Heraclitus uses paradoxical language to present the relationship between opposites in his worldview. This mode of expression has generated much controversy. Some take the paradoxes as evidence of a contradictory identity of opposites (Barnes), while others propose a dynamic union through transformation without identity that avoids the contradiction (Graham). By examining B88 and B62, I seek to identify the stronger and weaker points of such readings. The contradictory identity reading thwarts the transformation between opposites. The dynamic reading offers a plausible (...) alternative. However, it skips a characterization of how Heraclitus conceives of the transformation between opposites in physical terms. To fill this gap, I consider Heraclitus’ use of what I call the anti-cognate internal object in B62. I argue that ‘living the death and dying the life’ is a case of change as mixture, a popular conception among the early Presocratics. Upon closer examination, the anti-cognate internal object suggests that real contradictions belong to Heraclitus conception of change. The details reveal a philosophically compelling view. (shrink)

In this chapter, I explore how experiences of social belonging might emerge and be sustained in online communities, drawing from the work on rituals by Randall Collins. I argue that rather than viewing mediated interactions in terms of whether they are suitable substitutes for face-to-face interactions, we should consider mediated encounters in their own right. This allows us to recognize the creative ways that people can create rituals in a mediated setting and thus support and create a sense of (...) belonging with others online. I also highlight how some online platforms not only support online rituals but that they are well-positioned to create and circulate collective symbols (or sacred objects) of groups and, thus, can continue to scaffold and sustain on-going feelings of belonging. (shrink)

Subjectivity theories of consciousness take self-reference, somehow construed, as essential to having conscious experience. These theories differ with respect to how many levels they posit and to whether self-reference is conscious or not. But all treat self-referencing as a process that transpires at the personal level, rather than at the subpersonal level, the level of mechanism. -/- Working with conceptual resources afforded by pre-existing theories of consciousness that take self-reference to be essential, several attempts have been made to explain seemingly (...) anomalous cases, especially instances of alien experience. These experiences are distinctive precisely because self-referencing is explicitly denied by the only person able to report them: those who experience them deny that certain actions, mental states, or body parts belong to self. The relevant actions, mental states, or body parts are sometimes attributed to someone or something other than self, and sometimes they are just described as not belonging to self. But all are referred away from self. -/- The cases under discussion here include somatoparaphrenia, schizophrenia, depersonalization, anarchic hand syndrome, and utilization behavior; the theories employed, Higher-Order Thought, Wide Intrinsicality, and Self-Representational. Below I argue that each of these attempts at explaining or explaining away the anomalies fails. Along the way, since each of these theories seeks at least compatibility with science, I sketch experimental approaches that could be used to adduce support for my position, or indeed for the positions of theorists with whom I disagree. -/- In a concluding section I first identify two presuppositions shared by all of the theorists considered here, and argue that both are either erroneous or misleading. Second, I call attention to divergent paths adopted when attempting to explain alienation experiences: some theorists choose to add a mental ingredient, while others prefer to subtract one. I argue that alienation from experience, action, or body parts could result from either addition or subtraction, and that the two can be incorporated within a comprehensive explanatory framework. Finally, I suggest that this comprehensive framework would require self-referencing of a sort, but self-referencing that occurs solely on the level of mechanism, or the subpersonal level. In adumbrating some features of this “subpersonal self,” I suggest that there might be one respect in which it is prior to conscious experience. (shrink)

There is a large gap between the specialized knowledge of scientists and laypeople’s understanding of the sciences. The novice-expert problem arises when non-experts are confronted with (real or apparent) scientific disagreement, and when they don’t know whom to trust. Because they are not able to gauge the content of expert testimony, they rely on imperfect heuristics to evaluate the trustworthiness of scientists. This paper investigates why some bodies of scientific knowledge become polarized along political fault lines. Laypeople navigate conflicting epistemic (...) and social demands in their acceptance of scientific testimony; this might explain their deference to scientific fringe theories, which often goes together with denying established scientific theories. I evaluate three approaches to mitigate denialism: improving the message, improving the messenger, and improving the environment in which the message is conveyed. (shrink)

Feelings of belonging are integral in people’s choice of what career to pursue. Women and men are disproportionately represented across careers, starting with academic training. The present research focuses on two fields that are similar in their history and subject matter but feature inverse gender gaps—psychology (more women than men) and philosophy (more men than women)—to investigate how theorized explanations for academic gender gaps contribute to feelings of belonging. Specifically, we simultaneously model the relative contribution of theoretically relevant (...) individual differences (empathizing, systematizing, and intellectual combativeness) as well as life goals (prioritization of family, money, and status) to feelings of belonging and majoring in psychology or philosophy. We find that men report higher intellectual combativeness than women, and intellectual combativeness predicts feelings of belonging and majoring in philosophy over psychology. Although systematizing and empathizing are predictive of belonging and, in turn, majoring in psychology and philosophy, respectively, when other factors are taken into account, women and men do not differ in empathizing and systematizing. Women, more than men, report prioritizing having a family, wealth, and status in choosing a career, and these directly or indirectly feed into feelings of belonging and majoring in psychology, in contrast to prior theory. Together, these findings suggest that students’ perceptions of their own combativeness and the extent to which they desire money and status play essential roles in women’s feeling they belong in psychology and men’s feeling they belong in philosophy. (shrink)

It is often assumed that pluralities are rigid, in the sense of having all and only their actual members necessarily. This assumption is operative in standard approaches to modal plural logic. I argue that a sceptical approach towards the assumption is warranted.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted several instances of churches violating state issued and scientifically recommended guidelines designed to keep populations healthy and to prevent the further spread of the disease. While these instances are minority responses to these orders, they nonetheless raise questions about the rationality of ecclesial belonging in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, I draw on the work of William James and W. E. B. Du Bois to articulate a conception of ecclesial (...) class='Hi'>belonging as a social epistemological process engaging a complex, fluid multiplicity of knowers of various scales. I argue that, in this view, ecclesial rationality involves the construction of a concatenation of internal and external practices individual believers and groups can traverse so long as they consistently satisfy a plurality of desiderata. I suggest that what is irrational about religious-based defiance of COVID-19 guidelines is the church-sanctioned severance of internal from external practices. I suggest that this behavior is supported by a failure to grasp the demands of ecclesial rationality rather than embrace them, and that this conception of rationality may have been eroded by the value-neutral skepticism of secular rationality. (shrink)

to be, being and belonging, some point of departure categories to arrive to the conclusion that happyness is connecte to a feeling of possession, the Havinng. I revisit some ideaas of my PhD Text.

Kant has a number of harsh-sounding things to say about beggars and giving to beggars. He describes begging as “closely akin to robbery”, and says that it exhibits self-contempt. In this paper I argue that on a particular interpretation of his political philosophy his critique of giving to beggars can be seen as part of a concern with social justice, and that his analysis makes sense of some troubling aspects of the phenomenology of being confronted with beggars. On Kant's view, (...) without absolute poverty relief, the poor persons' external freedom is subject to the arbitrary choices of those who have means. But the legitimacy of the state is based on ensuring that no one's basic freedom is subject to the arbitrary choices of another. This means that in a legitimate state public structures must ensure that there is unconditional poverty relief. Having your basic needs met through private charity wrongs you. Kant's analysis is that when you encounter someone in a public space who asks you for money to meet their basic survival needs, you are being asked to solve a public problem in a private interaction, and there is no rightful way for you to do this. (shrink)

Reports of not feeling understood are frequent in testimonies of psychological trauma. I argue that these feelings are not a matter of a cognitive failure but rather an expression of the absence of a more pervasive background feeling of belonging. Contemporary accounts of we-intentionality promise but ultimately fall short in explaining this sense of belonging. Gerda Walther offers an alternative account of communal experiences. Her notion of “habitual unification” can explain the background feelings of belonging that are (...) woven through the individual’s everyday experience of being in a shared world. Having unified with another person, the world feels different. It is now experienced in light of a “we.” This is not only the case in actual, singular person-to-person encounters. Unification with others becomes habitual: it retreats into the background of the individual’s awareness, colouring their experience of the world. Thus sedimented, it forms a background sense of belonging to a shared world. Unification is enabled by experiencing others as being similar in a significant way, such as having the same experiences, values, or basic attitude: in Walther’s words, as being a “human, who also....” This, I shall argue, is impacted through traumatizing experiences. Trauma survivors struggle to experience others as “humans, who also...,” resulting in a failure of unification and thus impeding feelings of belonging. Trauma testimonies also suggest that actively seeking out recognition of similarities and shared aspects of experience may once again enable experiencing others as “humans, who also...,” thus enabling unification and re-establishing a sense of belonging. (shrink)

This essay identifies and intervenes in the limitations of both the social and the medical models of disability in the postcolonial context, suggesting that those limitations may apply to theorizations of disability more broadly. It suggests that Bessie Head's novel A Question of Power, which represents mental illness and disability without positing a stable etiology for them, illustrates the inapplicability of these ways of thinking about disability under instances of extreme precarity. As such, Head offers a test case for how (...) mental illness and disability writ large might be theorized without the suppositions implicit to the liberal subject. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the conception of evil and the prescriptions for its mitigation that Michel Serres has articulated in his recent works. My explication of Serres’s argument centers on the claim, advanced in many different texts, that practices of exclusion, motivated by what he calls “the terrifying concupiscence of belonging,” are the primary sources of evil in the world. After explicating Serres’s argument, I examine three important objections, concluding that Serres overestimates somewhat the role of exclusion in (...) perpetuating evil and that his prescriptions for mitigating evil are excessively optimistic. (shrink)

This article examines the ontology and politics of Peter Sloterdijk's Spheres trilogy, focusing in particular upon the notion of microspherical enclosure explicated in the first volume of this series. Noting Sloterdijk's unusual alignment of his philosophy with media theory, three main contentions are put forward. Firstly, that Sloterdijk's reconfiguration of Heidegger's fundamental ontology represents a largely unacknowledged renunciation of the primacy of Being-towards-death in the authentic existence of Dasein, foregrounding instead an originary co-belonging between mother and child. Secondly, that (...) Sloterdijk borrows from media theory a concern regarding the facticity of all communication, grounding philosophical discourse in the determinate locality of its origin, but does so while exalting a pre-natal communicative immediacy that would seem to disparage the everydayness of Dasein. Finally, that Sloterdijk's oft-justified scepticism regarding globalization often retreats into an anti-cosmopolitanism that, in its nostalgia for the comfort, security and immediacy of the matrixial co-belonging, evinces a covert but potentially noxious politics of exclusion. (shrink)

This paper explores how the social and affective lives of people with marginalized social identities are particularly affected by digital influences. Specifically, the paper examines whether and how social media enables LGBTQ+ people to experience feelings of belonging. It does so by drawing on literature from digital epistemology and phenomenology of the digital, and by presenting and analyzing the results of a qualitative study consisting of 25 interviews with LGBTQ+ people. The interviews were conducted to explore the social media (...) experiences of LGBTQ+ people through an empirical framework informed by both phenomenology and social epistemology, particularly feminist standpoint theory. The paper emphasizes the importance of positionality and the epistemic value of research that centers marginalized perspectives and employs an anti-oppressive research approach, and focuses on understanding the digital experiences of LGBTQ+ people from within their marginalized perspective. (shrink)

Intergenerational transfers are a core feature of the practice of private philanthropy. A substantial portion of the resources committed to charitable causes comes from transfers (either during life or at death) that continue to pay out after death. Indeed, much of the power of the charitable foundation lies in its ability to extend the life of an enterprise beyond the mortal existence of its initiating agents. Despite their prevalence, whether and in what way the instruments of intergenerational philanthropy can be (...) justified is controversial. Many have argued that these instruments unfairly privilege the interests of the dead at the expense of the living and unborn. More recently, others have argued that intergenerational charitable transfers comport with the demands of distributive justice and are therefore legitimate. This paper contends that both of these perspectives fail to see the problem for what it is. Intergenerational charitable transfers may indeed promote justice in certain respects, but they do so at the cost of imposing the judgments of the dead onto the living. Respecting the wishes of the past conflicts with an interest in “generational sovereignty.” The paper concludes that properly accounting for this interest in generational sovereignty doesn’t require the abolition of intergenerational philanthropy. But it does tell in favor of a different regulatory orientation than most legal systems currently adopt. (shrink)

In this paper, a criticism of representationalist views of consciousness is developed. These views are often supported by an appeal to a transparency thesis about conscious states, according to which an experience does not itself possess the qualities of which it makes one conscious. The experience makes one conscious of these qualities by representing them, not by instantiating them. Against this, it is argued that some of the properties of which one is conscious are had by the conscious state itself. (...) Only by adopting this view can we account for certain perceptual incompatibilities, such as the fact that one cannot see a stick as being both bent and not bent. This sort of experience is impossible because it would require that an experience have, and not just represent, incompatible features. [Presented at the APA Eastern Div mtg in NY in 2005]. (shrink)

Chinese international students who studied in the United States received “double stigmatization” from American and Chinese authorities because of the “political othering” tactic during COVID-19. The research used a phenomenological approach to examine why and how specifically the transnational identity of Chinese international students in the United States shifted during the double stigmatization. The researcher conducted a total of three rounds of interviews with 15 Chinese international students who studied in the United States and returned to China between 2018 and (...) 2020, which culminated in 45 interviews through a longitudinal study to probe the transnational identities of this population before and during the double stigmatization; the study also examined how the mindsponge mechanism worked during the identity shifts and the interplay among stigmatization, transnational identity shifts, and the mindsponge mechanism. The study concluded that before COVID-19, Chinese international students had been stigmatized in both China and the United States. (shrink)

In contemporary discussions on identity, difference and subjectivity, the thinking of Judith Butler has played a significant role, viewing identity as a problematic question of how the subject is constituted by historical structures of power that deprives it of original ownness and substantiality. As this situation for Butler stems neither from a historical occurrence, nor is clearly ontological, the question of the origin of this problem of identity and power remains. Through the thinking of Martin Heidegger, the present study develops (...) the argument that this problem indicates the completion of subject metaphysics, not its overcoming. When identity is thought and lived in terms of subjectivity, power will be its condition. This argument is first developed through a comparison of Butler’s and Heidegger’s respective appropriations of He-gel’s philosophy, together with an independent account of Hegel’s thinking. For Hegel, identi-ty involves a strive for being as a mediation of subjectivity and objectivity, where conscious-ness incorporates both beyond their split. According to Butler, this is impossible, as subjectivi-ty and objectivity are multiple, temporal and shared. For Heidegger however, the problem lies in the very thought of being as a connection of subjectivity and objectivity, and the under-standing of the human as the ground of this reconciliation. I will thereafter examine Heidegger’s “The Principle of Identity” (1957) as a response to this metaphysical comprehen-sion of identity. Here, Heidegger develops his notion of a belonging-together of man and be-ing, as a Sameness grounded in an enduring of the ontological difference between being and beings. In holding out this difference, man discovers that his primary belonging is that to the very being of his existence as such, rather than beings of subjective or objective kind. The no-tion of belonging-together is closely connected to the notion of the event (Ereignis), signify-ing Sameness as occurrence. The study covers Butler’s central writings up to 2006, Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic, Science of Logic and Phenomenology of Spirit, as well as the whole of Heidegger’s late thought on this topic from the 30’s and onward together with a selection of his earlier works, among them Being and Time. (shrink)

Love, avoidance, liking, thoughts of beauty, ugliness, sexual attraction are some of the categories that might be affirmed as belonging to the a set of relations called affinities. If one attempts to outline all of the influencing elements belonging to each of these terms it becomes very difficult to from a complete notion of concepts from particulars. For example, what factors are involved in the emergence feeling of love, and what factors comprise those feeling. A unique history to (...) each unique event in the emergence of feeling of love is most likely the case. The factors that comprise those feeling on the other hand (i.e. of a positive feeling of well being, a change in perception of factors that influence daily life experience, etc) are more accessible but their origin and history is difficult to tabulate in terms of a single nature or characteristics that compose the emergence of these feeling. In this respect, this presentation is devised to focus on the normally conducted projections and extensions of notions in ordinary investigation to these ends, verses a normally excluded and normally perceived insufficient, counterpart explanation of reduction absurdum (i.e. A=A). Thus it is proposed that the word "affinity", applied scientifically, when instantiated to human behavior is universally instantiatable as an innate universal property. (shrink)

This article discusses Heidegger’s interpretation of Parmenides given in his last public lecture ‘The Principle of Identity’ in 1957. The aim of the piece is to illustrate just how original and significant Heidegger’s reading of Parmenides and the principle of identity is, within the history of Philosophy. Thus the article will examine the traditional metaphysical interpretation of Parmenides and consider G.W.F. Hegel and William James’ account of the principle of identity in light of this. It will then consider Heidegger’s contribution, (...) his return to and re-interpretation of Parmenides in his last lecture. Heidegger will, through the Parmenidean claim that ‘Thinking and Being are one’ deconstruct the traditional metaphysical understanding of the principle of identity, and in its place offer a radically different conception of how our relationship, our ‘belonging together’ with Being can be understood. (shrink)

This manuscript has ensued from my past studies in biochemistry (PhD, CUNY 1986) and my current endeavors in graduate study in philosophy and anthropology. The current research project began during my period as a graduate student in biochemistry with a professor of classical genetics comment that DNA was unique in the physical world. The paradox presented to relate this notion to existing natural law lead me to evolve and communicate a view that the world itself is a special case of (...) a general case that has no relevant physical existence. I also hope to have presented a description of a situation that connects history, human behavior, the process and symbolisms of science, cause and effect to a holism of form, philosophy, mathematics, shape, and motion. (shrink)

The COVID-19 outbreak spurred unplanned closures and transitions to online classes. Physical environments that once fostered social interaction and community were rendered inactive. We conducted interviews and administered surveys to examine undergraduate STEM students’ feelings of belonging and engagement while in physical isolation, and identified online teaching modes associated with these feelings. Surveys from a racially diverse group of 43 undergraduate students at a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) revealed that interactive synchronous instruction was positively associated with feelings of interest (...) and belonging, particularly for students of color, while noninteractive instruction reduced social belonging, but was related to more cognitive engagement. Small group and one-on-one interviews with 23 of these students suggest that students derived feelings of connectedness from their instructors, peers, and prior experiences and relied on their sense of competency to motivate themselves in the course and feel a sense of belonging. Two embedded cases of students in physics classrooms are compared to highlight the range of student feelings of connectedness and competency during the lockdown. Findings reaffirm that social interaction tends to support belonging and engagement, particularly for under-represented (Black or African American and Hispanic) racial groups in STEM. STEM instructors who aim to support feelings of belonging and engagement in virtual learning environments should consider increasing opportunities for student–student and student–teacher interactions, as well as taking a flexible approach that validates and integrates student voice into instruction. Future research is needed to further explore the themes of relatedness and competency that emerged as aspects of course belonging. (shrink)

This essay details wolves’ sense of their surround in terms of how wolves’ perceptual acuities, motor abilities, daily habits, overriding concerns, network of intimate social bonds and relationship to prey gives them a unique sense of space, time, belonging with other wolves, memorial sense, imaginative capacities, dominant emotions (of affection, play, loyalty, hunger, etc.), communicative avenues, partnership with other creatures, and key role in ecological thriving. Wolves are seen to live within a vast sense of aroundness and closeness to (...) aspects of their surround (compared to humans), a highly charged intimacy and cooperation with other wolves, and a caring and non-aggressive attitude that goes beyond the pack, despite their loyalty and defense of territory. The cultural myths and history that absurdly demonize the wolf are explored in their self-righteous attempts to exterminate wolves, which I call “speciocide” and probe for projections of human viciousness. The supposed rapaciousness of wolves is re-examined by expanding Barry Lopez’s sense of the silent dialogue of death with other creatures to be reconsidered as a kind of respect, assertion of vitality, recognition or mortality and cooperation. (shrink)

Feminist philosophers are right to criticize Hegel’s prejudices against women. In many of his works, Hegel reduces women to their physiology as means of explaining why they occupy a subordinate role in nature and in society. Such treatment seems arbitrary at best, for the gendering of roles disrupts Hegel’s dialectical approach to spirit without any meaningful gain. Despite this defect in Hegel’s work, what is positive in Hegelian social and political philosophy remains intact. In this paper I argue that the (...) sexist claims that Hegel makes about women are irrelevant to his theory of the family in the Philosophy of Right. Therein, Hegel outlines three components that are necessary for the completion of the family: marriage, property and assets, and the raising of children. Hegel also includes a description of the different roles occupied by family members and divides these roles along gender lines. Given the three components that are essential to the family, I argue that there is no necessary basis for familial roles to be divided by gender. (shrink)

The Preamble to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms claims "Canada is grounded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God." This claim is hopelessly confused and it has no place in our constitution. This is true, moreover, whether you are a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Pantheist, an atheist, or someone who has never given one moment's thought to "the supremacy of God" -- much less "recognized" it.

In this article an attempt is made to detect what could have been the dialectical reasons that impelled the Cār-vāka thinker Udbhatabhatta to revise and reformulate the classical materialistic concept of cognition. If indeed according to ancient Cārvākas cognition is an attribute entirely dependent on the physical body, for Udbhatabhatta cognition is an independent principle that, of course, needs the presence of a human body to manifest itself and for this very reason it is said to be a peculiarity of (...) the body. Therefore, Udbhatabhatta seems to de-scribe the cognizing faculty according to a double ontology: it is both a principle and a characteristic, both inde-pendent and dependent. Two philosophical contexts—Vaisesika and Nyāya schools—are here taken into account as possible anti-Cārvāka fault-finding points of view that spured Udbhatabhatta to reconsider the Cārvāka per-spective. Although we do not have so much textual material on this particular aspect of the ancient and medieval philosophical debate in India, it nonetheless can be supposed that Udbhatabhatta’s reformulation of the concept of cognition was a tentative response to the Vaisesika idea that cognition is not an attribute of the body, rather of the mind (which is here supposed to be eternal), and to the Naiyāyika perspective according to which cognition would be an attribute of an everlasting self. In the case of the Nyāya school, fortunately we have at our disposal the criticism put forward by Vātsyāyana against the materialistic conception of cognition during this time. By examining some Vātsyāyana’s objections, it will emerge that Udbhatabhatta’s idea of cognition really seems to have the aspect of a consistent answer to them, from a renewed materialistic point of view. (shrink)

The paper explores the role of competing notions of what does it mean to have a testament of the law of the past in Christian and Rabbinic corpora of text and thought. The argument probes and renegotiates the complex relationships of the Christian suspension of Old Testament by the New Testament and the Rabbinic suspension of new testament in the two Talmudim. It consequently draws implications of that analysis for understanding the relationships of the two Talmudim to the tradition of (...) hermeneutics of texts, as influenced as the latter has been by theological and literary approaches of various Christian theologies of the two Testaments. As a part of that analysis the articles justifies the task of advancing and providing a critique of political theology and political philology as modes of thought and investigation. That provides a way to ask anew the question about relationships between theology, literary theory, and political thought. (shrink)

The actions of perceiving and grouping are the two that the human being carries out when thinking in entities different from himself. In this article “The Mirror Problem” and “The Peer Problem”, which correspond respectively to self-perception and the perception of others, are studied. By solving these two problems, the thinker arrives to the following conclusions: “I exist” and “I am”.

A review, posted 11 September 2002, of Richard Vernon's book. A previous version was published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science 39, no. 4 (Dec. 2006): 975–76.

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic initiated major disruptions to higher education systems. Physical spaces that previously supported interpersonal interaction and community were abruptly inactivated, and faculty largely took on the responsibility of accommodating classroom structures in rapidly changing situations. This study employed interviews to examine how undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) instructors adapted instruction to accommodate the mandated transition to virtual learning and how these accommodations supported or hindered community and belonging during the onset of the (...) pandemic. Interviews with 25 STEM faculty at an undergraduate Hispanic Serving Institution revealed a wide range of accommodations they made to their courses and how they managed communication with students. Faculty strived to support student belonging with responses ranging from caring to crisis management, though some faculty expressed feelings of powerlessness when unable to accommodate certain challenges. The case of a responsive and flexible instructor is presented to highlight a productive response to a crisis. These retrospective findings point to strategies to support faculty teaching in virtual learning environments in the future; increasing opportunities for student–student and student–faculty interaction, supporting faculty in learning technologies that support these interactions and addressing faculty’s feelings of powerlessness. (shrink)

It is not necessarily the case that we ever have experiences of self, but human beings do regularly report instances for which self is experienced as absent. That is there are times when body parts, mental states, or actions are felt to be alien. Here I sketch an explanatory framework for explaining these alienation experiences, a framework that also attempts to explain the “mental glue” whereby self is bound to body, mind, or action. The framework is a multi-dimensional model that (...) integrates personal and sub-personal components, psychological and neural processes. I then proceed to show how this model can be applied to explain the action-related passivity experiences of persons suffering from schizophrenia. I argue that a distinctive phenomenological mark of these experiences is that they are vividly felt, unlike ordinary actions (those taken to belong to self), and I seek to explain these heightened sensory experiences from within the proposed framework. I also propose hypotheses concerning such phenomena as thought insertion and anarchic hand syndrome that are motivated by this framework. Finally, I argue that the proposed model and view of self-experiences is consistent with several aspects of and theories of consciousness, especially theories which indicate that consciousness is more likely to be engaged when we are dealing with novelty or error—e.g. when self seems to have gone missing. I conclude by recommending that if we wish to learn about self, we would be well advised to attend closely to those times when it seems absent. (shrink)

Mental ownership concerns who experiences a mental state. According to David Rosenthal (2005: 342), the proper way to characterize mental ownership is: ‘being conscious of a state as present is being conscious of it as belonging to somebody. And being conscious of a state as belonging to somebody other than oneself would plainly not make it a conscious state’. In other words, if a mental state is consciously present to a subject in virtue of a higher-order thought (HOT), (...) then the HOT necessarily representsthe subject as the owner of the state. But, we contend, one of the lessons to be learned from pathological states like somatoparaphrenia is that conscious awareness of a mental state does not guarantee first-person ownership. That is to say, conscious presence does not imply mental ownership. (shrink)

The concept of ‘living metaphor’ receives a number of articulations within metaphor theory. A review of four key theories – Nietzsche, Ricoeur, Lakoff and Johnson, and Derrida – reveals a distinction between theories which identify a prior, speculative nature working on or with metaphor, and theories wherein metaphor is shown to be performatively always, already active in thought. The two cannot be left as alternatives because they exhibit opposing theses with regard to the ontology of metaphor, but neither can an (...) impartial philosophical appraisal of the most cogent or defensible theory be made, since the status and conduct of philosophy are part of the problem. Two responses to the predicament from within ‘living metaphor’ theory are considered: (1) Lakoff and Johnson’s ecological spirituality thesis which promises to make the contest redundant on the grounds that the origin of human concepts in our shared, embodied condition in the world removes all obstructions; (2) taking the lead from Nietzsche and Ricoeur, an approach based on the intersection of discourses, not as a resolution but as a gesture which allows the conflict to speak about ‘living metaphor’. (1) is shown to be unsuccessful, but (2) results in ‘living metaphor’ emerging as an attentiveness to questions of what does and does not belong, inspired by tensions between ‘is’ and ‘is not’, ‘from this perspective’ and ‘from that perspective’, and ‘is spoken about’ and ‘is spoken with’. (shrink)

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY PRIZE for the best published book in the history of philosophy [Awarded in 2010] _______________ -/- Although it is widely recognized that David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) belongs among the greatest works of philosophy, there is little agreement about the correct way to interpret his fundamental intentions. It is an established orthodoxy among almost all commentators that skepticism and naturalism are the two dominant themes in this work. The difficulty has been, (...) however, that Hume's skeptical arguments and commitments appear to undermine and discredit his naturalistic ambition to contribute to "the science of man". This schism appears to leave his entire project broken-backed. The solution to this riddle depends on challenging another, closely related, point of orthodoxy: namely, that before Hume published the Treatise he removed almost all material concerned with problems of religion. Russell argues, contrary to this view, that irreligious aims and objectives are fundamental to the Treatise and account for its underlying unity and coherence. It is Hume's basic anti-Christian aims and objectives that serve to shape and direct both his skeptical and naturalistic commitments. When Hume's arguments are viewed from this perspective we can solve, not only puzzles arising from his discussion of various specific issues, we can also explain the intimate and intricate connections that hold his entire project together. This "irreligious" interpretation provides a comprehensive fresh account of the nature of Hume's fundamental aims and ambitions in the Treatise. It also presents a radically different picture of the way in which Hume's project was rooted in the debates and controversies of his own time, placing the Treatise in an irreligious or anti-Chrisitan philosophical tradition that includes Hobbes, Spinoza and freethinking followers. Considered in these terms, Hume's Treatise constitutes the crowning achievement of the Radical Enlightenment. (shrink)

English abstract: On last day of the year 1999, Russia has entered another era of despotism, that of Vladimir Putin. During his reign, the Putin‘s clan has undermined and infiltrated the mass media, the parliament and the judicial system. Deliberate violation of basic citizen‘s rights, compulsory acquisition of property, government-funded racket, misuse of mass media to scarify and to disinform the peoples belong to the diabolic methods of self-constituted disposers. All this lawlessness has led to exorbitant corruption, mass poverty, economic (...) stagnation, and escalation of crimes. The actual manuscript investigates the roots of Putinism putting the person of Vladimir Putin in the focus of investigation. -/- Russian abstract: В 1999 году, в последний день столетия и тысячелетия, Россия вступила в новую эру деспотизма, эру Владимира Путина. В продолжение его правления, клан Путина коррумпировал и инфильтрировал средства массовой информации, парламент, правовую систему. Умышленное нарушение основных гражданских прав, конфискация собственности, государственный рэкет, злоупотребление средств массовой информации с целью запугивания и дезинформации населения стали дьявольскими методами самоназванных правителей. Всё это привело к безмерной продажности, массовой бедности, экономической стагнации и взрыву преступности. Данный манускрипт исследует корни Путинизма, помещая личность Владимира Путина в центр исследования. (shrink)

Trees belong to humanity’s heritage, but they are more than that. Their loss, through catastrophic fires or under business-as-usual, is devastating to many forms of life. Moved by this fact, we begin with an assertion that heritage can have an active role in the design of future places. Written from within the field of architecture, this article focuses on structures that house life. Habitat features of trees and artificial replacement habitats for arboreal wildlife serve as concrete examples. Designs of such (...) habitats need to reflect behaviours, traditions and cultures of birds, bats, and other animals. Our narrative highlights the nonhuman aspect of heritage, seeking to understand how nonhuman stakeholders can act as users and consumers of heritage and not only as its constituents. Our working definition states that more-than-human heritage encompasses tangible and intangible outcomes of historical processes that are of value to human as well as nonhuman stakeholders. From this basis, the article asks how the established notions of heritage can extend to include nonhuman concerns, artefacts, behaviours and cultures. As a possible answer to this question, the hypothesis tested here is that digital information can (1) contribute to the preservation of more-than-human heritage; and (2) illuminate its characteristics for future study and use. This article assesses the potential of three imaging technologies and considers the resulting data within the conceptual framework of more-than-human heritage, illuminating some of its concrete aspects and challenges. (shrink)

So-called "thick" moral concepts are distinctive in that they somehow "hold together" evaluation and description. But how? This paper argues against the standard view that the evaluations which thick concepts may be used to convey belong to sense or semantic content. That view cannot explain linguistic data concerning how thick concepts behave in a distinctive type of disagreements and denials which arise when one speaker regards another's thick concept as "objectionable" in a certain sense. The paper also briefly considers contextualist, (...) presuppositional, and implicature accounts of the evaluative contents of thick concepts, but finds none clearly superior to the others. (shrink)

Sensibility, in any of its myriad realms – moral, physical, aesthetic, medical and so on – seems to be a paramount case of a higher-level, intentional property, not a basic property. Diderot famously made the bold and attributive move of postulating that matter itself senses, or that sensibility (perhaps better translated ‘sensitivity’ here) is a general or universal property of matter, even if he at times took a step back from this claim and called it a “supposition.” Crucially, sensibility is (...) here playing the role of a ‘booster’: it enables materialism to provide a full and rich account of the phenomena of conscious, sentient life, contrary to what its opponents hold: for if matter can sense, and sensibility is not a merely mechanical process, then the loftiest cognitive plateaus are accessible to materialist analysis, or at least belong to one and the same world as the rest of matter. This was noted by the astute anti-materialist critic, the Abbé Lelarge de Lignac, who, in his 1751 Lettres à un Amériquain, criticized Buffon for “granting to the body [la machine, a common term for the body at the time] a quality which is essential to minds, namely sensibility.” This view, here attributed to Buffon and definitely held by Diderot, was comparatively rare. If we look for the sources of this concept, the most notable ones are physiological and medical treatises by prominent figures such as Robert Whytt, Albrecht von Haller and the Montpellier vitalist Théophile de Bordeu. We then have, or so I shall try to sketch out, an intellectual landscape in which new – or newly articulated – properties such as irritability and sensibility are presented either as an experimental property of muscle fibers, that can be understood mechanistically (Hallerian irritability, as studied recently by Hubert Steinke and Dominique Boury) or a property of matter itself (whether specifically living matter as in Bordeu and his fellow montpelliérains Ménuret and Fouquet, or matter in general, as in Diderot). I am by no means convinced that it is one and the same ‘sensibility’ that is at issue in debates between these figures (as when Bordeu attacks Haller’s distinction between irritability and sensibility and claims that ‘his own’ property of sensibility is both more correct and more fundamental in organic beings), but I am interested in mapping out a topography of the problem of sensibility as property of matter or as vital force in mid-eighteenth-century debates – not an exhaustive cartography of all possible positions or theories, but an attempt to understand the ‘triangulation’ of three views: a vitalist view in which sensibility is fundamental, matching up with a conception of the organism as the sum of parts conceived as little lives (Bordeu et al.); a mechanist, or ‘enhanced mechanist’ view in which one can work upwards, step by step from the basic property of irritability to the higher-level property of sensibility (Haller); and, more eclectic, a materialist view which seeks to combine the mechanistic, componential rigour and explanatory power of the Hallerian approach, with the monistic and metaphysically explosive potential of the vitalist approach (Diderot). It is my hope that examining Diderot in the context of this triangulated topography of sensibility as property sheds light on his famous proclamation regarding sensibility as a universal property of matter. (shrink)

One famous scene in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) is the dialogue between the young Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the expert trader Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey). Hanna is complaining that the stock market is unpredictable; it’s “fugazi … it’s fairy dust. It doesn’t exist. It’s never landed. It is not matter. It’s not on the element chart. It’s not real”. But the fact that something is unpredictable and non-physical does not imply that it does not exist. On the (...) other hand, its unpredictability, non-physicality, and the fact that the stock market trend is largely determined by investors’ beliefs, do make its nature difficult to grasp. -/- This special issue of Rivista di Estetica aims to explore the financial sector from an ontological point of view. While the ontology of money has been extensively studied, few scholars have focused on the stock market and, more generally, on those entities belonging to the investment landscape. Matters are made more complicated by the fact that the financial sector is characterized by an ever-increasing use of digital technology, including software elements that trade in the market themselves. We believe that a careful study of this phenomenon may help us better to understand the role of artificial agents in the social world. (shrink)

Biosemiotics belongs to a class of approaches that provide mental models of life since it applies some semiotic concepts in the explanation of natural phenomena. Such approaches are typically open to anthropomorphic errors. Usually, the main source of such errors is the excessive vagueness of the semiotic concepts used. If the goal of biosemiotics is to be accepted as a science and not as a priori metaphysics, it needs both an appropriate source of the semiotic concepts and a reliable method (...) of adjusting them for biosemiotic use. Charles S. Peirce’s philosophy offers a plausible candidate for both these needs. Biosemioticians have adopted not only Peirce’s semiotic concepts but also a number of metaphysical ones. It is shown that the application of Peirce’s basic semiotic conceptions of sign and sign-process (semiosis) at the substantial level of biosemiotics requires the acceptance of certain metaphysical conceptions, i.e. Tychism and Synechism. Peirce’s method of pragmaticism is of great relevance to biosemiotics: 1. Independently of whether Peirce’s concepts are used or even applicable at the substantial level of biosemiotics, Peirce’s method remains valuable in making biosemiotics and especially in adjusting its basic concepts. 2. If Peircean semeiotic or metaphysics is applied at the substantial level of biosemiotics, pragmaticism is valuable in clarifying the meaning and reference of the applied Peircean concepts. As a consequence, some restrictions for the application of Peirce in biosemiotics are considered and the distinction of Peirce’s philosophy from the 19th century idealistic Naturphilosophie is emphasized. (shrink)

In this article, I criticize Véronique Zanetti on the topic of moral compromise. As I understand Zanetti, a compromise could only be called a “moral compromise” if (i) it does not originate under coercive conditions, (ii) it involves conflict whose subject matter is moral, and (iii) “the parties support the solution found for what they take to be moral reasons rather than strategic interests.” I offer three criticisms of Zanetti. First, Zanetti ignores how some parties may not have reason to (...) seek social peace at all. Zanetti’s claim that there is consensus on the aim of social peace can involve idealising away from disagreement in a manner that Zanetti accuses Rawls of. Second, even if there is consensus on the aim of seeking social peace, this leaves open the possibility of disagreement about which society different people should belong to. This idealises away from real world conflict concerning borders. Indeed, Zanetti does not mention that her ‘central example’ of moral disagreement, the German Abortion compromise, was enacted in the wake of German reunification. Third, there are at least two things that can be called the ‘German Abortion compromise.’ The compromise that Zanetti speaks of was imposed by the German Federal Constitutional Court. The court declared unconstitutional a law passed in 1992 that had been negotiated in parliament. Zanetti does not dwell on this lack of democratic credentials. Even the substance of the court-imposed solution is itself a dubious example of a moral compromise between parties based on what is acceptable to their reason. -/- (penultimate version - If you would like the .pdf of the final version for personal scholarly use, please contact me through the email address on my profile or my CV.). (shrink)

Numerous scholars, philosophers, and experts in aesthetics have underscored the profound significance of a life enriched by the presence of beauty. Consequently, the appreciation of aesthetic experiences is considered pivotal for achieving self-discovery and self-transcendence (Howell et al. 2017). Despite theoretical prominence, limited qualitative research has been conducted on this topic. To address this gap in research, this study’s objective emphasized two questions guiding the inquiry; What is the role of aesthetic encounters in aiding self-realization or individuation? and, how do (...) these experiences foster self-transcendence? -/- A thematic analysis was performed on the online interviews conducted (N=25), and their results revealed seven themes pertaining to self-realization: a) Losing Yourself to Find Yourself; b) Relatability and Self-Reflection in Art; c) Identity as a Collection of Skills; d) Art as a Medium for Self-Expression and Acknowledgment; e) Aesthetic Genres and Taste as Identity; f) Belonging and Social Identity through Art; and g) Personal Interests and Choices in Artistic Consumption. Furthermore, seven themes for the second research question of self-transcendence were also discovered: a) Mother Nature’s Beauty; b) Intense, Passionate, and Overwhelming Experiences of Heightened Consciousness; c) Sacred Symbolism, Archetypal Imagery, and the Collective Unconscious; d) Collective Effervescence, Social Connection, and Shared Meaning; e) The ‘Profound’ Found in the Mundane; f) Feelings of Spiritual Elevation and Wellbeing; and g) Self-Referential Meaning-Making through Art. These findings evidenced the transformative potential of aesthetic experiences, shedding light on the facets of personal growth and meaning that individuals derive from such encounters. (shrink)

The monograph contains three works on research on the concept of a rejected sentence. This research, conducted under the supervision of Prof. Jerzy Słupecki by U. Wybraniec-Skardowska (1) "Theory of rejected sentences" and G. Bryll (2) "Some supplements of theory of rejected sentences" and (3) "Logical relations between sentences of empirical sciences" led to the construction of a theory rejected sentences and made it possible to formalize certain issues in the methodology of empirical sciences. The concept of a rejected sentence (...) was introduced by J. Łukasiewicz in the course of his inquiry into Aristotelian Syllogistic. It was essentialy generelized by J. Słupecki who, with reference to Tarski's axiomatic theory of deductive systems (1930), gave the formal definition of the rejection function Cn' according to which a sentence y is rejected on the base of a set of sentences X iff at least one sentence which belongs to X can be deduced from the sentence y. Słupecki proved (1959) that the function Cn', which assignes to the set X the set of sentences rejected on the basis of X, is additive and satisfies the axioms of Tarski's general theory of deductive systems. Work (1) uses not only Tarski's general theory of systems but also his the so-called enlarged theory of systems (1930). It constructs a theory T of rejected sentences (propositions), which is created from Tarski's richer theory of systems by adding one axiom and a number of definitions; among them the definition of the rejection function Cn' is fundamental one. Cn' is a function which assignes to every set X of false sentences the set Cn'X whose members are exclusively false senteces. A number of theorems which describes properties of defined concepts have been proved in T. Some of them are necessary for conducting considertions of the concluding section of (1) devoted to the empirical sentences. Section 2 of (1) deals with the theory of the unit consequenses. It is characterized by an axiom from which follow all axioms of Tarski's general theory of deductive systems, additivity and the property that the unit consequence of the set X of sentences is a unit consequence only one sentence of X. An example of unit consequence is the rejection consequence Cn'. In section 3 of (1) the dual theory T' equivalent to T is presented. In T' the primitive concept is the rejection function Cn'. The fundamental axiom of T' states that Cn' is a unit consequence. The concluding section brings a few examples of applications of the definitions and theorems of T in the domain of the scientific methodology. Work (2) corresonds to J. Słupecki paper (1959) and the theory T of rejected propositions given in work (1). In this paper some suplements of the theory T are given. Work (3) is an extension of the theory of rejected propositios given in the paper (1). It is an attempt of formalization some problems of methodology of the empirical sciences which concern to such concepts as: empirical sentence, similar sentence, generalization, inductive conclusion etc. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Hobbes belonged to philosophical and scientific circles grappling with the big question at the dawn of modern physics: materialism and its consequences for morality. ‘Matter in motion’ may be a core principle of this materialism but it is certainly inadequate to capture the whole project. In wave after wave of this debate the Epicurean view of a fully determined universe governed by natural laws, that nevertheless allows to humans a sphere of libertas, but does not require a creator god (...) or teleology to explain it, comes up against monotheism and its insistence on the incoherence of an ordered world in the absence of a God and his purposes. The following questions were central to this debate: Can we understand the universe as law-governed in the absence of a god? If so, what room is there in a fully determined mechanical universe for human freedom? If humans do enjoy freedom, does the same hold for other animals? Is this freedom compatible with standard views of morality? (shrink)

K denotes both the knowledge predicate satisfied by every currently known theorem and the finite set of all currently known theorems. The set K is time-dependent, publicly available, and contains theorems both from formal and constructive mathematics. Any theorem of any mathematician from past or present forever belongs to K. Mathematical statements with known constructive proofs exist in K separately and form the set K_c⊆K. We assume that mathematical sets are atemporal entities. They exist formally in ZFC theory although their (...) properties can be time-dependent (when they depend on K) or informal. The true statement "K is non-empty" is outside K forever because K is not a formal set. Paul Cohen proved in 1963 that the equality 2^{\aleph_0}=\aleph_1 is independent of ZFC. Before 1963, the statement "There is a known constructively defined integer n⩾1 such that 2^{\aleph_0}=\aleph_n" was outside K. Since 1963, this statement is outside K forever. The true statement "There exists a set X⊆{1,...,49} such that card(X)=6 and X never occurred as the winning six numbers in the Polish Lotto lottery" refers to the current non-mathematical knowledge and is outside K forever. In Martin-Löf's terminology, every currently known theorem is actually true whereas every theorem (known or unknown) is potentially true. Actual truth is knowledge dependent and tensed. Potential truth is knowledge independent and tenseless. Algorithms always terminate. We explain the distinction between algorithms whose existence is provable in ZFC and constructively defined algorithms which are currently known. By using this distinction, we obtain non-trivially true statements on decidable sets X⊆N that belong to constructive and informal mathematics and refer to the current mathematical knowledge on X. For every such statement, its truth concerning the current mathematical knowledge is implied by a true statement of the form: (the conjunction of i conditions of the form α∈K)∧(the conjunction of j conditions of the form β∉K)∧(the conjunction of k conditions of the form γ∈K_c)∧(the conjunction of l conditions of the form δ∉K_c), where i,j,k,l∈N and α,β,γ,δ are mathematical statements. In constructive mathematics and the traditional Brouwerian intuitionism, the truth of a mathematical statement means that we know a constructive proof. Therefore, the truth of a mathematical statement depends on time, where the statement is formally stated in the classical mathematics without the predicate K. In this article, mathematical statements on decidable sets X⊆N refer to time because they refer to the current mathematical knowledge on X. They cannot be formally stated in the classical mathematics without the predicate K and their logical values may change in time. For a set X⊆N whose infiniteness is false or unproven, we define which elements of X are classified as known. No known set X⊆N satisfies Conditions (1)-(4) and is widely known in number theory or naturally defined, where this term has only informal meaning. (1) A known algorithm with no input returns an integer n satisfying card(X)<ω ⇒ X⊆(-∞,n]. (2) A known algorithm for every k∈N decides whether or not k∈X. (3) For every known algorithm A with no input, the statement "A returns the logical value of the statement card(X)=ω" is outside K. (4) There are many elements of X and it is conjectured, though so far unproven, that X is infinite. (5) X is naturally defined. The infiniteness of X is false or unproven. X has the simplest definition among known sets Y⊆N with the same set of known elements. No set X⊆N will satisfy Conditions (1)-(4) forever, if for every algorithm with no input, at some future day, a computer will be able to execute this algorithm in 1 second or less. The physical limits of computation disprove the assumption of the above statement. We prove that the set X={n∈N: the interval [-1,n] contains more than 29.5+(11!/(3n+1))∙sin(n) primes of the form k!+1} satisfies Conditions (1)-(5) except the requirement that X is naturally defined. We present a table that shows satisfiable conjunctions of the form #(Condition1)∧(Condition 2)∧#(Condition 3)∧(Condition 4)∧#(Condition 5), where # denotes the negation ¬ or the absence of any symbol. We prove that there exists a naturally defined set C⊆N which satisfies the following conditions (6)-(11). (6) A known and simple algorithm for every k∈N decides whether or not k∈C. (7) For every known algorithm A with no input, the statement "A returns the logical value of the statement card(C)=ω" is outside K. (8) For every known algorithm A with no input, the statement "A returns the logical value of the statement card(N\C)=ω" is outside K. (9) It is conjectured, though so far unproven, that C is infinite. (10) For every known algorithm A with no input, the statement "A returns an integer n satisfying card(C)<ω ⇒ C⊆(-∞,n]" is outside K. (11) For every known algorithm A with no input, the statement "A returns an integer m satisfying card(N\C)<ω ⇒ N\C⊆(-∞,m]" is outside K. The set C={k∈N: 2^{2^k}+1 is composite} is naturally defined and satisfies conditions (6)-(11). (shrink)

As with terms such as “human rights”, “democracy”, and “equality”, the notion of “freedom” has an emblematic character with highly normative overtones. After the declaration of universal human rights, one might argue that freedom is – at least formally – a universal entitlement belonging to every human being. However, this universalist structure is built upon a conflictual foundation, as the juridico-political meaning of freedom is determined by the boundaries of national citizenship, statehood, and territorial sovereignty. This chapter examines refugeehood (...) as a normal by-product of the post-colonial world order, embodying the counter-history of nation-states whose internal borders, walls, and external fortifications are growingly being militarised and reinforced. Refugeehood represents an anomalous juridico-political condition that cannot be elucidated by colonial-racial binaries such as inclusion versus exclusion or rightlessness versus national citizenship. The central idea of this chapter is that, for refugees, the meaning of freedom and unfreedom are intertwined and should be approached as a dynamic relationship characterising the state of (non)-subjectivity. As political (non)-subjects, refugees call structural determinations of unfreedom into question. Refugees’ freedom is expressed in the act of flight and border crossing, irregular migratory movement, language games of resistance, and other emancipatory signifying practices by which they claim a place of refuge in the world. (shrink)

Architecture and Deconstruction. Case of Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi -/- Intensive relations between philosophical deconstruction and architecture, which were present in the late 1980s and early 1990s, belong to the past and therefore may be described from a greater than before distance. Within these relations three basic variations can be distinguished: the first one, in which philosophy of deconstruction deals with architectural terms but does not interfere with real architecture, the second one, in which a collaboration between Jacques Derrida (...) and a group of architects interested in his concepts is commenced, and the third one, in which completed or only designed objects or new concepts of deconstruction created by architects gain their supremacy over philosophy. The following book analyses these three possible ways, first of all with the reference to Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi. (shrink)

Possession, Belonging, Self-denial and Detachment of the Soul The state of “I” and “ME” are the attachment to the world and its objects. Self denial and denial of the self from everything is the detachment of the soul from the earthly life. When we don’t relate ourselves to the life-cycle of birth and death; realizing everything belongs to the universe and not to consider oneself the owner of any earthly objects or relations makes one detached from the self. When (...) we relate ourselves to some form and/or entity, then we have the attributes of the character in ourselves. When we deny the entity as ourselves and deny the “I”, then we are not related to any relation or belongings of that particular subject. When we deny the self, along we deny any belongings and possessions of the particular self, making ourselves out of the daily worldly life. Hence we realize true nature of the self, the Soul. State of Being Conscious, Sub-Conscious and Un-Conscious When we are aware of the self and in the present, it is in the conscious state. When we are in some state of mind and not in the present, it is sub-consciousness. While in this state, Mind will take you (self-the worldly persona) to the arena you want to be and sometimes to some unknown strange states (may be place, people or situation) that pertaining to the self. When the body is at rest, still mind takes the self to the other realms that the self is related to some or other way. This is not sub-conscious state of Mind, but Sub-conscious state of Self. And when we are not with the body, it is a state of unconsciousness. Since Mind and body is not real, part of the Illusionist world we need to leave it for sometime on a daily basis. So we give it a rest that called sleeping, when we are not present in the body! Truth is relative when Self is Absolute. But Self is not Absolute, so Truth is Absolute and Real. Perceptions are Relative and Unreal. Truth-Real or Relative: World is a state of Mind: a Perception not Real! (shrink)