The Arabic word taghut or taaghoot (ar. طاغوت, ṭāġūt, pl. ṭawāġīt) means to "cross the limits, overstep boundaries," or "to rebel."[1] In Islamic theology, the word refers to idolatry or to worship anything except Allah.
Taghut also denotes one who exceed their limits. The first stage of error is fisq (i.e. disobeying God without denying that one should obey Him), the second is kufr, (i.e. rejection of the very idea that one should obey God).[2] The last stage would be not only to rebel against God but also impose their rebellion against the will of God upon others. Those who reach this stage are taghut

Minds, Machines and Gödel

First published in Philosophy, XXXVI, 1961, pp.(112)-(127); reprinted in The Modeling of Mind, Kenneth M.Sayre and Frederick J.Crosson, eds., Notre Dame Press, 1963, pp.[269]-[270]; and Minds and Machines, ed. Alan Ross Anderson, Prentice-Hall, 1954, pp.{43}-{59}.

Gödel's theorem seems to me to prove that Mechanism is false, that is, that minds cannot be explained as machines. So also has it seemed to many other people: almost every mathematical logician I have put the matter to has confessed to similar thoughts, but has felt reluctant to commit himself definitely until he could see the whole argument set out, with all objections fully stated and properly met.1 This I attempt to do.

Gödel's theorem states that in any consistent system which is strong enough to produce simple arithmetic there are formulae which cannot {44} be proved-in-the-system, but which we can see to be true. Essentially, we consider the formula which says, in effect, "This formula is unprovable-in-the-system". If this formula were provable-in-the-system, we should have a contradiction: for if it were provablein-the-system, then it would not be unprovable-in-the-system, so that "This formula is unprovable-in-the-system" would be false: equally, if it were provable-in-the-system, then it would not be false, but would be true, since in any consistent system nothing false can be provedin-the-system, but only truths. So the formula "This formula is unprovable-in-the-system" is not provable-in-the-system, but unprovablein-the-system. Further, if the formula "This formula is unprovablein- the-system" is unprovable-in-the-system, then it is true that that [256] formula is unprovable-in-the-system, that is, "This formula is unprovable-in-the-system" is true.

By Ernest Wood, an adjutant of Leadbeaters at the time, who helped Krishnamurti with his homework, he was considered "particularly dim-witted".[16] Leadbeater was convinced that the boy would become a spiritual teacher and a great orator; the likely "vehicle for the Lord Maitreya"—in Theosophical doctrine, an advanced spiritual entity periodically appearing on Earth as a World Teacher to guide the evolution of humankind.[16]
In her biography of Krishnamurti, Pupul Jayakar quotes him speaking of that period in his life some 75 years later: "The boy had always said, 'I will do whatever you want'. There was an element of subservience, obedience. The boy was vague, uncertain, woolly; he didn't seem to care what was happening. He was like a vessel, with a large hole in it, whatever was put in, went through, nothing remained."

List of cognitive biases
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cognitive biases are tendencies to think in certain ways. Cognitive biases can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgment, and are often studied in psychology and behavioral economics.
Although the reality of these biases is confirmed by replicable research, there are often controversies about how to classify these biases or how to explain them.[1] Some are effects of information-processing rules (i.e. mental shortcuts), called heuristics, that the brain uses to produce decisions or judgments. Such effects are called cognitive biases.[2][3] Biases in judgment or decision-making can also result from motivation, such as when beliefs are distorted by wishful thinking. Some biases have a variety of cognitive ("cold") or motivational ("hot") explanations. Both effects can be present at the same time.[4][5]
There are also controversies as to whether some of these biases count as truly irrational or whether they result in useful attitudes or behavior. For example, when getting to know others, people tend to ask leading questions which seem biased towards confirming their assumptions about the person. This kind of confirmation bias has been argued to be an example of social skill: a way to establish a connection with the other person.[6]
The research on these biases overwhelmingly involves human subjects. However, some of the findings have appeared in non-human animals as well. For example, hyperbolic discounting has also been observed in rats, pigeons, and monkeys.[7]

Logical Paradoxes
paradox_logicalA paradox is generally a puzzling conclusion we seem to be driven towards by our reasoning, but which is highly counterintuitive, nevertheless. There are, among these, a large variety of paradoxes of a logical nature which have teased even professional logicians, in some cases for several millennia. But what are now sometimes isolated as “the logical paradoxes” are a much less heterogeneous collection: they are a group of antinomies centered on the notion of self-reference, some of which were known in Classical times, but most of which became particularly prominent in the early decades of last century. Quine distinguished amongst paradoxes such antinomies. He did so by first isolating the “veridical” and “falsidical” paradoxes, which, although puzzling riddles, turned out to be plainly true, or plainly false, after some inspection. In addition, however, there were paradoxes which “produce a self-contradiction by accepted ways of reasoning,” and which, Quine thought, established “that some tacit and trusted pattern of reasoning must be made explicit, and henceforward be avoided or revised.” We will first look, more broadly, and historically, at several of the main conundrums of a logical nature which have proved difficult, some since antiquity, before concentrating later on the more recent troubles with paradoxes of self-reference. They will all be called “logical paradoxes.”

List of paradoxes
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is a list of paradoxes, grouped thematically. The grouping is approximate, as paradoxes may fit into more than one category. Because of varying definitions of the term paradox, some of the following are not considered to be paradoxes by everyone. This list collects only scenarios that have been called a paradox by at least one source and have their own article.
Although considered paradoxes, some of these are based on fallacious reasoning, or incomplete/faulty analysis. Informally, the term is often used to describe a counter-intuitive result.
This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.
Contents  [show]
Logic[edit]

Barbershop paradox: The supposition that if one of two simultaneous assumptions leads to a contradiction, the other assumption is also disproved leads to paradoxical consequences. Not to be confused with the Barber paradox.
What the Tortoise Said to Achilles: "Whatever Logic is good enough to tell me is worth writing down...," also known as Carroll's paradox, not to be confused with the physical paradox of the same name.
Catch-22: A situation in which someone is in need of something that can only be had by not being in need of it.
Drinker paradox: In any pub there is a customer who, if they drink, everybody in the pub drinks.
Paradox of entailment: Inconsistent premises always make an argument valid.
Lottery paradox: There is one winning ticket in a large lottery. It is reasonable to believe of a particular lottery ticket that it is not the winning ticket, since the probability that it is the winner is so very small, but it is not reasonable to believe that no lottery ticket will win.
Raven paradox (or Hempel's Ravens): Observing a green apple increases the likelihood of all ravens being black.
Ross's paradox: Disjunction introduction poses a problem for imperative inference by seemingly permitting arbitrary imperatives to be inferred.
Unexpected hanging paradox: The day of the hanging will be a surprise, so it cannot happen at all, so it will be a surprise. The surprise examination and Bottle Imp paradox use similar logic
Self-reference[edit]
These paradoxes have in common a contradiction arising from self-reference.
Barber paradox: A barber (who is a man) shaves all and only those men who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself? (Russell's popularization of his set theoretic paradox.)
Berry paradox: The phrase "the first number not nameable in under ten words" appears to name it in nine words.
Crocodile dilemma: If a crocodile steals a child and promises its return if the father can correctly guess exactly what the crocodile will do, how should the crocodile respond in the case that the father correctly guesses that the child will not be returned?
Paradox of the Court: A law student agrees to pay his teacher after winning his first case. The teacher then sues the student (who has not yet won a case) for payment.
Curry's paradox: "If this sentence is true, then Santa Claus exists."
Epimenides paradox: A Cretan says: "All Cretans are liars". This paradox works in mainly the same way as the Liar paradox.
Exception paradox: "If there is an exception to every rule, then every rule must have at least one exception; the exception to this one being that it has no exception." "There's always an exception to the rule, except to the exception of the rule—which is, in of itself, an accepted exception of the rule." "In a world with no rules, there should be at least one rule - a rule against rules."
Grelling–Nelson paradox: Is the word "heterological", meaning "not applicable to itself", a heterological word? (Another close relative of Russell's paradox.)
Kleene–Rosser paradox: By formulating an equivalent to Richard's paradox, untyped lambda calculus is shown to be inconsistent.
Liar paradox: "This sentence is false." This is the canonical self-referential paradox. Also "Is the answer to this question no?", "I'm lying", And "Everything I say is a lie."
Card paradox: "The next statement is true. The previous statement is false." A variant of the liar paradox that does not use self-reference.
The Pinocchio paradox: What would happen if Pinocchio said "My nose will be growing"?[1]
Quine's paradox: "'Yields a falsehood when appended to its own quotation' yields a falsehood when appended to its own quotation." Shows that a sentence can be paradoxical even if it is not self-referring and does not use demonstratives or indexicals.
Yablo's paradox: An ordered infinite sequence of sentences, each of which says that all following sentences are false. Uses neither self-reference nor circular reference.
Opposite Day: "It is opposite day today." Therefore it is not opposite day, but if you say it is a normal day it would be considered a normal day.
Petronius's paradox: "Moderation in all things, including moderation" (unsourced quotation sometimes attributed to Petronius).
Richard's paradox: We appear to be able to use simple English to define a decimal expansion in a way that is self-contradictory.
Russell's paradox: Does the set of all those sets that do not contain themselves contain itself?
Socratic paradox: "I know that I know nothing at all."
Vagueness[edit]
Ship of Theseus (a.k.a. George Washington's axe or Grandfather's old axe): It seems like you can replace any component of a ship, and it is still the same ship. So you can replace them all, one at a time, and it is still the same ship. However, you can then take all the original pieces, and assemble them into a ship. That, too, is the same ship you began with.
Sorites paradox (also known as the paradox of the heap): If you remove a single grain of sand from a heap, you still have a heap. Keep removing single grains, and the heap will disappear. Can a single grain of sand make the difference between heap and non-heap?
Mathematics[edit]

See also: Category:Mathematics paradoxes and Paradoxes of set theory
All horses are the same color: A proof by induction that all horses have the same color.
Cramer's paradox: The number of points of intersection of two higher-order curves can be greater than the number of arbitrary points needed to define one such curve.
Elevator paradox: Elevators can seem to be mostly going in one direction, as if they were being manufactured in the middle of the building and being disassembled on the roof and basement.
Interesting number paradox: The first number that can be considered "dull" rather than "interesting" becomes interesting because of that fact.
Nontransitive dice: You can have three dice, called A, B, and C, such that A is likely to win in a roll against B, B is likely to win in a roll against C, and C is likely to win in a roll against A.
Potato paradox: If you let potatos consisting of 99% water dry so that they are 98% water, they lose 50% of their weight.
Russell's paradox: Does the set of all those sets that do not contain themselves contain itself?
Statistics[edit]
See also: Category:Statistical paradoxes
Abelson's paradox: Effect size may not be indicative of practical meaning.
Accuracy paradox: Predictive models with a given level of accuracy may have greater predictive power than models with higher accuracy.
Benford's Law: Numbers starting with early digits appear disproportionately often in seemingly random data sets.
Berkson's paradox: A complicating factor arising in statistical tests of proportions.
Freedman's paradox Describes a problem in model selection where predictor variables with no explanatory power can appear artificially important.
Friendship paradox: For almost everyone, their friends have more friends than they do.
Inspection paradox: Why one will wait longer for a bus than one should.
Lindley's paradox: Tiny errors in the null hypothesis are magnified when large data sets are analyzed, leading to false but highly statistically significant results.
Low birth weight paradox: Low birth weight and mothers who smoke contribute to a higher mortality rate. Babies of smokers have lower average birth weight, but low birth weight babies born to smokers have a lower mortality rate than other low birth weight babies. This is a special case of Simpson's paradox.
Simpson's paradox, or the Yule–Simpson effect: A trend that appears in different groups of data disappears when these groups are combined, and the reverse trend appears for the aggregate data.
Will Rogers phenomenon: The mathematical concept of an average, whether defined as the mean or median, leads to apparently paradoxical results—for example, it is possible that moving an entry from an encyclopedia to a dictionary would increase the average entry length on both books.
Probability[edit]


The Monty Hall problem: which door do you choose?
See also: Category:Probability theory paradoxes
Bertrand's box paradox: A paradox of conditional probability closely related to the Boy or Girl paradox.
Bertrand's paradox: Different common-sense definitions of randomness give quite different results.
Birthday paradox: What is the chance that two people in a room have the same birthday?
Borel's paradox: Conditional probability density functions are not invariant under coordinate transformations.
Boy or Girl paradox: A two-child family has at least one boy. What is the probability that it has a girl?
False positive paradox: A test that is accurate the vast majority of the time could show you have a disease, but the probability that you actually have it could still be tiny.
Grice's paradox: Shows that the exact meaning of statements involving conditionals and probabilities is more complicated than may be obvious on casual examination.
Monty Hall problem: An unintuitive consequence of conditional probability.
Necktie Paradox: A wager between two people seems to favour them both. Very similar in essence to the Two-envelope paradox.
Proebsting's paradox: The Kelly criterion is an often optimal strategy for maximizing profit in the long run. Proebsting's paradox apparently shows that the Kelly criterion can lead to ruin.
Sleeping Beauty problem: A probability problem that can be correctly answered as one half or one third depending on how the question is approached.
Three cards problem: When pulling a random card, how do you determine the color of the underside?
Three Prisoners problem: A variation of the Monty Hall problem.
Two-envelope paradox: You are given two indistinguishable envelopes, each of which contains a positive sum of money. One envelope contains twice as much as the other. You may pick one envelope and keep whatever amount it contains. You pick one envelope at random but before you open it you are given the chance to take the other envelope instead
Infinity and infinitesimals[edit]
Burali-Forti paradox: If the ordinal numbers formed a set, it would be an ordinal number that is smaller than itself.
Cantor's paradox: There is no greatest cardinal number.
Galileo's paradox: Though most numbers are not squares, there are no more numbers than squares. (See also Cantor's diagonal argument)
Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel: If a hotel with infinitely many rooms is full, it can still take in more guests.
Russell's paradox: Does the set of all those sets that do not contain themselves contain itself?
Skolem's paradox: Countably infinite models of set theory contain uncountably infinite sets.
Zeno's paradoxes: "You will never reach point B from point A as you must always get half-way there, and half of the half, and half of that half, and so on." (This is also a physical paradox.)
Supertasks may result in paradoxes such as
Benardete's paradox: Apparently, a man can be "forced to stay where he is by the mere unfulfilled intentions of the gods".
Ross-Littlewood paradox: After alternatively adding and removing balls to a vase infinitely often, how many balls remain?
Thomson's lamp: After flicking a lamp on and off infinitely often, is it on or off?
Geometry and topology[edit]


The Banach–Tarski paradox: A ball can be decomposed and reassembled into two balls the same size as the original.
Banach–Tarski paradox: Cut a ball into a finite number of pieces, re-assemble the pieces to get two balls, both of equal size to the first. The von Neumann paradox is a two-dimensional analogue.
Paradoxical set: A set that can be partitioned into two sets, each of which is equivalent to the original.
Coastline paradox: the perimeter of a landmass is in general ill-defined.
Gabriel's Horn or Torricelli's trumpet: A simple object with finite volume but infinite surface area. Also, the Mandelbrot set and various other fractals are covered by a finite area, but have an infinite perimeter (in fact, there are no two distinct points on the boundary of the Mandelbrot set that can be reached from one another by moving a finite distance along that boundary, which also implies that in a sense you go no further if you walk "the wrong way" around the set to reach a nearby point). This can be represented by a Klein bottle.
Hausdorff paradox: There exists a countable subset C of the sphere S such that S\C is equidecomposable with two copies of itself.
Missing square puzzle: Two similar-looking figures appear to have different areas while built from the same pieces.
Nikodym set: A set contained in and with the same Lebesgue measure as the unit square, yet for every one of its points there is a straight line intersecting the Nikodym set only in that point.
Smale's paradox: A sphere can, topologically, be turned inside out.
Decision theory[edit]

Abilene paradox: People can make decisions based not on what they actually want to do, but on what they think that other people want to do, with the result that everybody decides to do something that nobody really wants to do, but only what they thought that everybody else wanted to do.
Apportionment paradox: Some systems of apportioning representation can have unintuitive results due to rounding
Alabama paradox: Increasing the total number of seats might shrink one block's seats.
New states paradox: Adding a new state or voting block might increase the number of votes of another.
Population paradox: A fast-growing state can lose votes to a slow-growing state.
Arrow's paradox: Given more than two choices, no system can have all the attributes of an ideal voting system at once.
Buridan's ass: How can a rational choice be made between two outcomes of equal value?
Chainstore paradox: Even those who know better play the so-called chain store game in an irrational manner.
Decision-making paradox: Selecting the best decision-making method is a decision problem in itself.
Fenno's paradox: The belief that people generally disapprove of the United States Congress as a whole, but support the Congressman from their own Congressional district.
Green paradox: Policies intending to reduce future CO2 emissions may lead to increased emissions in the present.
Inventor's paradox: It is easier to solve a more general problem that covers the specifics of the sought-after solution.
Kavka's toxin puzzle: Can one intend to drink the non-deadly toxin, if the intention is the only thing needed to get the reward?
Morton's fork: Choosing between unpalatable alternatives.
Navigation paradox: Increased navigational precision may result in increased collision risk.
Newcomb's paradox: How do you play a game against an omniscient opponent?
Paradox of hedonism: When one pursues happiness itself, one is miserable; but, when one pursues something else, one achieves happiness.
Paradox of tolerance: Should one tolerate intolerance if intolerance would destroy the possibility of tolerance?
Paradox of voting: Also known as the Downs paradox. For a rational, self-interested voter the costs of voting will normally exceed the expected benefits, so why do people keep voting?
Parrondo's paradox: It is possible to play two losing games alternately to eventually win.
Prevention paradox: For one person to benefit, many people have to change their behavior — even though they receive no benefit, or even suffer, from the change.
Prisoner's dilemma: Two people might not cooperate even if it is in both their best interests to do so.
Relevance paradox: Sometimes relevant information is not sought out because its relevance only becomes clear after the information is available.
Voting paradox: Also known as Condorcet's paradox and paradox of voting. A group of separately rational individuals may have preferences that are irrational in the aggregate.
Willpower as a paradox: Those who kept their minds open were more goal-directed and more motivated than those who declared their objective to themselves.
Physics[edit]

For more details on this topic, see Physical paradox.


Robert Boyle's self-flowing flask fills itself in this diagram, but perpetual motion machines cannot exist.
Cool tropics paradox: A contradiction between modelled estimates of tropical temperatures during warm, ice-free periods of the Cretaceous and Eocene, and the colder temperatures that proxies suggest were present.
The holographic principle: The amount of information that can be stored in a given volume is not proportional to the volume but to the area that bounds that volume.
Irresistible force paradox: What would happen if an unstoppable force hit an immovable object?
Astrophysics[edit]
Algol paradox: In some binaries the partners seem to have different ages, even though they're thought to have formed at the same time.
Faint young Sun paradox: The apparent contradiction between observations of liquid water early in the Earth's history and the astrophysical expectation that the output of the young sun would have been insufficient to melt ice on earth.
The GZK paradox: High-energy cosmic rays have been observed that seem to violate the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit, which is a consequence of special relativity.
Classical mechanics[edit]
Archer's paradox: An archer must, in order to hit his target, not aim directly at it, but slightly to the side.
Archimedes paradox: A massive battleship can float in a few litres of water.
Aristotle's wheel paradox: Rolling joined concentric wheels seem to trace the same distance with their circumferences, even though the circumferences are different.
Carroll's paradox: The angular momentum of a stick should be zero, but is not.
D'Alembert's paradox: Flow of an inviscid fluid produces no net force on a solid body.
Denny's paradox: Surface-dwelling arthropods (such as the water strider) should not be able to propel themselves horizontally.
Elevator paradox: Even though hydrometers are used to measure fluid density, a hydrometer will not indicate changes of fluid density caused by changing atmospheric pressure.
Feynman sprinkler: Which way does a sprinkler rotate when submerged in a tank and made to suck in the surrounding fluid?
Hydrostatic paradox: Any quantity of liquid, however small, may be made to support any weight, however large.
Painlevé paradox: Rigid-body dynamics with contact and friction is inconsistent.
Tea leaf paradox: When a cup of tea is stirred, the leaves assemble in the center, even though centrifugal force pushes them outward.
Cosmology[edit]
Bentley's paradox: In a Newtonian universe, gravitation should pull all matter into a single point.
Fermi paradox: If there are, as probability would suggest, many other sentient species in the Universe, then where are they? Shouldn't their presence be obvious?
Heat death paradox: Since the universe is not infinitely old, it cannot be infinite in extent.
Olbers' paradox: Why is the night sky black if there is an infinity of stars?
Electromagnetism[edit]
Faraday paradox: An apparent violation of Faraday's law of electromagnetic induction.
Quantum mechanics[edit]
Bell's theorem: Why do measured quantum particles not satisfy mathematical probability theory?
Double-slit experiment: Matter and energy can act as a wave or as a particle depending on the experiment.
Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox: Can far away events influence each other in quantum mechanics?
Extinction paradox: In the small wavelength limit, the total scattering cross section of an impenetrable sphere is twice its geometrical cross-sectional area (which is the value obtained in classical mechanics).[2]
Hardy's paradox: How can we make inferences about past events that we haven't observed while at the same time acknowledge that the act of observing it affects the reality we are inferring to?
Klein paradox: When the potential of a potential barrier becomes similar to the mass of the impinging particle, it becomes transparent.
The Mott problem: spherically symmetric wave functions, when observed, produce linear particle tracks.
Quantum LC circuit paradox: Energies stored on capacitance and inductance are not equal to the ground state energy of the quantum oscillator.[citation needed]
Quantum pseudo-telepathy: Two players who can not communicate accomplish tasks that seemingly require direct contact.
Schrödinger's cat paradox: According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, a cat could be simultaneously alive and dead, as long as we don't look.
Uncertainty principle: Attempts to determine position must disturb momentum, and vice versa.
Relativity[edit]
Bell's spaceship paradox: concerning relativity.
Black hole information paradox: Black holes violate a commonly assumed tenet of science — that information cannot be destroyed.
Ehrenfest paradox: On the kinematics of a rigid, rotating disk.
Ladder paradox: A classic relativity problem.
Mocanu's velocity composition paradox: a paradox in special relativity.
Supplee's paradox: the buoyancy of a relativistic object (such as a bullet) appears to change when the reference frame is changed from one in which the bullet is at rest to one in which the fluid is at rest.
Trouton-Noble or Right-angle lever paradox: Does a torque arise in static systems when changing frames?
Twin paradox: The theory of relativity predicts that a person making a round trip will return younger than his or her identical twin who stayed at home.
Thermodynamics[edit]
Gibbs paradox: In an ideal gas, is entropy an extensive variable?
Loschmidt's paradox: Why is there an inevitable increase in entropy when the laws of physics are invariant under time reversal? The time reversal symmetry of physical laws appears to contradict the second law of thermodynamics.
Maxwell's Demon: The second law of thermodynamics seems to be violated by a cleverly operated trapdoor.[3]
Mpemba effect: Hot water can, under certain conditions, freeze faster than cold water, even though it must pass the lower temperature on the way to freezing.
Biology[edit]

Antarctic paradox: In some areas of the oceans, phytoplankton concentrations are low despite there apparently being sufficient nutrients.
C-value enigma: Genome size does not correlate with organismal complexity. For example, some unicellular organisms have genomes much larger than that of humans.
Cole's paradox: Even a tiny fecundity advantage of one additional offspring would favor the evolution of semelparity.
French paradox: The observation that the French suffer a relatively low incidence of coronary heart disease, despite having a diet relatively rich in saturated fats.
Glucose paradox: The large amount of glycogen in the liver cannot be explained by its small glucose absorption.
Gray's paradox: Despite their relatively small muscle mass, dolphins can swim at high speeds and obtain large accelerations.
Hispanic paradox: The finding that Hispanics in the U.S. tend to have substantially better health than the average population in spite of what their aggregate socio-economic indicators predict.
Lombard's paradox: When rising to stand from a sitting or squatting position, both the hamstrings and quadriceps contract at the same time, despite their being antagonists to each other.
Meditation paradox: The amplitude of heart rate oscillations during meditation was significantly greater than in the pre-meditation control state and also in three non-meditation control groups[4]
Mexican paradox: Mexican children tend to have higher birth weights than can be expected from their socio-economic status.
Paradox of enrichment: Increasing the food available to an ecosystem may lead to instability, and even to extinction.
Paradox of the pesticides: Applying pesticide to a pest may increase the pest's abundance.
Paradox of the plankton: Why are there so many different species of phytoplankton, even though competition for the same resources tends to reduce the number of species?
Peto's paradox: Humans get cancer with high frequency, while larger mammals, like whales, do not. If cancer is essentially a negative outcome lottery at the cell level, and larger organisms have more cells, and thus more potentially cancerous cell divisions, one would expect larger organisms to be more predisposed to cancer.
Pulsus paradoxus: Sometimes it is possible to hear, with a stethoscope, heartbeats that cannot be felt at the wrist. Also known as the Pulse Paradox.[5]
Sherman paradox: An anomalous pattern of inheritance in the fragile X syndrome.
Temporal paradox (paleontology): When did the ancestors of birds live?
Chemistry[edit]

Faraday paradox (electrochemistry): Diluted nitric acid will corrode steel, while concentrated nitric acid doesn't.
Levinthal paradox: The length of time that it takes for a protein chain to find its folded state is many orders of magnitude shorter than it would be if it freely searched all possible configurations.
SAR paradox: Exceptions to the principle that a small change in a molecule causes a small change in its chemical behaviour are frequently profound.
Time[edit]

Bootstrap paradox: Can a time traveler send himself information with no outside source?
Polchinski's paradox: A billiard ball can be thrown into a wormhole in a way that it would emerge in the past and knock its incoming past self away from the wormhole entrace, creating a variant of the grandfather paradox.
Predestination paradox:[6] A man travels back in time to discover the cause of a famous fire. While in the building where the fire started, he accidentally knocks over a kerosene lantern and causes a fire, the same fire that would inspire him, years later, to travel back in time. The bootstrap paradox is closely tied to this, in which, as a result of time travel, information or objects appear to have no beginning.
Temporal paradox: What happens when a time traveler does things in the past that prevent him from doing them in the first place?
Grandfather paradox: You travel back in time and kill your grandfather before he conceives one of your parents, which precludes your own conception and, therefore, you couldn't go back in time and kill your grandfather.
Hitler's murder paradox: You travel back in time and kill a famous person in history before they become famous; but if the person had never been famous then he could not have been targeted as a famous person.
Philosophy[edit]

Paradox of analysis: It seems that no conceptual analysis can both meet the requirement of correctness and of informativeness.
Buridan's bridge: Will Plato throw Socrates into the water or not?
Paradox of fiction: How people can experience strong emotions from purely fictional things?
Fitch's paradox: If all truths are knowable, then all truths must in fact be known.
Paradox of free will: If God knew how we will decide when he created us, how can there be free will?
Goodman's paradox: Why can induction be used to confirm that things are "green", but not to confirm that things are "grue"?
Paradox of hedonism: In seeking happiness, one does not find happiness.
Hutton's Paradox: If asking oneself "Am I dreaming?" in a dream proves that one is, what does it prove in waking life?
Liberal paradox: "Minimal Liberty" is incompatible with Pareto optimality.
Meno's paradox (Learning paradox): A man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know.
Mere addition paradox, also known as Parfit's paradox: Is a large population living a barely tolerable life better than a small, happy population?
Moore's paradox: "It's raining, but I don't believe that it is."
Newcomb's paradox: A paradoxical game between two players, one of whom can predict the actions of the other.
Paradox of nihilism: Several distinct paradoxes share this name.
Omnipotence paradox: Can an omnipotent being create a rock too heavy for itself to lift?
Preface paradox: The author of a book may be justified in believing that all his statements in the book are correct, at the same time believing that at least one of them is incorrect.
Problem of evil (Epicurean paradox): The existence of evil seems to be incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect God.
Rule-following paradox: Even though rules are intended to determine actions, "no course of action could be determined by a rule, because any course of action can be made out to accord with the rule".
When a white horse is not a horse: White horses are not horses because white and horse talk about different things.
Zeno's paradoxes: "You will never reach point B from point A as you must always get half-way there, and half of the half, and half of that half, and so on ..." (This is also a paradox of the infinite)
Mysticism[edit]

Tzimtzum: In Kabbalah, how to reconcile self-awareness of finite Creation with Infinite Divine source, as an emanated causal chain would seemingly nullify existence. Luria's initial withdrawal of God in Hasidic panentheism involves simultaneous illusionism of Creation (Upper Unity) and self-aware existence (Lower Unity), God encompassing logical opposites.
Economics[edit]

See also: Category:Economics paradoxes
Allais paradox: A change in a possible outcome that is shared by different alternatives affects people's choices among those alternatives, in contradiction with expected utility theory.
Arrow information paradox: To sell information you need to give it away before the sale.
Bertrand paradox: Two players reaching a state of Nash equilibrium both find themselves with no profits.
Braess's paradox: Adding extra capacity to a network can reduce overall performance.
Deaton paradox: Consumption varies surprisingly smoothly despite sharp variations in income.
Demographic-economic paradox: nations or subpopulations with higher GDP per capita are observed to have fewer children, even though a richer population can support more children.
Downs–Thomson paradox: Increasing road capacity at the expense of investments in public transport can make overall congestion on the road worse.
Easterlin paradox: For countries with income sufficient to meet basic needs, the reported level of happiness does not correlate with national income per person.
Edgeworth paradox: With capacity constraints, there may not be an equilibrium.
Ellsberg paradox: People exhibit ambiguity aversion (as distinct from risk aversion), in contradiction with expected utility theory.
European paradox: The perceived failure of European countries to translate scientific advances into marketable innovations.
Gibson's paradox: Why were interest rates and prices correlated?
Giffen paradox: Increasing the price of bread makes poor people eat more of it.
Icarus paradox: Some businesses bring about their own downfall through their own successes.
Jevons paradox: Increases in efficiency lead to even larger increases in demand.
Leontief paradox: Some countries export labor-intensive commodities and import capital-intensive commodities, in contradiction with Heckscher–Ohlin theory.
Lucas paradox: Capital is not flowing from developed countries to developing countries despite the fact that developing countries have lower levels of capital per worker, and therefore higher returns to capital.
Mandeville's paradox: Actions that may be vicious to individuals may benefit society as a whole.
Mayfield's paradox: Keeping everyone out of an information system is impossible, but so is getting everybody in.
Metzler paradox: The imposition of a tariff on imports may reduce the relative internal price of that good.
Paradox of prosperity: Why do generations that significantly improve the economic climate seem to generally rear a successor generation that consumes rather than produces?
Paradox of thrift: If everyone saves more money during times of recession, then aggregate demand will fall and will in turn lower total savings in the population.
Paradox of toil: If everyone tries to work during times of recession, lower wages will reduce prices, leading to more deflationary expectations, leading to further thrift, reducing demand and thereby reducing employment.
Paradox of value, also known as diamond-water paradox: Water is more useful than diamonds, yet is a lot cheaper.
Productive failure: Providing less guidance and structure and thereby causing more failure is likely to promote better learning.[7]
Productivity paradox (also known as Solow computer paradox): Worker productivity may go down, despite technological improvements.
Scitovsky paradox: Using the Kaldor–Hicks criterion, an allocation A may be more efficient than allocation B, while at the same time B is more efficient than A.
Service recovery paradox: Successfully fixing a problem with a defective product may lead to higher consumer satisfaction than in the case where no problem occurred at all.
St. Petersburg paradox: People will only offer a modest fee for a reward of infinite expected value.
Paradox of Plenty: The Paradox of Plenty (resource curse) refers to the paradox that countries and regions with an abundance of natural resources, specifically point-source non-renewable resources like minerals and fuels, tend to have less economic growth and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources.
Tullock paradox: Bribing politicians costs less than one would expect, considering how much profit it can yield.
Perception[edit]

For more details on this topic, see Perceptual paradox.
Tritone paradox: An auditory illusion in which a sequentially played pair of Shepard tones is heard as ascending by some people and as descending by others.
Blub paradox: Cognitive lock of some experienced programmers that prevents them from properly evaluating the quality of programming languages which they do not know.[8]
Politics[edit]

Stability-instability paradox: When two countries each have nuclear weapons, the probability of a direct war between them greatly decreases, but the probability of minor or indirect conflicts between them increases.
History[edit]

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: We learn from history that we do not learn from history.[9] (paraphrased)
Psychology[edit]

Region-beta paradox: People can sometimes recover more quickly from more intense emotions or pain than from less distressing experiences.
Self-absorption paradox: The contradictory association whereby higher levels of self-awareness are simultaneously associated with higher levels of psychological distress and with psychological well-being.[10]
Miscellaneous[edit]

Absence paradox: No one is ever "here".
Ant on a rubber rope: An ant crawling on a rubber rope can reach the end if when the rope stretches much faster than the ant can crawl.
The Antitrust Paradox: A book arguing that antitrust enforcement artificially raised prices by protecting inefficient competitors from competition.
Bonini's paradox: Models or simulations that explain the workings of complex systems are seemingly impossible to construct. As a model of a complex system becomes more complete, it becomes less understandable, for it to be more understandable it must be less complete and therefore less accurate. When the model becomes accurate, it is just as difficult to understand as the real-world processes it represents.
Bracketing paradox: Is an "historical linguist" a linguist who is historical, or someone who studies "historical linguistics"?
Buttered cat paradox: Humorous example of a paradox from contradicting proverbs.
Code-talker paradox: How can a language both enable communication and block communication?
Gender paradox: Women conform more closely than men to sociolinguistics norms that are overtly prescribed, but conform less than men when they are not.
Intentionally blank page: Many documents contain pages on which the text "This page is intentionally left blank" is printed, thereby making the page not blank.
Moral paradox: A situation in which moral imperatives clash without clear resolution.
Moravec's paradox: Logical thought is hard for humans and easy for computers, but picking a screw from a box of screws is an unsolved problem.
Movement paradox: In transformational linguistics, there are pairs of sentences in which the sentence without movement is ungrammatical while the sentence with movement is not.
Observer's paradox: The outcome of an event or experiment is influenced by the presence of the observer.
The Paradox of Anti-Semitism: A book arguing that the lack of external persecutions and antagonisms results in the dissolution of Jewish identity, a theory that resonates in works of Dershowitz and Sartre.
Stapp's Ironical Paradox: "The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment an incredible miracle."
Status paradox: Several paradoxes involve the concept of medical or social status.
Stockdale paradox: "You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."
See also[edit]

Portal icon Logic portal
Auto-antonym: A word that is encoded with opposing meanings.
Absurdity
Excusable negligence: If a behavior is excusable, it is not negligence.
Godel's incompleteness theorems and Tarski's indefinability theorem
Ignore all rules: To obey this rule, it is necessary to ignore it.
Impossible object: A type of optical illusion.
Invalid proof: An apparently correct mathematical derivation that leads to an obvious contradiction.
Logical fallacy: A misconception resulting from incorrect reasoning in argumentation.
Paradox gun: A gun that has characteristics of both (smoothbore) shotguns and rifles.
Paradoxical laughter: Inappropriate laughter, often recognized as such by the laughing person.
Performative contradiction: Some statements contradict the conditions that allow them to be be stated.
Proof that 0.999... equals 1
Puzzle
Self-refuting idea
Theories of humor: Incongruity theory and the Ridiculous.

When Moses received stone tablets on Mount Sinai inscribed with writings made by a divine being, he actually received two separate sets of tablets. 1

The first set of stone tablets was not inscribed with the Ten Commandments. Rather, they contained aphorisms of a Higher Law that held very profound and deep meanings. During his life, Moses had been initiated into an understanding of the inner, esoteric source of these aphorisms -- aphorisms that outlined principles underlying Creation and all of nature. 2

When Moses returned from Mount Sinai with the first set of tablets containing the aphorisms, he observed the immature behavior and attitude of the Israelites. Moses realized they were incapable of understanding the principles of Creation and were in no way ready for them. So Moses destroyed the stone tablets and revealed the aphorisms to a select few. 3 4


Moses returned to Mount Sinai and received a second set of tablets, tablets inscribed with lower laws that were more readily and easily understood by the Israelites. Upon those tablets were inscribed the Ten Commandments, basic laws that would provide a means for the Israelites to guide and develop themselves. 4

Today, just as then, many people are not ready to understand the aphorisms carved on those first tablets. The lower law of the Ten Commandments continues to provide a useful guide for those that understand them. Nevertheless, there are others who have developed to a point they are ready to examine and understand the aphorisms and principles of Creation. These aphorisms are the principles upon which the Summum philosophy is based. The aphorisms are the Principles of Summum and are the Principles of Creation.
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Vrilology is the practice of harnessing the Life Force that we share with the Gods, which we call, Vril, through the practice of Seither and Galdor sciences. Vrilology is the lost science that was given to our most ancient ancestors by the
Gods, so that they could master the world they lived within, and transform themselves into a race of God-men, about 9,000 years ago. This civilization was located on the shores of the ancient Black Sea. It grew into the lost civilization of
original Aryans, who were the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans. The Aryans misused this science and caused an ecological imbalance in the world climate. They lost most of the knowledge of Vrilology after their civilization was destroyed in
a the great flood, resulting from the melting of the ice caps, and raising the water levels of the oceans. This caused the land bridge between Europe and Asia Minor, to collapse and in turn, caused the Black Sea to rise 300 feet and swept
away that lost civilization, which is remembered in our myths as both the Great Biblical Floor and the lost civilization of Atlantis.

WHAT DOES THE WORD VRILOLOGY MEAN?

It means, "the science of the Vril." It is a collection of knowledge on how to harness the power of the Vril and use it to transform ourselves, our lives and the world around us.

WHAT IS VRIL?

Nālandā (Hindi/Sanskrit/Pali: नालंदा) is the name of an ancient center of higher learning in Bihar, India. The site of Nalanda is located in the Indian state of Bihar, about 55 miles south east of Patna, and was a Buddhist center of learning from 427 to 1197 CE. It has been called "one of the first great universities in recorded history". Some buildings were constructed by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka the Great (273–232 BCE) which is an indication of an early establishment of the Buddhist learning center Nalanda. The Gupta Empire also patronized some monasteries. According to historians, Nalanda flourished between the reign of the Gupta king Śakrāditya (also known as Kumāragupta, reigned 415-55) and 1197 CE, supported by patronage from Buddhist emperors like Harsha as well as later emperors from the Pala Empire. The complex was built with red bricks and its ruins occupy an area of 14 hectares. At its peak, the university attracted scholars and students from as far away as China, Greece, and Persia.Nalanda was sacked by Turkic Muslim invaders under Bakhtiyar Khalji in 1193, a milestone in the decline of Buddhism in India. The great library of Nalanda University was so vast that it is reported to have burned for three months after the Mughals set fire to it, sacked and destroyed the monasteries, and drove the monks from the site. In 2006, Singapore, China, India, Japan, and other nations, announced a proposed plan to restore and revive the ancient site as Nalanda International University

Details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda


Pusphagiri (Also Puspagiri Mahavihara) was one of the earliest buddhist mahavihara spread across Cuttack and Jajpur district, Odisha (ancient Kalinga) in 3rd century AD [1] [2] and flourished until the 11th century in India.[3][4] Today, its ruins lie atop the Langudi hills, low hills about 90 km from the Mahanadi delta, in the Jajpur and Cuttack district in Odisha.[5] The actual mahavihara campus, spread across three hilltops, contained several stupas, monasteries, temples, and sculptures in the architectural style of the Gupta period.[6] The Kelua river, a tributary of the Brahmani river of Odisha flows to the north east of Langudi hills, and must have provided a picturesque background for the mahavihara. The entire mahavihara is distributed across three campuses on top of the three adjoining hills, Lalitgiri, Ratnagiri, and Udayagiri.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puspagiri
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashoka


Ratnagiri: Part of Puphagiri Mahavihara
Puphagiri ranks along with Nalanda, Vikramshila and Takshila universities as one of the primary institutions of higher learning in ancient India. The three universities were mentioned in the travelogues of the famous Chinese traveller Xuanzang (Huien Tsang), who visited it in 639 CE, as Puphagiri Mahavihara,[7][8] as well as in medieval Tibetan texts.
_______
Nalanda University (Skt. Nālandā, Tib. ནཱ་ལེནྡྲ་) was the largest and most famous of the ancient Indian monastic universities, and is associated with some of the greatest figures in Mahayana Buddhism. In its heyday, it was home to some ten thousand students who gained admission only after successfully answering a serious of philosophical questions put to them by scholar-gatekeepers. It is located in what is now the state of Bihar, India.

Nalanda is mentioned in the sutras as a place where the Buddha often taught. Although some viharas may have been built on the site in the centuries after the Buddha's parinirvana, it is now generally agreed that the founding of the great university dates back to the reign of the Gupta king Kumaragupta I, who ruled from 415 to 455 and is referred to as Shakraditya (Śakrāditya) in many sources.[1] Several monasteries were constructed on the site during the Gupta period, and at some point, possibly during the sixth century, they were enclosed within a wall with a single gate. By the time the Chinese pilgrim Hsüan-tsang visited in the seventh century, entrance to the university could only be gained by those who passed the admission test put to them by learned gatekeepers. Hsüan-tsang stayed for a period of about six years, during which he studied Yogachara philosophy. I-tsing (635-713), another Chinese pilgrim, who visited after Hsüan-tsang and stayed for about ten years, reports that there were about 3500 monks in residence at that time.
The biography of Chak Lotsawa explains how he visited the site, then largely in ruins, in 1235 AD. While there, he studied with the master Rahula Shribhadra, a specialist in Sanskrit grammar who was in his nineties and was teaching a class of about seventy students. The biography includes a moving account of how, on one occasion, the lotsawa was forced to carry his aged teacher on his back in order to flee a band of 300 Muslim soldiers after everyone else had fled the monastery.
Buildings

The lecture halls cover many acres of land lined up along a long road that divides the teaching area from the adjoining temples. Along the edge of each lecture hall were rooms for the monks and their teachers. What remains is for the most part no more than several meters high, but the plan of the monasteries is still clearly in evidence.
Stupa of Shariputra
One of the most prominent features of the Nalanda University ruins is the stupa built in honor of Shariputra, who, by tradition, was born and also died in the area. Jetsun Taranatha explains that Nalanda is the place where Shariputra was born and attained arhathood. According to a prophecy the Mahayana teachings would spread greatly if they were taught at the place of Shariputra, but if taught at the place of Maudgalyayana although the Buddhists would be very powerful, the teachings would not spread as widely.
Library
The great library of Nalanda University was so vast that it is reported to have burned for three months after the Muslim invaders set fire to it, sacked and destroyed the monasteries, and drove the monks from the site.
Curriculum

The curriculum at Nalanda consisted not only of Hinayana and Mahayana philosophy but also medicine, logic, astrology, and many other subjects as well.
Legacy



Buddha Shakyamuni and the Seventeen Nalanda Masters
Nalendra Monastery, founded by Rongtön Sheja Kunrig in 1436, was named after Nalanda, reflecting a common Tibetan spelling of the word. His Holiness the Dalai Lama rarely starts a teaching without mentioning that it is in the "great tradition of Nalanda University"

_____________
Oldest university on earth is reborn after 800 years

Nalanda, an ancient seat of learning destroyed in 1193, will rise again thanks to a Nobel-winning economist

BY ANDREW BUNCOMBE   Wednesday 04 August 2010

During the six centuries of its storied existence, there was nothing else quite like Nalanda University. Probably the first-ever large educational establishment, the college – in what is now eastern India – even counted the Buddha among its visitors and alumni. At its height, it had 10,000 students, 2,000 staff and strove for both understanding and academic excellence. Today, this much-celebrated centre of Buddhist learning is in ruins.

After a period during which the influence and importance of Buddhism in India declined, the university was sacked in 1193 by a Turkic general, apparently incensed that its library may not have contained a copy of the Koran. The fire is said to have burned and smouldered for several months.

Now this famed establishment of philosophy, mathematics, language and even public health is poised to be revived. A beguiling and ambitious plan to establish an international university with the same overarching vision as Nalanda – and located alongside its physical ruins – has been spearheaded by a team of international experts and leaders, among them the Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen. This week, legislation that will enable the building of the university to proceed is to be placed before the Indian parliament.

"Advaita" (Sanskrit: not-two) = ood..dai..to

Advaita ("non-dualism") is often called a monistic system of thought. The word "Advaita" essentially refers to the identity of the Self (Atman) and the Whole (Brahman[43]). Advaita Vedanta says the one unchanging entity (Brahman) alone exists, and that changing entities do not have absolute existence, much as the ocean's waves have no existence in separation from the ocean. Brahman is the only truth, the spatio-temporal world is an illusion, and there is ultimately no difference between Brahman and Atman(individual self).

Advaita Vedanta is based on śāstra ("scriptures"), yukti ("reason") and anubhava ("experience"), and aided by karmas ("spiritual practices")

This is the reason why this philosophy is called an experiential philosophy-the underlying tenet being "That thou art", meaning that ultimately there is no difference between the experiencer and the experienced (the world) as well as the universal spirit (Brahman).

Among the followers of Advaita, as well those of other doctrines, there are believed to have appeared Jivanmuktas, ones liberated while alive.( Jivanmukta (derived from the word, Jivanmukti, a combination of Sanskrit words jiva and mukti) is someone who, in the Advaita philosophy of Hinduism, has gained dradh nishthaa, firmly assimilated knowledge of the Self- and is liberated while living in a human body, free from rebirth.)These individuals (commonly called Mahatmas, great souls, among Hindus) are those who realised the oneness of their self and the universal spirit called Brahman. He taught that it was only through direct knowledge that one could realise Brahman. "A perception of the fact that the object seen is a rope will remove the fear and sorrow which result from the illusory idea that it is a serpent"

Adi Shankara's opponents accused him of teaching Buddhism in the garb of Hinduism, because his non-dualistic ideals seemed rather radical to contemporary Hindu philosophy, and so he earned the title "pracchannabauddha". He further praised the Buddha as the "emperor of yogis in the Kali Age."[46] However, although Advaita proposes the theory of Maya, likening the universe to "a trick of a magician", Adi Shankara and his followers see this as a consequence of their basic premise that Brahman alone is real. Their theory of Maya emerges from their belief in experiential reality of the absolute consciousness 'Brahman' (as emphasized in Upanishads), as opposed to Buddhist doctrine of emptiness, which emerges from the Buddhist approach of observing the nature of reality.

Because of his unification of two seemingly disparate philosophical doctrines, Atman and Brahman, Westerners who know about him perceive him as the "St. Thomas Aquinas of Indian thought"[47] and "the most brilliant personality in the history of Indian thought. Even though he lived for only thirty-two years his impact on India and on Hinduism was striking. Adi Shankara, along with Madhva and Ramanuja, was instrumental in the revival of Hinduism. These three teachers formed the doctrines that are followed by their respective sects even today. They have been the most important figures in the recent history of Hindu philosophy.
Towards the end of his life, Adi Shankara travelled to the Himalayan area of Kedarnath-Badrinath and attained videha mukti ("freedom from embodiment").

Regarding meditation, Shankara refuted the system of Yoga and its disciplines as a direct means to attain moksha, rebutting the argument that it can be obtained through concentration of the mind. His position is that the mental states discovered through the practices of Yoga can be indirect aids to the gain of knowledge, but cannot themselves give rise to it. According to his philosophy, knowledge of Brahman springs from inquiry into the words of the Upanishads, and the knowledge of Brahman that shruti provides cannot be obtained in any other way.
This work of Adi Shankara is considered as a good summary of Advaita Vedanta and underscores the view that devotion to God, Govinda, is not only an important part of general spirituality, but the concluding verse drives through the message of Shankara: "Worship Govinda, worship Govinda, worship Govinda, Oh fool! Other than chanting the Lord's names, there is no other way to cross the life's ocean" ( Govinda = Both names translate to "cowherd". Sanskrit go means "cow"; pāla and vinda form tatpurusha compounds, literally translating to "finder of cows" and "protector of cows", respectively. It is cognate with Slavic gowendo "cowherd".)

It says literally 'That thou are'. In other words that Brahman which is the common Reality behind everything in the cosmos is the same as the essential Divinity, namely the Atman, within you. It is this identity which is the grand finale of Upanishadic teaching, according to Advaita. The realisation of this arises only by an intuitive experience and is totally different from any objective experience. It cannot be inferred from some other bit of knowledge. To comprehend the meaning an analysis of the three words in the pronouncement is needed.

neti neti is a Sanskrit expression which means "not this, not this", or "neither this, nor that"

 Tat Tvam Asi, literally "That Thou Art", (Tat = "Divinity", Tvam = "You", Asi = "are") meaning You are (actually) Divinity (who thinks otherwise)

"All you can teach is understanding. The rest comes on its own.".[21]

http://lib.oto-usa.org/libri/liber0220.html

Mathematical fictionalism (or as I'll call it, fictionalism) is best thought of as a reaction to mathematical platonism. Platonism is the view that (a) there exist abstract mathematical objects (i.e., nonspatiotemporal mathematical objects), and (b) our mathematical sentences and theories provide true descriptions of such objects. So, for instance, on the platonist view, the sentence ‘3 is prime’ provides a straightforward description of a certain object—namely, the number 3—in much the same way that the sentence ‘Mars is red’ provides a description of Mars. But whereas Mars is a physical object, the number 3 is (according to platonism) an abstract object. And abstract objects, platonists tell us, are wholly nonphysical, nonmental, nonspatial, nontemporal, and noncausal. Thus, on this view, the number 3 exists independently of us and our thinking, but it does not exist in space or time, it is not a physical or mental object, and it does not enter into causal relations with other objects. This view has been endorsed by Plato, Frege (1884, 1893–1903, 1919), Gödel (1964), and in some of their writings, Russell (1912) and Quine (1948, 1951), not to mention numerous more recent philosophers of mathematics, e.g., Putnam (1971), Parsons (1971), Steiner (1975), Resnik (1997), Shapiro (1997), Hale (1987), Wright (1983), Katz (1998), Zalta (1988), and Colyvan (2001).

Fictionalism, on the other hand, is the view that (a) our mathematical sentences and theories do purport to be about abstract mathematical objects, as platonism suggests, but (b) there are no such things as abstract objects, and so (c) our mathematical theories are not true. Thus, the idea is that sentences like ‘3 is prime’ are false, or untrue, for the same reason that, say, ‘The tooth fairy is generous’ is false or untrue—because just as there is no such person as the tooth fairy, so too there is no such thing as the number 3. It is important to note, however, that despite the name, fictionalist views do not have to involve any very strong claims about the analogy between mathematics and fiction. For instance, there is no claim here that mathematical discourse is a kind of fictional discourse. Thus, fictionalists are not committed to the thesis that there are no important disanalogies between mathematics and fiction. (We will return to this issue below, in section 2.4.) Finally, it should also be noted at the start that fictionalism is a version of mathematical nominalism, the view that there are no such things as mathematical objects.

Fictionalism was first introduced by Field (1980, 1989, 1998). Since then, the view has been developed—in a few different ways—by Balaguer (1996a, 1998a, 2001, 2009), Rosen (2001), Yablo (2002a, 2002b, 2005), Leng (2005a, 2005b, 2010), and Bueno (2009), though as will become clear below, one might question whether Bueno and Yablo are best interpreted as fictionalists. Finally, one might also interpret Melia (2000) as defending a fictionalist view, though he doesn't really commit to this.

The Jacobin Cuckoo, Pied Cuckoo, or Pied Crested Cuckoo (Clamator jacobinus) is a member of the cuckoo order of birds that is found in Africa and Asia. It is partially migratory and in India, it has been considered a harbinger of the Monsoon rains due to the timing of its arrival.[2] It has been associated with a bird in Indian mythology and poetry, known as the Chatak represented as a bird with a beak on its head that waits for rains to quench its thirst.

This species is widely mentioned in ancient Indian poetry as the chātak.[17][18] According to Indian mythology it has a beak atop its head and it thirsts for the rains.[19] The poet Kalidasa used it in his "Meghadoota" as a metaphor for deep yearning and this tradition continues in literary works.[20] Satya Churn Law, however noted that in Bengal, the bird associated with the "chatak" of Sanskrit was the Common Iora unlike the Jacobin Cuckoo suggested by European orientalists. He further noted that a captive Iora that he kept drank water only from dew and spray picked up from plant leaves suggesting that it may have been the basis for the idea that the "chatak" only drank raindrops.[21]

The triad consisting of a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis is called a dialectic. This triad and the term "dialectic" are usually used to describe the thought of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The terms also describe the philosophies of philosopher-economist Karl Marx and Philosopher-Theologian Paul Tillich. And, since the publication of an influential 1959 article by Gustav Mueller [1], almost all of Hegel's interpreters have been eager to reject the earlier belief that Hegel actually used thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectics. Thus, writing in 2007, almost fifty years after Mueller, Verene could write, "No first-rate Hegel scholar speaks of Hegel having a dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis." [2] In 2012, however, Wheat introduced extensive evidence, including twenty-eight dialectics from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and ten from The Philosophy of History, suggesting that Hegel actually did use thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectics. [3]
The dialectic triad is this:
Thesis: A simple verbless concept, usually consisting of only one or two words (e.g., "one"). Contrary to a common misunderstanding, the thesis is not a proposition (a statement affirming or denying something), an assertion, or a detailed argument. Sometimes each of a dialectic's three stages consists of two concepts ("unconscious union" = unconscious + union) rather than one.
Antithesis: Another verbless concept that is the opposite of the thesis (e.g., "many," the opposite of "one"); it is not just something different or a possibly lengthy "reaction" to or refutation of the thesis. When the thesis has two concepts, the antithesis has the two opposite concepts (e.g., conscious + separation; the opposite: unconscious + union).
Synthesis: A third verbless concept that somehow combines the thesis and antithesis into a sort of compromise (e.g., "one composed of many" or, in the two-concepts-per-stage format, "conscious" from the antithesis + "union" from the thesis).

GITANJALI

Song Offerings
A collection of prose translations
made by the author from
the original Bengali
With an introduction by
W. B. YEATS
to WILLIAM ROTHENSTEIN

---

INTRODUCTION
A few days ago I said to a distinguished Bengali doctor of medicine, `I know no German, yet if a translation of a German poet had moved me, I would go to the British Museum and find books in English that would tell me something of his life, and of the history of his thought. But though these prose translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years, I shall not know anything of his life, and of the movements of thought that have made them possible, if some Indian traveller will not tell me.' It seemed to him natural that I should be moved, for he said, `I read Rabindranath every day, to read one line of his is to forget all the troubles of the world.' I said, `An Englishman living in London in the reign of Richard the Second had he been shown translations from Petrarch or from Dante, would have found no books to answer his questions, but would have questioned some Florentine banker or Lombard merchant as I question you. For all I know, so abundant and simple is this poetry, the new renaissance has been born in your country and I shall never know of it except by hearsay.' He answered, `We have other poets, but none that are his equal; we call this the epoch of Rabindranath. No poet seems to me as famous in Europe as he is among us. He is as great in music as in poetry, and his songs are sung from the west of India into Burma wherever Bengali is spoken. He was already famous at nineteen when he wrote his first novel; and plays when he was but little older, are still played in Calcutta. I so much admire the completeness of his life; when he was very young he wrote much of natural objects, he would sit all day in his garden; from his twenty-fifth year or so to his thirty-fifth perhaps, when he had a great sorrow, he wrote the most beautiful love poetry in our language'; and then he said with deep emotion, `words can never express what I owed at seventeen to his love poetry. After that his art grew deeper, it became religious and philosophical; all the inspiration of mankind are in his hymns. He is the first among our saints who has not refused to live, but has spoken out of Life itself, and that is why we give him our love.' I may have changed his well-chosen words in my memory but not his thought. `A little while ago he was to read divine service in one of our churches---we of the Brahma Samaj use your word `church' in English---it was the largest in Calcutta and not only was it crowded, but the streets were all but impassable because of the people.'

Rabindranath Tagore was a global phenomenon, so why is he neglected?
Is his poetry any good? The answer for anyone who can't read Bengali must be: don't know. No translation is up to the job
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/may/07/rabindranath-tagore-why-was-he-neglected

Rabindranath Tagore became the embodiment of how the west wanted to see the east. Photograph: Hulton Archive
Rabindranath Tagore was born 150 years ago today. This weekend festivities and seminars are being held in his honour across the world. In London, the BFI is hosting a season of films inspired by his work; last night his fellow Bengali (and fellow Nobel laureate) Amartya Sen gave a talk at the British Museum; a two-day conference at the University of London will, among other things, examine his legacy in the Netherlands, Poland and Germany.

I consulted two dictionaries of quotations, the Oxford and Penguin, to check the most memorable lines of this poet, novelist, essayist, song and short story writer. Not a single entry. They skipped from Tacitus to Hippolyte Taine as if there was nothing in Tagore's collected works (28 thick books, even with his 2,500 songs published separately) that ever had stuck in anyone's mind, or was so pithily expressed that it deserved to; as if what had come out of Tagore's pen was a kind of oriental ectoplasm, floating high above our materialist western heads, and ungraspable. In fact, I could remember one line clearly enough, and vaguely remember a whole stanza. The first is how he described the Taj Mahal: like "a teardrop on the face of eternity". The second is the inscription Wilfred Owen's mother found in her dead son's pocketbook: "When I go from hence, let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable." But I owe this knowledge to (a) a tourist guide in Agra, and (b) to a biography. Reading Tagore himself had nothing to do with it.

WHAT DOES THE QUR'AN SAY ABOUT THE JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES?

By Samuel Green


On many occasions I have heard Muslims attack the Bible. Some seem keen to slander it anyway they can. But what does the Qur'an say about it? This article examines what the whole Qur'an says about the Jewish and Christian scriptures. The Qur'an used is according to Imam Hafs and translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali (AYA) or Mohammed Pickthall (MP).

Christianity, Judaism and Islam

The Qur'an teaches that Islam is the continued faithful religion in the same line as the Prophets who were before Muhammad: The same religion has He established for you as that which He enjoined on Noah ... and that which We enjoined on Abraham, Moses, and Jesus (42:13 AYA). The result of this view is that the scriptures given by these Prophets are considered to be genuine scriptures from God: But say, "We (Muslims) believe in the Revelation which has come down to us and in that which came down to you (Jews & Christians); our Allah and your Allah is One" (29:46 AYA).

Briffault is known for what is called Briffault's Law:

The female, not the male, determines all the conditions of the animal family. Where the female can derive no benefit from association with the male, no such association takes place. — Robert Briffault,The Mothers, Vol. I, p. 191

Commentary on works[edit]

In 1930, H. L. Mencken wrote the following in his Treatise on the Gods:

Primitive society, like many savage societies of our own time, was probably strictly matriarchal. The mother was the head of the family. ...What masculine authority there was resided in the mother's brother. He was the man of the family, and to him the children yielded respect and obedience. Their father, at best, was simply a pleasant friend who fed them and played with them; at worst, he was an indecent loafer who sponged on the mother. They belonged, not to his family, but to their mother's. As they grew up they joined their uncle's group of hunters, not their father's. This matriarchal organization of the primitive tribe, though it finds obvious evidential support in the habits of higher animals, has been questioned by many anthropologists, but of late one of them, Briffault, demonstrated its high probability in three immense volumes [The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions]. It is hard to escape the cogency of his arguments, for they are based upon an almost overwhelming accumulation of facts. They not only show that, in what we may plausibly assume about the institutions of early man and in what we know positively about the institutions of savages today, the concepts inseparable from a matriarchate color every custom and every idea: they show also that those primeval concepts still condition our own ways of thinking and doing things, so that "the societal characters of the human mind" all seem to go back "to the functions of the female and not to those of the male." Thus it appears that man, in his remote infancy, was by no means the lord of creation that he has since become."[9

Dara Shikoh (1615–1659) was the eldest son of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan and his wife Mumtaz Mahal. His name is from Persian داراشكوه meaning “The possessor of Glory”. He was favoured as a successor by his father and his sister Jahanara Begum, but was defeated by his younger brother Aurangzeb in a bitter struggle for the Mughal throne.

Dara Shikoh was a gentle and pious Sufi intellectual, one of the greatest representatives of that uniquely Indian synthesis sometimes referred to as the “composite culture”. He was an erudite champion of mystical religious speculation (which made him a heretic in the eyes of his more orthodox brother and the coterie around him) and a poetic diviner of syncretic cultural interaction among people of all faiths. Historians have speculated how different India would have been had he prevailed over his less enlightened brother Aurangzeb. Dara was a follower of Lahore’s famous Qadiri Sufi saint Mian Mir, whom he was introduced to by Mullah Shah Badakhshi (Mian Mir’s spiritual disciple and successor). He devoted much effort towards finding a common mystical language between Islam and Hinduism. Towards this goal he translated the Upanishads from its original Sanskrit into Persian so it could be read by Muslim scholars. His translation is often called “Sirre Akbar” or The Greatest Mystery, where he states boldly, in the Introduction, his speculative hypothesis that the work referred to in the Qur’an as the “Kitab al-maknun” or the hidden book is none other than the Upanishads. His most famous work, Majma ul-Bahrain (“The Mingling of the Two Oceans”) was also devoted to finding the commonalities between Sufism and Hindu Monotheism.

Dara's fate was decided by the political threat he posed as a prince popular with the common people – a convocation of nobles and clergy, called by Aurangzeb in response to the perceived danger of insurrection in Delhi, declared him a threat to the public peace and an apostate from Islam.[14] He was assassinated by four of Aurangzeb's henchmen in front of his terrified son on the night of 30 August 1659 (9 September Gregorian

These are the secret° sayings° which the living¹ Yeshua° has spoken, and Didymos Judas Thomas° inscribed them. (¹i.e. resurrected, as in Rev/Ap 1:18; see also Jer 23:18, Mt 13:34, Lk 1:1/8:10/10:21, Jn 21:25; online scan of the papyrus MS; hypertext interlinear of this logion; Gk fragment interlinear of this logion)
1. And he {says¹}: Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings shall not taste death. (Ps 118:17, Isa 25:8, Lk 9:27, Jn 5:24/8:51; Odes of St. Solomon, 26, ‘He who could interpret would be dissolved and would become that which is interpreted’; this is apparently an introductory logion quoting Thomas himself, included [like Jn 21:24] by his own disciples, since it speaks of the following as a collection of sayings; ¹thruout the Greek fragments of Thomas, ‘x says’ is in the present tense—see Henry Barclay Swete [1897];hyperlinear; Gk fragment)
2. Yeshua says: Let him who seeks not cease seeking until he finds; and when he finds he shall be troubled; and having been troubled he shall marvel, and he shall reign over the totality° {and find repose°}.(Gen 1:26, Dan 7:27, Lk 1:29/22:25-30!, Rev/Ap 1:6/3:21/20:4/22:5; =Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, II.9 & V.14; hyperlinear; Gk fragment)
3. Yeshua says: If those who lead you say to you: Behold, the Sovereignty is in the sky°!, then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you: It is in the sea!, then the fish {of the sea} will precede you. But the Sovereignty {of God} is within you and it is without you. {Whoever recognizes° himself shall find it; and when you recognize yourselves} you shall know that you are the Sons of the Living Father. Yet if you do not recognize yourselves, then you are impoverished and you are the impoverishment. (Gen 6:2, Dt 30:11-14, Hos 1:10, Zac 12:1, Mal 2:10, Lk 11:41/17:21, Th 89, Plato's Philebus, 48c/63c; hyperlinear; Gk fragment)
4. Yeshua says: The person old in days will not hesitate to ask a little child of seven days concerning the place of life—and he shall live. For many who are first shall become last {and the last first}; and they shall become a single unity. (Gen 2:2-3, 17:12, Mt 11:25-26/18:1-6+10-14, Lk 2:21; Mary Anne Evans [‘George Eliot’], Middlemarch: ‘She could but cast herself, with a childlike sense of reclining, in the lap of a divine consciousness which sustained her own’; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot: ‘Children ... understand everything.... One need only remember one’s own childhood’; Graham Greene, The Third Man: ‘He never grew up; the world grew up around him, that’s all’; hyperlinear; Gk fragment)