Invincible Knowledge

1993 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 51-62
Author(s):  
Renford Bambrough

As there is a condition of mind which is characterized by invincible ignorance, so there is another which may be said to be possessed of invincible knowledge; and it would be paradoxical in me to deny to such a mental state the highest quality of religious faith,—I mean certitude. (J. H. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 138–139)‘She's an artist. She keeps saying the same thing without repeating herself. (Iris Murdoch, The Good Apprentice, 66)In being initiated into our life as human beings we are subject to causal influences; guiding, teaching, restraint, compulsion, incentives, rewards, warnings, penalties. Until such influences have achieved their most important work we do not share the human understanding within which there can be ratiocination, evidence, argument. So there is and must be a causal story of how we come to acquire a human understanding; a causal story for the species as a whole and a causal story for each of us; and there is not and could not be any acceptable account, either for the species or for the individual, of how we reasoned or argued our way into our initial and fundamental understanding. I say the same thing without repeating myself if I call such knowledge and understanding invincible. It is not possible to Overthrow it by reasoning any more than it is possible to establish it by reasoning.

2009 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-115
Author(s):  
Luco van den Brom

Developments in medical technology summon the image of a novel ‘bionic’ humanity of the cyborg. Is it possible to entirely reproduce human beings and retain their identity? This technological enhancement aims at improving the physical make-up of the human phenomenon as an individual. Mankind thus assumes control over their mental evolution, creating a techno-sapiens. This prompts the question whether religious faith, emotion, intention or responsibility are physiological reproducible. Experiments with a ‘God Machine’ seem to evoke religious impressions and to deny the individual meaning of God and the human mind. Hick’s dualism of mind and brain as dancing partners is unsuccessful by actually personalizing the brain. This article proposes to describe mental and brain functions as complementary instead of tracing their physiological origin. Then, religious faith is not reduced to fides quae, as merely physiological reproducible information, but remains an existential attitude to life, as fides qua, by itself within the context of a community of believers.


Problemos ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 73 ◽  
pp. 25-41
Author(s):  
Gintautas Mažeikis

Straipsnyje analizuojamos Karsavino Eurazijos ir simfoninės asmenybės teorijos ir jų įtaka asmeniniam Karsavino likimui, jo sofiologinėms mesianistinėms nuostatoms. Aptariama svarbiausių filosofinių Karsavino idėjų genezė: gyvo religingumo ir bendrojo religinio fondo, gnostinės pleromos interpretacijos, Šv. Trejybės dialektika ir jos santykis su N. Kuziečio filosofija, simfoninės asmenybės teorija. Pagrindinis teiginys apie Karsavino ir Kuziečio filosofijų skirtumą yra pagrįstas kristologiniais Karsavino argumentais apie Kuziečio filosofijos nepakankamumą aiškinant Dievo kaip Possest eksplikacijos ir komplikacijos problematiką. Karsavinas, remdamasis ortodoksiniais kristologiniais teiginiais, simfoninės asmenybės bei ideokratijos teorija bei tipologine, istoriosofine civilizacijų klasifikacija, pagrindžia kairiąją Eurazijos sąjūdžio ideologiją, kuri išliko aktuali ir šiandienos Rusijos politinei situacijai. Straipsnyje parodomos lietuviškosios filosofijos ir Karsavino samprotavimų paralelės ir keliamas klausimas dėl Eurazijos ideologijos nesvarstymo tarpukario Lietuvoje. Straipsnio pabaigoje grįžtama prie filosofinio Karsavino apsisprendimo, saikingų, asmeninių mesianistinių jo nuostatų ir sokratiško likimo tardymų, įkalinimo Abezės lageryje laikotarpiu. Pagrindiniai žodžiai: gyvasis religingumas, simfoninė asmenybė, panteizmas, gnoticizmas, mesianizmas.Historiosophical Messianism of L. Karsavin and the Idea of Eurasia Gintautas Mažeikis SummaryThe historiosophical and messianistic ideas of L. Karsavin and his ideology of left Eurasia were based on the theological and gnostic symbolism of the early 20th century, F. Schelling’s philosophy of Myth and Universality, Vl. Solovjov’s Philosophy of Universality, Mystics of Christology, the Orthodox understanding of Saint Trinity, typological theory of civilizations. At the beginning of his mediaeval researches Karsavin investigated sacral events in rural areas in the 17th–18th centuries, especially in Italy, magic activities and popular beliefs in Christian Saints, based on uncritical, natural, live religious feelings and spontaneous faith. He maintained live religious faith to be the background for the significance and utility of all canonical religious rules and churches. These ideas are similar to the French school of Annales and to the M. Bakhtin’s theory of Carnival issues of the Mediaeval tradition of laughter. However, Karsavin re lated his consideration of spontaneous hierophany to the gnostic tradition of Divine Pleroma. It is important to them in order to interpret the philosophy of Nicolaus Cusanus, especially his conception of God as Possest and a permanent and contradictory process of explicatio and complicatio. On the basis of Cusanus’ philosophy, Karsavin developed his personal idea of dialectics of Saint Trinity as a union of Divine personalities. Karsavin maintained that the conception of Cusanus is insufficient because Cusanus didn’t explain the role of Christ in the full reunification of sinful human beings with God. By Karsavin, Cusanus avoided pantheistic tendencies and therefore couldn’t develop the theory of divination of personality. On the contrary, Karsavin develops the idea of divination of oneself in his theory of Symphonic personality. Every personality is a form of free solution and responsibility, love and self-sacrifice. Therefore, the personality develops itself from an autonomous individual into the personality as a family, the personality as a nation, as a state, and finally the personality transforms into a cosmic human being, or Adam Kadmon. The hierarchic growth of personality, his ontology presupposes his essential responsibility for the development of nation, state, culture and civilization. It was the basis of Karsavin’s messianism. The nation or culture couldn’t be developed in the necessary direction, towards divinity, without creative and self-sacrificing activity of the individual. The hierarchical conception of the world personality presupposes the ideocratic form of government. The idea of the ideocratic power makes Karsavin’s political considerations similar to the Soviet system of power. Karsavin from 1925 until 1929 was the leader of the left wing of the Eurasia movement which was located in Paris. He initiated and supported a dialog with Bolsheviks’ representatives. However, Karsavin strongly criticized communism and Bolsheviks from the Orthodox point of view. Karsavin was a deep believer and couldn’t support the destruction of churches by the Soviet regime. However, today it is possible to say that Karsavin’s political visions are very similar to the modern Vl. Putins’ regime in contemporary Russia. Eurasia and Symphonic Personality ideas became important motives for Karsavin’s coming to Lithuania in 1928. However, after arrival he didn’t participate in any political movement and developed his civilization ideas, the conception of ideocratic power and Symphonic Personality there. In the Lithuanian period, he becomes closer to the Russian Orthodox tradition of Old Believers and its ideas of self-sacrifice to populace. Karsavin didn’t emigrate from Lithuania in the threat of Soviet occupation. On the contrary, he spread his ideas of Symphonic Personality, dialectics of Trinity, self-sacrificing after the War and even in the concentration camp in Abeze until his death in 1952. Keywords: live religions, Symphonic Personality, pantheism, gnosticism, messianism.-size: 11pt;">   


e-CliniC ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lillian Sarjono ◽  
Karel Pandelaki ◽  
Jeffry Ongkowijaya

Abstract: Sleep is defined as a subconscious condition when the individual may be arose from sleep by giving him or her with stimulation which is a crucial process for human beings in the formation of new body cells, the improvement of damaged cells, and to maintain the balance of body metabolism and biochemistry. The quality of sleep described by less time of sleep have impact on the body, as biological process taking place at the moment of sleep would be disturbed. One of them is disturbance in the formation of hemoglobin in which a change shall be occurring where the content of hemoglobin is lower than its normal value. This study is analytical descriptive using a cross-sectional approach. Of 78 samples under study, the good quality sleep is 7 persons (9.0%) and the bad is 71 persons (91.0%). Normal content of hemoglobin is 40 person (51.3%) and abnormal is 38 persons (48,7%). The good quality sleep and normal content of hemoglobin is 4 persons (57.1%) and abnormal is 3 persons (42.9%). The bad quality sleep and normal content of hemoglobin is 36 persons (50.77%) and abnormal is 35 persons (49.3%). Conclusion: Most of students at Faculty of Medicine, Sam Ratulangi University, have bad quality sleep and normal content of hemoglobin. There are no differences between the content of hemoglobin from the 5th semester student in Medical Faculty student with who has good and bad sleep quality.Keywords: quality of sleep, hemoglobin Abstrak: Tidur didefinisikan sebagai suatu keadaan bawah sadar saat orang tersebut dapat dibangunkan dengan pemberian ransangan yang juga merupakan proses yang sangat dibutuhkan manusia untuk pembentukan sel-sel tubuh yang baru, perbaikan sel-sel tubuh yang rusak maupun untuk menjaga keseimbangan metabolisme dan biokimiawi tubuh. Kualitas tidur yang digambarkan dengan waktu tidur yang kurang akan membawa dampak bagi tubuh karena proses biologis yang terjadi saat tidur akan ikut terganggu. Salah satunya adalah pembentukan kadar hemoglobin yang terganggu dimana akan terjadi perubahan dimana kadar hemoglobin menjadi lebih rendah dari nilai normalnya. Penelitian ini bersifat deskriptif-analitik dengan pendekatan potong lintang. Dari 78 sampel pemelitian, kualitas tidur yang baik sebanyak 7 orang (9,0 %) dan yang buruk sebanyak 71 orang (91,0 %). Kadar hemoglobin normal sebanyak 40 orang (51,3 %) dan tidak normal sebanyak 38 orang (48,7 %). Kualitas tidur baik dengan kadar hemoglobin normal adalah 4 orang (57,1 %) dan kadar hemoglobin tidak normal adalah 3 orang (42,9 %). Kualitas tidur buruk dengan kadar hemoglobin normal adalah 36 orang (50,7 %) dan kadar hemoglobin tidak normal adalah 35 orang (49,3 %). Simpulan: Sebaigan besar mahasiswa Fakultas Kedokteran Unsrat mempunyai kualitas tidur yang buruk dan mempunyai kadar hemoglobin yang normal. Tidak terdapat perbedaan kadar hemoglobin pada mahasiswa semester 5 Fakultas Kedokteran Unsrat dengan kualitas tidur yang baik dan yang buruk. Kata kunci: kualitas tidur, hemoglobin


Author(s):  
Rohit Rastogi ◽  
Devendra Kumar Chaturvedi ◽  
Pallavi Sharma ◽  
Vishwas Yadav ◽  
Sumit Chauhan ◽  
...  

Machines are getting intelligent day by day. Modern science has gifted us many boons but simultaneously the mental, physical and spiritual disorders have surprisingly disturbed smile, peace and definite attitude and lifestyle of individual and all human beings. The stress has been the biggest challenge against mankind like nuclear weapons, global warming, and epidemics. It leads towards tension, frustration, and depression and ultimately in extreme cases towards the suicide or murder of innocents. The happiness index, safety of individual, living parameters have drastically challenged us and India specially has pathetic situation among global quality of life (QoL) index. This chapter is an effort to define a simulated model and framework for the subjective quality of stress into quantitative parameters and mathematically analyzing it with help of popular machine learning tools and applied methods. Using machine intelligence, authors are trying to establish a framework which may work as an expert system and may help the individual to grow self as better human being.


2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 27-41
Author(s):  
Sergey Lvovich Avrusin ◽  
Vyacheslav Grigoryevich Chasnyk ◽  
Irina Vladimirovna Solodkova ◽  
Yelena Vladimirovna Sinelnikova ◽  
Yaroslav Nikolayevich Bobko ◽  
...  

It is known that the term «inbreeding» refers to a descendant of close relatives. As a result of inbreeding in the population the number of homozygotes increases and thus the number of heterozygotes reduces, which degrades the quality of the population (inbreeding-depression), since it increases the frequency of diseases associated with recessive genes in such children. In isolated populations individuals with adverse signs as a result of inbreeding eventually get culled of (Kirkpatrick et al., 2000). Decrease in genetic di-versity as a result of inbreeding, usually leads to that the individual and the population lose their ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions, as many body functions are genetically determined. Simple statistical calculations indicate that all human beings are relatives to some extend. The inbreeding coefficient can be determined by analyzing the family tree based on the number of ancestors to the shared ancestor for both parents. The purpose of this study was to determine the inbreeding coefficient by means of isonymic analysis of the population of 2043 Nenets and Khanty children living in the villages of the Yamal region as well as in tundra assigned to boarding schools located in villages Salemal, Panaevsk, Yar-Sale, Novy Port and Gyda of the Yamal-Nenets autonomous destrict. Inbreeding coefficient was calculated using marital isonymy to estimate the frequency of consanguineous marriages as a measure of inbreeding (Crow and Mange,1965). We calculated the frequency of prospective isonymic marriages for individual Nenets and Khanty surnames for inhabitants of Yar-Sale, Salemal, Panaevsk, Novy Port and Gyda tundra. In Gyda tun-dra for one of the not very common in the region surnames the highest frequency of prospective consanguineous marriages was revealed (0.189). Values of the coefficient of random inbreeding for inhabitants of Yamal and Gyda tundra vary from 0.02 to 0.058 which is much higher than for example in the population of one of the Yakutia regions (0.0007) (Kucher et al., 2010) or in the population of Kirovsk region (0.00321-0.01063) (Kadyshev, 2011). In the population of Gyda tundra we revealed the highest coefficient of random inbreeding (0.058), which is the third world‘s largest value pub-lished to date.


Author(s):  
L. Moroz ◽  
S. Yakovenko

The article reveals the possibility and feasibility of applying an environmental approach to understanding the mental state of the population, which considers itself a victim as a result of the information and psychological war that is being waged against the Ukraine by the media of the Russian Federation. At the individual level, personal anxiety factors are the properties of the higher nervous system, which determine endurance and sensitivity to the influence of stressors, flexibility of thinking, which contributes to successful adaptation to changing and unfavorable living conditions. The mental state of a person is largely dependent on the quality of life, the assessment of threats to well-being and safety.


Author(s):  
B. Carragher ◽  
M. Whittaker

Techniques for three-dimensional reconstruction of macromolecular complexes from electron micrographs have been successfully used for many years. These include methods which take advantage of the natural symmetry properties of the structure (for example helical or icosahedral) as well as those that use single axis or other tilting geometries to reconstruct from a set of projection images. These techniques have traditionally relied on a very experienced operator to manually perform the often numerous and time consuming steps required to obtain the final reconstruction. While the guidance and oversight of an experienced and critical operator will always be an essential component of these techniques, recent advances in computer technology, microprocessor controlled microscopes and the availability of high quality CCD cameras have provided the means to automate many of the individual steps.During the acquisition of data automation provides benefits not only in terms of convenience and time saving but also in circumstances where manual procedures limit the quality of the final reconstruction.


2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-218
Author(s):  
Heather Ingman

Irish literary gerontology has been slow to develop and this article aims to stimulate discussion by engaging with gerontologists' assertions that ageing in a community of peers is enriching. Juxtaposing the experience of ageing individuals in the novels of Iris Murdoch and John Banville with the more social experiences of John McGahern's protagonists, the article finds parallels between Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea (1978) and Banville's fiction with its emphasis on the ageing individual, invariably male, who attempts to fashion a coherent identity through narration. By contrast, McGahern's The Barracks (1963), is focused through the eyes of a female protagonist whose final months are shaped by interaction with the society around her, while in That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002) ageing is experienced through an entire community.


Moreana ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (Number 209) (1) ◽  
pp. 79-93
Author(s):  
Marie-Claire Phélippeau

This paper shows how solidarity is one of the founding principles in Thomas More's Utopia (1516). In the fictional republic of Utopia described in Book II, solidarity has a political and a moral function. The principle is at the center of the communal organization of Utopian society, exemplified in a number of practices such as the sharing of farm work, the management of surplus crops, or the democratic elections of the governor and the priests. Not only does solidarity benefit the individual Utopian, but it is a prerequisite to ensure the prosperity of the island of Utopia and its moral preeminence over its neighboring countries. However, a limit to this principle is drawn when the republic of Utopia faces specific social difficulties, and also deals with the rest of the world. In order for the principle of solidarity to function perfectly, it is necessary to apply it exclusively within the island or the republic would be at risk. War is not out of the question then, and compassion does not apply to all human beings. This conception of solidarity, summed up as “Utopia first!,” could be dubbed a Machiavellian strategy, devised to ensure the durability of the republic. We will show how some of the recommendations of Realpolitik made by Machiavelli in The Prince (1532) correspond to the Utopian policy enforced to protect their commonwealth.


2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 34-36
Author(s):  
Vaia Touna

This paper argues that the rise of what is commonly termed "personal religion" during the Classic-Hellenistic period is not the result of an inner need or even quality of the self, as often argued by those who see in ancient Greece foreshadowing of Christianity, but rather was the result of social, economic, and political conditions that made it possible for Hellenistic Greeks to redefine the perception of the individual and its relationship to others.


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