Today, we find ourselves living during the most Religious era in all of human history. If this statement is true, it is also how we can predict the end of the human story.

Human civilization is very clearly reaching a point of critical mass when it comes to technology and how it transforms culture and the economics that is therefore driven forward. The conversation around the practical aspects of generative artificial intelligence (Chat GPT, Q Star, Bard, Claude, Genesis, Firefly, and others) and their ethical implications is massively trending. The political conversations around it are slow to catch up but will soon take over once the general public feels their impact, which is likely (...) to happen in the next two to three years. -/- What is not being spoken of is the need for new economic models that can integrate the enormous and continuous shifts in trade that will occur, as we continue to implement more efficient manufacturing and logistics. Things like 3D printing in hub regions, the automation of transportation, augmented and virtual reality, and new creativity-based industries will all disrupt capital markets as well as social systems due to what we could call "meta-scarcity", which is to say, "the scarcity of scarcity"; In effect, we will lack the scarcity to maintain predictive power over the future. This is because when technology is capable of optimizing for creativity, people come up with new demands, and when new demands are supplied as quickly as they arise, no one is capable of knowing what kind of trends the market will take, yet it is necessary to try as public discussion could beneficially shape the economic landscape. (shrink)

Because you know you exist with the cogito (I think therefore I am), you possess the fundamental capability to prove your own existence (science) and how you emerged (metaphysics). The act of 'metatheos' then, a metaphysical activity, serves to help you understand your own consciousness and its limitation, while simultaneously understanding God, what it is, and its limitlessness. God hereby, should begin to be conceivably understood as something well beyond our abilities to perceive, while also proving the definition that it (...) is everything, including nothingness. This eliminates the anthropomorphism of fundamentalist religions and the infinite regress of the material reductionists, as it makes them both valid and compatible. (shrink)

In this thesis, I examine how "truth" is never adequately defined yet still used as a foundation for meaning and purpose. The elephant which is ignored is the paradoxical nature of truth and how it relates to the infinite, which is something we have not yet come to understand well enough. I propose that it is still possible if we are open-minded enough to accept the unexpected.

The Münchhausen trilemma is the following: When trying to prove a fundamental truth, you run into one of, two of, or all three of the following issues: -/- 1: Circular reasoning 2: Infinite regress 3: An arbitrary starting point -/- But what if these are not in fact “problems”, but three different ways to observe the fundamental truth? Reconciling the three and showing how they function together is what I endeavor to articulate here.

The Monad’s components are as follows: 1: Monism as the state of eternal undifferentiation 2: Dualism as the state of infinite differentiations -/- MONAD = ET = INF ET Ψ INF.

There is a meaning crisis correlated with the exponential rate of technology; As it disrupts our lives and forces society and its individuals to adapt increasingly quickly, we lose meaning. The challenge to deal with this immediately becomes philosophical, as we have never before needed to define and understand what “meaning” is on such a conscious level.

(1st draft for review) -/- WARNING: -/- Reading this book comes with certain dangers to be mindful of; Please consider the following suggestions to avoid them: -/- 1: Do not try to perceive infinity; Any kind of success here leads to psychosis. 2: Do not try to resolve the paradoxes; To understand the greater truth of this book, paradoxes must be accepted as true. 3: Do not read this book if your faith is unstable and having it challenged could potentially (...) put you into existential crisis. (shrink)

This article proposes a brief argument for why mathematics is transcendental in so far as the concept of infinity emerges from it; this ultimately relies on the understanding that math gives a metaphysical justification for non-existence or "0".

This article presents an attempt to logically prove the concept of "perfection" without having to define it; this is done by proposing the paradox that "causes are their own effects", meaning that all forms we observe through causality are underpinned by a non-existential qualia which we can for all intents and purposes equate to perfection.

"The Metaverse", a concept which has now become the symbolic term for the next evolution of the internet, is an immersive environment of almost metaphysical proportions. In this article, I discuss how the additional degrees of freedom in this transhumanist reality might saddle future generations with a massive existential crisis if philosophy is not well understood and applied by individuals.

This thesis attempts to present a new singular type of paradox called a “Monoletheia”, which itself creates a logical bridge to reconcile two subsequent paradoxes we call “Antinomies” and “Dialetheia”. The consequence follows therefrom, to state that the concept of infinity transcends its own regress of an existential construct to include a non-existent variable (representing void). This is done by applying the theoretical idea of co-existence between constructs and their own negation. -/- The working hypothesis can be summed up in (...) the following proposition: “Existence co-exists with non-existence“, and is expressed mathematically for convenience as “Ex + co-ex w/ X“. For the same purpose, the expression denoting an antinomy is “A*” and “Dt” is used for dialetheia. (shrink)

This article addresses the inevitable convergence of the sciences with philosophy and how metaphysics plays a major role for future generations to think about consciousness and reality in radical new ways.

This essay examines the different positions between non-dualism and existentialism when it comes to the self-negation of absolute void and its ontological validity.

Religions seem to merge over time in order to achieve political and cultural stability; In the context of the modern-day, as the rate of globalization continues to increase, a greater understanding of syncretism is needed.

A ‘duality’ is a formal mapping between the spaces of solutions of two empirically equivalent theories. In recent times, dualities have been found to be pervasive in string theory and quantum field theory. Naïvely interpreted, duality-related theories appear to make very different ontological claims about the world—differing in e.g. space-time structure, fundamental ontology, and mereological structure. In light of this, duality-related theories raise questions familiar from discussions of underdetermination in the philosophy of science: in the presence of dual theories, what (...) is one to say about the ontology of the world? In this paper, we undertake a comprehensive and non-technical survey of the landscape of possible ontological interpretations of duality-related theories. We provide a significantly enriched and clarified taxonomy of options—several of which are novel to the literature. (shrink)

I argue that, although education should have positive effects on students’ epistemic character, it is often actually damaging, having bad effects. Rather than cultivating virtues of the mind, certain forms of education lead to the development of the vices of the mind - it is therefore epistemically corrupting. After sketching an account of that concept, I offer three illustrative case studies.

Ill persons suffer from a variety of epistemically-inflected harms and wrongs. Many of these are interpretable as specific forms of what we dub pathocentric epistemic injustices, these being ones that target and track ill persons. We sketch the general forms of pathocentric testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, each of which are pervasive within the experiences of ill persons during their encounters in healthcare contexts and the social world. What’s epistemically unjust might not be only agents, communities and institutions, but the theoretical (...) conceptions of health that structure our responses to illness. Thus, we suggest that although such pathocentric epistemic injustices have a variety of interpersonal and structural causes, they are also sustained by a deeper naturalistic conception of the nature of illness. (shrink)

Many prominent critiques of philosophical methods proceed by suggesting that some method is unreliable, especially in comparison to some alternative method. In light of this, it may seem natural to conclude that these (comparatively) unreliable methods should be abandoned. Drawing upon work on the division of cognitive labour in science, we argue things are not so straightforward. Rather, whether an unreliable method should be abandoned depends heavily on the crucial question of how we should divide philosophers’ time and effort between (...) different methods, in order to maximise our prospects of achieving epistemic success. We show that, in a range of cases, even a (comparatively) unreliable method deserves to be allocated some of these resources. (shrink)

Although the discipline of vice epistemology is only a decade old, the broader project of studying epistemic vices and failings is much older. This paper argues that contemporary vice epistemologists ought to engage more closely with these earlier projects. After sketching some general arguments in section one, I then turn to deep epistemic vices: ones whose identity and intelligibility depends on some underlying conception of human nature or the nature of reality. The final section then offers a case study from (...) a vice epistemic tradition that emerged in early modern English natural philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that certain theoretical conceptions of health, particularly those described as ‘biomedical’ or ‘naturalistic’, are viciously epistemically unjust. Drawing on some recent work in vice epistemology, we identity three ways that abstract objects (such as theoretical conceptions, doctrines, or stances) can be legitimately described as epistemically vicious. If this is right, then robust reform of individuals, social systems, and institutions would not be enough to secure epistemic justice: we must reform the deeper conceptions of health that (...) underlie them. (shrink)

According to a venerable ideal, the core aim of philosophical practice is wisdom. The guiding concern of the ancient Greek, Indian, and Chinese traditions was the nature of the good life for human beings and the nature of reality. Central to these traditions is profound recognition of the subjection to adversities intrinsic to human life. I consider paradigmatic exemplars of wisdom, from ancient Western and Asian traditions, and the ways that experiences of adversity shaped their life. The suggestion is that (...) these exemplars, if any, will show how to live wisely in adversity. (shrink)

Since subjection to harm is an intrinsic feature of our social and epistemic lives, there is a perpetual need for individual and collective agents with the virtue of epistemic courage. In this chapter, I survey some of the main issues germane to this virtue, such as the nature of courage and of harm, the range of epistemic activities that can manifest courage, and the status of epistemic courage as a collective and as a professional virtue.

In many diagrams one seems to perceive necessity – one sees not only that something is so, but that it must be so. That conflicts with a certain empiricism largely taken for granted in contemporary philosophy, which believes perception is not capable of such feats. The reason for this belief is often thought well-summarized in Hume's maxim: ‘there are no necessary connections between distinct existences’. It is also thought that even if there were such necessities, perception is too passive or (...) localized a faculty to register them. We defend the perception of necessity against such Humeanism, drawing on examples from mathematics. (shrink)

We offer philosophical motivations for a method we call Virtual World Cognitive Science (VW CogSci), in which researchers use virtual embodied agents that are embedded in virtual worlds to explore questions in the field of Cognitive Science. We focus on questions about mental and linguistic representation and the ways that such computational modeling can add rigor to philosophical thought experiments, as well as the terminology used in the scientific study of such representations. We find that this method forces researchers to (...) take a god’s-eye view when describing dynamical relationships between entities in minds and entities in an environment in a way that eliminates the need for problematic talk of belief and concept types, such as the belief that cats are silly, and the concept CAT, while preserving belief and concept tokens in individual cognizers’ minds. We conclude with some further key advantages of VW CogSci for the scientific study of mental and linguistic representation and for Cognitive Science more broadly. (shrink)

Many people report that reading first-person narratives of the experience of illness can be morally instructive or educative. But although they are ubiquitous and typically sincere, the precise nature of such educative experiences is puzzling—for those narratives typically lack the features that modern philosophers regard as constitutive of moral reason. I argue that such puzzlement should disappear, and the morally educative power of illness narratives explained, if one distinguishes two different styles of moral reason: an inferentialist style that generates the (...) puzzlement and an alternative exemplarist style that offers a compelling explanation of the morally educative power of pathographic literature. (shrink)

This chapter challenges the common claim that vicious forms of argumentative practice, like interpersonal arrogance and discursive polarisation, are caused by martial metaphors, such as ARGUMENT AS WAR. I argue that the problem isn’t the metaphor, but our wider practices of metaphorising and the ways they are deformed by invidious cultural biases and prejudices. Drawing on feminist argumentation theory, I argue that misogynistic cultures distort practices of metaphorising in two ways. First, they spotlight some associations between the martial and argumentative (...) domains while occluding others, resulting in a sort of myopia. Second, those cultures interfere with a phenomenon I label normative isomorphism – the capacity of some structural metaphors to enable (and often encourage) a transfer of normative chracater traits from the source domain to the target domain. Crucially, the normative status of character trait often changes across domains—traits that are virtuous in the martial domain are often vicious in the argumentative domain, and vice versa. Sexist myopia tends to deform practices of metaphorising by interfering with normative isomorphism by privileging the transfer across domains of traits that recapitulate invidious cultural constructions of masculinity in terms of aggression, domination, and violence. Basically, the problem isn’t the metaphors, but the cultures. (shrink)

Radical democratic thinking is becoming intrigued by the material situatedness of its political agents and by the role of nonhuman participants in political interaction. At stake here is the displacement of narrow anthropocentrism that currently guides democratic theory and practice, and its repositioning into what we call ‘the nonhuman condition’. This Critical Exchange explores the nonhuman condition. It asks: What are the implications of decentering the human subject via a new materialist reading of radical democracy? Does this reading dilute political (...) agency? Or should this be seen, on the contrary, as an invitation for new voices and demands to enter into democratic assemblages? How might engagement with the more-than-human disrupt or extend theories of radical democracy? Hans Asenbaum and Amanda Machin discuss the human democratic subject both through radical democratic and new materialist lenses. They suggest that a new materialist decentred subject does not lose agency but further gains political responsibility in radical democracy. Jean-Paul Gagnon highlights the possibility of becoming through loss. In losing our anthropocentric arrogance—our understanding of being other and better than animal—we become more connected and discover our place in human-nonhuman assemblages. Melissa Orlie agrees that something can be gained through renouncing dominant human fantasies and presents a ‘radical democratic naturalism’. By renouncing land violence and acknowledging nature’s subjectivity, we can further nonexploitative radical democratic politics. This is where the notion of ‘tidalectic’ processes introduced by James L. Smith is helpful. Focusing on water and the Indigenous knowledges around rivers, he considers how democracy and community can be reimagined as plural, cyclical and attentive to the nonhuman with which the human is inevitably entangled. Diana Leong offers a different approach. Considering the nonhuman from the perspective of Black Studies demands an awareness to how blackness has long been constituted as non- or partially human. (shrink)

The problem of evil is an ideal topic for experimental philosophy. Suffering--which is at the heart of most prominent formulations of the problem of evil--is a universal human experience and has been the topic of careful reflection for millennia. However, interpretations of suffering and how it bears on the existence of God are tremendously diverse and nuanced. We might immediately find ourselves wondering why (and how!) something so universal might be understood in so many different ways. Why does suffering push (...) some people toward atheism while pushing others toward deeper faith? What cultural, psychological, or sociological differences account for this diversity of responses? And, importantly, what light might this diversity of responses shed on the problem of evil and how it has been formulated by philosophers in recent years? The primary aim of this paper is to highlight how the tools and resources of experimental philosophy might be fruitfully applied to the problem of evil. In the first section, we review some recent work in this area and describe the current state of this emergent body of literature. In the second section, we review the broader and more recent theoretical developments on the problem of evil. Finally, in the final section, we outline some potential areas of future empirical research that we see as especially promising given those developments. (shrink)

Many ancient traditions recognise certain people as exemplars of virtue. I argue that some of these traditions incorporate a 'cosmic' mode of emulation, where certain of the qualities or aspects of the grounds or source of the world manifest, in human form, as virtues. If so, the ultimate objection of emulation is not a human being. I illustrate this with the forms of Daoist exemplarity found in the Book of Zhuangzi, and end by considering the charge that the aspiration to (...) cosmic emulation is inhumane. (shrink)

If a person requires an organ or tissue donation to survive, many philosophers argue that whatever moral responsibility a biological relative may have to donate to the person in need will be grounded at least partially, if not entirely, in biological relations the potential donor bears to the recipient. We contend that such views ignore the role that a potential donor's unique ability to help the person in need plays in underwriting such judgments. If, for example, a sperm donor is (...) judged to have a significant moral responsibility to donate tissue to a child conceived with his sperm, we think this will not be due to the fact that the donor stands in a close biological relationship to the recipient. Rather, we think such judgments will largely be grounded in the presumed unique ability of the sperm donor to help the child due to the compatibility of his tissues and organs with those of the recipient. In this paper, we report the results of two studies designed to investigate the comparative roles that biological relatedness and unique ability play in generating judgments of moral responsibility in tissue donation cases. We found that biologically related individuals are deemed to have a significant moral responsibility to donate tissue only when they are one of a small number of people who have the capacity to help. (shrink)

In the field of machine consciousness, it has been argued that in order to build human-like conscious machines, we must first have a computational model of qualia. To this end, some have proposed a framework that supports qualia in machines by implementing a model with three computational areas (i.e., the subconceptual, conceptual, and linguistic areas). These abstract mechanisms purportedly enable the assessment of artificial qualia. However, several critics of the machine consciousness project dispute this possibility. For instance, Searle, in his (...) Chinese room objection, argues that however sophisticated a computational system is, it can never exhibit intentionality; thus, would also fail to exhibit consciousness or any of its varieties. This paper argues that the proposed architecture mentioned above answers the problem posed by Searle, at least in part. Specifically, it argues that we could reformulate Searle’s worries in the Chinese room in terms of the three-stage artificial qualia model. And by doing so, we could see that the person doing all the translations in the room could realize the three areas in the proposed framework. Consequently, this demonstrates the actualization of self-consciousness in machines. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the research field of machine ethics and how it relates to a technological singularity—a hypothesized, futuristic event where artificial machines will have greater-than-human-level intelligence. One problem related to the singularity centers on the issue of whether human values and norms would survive such an event. To somehow ensure this, a number of artificial intelligence researchers have opted to focus on the development of artificial moral agents, which refers to machines capable of moral reasoning, judgment, and decision-making. (...) To date, different frameworks on how to arrive at these agents have been put forward. However, there seems to be no hard consensus as to which framework would likely yield a positive result. With the body of work that they have contributed in the study of moral agency, philosophers may contribute to the growing literature on artificial moral agency. While doing so, they could also think about how the said concept could affect other important philosophical concepts. (shrink)

David. E. Cooper’s claim in Animals and Misanthropy is that honest reflection on the ways human beings treat and compare with animals encourages a dark, misanthropic judgment on humankind. Treatment of animals manifests a range of vices and failings that are ubiquitous and entrenched in our practices, institutions, and forms of life, organized by Cooper into five clusters. Moreover, comparisons of humans and animals reveals both affinities and similarities, including a crucial difference that animals are capable of virtues while being (...) vice-free, whereas humans are both virtuous and vicious. Various familiar ways of thinking morally and scientifically about animal life are criticized for being overly abstract, occluding richer ways of engaging with animals that are better able to disclose the fundamental wrong of their treatment by humans. The book offers a concise, lucid challenge to mainstream ways of thinking morally about animals and to comfortably optimistic estimations of the moral performance of humankind. (shrink)

There has been a general failure among mental health theorists and social psychologists to understand the etiology of work-engendered depression. Yet the condition is increasingly prevalent in highly industrialized societies, where an exclusionary focus upon work, money, and the things that money can buy has displaced values that traditionally exerted a liberating and humanizing influence. Social critics have called the result an impoverishment of the spirit, a state of cultural bankruptcy, and an incapacity for genuine leisure. From a clinical perspective, (...) the condition has been diagnosed as widespread narcissism and obsessive work. -/- Acedia, a concept developed by the Scholastics, throws clarifying light on the origin of this form of depression. (shrink)

I propose that Confucianism incorporates a latent commitment to the closely related epistemic virtues of curiosity and inquisitiveness. Confucian praise of certain people, practices, and dispositions is only fully intelligible if these are seen as exercises and expressions of epistemic virtues, of which curiosity and inquisitiveness are the obvious candidates. My strategy is to take two core components of Confucian ethical and educational practice and argue that each presupposes a specific virtue. To have and to express a ‘love of learning’ (...) requires the virtue of curiosity, while the normative practice of good questioning requires exercise of the virtue of inquisitiveness. Taken together, people engaging in the foundational Confucian project of moral self-cultivation must desire and acquire a range of epistemic goods, a set of dispositions that manifest in the virtues of curiosity and inquisitiveness, possession of which is admirable and excellent. Such, at least, is the claim defend in this chapter, which is an exercise in cross-cultural virtue epistemology. (shrink)

A study of the psychology of demoralization affecting university faculty in the liberal arts. This form of demoralization is not adequately understood in terms of the concept of career burnout. Instead, demoralization that affects university faculty in the liberal arts requires a broadened understanding of the historical and psychological situation in which these professors find themselves today.

This paper proposes that spiritual persons are an excellent focus for the study of 'living religion' and offers a methodology for doing so. By ‘spiritual persons’, I have in mind both exemplary figures – like Jesus or the Buddha – and the multitude of ‘ordinary’ spiritual persons whose lives are led in aspiration to the spiritual goods the exemplars manifest (enlightenment, say, or holiness). I start with Linda Zagzebski's recent argument that moral persuasion primarily occurs through encounters with exemplars of (...) moral qualities, of a sort that invite admiration and emulation. A plurality of modes of spiritual exemplarity is distinguished, each reflecting a distinct form of spiritual aspiration, which will show in the lives of the members of different traditions. I develop this claim by focusing on the ways that spiritual aspirants can encounter exemplars through their depictions in spiritual narrative. It emerges that narrative encounters can activate certain forms of admiration and enable certain forms of emulation if they depict the suffering of exemplars. (shrink)

A chapter exploring the relations between humility and the sciences.

This article focuses on a particular issue under machine ethics—that is, the nature of Artificial Moral Agents. Machine ethics is a branch of artificial intelligence that looks into the moral status of artificial agents. Artificial moral agents, on the other hand, are artificial autonomous agents that possess moral value, as well as certain rights and responsibilities. This paper demonstrates that attempts to fully develop a theory that could possibly account for the nature of Artificial Moral Agents may consider certain philosophical (...) ideas, like the standard characterizations of agency, rational agency, moral agency, and artificial agency. At the very least, the said philosophical concepts may be treated as signposts for further research on how to truly account for the nature of Artificial Moral Agents. (shrink)

This paper examines a largely unrecognized mental disorder that is essentially a disability of values. It is their daily contact with this pathology that leads many university liberal arts faculty to demoralization. The deeply rooted disparity between the world of the traditional liberal arts scholar and today’s college students is not simply a gulf across which communication is difficult, but rather involves a pathological impairment in the majority of students that stems from an exclusionary focus on work, money, and the (...) acquisition of things. It is argued that this state of mind constitutes a self-disabling mental illness, which for a society becomes pathological ideology, and for the individual takes the form of clinical narcissism. (shrink)

This article looks at “faith-in” and what Jonathan Kvanvig calls the “belittler objection” by comparing Hegel’s and Kierkegaard’s interpretations of Abram (later known as Abraham). I first argue that Hegel’s treatment of Abram in Spirit of Christianity and its Fate is an objection to faith-in. Building on this with additional Hegelian texts, I argue that Hegel’s objection employs his social command account of morality. I then turn to Johannes de Silentio’s treatments of Abraham in Fear and Trembling and Søren Kierkegaard’s (...) Works of Love to argue that Kierkegaard defends faith-in as part of a moderate divine command account of moral knowledge. Finally, this article suggests that the belittler objection is ultimately an objection to faith-in as a divine command source of moral knowledge or obligation rather than social command. (shrink)

The collaboration of Language and Computing nv (L&C) and the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) is guided by the hypothesis that quality constraints on ontologies for software ap-plication purposes closely parallel the constraints salient to the design of sound philosophical theories. The extent of this parallel has been poorly appreciated in the informatics community, and it turns out that importing the benefits of phi-losophical insight and methodology into application domains yields a variety of improvements. L&C’s LinKBase® (...) is one of the world’s largest medical domain ontologies. Its current primary use pertains to natural language processing ap-plications, but it also supports intelligent navigation through a range of struc-tured medical and bioinformatics information resources, such as SNOMED-CT, Swiss-Prot, and the Gene Ontology (GO). In this report we discuss how and why philosophical methods improve both the internal coherence of LinKBase®, and its capacity to serve as a translation hub, improving the interoperability of the ontologies through which it navigates. (shrink)

Feyerabend is well-known as a pluralist, and notorious for his defences of, and sympathetic references to, heterodox subjects, such as parapsychology. Focusing on the latter, I ask how we should understand the relationship between the pluralism and the defences, drawing on Marcello Truzzi's and Martin Gardner's remarks on Feyerabend along the way.

This is a study of the relativity of facts in relation to the frameworks of reference in terms of which those facts are established. In this early paper from 1975, intended for a less technical audience, the author proposes an understanding of facts and their associated frameworks in terms of complementarity. This understanding of facts leads to an integrated yet pluralistic concept of reality. In the Addendum, readers will find a partial listing of related publications by the author that extend (...) the research described in this paper. (shrink)

In this essay, I explore a documentary about the curious case of Charlie and his Orchestra. While swing music was outlawed in Nazi Germany as “degenerate,” the Nazi regime created a radio program called “Charlie and his Orchestra” for foreign consumption. The propaganda lay in the changes to the original lyrics of the songs played, making them convey the anti-Semitic and other themes of the Nazi ideology. The review discusses just how good the musicians were, and how popular the program (...) was. (shrink)

In this essay, I review in great detail Ian Garden’s outstanding book, The Third Reich’s Celluloid War. Garden begins by discussing propaganda theory and then discusses not just Nazi feature films and documentaries, but television as well. (The Nazis had the earliest TV network). All in all, the regime produced over 1,300 feature films during its time in power. Garden also compares Nazi propaganda films to British and American ones.