Search Results (184)

The following essay argues that Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel Silence, elucidates a corrective to pragmatist deliberative philosophy. First, it begins with the book’s protagonist Rodrigues in his eventual role evaluating banned Christian objects to prevent them from entering seventeenth century Japan. While these actions present a model of a dejected, apostate padre, they also model his silent acknowledgement of suffering. Second, Endō’s narrative does not aim to explain the suffering its characters experience. Instead, it draws its readers into a practical concern for what Ludwig Wittgenstein referred to as their form of life. Film adaptations highlight the challenges of interpreting religious examples by including artworks that defy easy apprehension. Third, throughout Silence the story navigates the gap between Rodrigues’s visceral suffering and divine silence. In so doing, it exemplifies Simone Weil’s notion of embodied affliction. To fully appreciate such experiences, Weil suggests that the scope of affliction must include divine silence. The desire for God arises in response. A similar contrast can be seen between the characters’ different dispositions towards keeping quiet. In sum, the essay contends that when immanent suffering is inevitable, practices of embodied silence can be the only way to speak. Full article

Background: Regenerative supply chain research seeks to move beyond minimal-harm sustainability toward forms of organizing that preserve, restore, and enhance social–ecological systems. However, existing work often explains regeneration through principles, capabilities, and governance arrangements while giving less attention to the uneven socioecological conditions and appropriative dependencies that shape supply-chain activity. Methods: This conceptual study uses an abductive close reading of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World as a sole-source textual dataset. The analysis combines an immanent reading of the complete monograph with a theory-informed reading that places Tsing’s concepts in dialogue with regenerative supply-chain scholarship. Results: The study develops two linked theoretical shifts. First, it conceptualizes supply chains as patchy socioecological assemblages composed of firms, livelihoods, infrastructures, ecological processes, and disturbance histories that only partially cohere under managerial control. Second, it defines regenerative attunement as the ongoing, place-sensitive reconfiguration of supply-chain scale, timing, governance, and value distribution so that economic activity helps reproduce rather than merely appropriate socioecological capacities. Conclusions: These concepts extend regenerative supply-chain theory by clarifying the relationships among supply-chain structure, value appropriation, temporal plurality, and distributed governance, while providing directions for managerial diagnosis and future empirical research. Full article

Jigan (寂感), derived from the Book of Changes, which states “when remaining in serene stillness without stirring, it attains universal penetration once stirred by resonance (jiran budong ganer suitong 寂然不動感而遂通).” It describes the profound subtlety of the Zhouyi. On the other hand, Jizhao (寂照) is a Sinicized Buddhist interpretation denoting the non-dual integration of true suchness and prajñā wisdom. Jigan developed into an ontological framework during the Song Dynasty (960–1279), while jizhao took shape during the Wei-Jin period. Philosophically, both manifest a non-dual substance-function structure “quiescence as resonance” and “quiescence as illumination.” They jointly serve as the foundational model for mind-nature cultivation and spiritual transcendence. From this theory of cultivation, however, divergent spiritual aspirations of Confucianism and Buddhism. Confucianism elucidates the principle of universal oneness of all things through quietude-resonance, pursuing the spiritual realm of sagehood. By contrast, Buddhism penetrates through self-attachment and dharma-attachment via quiescent illumination, thereby detaching from all karmic conditions, and manifests Prajñā. Confucianism integrates the practice of jigan into its ritual education, sacrificial ceremonies and daily disciplinary norms, rendering it a practical pathway for sustaining the cosmic-ethical order and generating ritual authority. Buddhism implements jizhao in meditation, precepts, and monastic life, constructing an enlightenment-oriented sacred community. Jigan and jizhao represent two distinct paths of religious transformation and spiritual attainment. This paper compares how both emanate from the ontological state of “serene stillness without stirring” into practical cultivation manifested as “resonance penetrating all things” or “simultaneity of illumination and function”, and ultimately shape divergent modes of sacredness and forms of social integration. While jigan and jizhao reveal a structural convergence in the cultivation theories of Confucianism and Buddhism, they also demonstrate disparate orientations in their spiritual aspirations. Full article

Taking into account that Marion studied Sein und Zeit simultaneously with Henry’s opus magnum, L’essence de la manifestation, one may read his phenomenology of givenness as an overcoming of the aporias that Henry identifies in Heidegger; aporias that, as Marion argues, persist in Henry’s own solutions. In this way, following Heidegger’s principle that possibility stands higher than actuality, Marion overcomes Henry’s non-ecstatic phenomenology of life, which closes the phenomenological field in a pure immanence. Contrary to Henry, Marion argues that the structure of call and response fulfils, more radically than any phenomenology of immanence, Heidegger’s own definition of phenomenology as letting the phenomenon show itself in and from itself. Moreover, the study of Heidegger’s Beiträge, a text that only became publicly available in 1989, and which Marion never cites, reveals a remarkable convergence between Marion’s notion of revelation and Heidegger’s Ereignis, insofar as both think it is what gives itself unconditionally, exceeding every horizon of subjectivity, whether transcendental, intentional, or purely affective. Full article

Al-Wehdat open market, originating in a mid-20th-century Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, has evolved into a vital urban common and a paradigmatic case of Everyday Architecture of Compromise. It demonstrates significant economic, social, political, and cultural dynamism, leveraging the relational and solidary capacities of a disenfranchised migrant community to build resilience and assert their Right to the (negated) City. This paper examines how the market’s mode of production responds to intersecting geopolitical, economic, and democratic crises. Employing a constructivist, conjunctural urbanism approach and scene-based analysis, we situate Al-Wehdat market within discourses on urban commons and relationality. Our theoretical framework draws on Hannah Arendt, Gilbert Simondon, and Ash Amin to reconceptualise the Right to the City as the Right to the Open Urban Market. We foreground customary territorial communing as a counterforce to corporative commodification, as essential in the struggle for urban justice, differential individuation, and immanent re-enchantment. Findings, presented through vivid market scenes, show how everyday interactions, creative material arrangements, and rich collaborative imagination sustain these commons. Thematic analysis identifies patterns in community relations, materiality, infrastructure, and acts of repair that sustain the regenerative capacity of key everyday relational, political, techno-material and convivial practices. We conclude by advocating for community empowerment policies that recognise the centrality of everyday relational individuation in shaping inclusive cities amidst polycrisis in the Global South. Full article

Contemporary critiques of digital capitalism have examined behavioural data extraction, algorithmic governance, attention capture, and platform regulation, while debates about responsibility have generally focused further downstream on consent, moderation, and individual conduct. The relation between these two moments nevertheless remains under-conceptualised. Digital infrastructures increasingly help organise the pre-reflective conditions under which significance, urgency, and practical orientation emerge; yet conduct formed within these environments is subsequently attributed to users as though those formative conditions were neutral background. To conceptualise this relation, the article introduces affective heteronomy: the systematic organisation of affectively charged orientations from which conduct arises, whereby solicited responses are experienced, and later attributed, as the subject’s own. Anchored in Adorno’s account of freedom, unfreedom, and the bodily addendum, the argument proceeds through conceptual reconstruction and immanent critique, bringing that account into conversation with surveillance and data colonialism, societies of control, algorithmic governmentality, affect theory, platform governance, and neoliberal responsibilisation. The central problem is neither influence nor responsibility considered alone, but an asymmetry between formation and judgment: the same order that helps organise the conditions of conduct later disregards those conditions when demanding an account. The article concludes that critique cannot abolish the entanglement of freedom and unfreedom, but it can require practices of answerability to account for the infrastructures that help form the conduct they attribute. Full article

The aim of this article is to offer a theoretical contribution to the topic of “engaged spirituality”. First, I provide definitional and conceptual clarifications, hopefully useful in specifying what I call ‘postmodern spirituality’. In this way, we will also be able to better understand the specific features of “engaged spirituality”, at least from the theoretical perspective adopted here. I am proposing a conceptual integration that takes into account some frequently underestimated dimensions of the phenomenon. Particular attention will be paid to highlighting the defining dividing line between the transcendent and immanent spheres. I elucidate that I will focus exclusively on new forms of spirituality, not on spirituality in a broader sense. In the third section, I explain why I believe we can—applying some insights from Bell and Maffesoli—speak of a ‘postmodern spirituality’. The affirmation of a re-enchanted sacred sphere undergoing a process of “dionysification” is, in my view, the symbolic core of the imagery of new forms of spirituality. In the fourth section, through a comparative analysis, I will briefly highlight the main differences between archaic/premodern sacred and postmodern spirituality: here I will highlight a transition from the social condition of ‘ontological debt’—according to Gauchet—to that of ‘ontological credit’. In the fifth section I will finally address “engaged spirituality”, underlining how ‘postmodern spirituality’ can certainly be a vehicle for social transformation. However, for reasons I will try to clarify, the “engagement” of ‘postmodern spirituality’, while characterized by emotional intensity, simultaneously lacks temporal extension. In my conclusions I will propose to frame the engagement related to the ‘postmodern spirituality’ as a form of “inner-worldly mysticism” but characterized by a peculiar Gnostic component. The final goal is to propose an original theoretical speculation that, drawing also on concepts from Max Weber and Eric Voegelin, provides an analytical tool I hope will be helpful in contributing to the sociological study of the phenomenon of “engaged spirituality”. Full article

This study tries to fill the gap on the lack of a systematic analysis of the concept “manifestation” (xian 顯) in the Yijing. The idea of revealing the invisible dao permeates the Yijing text, but contemporary scholarship tends to subordinate xian to other categories such as image (xiang 象), word (ci 辭), or the complementary dynamics of yin-yang 陰陽 and substance-function (ti-yong 體用). This brings up a fundamental question: does xian have a consistent logic, as is often asserted, that links the practical, cosmic and human dimensions of the Yijing? And the study says it does. It understands three intertwined perspectives: the xian of divination, the xian of Heaven and Earth, and the xian of transcendence. Therefore, this study describes the necessary evolution from the revelation of divination to cosmological ground to human achievement. The xian of divinatory affairs explains how subtle and imperceptible cosmic principles are translated and manifested into readable hexagram judgments through the Yijing. This mechanism has its deeper ground in the xian of Heaven and Earth, which shows that the cosmos itself functions in terms of the mutual implication of xian and hidden. But the cosmological manifestation is still external; it is not human realization itself. The xian of transcendence ends the argument by showing that the ultimate meaning of xian is realized only when human beings internalize it and embody it through virtuous conduct. These three perspectives together form a coherent framework for understanding the Yijing’s connection of the transcendent dao and the empirical human world. They also show us the transcendence and immanence of the Heavenly dao in the human world, that sharing the xian and hidden of Heaven and Earth, and participating in their achievements and realization are possible through self-cultivation. Full article

Background: Arthur Schopenhauer’s On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (in its revised 1847 edition) has been variously interpreted as an epistemological prelude to his metaphysics of will, as a continuation of Kantian transcendental philosophy, or as an early expression of Schopenhauer’s broader soteriological concerns. These readings often differ in emphasis but converge in treating the text primarily as subordinate to Schopenhauer’s later system or early intellectual development. Methods: This article offers a systematic textual reconstruction of the 1847 edition within the Kantian tradition of transcendental critique. It proceeds through close reading and conceptual analysis of Schopenhauer’s articulation of the principle of sufficient reason, situating individual argumentative steps within both Kantian and post-Kantian debates. The aim is not to deny the relevance of systematic or developmental readings, but to clarify the internal philosophical function of the text’s argumentative structure. Results: The analysis shows that Schopenhauer’s account of the principle of sufficient reason consistently operates as a critical and immanent framework for structuring possible explanation rather than as a metaphysical grounding principle. Across its four domains, the principle is differentiated into irreducible forms governing distinct types of object-relation, thereby constraining illegitimate transitions between epistemic justification and ontological explanation. This reading highlights (i) the internal differentiation of explanatory forms, (ii) the restriction of causal claims to intra-phenomenal relations, and (iii) the systematic limitation of metaphysical grounding strategies. Conclusions: On this reading, the Fourfold Root does not function primarily as a foundational doctrine for Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of will, but as a critical investigation into the limits of metaphysical explanation within experience. It thereby reconfigures metaphysical inquiry as a reflective clarification of the conditions under which explanation is possible, rather than as a doctrine of ultimate ontological grounds. Full article

This work presents an extension of the Belgrade ACol collisional database within the Virtual Atomic and Molecular Data Centre (VAMDC) framework to include dissociative electron attachment (DEA) processes. DEA, a low-energy electron-driven resonant mechanism leading to molecular fragmentation, is relevant in fields such as plasma science, radiation damage, nanofabrication, and EUV lithography. The ACol data model was redesigned to improve semantic clarity and flexibility by separating physical collision data from bibliographic and serialization structures. A new DataSource entity and a redefined TabulatedData–Collision relationship enable a more normalized database while preserving compatibility with the XSAMS schema through dynamic, query-time construction of hierarchical structures. The implementation is demonstrated using DEA to isoflurane, incorporating experimental data from independent studies and cataloging resulting fragment anions and energy-dependent yields. Elastic cross sections of isoflurane are included as they are immanently connected to DEA, providing an essential tool for understanding the complex DEA process. The novelty of the present implementation lies not in the first representation of DEA within VAMDC, but in its integration into a multi-process collision database based on a compact, normalized data model that separates scientific data and bibliographic provenance from the XSAMS serialization structure. The updated architecture enhances interoperability, reduces redundancy, and improves data management while maintaining compliance with VAMDC standards. Full article

This study conducts a technical analysis of frontier generative AI algorithms—including Meta’s Self-Rewarding Language Models, DeepMind’s EVA (Evolving Alignment via Asymmetric Self-Play) framework, and DeepSeek’s pure reinforcement-learning models—in order to examine an intrinsic paradigm shift in the ethical governance of generative artificial intelligence and to advance a physicalist analysis of algorithmic endogenous ethics. Combining a close reading of alignment techniques (RLHF, DPO, iterative DPO, GRPO) with a conceptual analysis grounded in Peter-Paul Verbeek’s theory of technological mediation and moral materialization, the paper traces how value-alignment goals are being “materialized” into internal, dynamic, and evolvable “moral scripts” within the algorithms themselves. The analysis shows that contemporary alignment practices are moving from external ethical discipline toward endogenous norms generated through iterative self-evaluation, asymmetric self-play, and rule-based self-exploration. The paper argues that this trend warrants a re-examination of Verbeek’s framework for its capacity to explain the co-evolution of technology and morality in the digital age, and it envisions a future of human–machine value co-evolution organized around new research directions such as “Setting as Governance” and “value homeostasis mechanisms”. Full article

This paper investigates whether transcendent worldviews—those oriented toward a beyond—decline while immanent worldviews—those oriented toward this world—increase. We draw on an inventory spanning positions from theism and deism to naturalism and existentialism, administered seven times in West Germany (1982–2023) and six times in East Germany (1992–2023). In West Germany, existentialist worldviews ranked first, followed by naturalist, theist, and deist ones. While existentialist worldviews remained stable, transcendent worldviews declined and immanent ones grew, producing a substantial and growing advantage for immanent over transcendent orientations. In East Germany, existentialist and naturalist worldviews were markedly dominant, well above transcendent ones throughout the observation period. Both remained stable, while transcendent worldviews increased only minimally, leaving the gap largely intact. To test whether these period effects persist under controls, we employ OLS regressions with robust standard errors, accounting for cohort, age, church attendance and belonging, community size, parenthood, work engagement, education, and gender. In West Germany, transcendent worldviews declined and immanent ones increased non-monotonically. In East Germany, the pattern reversed: transcendent worldviews increased and immanent ones decreased non-monotonically. While mean levels do not differ significantly between the two regions, the direction and structure of effects do. The discussion addresses why transcendent worldviews are better explained than immanent ones, and what accounts for the divergent trajectories between East and West Germany. Full article

This essay advances a theological reappraisal of Impressionist painting as a modern mode of sacramental perception capable of renewing the contemplative imagination within a disenchanted West. While recent scholarship has interpreted Impressionism as a limit case of aesthetic immanence, reducing vision to light, temporality, and surface, this study argues that such immanence is not closed. Drawing on Aidan Nichols’s distinction between art made for the liturgy and art tutored by it and informed by David Fagerberg’s account of liturgy as the right ordering of reality itself, the argument proposes that Impressionist form can be evaluated according to precise theological criteria. Sustained ekphrastic analysis of Monet’s Portal of Rouen Cathedral in Morning Light (1894), Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire (c. 1902–1904), and Messiaen’s Louange à l’Immortalité de Jésus (1941) is brought into conversation with Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of givenness, Pavel Florensky’s theology of perspective, and Augustine’s account of distentio animi. Read in this light, Impressionism emerges not as indifference to the sacred, but as a discipline of attention that disposes artist and perceiver toward participation in a liturgical reality already given in creation: a modern praeparatio evangelica whose formal achievements, though historically bounded, remain theologically available. The argument does not presume that Impressionist form is theological in intention, but that, when attended to with sufficient formal discipline, it may be recognized as consonant with theological accounts of perception. Full article

This article examines how divine infinity in Western metaphysics is re-specified through transformations in the concept of ground. Traditional metaphysics usually understands God as the first principle of the world. Yet God can function as ground not merely because He is the first cause, but because He is understood as a being that in some manner exceeds finite beings. We argue that the meaning of divine infinity depends on how God is understood as ground. To show this, the article focuses on three philosophers—Scotus, Spinoza, and Deleuze—and traces the changing forms of divine infinity across three decisive stages. First, in Scotus, God is still understood as an infinite being transcending finite creatures, yet through the univocity of being, God and finite beings enter a common conceptual field. Second, in Spinoza, God no longer appears primarily as an infinite being transcending finite beings, but is determined as absolutely infinite substance and infinite power; correspondingly, ground is no longer the first being external to nature, but becomes a productive cause immanent to nature. Finally, in Deleuze, ground is no longer borne by any substance, but is understood as the plane of immanence constituted by relations of difference and intensity; divine infinity accordingly no longer appears as a property of some ultimate being, but is transformed into the plane’s own self-sufficiency and lack of exteriority. On this basis, the article argues that modern ontology is not a simple break with the theological tradition, but rather effects within theological problems themselves a metaphysical transformation of divine infinity: as the structure of ground changes, the relations between God and world, and between the infinite and the finite, are continually rewritten. Full article

This article explores the specificity of social assistance conducted by the Romanian Orthodox Church (ROC) compared to Faith-Based Organizations (FBOs) in the UK, USA, and France. The article is a secondary qualitative analysis of a circumscribed subset of the interview material assembled in a wider mixed-methods study on the professionalization of charity in the ROC, pursuing a different research question—the configurational specificity of the Orthodox model—than the parent study itself. Using Grounded Theory methodology on the corpus of nineteen interviews with clergy, social workers, and experts from Northeastern Romania, the analysis develops the category of the sacralization of social assistance—a configuration of practices and meanings in which the spiritual dimension is structurally integrated, sacramentally obligatory, and clerically authorized. While each of these features has been documented individually in Protestant and Catholic faith-based organizations, their joint configuration in the Romanian Orthodox case differs in degree and arrangement from patterns reported in the Western literature. A theoretically informed contrast with that literature highlights six dimensions along which the ROC configuration, as articulated by providers, diverges from the patterns most frequently reported in that literature: (1) the spiritual dimension is structurally integrated in ROC versus optional in UK/USA or institutionally absent in France; (2) leadership remains predominantly clerical versus secularly professionalized in the West; (3) the beneficiary is conceptualized as a living icon of Christ versus a person with civil rights; (4) the purpose of interventions is soteriological versus immanent social reintegration; (5) professionalization generates anxiety about secularization versus comfortable normalization; (6) volunteerism remains informal-communitarian versus formalized-systematic. The research proposes a dual-axis typology that differentiates between the presence and the nature of the spiritual dimension. Full article