Contemporary charity seems contradictory given its roots as a transformative practise in wisdom t... more Contemporary charity seems contradictory given its roots as a transformative practise in wisdom traditions; today, it is an incidental giving of surplus wealth for utilitarian ends. This contradiction is the result of the disconnection of the practise of charity from the virtue of agape, a transformative other-love necessary for self-transcendence in Christian wisdom tradition. This disconnection echoes disconnections that led to problems constituting the modern meaning crisis: connection collapse, anxious narcissism, and sapiential obsolescence. As such, charity is an apt case study for the meaning crisis. Moreover, just as Buddhism shows promise as an answer to the meaning crisis, it may also be a method for restoring the agapic nature of charity.
At the intersection of women's rights and anticolonial resistance in twentieth century Asia, wome... more At the intersection of women's rights and anticolonial resistance in twentieth century Asia, women's bodies and lives became the battleground for political rhetoric by elite nationalists and rationalists. As liberal ideas of equality, freedom, and rationality were taken up by educated elites in China and India, female suffering was driven to the forefront as a symbol of colonial suffering. However, in pursuit of political identity, elites appropriated women's suffering for propaganda at the expense of women's voices. Their methods internalized and perpetuated the moral hegemony imposed by Western colonizers, bifurcating the "backward" traditionalism of their female "victims" from the Western-informed "progressive" modernity of anticolonial movements. This rigid demarcation resulted in a hypocrisy that was counterproductive for women's rights-it misdirected political energies towards policy reforms that did not address the fundamental misogyny pervading all levels of patriarchal society, and, worse, it shamed and silenced women. Thus, women and anticolonial movements existed in an imbalanced relationship: women's bodies and lives helped establish the moral authority of anticolonial agendas, but anticolonial agendas neither acknowledged the hypocritical misogyny within their own movements nor gave agency to the "traditionalist" female victims they purported to fight for.
Subjectivity in the writings of Durba Ghosh, Alexander Rocklin, and Frantz Fanon are examinations... more Subjectivity in the writings of Durba Ghosh, Alexander Rocklin, and Frantz Fanon are examinations of "truth" in colonial contexts. In the process of becoming historical ("objective") truth, all subjectivities linger in liminality. Ghosh, Rocklin, and Fanon trace the liminality of subject-formation through case studies of British and American colonized subjects to examine how changing colonial contexts defined their colonial subjectivities and constrained their mobility within colonial spaces based on such subjectivities. Ghosh examines how the
Could sentient android lovers ever exist? What about sentient extraterrestrials? At the core of t... more Could sentient android lovers ever exist? What about sentient extraterrestrials? At the core of these ideas is the question of multiple realizability. Recently, Shapiro and Polger have challenged the central premises of multiple realizability: they suggest that a higher-level property (e.g. psychological function) cannot be multiply realized by different lower-level properties (e.g. neurobiological structure) within living things on the grounds that adaptation tightly couples structure and function together. They propose a criterion for judging multiple realization that contests purported evidence of multiple realization from neuroplasticity and Darwinian convergence, and results in a dilemma for proponents of multiple realizability. I argue that their criterion faces a problem of scale- and context-sensitivity, which, along with their dilemma, could be dissolved by taking a process perspective on living things as autonomous, autopoeitic dynamic systems.
Metaphor is linked to transfer, a useful phenomenon for explaining cognitive processes such as pr... more Metaphor is linked to transfer, a useful phenomenon for explaining cognitive processes such as problem solving and memory. However, modern models for metaphor remain unable to produce mechanisms that explain how cognition produces and interprets metaphor. In computational frameworks, including the Structure Mapping Theory and Representation Transformation model, selection problems pervade models, while in the more Gestalt Conceptual Metaphor Theory, vagueness prevents clear operationalization and empirical experimentation. Ultimately, all extant metaphor models rely on meaning extraction to construct mental representation, for which there exists no adequate cognitive mechanism. In addition, some theorists suggest that representation itself is irrelevant to the problem, and clearer explanations may lie in dynamical theory frameworks.
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Drafts by Maggie Cheung