The Theory and Philosophy of Life

Author(s):  
Gavin Flood

The idea that there is an animating principle, a life force, that drives the living, that life itself comes to form through the manifold appearances of the world, is very ancient and can be found in Greece, China, and India. We also have more recent philosophical arguments that have understood life in terms of a vital principle or essence. Philosophies rooted in biology have tended to be sceptical of vitalist philosophies, while vitalist philosophies have rejected eliminative, materialist explanations. With reference to these concerns, the chapter examines the question of whether we are to understand life primarily in terms of human purposes, desires, fears, and hopes; or are we to explain life primarily in terms of impersonal, biological drives?

Author(s):  
Gavin Flood

The philosophies of life that emphasize life as a plane of immanence, in which there is no outside and no transcendence beyond the world, have expressed a modern non-dualism that is compatible with contemporary developments in neuroscience, social cognition, and evolution. A strong philosophical claim is that the immanence view expresses a truth about life itself, supported by science, against which the history of religions can be measured. A weak claim is that modern articulations of life itself are no more adequate than those of tradition, but the modern view is simply another approximation in expressing the field of immanence. The chapter argues for the weak view.


Author(s):  
Gavin Flood

This book considers how religion as the source of civilization transforms the fundamental bio-sociology of humans through language and the somatic exploration of religious ritual and prayer. It offers an integrative account of the nature of the human, based on what contemporary scientists tell us, especially evolutionary science and social neuroscience, as well as through the history of civilizations. Part I contemplates fundamental questions and assumptions: the current state of knowledge concerning life itself, the philosophical issues in that understanding, and how we can explain religion as the driving force of civilizations in the context of human development within an evolutionary perspective. Part II offers a reading of religions in three civilizational blocks—India, China, and Europe/the Middle East—particularly as they came to formation in the medieval period. It traces the history of how these civilizations have thematized the idea of life itself. It then takes up the idea of a life force in Part III and traces the theme of the philosophy of life through to modern times. On the one hand, the book presents a narrative account of life itself through the history of civilizations and, on the other, it presents an explanation of that narrative in terms of life.


Author(s):  
Alistair Fox

This chapter examines Merata Mita’s Mauri, the first fiction feature film in the world to be solely written and directed by an indigenous woman, as an example of “Fourth Cinema” – that is, a form of filmmaking that aims to create, produce, and transmit the stories of indigenous people, and in their own image – showing how Mita presents the coming-of-age story of a Māori girl who grows into an understanding of the spiritual dimension of the relationship of her people to the natural world, and to the ancestors who have preceded them. The discussion demonstrates how the film adopts storytelling procedures that reflect a distinctively Māori view of time and are designed to signify the presence of the mauri (or life force) in the Māori world.


2021 ◽  
pp. 223386592110183
Author(s):  
Kaushik Roy

Before the onset of the industrial revolution, China and India were the two biggest powers in Eurasia. Their total population comprised almost half of the world’s population. And the GNP of premodern China was half of the combined GNP of the world. Before circa 1600 CE, most of the textiles and iron in the world were manufactured in these two countries. China and India suffered a temporary eclipse during the age of colonialism. However, with the rise of the economic and military power of China and India from the late 20th century, it seems that these two countries are bound to reclaim their traditional positions as big powers in the international system. However, there is a caveat. In the premodern era, the Himalayas prevented any intimate contact between the ‘dragon’ and the ‘elephant’. But, from the mid-20th century, advances in technology, economic competition and the annexation of Tibet by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) among other factors resulted in China and India coming into direct contact with each other. The result has been cooperation–competition–conflict. And this has had consequences not only for these two countries but for the whole world. The present article attempts to trace the troubled trajectory of India’s China policy from the late 1940s (when these two countries became independent) up to the present day.


2022 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Samera Esmeir

Modern state law is an expansive force that permeates life and politics. Law's histories—colonial, revolutionary, and postcolonial—tell of its constitutive centrality to the making of colonies and modern states. Its powers intertwine with life itself; they attempt to direct it, shape its most intimate spheres, decide on the constitutive line dividing public from private, and take over the space and time in which life unfolds. These powers settle in the present, eliminate past authorities, and dictate futures. Gendering and constitutive of sexual difference, law's powers endeavor to mold subjects and alter how they orient themselves to others and to the world. But these powers are neither coherent nor finite. They are ripe with contradictions and conflicting desires. They are also incapable of eliminating other authorities, paths, and horizons of living; these do not vanish but remain not only thinkable and articulable but also a resource for the living. Such are some of the overlapping and accumulative interventions of the two books under review: Sara Pursley's Familiar Futures and Judith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria. What follows is an attempt to further develop these interventions by thinking with some of the books’ underlying arguments. Familiar Futures is a history of Iraq, beginning with the British colonial-mandate period and concluding with the 1958 Revolution and its immediate aftermath. Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is a history of “French Algeria” that covers a century of French colonization from 1830 to 1930. The books converge on key questions concerning how modern law and the modern state—colonial and postcolonial—articulated sexual difference and governed social and intimate life, including through the rise of personal-status law as a separate domain of law constitutive of the conjugal family. Both books are consequently also preoccupied with the relationship between sex, gender, and sovereignty. And both contain resources for living along paths not charted by the modern state and its juridical apparatus.


2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Saman Saleh ◽  
Abdulkhaleq Nader Qader ◽  
Mosleh Zeebaree ◽  
Goran Yousif Ismael ◽  
Musbah Aqel

Time management is the ability to plan and control how a person spends his hours in order to achieve his goals effectively. This involves organizing time between different areas of life, from work, household tasks, social life, and hobbies. Time always passes and we cannot control it, but time management is by organizing events in your life in proportion to time. You may often want to get more time in your day, but you only have 24 hours, 1440 minutes, or 86,400 seconds each day. How long can someone invest Time has acquired its importance for a person, as it represents an important dynamic and mobile dimension in his life that he cannot control, and because it is the vessel that embraces all human interactions and products, and because it is life itself, and that life is the amount of time that a person lives from birth until his death. Therefore, many specialists consider time as the most important component of life, and the most important resource available to humans in life, due to its unique and distinctive features. Because of the importance of time for humans, the ancient civilizations and the various monotheistic religions varied in their interest in it, but during research findings that there are important to record a precedent in order to take advantage of each part of the time, its parts to implement the righteous and purposeful workers that benefit them with good and benefit in the world and the hereafter, and warned them against wasting it and this is clearly manifested in many of the evidence included in the recommendation and result in part.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2017 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ankur Kumar Jindal ◽  
Vingesh Pandiarajan ◽  
Raju Khubchandani ◽  
Nutan Kamath ◽  
Tapas Sabui ◽  
...  

Kawasaki disease (KD) is recognized as a leading cause of acquired heart disease in children in developed countries. Although global in distribution, Japan records the highest incidence of KD in the world. Epidemiological reports from the two most populous countries in the world, namely China and India, indicate that KD is now being increasingly recognized. Whether this increased reporting is due to increased ascertainment, or is due to a true increase in incidence, remains a matter of conjecture. The diagnosis and management of KD in developing countries is a challenging proposition. In this review we highlight some of the difficulties faced by physicians in managing children with KD in resource-constrained settings. 


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (01) ◽  
pp. 81-90
Author(s):  
Sumiati Sumiati

ABSTRAK Pendidikan merupakan suatu kegiatan yang universal dalam kehidupan manusia. Di manapun di dunia ini terdapat masyarakat manusia, dan di sana pula terjadi pendidikan. Walaupun pendidikan merupakan gejala umum dalam kehidupan masyarakat, namun perbedaan pandangan hidup, perbedaan falsafah hidup yang dianut oleh masing-masing bangsa atau masyarakat menyebabkan adanya perbedaan penyelenggaraan termasuk perbedaan tujuan pendidikan yang ingin dicapai oleh suatu bangsa atau masyarakat. Kegiatan pendidikan tidak dapat dilepaskan dari yang hendak dicapainya. Bagi manusia pendidikan merupakan suatu keharusan, karena manusia lahir dalam keadaan tidak berdaya, ia sangat membutuhkan bantuan dan bimbingan orang lain untuk dapat berdiri sendiri. Di samping itu manusia lahir tidak langsung dewasa yang mengidentifikasikan manusia dengan moral yang berlaku, dan manusia yang bertanggung jawab, manusia yang sanggup mempertanggungjawabkan segala konsekuensi dan perbuatannya. Oleh karena itu, perbuatan mendidik merupakan perbuatan yang mempunyai tujuan, ada suatu yang ingin dicapai dengan perbuatan tersebut. Orang tua menyuruh anaknya melaksanakan shalat lima waktu, melatih anaknya melaksanakan saum pada bulan ramadhan, melarang anaknya kencing di sembarang tempat dan sambil berdiri, menyekolahkan anaknya dan lain-lain, semuanya itu memiliki maksud dan tujuan yang ingin dicapai, khususnya bagi anaknya. Kata Kunci: Pendidik, Terdidik ABSTRACT Education is a universal activity in human life. Everywhere in the world there is human society, and there is also education. Although education is a common phenomenon in the life of the community, the differences in life views, differences in the philosophy of life adopted by individual nations or societies lead to different organizational differences, including differences in educational goals to be achieved by a nation or society. Educational activities cannot be separated from what they want to achieve. For human education is a must, because humans are born in a state of helpless, he urgently needs the help and guidance of others to be able to stand on their own. In addition man is born indirectly mature which identifies man with the prevailing morals, and responsible man, man who is able to account for all consequences and actions. Therefore, the act of educating is a purposeful act, there is something to be achieved with the action. Parents asked their children to perform the five daily prayers, to train their children to carry out fasting in Ramadan month, to forbid their children to urinate in any place and to stand up, send their children to school and others, all of which have a purpose and goal to be achieved, especially for their children. Keywords: Educator, Educated


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (02) ◽  
pp. 5-18
Author(s):  
P S SURYANARAYANA

China and India have surprised the world by their military brinkmanship since mid-2020 amid the global coronavirus pandemic. Also surprising was their sudden disengagement at a key site, Pangong Tso Lake area in the western sector of their disputed boundary, in February 2021. But the continuing crisis has eroded their summit-level consensus reached in 2018 and 2019 that they were neighbourly partners, not rivals. The genesis of this crisis is the clash of their new perspectives on the Kashmir issue which, originally an India–Pakistan affair, has now become a major Chinese concern as well. Two new game changers in the troubled Sino–Indian engagement have caused this crisis. The author suggests a nuanced agreement on mutual military accommodation. Such an accord could create the ambience for serious negotiations to settle the intractable Sino–Indian boundary disputes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
pp. 50
Author(s):  
Oleg Aronson

The article is devoted to an analysis of the creative work of the Russian philosopher Valery Podoroga. It focuses on the special discipline he created, namely, “analytical anthropology”, and the book “Anthropograms”, in which Valery Podoroga sets out the basic principles and analytical tools of his philosophical work. Examining the books of the philosopher that preceded the creation of analytical anthropology and those that were written later, it is possible to single out two important lines of his research. First, the philosophy of literature and second, research in the field of the political. Podoroga’s understanding of literature is broader than that of a cultural practice or a social institution. For him, it is the space of the corporal experience of contact with the world, in which the affective aspect of thinking is realized. This line of analysis points to the “poetic” dimension of the experience of thinking, since the emphasis here is on what Jakobson called the “poetic function of language”, its orientation toward itself. It is precisely the literary aspect that becomes important when analyzing the texts of philosophers (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger); however, what is even more important is that in the very experience of fiction Podoroga is trying to find new means for philosophy. His “poetic line” is closely connected with the poetics of space (Bachelard) and the phenomenology of the body (Merleau-Ponty, Henry). It is the combination of poetics and phenomenology that allows Podoroga to overcome both the orientation of poetics exclusively toward language and the categorical apparatus of philosophy. The main result of Valery Podoroga’s work is the creation of an “anthropogram”, a special kind of scheme in which the action of the Work (a literary work, but not only) is immanent to the dynamics of the world. Is it possible to create such anthropograms outside the field of literature? Podoroga does not specify. The article attempts to show how Podoroga’s ways of working with literary texts correlate with his works dealing with the technologies of power and violence, transforming separate political and ethical terms into anthropograms, that is, forms of thought immanent to life itself.


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