Philosophy Framework Quotes

What we wish for, dream and imagine is the very framework and foundation of everything we create

In the West, ikigai is often used as a career-finding diagram. In Japan, ikigai is a way of life.

In addition to the interpretive frameworks of the mythological (classical-Greek), the theological (Medieval-Christian), and the existential (modern-European), would it be possible to shift our framework to something we can only call cosmological? Could such a cosmological view be understood not simply as the view from inter-stellar space, but as the view of the world-without-us, the Planetary view?

Truth changes with the season of our emotions. It is the shadow that moves with the phases of our inner sun. When the nights falls, only our perception can guess where it hides in the dark. Within every solar system of the soul lies a plan of what truth is--- the design God has created, in our own unique story. This is as varying as the constellations, and as turning as the tide. It is not one truth we live to, but many. If we ever hope to determine if there is such a thing as truth, apart from cultural and personal preferences, we must acknowledge that we are then aiming to discover something greater than ourselves, something that transcends culture and individual inclinations. Some say that we must look beyond ourselves and outside of ourselves. However, we don’t need to look farther than what is already in each other. If there was any great plan from a higher power it is a simplistic, repetitious theme found in all religions; the basic core importance to unity comes from shared theological and humanistic virtues. Beyond the synagogue, mosques, temples, churches, missionary work, church positions and religious rituals comes a simple “message of truth” found in all of us, that binds theology---holistic virtues combined with purpose is the foundation of spiritual evolution. The diversity among us all is not divided truth, but the opportunity for unity through these shared values. Truth is the framework and roadmap of positive virtues. It unifies diversity when we choose to see it and use it. It is simple message often lost among the rituals, cultural traditions and socializing that goes on behind the chapel doors of any religion or spiritual theology. As we fight among ourselves about what religion, culture or race is right, we often lose site of the simple message any great orator has whispered through time----a simplistic story explaining the importance of virtues, which magically reemphasizes the importance of loving one another through service.

She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death.

Permaculture Economics is an economic framework that combines principles from permaculture, a design system for sustainable and regenerative agriculture and living, with the fundamentals of capitalist economics.

Thomas Jefferson, that owner of many slaves, chose to begin the Declaration of Independence by directly contradicting the moral basis of slavery, writing "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights ..." thus undercutting simultaneously any argument that Africans were racially inferior, and also that they or their ancestors could ever have been justly and legally deprived of their freedom. In doing so, however, he did not propose some radically new conception of rights and liberties. Neither have subsequent political philosophers. For the most part, we've just kept the old ones, but with the word "not" inserted here and there. Most of our most precious rights and freedoms are a series of exceptions to an overall moral and legal framework that suggests we shouldn't really have them in the first place.

The contemplation of revealed truth is a disturbing element in Christian philosophy though a very beautiful one, for it means that the framework of philosophy is widened, and, above all, it can never rest satisfied with the flat, one-dimensional "harmonies" of rationalism. That is the moment when a Christian philosophy, striking upon the rock of divine truth, foams and boils; and that is its unique privilege.

I’m going to recommend a simple framework for evaluating and changing your behavior based on a combination of cognitive-behavioral therapy and ancient Stoic practices. It consists of the following steps: 1. Evaluate the consequences of your habits or desires in order to select which ones to change. 2. Spot early warning signs so that you can nip problematic desires in the bud. 3. Gain cognitive distance by separating your impressions from external reality. 4. Do something else instead of engaging in the habit.

The [character-]armored, mechanistically rigid person thinks mechanistically, produces mechanistic tools, and forms a mechanistic conception of nature. The armored person who feels his orgonotic body excitations in spite of his biological rigidity, but does not understand them, is mystic man. He is interested not in "material" but in "spiritual" things. He forms a mystical, supernatural idea about nature. Both the mechanist and the mystic stand inside the limits and conceptual laws of a civilization which is ruled by a contradictory and murderous mixture of machines and gods. This civilization forms the mechanistic-mystical structures of men, and the mechanistic-mystical character structures keep reproducing a the mechanistic-mystical civilization. Both mechanists and mystics find themselves inside the framework of human structure in a civilization conditioned by mechanistics and mysticism. They cannot grasp the basic problems of this civilization because their thinking and philosophy correspond exactly to the condition they project and continue to reproduce. In order to realize the power of mysticism, one has only to think of the murderous conflict between Hindus and Muslims at the time India was divided. To comprehend what mechanistic civilization means, think of the "age of the atom bomb.

Meaning is invisible, but the invisible is not the contradictory of the visible: the visible itself has an invisible inner framework (membrure), and the in-visible is the secret counterpart of the visible, it appears only within it, it is the Nichturpräsentierbar which is presented to me as such within the world--one cannot see it there and every effort to see it there makes it disappear, but it is in the line of the visible, it is its virtual focus, it is inscribed within it (in filigree).

The nature of existence is chaotic, unpredictable, slippery in definition, and the important thing to do is to focus on love within this chaotic framework.

It is therefore important to discover whether there is any answer to Hume within the framework of a philosophy that is wholly or mainly empirical. If not, there is no intellectual difference between sanity and insanity. The lunatic who believes that he is a poached egg is to be condemned solely on the ground that he is in a minority, or rather — since we must not assume democracy — on the ground that the government does not agree with him. This is a desperate point of view, and it must be hoped that there is some way of escaping from it.

The only thing that interests the physicist is finding out on what assumptions a framework of things can be constructed which will enable us to know how to use them mechanically. Physics, as I have said on another occasion, is the technique of techniques and the ars combinatoria for fabricating machines. It is a knowledge which has scarcely anything to do with comprehension.

The end will come when businessmen accept "You can't fight city hall" as their philosophy and settle down to "exist" within the framework of a completely-controlled, federally-dominated economy. When fear of a lost government contract, an income tax audit, or the disfavor of a vocal customer is more important for most Americans than standing up for principle, the fight will be over.

Buddhism has become for me a philosophy of action and responsibility. It provides a framework of values, ideas, and practices that nurture my ability to create a path in life, to define myself as a person, to act, to take risks, to image things differently, to make art. The more I prize Gotama's teachings free from the matrix of Indian religious thought in which they are entrenched and the more I come to understand how his own life unfolded in the context of his times, the more I discern a template for living that I can apply at this time in this increasingly secular and globalized world.

The primary purpose of this work is to briefly review the philosophical, psychological, neuroscientific, and methodological frameworks that have been developed throughout the history of the West . . .

The tangible and factual components of reality along with the intangible strands of memory and imagination constitute the framework that houses our vital life force. A person is likewise composed of contradictory and complementary forces of pain and pleasure, darkness and lightness, and clashing and harmonizing bands of thoughts and feelings. The web and root of all persons consists of both the expressible and the unsayable. Who has not held imaginary conversations with gods, devils, and spirits? Persons whom enthusiastically cultivate an inner life, ardently experience the quick of nature, and willingly immerse themselves in all aspects of everyday living will experience renewal. Analogous to the heat source of fire, we need the spark of desire to fuel our hearts and the spirit of the breeze to spread our heart songs.

The philosopher seeks a generality beyond the boundaries of science; he attempts to frame a comprehensive and coherent framework of ideas within which the partial results of science may become more intelligible.

It is clear this philosophy has been welcomed with open arms by men already predisposed to misogynistic tendencies, who seem to appreciate the opportunity to validate their bias within a grandiose ideological framework.

The effects of this change were momentous. Truth was no longer to be ascertained by consulting authority, but by inward meditation. There was a tendency, quickly developed, towards anarchism in politics, and, in religion, towards mysticism, which had always fitted with difficulty into the framework of Catholic orthodoxy. There came to be not one Protestantism, but a multitude of sects; not one philosophy opposed to scholasticism, but as many as there

Aging makes you think about philosophy and religion, and whether they have value. It's a framework for morality. [...] The only way we live on at all is through the works we leave behind, but more through example. Example is the see that can be propagated through generations. - Elizabeth Jane Howard

If you’re an Orthodox believer, then what sustains this framework is the obligation that you follow. But if you live in a democratic, liberal world whose motto is: “Make choices and manage your choices according to what is good for you,” then there is a built-in tension between that which connects and that which divides. Between the material and the intellectual or ethical. Materialism is not a dirty word, but in this tension between the individual and the material on the one hand, and the communal and the ethical on the other, we are at the end of an age in which the material and the individual are triumphing.

It would be interesting to compare Tarkovsky’s work with the Hollywood commercial rewritings of novels which have served as bases for movies: Tarkovsky does exactly the same as the lowest Hollywood producer, re-inscribing the enigmatic encounter with Otherness, the Thing, into the framework of the production of the couple.

Science has marched forward. But civilization’s values remain rooted in philosophies, religious traditions, and ethical frameworks devised many centuries ago. Even our economic system, capitalism, is half a millennium old. The first stock exchange opened in 1602 in Amsterdam. By 1637, tulip mania had caused the first speculation bubble and crash. And not a lot has changed. Virtually every business stills uses the double-entry bookkeeping and accounting adopted in thirteenth –century Venice. So our daily dealings are still heavily influenced by ideas that were firmly set before anyone knew the world was round. In many ways, they reflect how we understood the world when we didn’t understand the world at all.

The principal advantage of narrative writing is that it assists us place our life experiences in a storytelling template. The act of strict examination forces us to select and organize our past. Narration provides an explanatory framework. Human beings often claim to understand events when they manage to formulate a coherent story or narrative explaining what factors caused a specific incident to occur. Stories assist the human mind to remember and make decisions based on informative stories. Narrative writing also prompts periods of intense reflection that leads to more writing that is ruminative. Contemplative actions call for us to track the conscious mind at work rendering an accounting of our weaknesses and our strengths, folly and wisdom.

The majority of species, too, could scrape together some sort of metaphysical framework, a form of earlier speculation – semi-deranged or otherwise – regarding the way things worked at a fundamental level which could later be held up as a philosophy, life-rule system or genuine religion, especially if one used the excuse that it was really only a metaphor, no matter how literally true it had declared itself to be originally.

This novel contains violent scenes and grotesque expressions.' That being said, it's implied that they are merely small events happening inside the solid framework of a novel, and most of it is nothing more than foolish assumptions unable to detach themselves from rules and order. After having enjoyed that violence and grotesque to their heart's content, the readers will make an unsatisfied face and return to the world they originally belonged to, their world, the normal world. Violence and grotesque are just a form of amusement, pure and unadulterated amusement. It's just that, only that, and nothing more than that. But the problem here is that: "just that" isn't in the sense of "nothing other than that." It's in the sense of even though there are multiple choices, we find ourselves making a decision while still believing there is only one. Although those are hopeless lyrics, worthless words useless as a real world problem, and merely notions overlapping with other notions to make food for pseudo-philosophy.

I’m going to recommend a simple framework for evaluating and changing your behavior based on a combination of cognitive-behavioral therapy and ancient Stoic practices. It consists of the following steps: 1. Evaluate the consequences of your habits or desires in order to select which ones to change. 2. Spot early warning signs so that you can nip problematic desires in the bud. 3. Gain cognitive distance by separating your impressions from external reality. 4. Do something else instead of engaging in the habit. In addition, consider how you might introduce other sources of healthy positive feelings by: 1. Planning new activities that are consistent with your core values. 2. Contemplating the qualities you admire in other people. 3. Practicing gratitude for the things you already have in life.

Leaders nourish and uphold the culture of an organization. They make choices that inevitably limit the size and scope of activities that the organization undertakes. A good leader will only work in a firm where there is clear and effective governance to protect the culture, philosophy and investment discipline of the firm. The most effective leaders create a non-hierarchical environment in which idea sharing is encouraged, and diligent execution is rewarded. They also establish a solid foundation, a durable framework, and processes for successfully managing an organization that can maintain these qualities. And last, a great investment leader has a zero tolerance policy for breaches of integrity. By integrity, we mean not only honesty and fulfillment of fiduciary obligation, but process integrity.

The ‘I’ is a bare consciousness, accompanying all concepts. In the ‘I’, ‘nothing more is represented than a transcendental subject of thoughts’. ‘Consciousness in itself (is) not so much a representation…as it is a form of representation in general.’ The ‘I think’ is ‘the form of apperception, which clings to every experience and precedes it.’ Kant grasps the phenomenal content of the ‘I’ correctly in the expression ‘I think’, or—if one also pays heed to including the ‘practical person’ when one speaks of ‘intelligence’—in the expression ‘I take action’. In Kant’s sense we must take saying “I” as saying “I think.” Kant tries to establish the phenomenal content of the “I” as *res cogitans*. If in doing so he calls this “I” a ‘logical subject’, that does not mean that the “I” in general is a concept obtained merely by way of logic. The “I” is rather the subject of logical behavior, of binding together. ‘I think’ means ‘I bind together’. All binding together is an ‘*I* bind together’. In any taking-together or relating, the “I” always underlies—the ὑποκείμενον [hypokeimenon; subjectum; subject]. The *subjectum* is therefore ‘consciousness in itself’, not a representation but rather the ‘form’ of representation. That is to say, the “I think” is not something represented, but the formal structure of representing as such, and this formal structure alone makes it possible for anything to have been represented. When we speak of the “form” of representation, we have in view neither a framework nor a universal concept, but that which, as εἶδος [eidos], makes every representing and everything represented be what it is. If the “I” is understood as the form of representation, this amounts to saying that it is the ‘logical subject’. Kant’s analysis has two positive aspects. For one thing, he sees the impossibility of ontically reducing the “I” to a substance; for another thing, he holds fast to the “I” as ‘I think’. Nevertheless, he takes this “I” as subject again, and he does so in a sense which is ontologically inappropriate. For the ontological concept of the subject *characterizes not the Selfhood of the “I” qua Self, but the self-sameness and steadiness of something that is always present-at-hand*. To define the “I” ontologically as “*subject*” means to regard it as something always present-at-hand. The Being of the “I” is understood as the Reality of the *res cogitans*." ―from_Being and Time_. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, pp. 366-367

A conception of the law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for – for the individual, or the family, or the people, or the largest number – becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority. And this predicament is by no means solved if the unit to which the "good for" applies is as large as mankind itself. For it is quite conceivable, and even within the realm of practical political possibilities, that one fine day a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude quite democratically – namely by majority decision – that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof. Here, in the problems of factual reality, we are confronted with one of the oldest perplexities of political philosophy, which could remain undetected only so long as stable Christian theology provided the framework for all political and philosophical problems, but which long ago caused Plato to say: "Not man, but a god, must be the measure of all things.

Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive political philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that individual freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and government. Libertarianism offers its believers a clear conscience to do things society presently restrains, like make more money, have more sex, or take more drugs. It promises a consistent formula for ethics, a rigorous framework for policy analysis, a foundation in American history, and the application of capitalist efficiencies to the whole of society. But while it contains substantial grains of truth, as a whole it is a seductive mistake. . . . The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. . . . Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it. . . . So even if the libertarian principle of “an it harm none, do as thou wilt,” is true, it does not license the behavior libertarians claim. Consider pornography: libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by it. . . . There is no need to embrace outright libertarianism just because we want a healthy portion of freedom, and the alternative to libertarianism is not the USSR, it is America’s traditional liberties. . . . Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians. The political corollary of this is that since no electorate will support libertarianism, a libertarian government could never be achieved democratically but would have to be imposed by some kind of authoritarian state, which rather puts the lie to libertarians’ claim that under any other philosophy, busybodies who claim to know what’s best for other people impose their values on the rest of us. . . . Libertarians are also naïve about the range and perversity of human desires they propose to unleash. They can imagine nothing more threatening than a bit of Sunday-afternoon sadomasochism, followed by some recreational drug use and work on Monday. They assume that if people are given freedom, they will gravitate towards essentially bourgeois lives, but this takes for granted things like the deferral of gratification that were pounded into them as children without their being free to refuse. They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint. Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being replaced by the external restraints of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not more. This contempt for self-restraint is emblematic of a deeper problem: libertarianism has a lot to say about freedom but little about learning to handle it. Freedom without judgment is dangerous at best, useless at worst. Yet libertarianism is philosophically incapable of evolving a theory of how to use freedom well because of its root dogma that all free choices are equal, which it cannot abandon except at the cost of admitting that there are other goods than freedom. Conservatives should know better.

Due to the various pragmatic obstacles, it is rare for a mission-critical analysis to be done in the “fully Bayesian” manner, i.e., without the use of tried-and-true frequentist tools at the various stages. Philosophy and beauty aside, the reliability and efficiency of the underlying computations required by the Bayesian framework are the main practical issues. A central technical issue at the heart of this is that it is much easier to do optimization (reliably and efficiently) in high dimensions than it is to do integration in high dimensions. Thus the workhorse machine learning methods, while there are ongoing efforts to adapt them to Bayesian framework, are almost all rooted in frequentist methods. A work-around is to perform MAP inference, which is optimization based. Most users of Bayesian estimation methods, in practice, are likely to use a mix of Bayesian and frequentist tools. The reverse is also true—frequentist data analysts, even if they stay formally within the frequentist framework, are often influenced by “Bayesian thinking,” referring to “priors” and “posteriors.” The most advisable position is probably to know both paradigms well, in order to make informed judgments about which tools to apply in which situations.

In the spread of gender-identity ideology, developments in academia played a crucial role. This is not the place for an extended critique of the thinking that evolved on American campuses out of the 1960s French philosophy and literary criticism into gender studies, queer theory, critical race theory and the like. I will merely focus on what some have dubbed 'applied postmodernism' and the form of activism, known as 'social justice', that seeks to remake humanity along ideological lines. And I will lay out the key elements that have enable transsexuality, once understood as a rare anomaly, to be converted into an all-encompassing theory of sex and gender, and body and mind. Within applied postmodernism, objectivity is essentially impossible. Logic and reason are not ideals to be striven for, but attempts to shore up privilege. Language is taken to shape reality, not describe it. Oppression is brought into existence by discourse. Equality is no longer achieved by replacing unjust laws and practices with new ones that give everyone the chance to thrive, but by individuals defining their own identities, and 'troubling' or 'queering' the definitions of oppressed groups. A dualistic ideology can easily be accommodated within such a framework. Being a man or woman – or indeed non-binary or gender-fluid - becomes a matter of finding your own gender identity and revealing it to the world by the medium of preferred pronouns. It is a feeble form of dualism to be sure: the grandeur of Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am' replaced by 'they/them' on a pronoun badge.

Chapter 1, “Esoteric Antiquarianism,” situates Egyptian Oedipus in its most important literary contexts: Renaissance Egyptology, including philosophical and archeological traditions, and early modern scholarship on paganism and mythology. It argues that Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies are better understood as an antiquarian rather than philosophical enterprise, and it shows how much he shared with other seventeenth-century scholars who used symbolism and allegory to explain ancient imagery. The next two chapters chronicle the evolution of Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies, including his pioneering publications on Coptic. Chapter 2, “How to Get Ahead in the Republic of Letters,” treats the period from 1632 until 1637 and tells the story of young Kircher’s decisive encounter with the arch-antiquary Peiresc, which revolved around the study of Arabic and Coptic manuscripts. Chapter 3, “Oedipus in Rome,” continues the narrative until 1655, emphasizing the networks and institutions, especially in Rome, that were essential to Kircher’s enterprise. Using correspondence and archival documents, this pair of chapters reconstructs the social world in which Kircher’s studies were conceived, executed, and consumed, showing how he forged his career by establishing a reputation as an Oriental philologist. The next four chapters examine Egyptian Oedipus and Pamphilian Obelisk through a series of thematic case studies. Chapter 4, “Ancient Theology and the Antiquarian,” shows in detail how Kircher turned Renaissance occult philosophy, especially the doctrine of the prisca theologia, into a historical framework for explaining antiquities. Chapter 5, “The Discovery of Oriental Antiquity,” looks at his use of Oriental sources, focusing on Arabic texts related to Egypt and Hebrew kabbalistic literature. It provides an in-depth look at the modus operandi behind Kircher’s imposing edifice of erudition, which combined bogus and genuine learning. Chapter 6, “Erudition and Censorship,” draws on archival evidence to document how the pressures of ecclesiastical censorship shaped Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies. Readers curious about how Kircher actually produced his astonishing translations of hieroglyphic inscriptions will find a detailed discussion in chapter 7, “Symbolic Wisdom in an Age of Criticism,” which also examines his desperate effort to defend their reliability. This chapter brings into sharp focus the central irony of Kircher’s project: his unyielding antiquarian passion to explain hieroglyphic inscriptions and discover new historical sources led him to disregard the critical standards that defined erudite scholarship at its best. The book’s final chapter, “Oedipus at Large,” examines the reception of Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies through the eighteenth century in relation to changing ideas about the history of civilization.

Polanyi describes the informal and tacit elements essential to science. These include transmission of skills from master to apprentice, the development of “connoisseurship,” and the inculcation in a student of a disciplinary tradition and interpretive framework. These tacit components of knowing account for the process of problem solving or discovery: the art of understanding the whole by intuitively combining an internalized subsidiary awareness of particular things with a focus on a question to be solved about external objects. Common experiences that give us a sense of this tacit knowledge, which cannot be articulated by rote rules, are the achievements of riding a bicycle or playing the piano or discriminating a fine wine (49–50, 54).

Abstract mathematical models might be thought of as attempts to use a general-purpose and precise framework to represent dependence relationships that might exist between the parts of real systems. A mathematical model will treat one variable as a function of others, which in turn are functions of others, and so on. In this way, a complicated network of dependence structures can be represented. And then, via a commentary, the dependence structure in the model can be treated as representing the dependence structure that might exist in a real system.

When we understand all that constitutes the cognitive unconscious, our understanding of the nature of consciousness is vastly enlarged. Consciousness goes way beyond mere awareness of something, beyond the mere experience of qualia, beyond the awareness that you are aware, and beyond the multiple takes on immediate experience provided by various centers of the brain. Consciousness certainly involves all of the above plus the immeasurably vaster constitutive framework provided by the cognitive unconscious, which must be operating for us to be aware of anything at all.

The terminology "analytic-synthetic" was introduced by Kant. Although the distinction itself looks uncontroversial, it can be made to do real philosophical work. Here is one crucial piece of work the logical positivists saw for it: they claimed that all of mathematics and logic is analytic. This made it possible for them to deal with mathematical knowledge within an empiricist framework. For logical positivism, mathematical propositions do not describe the world; they merely record our conventional decision to use symbols in a particular way. Synthetic claims about the world can be expressed using mathematical language, such as when it is claimed that there are nine planets in the solar system. But proofs and investigations within mathematics itself are analytic.

Science works by taking theoretical ideas and trying to find ways to expose them to observation. The scientific strategy is to construe ideas, to embed them in surrounding conceptual frameworks, and to develop them, in such a way that this exposure is possible even in the case of the most general and ambitious hypotheses about the universe.

In the twentieth century, many philosophers have utilized analytical philosophy4 as a framework for exploring the nature of moral situations and the meaning and validity of moral terms such as justice, goodness, virtue, and right. In fact, earlier in the twentieth century, one school of analytical philosophy, logical positivism, argued that ethical judgments are not really propositions or meaningful statements; they are purely emotive, arousing feeling, and hence belong to psychology or sociology.

Obviously, an actual emergency cannot be interrupted to reflect on specific objectives, goals, and capabilities as a way to engage in an emergent learning process. However, a number of ways that this type of reflective process can still be accomplished is to facilitate and encourage learning during a real emergency. To be clear, the underlying motive of the entire framework is to infuse a continuous learning sensibility into a response agency by adopting a philosophy of continual learning though reflection and action. In other words, a shift in organizational culture and values is necessary.

...[P]hilosophical theories are structured by conceptual metaphors that constrain which inferences can be drawn within that philosophical theory. The (typically unconscious) conceptual metaphors that are constitutive of a philosophical theory have the causal effect of constraining how you can reason within that philosophical framework.

But we dare not adopt our political philosophy uncritically from some non-Christian source. It must emerge from our normative biblical framework and our painstaking, extensive socioeconomic and political analysis.

True religious myths … acknowledge transcendence and foment the openness - the faith - that is precondition to the final leap to freedom. They bring us to the edge of what can be achieved within the framework of language, space and time, priming us for grace.

William James and most early psychologists were strongly influenced by British empiricism, which in turn is based on Christian philosophies. Under the empiricist framework, knowledge derives from the (human) brain’s ability to perceive and interpret the objective world. According to the empiricist philosopher David Hume,10 all our knowledge arises from perceptual associations and inductive reasoning to reveal cause-and-effect relationships.11 Nothing can exist in the mind without first being detected by the senses because the mind is built out of sensations of the physical world. He listed three principles of association: resemblance, contiguity in time and place, and causation.

Such Christian frameworks of meaning encourage a positive expectation on the part of believers that something may be learned and gained through illness and suffering.

There is an enormous amount that we still don’t understand—because, as always, what we don’t know is vastly greater than what we know. But we are learning. Perhaps in a curious way, transporting ourselves back to our natural reality, which for Price has its roots in pragmatism and in a respect for what we have learned about reality thanks to scientific rationalism, ends up bringing us closer to the intuitions of Nietzsche, which along a different route have led to the excesses of postmodernism: before being a rational animal, man is a vital animal—“It is our needs that interpret the world . . . Every instinct has its thirst for dominion.” True, but our reason also emerges from this magma, and emerges as our most effective weapon. Price’s book argues with strength and rigor for a humble and complete naturalism: we are natural creatures in a natural world, and these terms give us the best conceptual framework for understanding both ourselves and the world. We are part of this tremendous and incredibly rich nature about which we still understand little, albeit enough to know that it is sufficiently complex to have given rise to all that we are, including our ethics, our capacity for knowledge, our sense of beauty and our ability to experience emotions. Outside of this there is nothing. For a theoretical physicist such as myself, for an astronomer accustomed to thinking about the endless expanse of more than a hundred billion galaxies, each one consisting of more than a hundred billion stars, each one with its garland of planets, on one of which we dwell for a brief and fugitive moment, like specks of infinitesimal dust lost in the endlessness of the cosmos, this seems no more than obvious. Every anthropocentrism pales into insignificance in the face of this immensity. This is naturalism. Emptiness Is Empty: Nāgārjuna December 8, 2017 We rarely come across a book with the capacity to influence our way of thinking.

The traditional American war movie treats war as episodic and unusual, but here the voice-overs by Train elevate such violence and destruction to permanent metaphysical status. This is another reason why the narrative framework of the genre is invoked only to be refused.

3) Chrislam is an Obvious False Teaching that Has Entered Christianity: Marloes Janson and Birgit Meyer state that Chrislam merges Christianity and Islam. This syncretistic movement rests upon the belief that following Christianity or Islam alone will not guarantee salvation. Chrislamists participate in Christian and Islamic beliefs and practices. During a religious service Tela Tella, the founder of Ifeoluwa, Nigeria’s first Chrislamic movement, proclaimed that “Moses is Jesus and Jesus is Muhammad; peace be upon all of them – we love them all.’” Marloes Janson says he met with a church member who calls himself a Chrislamist. The man said, “You can’t be a Christian without being a Muslim, and you can’t be a Muslim without being a Christian.” These statements reflect the mindset of this community, which mixes Islam with Christianity, and African culture. Samsindeen Saka, a self-proclaimed prophet, also promotes Chrislam. Mr. Saka founded the Oke Tude Temple in Nigeria in 1989. The church's name means the mountain of loosening bondage. His approach adds a charismatic flavor to Chrislam. He says those bound by Satan; are set free through fasting and prayer. Saka says when these followers are set free from evil spirits. Then, the Holy Spirit possesses them. Afterward, they experience miracles of healing and prosperity in all areas of their life. He also claims that combining Christianity and Islam relieves political tension between these groups. This pastor seeks to take dominion of the world in the name of Chrislam (1). Today, Chrislam has spread globally, but with much resistance from the Orthodox (Christians, Muslims, and Jews). Richard Mather of Israeli International News says Chrislamists recognize both the Judeo-Christian “Bible and the Quran as holy texts.” So, they fuse these religions by removing Jewish references from the Bible. Thereby neutralizing the prognostic relevance “of the Jewish people and the land of Israel.” This fusion of Islam with Christianity is a rebranded form of replacement theology (2) (3). Also, traditional Muslims do not believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Therefore, they do not believe Christ died on the cross for the sins of the world. Thus, these religions cannot merge without destroying the foundations of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. References: 1. Janson, Marloes, and Birgit Meyer. “Introduction: Towards a Framework for the Study of Christian-Muslim Encounters in Africa.” Africa, Vol. 86, no. 4, 2016, pp. 615-619, 2. Mather, Richard. “What is Chrislam?” Arutz Sheva – Israel International News. Jewish Media Agency, 02 March 2015, 3. Janson, Marloes. Crossing Religious Boundaries: Islam, Christianity, and ‘Yoruba Religion' in Lagos, Nigeria, (The International African Library Book 64). Cambridge University Press. 2021.

When diverse populations split into isolated groups, we should expect either animosity or, at best, a sort of practical relativism. This, in turn, will tend to lessen the interest in reconciliation with the moral view of others, and so decrease the likelihood that there will be convergence on the justification of an impartial framework. Because of this, the overarching framework in which the like-minded communities relate is apt to be seen as unjustified by most. After all, the other group will often have a very different set of rules emanating from a very different set of ideals, and there may well be little in the socially eligible set between them. As the Ostroms observed: 'a highly fragmented political system without substantial overlap is especially prone to conflict.

At its heart, neoliberalism is a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual—not collective, please note—individual entrepreneurial freedoms defined in very particular ways, and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, so-called “free markets,” and so-called “free” trade. If I could just have my hands doing air quotes, I’d be doing it continuously, but you can see that in your imagination. The role of the state under neoliberal philosophy is to create and preserve an institutional framework that’s appropriate to these kinds of practices. It must guarantee the quality and integrity of money. Also set up those military defense, police, and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights, and to guarantee, by force if need be (and we’ve seen some of this already in the conversation about militarism; we’ll see more of it), by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. That’s the role of the state. If markets do not exist in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution, then they must be created by state action if necessary. You can see these things immediately as either prior public goods or public resources, these are all to be brought under the rubrics of the market through privatization, an essential feature of neoliberalism. Any other actions by the state are deemed then to be illegitimate, but you can tell already that the state has a very significant role to play here, even though proponents of neoliberalism and their rhetoric constantly downplay both the role and the necessity of the state. It should also be quite clear, immediately and despite this rhetoric, that neoliberalism is not really an unencumbered, non-state-mediated enterprise.

The Emotion Revolution Before the current burst of research into emotion, most scientists understood our feelings within a framework that goes all the way back to the ideas of Charles Darwin. That traditional theory of emotion embraced a number of principles that seem intuitively plausible: that there is a small set of basic emotions—fear, anger, sadness, disgust, happiness, and surprise—that are universal among all cultures and have no functional overlap; that each emotion is triggered by specific stimuli in the external world; that each emotion causes fixed and specific behaviors; and that each emotion occurs in specific dedicated structures in the brain. This theory also encompassed a dichotomous view of the mind that goes back at least to the ancient Greeks: that the mind consists of two competing forces, one “cold,” logical, and rational and the other “hot,” passionate, and impulsive. For millennia these ideas informed thinking in fields from theology to philosophy to the science of the mind. Freud incorporated the traditional theory into his work. John Mayer and Peter Salovey’s theory of “emotional intelligence,” popularized by the 1995 book of that name by Daniel Goleman, is in part based on it. And it is the framework for most of what we think about our feelings. But it is wrong.

On the other hand, if you spent those thirty years, or three thousand years, primarily studying mental phenomena, you might draw a different conclusion. The simple point here is that multiple theories, or multiple moments of awareness, may best be validated when they are brought into conjunction with moments of awareness or perspectives that are radically different. Whether our perspective is Christianity, Buddhism, the philosophy of Greek antiquity, or modern neurobiology, the way forward may be to overcome the illusions of knowledge by engaging deeply, respectfully, and humbly with people who share radically different visions. I think there’s a common assumption from a secular perspective that the religions of the world cancel themselves out in terms of any truth claims: Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism say many different things on many fronts, so when you shuffle them all together, they all collapse into nothing. In that view, the only moment of cognition that seems to be left standing is science, with nothing to bounce off of because religions have canceled each other out. It’s also often believed that the contemplative traditions feel they already know the answers. You set out on your contemplative path and are guided to the right answer. If you deviate from that, your teacher brings you back and says, “Not that way. We already know the right answer. Keep on meditating until you get to the right answer.” That is completely incompatible with the spirit of scientific inquiry, which seeks information currently thought to be unknown, and is therefore open to something fresh. As I put these various problems together in my mind, a solution seems to rise up, which is a strong return to empiricism and clarity. What don’t we know and what do we know? It’s very hard to find that out when we only engage with people who have similar mentalities to our own. As Father Thomas suggested, Christianity needs to return to a spirit of empiricism, to the contemplative experience, rather than resting with all the “right” answers from doctrine. The same goes for Buddhism. In this regard I’m deeply inspired by the words of William James: “Let empiricism once become associated with religion, as hitherto, through some strange misunderstanding, it has been associated with irreligion, and I believe that a new era of religion as well as philosophy will be ready to begin . . . I fully believe that such an empiricism is a more natural ally than dialectics ever were, or can be, of the religious life.”99 We may then find there are indeed profound convergences among multiple contemplative traditions operating out of very different initial frameworks: the Bible, the sutras, the Vedas, and so forth. When we go to the deepest experiential level, there may be universal contemplative truths that the Christians, the Buddhists, and the Taoists have each found in their laboratories. If there is some convergence, these may be some of the most important truths that human beings can ever access.

It is easy to detect Loewald’s debt to phenomenological philosophy, for he in many ways presents a psychoanalytic alternative to the phenomenological understanding of what it means for human beings to actualize their potential and to live authentically. Phenomenological accounts often emphasize (as Nietzsche also did) that it is the subject’s responsibility to make the most of the fact that it is born into specific life circumstances—family situation, historical period, culture, and so on—that it did not select. Heidegger describes this predicament in terms of the anxiety of being “thrown” into a world of preexisting norms and meanings—a world that was not designed for one’s comfort, that one does not necessarily fully comprehend, let alone appreciate, and that one cannot control or manipulate in any significant degree. Within this framework, the subject’s existential challenge—what makes its life both demanding and stimulating—is to arrive at a measure of creative autonomy in relation to the external forces that threaten to determine its existence. In other words, although Heidegger acknowledges that the subject is always by definition a “being-in-the-world”—a creature whose life only makes sense against the backdrop of the particular world within which it endeavors to find its bearings—he at the same time underlines that it is the subject’s responsibility to ensure that it does not become entirely swallowed up by that world; it is the subject’s existential obligation to fend off states of non-creative complacency that would deprive it of the ability to keep asking itself what it, as a conscious being with singular ideals, passions, and practical concerns, finds significant in its life.

We live in a wave universe, cycling forward for all eternity, and ruled by wave mathematics: Fourier mathematics. Fourier mathematics is the basis of music theory, light theory, wave theory, quantum mechanics, and holography. It uniquely explains mind, and solves the problem of Cartesian mind-matter interaction. Einstein’s relativity theory is a spacetime misinterpretation of Fourier mathematics, deriving from Einstein’s inability to conceive of a Singularity outside space and time as the mysterious “ether” that provides the absolute framework for spacetime reality. If humanity turned its entire attention to holography, and Fourier mathematics, we would be Gods living in paradise in just one generation. What are we waiting for?

The essence, likewise, is an inner framework, it is not above the sensible world, it is beneath, or in its depth, its thickness. It is the secret bond...things are Essences at the level of Nature.

We must accustom ourselves to understand that 'thought' is not an invisible contact of self with self, that it lives outside of this intimacy with oneself, in front of us, not in us, always eccentric. Just as we rediscover the field of the sensible world as interior-exterior, so also it is necessary to rediscover as the reality of the inter-human world and of history a surface of separation between me and the other which is also the place of our union, the unique Erfullung of his life and my life. It is to this surface of separation and of union that the existentials of my personal history proceed, it is the geometrical locus of the projections and introjections, it is the invisible hinge upon which my life and the life of the others turn to rock into one another, the inner framework of intersubjectivity.

In the Republic, Plato tries to show that what makes a human life happy is to be found in being a good, virtuous person – something that the person has to achieve for herself, while wealth, status and other things commonly valued are irrelevant to happiness. This challenging thesis is defended by a claim that virtue consists in the proper ordering and structure of the person’s soul, one in which reason rules (see Chapter 1). A properly ordered and so virtuous soul, compared to a properly ordered and so healthy body, brings the person a happy life, while unhappiness results from the breakdown of the soul’s order. The framework of the book consists in Plato’s developing and defending this idea that, contrary to popular belief, happiness is to be found in virtue, the right ordering of the soul, even in the worst possible conditions of poverty and torture.

It is easy to detect Loewald’s debt to phenomenological philosophy, for he in many ways presents a psychoanalytic alternative to the phenomenological understanding of what it means for human beings to actualize their potential and to live authentically. Phenomenological accounts often emphasize (as Nietzsche also did) that it is the subject’s responsibility to make the most of the fact that it is born into specific life circumstances—family situation, historical period, culture, and so on—that it did not select. Heidegger describes this predicament in terms of the anxiety of being “thrown” into a world of preexisting norms and meanings—a world that was not designed for one’s comfort, that one does not necessarily fully comprehend, let alone appreciate, and that one cannot control or manipulate in any significant degree. Within this framework, the subject’s existential challenge—what makes its life both demanding and stimulating—is to arrive at a measure of creative autonomy in relation to the external forces that threaten to determine its existence. In other words, although Heidegger acknowledges that the subject is always by definition a “being-in-the-world”—a creature whose life only makes sense against the back-drop of the particular world within which it endeavors to find its bearings—he at the same time underlines that it is the subject’s responsibility to ensure that it does not become entirely swallowed up by that world; it is the subject’s existential obligation to fend off states of non-creative complacency that would deprive it of the ability to keep asking itself what it, as a conscious being with singular ideals, passions, and practical concerns, finds significant in its life.

A worldview (or vision of life) is a framework or set of fundamental beliefs through which we view the world and our calling and future in it. This vision need not be fully articulated: it may be so internalized that it goes largely unquestioned; it may not be explicitly developed into a systematic conception of life; it may not be theoretically deepened into a philosophy; it may not even be codified into creedal form; it may be greatly refined through cultural-historical development. Nevertheless, this vision is a channel for the ultimate beliefs which give direction and meaning to life. It is the integrative and interpretative framework by which order and disorder are judged; it is the standard by which reality is managed and pursued; it is the set of hinges on which all our everyday thinking and doing turns.

We are entering a new era of multiple frontier risks, including runaway technologies and complex geopolitical crises. To remain on the front foot, the world requires symbiotic foresight in public policy and highly trained multidisciplinary thinkers who can connect the dots using frameworks such as Neuro-Techno-Philosophy.

It is a fact of human life that one must eventually choose a philosophy. Or such was the opinion of the Count, as he stood before his old windows in suite 317, having slipped inside with the help of Nina’s key. Whether through careful consideration spawned by books and spirited debate over coffee at two in the morning, or simply from a natural proclivity, we must all eventually adopt a fundamental framework, some reasonably coherent system of causes and effects that will help us make sense not simply of momentous events, but of all the little actions and interactions that constitute our daily lives—be they deliberate or spontaneous, inevitable or unforeseen.

It is a fact, whether we wish to accept it or not, that India is the Mother of all of us. She has given us everything: religion, philosophy, science, art. All that has been truly great, noble, and generous, throughout the ages has come from India. At this moment when a hurricane of violence and hate is raging across the world, and will rage still more through the world of the future, making the very frame-work of our civilization crack, at this moment when intellectual and moral values are being trampled upon by the hordes of egotism, brutality, and lying, let us go together, towards India from whom we can learn so much.

That framework is the idea that in order to live a good (in the sense of eudaimonic) life, one has to understand two things: the nature of the world (and by extension, one’s place in it) and the nature of human reasoning (including when it fails, as it so often does).

Manichaean politics have now taken root internally as part of our civil religion in the midst of our own internal political debate. We are in a political season of extreme hivishness, where political powers and principalities use Manichaean philosophy to cast the world in threatening terms of good and evil. One political party is good, the other evil. Both parties and everyone in between now operate out of a hivish Manichaean political framework.

You should realize that even the thoughts originating in your mind are not always your own. They don’t just happen when you want them to arise, but often arise within a certain dictated framework. Let me explain. In some ways, our minds have some similarities to AI models of the current era. Just like AI, we are trained on large sets of data and facts, fed by our operator (the society and world around us) and our thinking is limited within the current evolutionary constraints of our own brains, just like other animals cannot possess the cognitive capabilities of a human. To think beyond this framework is almost a superhuman task, truly demonstrated by only a few known people in history, the Buddha being one example. In other words, the one who is blind from birth, has no idea what “seeing” feels like.

You should realize that even the thoughts originating in your mind are not always your own. They don’t just happen when you want them to arise, but often arise within a certain dictated framework. Let me explain. In some ways, our minds have some similarities to AI models of the current era. Just like AI, we are trained on large sets of data and facts, fed by our operator (the society and world around us) and our thinking is limited within the current evolutionary constraints of our own brains, just like other animals cannot possess the cognitive capabilities of a human. To think beyond this framework is almost a superhuman task, truly demonstrated by only a few known people in history, the Buddha being one example. In other words, the one who is blind from birth, has no idea what “seeing” feels like.

In the modern context, Stoicism offers a robust framework for navigating the complexities of life. Whether it's personal challenges, professional hurdles, or societal upheavals, Stoicism equips individuals with the tools to maintain rationality, vitality, and a sense of purpose.

Within the framework of the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, social justice as developed by Pope Pius XI has a precise meaning. It is the particular virtue directed to the common good. Its purpose is the reform of the institutions of the common good to enable people to practice the individual virtues more effectively. Not unexpectedly, that requires explanation. This is especially so since most people today do not have the background or training to understand the terms with the necessary precision or in the sense they were originally meant.

THE FOURTH FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF PRIMORDIAL DIMENSIONAL SPACE: GOD’S THEORY OF RANDOMNESS Primordial dimensional space and Minus Zero may not have always existed. They were random events in the life cycle of the primordial dimension space. Everything that came from them was also random. This was the God’s Theory of Randomness. The God’s Theory of Randomness says that randomness is the main theme of development in the primordial dimension, which is beyond all other dimensions. This randomness often shows up outside the framework of a symbolic order that is not dominant. The God’s Theory of Randomness can explain everything, such as the origin of the universe, the extinction of dinosaurs, the advancement of civilization, the rise and fall of technology, the inequality between the rich and the poor, and the destiny of individuals.

We must stop rejecting the discoveries of science. We must stop denouncing provable facts. We must become a spiritual partner of science, using our vast experience—millennia of philosophy, personal inquiry, meditation, soul-searching—to help humanity build a moral framework and ensure that the coming technologies will unify, illuminate, and raise us up…rather than destroy us.

Methodological naturalism is concerned not with claims about what exists but with methods of learning what nature is. It is the idea that all scientific endeavors, hypotheses, and events are to be explained and tested by reference to natural causes and events. This second sense of naturalism seeks to provide a framework within which to conduct the scientific study of the laws of nature. Methodological naturalism is a way of acquiring knowledge. It is a distinct system of thought concerned with a cognitive approach to reality, and is thus a philosophy of knowledge.

A Consciously Constructive organisation must equally balance the 6 Proven aspects of a High Performance Workplace using the proven CLEARx framework. Philosophy and System.

We’re talking about fundamentals here; the fundamental physical laws pertaining to the day-to-day running of the universe. Physicists call them the fundamental constants—things like the masses of atomic particles, the speed of light, the electric charges of electrons, the strength of gravitational force.… They’re beginning to realize just how finely balanced they are. One flip of a decimal point either way and things would start to go seriously wrong. Matter wouldn’t form, stars wouldn’t twinkle, the universe as we know it wouldn’t exist and, if we insist on taking the selfish point of view in the face of such spectacular, epic, almighty destruction, nor would we. The cosmic harmony that made life possible exists at the mercy of what appear, on the face of it, to be unlikely odds. Who or what decided at the time of the Big Bang that the number of particles created would be 1 in 1 billion more than the number of antiparticles, thus rescuing us by the width of a whisker from annihilation long before we even existed (because when matter and antimatter meet, they cancel each other out)? Who or what decided that the number of matter particles left behind after this oversize game of cosmic swapping would be exactly the right number to create a gravitational force that balanced the force of expansion and didn’t collapse the universe like a popped balloon? Who decided that the mass of the neutron should be just enough to make the formation of atoms possible? That the nuclear force that holds atomic nuclei together, in the face of their natural electromagnetic desire to repulse each other, should be just strong enough to achieve this, thus enabling the universe to move beyond a state of almost pure hydrogen? Who made the charge on the proton exactly right for the stars to turn into supernovas? Who fine-tuned the nuclear resonance level for carbon to just delicate enough a degree that it could form, making life, all of which is built on a framework of carbon, possible? The list goes on. And on. And as it goes on—as each particularly arrayed and significantly defined property, against all the odds, and in spite of billions of alternative possibilities, combines exquisitely, in the right time sequence, at the right speed, weight, mass, and ratio, and with every mathematical quality precisely equivalent to a stable universe in which life can exist at all—it adds incrementally in the human mind to a growing sense, depending on which of two antithetical philosophies it chooses to follow, of either supreme and buoyant confidence, or humble terror. The first philosophy says this perfect pattern shows that the universe is not random; that it is designed and tuned, from the atom up, by some supreme intelligence, especially for the purpose of supporting life. The other says it’s a one in a trillion coincidence.

Nor do the Laws of Nature become less constant or effective, when we know them, likewise, to be merely mental creations. They are in full effect on the various planes. We overcome the lower laws, by applying still higher ones — and in this way only. But we cannot escape Law or rise above it entirely. Nothing but THE ALL can escape Law — and that because THE ALL is LAW itself, from which all Laws emerge. The most advanced Masters may acquire the powers usually attributed to the gods of men; and there are countless ranks of being, in the great hierarchy of life, whose being and power transcends even that of the highest Masters among men to a degree unthinkable by mortals, but even the highest Master, and the highest Being, must bow to the Law, and be as Nothing in the eye of THE ALL. So that if even these highest Beings, whose powers exceed even those attributed by men to their gods — if even these are bound by and are subservient to Law, then imagine the presumption of mortal man, of our race and grade, when he dares to consider the Laws of Nature as "unreal," visionary and illusory, because he happens to be able to grasp the truth that the Laws are Mental in nature, and simply Mental Creations of THE ALL. Those Laws which THE ALL intends to be governing Laws are not to be defied or argued away. So long as the Universe endures, will they endure — for the Universe exists by virtue of these Laws which form its framework and which hold it together.

Initially, she responded by turning inward, pondering questions about the meaning of life and her place in the world. This led her to the study of philosophy in college and graduate school, and it was there that she discovered Hegel and the dialectic method. Dialectics gave her a way to connect her inward struggles around social identity and her place in the world with outward struggles revolving around social conflicts and political contestation. More broadly, dialectics offered her a framework—one that was intellectual but also profoundly personal—with which to understand and resolve the contradictory realities she observed around her. Rather than avoid contradictions, she learned to accept them as productive and necessary. This set an enduring foundation: she would make the practice of embracing contradictions and dialectical thinking hallmarks of her intellectual and political activities for the rest of her life.

Germany, a country with a tradition of strong commitment to public funding for culture, has a statement which clearly refers to non-economic cultural capital: 'Our lives cannot be founded solely on supposed efficiency, as it would then be incomplete in terms of substance. We need the contexts of philosophy, the arts, and spiritual values which provide everyday life with an orientation framework within which practical goals can be pursued.

I have seen frameworks that allowed applications to be written with only a few lines of code, but it was extremely difficult to figure out what those lines were. Sometimes an approach that requires more lines of code is actually simpler, because it reduces cognitive load.

The ideal of explication differs not only from previous philosophy, and from Carnap’s own previous framework of rational reconstruction, but also from most present analytic philosophy. It differs from Quine’s influential programme, for instance, encapsulated in Neurath’s metaphor of reconstructing the boat of our conceptual scheme on the open sea, without being able to put it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from new materials. In Carnap’s framework, our collective mental life is not – to adopt the metaphor – all in the same boat. It consists rather of a give and take between two kinds of communicative devices that operate in different ways. Carnap’s boat is only one of these two parts, not both. It is the medium of action and practical decisions, in which vague concepts of ordinary language have a continuing, perhaps essential, role. This is not, in Carnap’s terms, a proper linguistic ‘framework’ at all. It is a medium not for the pursuit of truth but for getting things done, and it is well adapted to this purpose. To improve it further, we chip away at it and replace its components, a few at a time, with better ones – and this reconstruction, it is true, we carry out at sea. But the better components we acquire from the ports we call at, where we go shopping for proper linguistic frameworks. We take on board better materials and better navigational instruments that help us to reach whatever ports we hope to visit in future – where we can again bring on new and improved materials and instruments. Sometimes, the improved instruments will so influence our knowledge of where we are going that the whole plan of the journey will be revised, and we will change course. But the decision what port to head for next we have to make on board, in our pragmatic vernacular, with whatever improvements we have incorporated up to that point.

We must become a spiritual partner of science, using our vast experience—millennia of philosophy, personal inquiry, meditation, soul-searching—to help humanity build a moral framework and ensure that the coming technologies will unify, illuminate, and raise us up…rather than destroy us.” “I could not agree more,” Langdon said. I only hope science accepts your help. At the bottom of the stairs, Beña motioned past Gaudí’s tomb to the display case containing Edmond’s volume of William Blake’s works. “This is what I wanted to ask you about.” “The Blake book?

The market economy is not everything. It must find its place in a higher order of things which is not ruled by supply and demand, free prices, and competition. It must be firmly contained within an all-embracing order of society in which the imperfections of and harshness of economic freedom are corrected by law and in which man is not denied conditions of life appropriate to his nature.

Underdetermination—where two different theories give the same predictions—is rarely an all-or-nothing affair, because the distinction between theoretical and observational claims is blurry. Apparent cases of underdetermination often get resolved over time as one theory turns out to be more powerful as a framework. The only realistic cases of exact underdetermination seem to be where two theories are mathematically equivalent; in these cases, physicists—and some, but not all, philosophers of physics—regard them as the same theory.

Your circumstances can define you OR you can choose to define yourself.

Just as you could not have a smartphone serving up semantic content without a syntactic smartphone technology to enable it, you cannot have an empirical world without a syntactic framework to support it, which is provided by eternal and necessary mathematics.

Plato was crucial. His works provided a framework for making Christianity intellectually respectable, while Christianity in turn gave Plato’s philosophy a shining new relevance. The supreme light of truth that had hovered outside Plato’s shadowy cave was now revealed to be the light of Christ.8

If metaphors require an underlying cultural framework, then the heiroglyphhic language of the gods cannot be a merely primitive stage of human consciousness: it needs the presence of both the symbolic language of heroes and the epistolary language of me as its starting point. Thus Vico is not speaking of a linear development from a metaphorical language to a more conventional language, but of a continual, cyclical activity. The language of the gods is a heap of unrelated synedoches and metonymies…

No algorithm exists for the metaphor, nor can a metaphor be produced by means of a computer’s precise instructions, no matter what the volume of organized information to be fed in. The success of a metaphor is a function of the sociocultural format of the interpreting subjects; encyclopedia. In this perspective, metaphors are produced solely on the basis of a rich cultural framework, on the basis, that is, of a universe of content that is already organized into networks of interpretation, which decide semiotically) the identities and differences of properties.

I believe that in spite of the hazards involved, I am called upon to search for the truth and state my findings. This sentence, summarizing my fiduciary programme, conveys an ultimate belief which I find myself holding. Its assertion must therefore prove consistent with its content by practising what it authorizes. This is indeed true. For in uttering this sentence I both say that I must commit myself by thought and speech, and do so at the same time. Any enquiry into our ultimate beliefs can be consistent only if it presupposes its own conclusions. It must be intentionally circular.

I do not believe in religions and only believe in Buddhism. Because it is a vision. I also respect practical and rational socialist systems such as politics. It, too, must be one with a socialist framework. And I respect people of all cultures because they are all part of society. Finally, I can say that I am a different person to different people. Annoying to one. Talented to another.Quiet to a few. Unknown to a lot. But who am I, to me? , Really, I am a normal person who is still moving forward in life looking for who I am

Sandel, and the political philosophy he taught, offered Chinese young people a vocabulary that they found useful and challenging but not subversive, a framework in which to talk about inequality, corruption, and fairness without sounding political. It was a way to talk about morality without having to mention the “just sisters” defense or the ambitions on display in Macau.

Unfortunately the majority of us allow our philosophical framework to form unconsciously, subtly in the back of our minds, or perhaps we simply accept a framework that is given to us—by society, by our religious tradition or spiritual teacher, by a close-knit group of friends or coworkers. Our own philosophies are not really our own at all, but rather a mysterious mix of social and cultural conditioning, impersonal forces inherited through various structures of consciousness, and faint or not-so-faint notions of our divinity. The less we take responsibility for what does exist in our minds and being, the more we become like puppets, acting and living not out of a sense of personal integrity, but rather through the inclinations of others, cultural conditioning, and the impersonal motivations of subliminal archetypes. The great tragedy is that many of us trick ourselves into thinking this is who we truly are. For the new monastic that is clearly not an option. She

For the new monastic that is clearly not an option. She is required to do the hard work of bringing her personal philosophy and intellectual framework into the light, working on it and merging it with the wisdom of her heart, stretching it, molding it, and making it explicit so that it can function as a road leading her into a life of continual growth and spiritual maturity, allowing her unique talents to flower as benefactions to the whole. In particular, because the new monastic is often creating an individualized framework for her journey, her responsibility for this task becomes much greater. In a certain sense, when she simply relies on a framework given from a religious tradition, she may have the support and guidance of thousands of years of reflective thought and careful cultivation to lean on. This can be a tremendous support. The new monastic must soberly assess these frameworks and the support and guidance they offer, but must give primal credence to that which is arising in her own heart and the living, synthesizing presence of Sophia. In the next section we show why we believe that this personalizing of spiritual frameworks is a necessary step in bringing forth our unity as a human family.

The common linguistic and intellectual ground on which Muslim, Christian, and Jewish philosophy flourished then characterized the entire medieval Islamicate world. But within the semiclosed precincts of “this peninsula” (a term of endearment as much as a geographical designation, used by both Jews and Muslims), the commonality is particularly striking, and perhaps easier to follow. Without imposing on al-Andalus a single predominant school of thought (be it Pseudo-Empedoclean or Aristotelian), and without appealing to a spurious Spanish “genius,” one can identify recurring themes in Andalusian speculative thought. The true meaning of tawḥīd and the correct interpretation of the divine attributes run like a thread through Andalusian thought, from Ibn Masarra and Ibn Gabirol to the Almohads and Maimonides. The respective merits of rational thought and revelation, philosophy and scriptures, preoccupied thinkers from Ibn Masarra and Baḥyā Ibn Paqūda to Averroes and Judah Halevi. Key concepts such as tadbīr (as divine providence or as human governance) or iʿtibār (contemplation and drawing a lesson) surface time and again, receiving different interpretations and being put to different uses by Ibn Masarra and Baḥyā, by Averroes and Maimonides. All of these thinkers had to negotiate their way in the political and social framework of al-Andalus, balancing mundane commitments to the court and to their respective communities with a yearning for perfection, for the sublime and the transcendent. We can sometimes trace the movement of these themes from one thinker to another; more often, the transmission lines remain buried, leaving us to choose between assuming an enigmatic osmotic process and admitting the existence of yet unknown contacts.

[There is a] white determination to regard black people as "white" without rewarding them and treating them as white or making them as educated or affluent. They regard black children as different from white, but insist upon black children acting and thinking as if they were white, to do this within a white framework and a white-designed milieu. Thus the black child is presented with a maddening, diabolical and double message: never forget that you are different, but we must all forever pretend that you are the same.

Mandelbrot's insights are reminiscent of the approach taken by the ancient formulators of the Yijing, the Chinese classic Book of Changes, who seem to be the first to arrive at an understanding of interlocking patterns of the human and natural worlds. Their insight was to imagine "a system of coordinates, a tabulation framework, a stratified matrix in which everything had its position, connected by the 'proper channels' with everything else." Chinese philosophers during the second and third centuries would also maintain that the seamless dimensionality in nature is the definitive characteristic of Dao-the way the world is formed and the way it behaves: "Way-making (dao) is the flowing together of all things (wanwu)," and "It is inherent in things that they are ties to each other, that one kind calls up another." Dao, or "way," is in many ways just life itself, the flowing of life, or even the changing world itself. "The flowing together of all things" in the quote above is wanwu, the totality of all that is happening in the world.

Virtue ethics as studied here does not always fit well into certain alien molds, as much as we might hope—molds that are humanistic, secular, Western, or democratic. Rather, writings on virtue seem to have fit and to continue to fit into a much larger body of knowledge, a framework from which thinkers drew their own “Islamic” ethics. Evidence for this can be found in the stories that Muslims told, and those they still tell, which make use of various branches of moral learning more freely than what is observed in writings specific to one science or another. Those who advocated scripture or voluntarism cannot be excluded from this. Sciences such as philosophy and Sufism could be considered tools in almost any scholar’s toolbox, even if the overall epistemological architecture of that science contravened that scholar’s claims. Such was the case with Ghazālī’s use of philosophy. While he has been presented as appropriating humanistic virtue ethics, Ghazālī, like his later Shiʿi interpreter Fayd. Kāshānī (d. 1679), reminded Muslim readers that religious law and virtue ethics (both philosophical and Sufi virtue ethics) have a common goal, the achievement of ultimate happiness through the perfection of the soul. For advocates of traditional Islamic law, Ghazālī’s intellectual mission typifies a recurring corrective in Islam, perhaps because of Islam’s rich and hermeneutically complex legal tradition: to caution readers not to lose sight of Islam’s larger ethical aims by becoming absorbed with ritual technicalities or divinely commanded limits. Such reminders can be found today to an even greater extent than in the past. New philosophical positions have meant that Muslim thinkers interested in “God’s law” often return to it with insights gleaned from the Western ethical traditions. Networks of ethical reasoning that exist today, moreover, mean that almost no moral decision can truly be made in a scriptural void, just as they could not in the past. The salience of certain single-minded interpretations of Islam often brings us to forget that on a day-to-day basis, a Muslim (like any moral agent) draws on multiple pools of knowledge and culture to make any decision or develop any habit.

The ultimate ground of awareness that makes it possible to have the dualistic experiences such as the pleasant and unpleasant along with the whole spectrum of gradations in between is beyond being entangled while providing a framework on which such a play happens.

The Intellectual Vacuum of Current Moral Thought Toward the beginning of this chapter we made the statement that the centuries-long attempt to devise a morality from within merely human resources has now proven itself a failure. Now we want to return to this point in the light of Jesus’ exposition of the rightness of the kingdom heart. What is the basis of such a statement? Simply this: that, as noted in the opening of chapter 1, there is in fact no body of moral knowledge now operative in the institutions of knowledge in our culture. This is the outcome of the now centuries-long effort to develop a moral guide to life within the framework of human thought and experience alone, unassisted by revelation. By contrast, the Christian teaching about moral goodness that derives from the principles laid down by Jesus does have a historical, theoretical, and practical claim to constitute the true body of moral knowledge. This is not said to encourage blind acceptance but precisely the opposite. It is said to encourage the toughest of testing for those teachings in all areas of thought and real life. We saw in chapter 1 the young lady who went to Professor Coles on her way out of Harvard and said to him, “I’ve been taking all these philosophy courses, and we talk about what’s true, what’s important, what’s good. Well, how do you teach people to be good?” Then she added, “What’s the point of knowing good, if you don’t keep trying to become a good person?” But, as we pointed out, knowing good is not seriously proposed in college or university courses today. Any “knowing” in such matters is thought to be totally impossible. In fact, both knowing good and being good are for the most part treated with open scorn in the academic settings which determine so much of our lives. That is the outcome of the long effort to establish a secular ethic in the modern period. But the concern for becoming good and being good remains, as the words of both President Bok and Professor Coles show, for it is a real-life issue that will never go away. And it is with regard to this issue of what kind of people we are to be that the teachings of Jesus about the rightness of the kingdom heart show him to be the unrivaled master of human life. Any serious inquirer can validate those teachings in his or her own experience. But they cannot invalidate them by simply refusing to consider them and hiding behind the dogmas of modern intellect.