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.

Youth Preferences in the Choice of Information Resources on the Internet

The article analyzes the results of a questionnaire survey of students of Moscow Technical University of Communications and Informatics, aimed at studying the role of electronic resources in youth communication. The results of empirical research aimed at attitudes of students to various forms of interaction in the Web are presented. The preferences of students in the choice of the optimal mass media, programs for the rapid exchange of information are indicated. The motives and peculiarities of the attitude to the Internet are analyzed and explained. In this regard, it has been determined to what extent university students are involved in the information and communication environment of the Internet, ready for the perception of educational and other information on the Web. Separately, the amount of time that students devote to communication in social networks is characterized. In addition, the questionnaire survey focuses on the normative aspect of communication on the Internet, reveals the attitude of young people to the violation of legislation on the World Wide Web.

Emotions Under Trauma

While emotions can play positive, contributory roles in our cognition and our lives, they frequently have the opposite effect. Michael Brady’s otherwise excellent introduction to the topic of emotion is unbalanced because he does not attend to harms emotions cause. The basic problem is that emotions have a normative aspect: they can be justified or unjustified and Brady does not attend to this. An example of this is Brady’s discussion of curiosity as the emotional motivation for knowledge. More importantly, while emotions can and sometimes do reveal to us what we value, it is far less frequent that emotions reveal objective value.

Beyond the Basics of Emotions

While emotions can play positive, contributory roles in our cognition and our lives, they frequently have the opposite effect. Michael Brady’s otherwise excellent introduction to the topic of emotion is unbalanced because he does not attend to harms emotions cause. The basic problem is that emotions have a normative aspect: they can be justified or unjustified and Brady does not attend to this. An example of this is Brady’s discussion of curiosity as the emotional motivation for knowledge. More importantly, while emotions can and sometimes do reveal to us what we value, it is far less frequent that emotions reveal objective value.

How sociology of emotions is possible, and how it helps to understand happiness and justice

The article is a reflection-review of the book by Scott R. Harris An Invitation to the Sociology of Emotions (translated from English by O.A. Simonova; Moscow: HSE; 2020). Certainly, such a type of scientific works does not need a review after publication, but this book requires special attention for sociology of emotions seems to be a marginal area of Russian sociology, at least in the institutional perspective. After a brief description of the origins and manifestations of the affective turn, the author considers its consequences for social sciences (recognition of the cultural nature of emotions, perception of emotional standards in the course of socialization, etc.), and reconstructs the sociological model for the study of emotions as developed by Harris: reliance on symbolic interactionism and the social exchange theory, analysis of the normative aspect of emotions (cultural expectations about how one should feel in different situations, social standards for assessing the acceptability of emotions, etc.) and of the procedural side of the emotional life (exchange of emotions, management of emotions, identification of emotions, and emotional labor).

PEMAKNAAN NORMA KONSTITUSI DALAM PENGUATAN DEWAN PERWAKILAN DAERAH DALAM RULE MAKING FUNCTION

The existence of the House of Representatives (DPD) in including regional inputs in the form of norms has experienced polemics. These polemics include the decisions of the State Administrative Court (PTUN), the Supreme Court (MA), and the Constitutional Court (MK) that are out of sync with one another. This decision has the impact of legal dualism which results in confusion for the General Election Commission (KPU) to carry out its functions and even disharmony between legal norms. This normative research aims to determine the existence of a basis to support the DPD in order to reduce conflicts of interest. As a result, the KPU, when viewed from the normative aspect, the Constitutional Court is the sole interpreter of the constitution because of the authority granted by the constitution in Article 24 C. If so, then the KPU does not have to worry about implementing the Constitutional Court's decision because it is constitutional. That is, the KPU carrying out the Constitutional Court's Decision means maintaining the dignity of the DPR so that the aspirations carried out truly represent the needs of the region without worrying about conflicts of interest because they have as administrators of political parties.

Feeling Joint Ownership of Agency: The Normative Aspect of Agency Transformation

Team reasoning is the idea that we can think as a ‘we’ and this can solve some coordination dilemmas, such as Hi-Lo. However, team reasoning can only solve the dilemmas it is intended to solve if the conditions for team reasoning warrant the belief that others will also perform team reasoning and these conditions cannot render team reasoning otiose. In this paper, I will supplement the theory of team reasoning by explaining how agency transformation also involves a change in the normative attitude. To do this, I will use the theory of affordances, which is the idea that the environment provides ways to interact with it. I will argue that when a person perceives as a group member, she associates herself and the other members with the group’s mosaic of affordances. This triggers a feeling of joint ownership of the agency. It is the feeling that it is up to us to deal with the situation, so we feel entitled to demand each other to cooperate. It warrants the belief that others are team-reasoners without rendering team reasoning otiose. This means that the agency transformation (from I to we) involves a change in the normative attitude.

Syntactic innovations in Polish Internet communication

Today, the use of language on the Internet is the most important environment for the emergence of new language customs and variant forms. The article presents search results and the quantitative and qualitative analysis of two syntactic constructions: X and their non-normative variants: Y. The study takes into account the numerical ratio of normative and nonnormative constructions, comparative data from various types of discourses and media texts, including those derived from Polish Internet speech in its interactive and non-interactive variants, and a comparison of data from various periods (until 2000, 2001–2010, after 2010), when the Polish language did not succumb to the influence of network communication (or its impact was less). The sources of data are the National Corpus of Polish, Monco PL online news search engine and Forumowisko PL online forums. The overarching aim of the research is the initial implementation of research postulates formulated both in normative linguistics (developing research tools that will allow for the codification of the standard norm of Polish to be re-codified) and in the field of media linguistics (developing criteria for assessing the rules of communication in the network that will take into account the normative aspect of language in combination with the rules governing Internet communication).

The Civic Culture: Between Analytical Category and Normative Ideal

Political culture is one of the most popular research areas related to the functioning of the sphere of politics. Contemporary research on political culture was initiated in the 1950s by American researchers Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba. Their research was characterised by the assumption that the stability of a political system requires a balance between political structures and the accompanying political patterns. They pointed out that modern democratic institutions require civic participation and thus the development of a specific type of attitudes towards the sphere of politics referred to as the civic culture. In this article, the author analyses the social context in which the concepts of Almond and Verba arose, noting that they strongly influenced the way the concept of the civic culture was conceptualised. The author draws attention to the normative aspect of the theory of the American researchers, the consideration of which is necessary for a full understanding of the concept of the civic culture.

Gramatica Critică Sau Critica Gramaticii?

Gramatica critică a limbii române (The Critical Grammar of the Romanian Language), authored by Ștefan Găitănaru, was published in 2018, at the University of Pitești Publishing House. The launch of this book took place during the National Conference on Adaptation, Conservation and Rejection in the Evolution of the Romanian Cultural/ Linguistic/ Literary Phenomenon, held at the Faculty of Letters in Sibiu, on May 24, 2019. The purpose of the book, mentioned by the author in the Preface, is to update the grammar research, emphasizing the normative aspect. Thus, we witness a descriptive-normative grammar, with a classical structure: part I - Morphology and part II - Syntax, each section comprising the description, analysis and interpretation of specific components. This Critical Grammar brings to the surface controversial aspects regarding the grammatical structure of the Romanian language, with pertinent observations and recommendations, with solid arguments, for or against, from case to case.