This paper critically examines the metaphorical use of medical terms in philosophy. Three examples selected from distinct philosophical contexts demonstrate that such terms have been employed as metaphors both to describe the practice of philosophising and historically to diagnose philosophical positions. The selected examples are (i) the title of Avicenna’s main philosophical work, The Book of Healing, (ii) the criticism of medical metaphors in Enlightenment philosophy, and (iii) recent historical diagnoses in philosophy. The underlying epistemological assumptions of all three contexts (...) are reconstructed to critically analyse the medical metaphors. Through this tripartite synopsis, I arrive at a normative conclusions medical metaphors, such as the “healing of the soul” or “pathology of reason”, do not stand up to the critique of Enlightenment and are obsolete against the theoretical background of my reference texts. (shrink)

Based on Aristotelianism, philosophies in Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and traditional phenomenology, Martin Heidegger and late Max Scheler, shared a conceptual understanding of the soul. The plant’s soul – a worldly stage of the individualization of universal creativity - unfolds via the animal towards the human and beyond. The Phenomenology of Life philosophy (Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka) enmeshed the ontopoiesis of the vegetative beingness into the unity-of-everything-there-is-alive, thereby overcoming the discommunicative hierarchization of the soul. An eco-cosmological following of „the plant’s“ ontopoiesis will have (...) to base its understanding not only on the communicative creativity of „the plant“ but on its inseparable interwovenness into the web of life, thereby also taking into consideration newest botanical studies which brought to light insights into so far unknown „intelligence“ of plants. (shrink)

This paper asks: Why is it morally good to foster the digital commons? How can we ethically justify the importance of the digital commons? An answer is given based on Aristotelian ethics. Because A...

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Ernst Bloch´s death and the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx´ birth, the presented study examines Bloch´s reinterpretation of the Marxist philosophy in his original concept, which is based on the self-transcendence, on the utopian horizons of the materialistic-monistic founded identities. Is the humanistic philosophy of historical progress founded ontologically enough?

When Susan Sontag addresses the problem of pornography and relates it to Hegel, she is not merely describing a path in European philosophy aimed to construct a new language, but she is also committing this aim to the importance of re-reading culture. The fashion in which pornography describes reality is meaningful when we are trying to approach Hegel in his aim to construct a post-religious language that finally will make ready-to-hand life as life. Politics, and society, being two essential elements (...) to understand reality, become singularly interesting when analyzed through the gaze of Sontag in combination of Hegel’s philosophy. The conservative morals that reign over what we understand as pornography, and the cultural moment of Europe since the most progressive moments of the 19 th century, describe a fatalist landscape for the future of society and politics. Yet, the learnings from Hegel remain meaningful. In this paper I examine how a post-religious philosophy, aimed long ago by Hegel’s contribution to philosophy, can serve to the understanding of a post-pornographic society: a society that is able to learn from the contributions of Frankfurt’s school with regards to an efficient cultural tissue, and defeat the old religious morals that are inserted in the backbone of politics and philosophy still today. (shrink)

This monograph sets out from the idea of an obscure and perverted relationship between environmentalism, understood as a 21 st century green and popular movement, and pornography, understood as a traditionalist and conservative art form. Both sides seem to come together in the interest of what has been called the Anthropocene. Somehow the same groups that rely on a fierce defense of the planet and demand a collective awareness of the risk the entire humanity faces do not do it any (...) longer on behalf of an unknown future or revolutionary goal, but for the conservation of a still image of Earth: a positive conviction on how the future is going to look like. This aporia is dissolved into an oxymoron when environmentalist practices are put at work. (shrink)