scholarly journals Collateral beauty in the wind of truth: reclaiming a new sense of reality

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rita Casadei

It is beautiful to be able to have the opportunity to allow oneself a doubt on the unquestionability of one's mental habits; it is beautiful to be able to renew one's energy to relate to the world in a way not bent by the banality of convenience and calculation. It is beautiful to realise that one feels the need for beauty as an inspirational motive for one's thinking, feeling and acting, and as a resource towards a new education. The serious pandemic crisis has probably accelerated a necessary but demanding process that takes time to accomplish: that of becoming aware of a reality based on the principle of interconnection and interdependence – of the person with all his/her dimensions, with each other, with the Cosmos. I believe that this new perception of reality – as the result of an experience – can mark a new step for the discourse and pedagogical practice so as to devote itself to a new form of beauty in the search for a ἀλήθεια (aletheia) truth to be configured as a desire for unveiling and deep understanding of the sense of reality, to be nourished in a revitalised interdisciplinarity, with a sense of wonder and amazement for every aspect of life. Care, responsibility and commitment, if animated by joy and love, can only aspire to excellence, giving the person the opportunity to fully realise his or her dignity and humanity.

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 528
Author(s):  
Ako Abubakr Jaffar ◽  
Mazen Ismaeel Ghareb ◽  
Karzan Hussein Sharif

The Retailers all over the world are prospering from the burgeoning trend of online shopping. Kurdistan Regional Government is still struggling to grow its e-commerce markets. On the other hands e-commerce in Various countries in the Middle East have some of the world’s highest internet and mobile penetration rates. Alternative payments methods are quickly expanding, and having access to some of the world’s most coveted natural resources that allows countries in their region to have some of the highest GDP in the world. There are several challenges prevalent in the KRG Region market that will require international merchants to develop strategies based on innovation and vigilance. This unique region is plagued with complications many other countries have little to no experience with e-commerce, which highlights the need for retailers to have a deep understanding as to how this region operates before they can begin finding solutions. One of the biggest concerns today's consumers have is the risk of fraud when they are shopping online. With highly sophisticated malware and perceptive cybercriminals, customers' card and bank information can easily be stolen if a merchant does not take the proper security measures. In this paper we summarize all challenges need to be addressed in KRG in order to make correct steps to apply e-commerce in KRG. Finally, the recommendations and framework are proposed for e-commerce to encourage government, organizations, and people to take advantages from e-commerce.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yue-Cune Chang

BACKGROUND The Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19) is the new form of an acute infectious respiratory disease and has quickly spread over most continents in the world. Recently, it has been shown that Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) might protect against COVID-19. This study aims to investigate the possible correlation between BCG vaccination and morbidity/mortality/recovery rate associated with COVID-19 infection. OBJECTIVE Our findings confirm that the BCG vaccination might protect against COVID-19 virus infection. METHODS Data of COVID-19 confirmed cases, deaths, recoveries, and population were obtained from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ (Accessed on 12 June, 2020). To have meaningful comparisons among countries’ mortality and recovery rates, we only choose those countries with COVID-19 infected cases at least 200. The Poisson regression and logistic regression were used to explore the relationship between BCG vaccination and morbidity, mortality and recovery rates. RESULTS Among those 158 countries with at least 200 COVID-19 infected cases, there were 141 countries with BCG vaccination information available. The adjusted rates ratio of COVID-19 confirmed cases for Current BCG vaccination vs. non-Current BCG vaccination was 0.339 (with 95% CI= (0.338,0.340)). Moreover, the adjusted odds ratio (OR) of death and recovery after coronavirus infected for Current BCG vaccination vs. non-Current BCG vaccination were 0.258 (with 95% CI= (0.254,0.261)) and 2.151 (with 95% CI= (2.140,2.163)), respectively. CONCLUSIONS That data in this study show the BCG might provide the protection against COVID-19, with consequent less COVID-19 infection and deaths and more rapid recovery. BCG vaccine might bridge the gap before the disease-specific vaccine is developed, but this hypothesis needs to be further tested in rigorous randomized clinical trials. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT RR2-https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.14.20131268


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Philipp Klar ◽  
Georg Northoff

The existential crisis of nihilism in schizophrenia has been reported since the early days of psychiatry. Taking first-person accounts concerning nihilistic experiences of both the self and the world as vantage point, we aim to develop a dynamic existential model of the pathological development of existential nihilism. Since the phenomenology of such a crisis is intrinsically subjective, we especially take the immediate and pre-reflective first-person perspective’s (FPP) experience (instead of objectified symptoms and diagnoses) of schizophrenia into consideration. The hereby developed existential model consists of 3 conceptualized stages that are nested into each other, which defines what we mean by existential. At the same time, the model intrinsically converges with the phenomenological concept of the self-world structure notable inside our existential framework. Regarding the 3 individual stages, we suggest that the onset or first stage of nihilistic pathogenesis is reflected by phenomenological solipsism, that is, a general disruption of the FPP experience. Paradigmatically, this initial disruption contains the well-known crisis of common sense in schizophrenia. The following second stage of epistemological solipsism negatively affects all possible perspectives of experience, that is, the first-, second-, and third-person perspectives of subjectivity. Therefore, within the second stage, solipsism expands from a disruption of immediate and pre-reflective experience (first stage) to a disruption of reflective experience and principal knowledge (second stage), as mirrored in abnormal epistemological limitations of principal knowledge. Finally, the experience of the annihilation of healthy self-consciousness into the ultimate collapse of the individual’s existence defines the third stage. The schizophrenic individual consequently loses her/his vital experience since the intentional structure of consciousness including any sense of reality breaks down. Such a descriptive-interpretative existential model of nihilism in schizophrenia may ultimately serve as input for future psychopathological investigations of nihilism in general, including, for instance, its manifestation in depression.


Author(s):  
Simon Caney

This chapter explores the relevance of facts and empirical enquiry for the normative project of enquiring what principles of distributive justice, if any, apply at the global level. Is empirical research needed for this kind of enquiry? And if so, how? Claims about global distributive justice often rest on factual assumptions. Seven different ways in which facts about national, regional and global politics (and hence empirical research into global politics) might inform accounts of global distributive justice are examined. A deep understanding of the nature of global politics and the world economy (and thus empirical research on it) is needed: to grasp the implications of principles of global distributive justice; to evaluate such principles for their attainability and political feasibility; to assess their desirability; and, first, to conceptualize the subject-matter of global distributive justice and to formulate the questions that accounts of global distributive justice need to answer.


Author(s):  
Huang-Ming Chang ◽  
Leonid Ivonin ◽  
Marta Diaz ◽  
Andreu Catala ◽  
Wei Chen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Abigail Williams

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. This book offered a series of vignettes of reading lives and practices. It presented a cluster of historical figures and a range of historical books, and used them to try to reconstruct what literature has meant and what it has been used for. It showed that the way in which people used the books they read are closely bound up with other aspects of amateur, domestic culture. This book also showed that anxieties about forms of reading are not new. Eighteenth-century commentators worried about learning bought too easily and readers who could no longer engage with whole texts. Families encouraged reading together because they feared that young people were losing their sense of reality through their immersion in addictive imaginative fictions. The world of eighteenth-century reading was a very different land, but in some ways, perhaps not so far from our own as we like to think.


2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-317
Author(s):  
Kurt Wurmli

Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata are recognized as the most influential creators of the contemporary Japanese dance form known today as butoh. Since its wild and avant-garde beginnings in the late 1950s, butoh has evolved into an established and appreciated art form throughout the world. Despite its popularity and strong influences on the international modern dance world, butoh only recently became an accepted subject for academic research in Japan as well as in the West. With the new opening of butoh research centers and archives—such as the Ohno Dance Studio Archives at BANK ART 1929 in Yokohama, the Kazuo Ohno Archives at Bologna University in Italy, and the Hijikata Tatsumi Archives at Keio University in Tokyo—serious scholarly attention has been given to the art of butoh's founders. However, the lack of firsthand sources by butoh artists reflecting their own work still poses great limitations for a deep understanding of the art form. Kazuo Ohno's World from Without and Within is not only the first full-length book in English about the master's life and work, but also offers a rare inside view of butoh.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Little ◽  
Alison Winch

Our case study looks at the events surrounding the sacking ofGoogle engineer James Damore who was fired for authoring a memo which stated that women are biologically less suited to high-stress, high-status technical employment than men. Damore, asserting that his document ‘was absolutely consistent with what he’d seen online’, instantly became an ambivalent hero of the alt-right. Like the men who own and run the companies of Silicon Valley, the software engineer subscribes to the idea that the world can be understood and altered through the rigorous application of the scientific method. And as he draws on bodies of knowledge from evolutionary psychology and mathematical biology, we see how the core belief structures of Silicon Valley, when transferred from the technical to the cultural and social domain, can reproduce the sort of misogynistic ‘rationalism’ that fuels the alt-right. We argue that Damore’s memo is in line with Google’s ideology of ‘dataism’: that is the belief that the world can be reduced to decontextualised information and subject to quantifiable logics.Through its use of dataism, the memo reveals much about the similarities and continuities between Damore, the ideas laid out n his memo, and Google itself. Rather than being in opposition, these two entities are jostling for a place in the patriarchal structures of a new form of capitalism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-23
Author(s):  
K.A. Barannikov ◽  
I.M. Remorenko

The authors make retrospective analyze of "outcome-based education" and “competence-based education” concepts evolution. National educational standards and curricula all around the world have gone through dramatic transformation over the last 20 years. New education models require new methodology for designing educational outcomes. In the paper, based on the analysis of international experience, a framework for designing outcomes is proposed. Authors analyze Canada, UK, Finland, Australia, USA experience. Also terminology of meta-subject and subject outcomes are discusses in the paper. The framework presented by the authors is applicable both for school and teacher curricula, and at the national level, when formulating standards or example currucula.


2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Basia Nikiforova

The paper deals with the concept of matter manipulation and its vitality in the Brothers Quay’ works. The matter manipulation is not limited to the actual “matter”. Brothers Quay perceive the acting “matters” as symbols and signs of human activities and relationships. For them, there is no fundamental difference between “matters” and living beings inhabiting their films. Matter manipulation is the process of “machine” production, reproduction, destruction, repair and deconstruction. The creation process acts as a magic spell, in which objects are transformed into something else. The Street of Crocodiles (1986) is an example of deep understanding of lifelessness as a mask, a kind of conspiracy, behind which unknown life forms hide. Brothers Quay’ creative works tell us about autonomous existence of objects beyond their direct utilitarian purpose. The article will be devoted to such problems as synergistic vision of the world in which the material and the spiritual are inseparable. Despite the paradox of visual embodiment, it fits into a philosophical metatheory of the “new materialism”, which transversely crosses streams of matter and mind, body and soul, nature and culture. The legacy of Brothers Quay open to us the world of ordinary, “banal” things, signs of time on their body shell, in contradiction with the dominance of endless consumption of new, intrusive advertising and cult of youth, in which there is no room for “sign of the times”. Santrauka Straipsnio objektas – manipuliavimo materija ir jos vitališkumo koncepcija brolių Quay darbuose. Manipuliavimas materija neapsiriboja tikrąja „materija“. Broliai Quay veikiančiąją „materiją“ supranta kaip žmonių veiklos bei santykių simbolius ir ženklus. Jų manymu, nesama esminio skirtumo tarp „materijos“ ir gyvų būtybių jų filmuose. Manipuliavimas materija – tai „mašininio“ produkavimo, reprodukavimo, destrukcijos, taisymo ir dekonstravimo procesas. Kūrybos procesas – tai tarsi magiškas akimirksnis, kurio metu objektai transformuojami į kažką kita. Krokodilų gatvė – tai negyvybingumo kaip kaukės, tam tikros konspiracijos, anapus kurios glūdi nepažintojo gyvenimo formos, gilaus supratimo pavyzdys. Brolių Quay kūrybos darbai byloja apie autonomišką objektų egzistenciją anapus jų tiesioginių utilitarinių tikslų. Straipsnis skirtas tokioms problemoms, kaip sinergetinis pasaulio, kuriame materija ir dvasia yra neatsiejamos, matymas. Nepaisant vizualiojo įkūnijimo paradokso, jis pritaikomas „naujojo materializmo“ filosofinei metateorijai. „Naujasis materializmas“ skersai išilgai kerta materijos ir sąmonės, kūno ir sielos, gamtos ir kultūros klodus. Brolių Quay palikimas atveria įprastinių, „banalių“ daiktų pasaulį, laiko ženklus jų kūniškumo lentynoje, visa tai priešpastatydamas neišsenkančiam naujosios įkyrios reklamos ir jaunystės kulto vartojimo dominavimui – pastarojo sąlygomis nesama vietos „laiko ženklų“ kambariui. Reikšminiai žodžiai: animacija, broliai Quay, Vidurio ir Rytų Europa, Gilles'is Deleuze'as, mašina, manipuliavimas, medžiaga, vitališkumas


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