Impersonal Aspects Research Articles

Personal/impersonal and subject/null subject phenomena in the multi-structural languages

The study examines the functional potential of impersonal pronouns in different languages. The aim of this study is to analyze personal/impersonal and subject/null subject phenomena in multi-structural languages. The novelty of the study is to establish the role of the pronoun in personal and impersonal aspects. To achieve the aim of the study, the following methods are used: lexico-grammatical analysis, structural analysis, contrast analysis, and interpretative analysis of artistic and lexicographic texts. The comparative research was based on Russian, English, German, and French lexicographic resources and examples from artistic discourse in Russian, English, German, and French with their translations. As a result of the study, it was revealed that the impersonal pronoun is a homonym for the personal pronoun of the 3rd person unit. In grammatical studies, the impersonal pronoun stands out as an independent category. A unit known in grammar as the 3rd person pronoun (in German es, in English it, in French il, ce) has a broader functional potential than other pronouns. Namely, it can act in the text not only as a substitute for another word but can also indicate syntactic structures of different complexity: from a word to a complex of propositions. The prospect is to study the discursive nature of impersonality in various types of discourse in different linguocultures.

Проповедь личного безличного Бога в учении Свами Вивекананды

The article examines the concept of God presented in the teachings of the world famous Indian religious reformer and public figure Swami Vivekananda. The thinker seeks to reconcile the understanding of God in Hinduism and Western religious traditions, and therefore argues that God has both personal and impersonal aspects at the same time. The purpose of the research is to reveal the essence of the idea of a personal impersonal God proposed by Vivekananda, as well as to clarify the possibilities and conditions for the predominance of one aspect of God over another. Modern philosophers distinguish three approaches to the consideration of God as a person: God is a person and so personal, God is non-personal, and so is not a person, God is a personal non-person. The article takes the characteristics of the personal existence of God in Christianity as the basis for understanding God as a person in the views of the Indian thinker. To estimate the presentation of the personal aspect of God by Vivekananda, a combination of approaches is used: declarative, anthropocentric, attributive, substantive-hypostatic and biographical. The declarative approach points to the equivalence of the personal and impersonal aspects of God in Vivekananda's views, the anthropocentric and attributive approaches speak of the predominance of the personal aspect of God. The substantial-hypostatic approach demonstrates the philosopher's attitude to God as a substance, but not a hypostasis, which is characteristic of Indian religious metaphysics. The biographical approach indicates the displacement of the impersonal aspect of God by the personal aspect. The study concludes that Vivekananda's views on the idea of a personal impersonal God must be placed between the ideas of proponents of the impersonal Absolute and theistic personalists who consider God as a person and so personal. The author considers the influence of socio-historical conditions of the formation of Indian society at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries to be the reason for the closeness of the philosopher's views to theistic personalism. The philosopher built his religious and philosophical teaching taking into account the need to educate a free personality for a future independent India. Therefore, God in Vivekananda's views has acquired the characteristics of a personality in its modern understanding.

Contents of a Fair Personnel Assessment

The article discusses the requirements for an effective and fair personnel evaluation system and measures to improve such a system. The five factors of effectiveness cover the emotional and cognitive reactions of the employee and include both human and impersonal aspects of the assessment, as well as the usability of the instruments.

‘Creation out of nothing’ – A problematic assumption: biblical, metaphysical and scientific perspectives

Science, technology, commerce and consumerism have set humankind on a trajectory towards a catastrophe of inestimable proportions. To respond appropriately to this danger, theology must replace obsolete contextualisations of its message with currently relevant ones. ‘Creation out of nothing’ is a case in point. Will God create a new and perfect world ‘out of nothing’ after we have messed up the one we have? Probably not! In Part I, I show that ‘creation out of nothing’ is not a relevant issue in the biblical tradition. In Part II, I argue that the concept is based on the unsupported metaphysical postulate of ‘divine perfection’. In Part III, I try to find an equivalent for the concept in science that theology could link up with. ‘Creation’ can be equated with a cosmic evolution proceeding in levels of emergence. But ‘out of nothing’ cannot be supported by science. Even at the most fundamental level, energy and the way it operates, are presupposed. At lower levels, the process is guided by causality and (embedded) contingency. Intentionality and agency only appear at the personal and social levels. Dealing with existential needs, faith (appropriately) intuits a personal transcendent Source and Destiny of reality, but (inappropriately) absolutizes the personal at the expense of the impersonal aspects of reality. The laws of nature are also of God; they are essential; they are valid. They leave sufficient space for novelty and agency, but God works as much through regularity as through contingency. Contribution: The dynamic nature of the biblical tradition demands constant re-contextualisations of its central message. ‘Creation out of nothing’ is part of the contextualisation of the message into the ancient Hellenistic worldview, which does not fit into the modern scientific worldview and must be replaced with a contemporarily more appropriate alternative.

How Can Personnel Performance Evaluation Systems Be Improved?

In the same way that it is difficult for individuals to develop a way of evaluating themselves, it is also difficult for organizations and their employees to develop a perfect way of evaluating the performances of their personnel. As such, research on this is still actively being carried out at present, and the personnel performance evaluation methods continue to evolve from the methods that have been developed through research. Discussed in this article are measures of improving personnel performance evaluation. The existing performance evaluation theories and pitfalls are discussed and presented, and the public organizations in South Korea are analyzed to derive practical improvement measures and to improve the personnel performance evaluation methods they are currently employing. The five factors of effectiveness can be considered to encompass the emotional and cognitive responses of the employee, and to cover both the human and the impersonal aspects of evaluation as well as tool usability. Based on the results of the study, a personnel performance evaluation improvement plan was formulated, as presented in this article. It is hoped that this study will be able to make several academic contributions and that the proposed personnel performance evaluation improvement measures will prove useful.

Where East meets West: in the house of individuation.

The psychological process of individuation as experienced in Jungian work may lead to states of consciousness that resemble advanced spiritual developments across religious traditions and cultures. This is where Westerners may reach a common ground with the East. In the essentials and with respect to the final goal there is little difference among the many ways to the self, even if the cultural features in the landscape are disparate. In late stage Jungian analysis and individuation and in what Erich Neumann calls 'centroversion', the personal and the impersonal aspects of the personality accumulate around the ego-self axis to form a composite identity. In this complex structure the ego does not vanish but is joined to the impersonal archetypal levels of the psyche and identity thus becomes at once individual and archetypal. This is the third stage of conjunction as described by Jung in Mysterium Coniunctionis and it is identical to the type of consciousness depicted in the final scenes of Zen Buddhism's Ten Ox-Herding Pictures.

Multi-faceted trust and distrust prediction for recommender systems

Many trust-aware recommender systems have explored the value of explicit trust, which is specified by users with binary values and simply treated as a concept with a single aspect. However, in social science, trust is known as a complex term with multiple facets, which has not been well exploited in prior recommender systems. In this paper, we attempt to address this issue by proposing a (dis)trust framework with considerations of both interpersonal and impersonal aspects of trust and distrust. Specifically, four interpersonal aspects (benevolence, competence, integrity and predictability) are computationally modeled based on users' historic ratings, while impersonal aspects are formulated from the perspective of user connections in trust networks. Two logistic regression models are developed and trained by accommodating these factors, and then applied to predict continuous values of users' trust and distrust, respectively. Trust information is further refined by corresponding predicted distrust information. The experimental results on real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model in further improving the performance of existing state-of-the-art trust-aware recommendation approaches.

Breillat’s Time

This article considers an embodied relation to the lived time of personal history in Catherine Breillat’s films, and thereby seeks to move beyond the impersonal aspects of the Deleuzian time‐image. The author draws first of all on Julia Kristeva’s work, particularly her provocative interest in “women’s time”, to argue that Breillat fleshes out a gendered temporality that is bound up with her unique explorations of the female body and sexual desire. In carving out a relation to the present historical moment in this regard, as well as being ahead of and before their time, Breillat’s films perform complex articulations of the “future perfect” — the tense that Kristeva discusses in her gendered conception of time and in her broader theorization of poetic language. Yet they also broach the sense in which Roland Barthes explores such future anteriority in the different context of photography. It is this visual, albeit static, register that introduces us to the ways in which Breillat’s work engages temporality in order to breach time. Addressing her oeuvre from the 1970s onwards, the first half of this article shows how the dual suspensions of death and eternity haunt the lived time of her female protagonists to flesh out a filmic future perfect. Connecting the concern with death and eternity to the question of transcendence, the second half of the article makes a detailed reading of Anatomie de l’enfer (2004). While her self‐proclaimed interest in transcendence is not founded in religion, Breillat visualizes a communion of skin and spirit in her exploration of female sexuality, thereby linking physical time to a metaphysical realm.

Training the Trainers: Towards a Description of Translator Trainer Competence and Training Needs Analysis

There is now a relative wealth of Translation Studies literature on translator training, but it often centres on impersonal aspects such as processes, content or activities, and ignores the human factor. There are two sets of participants in the teaching and learning process, both of whom are essential for its success: students or trainees, and teachers or trainers. Other than to bemoan their supposed deficiencies, or to design elaborate entrance filters, little has been said about students. But even less has been said about trainers. In this paper, attention focuses on them. The little that TS literature says about trainer profiles is mostly centred on the need for them to have professional translator competence. This paper takes a broader approach to the issues surrounding translator trainers and their training, setting them firmly within the broader context of higher education teaching as a profession, and attempts to link recently developed professional standards in higher education teaching to our field. This background allows the author to draw up a competence-based profile of the translator trainer and briefly to review which areas of such a profile have been addressed in TS and which are still in need of further work. The paper ends with an overview of the preliminary results of a study currently underway in Spain, designed to carry out detailed training needs analysis for translator trainers.

Fair Trade or Fair Play

PSYCHOLOGY A distressing trend of the past few decades has been the increasing regard for quantification of behavior with the attendant corollary that developing a metric and quantitatively analyzing it are sufficient for understanding how humans behave. Within the realm of social exchanges, monetization, whether of time or productivity or reward, is readily achieved, and open markets soon establish prices for everything and anything. But is this the whole story? Heyman and Ariely describe a trio of experiments, loosely based on Tom Sawyer and his whitewashing escapade, that reveal behavior in a social versus a monetary market. Small- or medium-sized payments of money or candy, or no payment at all, were used as incentives for students to perform a set of tasks designed to gauge the extent of effort expended. As expected, effort increased with the amount of money paid. In contrast, effort was relatively insensitive to the amount of candy offered, but explicitly mentioning the prices of the small and medium amounts of candy resulted in expended effort that did then vary with price. The authors suggest that social and monetary markets evoke different behaviors and may rely on dissimilar motivations, with the tacit considerations of altruism and reputation in the former, and the impersonal aspects of quotidian labor in the other. — GJC Psychol. Sci. , in press.

Teaching Economics in Primary School: The Concepts of Work and Profit

Research on children's social cognition has dealt mainly with face to face relations; only a few studies have considered how children understand impersonal aspects of society such as economics. This study involves an investigation of teaching the concepts of work and profit to third-graders. Five instruction units were created and during a one-month period these were presented to five classes at different schools in Rome. A sample of 80 pupils was interviewed before and after teaching aimed at ascertaining their ideas on prices, profit and product distribution. Children's responses were scored on several scales, on which separate ANOVAs (class x sex x repeated measures or class x repeated measures) were carried out. The results show an overall improvement in children's knowledge, with differences that may be related not only to the complexity of the different concept but also to children's initial levels of competence.

Psychiatry and medical progress: therapeutic considerations.

Advances in medical technology have spurred interest in psychosocial adaptation to newer procedures, such as cardiac operations, chronic hemodialysis and renal renal transplantation. In spite of this interest, investigators have paid little attention to psychotherapeutic measures involved in the care of patients undergoing these procedures. This presentation reviews the available work in this area and brings together common themes related to the preparation and psychological treatment of these patients. These themes center around the importance of a continuous relationship with the patient which begins in the preoperative and pretreatment phase, the value of exploring in a nonthreatening fashion conflicts and fears aroused by the procedure, the need to counteract the non-human and impersonal aspects associated with medical progress, and the role of psychiatrist as the mediator between the patient and those involved in his care.

Medical Care in Sweden

Sweden has created a strong medical care system as part of a broad program of social welfare. Its best feature is the equal access that all citizens have to good care by competent personnel in modern facilities. Financing is by compulsory tax-paid hospital and sickness insurance. Planning is coordinated on both county and national levels to match resources to current needs. Hospitals are regionalized, centralized, and integrated. Weak points of Swedish medical care are its impersonal aspects, the shortage of staff and usable hospital beds which create long waits for admission, lack of continuity of care, absence of choice by patients of doctors and hospitals, and high taxes. Reforms in 1970 have aggravated these problems. An improved American medical care system would adopt the good features of Swedish medical care, while avoiding the unsuccessful ones.

Positive Contributions of Scientific Management

I. Introduction, 466.—II. Mechanical or Impersonal Aspects, 471.—A. Increased Production, 471. — B. Decreased Cost, 473. — The Use of Equipment, 475. — The Use of Labor, 477. — Material Control, 477. — Routing, 479. — The Regularizing of Production, 481. — C. Improvement in or Maintenance of Quality, 482. — D. Speedy Production and Accurate Delivery, 483. — E. The Power and Stimulus of Knowledge, 484. — III. The Human Factor, 487. — A. Industrial Peace, 489. — B. High Wages, 490. — C. Proper Working Hours, 492. — D. Conditions of Work as Related to the Health and Well-being of the Worker, 493. — E. Selection, Fitting and Training, 496. — F. Free Scope for Individual Initiative and Opportunity for Advancement, 498. — G. Reduction of Labor Turnover, 500. — H. A Spirit of Coooperation and Confidence, and a Feeling of Security, 501.