A quest for unity

The KNDN Problem: A Quest for Unity in Diversity

Given a query location Q in multi-dimensional space, the classical KNN problem is to return the K spatially closest answers in the database with respect to Q. The KNDN (K-Nearest Diverse Neighbor) problem is a semantic extension where the objective is to return the spatially closest result set such that each answer is sufficiently different, or diverse, from the rest of the answers. We review h...

Yeats and the Quest for Unity: "Among School Children" and Unity of Being

Book Review John Dewey’s Quest for Unity: The Journey of a Promethean Mystic

Richard Gale’s slender monograph is a sometimes insightful, sometimes enervating and always personal reckoning with John Dewey’s philosophy. Gale’s basic thesis is that Dewey is a unificationist malgré lui, that despite being committed to empiricism and pluralism his pragmatism remains profoundly metaphysical in a non-naturalistic sense. This claim is hardly new or surprising. Thinkers as diver...

The Humanist Quest for a Unity of Knowledge and the Orthodox Metaphysics of Light

The Quest for Ethical Truth: Wang Yangming on the Unity of Knowing and Acting

Drawing an analogy between Wang Yangming’s endeavor to know ethical truth and Descartes’ quest for epistemic certainty, this paper proposes a reading of Wang's doctrine of the unity of knowing and acting to the effect that the doctrine does not express an ethical teaching about how the knowledge that is already acquired is to be related to acting, but an epistemological claim as to how we know ...