Figal has long been recognized as one of the most insightful interpreters working in the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics and its leading themes concerned with ancient Greek thought, art, language, and history. With this book, Figal presses this tradition of philosophical hermeneutics in new directions. In his effort to forge philosophical hermeneutics into a hermeneutical philosophy, Figal develops an original critique of the objectification of the world that emerges in modernity as the first stage in his systematic treatment of the (...) elements of experience hermeneutically understood. Breaking through the prejudices of modernity, but not sacrificing the importance and challenge of the objective world that confronts us and is in need of interpretation, Figal reorients how it is that philosophy should take up some of its most longstanding and stubborn questions. World, object, space, language, freedom, time, and life are refreshed as philosophical notions here since they are each regarded as elements of human life engaged in the task assigned to each of us—the task of understanding ourselves and our world. (shrink)

This article begins with a treatment of Friedrich Nietzsche’s early essay “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense.” The essay is often read, in the deconstructive tradition, as a showcase example of the impossibility of making a literal philosophical claim: is Nietzsche’s claim that all truth is merely metaphorical itself a true statement, or merely a metaphorical one? The present article claims that this supposed paradox relies on the groundless assumption that all philosophy must ultimately be grounded in some (...) unshakeable literal truth. From here, we turn to Edmund Gettier’s famous critique of the widespread notion of knowledge as “justified true belief.” Expanding on Gettier’s point, it is argued that there can only be “justified untrue belief” or “unjustified true belief,” never a belief that is both justified and true at once. (shrink)

The goal of creating Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – or in other words of creating Turing machines (modern computers) that can behave in a way that mimics human intelligence – has occupied AI researchers ever since the idea of AI was first proposed. One common theme in these discussions is the thesis that the ability of a machine to conduct convincing dialogues with human beings can serve as at least a sufficient criterion of AGI. We argue that this very ability (...) should be accepted also as a necessary condition of AGI, and we provide a description of the nature of human dialogue in particular and of human language in general against this background. We then argue that it is for mathematical reasons impossible to program a machine in such a way that it could master human dialogue behaviour in its full generality. This is (1) because there are no traditional explicitly designed mathematical models that could be used as a starting point for creating such programs; and (2) because even the sorts of automated models generated by using machine learning, which have been used successfully in areas such as machine translation, cannot be extended to cope with human dialogue. If this is so, then we can conclude that a Turing machine also cannot possess AGI, because it fails to fulfil a necessary condition thereof. At the same time, however, we acknowledge the potential of Turing machines to master dialogue behaviour in highly restricted contexts, where what is called “narrow” AI can still be of considerable utility. (shrink)

Offers a compelling intercultural perspective on body, art, self, and society.

Die zentralen Fragestellungen bezüglich der wahren Beschaffenheit des Universums betreffen Folgendes: seinen Ursprung, seine Entstehung, die Existenz und Kontingenz seiner Gesetze, seine Intentionalität, Fassbarkeit, Transzendenz und die Anwendung erster Grundsätze, die diesen Phänomenen zugrunde liegen. Häufig sind die entsprechenden Untersuchungen jedoch belastet von (1) einer „semantischen Transmutation“ von Konzepten und Begriffen zwischen und innerhalb von drei allgemeinen Wissensfeldem - dem physikalischen, philosophischen und theologischen - sowie von (2) den Einschränkungen der anfänglichen Leitgedanken des Betrachters, die oft von skeptischen Annahmen geleitet (...) werden und uns hindern, die Möglichkeiten zu erforschen, die unserer ursprünglichen Einstellung widersprechen. Obwohl ich mich im Laufe meiner Untersuchung mit diesen Problemen beschäftigen werde, ist das Hauptergebnis dieser Studie ein Erklärungsvorschlag zum Phänomen des „Nichts“ und insbesondere seines Verhältnisses zum Universum oder zu Gott. Das Nichts ist eine der Hauptquellen argumentativer Abhandlungen für und gegen die Existenz und Anerkennung Gottes auf Grundlage von Argumenten bezüglich des Ursprungs unseres Universums. Der Erklärungsvorschlag soll als Anleitung zu einer Konstruktion von Gegenargumenten dienen, die vielen der Annahmen widersprechen, die einer Vielzahl an Autoren als „kosmologische“, „logische“, „ontologische“, „physikotheologische“ und ähnliche Beweissysteme für oder gegen die Existenz Gottes dienen. Hauptsächlich werden die Problemstellungen des Ursprungs und der Schöpfung unseres Universums diskutiert. Im Zuge dessen beschäftige ich mich jedoch auch mit den anderen genannten Fragen. Der Hauptfokus liegt auf der Schwierigkeit, das Phänomen des Nichts in kosmologische Auseinandersetzungen über Ursache und Ursprung des Universums einzubeziehen. Dies wird in drei Untersuchungen betrachtet. Die erste Untersuchung konzentriert sich auf die Begriffe des Seins, des Nichtseins, des Absoluten und des Nichts, da diese üblicherweise bei der Erforschung des Universums und des Wesens Gottes verwendet werden. Die Untersuchung entwickelt sich dann in Form eines dialektischen Vergleichs ausgewählter Philosophen weiter, die sich mit dem gewählten Thema befasst haben und endet in einer übergreifenden Synthese, in der ich versuche, die Zusammenhänge zu klären und den Begriff des Einzig-Absoluten für die zweite und dritte Untersuchung zu definieren. (shrink)

Resumen: En lo que sigue ofrezco una exploración de dos “conceptos tensos”: “pueblo” y “populismo”. En la primera sección abordaré la noción de “pueblo” a través de lo que se podría considerar su gramática populista. Luego desarrollaré algunas reflexiones sobre la división de campo que el populismo instala con su apelación al “pueblo” o a cualquiera de las otras nociones que tengan una función similar en su retórica. Analizaré, pues, la cuestión del antagonismo, la partición del espacio social y del (...) espacio del poder entre “ellos” y “nosotros”. Por último, plantearé la cuestión de la democracia como aquello que, en última instancia, está en juego en el desafío ambiguo del populismo.: In what follows I offer an exploration of two “tense concepts”: “people” and “populism”. In the first part I address the notion of “people” through what might be considered its populist grammar. Then I develop some reflec-tions on the field division that populism introduces with its appeal to the “people” or any of the other notions that have a similar function in their rhetoric. I will therefore analyze the antagonism, the partitioning of social space and the space of power between a “them” and an “us”. Finally, I raise the question of democracy as what is ultimately at stake in the ambiguous challenge of populism. (shrink)

This article explores a German philosophy of metaphor, which proposed a close link between the body and the mind as the basis for metaphor, debunked the view that metaphor is just a decorative rhetorical device and questioned the distinction between the literal and the figurative. This philosophy of metaphor developed at the intersection between a reflection on language and thought and a reflection on the nature of beauty in aesthetics. Thinkers such as Giambattista Vico, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul (...) and others laid the foundations for this philosophy and it was successively refined by Gustav Gerber, Alfred Biese and Friedrich Nietzsche. It influenced in its turn in various ways the linguistic study of metaphor and the psychology of metaphor as elaborated, for instance, by a lesser-known American scholar, Gertrude Buck. All these thinkers contributed to a philosophy and psychology of the metaphoric according to which metaphors are not only nice, but necessary for the structure and growth of human thought and language. Obvious parallels between this 19th-century philosophy of metaphor and the 20th-century theory of metaphor developed by Lakoff and his followers are examined throughout. (shrink)

As opposed to what is held in common opinion, the golden section never played any significant role in Antiquity or Renaissance. It is basically an invented tradition from Romanticism, and as such ascribed to earlier eras. The book contains a step by step investigation of the impact of the 'divine proportion' in mathematics, science and humanities.

Este artículo reconstruye la teoría de Cornelius Castoriadis sobre el imaginario político de las sociedades desde una perspectiva lingüística. Después de analizar detalladamente sus características principales, se argumenta que el concepto del imaginario es muy similar al planteamiento de Friedrich Nietzsche sobre lo dionisíaco. Siguiendo a Nietzsche en su autocrítica y posterior abandono de su esquema dual de Dionisos y Apolo, y gracias a su método genealógico y lingüístico de lo político y social, el artículo concluye con una lectura alternativa (...) del imaginario en tanto que instancia crítica. (shrink)

Desde un futuro anterior el pensamiento de la deconstrucción _asedia_ a la filosofía del martillo nietzscheana, ya que nos permite re-escribirla a partir de la nueva perspectiva que inaugura. En este trabajo nos proponemos abordar principalmente los trabajos de Nietzsche _Sobre verdad y mentira en sentido extramoral_ y _Sobre la utilidad y el perjuicio de la historia para la vida_, para analizar el modo en que, en estos textos tempranos, la escritura derridiana reconfigura el entramado filosófico nietzscheano.

This paper takes up Shannon Rodgers’ 2016 critique of curriculum writers’ call for observable verbs, pp. 563–578), and argues that a more effective line of critique should focus not on metaphorical thinking, but on the notion of observation itself, by way of Nietzsche on metaphor, the history of astronomy, the non-existence of dragons and dissuading indigenous people from voting.

Hegel's rejection of the Kantian thing-in-itself makes the "an sich" an ingredient in experience—that about a thing which is not yet present to us is what it is "an sich." Hegel bars thus any philosophical appeal to anything construed as atemporal, a path which I argue was also taken by Nietzsche, Foucault, Rorty, and Habermas. Unlike them, however, Hegel pursues a project of systematic philosophy, which now consists in showing how temporal things mutually support one another. The recent Continental philosophers (...) I discuss do not share this systematic conception; hence some of their most distinctive insights and problems. (shrink)

Architecture and Deconstruction. Case of Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi -/- Intensive relations between philosophical deconstruction and architecture, which were present in the late 1980s and early 1990s, belong to the past and therefore may be described from a greater than before distance. Within these relations three basic variations can be distinguished: the first one, in which philosophy of deconstruction deals with architectural terms but does not interfere with real architecture, the second one, in which a collaboration between Jacques Derrida (...) and a group of architects interested in his concepts is commenced, and the third one, in which completed or only designed objects or new concepts of deconstruction created by architects gain their supremacy over philosophy. The following book analyses these three possible ways, first of all with the reference to Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi. (shrink)

Karl Löwith is heralded by Richard Wolin in his work, Heidegger's Children, as being “one of the most significant figures of twentieth century German philosophy” and was praised by Hans-Georg Gadamer as being the best German writer of his time. Löwith’s philosophy has, however, not received due attention since his death in 1973. The current project attempts to show Löwith’s continued importance for modern philosophy by pulling his various critiques together and showing their proper role in his work as a (...) whole. (shrink)