

Dialogue ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 676-692 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Duane Willard
Keyword(s):  
Human Beings ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Many ◽  
The U.S

An Acquaintance of mine decided, in the late 1950s, to become an officer in the U.S. Navy, until he discovered a Navy regulation stating that ugly men would not be accepted as officer candidates. Surely there is something suspicious about such a policy. Yet, in a time when people are so conscious of the many forms of discrimination — race, colour, sex, age, religion — it is somewhat surprising that little serious attention is given to the practice of what I shall call ‘aesthetic discrimination against persons’, discrimination on the basis of appearance or looks. It is true that, in recent years, some social scientists have conducted research leading them to the conclusion that human beings prefer and esteem good looking people over plain or ugly ones (a conclusion the truth of which has been known for thousands of years prior to its ‘proof’). A few of these researchers have even been willing to venture moral opinions on the subject.

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