Venerable Concept Research Articles

SACRED CONCEPTS ASSOCIATED WITH THE RITUAL OF LAYING DOWN A CHILD IN THE CRADLE

This article explains a venerable concept that has recently been explored in the field of literary studies. This concept has been reflected in the culture and spiritual life of the people since ancient times. The concept of honoring the sacred world, which is completely intertwined with the Kazakh’s own worldview, customs and family life, reveals the essence of the people. It is known that the Kazakh people, rocking their babies to sleep with lullabies, occupy a leading position in national education. That is why in this work the concept of veneration, which is the main object of research, was considered in the context of the rite of laying in the cradle and poems associated with this rite. We learned the essence of our national character from folklore, saw and clearly distinguished the spiritual nature of the people from the works described in words. However, behind our precious treasure there are still many things to be explored. In the 21st century, when different cultures meet, it is not enough to define Kazakh values; to preserve the national spirit, it is necessary to widely promote the image of national culture - cherished Kazakh concepts. In this article, we have looked at the content of some traditions that have changed over time and considered their meaning. Within the framework of the topic, we have highlighted the concept of sacredness, which, together with the rite, is inextricably linked and testifies to the culture of a particular period. In the course of the article, focusing on the origin of the concept of the sacred, it talks about sacred things that have been evident from the very beginning of human existence.

Mircea Eliade et l’herméneutique psycho-historique

"Mircea Eliade and Psycho-Historical Methodology. Starting from Thomas Kuhn’s seminal work on scientific paradigms, the venerable concept of Weltanschauung (world-vision) can be upgraded in order to reach a psycho-historical understanding of cultural evolutions. In this paper I intend to adapt to contemporary cultural hermeneutics a schema proposed by Nietzsche and developed by Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis. In this model, the relations between the individual consciousness and the unconscious offer the blueprint for describing the dynamics of the collective psyche. The model states that, when a culture (religion, etc.) has been overruled by a new dominant culture (religion), it remains active by way of survivals and reminiscences (Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin) and eventually, after a period of persecution and censorship, it will re-emerge in a new form, transformed by the general principles of the dominant culture but nevertheless contesting and challenging it. I will attempt to show that such a psychohistorical dialectic has occurred six successive times in the history of European civilization. Keywords: psycho-history, Mircea Eliade, remerging cultures, European civilization, history of religions "

The Practices of Hope: Literary Criticism in Disenchanted Times, by Castiglia, Christopher

<i>The Practices of Hope: Literary Criticism in Disenchanted Times</i>, by Castiglia, Christopher

Der dreiste „Monsieur K*“: Über Karamzins Briefe eines reisenden Russen

Summary In Karamzin’s ‘Letters of a Russian Traveller’ the narrator displays a strong inclination to confound his readers, to irritate and to provoke them. Under the surface of his sentimental style we encounter persistent violations of norms generally accepted in eighteenth-century Russian society, including the Petrine ethos of service and the relationship of official to private values. The narrator frequently ignores traditional morality. He depicts suicide not as a mortal sin, but as a human catastrophe. The same goes for norms of marital fidelity and social hierarchy; venerable concepts like ‘love of the fatherland’ and ‘historical greatness’ are reinterpreted. The latter phenomenon is especially striking: in 1790, while Russia was fighting two wars (against the Ottoman empire and against Sweden), the Traveller constantly displays a love of peace, implicitly condemning Catherine II and her bellicose foreign politics. A concluding digression touches upon the striking political difference between the youthful and the mature Karamzin.

U-Pb geochronology documents out-of-sequence emplacement of ultramafic layers in the Bushveld Igneous Complex of South Africa.

Layered intrusions represent part of the plumbing systems that deliver vast quantities of magma through the Earth's crust during the formation of large igneous provinces, which disrupt global ecosystems and host most of the Earth's endowment of Pt, Ni and Cr deposits. The Rustenburg Layered Suite of the enormous Bushveld Igneous Complex of South Africa has been presumed to have formed by deposition of crystals at the floor of a subterranean sea of magma several km deep and hundreds of km wide called a magma chamber. Here we show, using U–Pb isotopic dating of zircon and baddeleyite, that individual chromitite layers of the Rustenburg Layered Suite formed within a stack of discrete sheet-like intrusions emplaced and solidified as separate bodies beneath older layers. Our U–Pb ages and modelling necessitate reassessment of the genesis of layered intrusions and their ore deposits, and challenge even the venerable concept of the magma chamber itself.

Civil Religion Reconsidered: The Saliency of a Venerable Concept

ABSTRACTThis essay reexamines civil theology, a venerable concept in the field of political science and how it is symbolized in contemporary political practice. Civil theology provides the foundation of politics for a community and is reflected in its myths and how the community interpretes itself within the greater structure of reality. It is during periods of crises, however, when this myth structure and society's understanding of itself come into question that civil theology presents itself as a salient topic for theoretical analysis and speculation. This article considers a contemporary response to the crisis of our time, one associated with the breakdown of the “traditional” American civil theology and the impact this has had on political thought and policy debates. From an understanding of this response may come a broader knowledge of the problems confronting the policy process as well as potential resolutions.

Capturing Unknown Substrates via in Situ Formation of Tightly Bound Bisubstrate Adducts: S-Adenosyl-vinthionine as a Functional Probe for AdoMet-Dependent Methyltransferases.

Identifying an enzyme's substrates is essential to understand its function, yet it remains challenging. A fundamental impediment is the transient interactions between an enzyme and its substrates. In contrast, tight binding is often observed for multisubstrate-adduct inhibitors due to synergistic interactions. Extending this venerable concept to enzyme-catalyzed in situ adduct formation, unknown substrates were affinity-captured by an S-adenosyl-methionine (AdoMet, SAM)-dependent methyltransferase (MTase). Specifically, the electrophilic methyl sulfonium (alkyl donor) in AdoMet is replaced with a vinyl sulfonium (Michael acceptor) in S-adenosyl-vinthionine (AdoVin). Via an addition reaction, AdoVin and the nucleophilic substrate form a covalent bisubstrate-adduct tightly complexed with thiopurine MTase (2.1.1.67). As such, an unknown substrate was readily identified from crude cell lysates. Moreover, this approach is applicable to other systems, even if the enzyme is unknown.

The Two Analyses of Mr. X: Two Analytic Voices and the Emergence of Something New

In a bridging session after the sudden death of his analyst, I realized that Mr. X and I were both grieving for her. V had been my teacher, supervisor, and friend, and I knew her analytic voice from the inside. I heard it in my consulting room not only in Mr. X’s words but also in his relational patterns and expectations as they emerged as we moved along. Hearing V’s voice stand in such stark contrast with mine led me to reconceptualize the venerable concept of analytic voice from within contemporary psychoanalytic theory. My analytic voice freed Mr. X from V’s complex constraints, and my experience as Mr. X’s analyst unexpectedly came to free me. I have come to understand analytic voice as an emergent property of a complex dynamic system.

Indirect Rule and Varieties of Governance

This article reexamines the venerable concept of indirect rule. We argue, drawing on evidence from colonial and postcolonial South Asia, that indirect rule actually represented a diverse set of governance forms that need to be clearly distinguished. Using a new typology of varieties of governance, we show that colonial governments establishedsuzerain,hybrid, andde juregovernance, in addition to direct rule across territories, based on the incentives and constraints of the state. The repertoire of governance forms narrowed and changed but did not disappear during decolonization, showing that the postcolonial state had powerful reasons to maintain forms of heterodox governance. Dramatic shifts, alongside enduring continuity, challenge a simple narrative of path dependence and the adherence to tradition, instead showing that governments have made conscious choices about how to govern. We conclude by discussing the implications of these arguments for broader understandings of state power.

Ten virtues of outstanding leaders: leadership and character

Al Gini & Ronald M. Green Ten Virtues of Outstanding Leaders: Leadership and Character New York: Wiley, 2013Reviewed by Howard A. DoughtyGeorge Bernard Shaw said somewhere that Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination. That may be true of inherited monarchies, but what about self-made sovereigns who may win their supremacy through combat or cunning? What about rulers who go by other names and who may even gain their spot atop the hierarchy by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote. And what about non-governmental leaders such as executives in the public or private sector, senior military officers, college deans or, for that matter, presidents of local service, suburban book or elegant wine-tasting clubs?The assumption that organizational efficacy depends on clear distinctions between the rulers and the ruled and well-defined chains of command connecting the leaders and the led is so ingrained in modern society that to question, much less to deny, its inevitability is to risk being predismissed as a joker with dangerous anarchistic tendencies.Though there have been ample additions to the literature, the classic text on the subject was written a century ago. Robert Michels study, Political Parties (1915), expressed the sentiment well. There was, he said, an iron law of oligarchy that governed all enduring organizations regardless of the personal preferences and philosophies of their members. Michels did not study massive corporations or authoritarian establishments where it could be assumed that power would be exerted firmly and directly from the top down. He looked instead at the internal workings of the German Social Democratic Party, a socialist enterprise where the values of and equality were almost universally and sometimes intensely endorsed. He found therein the basis for a claim of a universal tendency.Tactical and technical necessities, he insisted, required an asymmetric division of labour in the interest of effectiveness. Democracy and equality were fine principles; but, especially, large organizations demanded that decisions be made efficiently and authoritatively if any significant practical goals were to be achieved. Michels started out as an anarcho-syndicalist; he migrated to Mussolini's fascist movement. Circumstances change; so do people.Today, even tender-hearted democrats who might once have spoken about participatory democracy and expressed a desire to involve people in the decisions that affected their lives no longer seem depressed by the dominance of leaders. Yes, we can! they shouted back at candidate Obama with the anonymity of the audience substituting for civic action.Admiration, inspiration and emulation all partially describe the relationship between electors and their representatives. The adjective charismatic (now reduced to a common trait among people possessing popularity or celebrity) has become a term of adulation and affirmation. Meanwhile, more experimental, experiential, adventuresome, open and playful approaches to administrative and political projects seem strangely obsolete. The neoliberal agenda with its emphasis on instrumental corporate values of efficiency and productivity combine with a commitment to human resource management that specifically undermines or jettisons notions of institutional loyalty and long-term commitment. Market mechanisms dominate and vibrant civic life is transformed into a network of virtual friends and an algorithm of consumer choice. In such a world, leadership can be quietly transformed into tyranny as the victims are seduced into complicity in their own domination. Welcome to big data analytics.Gini and Green, meantime, take the general principle of hierarchy as an organizational necessity and the practice of visible leadership as a structural inevitability, and then they go on to insert the venerable concept of virtue into the scenario. …

Franchising and the Parol Evidence Rule

The parol evidence rule, though a venerable concept in contract law, remains a source of controversy. This key tenet of contract interpretation “bars extrinsic terms agreed upon prior to or at the same time as, a total integration regardless of whether the term is written or oral.” In other words, if the parties intended the document to encompass the entire agreement, evidence of prior or contemporaneous communications — in other words, parol evidence — will not be permitted to alter the terms of the contract, unless the language is ambiguous or some other exception is present.

A Measure of Control

Control is a venerable concept, still immensely popular on television shows such as Oprah and Dr. Phil, where ‘‘taking control of one’s life’’ is recommended for every difficult situation. In the scientific literature, the measurement of control over one’s health was introduced in the 1970s. The Health Locus of Control scale, 1 building on Rotter’s distinction between internal and external control, 2 addressed 3 aspects of control: self or internal control, chance or the absence of control, and belief in the influence of powerful others. These factors are considered to be stable personality characteristics, or traits. The control concept has lost some popularity as ‘‘it was not easy to manipulate Perceived Control in health care settings, for instance by giving patients choices over aspects of their treatment.’’ 1(p11) The concept, however, remains useful as a mediator of treatments’ effects on health and medical outcomes. 3 In work on shared decision making, the measure of the patient’s preferred participatory role in decision making 4 may address a related concept. The article by Victoria Miller and colleagues 5 in this issue, ‘‘The Decision Making Control Instrument to Assess Voluntary Consent,’’ describes the development of an instrument to assess feelings of control or voluntariness regarding medical decision making. The context is informed consent regarding treatment for seriously ill children. The ‘‘control’’ measured here is not a personality trait but a state experienced in a particular medical decision situation. The study was carefully done. Its sample was sufficiently large for psychometric analyses. The item generation process was thorough, based on theory, literature, and patient interviews, resulting in 29 items. The usual factor analyses yielded three 3-item scales: self-control, absence of control, and others’ control. Reliability and cross-validity measures of these separate scales were satisfactory. In their reflection of different ways in which parents experienced their control in deciding about their child’s treatment, the scales are remarkably similar to the factors of the Health Locus of Control Scale (HLOC), discussed above. The authors use the words control and voluntariness as synonyms, stemming from the ethical and philosophical analysis of voluntariness and its relation to control. 6 As the authors discuss, these words

Influences of lower-mantle properties on the formation of asthenosphere in oceanic upper mantle

Asthenosphere is a venerable concept based on geological intuition of Reginald Daly nearly 100 years ago. There have been various explanations for the existence of the asthenosphere. The concept of a plume-fed asthenosphere has been around for a few years due to the ideas put forth by Yamamoto et al.. Using a two-dimensional Cartesian code based on finite-volume method, we have investigated the influences of lower-mantle physical properties on the formation of a low-viscosity zone in the oceanic upper mantle in regions close to a large mantle upwelling. The rheological law is Newtonian and depends on both temperature and depth. An extended-Boussinesq model is assumed for the energetics and the olivine to spinel, the spinel to perovskite and perovskite to post-perovskite (ppv) phase transitions are considered. We have compared the differences in the behavior of hot upwellings passing through the transition zone in the mid-mantle for a variety of models, starting with constant physical properties in the lower-mantle and culminating with complex models which have the post-perovskite phase transition and depth-dependent coefficient of thermal expansion and thermal conductivity. We found that the formation of the asthenosphere in the upper mantle in the vicinity of large upwellings is facilitated in models where both depth-dependent thermal expansivity and conductivity are included. Models with constant thermal expansivity and thermal conductivity do not produce a hot low-viscosity zone, resembling the asthenosphere. We have also studied the influences of a cylindrical model and found similar results as the Cartesian model with the important difference that upper-mantle temperatures were much cooler than the Cartesian model by about 600 to 700 K. Our findings argue for the potentially important role played by lower-mantle material properties on the development of a plume-fed asthenosphere in the oceanic upper mantle.

Culture, Property, and Peoplehood: A Comment on Carpenter, Katyal, and Riley's “In Defense of Property”

First, the good news: Carpenter, Katyal, and Riley make a compelling case that the venerable concept of property—long defined primarily by such principles as transferability and rights of exclusion and control—should be broadened to encompass a robust ideal of stewardship. In doing so, “In Defense of Property” (henceforth, IDP) renders property more compatible with the indigenous view of things. This significant contribution to ongoing global debates about the protection of indigenous heritage will be of great interest to readers of the IJCP.

Stewardship in Mental Health Policy: Inspiration, Influence, Institution?

The venerable but amorphous concept of stewardship has lately gained prominence in discussions of public policy and management and is sometimes offered as a "strategy" with a distinctive potential to mobilize effective public leadership in the service of broad social missions. In this article we explore how stewardship may be useful to the theory and practice of mental health policy, and, reciprocally, how examples from mental health policy may elucidate the dynamics of stewardship. After examining its key political ingredients--authority, advocacy, and analysis--we discuss the practical challenges in moving stewardship from moral inspiration to institutional reality.

The Rule of Law Unplugged

The 'Rule of Law' is a venerable concept, but, on closer inspection, is a complex admixture of positive assumptions, occasionally wishful thinking, and inchoate political and legal theory. While enormous investment has been made in rule of law reformism throughout the world, advocates of transplanting American-style legal and political institutions to developed and developing countries in the world are often unclear about what they are transplanting and why they are ambitiously doing so. Scholars clearly have more work to do in understanding the rule of law and designing institutions to realize the objectives for which this grand project is intended.In this paper, we revisit the concept of the rule of law in order to help unpack the theoretical and operational assumptions underlying scholarship and reform efforts. We do so from the perspective of legal and positive political theory; and we interrogate various institutional devices (such as constitutionalism and the independent judiciary) in order to shed light on how the construct of the rule of law is being put into service on behalf of cross-national reform initiatives.

The End of Balance-of-Power Theory? A Comment on Wohlforth et al.'s `Testing Balance-of-Power Theory in World History'

The balance of power is one of the oldest and most venerable concepts in the study of International Relations. Few concepts have had a comparable influence on both scholarship and statesmanship, and few have been so fiercely contested. In a recent article, `Testing Balance-of-Power Theory in World History' ( EJIR, June 2007), Wohlforth et al. set out to test balance-of-power theory against 2000 years of world history. Although their article has considerable merits, I highlight three main weaknesses in their approach. First, I argue that they misstate balance-of-power theory. Second, the competing theoretical hypotheses they offer are (a) not novel, (b) too vague to enable productive empirical testing. Third, the historical evidence they present, based on the study of ancient international systems, is too scant and impressionistic to be probative for the causal mechanisms they seek to evaluate. As a result, balance-of-power theory is neither refuted nor significantly refined.

Design and code reviews in the age of the internet

New collaboration tools allow geographically distributed software-development teams to boost the venerable concept of code review.

The Use of Unlabeled Data in Predictive Modeling

The incorporation of unlabeled data in regression and classification analysis is an increasing focus of the applied statistics and machine learning literatures, with a number of recent examples demonstrating the potential for unlabeled data to contribute to improved predictive accuracy. The statistical basis for this semisupervised analysis does not appear to have been well delineated; as a result, the underlying theory and rationale may be underappreciated, especially by nonstatisticians. There is also room for statisticians to become more fully engaged in the vigorous research in this important area of intersection of the statistical and computer sciences. Much of the theoretical work in the literature has focused, for example, on geometric and structural properties of the unlabeled data in the context of particular algorithms, rather than probabilistic and statistical questions. This paper overviews the fundamental statistical foundations for predictive modeling and the general questions associated with unlabeled data, highlighting the relevance of venerable concepts of sampling design and prior specification. This theory, illustrated with a series of central illustrative examples and two substantial real data analyses, shows precisely when, why and how unlabeled data matter.

Beyond Descartes: Panpsychism Revisited

For some two millennia, Western civilization has predominantly viewed mind and consciousness as the private domain of the human species. Some have been willing to extend these qualities to certain animals. And there has been a small but very significant minority of philosophers who have argued that the processes of mind are universal in extent, and resident in all material things – the concept of panpsychism. The traditional ‘man-alone’, or ‘man-and-higher-animals’, views of mind have come under increasing criticism of late, and their philosophical weaknesses seem increasingly insurmountable. This has caused some thinkers to reexamine the ancient and venerable concept of panpsychism, and to apply it anew in contemporary theories of mind. The present essay reintroduces panpsychism, and demonstrates something of its legacy in Western thought.