Absolute Notion Research Articles

Proceedings of the Second Symposium of the Dionysius Circle: “Participationes tripliciter considerari possunt”: The Absolute Notion of Esse in Aquinas’s Commentary on the Divine Names

Abstract In this paper, I argue that, for Aquinas, esse commune is the absolute notion of esse. It is absolute, moreover, precisely in the Avicennian sense insofar as it is the consideration of esse as abstracted from intelligible and material modes of being. First, I clarify Dionysius’s distinction between the two senses of per se theonyms, focusing on the Procline provenance of adverbs like ἀπολύτως and ἀρχηγικῶς in the Divine Names. Second, I defend Aquinas’s interpretation and development of Dionysius’s distinction, higlighting his reliance on Avicenna’s threefold consideratio in his account of per se theonyms as absolute natures. I will conclude with suggestions for further research.

KRISIS METAFISIKA DAN FILSAFAT SEBAGAI TUGAS BERPIKIR: PERSPEKTIF HEIDEGGER

This article aims to reflect further Heidegger's thought on the crisis of metaphysics and philosophy as a task of thinking. Philosophy since ancient times, even today, has been oriented to seek and formulate the essential and universal concept. Is it true that searching for the ontotheological nature is the most important task of philosophy? Is it true that these single principles can reflect the truth? By using the method of library researh and critical analysis of Heidegger's works and studies on the crisis of metaphysics, this article shows that philosophy essentially does not aim to formulate absolute, universal and single notion. Philosophy is also not a project of producing standard, abstract, sophisticated and technical concepts. The important task of philosophy is to encourage men to think, an art of understanding. Thinking is not a calculative thinking (instrumental-technical rationality) but meditative and reflective thinking. Under philosophy as the task of thinking, Being, namely the totality of reality, is responded with amazement, humility and simplicity. Philosophy must liberate itself from the metaphysical trap of totalitarian power which tends to hegemonize others in the name of a single truth, to philosophy that celebrates the plurality of truths with humility dan simplicity. That is the real meaning of philosophy as philo-sophia, the love of wisdom.

Teaching time as a social imaginary. Using speculative fabulation to deconstruct the hegemonic temporalities of modernity

In this paper, we discuss our experience in teaching time to university students. Our analysis suggests that students’ sociological imagination and fictional creativity might be used as means to deconstruct the hegemonic temporalities of modernity. Specifically, we exemplify our claims by considering a set of classroom activities that use speculative fabulation in order to make students question key assumptions about the objective nature of time. The activities we discuss are based on an original combination of exposure to cultural products, reflective writing exercises, and moderated group discussion, thus opening up new horizons of temporal experimentation, exploration, and interpretation. Our activities invite students to imagine alternative temporalities that are decoupled from prevalent mindsets and challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions about the temporal worlds. The assignments are designed as imaginative scenarios, in which students are asked to question the universal, commodified, and absolute notion of time while becoming familiar with the work of relevant thinkers in sociology and anthropology. Based on our results, we conclude that speculative fabulation holds a strong emancipatory potential and is able to bring about significant changes in how students think about time, because it promotes more empowering and meaningful ways of engagement with the world.

A Novel Markovian Framework for Integrating Absolute and Relative Ordinal Emotion Information

There is growing interest in affective computing for the representation and prediction of emotions along ordinal scales. However, the term ordinal emotion label has been used to refer to both absolute notions such as low or high arousal, as well as relation notions such as arousal is higher at one instance compared to another. In this paper, we introduce the terminology absolute and relative ordinal labels to make this distinction clear and investigate both with a view to integrate them and exploit their complementary nature. We propose a Markovian framework referred to as Dynamic Ordinal Markov Model (DOMM) that makes use of both absolute and relative ordinal information, to improve speech based ordinal emotion prediction. Finally, the proposed framework is validated on two speech corpora commonly used in affective computing, the RECOLA and the IEMOCAP databases, across a range of system configurations. The results consistently indicate that integrating relative ordinal information improves absolute ordinal emotion prediction.

THE STUDY OF THE MANAGEMENT OF THE QUALITY OF EDUCATION IN INSTITUTIONS OF GENERAL SECONDARY EDUCATION: HISTORICAL ASPECT

Research relevance is caused by the fact that education is realized as an educational service and the quality of education is studied as an accordance to educational standards and personal demands. The aim of the article is to justify and bring to life philosophical-pedagogical aspects of education management formation in Ukraine and in the world. It was found out that all aspects of education management development are important, however in regards with our research quality is seen as: a) Absolute notion – it is a standard; b) Relative meaning – it is means of defining the appropriateness of the standard result; c) Category which is the complex of object’s qualities and corresponds the requires, demands and norms. Different approaches to defining education quality were analyzed, namely with the help of studying pedagogical-philosophical works of various scientists. Philosophical-pedagogical aspects of education quality management in secondary education institutions were revealed. It was emphasized that employees’ activity on the base of principles of general quality management facilitates constant increase of education quality, approving objective managing decisions, interest of every participant of the process and responsibility for the result. It was found out the education quality management at present is considered as a continuous process of interaction of managing and managed systems, aimed at providing availability of qualitative nursery, primary, basic and secondary education in the educational system due to creating the conditions of functioning and development of general educational system.

Boosting unstable particles

In relativity, there is no absolute notion of simultaneity, because two clocks that are in different places can always be desynchronized by a Lorentz boost. Here, we explore the implications of this effect for the quantum theory of unstable particles. We show that, when a wavefunction is boosted, its tails travel one to the past and the other to the future. As a consequence, in the new frame of reference, the particle is in a quantum superposition "decayed + non decayed", where the property "decayed-ness" is entangled with the position. Since a particle cannot be localised in a region smaller than the Compton wavelength, there is a non-zero lower bound on this effect, which is fundamental in nature. The surprising implication is that, in a quantum world, decay probabilities can never be Lorentz-invariant. We show that this insight was the missing ingredient to reconcile the seemingly conflicting views about time dilation in relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum field theory.

A Reflection on Joseph Smith's Restorationist Vision of Truth

A Reflection on Joseph Smith's Restorationist Vision of Truth

The Dream of Absolutism: Louis XIV and the Logic of Modernity by Hall Bjørnstad

Reviewed by: The Dream of Absolutism: Louis XIV and the Logic of Modernity by Hall Bjørnstad Anna Rosensweig Hall Bjørnstad. The Dream of Absolutism: Louis XIV and the Logic of Modernity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021. Pp. xii + 230. $30.00. In his erudite and exciting new book, Hall Bjørnstad urges those of us who study premodern France and its afterlives to take another look at absolutism. We moderns may think we already know all about this political system in which kings received their power and authority from God. We can easily identify absolutism's most spectacular avatars in the royal person of Louis XIV and his palace at Versailles. Bjørnstad argues, however, that our presumption of knowledge about absolutism, and our familiarity with its signs and wonders, has inhibited our ability to understand fully its logic and appreciate its inner workings. A key methodological problem with scholarship on absolutism is a tendency to label it "mere propaganda," and as a result anachronistically to reduce absolutism to a modern mechanism of political communication, persuasion, and control. The conceptual model of propaganda requires a sender and receiver of a specific message. Those with power must transmit their message to those without in order to gain or maintain authority. To view seventeenth-century texts and images that celebrated Louis XIV as propaganda is to presume that seventeenth-century readers and viewers needed to be persuaded of the king's glory. What the model of propaganda fails to account for, Bjørnstad explains, is how absolutism eschews the need for communication or persuasion by presenting itself as fully realized in the figure of Louis XIV. There is no audience to convince of the king's glory because absolutism's true audience is the king himself. Bjørnstad proposes that in order better to comprehend absolutism's own logic, we must approach it as a collective dream. He writes, "The logic at work in the absolutist expressions analyzed here is dreamlike in that it seems to imply the dimming of rational exigencies and allows for the integration of contradictions" (34). Identifying and elaborating this notion of absolutism as a dream allows Bjørnstad to take seriously the notion that Louis XIV received his glory from God, rather than to dismiss this idea as either a cynical political mystification or a naïve belief in the supernatural. With each chapter Bjørnstad provides detailed analyses of texts and images that allow us to approach this collective reverie. Chapter 1 examines a tension at the heart of the Mémoires that Louis XIV addressed to the dauphin, namely, the challenge of bequeathing unparalleled glory to one's successors. Chapter 2 takes us to the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles and Charles Le Brun's painting on its vault, Le Roi gouverne par lui-même, 1661, in which the king seeing himself announces the immaculate conception of absolutism as such. Chapter 3 demonstrates how texts that seem excessively exuberant in their praise of Louis XIV—Claude-Charles Guyonnet de Vertron's Parallèle de Louis le Grand avec les princes qui ont été surnommés grands (1685) and Jean de Préchac's fairy tale "Sans Paragon" (1698)—offer unique insight into the premodern political imaginary. Finally, Bjørnstad's concise conclusion provides a helpful summary of the dream's constitutive features and provocatively suggests that this dream continues to occupy our political unconscious. As Bjørnstad so powerfully observes, modernity's fervent claims of disenchantment, demystification, and rationality belie its own participation in this supposedly premodern dream. Although The Dream of Absolutism is most explicitly a book about the past, the present lurks behind every gilded corner. Incisive and capacious, Bjørnstad's book should be read widely, by specialists of early modern France, of course, but also by intellectual historians, political theorists, and students of contemporary politics. [End Page 168] Anna Rosensweig University of Rochester Copyright © 2022 L'Esprit Créateur

Putnam, James and “Absolute” Truth

While historians of pragmatism often present William James as the founder of the “subjectivist” wing of pragmatism that came back into prominence with the writings of Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam has argued that James’s views are actually much closer to Peirce’s (and Putnam’s own). Putnam does so by noting that James distinguishes two sorts of truth: “temporary truth,” which is closer to a subjective notion of warranted assertibility, and “absolute truth,” which is closer to Peirce’s own comparatively objective notion of truth as what would be believed at some idealized end of inquiry. Putnam then argues that the temptation to read James as a precursor to Rorty requires privileging his talk of temporary truth, when, in fact, it was always absolute truth that was the primary sense of the term for James. This paper will argue that James’s views on truth are, in fact, much less tied to the absolute notion than Putnam suggests, and, indeed, that James’s account of the relations between our concepts and reality leave open the possibility that no claim of ours could ever be “absolutely” true, and thus that “temporary” truth would be all we could ever expect to have.

A Critique on the Book “Power and Knowledge in Iran of the Islamic Era”

The tradition directs the changes and developments of Islamic society with a certain formulation of thought. Rejecting its historic rules, the tradition prevents critical questions, extends its domination to contemporary reading, and protects religion by adhering to it. The orientalist pattern and the traditional method of understanding are two important approaches in interpreting and understanding the tradition. Each of the two methods presents different perspectives and outcomes of Middle Eastern political knowledge. But none of them shows how power has shaped knowledge and products of religious thought while taking benefit of them in the favor of its own strategies and goals. None of these two methods have focused on identifying alternative political patterns that are altered and rejected in order to make the existing order the only possible model of legitimate political life. Adopting a discursive approach, the book, Power and Knowledge in Iran, the Islamic Era, attempts to demonstrate how and through what mechanism, Islamic discourse highlights and diversifies plural concepts, and how it extends a central concept while projecting it as an absolute, beyond time and place notion. Nonetheless, the expectations resulted from adopting such a framework would go beyond that. Such expectations, being particularly based on the discursive presuppositions, are the evaluation core of this work along with other details of the text.

Methodology and Axiomatic Characterization of a Multidimensional and Fuzzy Measure of Deprivation

This article proposes a general methodology to measure multidimensional deprivation in a fuzzy setup. Each dimension comprises multiple dimensional attributes. The methodology is developed in a flexible manner to incorporate any theoretical construct of wellbeing. The new fuzzy membership functions proposed in the method combines the absolute and relative notions of deprivation and take the functional form of normalized and weighted deprivation gaps. A new weight structure is proposed for aggregations within and across the dimensions. Three forms of deprivation indices are discussed: the headcount ratio, the adjusted deprivation index, and the deprivation index. A unified axiomatic framework is discussed for the multidimensional and fuzzy measures of deprivation. Various desired axiomatic properties of the fuzzy membership functions are included as precursory axioms in the framework. The proposed measure satisfies a majority of the desirable axioms.

Skills, Efficiency, and Timing in a Simple Attack and Defense Model

In this paper, we consider a simple two-player attack and defense model, focusing on the role of players’ abilities and choice timing. Abilities are divided into skills and efficiency, where the former is an absolute notion and the latter a relative notion of ability. Timing is investigated by comparing players’ investments in a simultaneous and a Stackelberg game. In the simultaneous game, the Nash Equilibrium investment level in attack and defense resources is symmetric, increasing in the skills but non-monotonic in the relative efficiency. In the Stackelberg game, the equilibrium investment levels are asymmetric, increasing in the skills, but with their ranking affected only by the relative efficiency. Therefore, interestingly, players’ choice is mostly characterized by players’ relative efficiency rather than by their skills, in regards to timing.

Rudolf Otto’s ‘the Absolute Other’ and a radical postsecular urban contextualization

This article proposes an idea of radical urban contextualisation that follows Rudolf Otto’s discussion on an encounter with the Absolute Other. The article critically reviews current applications of postsecularism to urban theory formulated in a general framework of Jurgen Habermas’ intervention in the early 21st century. The article argues that contemporary postsecular urban theory cannot fully answer fundamental challenges that contemporary cities are facing – both political and environmental – mostly because it focuses on linguistic and cultural aspects of a city. The article proposes the ‘radicalization’ of postsecularism, engaging directly with the ‘religious experience’ defined by Rudolf Otto as an encounter with The Absolute Other – the unknown and unpredictable. The Absolute Other notion allows to ultimately contextualize every urban situation in order to formulate conditions for future-oriented (post-capitalist) urbanism.

Extending Everything with Nothing

In this paper we offer a new solution to the old paradox of nothingness. This new solution develops in two steps. The first step consists in showing how to resolve the contradiction generated by the notion of nothingness by claiming that the contradiction shows the indefinite extensibility of the concept of object. The second step consists in showing that, having accepted the idea of indefinite extensibility, we can have absolute generality without the emergence of the contradiction connected to the absolute notion of nothingness. The idea of indefinite extensibility allows us to have our cake (absolute generality) and to eat it too (avoid commitment to a contradictory notion of nothingness).

In the Space of Reasonable Doubt

This paper explores ‘reasonable doubt’ as an enlightening notion to think of reasoning and decision-making generally, beyond the judicial domain. The paper starts from a decision-theoretic understanding of the notion, whereby it can be defined in terms of degrees of belief and a probabilistic confirmation threshold for action. It then highlights some of the limits of this notion, and proposes a richer analysis of epistemic states and reasoning through the lens of ‘reasonable doubt’, which in turn is likely to supplement the DT framework. The strategy consists in fighting on two fronts: with DT, the paper claims that there is no absolute (i.e. decision-independent) notion of ‘reasonable doubt’ but, pace DT, it shows that reasonable doubt cannot be accounted for only in terms of degrees of belief and probabilistic threshold. We argue that the lens of reasonable doubt sheds light on aspects of belief dynamics, as well as of the nature of epistemic attitudes, which are often obscured by belief-centred approaches. In particular, when it comes to acknowledging the necessary ignorance and irreducible uncertainty that we face in our everyday-life decisions, studying the various facets of doubt rather than focusing on what can be believed, enables one to do justice to the richness and diversity of the mental states in play.

The exercise of the object

What is an object? A prior question: What is objecthood? Au fond, and to logic’s eye, object is a role to be played with respect to a thought (on a decomposition). It is to be a countable which that thought represent as being some way for such a countable to be; what restores the business of truth-of to that of truth outright. What plays that role for some given thought is then an object with respect to that thought. Given this, there are corresponding absolute notions, to be fit for this role, and to be fit only for this role. So the fundamental task here is identifying the conditions on playing this role at all. All this is a contribution, however limited, to a topic called ‘ontology’. This last word also occurs in the plural in several contexts. The end of this essay considers how these notions (non-countable, and the several countables) might relate, and what assumptions underlie what some have seen them to.

Remarks on Entanglement and Identical Particles

We argue that in the case of identical particles the most natural identification of separability, that is of absence of non-classical correlations, is via the factorization of mean values of commuting observables. It thus follows that separability and entanglement depend both on the state and on the choice of observables and are not absolute notions. We compare this point of view with a recent novel approach to the entanglement of identical particles, which allows for the definition of an entanglement entropy from a suitably defined reduced particle density matrix, without the need of labelling the system constituents. We contrast this figure of merit with the aforementioned lack of an absolute notion of entanglement by considering few paradigmatic examples.

Absolutism without Tyranny in Gorboduc: The Changing Poetics of Tudor Political Drama

AbstractBesides being the first five‐act tragedy on the English stage, Gorboduc was also the first play to depict usurpation, regicide, and rebellion, on the English stage – all of which became common plot devices in late‐sixteenth century English drama. By offering a reading of the play's treatment of absolutism – divorced from tyranny – manifesting itself in the decision upon the sovereign exception, this article will re‐evaluate the differences between early Tudor political moralities about tyranny and the late Elizabethan usurpation plays, and will ground the transition from one to the other in Gorboduc's engagement with radical innovations in dramaturgy and political thought. It will refer to contemporary political tracts as well as modern political theory, especially the legal fiction of the ‘king's two bodies’ which indirectly makes its presence felt in Gorboduc. Invoking Ernst Kantorowicz's theorization of the ‘king's two bodies’ and Carl Schmitt's theory of sovereignty as a critical framework, this article questions the relation of sovereign power to the person of the bearer, and problematizes the notion of monarchical absolutism.

Gaining through Bereavement: A Comparative Study of the Literature of Bijan Najdi and Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Abstract Throughout human history bereavement has always imposed its undeniable and inevitable impact on the life of those affected by it. Despite all discrepancies what can be considered the common ground in bereavement among all nations regardless of cultural, ideological, religious and ethical values is the fact that bereavement infuses an indispensable change into the lives of those encountering it. The comparative study of Burial and The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World by Iranian and Colombian authors, respectively, points out the unconventional reversed handling of bereavement which results in obtaining insight into the human capacity to mature. Both authors make their characters inseminate their barren lives with grief to produce a change which is drastic and flourishing in Gabriel Garcia Marquez and soothing and stabilizing in Bijan Najdi. Through the course of the stories the childless couple in Najdi and the villagers in Garcia Marquez are gradually exposed to the truth of their lives ironically by the corpses coming up their ways quite unexpectedly and learn to develop new identities, attaching themselves to and possessing the bodies. This comparative study sheds light on how the revelation they experience inculcates a joyful, fluid mobility in the villagers and stability in the couple’s life. The study of these texts reveals the absolute notion that the actual change originates from the world within and what lies in the world without is dead.

PROPOSING A NEW CONSTRUCT: ACADEMIC CULTURAL DIVERSITY IN STUDYING ABROAD

The present study is an attempt to introduce, define and explore a new construct called Academic Cultural Diversity (ACD) through narrative-interviewing the first year International Students (FIS) as well as the lecturers’ of the University of Pecs, Hungary (UP). Up to 2015, according to the monthly newsletter published by UP, 2,500 international students came to peruse their academic career at this university. This figure was impressive enough to encourage me to explore if the diversity of their academic cultural background boost or hinder them reaching their study abroad expectations. A close look at their exam results in the first year indicates that a large proportion of them get extremely low score and fail the exams several times over their first study abroad academic year. As an example, on the basis of the evidence currently available, 68 out of 79 (86%) FIS majoring in Pharmacy at the UP who took the exam course “Analytical chemistry” in 2016, failed and had to re-take the course in the next semester. To address the mentioned problem, the present study is an attempt (i) to explore the most common and crucial ACD faced by FIS at the UP from students’ perspective (ii) from their lecturers’ perspective (iii) to see how similar or different they view the notion “low academic performance” of FIS (iv) to introduce and define ACD as a new construct in the field based on the available literature and the findings of the current study. Thirty international students from 30 countries and five university lecturers at the UP participated in this study to uncover the key factors of the low academic performance of FIS. A narrative interviewing as a means of data collection was administered to elicit data from both students and their lecturers with regards to their present and past experiences for further analysis and comparison. The results are significant in three respects: (i) ACD is an absolute context-specific notion which can boost or hinder FIS academic performance across contexts (ii) Lecturers and FIS are different in their opinion in a way that some of their different beliefs diverge dramatically, and often do. Article visualizations: