Strict Distinction Research Articles

Divine Medicine: Healing and Charity Through Spirit-Writing in China

This study traces the evolution of religious healing practices associated with divine presence in China, from pre-modern traditions to the modern use of spirit-writing for obtaining divine prescriptions. It examines the continuity and transformation of these practices from the late imperial period to contemporary times. It argues that healing through divine prescriptions obtained via spirit-writing challenges the perceived dichotomy between religion and science, demonstrating that they have complementary roles, rather than being strictly opposing categories. For members of Jishenghui 濟生會, a lay Buddhist charity devoted to the Buddhist god Jigong 濟公 in Republican China, religion and scientific medical practice were integrated as complementary elements of daily life, combining doctrinal beliefs, ritual practices, and moral self-cultivation. This study examines how Jishenghui used spirit-writing to obtain and distribute divine prescriptions and medicines, demonstrating that the organization’s philanthropic activities and social standing were enhanced by the integration of religious beliefs with medical and charitable practices during the Republican period. This study bridges existing research on the histories of spirit-writing and Chinese medicine, and the distinctions made between “Buddhist medicine” and “Daoist medicine”. The article contends that, for ordinary people, no strict distinction existed between Buddhist and Daoist healing practices; instead, a shared religious culture regarding illness and healing was predominant. By contextualizing key analytical concepts such as “divine medicine”, especially “divine prescriptions” (jifang 乩方 and xianfang 仙方) within the broader history of Chinese medicine and religious practices, this article demonstrates the social significance of spirit-writing as a ritual technique to provide healing and charity by lay Buddhists in Republican China, and its enduring relevance in contemporary Chinese societies.

The concepts of a deportee and deportation in Lithuanian during the period of Soviet occupation: legal, ideological, administrative and social aspects

The subject of the article is the phenomenon of population transfer organized by the Soviets – deportations. The aim is to analyse and deconstruct the concepts of a deportee, deportation and exile using insights and methods of different scientific disciplines (sociology, history, law). The phenomenon of Soviet deportations is viewed from the perspective of a variety of sources and through examination of different source groups: Soviet sources of criminal law, administrative documents of the Lithuanian Communist Party, criminal court files and files of deportees, diaries and memoirs of the deportees themselves. The main question raised by the article is whether the legal status and actual situation of a deportee differed from that of a political prisoner. Could there a strict distinction be drawn between these two groups of repressed people in the Soviet system? In what circumstances the legal and factual situation of a “deportee” and “political offender” was similar?

Петр Великий и регистрация недвижимости: справедливы ли упреки?

According to a widespread point of view, in the Russian law of the XVII century after the adoption in 1649 of the Soborny Ulozheniye, there was a strict distinction between the execution of a bill of sale as a private dispositive act and an entry in the books of the Pomestniy Prikaz — only the latter led to the transfer of ownership of land. Due to Peter’s reforms the transfer of ownership again, as before, was associated with the moment of the bill of sale; the record retained its significance only for the collection of duties. In the author’s opinion, accusations against Peter the Great of such reductionism are unfounded. Making a registration record in the Russian law of that period was not a way of transferring the right.

IS CROCE'S PHILOSOPHY ANTI-ESSENTIALIST AND AGAINST METAPHYSICS?

This essay might be considered an attempt to analyze Croce’s philosophical discourse in general, where he points out his thoughts as a “humanistic alternative to the consolations of religion and metaphysics”; and, to argue whether his aimed task was successful, especially in setting a strict distinction between his philosophical perspective and his claimed anti-metaphysical position. The first major step to take, is to focus on his essentialist philosophy of art, namely, “art as expression”; and second, his division of knowledge between theoretical and practical, which he claimed as products of the main directions of the human mind or human consciousness which Croce called “spirit”, or, of that which “really” exists. Initially, we could argue that even this presupposition could be considered as highly metaphysical.

On the dual‐purpose buildings constructed by the Incorporated Church Building Society (Part 1) from the mid‐19th to the early 20th century

AbstractThe Incorporated Church Building Society, established in 1818, was initially unable to subsidize secular‐use buildings from the general fund. However, in 1858, it established the mission building fund and began to construct hamlet chapels, school churches, mission halls, and mission rooms. In the early years, there were some examples of dual‐purpose buildings without a strict distinction between sacred and secular spaces, but a type of building with a church on the upper floor and secular rooms on the lower floor emerged. However, the distinction between sacred and secular spaces was insufficient, and a stage for secular use had not yet emerged.

Lexical Functional Grammar as a Construction Grammar

Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a lexicalist, constraint-based grammatical theory that shares a lot of the basic assumptions of Construction Grammar (CxG), such as a commitment to surface-oriented descriptions (no transformations), and the simultaneous representation of form, meaning, and other grammatical information (no derivations). Nevertheless, LFG is not standardly viewed as a kind of CxG, in particular since its adherence to the principle of Lexical Integrity means that it insists on a strict morphology-syntax distinction where CxG canonically rejects such a divide. However, such a distinction is in fact entirely compatible with CxG assumptions; the actual problem with viewing LFG as a CxG is the difficulty it has in describing the more substantive end of the schematic-substantive spectrum of constructions. I suggest that by replacing the limited context-free grammar base of LFG responsible for this shortcoming with a more expressive formalism (in this case a description-based tree-adjoining grammar), we can obtain a fully constructional LFG, suitable as a formal framework for CxG.

The Indefectibility of the Apostolic See: Was the Idea of a Heretical Pope Formally Excluded at the First Vatican Council?

During the prelude to the First Vatican Council, the idea of a heretical pope was used as the primary argument against the solemn definition of papal infallibility. The medieval canonists and conciliarists had allowed for the notion of papal heresy by making a strict distinction between the apostolic seat itself and the individual occupants of the throne of Peter. However, when we examine the text of Pastor Aeternus in light of the contents of the official Relatio, which was drawn up at the council to explain the meaning of this document, we find that the above distinction used by the conciliarists was formally proscribed with an anathema. This article will argue that in doing so, the Council Fathers definitively excluded the possibility of a heretical pope.

Correspondence between excited energy eigenstates and local minima of the energy landscape in quantum spin systems

The quantum-classical correspondence between local minima on the classical energy landscape and excited eigenstates in the energy spectrum is studied within the context of many-body quantum spin systems. In mean-field approximations of a quantum problem, one usually focuses on attaining the global minimum of the resulting energy function, while other minimum solutions are usually ignored. For frustrated systems, a strict distinction between global and local minimum is often not tenable since first-order-type transitions can interchange the roles played by two different minima. This begs the question of whether there is any physical interpretation for the local minima encountered in mean-field approximations of quantum systems. We look at the problem from the perspective of quantum spin systems. Two models are studied, a frustrated model with quenched disorder and a pure system without frustration. Accurate classical energies of the minima are compared with the full spectrum of energy levels, allowing us to search for signs of correspondence between them. It is found that the local minima can generally be interpreted as excited energy eigenstates. Instances of spurious minima are also reported.

LINKS. A System for Historical Family Reconstruction in the Netherlands

LINKS stands for 'LINKing System for historical family reconstruction' and is a software system to link nominal data from the Dutch archives and ultimately reconstruct historical individuals and families. We present the background and philosophy of this matching system and explain its data structure and functioning. Currently the core data of the LINKS system consists of indexed civil certificates. These certificates are available from 1812 — the start of the Dutch Vital Registration — until the year they are confidential based on privacy laws. For more than 20 years, thousands of volunteers have been working to build this index, which contains not only the names of newborn, married and deceased persons, but also the names of their parents, places of birth, ages and sometimes their occupational titles. The software system LINKS includes the standardization of all input before linking, nominal record linkage procedures and identification of all unique persons involved in the system. All processes are repeatable and a strict distinction is maintained between source data, standardized, linked and enriched data and released data. Moreover, LINKS also informs archives about all kinds of errors and inconsistencies found during the cleaning and matching process. We will discuss two matching systems, the first is the original querying system that runs within a MySQL database environment and the second is a newly developed system, called burgerLinker, which is based on knowledge graphs and which is designed as a system that can be used independently from LINKS and is made available as open source software. Finally, we present the most important releases of LINKS data so far: two national releases that link birth and parental marriage certificates, creating families and pedigrees and an integrated dataset of persons, families and family trees in four provinces.

Moving From Traumatic Events to Traumatic Experiences in the Study of Traumatic Psychopathology.

Trauma is defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) as an event that includes "actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence" (p. 271). The list of traumatic events included in the DSM-5 represents a long history of psychiatry and psychology's attempts to define trauma and differentiate these events from less severe stressors. In this commentary, we suggest that this strict distinction between traumatic events and stressful events is not useful for public health. The current DSM-5 list of traumatic events may work well for identifying people with the most severe experiences and highest conditional probability of distress who need clinical care. However, the public health field has different priorities. If we think about posttraumatic psychological distress on a population scale, it is not only helping those with the most severe experiences that is needed; rather, public health requires paying attention to all people experiencing distressing stress and trauma reactions. We propose that context is crucial to the development of a population-relevant definition of trauma and provide examples of situations in which stressors have resulted in posttraumatic psychological distress and in which traumatic event reactions have been mitigated by the context in which they occur. We discuss trauma context from an epidemiologic perspective and conclude with recommendations for the field. This article is part of a Special Collection on Mental Health.

Post‐2015 refugees in Germany: “Culture of welcome”, solidarity or exclusion?

Post‐2015 refugees in Germany: “Culture of welcome”, solidarity or exclusion?

Enlightenment Thinkers on Marriage

Two centuries after Montaigne's reflective discussion of marriage in the sixteenth century, Enlightenment thinkers also expressed their views on the issue of marriage. In his Letters to the Persians, Montesquieu expressed his desire for a "marriage of the heart", a contract in which the marriage should be based on the unity of the couple's temperament, and therefore the marriage should be dissolved if the temperament is not compatible. In addition, marriage is a matter of social welfare and interest, so the secular and religious powers should reconcile their handling of marriage matters and avoid conflicts between civil and religious laws as much as possible. Voltaire, on the other hand, fully supported the secularization of marriage and demanded a strict distinction between the content and the form of marriage, contract and sacrament. He claimed that the Church's interference in marriage matters would threaten the secular authority and lead to the disruption of the laws of the state. Secular authority should prevail, and religious law should not undermine civil law. Rousseau, on the other hand, saw good marriage as a necessary condition for the formation of political citizens. Marriage is not a "natural" situation, but rather it is related to the obligations and nature of the state, and thus the marriage relationship is essentially political. Although each of the three Enlightenment thinkers had a distinctive view of marriage, they also showed a striking consensus, especially in linking marriage to society, which was different from the individualistic view of marriage in the Renaissance. The purpose of this paper is to explore the conceptions of marriage by Enlightenment thinkers to better understand the changes in the concept of marriage since the Renaissance and the issues of marriage before and after the French Revolution that underlie them.

From agonistic to insurgent democracy

This article uncovers an internal tension within theories of agonistic democracy. On the one hand, as radical pluralists, agonistic democrats want to institute a ‘symmetrical’ political scene where different identities can struggle on an equally legitimate basis. On the other hand, they often normatively prioritize the struggles of oppressed groups against domination. In response, this article proposes to collapse any strict distinction between pluralism and social relations of domination. The result is a move from agonistic to insurgent democracy, where insurgent struggles against domination give the central impetus to any democracy. To do so, it turns to the writings of Étienne Balibar, who argues that most, if not all, symmetrical political conflict is built on asymmetrical forms of domination or oppression. This leads us to develop an account of democratic conflict that is incessantly asymmetrical. Finally, this article suggests an alternative way of rescuing the political principle of pluralism cherished by agonistic democrats. Balibar’s writings on the ‘ideology of the dominated’ show that every insurgent struggle expresses itself ideologically, which harbours the risk of obscuring other forms of domination. Therefore, democracy is not only kept alive by insurgent movements, it requires that the latter democratize themselves by maintaining a permanent openness to alternative calls against domination or oppression.

Universal Categories, Single Language Realisations: Aspectuality in French and other Romance Languages

Aspect and Aktionsart are both categories that codify information on the internal temporal structure of states of affairs. In traditional studies on aspectuality, a very strict distinction between them is usually made. Aspect is an obligatory grammatical (morphosyntactic) verbal category, which must therefore be expressed in all languages whose verbal systems allow it. Aktionsart is a lexical verbal category and is not subject to such restraints in individual languages. This “bidimensional” perspective – widespread in Linguistics and even more so in Romance Linguistics (see, among many others, Bertinetto 1986; Smith 1991; Squartini 1998) – contrasts with a less common “unidimensional” approach (De Miguel 1999; Verkuyl 1972, 1993). The latter advocates the semantic identity of what, in terms of the linguistic analysis of individual languages, is considered either grammatical or lexical aspect.In this paper, an analysis of aspectuality as a semantic-functional category comprising both aspect and Aktionsart will be introduced by means of a new unidimensional model, which has an onomasiological background and is based on frame semantics (see Dessì Schmid 2014, 2019). In accordance with many studies on cognitive semantics, aspectuality is defined as the structuring of states of affairs through delimitation or bounding (see, e.g., Smith 1997; Bickel 1997; Langacker 1987, 2006; Talmy 1996, 2000); this delimitation principle is further developed and applied in a highly extended and structured way.The paper will focus on French examples but will also consider some data from other Romance languages, although it is applicable to any individual language.

Exploring the Effectiveness of Sustainability Measurement: Which ESG Metrics Will Survive COVID-19?

This paper aims to investigate the current state of play on Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) integration and check the validity of the current metrics system by assessing if it will survive the COVID-19 crisis. By adopting a qualitative research approach through semi-structured anonymous interviews with 14 senior managers of six European listed companies we use a framework by assessing the mechanisms of reactivity on the effectiveness of ESG measures in times of COVID-19. By interpreting the practitioners’ points of view through the lens of the sociological framework by Espeland and Sauder (Am J Sociol 113:1–40, 2007) our findings show different mechanisms of reactivity by companies on the effectiveness of ESG measures in times of COVID-19, i.e., active and passive conformity and active resistance. We also identified the main Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) institutional factors that affect managers’ reactivity. An extensive re-formulation of the ESG metrics is required in the light of times of crisis, given that accountability and transparency are strongly linked to quantitative measures which can play a critical role in the financial system and investors’ engagement. Particularly, the strict distinction between “E”, “S” and “G” issues should be abandoned claiming a different holistic re-design of sustainability measures by considering the increasing relevance of the Social dimension in time of COVID-19. This study provides a valuable contribution to the existing literature on the measurement of sustainability within the link of accountability and crisis by highlighting new corporate needs to re-design the ESG metrics system.

Classification of network social movements in the cities of Southwestern Siberia regions

The article presents the results of the study of urban Internet communities of a causal nature in the regions of Southwestern Siberia. Communities are analysed by variables: the degree of their development, the number of participants, the goals and objectives set, the forms of activity used. These communities were identified in social networks and messengers such as VKontakte, Facebook, Twitter, Odnoklassniki, Instagram, Telegram, as well as among YouTube channels and specialized sites. The informatisation of modern society provides citizens with more and more opportunities to participate in public life and establish horizontal communications. This is combined with the processes of raising the level of civic consciousness and the search for "workarounds" for participation in public politics. Both of these tendencies lead to more and more active involvement of citizens in the processes of self-organisation and participation in various associations. This leads to an increase in the number of urban problematic (causal) communities and in the number of their participants, the creation of new projects, and the massisation of their actions. There can be distinguished two main vectors for the development of such urban communities: urban protection and environmental. The first direction deals with the issues of arranging the living environment of citizens and creating "places of application" of causal civil activity, with problems of combining commercial, social, historical and cultural principles in the development of cities. The second one deals with the issues of protecting the natural environment, improving the living conditions of citizens, changing the consciousness and behaviour of people towards those more environmentally friendly. The set of methods used by all these communities is very wide: information campaigns in media and the Internet, filing petitions and appeals, organising of practical activities in the direction of their work, educating citizens, holding pickets and other public events, establishing contacts between civil society and government. It should be noted that there is no strict distinction between the communities of the two main problem areas, since the tasks they strive to solve (for example, the preservation of green areas in cities, the fight against landfills, etc.), as well as the composition of the participants, partially coincide.

PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP PROJECT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM IN THE REPUBLIC OF KAZAKHSTAN: ANALYSIS OF PROBLEMS AND PERSPECTIVES

The purpose of the study. The main purpose of this article is to assess the current state of public-private partnership (PPP) in the Republic of Kazakhstan, analyze and combine what we know about the PPP project management system in Kazakhstan. The need was identified to assess the current state of the public-private partnership project management system, to identify the main gaps and barriers to the implementation of PPP projects in Kazakhstan and to propose measures for their regulation and improvement.Methodology. In the preparation of the article, a descriptive methodology was used, as well as a heuristic method of analysis. In the course of the study, data presented on public resources, including government portals, were analyzed. The study examined legal acts and regulations related to laws on PPP projects, on PPP, the public sector, the private sector, concessions, corporate legislation.Research methods. Within the framework of the conducted research, the following methods were used:- theoretical, including the analysis of domestic and foreign scientists in the field of public-private partnership;- logical methods of generalization, comparison and comparison, deduction and induction, method of formalization, logical interpretation, method of logical justification and some others;- analysis of legislative and regulatory documents;- analysis of the database of public-private partnership projects of the Kazakhstan PPP center;- a method of graphical representation of the obtained results of analysis and evaluation.Originality / value of the research: Kazakhstan's information policy, which is permanently in the process of transformation, needs to be rebooted today. An upgrade of the public-private partnership project management system is needed. The main attention in the study was focused on determining and assessing the current state, as well as the dynamics of development of public-private partnership projects in the Republic of Kazakhstan.The authors identified and structured the main gaps in the development of the PPP project management system, and also proposed measures to improve them.Findings. PPP in Kazakhstan requires comprehensive consideration in order to improve legislative aspects and approach the forms of PPP common in Western countries, it is necessary to build new modern PPP approaches, transform the mechanism into an accessible and transparent source of project implementation for business and the public, make a strict distinction between public procurement, since today the tool has become a bypass of the public procurement procedure. It is necessary to remove all business risks from the state. It is necessary to avoid unreasonably provided extra benefits and over-marginality. All this will radically change and improve the current state of the PPP project management system in the Republic of Kazakhstan and will make it more attractive for implementation. The state plays a leading role in this process, and state regulation of the PPP project management system should serve as a driver for changes dictated by time and the need to transform this system.

‘If You’re Going to Trust the Machine, Then That Trust Has Got to Be Based on Something’:

The role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in clinical decision-making raises issues of trust. One issue concerns the conditions of trusting the AI which tends to be based on validation. However, little attention has been given to how validation is formed, how comparisons come to be accepted, and how AI algorithms are trusted in decision-making. Drawing on interviews with collaborative researchers developing three AI technologies for the early diagnosis of pulmonary hypertension (PH), we show how validation of the AI is jointly produced so that trust in the algorithm is built up through the negotiation of criteria and terms of comparison during interactions. These processes build up interpretability and interrogation, and co-constitute trust in the technology. As they do so, it becomes difficult to sustain a strict distinction between artificial and human/social intelligence.

Feyerabend on the Quantum Theory of Measurement: A Reassessment

ABSTRACT In 1957, Feyerabend delivered a paper titled ‘On the Quantum-Theory of Measurement’ at the Colston Research Symposium in Bristol to sketch a completion of von Neumann's measurement scheme without collapse, using only unitary quantum dynamics and well-motivated statistical assumptions about macroscopic quantum systems. Feyerabend's paper has been recognised as an early contribution to quantum measurement, anticipating certain aspects of decoherence. Our paper reassesses the physical and philosophical content of Feyerabend's contribution, detailing the technical steps as well as its overall philosophical motivations and consequences. Summarising our results, Feyerabend interpreted collapse as a positivist assumption in quantum mechanics leading to a strict distinction between the uninterpreted formalism of unitary evolution in quantum mechanics and the classically interpreted observational language describing post-measurement outcomes. Thus Feyerabend took the no-collapse completion of the von Neumann measurement scheme to show the dispensability of the positivist assumption, leading the way to a realistic interpretation of quantum theory. We note, however, that there are substantial problems with his account of measurement that bring into question its viability as a legitimate foil to the orthodox view. We further argue that his dissatisfaction with the von Neumann measurement scheme is indicative of early views on theoretical pluralism.

Lexicography Description of a Special Word in a Common Explanatory Dictionary: Labels, Remarks, Commentaries

The paper deals with various ways of presenting information about words of a terminological or professional nature in a common philological dictionary of the Russian language. Usually, either particular labels of general type such as "spec. (special)", "in professional speech", or specific labels for particular science or discipline such as "biol." (biology), "lingv."(linguistics), "mat." (mathematics), "arch." (architecture), "sport." (sports), etc. are used. In addition, in a common dictionaries of the Russian language, other types of explanations of a terminological and professional words are used (for example, remarks like "In football";, "In diplomacy", "In Buddhism";), commentaries (for example, like "In Soviet times", "In modern use", "According to spiritualistic ideas") and some others. At the same time, there is no strict distinction between labels, remarks and commentaries, not only in different dictionaries, but sometimes even in the same dictionary. In the work it is proposed to have in the arsenal of lexicography at least three different explanations – labels, and remarks, and commentaries – and to use them more consistently in various cases.