Mircea Eliade. Yoga. Paris: Gallimard, 1960.
"India has endeavoured…to analyze the various conditioning factors of the human being. …this was done not in order to reach a precise and coherent explanation of the human being, as did, for instance, Europe of the 19th century,… but in order to know how far the zones of the human being go and see whether there is anything else beyond these conditionings" (p. 10).
The logic of action, as part of logical theory, deals with various aspects of defining what leads to reaching a goal and what are the factors involved in defining the goal and testing the result.
Raymond Bondon, in Logique du social (translated by David and
Gillian Silverman as The Logic of Social Action: An
Introduction to Sociological Analysis, London/Boston: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1981), gives the subject a sociological perspective.
Cornel Popa, in Praxiologie si Logica (Praxiology and Logic,
Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1984) deals with social action.
Authors such as D. Lewis, A. Salomaa, B.F. Chelas, R.C. Jeffrey,
and Jaako Hintikka, whose contributions were reunited in a volume
celebrating Stig Kanger, pay attention to semantic aspects and
conditional values in many-valued propositional logics (cf.
Logical Theory and Semantic Analysis, edited by Soren Stenlund,
Dordrecht/Boston: Reidel, 1974).
The term culture originates in human practical experiences related to nature: cultivating land, breeding and rearing animals. By extension, culture (i.e., cultivating and breeding the mind) leads to the noun describing a way of life. In the late 18th century, Herder used the plural cultures to distinguish what was to become civilization. In 1883, Dilthey made the distinction between cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften, addressing the mind) and natural sciences. The objects of cultural sciences are man-made and the goal is understanding (Verstehen). For more information on the emergence and use of the term culture, see A.L. Kroeber and C. Kluckholm, Culture: a Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, in Peabody Museum Papers, XLVII, Harvard University Press, 1952.
Ramon Lull (Raymundus Lullus, 1235-1315) suggested a mechanical system of combining ideas, an alphabet (or repertory) and a calculus for generating all possible judgments. Called Ars Magna (The Great Art), his work attracted both ironic remarks and enthusiastic followers.
Athanasius Kircher, in Polygraphia nova et universalis ex combinatoria arte detecta (New and universal polygraphy discovered from the arts of combination, Rome, 1663), tried to introduce an arithmetic of logic.
George Delgarus, in Ars signorum (The art of signs, London, 1661), suggested a universal language of signs.
John Wilkins dealt with it as a secret language (1641, Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger, and 1668, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language).
Lotfi Zadeh introduced fuzzy logic: a logic of vague though quantified relations among entities and of non- clear-cut definitions (What is young? tall? bold? good?).