According to causal idealism, causation is a product of human mental activity in a world lacking a mind-independent causal relation. The view is historically popular. Collingwood (1938) held that causal questions are essentially epistemological rather than ontological. Russell (1913) held that there was no role for causation in fundamental physics. And insofar as Hume famously took causation to...

1. The Problem I begin with a gloomy observation on monastic education by Phra Prayud Payutto (1939) of Thailan whom Tambiah calls "a brilliant scholar-monk" [1]. Payutto said in 1984: "The present state of m education is similar to a sky which has some spots of sunshine, but is in fact full of cloud. The sky is n clear. When monks themselves see the dull and overcast sky they may feel disheart...

In the ‘Refutation of Idealism’ chapter of the first ‘Critique’, Kant argues that the conditions required for having certain kinds of mental episodes are sufficient to guarantee that there are ‘objects in space’ outside us. A perennially influential way of reading this compressed argument is as a kind of causal inference: in order for us to make justified judgements about the order of our inner...

For many Rice students, tomorrow will be their first chance to participate in a presidential election. Yet a large number of people are still undecided; and many don't wish to support any of the candidates that are running for the presidency of the United States. The campaign has dealt little with issues and specifics. More important have been the public images of each candidate, his views on m...

local planning is a basic principle as well as a major part of comprehensive rural development in which main emphasis is placed on local initiatives to make human interactions more active and dynamic. in local planning, all parties including local people, governmental bodies and ngos interact to fulfill the basic goals of community development. one may find good examples of local planning exper...

Satellite imagery is a form of big data that can be harnessed for many social good applications, especially those focusing on rural areas. In this article, we describe the common problem of selecting sites for and planning rural development activities as informed by remote sensing and satellite image analysis. Effective planning in poor rural areas benefits from information that is not availabl...

BACKGROUND Previous studies about inequality in children's health focused more on physical health than the neurodevelopment. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the inequality in early childhood neurodevelopment in poor rural China and explore the contributions of socioeconomic factors to the inequality. METHOD Information of 2120 children aged 0 to 35 months and their households in six poor ...