All Is Burning: Buddhist Mindfulness as Radical Reflection

This paper consists of two parts. In the first part (Section 1, part of Section 2), I put forward a critique of what I refer to as the ‘received’ or ‘standard’ view of mindfulness in the Western cultural milieu. According to the received view, mindfulness is the acontextual ‘core’ of Buddhism whose determining characteristic is bare (present-oriented, non-judgmental) attention to the flow and content of experience. As noted by many researchers, this conception is in stark contrast to the traditional Buddhist understanding, where mindfulness is not only embedded in a broader context that provides it with a specific philosophico-existential orientation (normative aspect) but is also construed as a reflective activity (noetic aspect). In the second part (part of Sections 2–4), I argue that one of the main issues with the standard view is that it frames experience in terms of what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls ‘objective thought’ (using objectivity, or ‘thinghood’, as an onto-epistemological standard of reality), which makes the two aspects of the traditional conception (normative and noetic) unintelligible. I then provide an alternative view based on the phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty that attempts to integrate the two aspects into a broader conception of experience. By drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s notions of ‘phenomenal field’ and ‘radical reflection’, I argue that mindfulness needs to be understood as a reflective attitude that allows one to discern not only the content but also, and primarily, the context of each experience, and that this also includes seeing itself—the act of reflection—as an act that stems from, and returns back into, the pre-reflective current of existence.

PHILOSOPHICAL PATHOS IN MARÍA ZAMBRANO AND ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

This work first analyses María Zambrano's reflections on the limits of philosophy, based on the suspicion of its vanity and the ambivalence of its origins. Zambrano explores the genealogy of the traditional conception of the origin of philosophy as wonder, a wonder that she would share with poetry. She postulates a horizon of the conjunction of philosophy and poetry, to respond to the wonder at reality, but she also refers to the possibility of rescuing a more venerable form of philosophy. Secondly the work examines whether Schopenhauer's philosophy, with its proverbial pessimism and its conception of philosophical admiration as dismay, could be regarded as an example of this venerable form of philosophy and, finally, whether aspiring to create this conjunction with poetry is still philosophy.

Changing Electoral Behaviour of Tea Tribes People in Assam: A Study of Mariani Legislative Constituency

The electoral behaviour of people is generally influenced by different socio-political and economic factors. It is more common in a diverse society like India where caste and community plays a significant role in many ways shaping the mindset of the electorates during the time elections. In Assam, these factors found to be more determined in many areas among various communities. The Tea Tribes are one of such communities in the state which has been used as vote banks by political parties since the post-independent period. But gradually this traditional conception of vote bank and trend of community voting has declined as many other factors started determining the electoral behaviour of this community.

An Examination of University Students' Views of the Nature of Science Based on Their Epistemological Beliefs

This study aims to examine the scientific epistemological beliefs of university students and to analyze their views on the nature of science on the basis of these beliefs. A total of 161 university students from a public university participated voluntarily in the study. The Scientific Epistemological Beliefs Survey and The Nature of Science View Scale (NOSVS) were used as the data collection tools. The data analysis revealed that 88.2% of the students hold a traditional conception of science and 11.8% of them have a non-traditional conception of science. Also, the analysis of their nature of science views showed that 49.7% of them have a contemporary, while 50.3% have a transitional view of the nature of science. In addition, it was found that factor and total scores of students' nature of science views have a statically significant difference, depending on their traditional and non-traditional conception of science. This finding can be interpreted as a significant relationship between scientific epistemological beliefs and views about the nature of science.

Self-Knowledge

This chapter is concerned with Nietzsche’s scepticism about introspective knowledge. More precisely, it is claimed that Nietzsche rejects the traditional conception of introspective self-knowledge as something that is direct and privileged. To the contrary, he argues that self-knowledge is interpretive, for it is obtained by applying to oneself the same folk-psychological framework we apply in order to read the mind of other people. Furthermore, and relatedly, Nietzsche claims that introspective self-knowledge involves a falsification of what we actually think and do. Finally, it is argued that Nietzsche does not conclude from this that self-knowledge is impossible, but rather that third-person psychological and genealogical inquiry about oneself is a more reliable source of self-knowledge than introspection.

Muslim female activism in social discourse of the republic of Tatarstan

Nowadays the stress turns from traditional forms of activism to new forms of it and mostly it is implemented in internet sphere. Today social nets become the place of formation and development of social discourse. In framework of this paper, several prominent Muslim female blogs in Instagram are examined. So contemporary Muslim women actively join in the information field, find their niche and ac- quire audience in social nets too. At the present point they represent themselves primarily as wives and mothers, thus they get social approval for being in public sphere. However, the example of contemporary Muslim bloggers tends to transform traditional conception of religious women and her behavioral pat- terns. Now Muslim women-bloggers do not make any statements, denoting their civil rights or political positions, generally they are oriented on female auditory. Their activity is an example of the way to imple- ment your right of appearance in public sphere, saving your religious identity.

Kuhn and Wittgenstein: The Paradigm Priority Problem, Relativism and Incommensurability

For dropping the incommensurability idea elaborated at the time of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn dismisses the concept of “revolution”. The incommensurability involved the incomparability of theories. In this new environment, the revolution is replaced by conceptual reformulation and the incommensurability becomes occasional. The linguistic turn in Kuhn’s thought involves conceptual changes whose aim is to get around the accusation of relativism that the former notion of incommensurability arouses. The most fundamental effect of these conceptual reformulations is the commitment to a traditional conception of semantics. It changes the comprehension of the historical and social nature of the foundations of the changes that scientific knowledge goes through. The comparison between the answer to the problem of paradigm priority attributed by Kuhn to Wittgenstein and Wittgenstein by himself shows that the basis of the normative nature of paradigm commitment is an essentialist concern. In the second half of this paper, I will evaluate Kuhn’s manner of getting around the problems of incommensurability in contrast to Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy dealing with similar issues in On Certainty. This enables one to essay answers to the problems of incommensurability without relativism or any commitment to a traditional conception of semantics. These contrasts show how far Kuhn’s new theory of science departs from the Wittgensteinian inspiration and abandons the point of view of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The development of these two halves makes it possible to indicate reasons to believe that questions concerning the theory and history of science can benefit largely from a grammatical exploration, which gives rise to a theory of science inspired by Wittgenstein’s thought, as Mauro Condé suggests.

The holobiont mind: A bridge between 4E-cognition and the microbiome

All life on earth is intrinsically linked. At the very foundation of everyevolutionary interaction are microorganisms; integral components in thecomposition of both organisms and ecosystems. This perspectivechallenges the traditional conception of monogenetic biologicalindividuals, suggesting living beings are actually composite multi-speciescomplexes; holobionts. In the present article, we introduce the conceptof the holobiont mind; a biogenic conception of cognition. Wefurthermore expand on the idea of the mind as the emerging product ofmulti-genomic morphology of a composite agent, in ever changinginteraction with its ecological niche. We briefly review recent evidence onthe Brain-Gut-Microbiome axis and the Microbiome of the BuiltEnvironment in order to provide a bridge between the Holobiont Mindand the 4E approach to Cognition, two complementary lines of evidencethat have not been linked before, opening novel venues for research withdirect impact on health and disease.

La Philosophie pour enfants : une piste pour réconcilier enseignement disciplinaire et vie scolaire ?

"Philosophy for Children: a Way to Reconcile Disciplinary Teaching and School Life? Drawing mainly on John Dewey's writings, this contribution aims to extend the dualism of a traditional conception of education at the epistemological, pedagogical and organizational levels. This conception was already criticised by this author at the beginning of the 20th century and still remains widely present today among the school community. Through this approach, we demonstrate that the dualist approach is as many obstacles to be removed in the process both to improve and rebuild a better education. The hypothesis defended here consists to demonstrate how philosophy for children, strengthened by its pragmatist heritage, can challenge these dualisms and thereby jeopardize the traditional conception of education. Keywords: John Dewey, philosophy of education, co-curriculum, school life, philosophy for children "

Emotional Cartography of Everyday Heritage via Photography

This paper presented the results of a heritage education intervention in a non-formal context via a collective photographic exhibition organised by a cultural association. In accordance with the Faro Convention on the value of cultural heritage for society, people’s role in the construction and sustaining of their identity is recognised, and the fostering of shared responsibility towards the environment was sought. A mixed methodology was employed in order to evaluate the effects of participation in this project on the perception of heritage, to analyse what relationship there was between this conception and the photographic output, and to explain to what extent participation in a collective exhibition had an influence on the emotional resignification of everyday heritage. The results showed that the participants modified their traditional conception of heritage towards a symbolic-identity type, consciously questioned their relationship and commitment with everyday places, and rediscovered their environment by way of a contextualised learning sequence.