51 research outputs found
'Heaven starts at your parents' feet' : adolescent bowing to parents and associated spiritual attitudes
In a quantitative survey of religious attitudes and practices in a multi-religious sample of
369 school pupils aged between 13 and 15 in London, the practice of bowing to parents was
found widespread in 22% of adolescents spanning several religious affiliations and
ethnicities â especially Buddhists, Hindus and those of Indian, African and âOther Asianâ
ethnicity. Whether an adolescent bowed correlated significantly with spiritual attitudes such
as wanting to abstain from alcohol, hearing religious stories, being inspired by religious
festivals and liking the idea of seeing God in everything. Findings suggest bowing to
parents can have religious significance on all three levels of Jacksonâs Interpretive
Approach and therefore cannot be regarded as a âcultural accretionâ of religion. Study of
bowing to parents could form a unifying exercise in shared values for study of religion in
the plural classroom and facilitate community cohesion in certain religious membership
groups
The Structure of Episodic Memory: Ganeri's âMental Time Travel and Attentionâ
We offer a framework for assessing what the structure of episodic memory might be, if one accepts the Buddhist denial of persisting selves. This paper is a response to Jonardon Ganeri's paper "Mental time travel and attention", which explores Buddhaghosa's ideas about memory. (It will eventually be published with a reply by Ganeri)
I Me Mine: on a Confusion Concerning the Subjective Character of Experience
In recent debates on phenomenal consciousness, a distinction is sometimes made, after Levine (2001) and Kriegel (2009), between the âqualitative characterâ of an experience, i.e. the specific way it feels to the subject (e.g. blueish or sweetish or pleasant), and its âsubjective characterâ, i.e. the fact that there is anything at all that it feels like to her. I argue that much discussion of subjective character is affected by a conflation between three different notions. I start by disentangling the three notions in question, under the labels of âfor-me-nessâ, âme-nessâ and âminenessâ. Next, I argue that these notions are not equivalent; in particular, there is no conceptual implication from for-me-ness to me-ness or mineness. Empirical considerations based on clinical cases additionally suggest that the three notions may also correspond to different properties (although the claim of conceptual non-equivalence does not depend on this further point). The aim is clarificatory, cautionary but also critical: I examine four existing arguments from subjective character that are fuelled by an undifferentiated use of the three notions, and find them to be flawed for this reason
Transcending Borders, Bridging Gaps: Opening a Dialogue Between the U. S. A. and Italyâs Migration Turn
- âŠ