Nagarjuna and Quantum physics. Eastern and Western Modes of Thought. Summary. The key terms. 1. Key term: ‘Emptiness’. The Indian philosopher Nagarjuna is known in the history of Buddhism mainly by his keyword ‘sunyata’. This word is translated into English by the word ‘emptiness’. The translation and the traditional interpretations create the impression that Nagarjuna declares the objects as empty or illusionary or not real or not existing. What is the assertion and concrete statement made by this interpretation? (...) That nothing can be found, that there is nothing, that nothing exists? Was Nagarjuna denying the external world? Did he wish to refute that which evidently is? Did he want to call into question the world in which we live? Did he wish to deny the presence of things that somehow arise? My first point is the refutation of this traditional translation and interpretation. 2. Key terms: ‘Dependence’ or ‘relational view’. My second point consists in a transcription of the keyword of ‘sunyata’ by the word ‘dependence’. This is something that Nagarjuna himself has done. Now Nagarjuna’s central view can be named ‘dependence of things’. Nagarjuna is not looking for a material or immaterial object which can be declared as a fundamental reality of this world. His fundamental reality is not an object. It is a relation between objects. This is a relational view of reality. Reality is without foundation. Or: Reality has the wide open space as foundation. 3. Key terms: ‘Arm in arm’. But Nagarjuna did not stop there. He was not content to repeat this discovery of relational reality. He went on one step further indicating that what is happening between two things. He gave indications to the space between two things. He realised that not the behaviour of bodies, but the behaviour of something between them may be essential for understanding the reality. This open space is not at all empty. It is full of energy. The open space is the middle between things. Things are going arm in arm. The middle might be considered as a force that bounds men to the world and it might be seen as well as a force of liberation. It might be seen as a bondage to the infinite space. 4. Key term: Philosophy. Nagarjuna, we are told, was a Buddhist philosopher. This statement is not wrong when we take the notion ‘philosophy’ in a deep sense as a love to wisdom, not as wisdom itself. Philosophy is a way to wisdom. Where this way has an end wisdom begins and philosophy is no more necessary. A.N. Whitehead gives philosophy the commission of descriptive generalisation. We do not need necessarily a philosophical building of universal dimensions. Some steps of descriptive generalisation might be enough in order to see and understand reality. There is another criterion of Nagarjuna’s philosophy. Not his keywords ‘sunyata’ and ‘pratityasamutpada’ but his 25 philosophical examples are the heart of his philosophy. His examples are images. They do not speak to rational and conceptual understanding. They speak to our eyes. Images, metaphors, allegories or symbolic examples have a freshness which rational ideas do not possess. Buddhist dharma and philosophy is a philosophy of allegories. This kind of philosophy is not completely new and unknown to European philosophy. Since Plato’s allegory of the cave it is already a little known. The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg has underlined the importance of metaphors in European philosophy. -/-. (shrink)

1.Summary The key terms. 1. Key term: ‘Sunyata’. Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) is known in the history of Buddhism mainly by his keyword ‘sunyata’. This word is translated into English by the word ‘emptiness’. The translation and the traditional interpretations create the impression that Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) declares the objects as empty or illusionary or not real or not existing. What is the assertion and concrete statement made by this interpretation? That nothing can be found, that there is nothing, that nothing exists? Was (...) Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) denying the external world? Did he wish to refute that which evidently is? Did he want to call into question the world in which we live? Did he wish to deny the presence of things that somehow arise? My first point is the refutation of this traditional translation and interpretation. 2. Key terms: ‘Dependence’ or ‘relational view’. My second point consists in a transcription of the keyword of ‘sunyata’ by the word ‘dependence’. This is something that Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) himself has done. Now Nagarjuna’s (Kumarajiva’s) central view can be named ‘dependence of things’. Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) is not looking for a material or immaterial object which can be declared as a fundamental reality of this world. His fundamental reality is not an object. It is a relation between objects. This is a relational view of reality. This is the heart of Nagarjuna’s (Kumarajiva’s) ideas. In the 19th century a more or less unknown Italian philosopher, Vincenzo Goberti, spoke about relations as the mean and as bonds between things. Later, in quantum physics and in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead we are talking about interactions and entanglements. These ideas of relatedness or connections or entanglements in Eastern and Western modes of thought are the main idea of this essay. Not all entanglements are known. Just two examples: the nature of quantum entanglements is not known. Quantum entanglements should be faster than light. That's why Albert Einstein had some doubts. A second example: the completely unknown connections between the mind and the brain. Other examples are mysterious like the connections between birds in a flock. Some are a little known like gravitational forces. 3. Key terms: ‘Arm in arm’. But Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) did not stop there. He was not content to repeat this discovery of relational reality. He went on one step further indicating that what is happening between two things. He gave indications to the space between two things. He realized that not the behaviour of bodies, but the behaviour of something between them may be essential for understanding the reality. This open space is not at all empty. It is full of energy. The open space is the middle between things. Things are going arm in arm. The middle might be considered as a force that bounds men to the world and it might be seen as well as a force of liberation. It might be seen as a bondage to the infinite space. 4. Key term: Philosophy. Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva), we are told, was a Buddhist philosopher. This statement is not wrong when we take the notion ‘philosophy’ in a deep sense as a love to wisdom, not as wisdom itself. Philosophy is a way to wisdom. Where this way has an end wisdom begins and philosophy is no more necessary. A.N. Whitehead gives philosophy the commission of descriptive generalization. We do not need necessarily a philosophical building of universal dimensions. Some steps of descriptive generalization might be enough in order to see and understand reality. There is another criterion of Nagarjuna’s (Kumarajiva’s) philosophy. Not his keywords ‘sunyata’ and ‘pratityasamutpada’ but his 25 philosophical examples are the heart of his philosophy. His examples are images. They do not speak to rational and conceptual understanding. They speak to our eyes. Images, metaphors, allegories or symbolic examples have a freshness which rational ideas do not possess. Buddhist dharma and philosophy is a philosophy of allegories. This kind of philosophy is not completely new and unknown to European philosophy. Since Plato’s allegory of the cave it is already a little known. (Plato 424 – 348 Befor Current Era) The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg has underlined the importance of metaphors in European philosophy. 5. Key terms: Quantum Physics. Why quantum physics? European modes of thought had no idea of the space between two this. They were bound to the ideas of substance or subject, two main metaphysical traditions of European philosophical history, two main principles. These substances and these subjects are two immaterial bodies which were considered by traditional European metaphysics as lying, as a sort of core, inside the objects or underlying the empirical reality of our world. The first European scientist who saw with his inner eye the forces between two things had been Michael Faraday (1791-1867). Faraday was an English scientist who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism. Later physicists like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and others followed his view in modern physics. This is a fifth point of my work. I compare Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) with European scientific modes of thought for a better understanding of Asia. I do not compare Nagarjuna (kumarajiva) with European philosophers like Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein. The principles and metaphysical foundations of physical sciences are more representative for European modes of thought than the ideas of Hegel, Heidegger and Wittgenstein and they are more precise. And slowly we are beginning to understand these principles. Let me take as an example the interpretation of quantum entanglement by the British mathematician Roger Penrose. Penrose discusses in the year of 2000 the experiences of quantum entanglement where light is separated over a distance of 100 kilometers and still remains connected in an unknown way. These are well known experiments in the last 30 years. Very strange for European modes of thought. The light should be either separated or connected. That is the expectation most European modes of thought tell us. Aristotle had been the first. Aristotle (384 - 322 Before Current Era) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and a teacher of Alexander the Great. He told us the following principle as a metaphysical foundation: Either a situation exists or not. There is not a third possibility. Now listen to Roger Penrose: “Quantum entanglement is a very strange type of thing. It is somewhere between objects being separate and being in communication with each other” (Roger Penrose, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind, Cambridge University Press. 2000 page 66). This sentence of Roger Penrose is a first step of a philosophical generalization in a Whiteheadian sense. 6. Key terms: ‘The metaphysical foundations of modern science’ had been examined particularly by three European and American philosophers: E. A. Burtt, A.N. Whitehead and Hans-Georg Gadamer, by Gadamer eminently in his late writings on Heraclitus and Parmenides. I try to follow the approaches of these philosophers of relational views and of anti-substantialism. By ‘metaphysical foundations’ Edwin Arthur Burtt does not understand transcendental ideas but simply the principles that are underlying sciences. 7. Key terms: ‘Complementarity’, ‘interactions’, ‘entanglements’. Since 1927 quantum physics has three key terms which give an indication to the fundamental physical reality: Complementarity, interactions and entanglement. These three notions are akin to Nagarjuna’s (Kumarajiva’s) relational view of reality. They are akin and they are very precise, so that Buddhism might learn something from these descriptions and quantum physicists might learn from Nagarjuna’s (Kumarajiva’s) examples and views of reality. They might learn to do a first step in a philosophical generalisation of quantum physical experiments. All of us we might learn how objects are entangled or going arm in arm. [The end of the summary.]. (shrink)

In tracing historically the development of Filipino philosophy as traditionally conceived, the author discovered that the early Filipino philosophers were Enlightenment thinkers. This was the direct consequence of the Filipino colonial experience and the explanation why the trajectory of Filipino philosophy is basically Western in orientation.

This paper will focus on the notion of toxic masculinity that has a lot to do with deforming the male identity figure. I am here really concerned with probing within the need of conforming with the traditional masculinity ideology in the East and the West, and how it hinders males from discovering what it means to be a male. Actually, the scope of research in this paper exceeds one culture to include both the Western and the Eastern cultures, (...) which have proved with evidence to share many attributes. I am also revealing how this masculinity has been misinterpreted over the years to encompass weird attitudes and behaviors as suppressing emotions or masking distress or showing violence as an indicator of power. How the idea of the necessity of being “tough all the time” may affect their mental and psychological wellbeing and what is less than that could stigmatize them for being “feminine” or “weak”. In this paper, I will also try to reveal how great sector of women unintentionally feeds this ego of toxic masculinity to their sons since childhood days. By connecting all these factors to the development of the characters in Victor Surge’s novel “Men in Prison”, we are simply highlighting the psychological dimension and consequences of suppressed men. It is regarded as an unfiltered view of humanity in the early 20th century. The depraving brutality that Serge experienced behind bars is mirroring a society subduing men in various levels. I hopefully seek to break down factors that trap men in a certain framework out of which there is no escape. (shrink)

Modern science originated in Western Europe, but its astonishing successes have forced every other civilization in the world to acknowledge and embrace its achievements. It is at the core of modernity and of the globalization of civilization. Consequently, efforts to show that non-Western traditions of thought should be taken seriously within the paradigm of science itself will inevitably provoke skepticism. However, science itself is riven not only by major problems and rival research programs, but by different conceptions (...) about what is science and what are its goals. These have generated such confusion, even within such advanced fields of science as physics, that more and more scientists are examining non-Western traditions of thought to provide a sufficiently broad perspective to overcome this confusion, to identify the core problems within science and to redefine it and its goals. This special edition brings into focus such work in a historical-epistemological perspective. (shrink)

The idea about this special issue came from a paper published as an updated and upridged version of an older memorial lecture given by Brian D. Josephson and Michael Conrad at the Gujarat Vidyapith University in Ahmedabad, India on March 2, 1984. The title of this paper was “Uniting Eastern Philosophy and Western Science” (1992). We thought that this topic deserves to be revisited after 25 years to demonstrate to the scientific community which new insights and achievements were (...) attained in this fairly broad field during this period. (shrink)

We find the claim that time is not real in both western and eastern philosophical traditions. In what follows I will call the view that time does not exist temporal error theory. Temporal error theory was made famous in western analytic philosophy in the early 1900s by John McTaggart (1908) and, in much the same tradition, temporal error theory was subsequently defended by Gödel (1949). The idea that time is not real, however, stretches back much further (...) than that. It is common to hear it said that according to Buddhist philosophy (as though that were a monolithic view) time is illusory. While it is not true that, in general, either contemporary or ancient Buddhist scholars have thought time to be illusory, there are certainly some schools of Buddhist thought, such as that of traditional Dzogchen practitioners, according to which there is no time. This paper is an attempt to set out a taxonomy of different views about what it takes for there to be time and, alongside that, a taxonomy of views about whether there is time or not, and if there is time what it is like. (shrink)

Nagarjuna and Quantum physics Eastern and Western Modes of Thought Christian Thomas Kohl -/- Nagarjuna (2nd century) is known in the history of Buddhism by the keyword sunyata. This word is translated into English by the term emptiness. The translation and the traditional interpretations give the impression that Nagarjuna declares the objects as empty, illusionary, not real or not existing. Many questions could be asked at this point. What is the assertion made by this interpretation? Is it that (...) nothing can be found or, that there is nothing or, that nothing exists? Was Nagarjuna denying the external world? Did he wish to refute what evidently is? Did he want to call into question the world in which we live? Did he wish to deny the presence of things which arise? I submit two moves to provide an answer to these queries. The first move refutes the traditional translation and interpretation. The second move is to transcribes sunyata by rendering “dependence” in line with Nagarjuna’s writings. His central view could be called “interdependence of things”. Nagarjuna was not looking for an object to be declared as fundamental reality. His fundamental reality of this world is not an immaterial or material object. It is a relation between objects including sentient beings and its main exponent: human beings. This is a relational and non-foundational view of reality which considers reality as dynamics within a wide open space. ENGLISH AND CHINESE . (shrink)

Some Eastern and Western traditions considered necessary the development of certain practices for the care of the self in relation to death. We propose to analyze in a comparative way the Pythagorean, Buddhist, and Taoist point of view. To do it, we seek to answer three questions under these three schools of thought, noting their points of agreement and disagreement. The questions are: (1) Why this care of the self is required regarding to death?, (2) What role (...) philosophy does in this care of the self?, and (3) What consequences has this care of the self in relation to the other if this person has not reached enlightenment before dying?. (shrink)

Desire is an important philosophical topic that deeply impacts everyday life. Philosophical practice is an emerging trend that uses philosophical theories and methods as a guide to living a eu‐ daimonic life. In this paper, we define desire philosophically and compare different theories of desire in specific Eastern and Western traditions. Based on the Lacanian conceptual–terminological triad of “Need‐Demand‐Desire”, the research of desire is further divided into three dimensions, namely, the subject of desire, the object of desire, (...) and the desire itself. The concept of desire is then an‐ alyzed from this triad and these three dimensions through different philosophical theories. This paper selects Buddhism as the representative of Eastern tradition, and Stoicism as the representative of the West, paying special attention to Stoicism’s “spiritual exercises” following Pierre Hadot. By exploring and comparing the Buddhist paths to liberation from suffering (i.e., the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path) and the two theoretical pillars in Stoicism (i.e., the notions of “living according to nature” and “the dichotomy of control”), practical guidance is then provided for un‐ derstanding and regulating desire in times of crisis. This understanding and regulation of desire constitutes a philosophical therapy for today’s troubles, particularly those caused by excessive or irrational desires. (shrink)

The human attempts to access, measure and organize physical phenomena have led to a manifold construction of mathematical and physical spaces. We will survey the evolution of geometries from Euclid to the Algebraic Geometry of the 20th century. The role of Persian/Arabic Algebra in this transition and its Western symbolic development is emphasized. In this relation, we will also discuss changes in the ontological attitudes toward mathematics and its applications. Historically, the encounter of geometric and algebraic perspectives enriched the (...) mathematical practices and their foundations. Yet, the collapse of Euclidean certitudes, of over 2300 years, and the crisis in the mathematical analysis of the 19th century, led to the exclusion of “geometric judgments” from the foundations of Mathematics. After the success and the limits of the logico-formal analysis, it is necessary to broaden our foundational tools and re-examine the interactions with natural sciences. In particular, the way the geometric and algebraic approaches organize knowledge is analyzed as a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural issue and will be examined in Mathematical Physics and Biology. We finally discuss how the current notions of mathematical (phase) “space” should be revisited for the purposes of life sciences. (shrink)

We often speak of 'Eastern' and 'Western' philosophy, yet it is not always easy to distinguish the key factors that justify this distinction. This essay explores the two very different conceptions of the continuum that underlie these traditions of thought and knowledge. The views of Hermann Weyl are given and it is proposed they are correct. Attention is drawn to the mutually-exclusive visions of the continuum that separate the philosophies of East and West, for they offer us (...) a way of pinning down a definition of these vague geographical terms so as to give them, in at least one respect, a clear philosophical and scientific meaning. (shrink)

To address some questions in global biomedical ethics, three problems about cultural moral differences and alleged differences in Eastern and Western cultures are addressed: The first is whether the East has fundamentally different moral traditions from those in the West. Concentrating on Japan and the United States, it is argued that theses of profound and fundamental East-West differences are dubious because of many forms of shared morality. The second is whether human rights theory is a Western (...) invention with no firm traditions in Eastern moral traditions. It is argued that this thesis is unsupported both historically and in contemporary bioethics. The third problem is whether multiculturalist theory casts doubt on claims of universal principles and rights. It is argued that the reverse is true: multiculturalism is a universalistic theory. The argument throughout supports common morality theory. (shrink)

There are two fundamental models to understanding the phenomenon of natural life. One is thecomputational model, which is based on the symbolic thinking paradigm. The other is the biologicalorganism model. The common difficulty attributed to these paradigms is that their reductive tools allowthe phenomenological aspects of experience to remain hidden behind yes/no responses (behavioraltests), or brain ‘pictures’ (neuroimaging). Hence, one of the problems regards how to overcome meth-odological difficulties towards a non-reductive investigation of conscious experience. It is our aim in (...) thispaper to show how cooperation between Eastern and Western traditions may shed light for a non-reductive study of mind and life. This study focuses on the first-person experience associated withcognitive and mental events. We studied phenomenal data as a crucial fact for the domain of livingbeings, which, we expect, can provide the ground for a subsequent third-person study. The interventionwith Jhana meditation, and its qualitative assessment, provided us with experiential profiles based uponsubjects' evaluations of their own conscious experiences. The overall results should move towards anintegrated or global perspective on mind where neither experience nor external mechanisms have thefinal word. (shrink)

The Taizhou school of philosophy, followers of Wang Yangming, places significant emphasis on the body, which has led to theoretical challenges concerning the potential dissipation of natural desires. Critics contend that while Taizhou philosophy acknowledges the natural state of human existence, it fails to provide a satisfactory explanation for the existence of evil and tends to overlook the crucial role of deliberate moral practice by idealizing the natural as morally perfect. Drawing on insights from embodied cognition, this article aims to (...) shed light on the nuanced perspectives of Taizhou moral philosophy and address common criticisms regarding its approach to evil and moral practice. I will explore Taizhou’s holistic understanding, which integrates mind and body, self and others, offering fresh insights into the interplay between deliberation and spontaneity within moral practices. As a comparative and interdisciplinary endeavor, this work seeks to bridge the divide between Eastern and Western philosophical traditions and between moral philosophy and empirical science. This article not only aims to enhance our understanding of Taizhou philosophy but also strives to illuminate broader implications for ethical behavior and moral reasoning in a diverse, global context. (shrink)

This chapter will explicate what Nishida means by “nothing” (mu, 無), as well as “being” (yū, 有), through an exposition of his concept of the “place of nothing” (mu no basho). We do so through an investigation of his exposition of “the place of nothing” vis-àvis the self, the world, and God, as it shows up in his epistemology, metaphysics, theology and religious ethics during the various periods of his oeuvre – in other words, his understanding of nothingness that he (...) takes to be the root of the self, the world, and the religious notion of an absolute or God. We will also indicate some of the sources of his notion from the Eastern and the Western traditions. What unites his view to nothing from the different periods is an existential praxis, and what I call an “anontology” that avoids reduction to either opposites of being and non-being (on-mēon). (shrink)

There are three main moral theories: virtue ethics, the deontological approach and utilitarianism. The concern here is how they interrelate, why they come into focus at different times and places, and how they are configured in their application to a modern democratic society. Person-oriented virtue ethics was the dominant understanding in Ancient Greece but within the Western tradition this was later subordinated to the monotheism of Ancient Judaism as modified by Christianity. Of growing importance by the eighteenth century was (...) rights theory which was often still situated religiously. Kant’s principle of the categorical imperative has been highly influential but was challenged by the emerging nature of industrial and capitalist society. Utilitarianism, within which the moral rightness of activity resides in its tendency to promote happiness or unhappiness, represented the decisive move from the transcendental to the immanent approach. Although all three approaches to moral theory continue to be relevant to identifiable situations and aspects of modern society, there has been a substantial turn towards a heavily modified utilitarianism associated with parliamentary democracy and market economies founded on property ownership. The root cause of this is the ability of utilitarianism, as opposed to the other approaches, to handle considerations of number and probability. The concept of utility is fundamental in economics but the idea has evolved away from its origins to mean “preference”. There is a sense in which the straightforward appeal of basic utilitarianism has been “leased out” in modified form to a set of institutional arrangements. Certain “pressure points” in a modern society are noted which pose particular problems pertinent to moral theory. Bernard Williams argues persuasively for an appropriately modified form of virtue ethics. (shrink)

"Meritocracy" has historically been understood in two ways. The first is as an approach to governance. On this understanding, we seek to put meritorious (somehow defined) people into public office to the benefit of society. This understanding has its roots in Confucius, its scope is political offices, and its justification is consequentialist. The second understanding of "meritocracy" is as a theory of justice. We distribute in accordance with merit in order to give people the things that they deserve, as justice (...) demands. This understanding has its roots in Aristotle, its scope is social goods broadly, and its justification is deontological. In this article, I discuss the differences--especially the conceptual differences--between these two, prima facie distinct, meritocratic traditions. I also argue that despite their differences Eastern Meritocracy and Western Meritocracy are harmonious. In Section I of the article I introduce the two meritocratic traditions through, in part, a highly abbreviated history of talk about "merit" and "meritocracy" in Chinese and Western philosophy. In Section II, I discuss a number of conceptual issues and partition meritocratic theories in accordance with their scopes and normative justifications. I also discuss two scenarios. In one scenario, Eastern Meritocracy appears to deliver the right result and Western Meritocracy, the wrong result. In the other scenario, vice versa. Finally, in Section III, I argue that Eastern Meritocracy and Western Meritocracy are each special cases of a single, compelling notion of "meritocracy.". (shrink)

1.Summary The key terms. 1. Key term: ‘Sunyata’. Nagarjuna is known in the history of Buddhism mainly by his keyword ‘sunyata’. This word is translated into English by the word ‘emptiness’. The translation and the traditional interpretations create the impression that Nagarjuna declares the objects as empty or illusionary or not real or not existing. What is the assertion and concrete statement made by this interpretation? That nothing can be found, that there is nothing, that nothing exists? Was Nagarjuna denying (...) the external world? Did he wish to refute that which evidently is? Did he want to call into question the world in which we live? Did he wish to deny the presence of things that somehow arise? My first point is the refutation of this traditional translation and interpretation. 2. Key terms: ‘Dependence’ or ‘relational view’. My second point consists in a transcription of the keyword of ‘sunyata’ by the word ‘dependence’. This is something that Nagarjuna himself has done. Now Nagarjuna’s central view can be named ‘dependence of things’. Nagarjuna is not looking for a material or immaterial object which can be declared as a fundamental reality of this world. His fundamental reality is not an object. It is a relation between objects. This is a relational view of reality. This is the heart of Nagarjuna’s ideas. In the 19th century a more or less unknown Italian philosopher, Vincenzo Goberti, spoke about relations as the mean and as bonds between things. Later, in quantum physics and in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead we are talking about interactions and entanglements. These ideas of relatedness or connections or entanglements in Eastern and Western modes of thought are the main idea of this essay. Not all entanglements are known. Just two examples: the nature of quantum entanglements is not known. Quantum entanglements should be faster than light. That's why Albert Einstein had some doubts. A second example: the completely unknown connections between the mind and the brain. Other examples are mysterious like the connections between birds in a flock. Some are a little known like gravitational forces. 3. Key terms: ‘Arm in arm’. But Nagarjuna did not stop there. He was not content to repeat this discovery of relational reality. He went on one step further indicating that what is happening between two things. He gave indications to the space between two things. He realized that not the behaviour of bodies, but the behaviour of something between them may be essential for understanding the reality. This open space is not at all empty. It is full of energy. The open space is the middle between things. Things are going arm in arm. The middle might be considered as a force that bounds men to the world and it might be seen as well as a force of liberation. It might be seen as a bondage to the infinite space. 4. Key term: Philosophy. Nagarjuna, we are told, was a Buddhist philosopher. This statement is not wrong when we take the notion ‘philosophy’ in a deep sense as a love to wisdom, not as wisdom itself. Philosophy is a way to wisdom. Where this way has an end wisdom begins and philosophy is no more necessary. A.N. Whitehead gives philosophy the commission of descriptive generalization. We do not need necessarily a philosophical building of universal dimensions. Some steps of descriptive generalization might be enough in order to see and understand reality. There is another criterion of Nagarjuna’s philosophy. Not his keywords ‘sunyata’ and ‘pratityasamutpada’ but his 25 philosophical examples are the heart of his philosophy. His examples are images. They do not speak to rational and conceptual understanding. They speak to our eyes. Images, metaphors, allegories or symbolic examples have a freshness which rational ideas do not possess. Buddhist dharma and philosophy is a philosophy of allegories. This kind of philosophy is not completely new and unknown to European philosophy. Since Plato’s allegory of the cave it is already a little known. (Plato 424 – 348 Befor Current Era) The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg has underlined the importance of metaphors in European philosophy. 5. Key terms: Quantum Physics. Why quantum physics? European modes of thought had no idea of the space between two this. They were bound to the ideas of substance or subject, two main metaphysical traditions of European philosophical history, two main principles. These substances and these subjects are two immaterial bodies which were considered by traditional European metaphysics as lying, as a sort of core, inside the objects or underlying the empirical reality of our world. The first European scientist who saw with his inner eye the forces between two things had been Michael Faraday (1791-1867). Faraday was an English scientist who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism. Later physicists like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and others followed his view in modern physics. This is a fifth point of my work. I compare Nagarjuna with European scientific modes of thought for a better understanding of Asia. I do not compare Nagarjuna with European philosophers like Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein. The principles and metaphysical foundations of physical sciences are more representative for European modes of thought than the ideas of Hegel, Heidegger and Wittgenstein and they are more precise. And slowly we are beginning to understand these principles. Let me take as an example the interpretation of quantum entanglement by the British mathematician Roger Penrose. Penrose discusses in the year of 2000 the experiences of quantum entanglement where light is separated over a distance of 100 kilometers and still remains connected in an unknown way. These are well known experiments in the last 30 years. Very strange for European modes of thought. The light should be either separated or connected. That is the expectation most European modes of thought tell us. Aristotle had been the first. Aristotle (384 - 322 Before Current Era) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and a teacher of Alexander the Great. He told us the following principle as a metaphysical foundation: Either a situation exists or not. There is not a third possibility. Now listen to Roger Penrose: “Quantum entanglement is a very strange type of thing. It is somewhere between objects being separate and being in communication with each other” (Roger Penrose, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind, Cambridge University Press. 2000 page 66). This sentence of Roger Penrose is a first step of a philosophical generalization in a Whiteheadian sense. 6. Key terms: ‘The metaphysical foundations of modern science’ had been examined particularly by three European and American philosophers: E. A. Burtt, A.N. Whitehead and Hans-Georg Gadamer, by Gadamer eminently in his late writings on Heraclitus and Parmenides. I try to follow the approaches of these philosophers of relational views and of anti-substantialism. By ‘metaphysical foundations’ Edwin Arthur Burtt does not understand transcendental ideas but simply the principles that are underlying sciences. -/- 7. Key terms: ‘Complementarity’, ‘interactions’, ‘entanglements’. Since 1927 quantum physics has three key terms which give an indication to the fundamental physical reality: Complementarity, interactions and entanglement. These three notions are akin to Nagarjuna’s relational view of reality. They are akin and they are very precise, so that Buddhism might learn something from these descriptions and quantum physicists might learn from Nagarjuna’s examples and views of reality. They might learn to do a first step in a philosophical generalisation of quantum physical experiments. All of us we might learn how objects are entangled or going arm in arm. [The end of the summary.] -/- « Wenn du gerade das, wodurch auch immer du gefesselt bist, erkennst, wirst du zur Freiheit gelangen. Wenn du diesen speziellen Pfad verwirklichst, gelangst du in einem Leben zur Buddhaschaft. Deswegen verhält es sich folgendermaßen : Wenn plötzlich die Geistesregung « Begierde » enststeht, dann betrachte, ohne ihr zu folgen, direkt ihre Essenz und verweile in dieser Betrachtung, ohne Ablenkungen zuzulassen. Auf diese Weise reinigt Begierde sich selbst, ohne aufgegeben zu werden, da sie ohne Grundlage und Ursprung entsteht. Das wird « Befreiung in sich selbst », « unterscheidende ursprüngliche Weisheit » oder Buddha Amitabha » genannt ». Jigden Sumgön, Licht, das die Dunkelheit durchbricht, Otter Verlag, München 2006, Seite 47, 48 . (shrink)

PREFACE WORD -/- Hilmi Ziya Ülken was born in Istanbul during the last period of the Ottoman Empire, was educated during this period and worked in many areas of the intellectual life of the newly established Republic. Although he was interested in many fields of social sciences, he gained fame in philosophy, sociology, history of thought and literature. Again, he undertook important tasks in revealing and introducing medieval Islamic thinkers and post-Tanzimat Turkish thought, and due to his deep knowledge of (...) Eastern and Western philosophies, he made comparative studies in these fields and tried to reveal the similarities and differences in both cultures. Many graduate studies, book chapters and articles have been written about such an important thinker whose works are also recognized abroad. Among the thinkers of the Republican Era, Ülken is one of the most studied names. In this study, Ülken's biography, his intellectual adventure, his understanding of philosophy and his ideas about the life of thought are discussed panoramically, and the bibliographic information obtained about his articles and other works that have not yet been fully revealed has been added to the study. Another important document added to this study is Ülken's biography written in his own handwriting. Our hope is that with the completion of the information missing in this study, a complete portrait of Ülken will be revealed. When Ülken's works are taken into consideration, it is understood that he wrote works in many fields of social sciences. The fact that he did not concentrate on a certain field but worked in many fields has been a frequently criticized aspect of him. In this sense, we think that the phrase "A Thinker of Mütebahhir", which we wrote as a subtitle to the title of our study, defines him very well. Many names have used the adjective mütebahhir, which means ocean and depth in Ottoman Turkish, about Ülken. While Necati Öner used it in a positive sense, names such as Cemil Meriç (1916-1987) and İsmail Tunalı (1923-2015) used it in a sense that includes negative connotations, such as saying words in every field, his knowledge is unlimited but formless and non-systematic, and Salâh Birsel (1919-1999) wrote on every subject. On the other hand, scholars such as Kurtuluş Kayalı and Ali Utku, who have recently conducted competent studies on Ülken, have emphasized that Ülken - contrary to popular belief - thought and worked within a system and was very sensitive about his system of thought. When Ülken's works are examined in general, it is seen that many of them were formed by turning lecture notes into books, and this situation caused many problems. This situation led to problems such as the disorganization of his works, the lack of a certain systematization, the lack of the necessary methodological sensitivity in footnotes and citations, and the use of some terms in their original language instead of their Turkish equivalents. When we look at the life stories of important thinkers in the history of thought, we observe that they were not only influenced by the social, political, economic, etc. conditions of the period in which they lived, but also that they influenced these conditions in the period in which they lived. The best example of this situation among the thinkers of the early years of the Republic is Ülken. When his works are examined in chronological order, it is noticeable that his ideas constantly changed, that he had to defend the ideas he criticized from time to time, and that he was in a constant search. He explained his works in many fields by saying that he wrote works that would be a source for his own works and that he served as a bridge to the past. The fact that he was a doyen in many fields of social sciences despite having a Mülkiye education can be explained by his self-education. Ülken, who set an example for academics and thinkers with his hard work, diligence, and lifestyle of constantly reading, researching and writing, carried out very important works in his 73 years of life. As Öner, a student of his who knew him closely, says: "In his daily life, Ülken was either reading, writing or philosophizing." Again, Tunalı says about his diligence that "when he was finishing a book, he would have written another book!" It can be said that one of Ülken's efforts was to establish a tradition of sociology and philosophy in Turkey by recognizing the disconnect in our world of thought. Ülken expressed this to his student Necati Öner by saying, "We are a quarter in philosophy, you will be half, and then we will be complete!" While the influence of philosophers and sociologists who came to our country with the educational reforms was quite limited, Ülken succeeded in establishing a tradition in Istanbul Sociology and Ankara Theology. For this reason, important sociologists and philosophers of our country, such as Baykan Sezer (1938-2002) and Kurtuluş Kayalı (born 1949), admitted that "we are students of the Ülken tradition" even though they were not his direct students. Ülken provided an important opening in the social sciences with his methodology that analyzed the problems he dealt with in depth, tried to deal with all aspects of the issues and made synthesis attempts between different ideas. In addition, with the newly established Republic, he made great efforts to collect and translate sources in many fields, especially philosophy, and to carry out activities on a philosophical basis. The fact that his works continued to attract attention in every period after him and were reprinted and read again and again reveals the centrality of his role in the intellectual life of the Republican period. In this study, in which the life, philosophy and thoughts of Hilmi Ziya Ülken, whose valuable contributions to Turkish-Islamic thought are undeniable, have been tried to be presented in general terms, the articles and book chapters I have written about Ülken in various journals and book chapters and whose titles I have given in the bibliography and bibliography section have also been utilized. I hope that this monographic study will make a small contribution to the studies on Ülken, who deserves to be remembered with mercy and gratitude. -/- . (shrink)

Philosophers have gotten something of a bad reputation for widespread—and perhaps closed-minded—atheism. The reality, however, is quite otherwise. For most of their history, philosophy and religion have been intertwined in one way or another, and the vast majority of philosophers have had some kind of religious beliefs, oftentimes central to their philosophy, whether or not they have made the links explicit. This is not without good reason. Though their methods (sometimes) differ, philosophy and religion have always shared a number of (...) similar goals in terms of seeking answers to life’s “Big Questions,” questions about the ultimate nature of reality, our purpose or place in the world, the meaning of life and how we should live it. This chapter addresses philosophy's reputation of closed-mindedness towards the end, but first it addresses the historical point. (shrink)

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), at about the start of the nineteenth century, was advocat‐ ing that the study about religion has to be included in university‐level education in the East. The university he envisioned and founded (Visva‐Bharati) included in its curriculum such a study. Shortly a er India’s regaining independence in 1947 and becoming a secular state, that institution was inaugurated as a central university with an advanced institute for philosophy and the study of religion. This essay answers whether his understanding (...) of studying religion would accommodate the approach to the academic study of religion associated with the mod‐ ern Western research university. It also inquires the extent that the curriculum for the study of religion at Visva‐Bharati evidences such an approach. The answers it advances draw primarily on his two essays, Eastern University and Hindu University, which o er his vision of univer‐ sity level education; on commissioned reports for higher level education in the new India as a secular state; on developments in the academic study of religion in the West, especially the United States; on the relatively recent revised curriculum for such a study at Visva‐Bharati University; and on ideas of social imaginary and the comparative study of religion articulated by Western scholars. (shrink)

According to the current scientific paradigm, what we call ‘life’, ‘mind’, and ‘consciousness’ are considered epiphenomenal occurrences, or emergent properties or functions of matter and energy. Science does not associate these with an inherent and distinct existence beyond a materialistic/energetic conception. ‘Life’ is a word pointing at cellular and multicellular processes forming organisms capable of specific functions and skills. ‘Mind’ is a cognitive ability emerging from a matrix of complex interactions of neuronal processes, while ‘consciousness’ is an even more elusive (...) concept, deemed a subjective epiphenomenon of brain activity. Historically, however, this has not always been the case, even in the scientific and academic context. Several prominent figures took vitalism seriously, while some schools of Western philosophical idealism and Eastern traditions promoted conceptions in which reality is reducible to mind or consciousness rather than matter. We will argue that current biological sciences did not falsify these alternative paradigms and that some forms of vitalism could be linked to some forms of idealism if we posit life and cognition as two distinct aspects of consciousness preeminent over matter. However, we will not argue in favor of vitalistic and idealistic conceptions. Rather, contrary to a physicalist doctrine, these were and remain coherent worldviews and cannot be ruled out by modern science. (shrink)

World philosophies are gradually gaining in recognition. Today, philosophers in Southeast Asia can freely construct their regional philosophies without philosophical tyranny of the West. However, this situation has not come so easily. Many Asian and African philosophies have experienced a struggle for acceptance. And even this recognition is limited by selectivity and philosophical fashion centered in Western academia and perpetuated by Western educated eastern intellectuals. This paper attempts to show how regional philosophy in general and Southeast Asian (...) philosophy in particular can be constructed and accepted. These regional self-constructed philosophies can serve to correct the legacy of the racism and bigotry of the tradition. And the paper also promotes the idea of establishing a philosophical umbrella called ‘Southeast Asian philosophy’ under which regional philosophies can develop and thrive. (shrink)

Philosophers in the Western tradition have both theorized about imagination and used imagination in their theorizing about other matters. In this chapter, I first provide a brief overview of philosophical theorizing about imagination with a special focus on its relation to other mental states such as belief and perception. I then turn to a discussion of the methodological role that imagination has played in philosophy. I here focus on the imaginability principle, i.e., the claim that the imaginability of a (...) given scenario entails that such a scenario is in some sense possible. Relying on this kind of principle, philosophers have used imagination to justify theories in domains such as philosophy of mind, metaphysics and ethics. (shrink)

Omnicide: Mania, Fatality and Future-in-Delirium (2019) finds Iranian-American philosopher and comparative literature theorist Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh carving the figure of the diffracted neo-Bedouin wanderer, whose mania we tail through the book’s haunted pages. The book’s namesake, “omnicide,” refers to the complete and total erasure of the Earth--the term has most recently been generally applied in ecological contexts, most markedly in regards to the Anthropocene and futurology. However, it is the explicitly poetic and literary intersection between mania and the grotesque that (...) Mohaghegh inches us towards, lifting omnicide from its proscriptive use in the Western philosophical/sociological tradition and goading it towards an unfamiliar cryptic terrain. Surveying ten contemporary Middle Eastern poets and fiction writers, including Sadeq Hedayat (Iran), Réda Bensmaia (Algeria), Samuel Adonis (Syria), Joyce Mansour (Egypt), Forugh Farrokhzad (Iran), Ibrahim al-Koni (Libya), Ahmad Shamlu (Iran), Ghada Samman (Lebanon), Mahmoud Darwish (Palestine) and Hassim Blasim (Iraq), Mohaghegh parses curious stanzas and plucks spectral paragraphs from myriad texts so as to navigate the largely occluded and excised narratives of the contemporary Middle Eastern philosophical-literary canon. Not only does Mohaghegh acuminate the multifaceted question of mania and its variegated networks, chambers, byways and sunken burrows--so as to juxtapose two different world literatures (East and West)--but Mohaghegh also illuminates this oeuvre to affront the Western psychoanalytic treatment of mania as an exclusionary vessel. Thus, despite Mohaghegh avoiding any explicit references to Western philosophers and scientists, both the codified dictum of the medical decree and the hyper-genealogical superlative tradition of Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault and their contemporaries rankle Omnicide’s annals. (shrink)

What are some metaphysical fundamentals which constitute the reality? This question has occupied philosophers for a long time. The western tradition once dealt with conceptions of earth, air, water, fire, ether whereas the eastern tradition has studied notions like yin-yang(陰陽), taiji(太極), lichi(理氣). The question is now being researched under the name of physicalism or naturalism, and yet what is not yet clarified is the relationship between electromagnetic force as the fundamental of the physical and consciousness as the fundamental (...) of the mental. What is puzzling is that most philosophers insist on the overcoming of the traditional dualism while they tend to accept the distinction between electromagnetic force and consciousness. If they decide that the metaphysical paradigm of the duality is plausible then they should first present the grammar of functions of those concepts like individual, identity, causation. If they can see that the prospect of that traditional metaphysical paradigms are not hopeful, then they better start to look for an alternative metaphysical picture where the world can be understood more holistically. There have been alternative paradigms such as metaphysics of process and integration. It’s time to take a look at one of these. This paper tries to interpret the latter. -/- The notion of integration(誠) has been the subject studied for a long time as a teaching of Zhongyong, one of the key Confucian texts. Many has taken the word “誠” of Zhongyong to mean sincerity or faithfulness. Certainly there are anthropological or ethical dimension to the meaning of the word. But the whole text seems to direct a reader to see how the world is, the metaphysical dimension of the world. I will interpret the major thrust of Zhongyong to say that integration is a metaphysical fundamental. If one is to accept the evolution thesis of the body of human being then she is also to concede the evolution thesis of the mind of human being. If one is positive toward the evolutionary theory of the human mind then she is more likely open-minded toward the powers of the mind of physical things. This may allow to proceed to a thesis that integration is an information consciousness(chapter 1). Suppose that physical things of the world are integrational. Then the integration is not to be given from the outside but from within. Then when things are integrational they become integrators. Integrators are bound to possess some sort of power. I will discuss the thesis that integration is a dispositional power(chapter 2). If all things are bundles of informations then information is ubiquitous(chapter 3) and things may be passive in certain contexts but are active toward their informations, processing them in their own ways. If these three hypotheses are reasonable then my thesis of integration as a metaphysical fundamental would be plausible. (shrink)

Purpose – With the growing demand for ethical standards in the prevailing business environment, ethical leadership has been under increasingly more focus. Based on the social exchange theory and social learning theory, this study scrutinized the impact of ethical leadership on the presentation of ethical conduct by employees through the ethical climate. Notably, this study scrutinized the moderating function of the person organization fit (P-O fit) in relation to ethical climate and the ethical conduct of employees. -/- Design/methodology/approach – To (...) evaluate the research hypotheses, two-wave data were collected from 295 individuals who are currently employed in various Iraqi organizations (i.e. manufacturing, medical, and insurance industries). -/- Findings – In line with the hypotheses, the outcomes from a sample of 295 workers working in different Iraqi entities exhibited a positive relationship between the ethical behavior of leaders and the ethical conduct of employees in the ethical climate. Moreover, it was observed that the P-O fit of employees moderated the relationship between ethical climate and the ethical conduct of employees such that the relationship was more robust for those with a high P-O fit in comparison to those with a low P-O fit. -/- Research limitations/implications – The primary limitation of this study is in the data, which was obtained from a single source. Although the study conducted two surveys and utilized a mediation and moderation variables model that was less likely to be influenced by common method bias (CMB) (Podsakoff et al., 2012), one cannot completely rule out CMB. Apart from the potential effects of the CMB, the consistency of the empirical findings could have also been compromised since self-reported data were utilized in measuring ethical behavior, which can be a very complex and sensitive issue. For this reason, the social desirability response bias cannot be ruled out completely. When possible, future studies must gather data from multiple sources. Furthermore, supervisors must evaluate the ethical behavior of employees. Another limitation was that the findings of this study were based on a sample in a Middle Eastern cultural context such as in Iraq. Perhaps, the particular cultural features of this context, which encompassed, among other things, strong adherence to religious values (Moaddel, 2010), could have influenced the findings of this study. It is true that the effects of differences (P–O fit) are highly likely to replicate across cultural contexts (Triandis et al., 1988). However, it can be seen that further studies are needed to evaluate the context-sensitivity of these findings (Whetten, 2009) by analyzing other cultures, where the importance of religiosity is on the decline (i.e. in Western countries, Ribberink et al., 2018) or where the cultural features are very much different from those that apply to Iraq. Lastly, other external factors were not taken into account by this study as it tried to explain ethical behavior. Ethics is a highly complex subject and is influenced by numerous variables at the organizational, individual, and external environment levels. Thus, caution must be observed when making inferences from the present study which, to a certain degree, offered a simplified version of ethical behavior by concentrating on a few variables such as the Arab culture’s traditional ideology, which dominates even science (Abu Khalil, 1992). In addition, there are political conflicts in the Middle Eastern cultural context such as what is happening in Iraq (Harff, 2018). Thus, it is important to include such aspects in future researches. -/- Practical implications – In terms of management, the findings send a clear signal to those in the upper echelon that, without ignoring the issue of ethics in organizations, employees are a critical aspect to be taken into account to encourage ethical behavior at the workplace. This study has important practical implications. First, this study determined that ethical leadership (here, of the supervisors) positively influences the behavior of subordinates (refers to the supervisors here); this, in turn, further improves the ethical behavior of employees. It is vital that managers or supervisors are motivated to practice ethical leadership because they directly influence the employees. It has been suggested that top managers, especially chief executive officers, have the ability to shape the ethical climate, which also influences the ethical behavior of employees further. This study offered several feasible ways that managers can apply to achieve that. In particular, top managers may utilize the ethical climate as a way of communicating the ethical values that they have to their subordinates, thereby serving as a motivation for the subordinates to adopt ethical behavior. It was also suggested by this study that ethical climate and the P–O fit may, to some degree, substitute each other as they influence the ethical behavior of employees. Therefore, firms that were identified to have a low level of ethical standards, practices, and policies, at least from the employees’ perspective, are better poised to conduct ethical issues in order to construct the ethical behavior of their subordinates. More importantly, it is highly essential that the value congruence between an organization and its followers be considered. -/- Social implications – This study highlighted the notion of ethics and how it’s essential for society. Ethics refers to the norms, standards, and values that direct the behavior of an individual. Ethical behavior is vital in society because we need to be treated with respect as human beings. -/- Originality/value – This study responds to recent calls for more research to identify factors that may strengthen or mitigate the influence of ethical behavior in the workplace such as ethical leadership, ethical climate, and Person–Organization. (shrink)

With a focus on Asian philosophical traditions, this book examines varieties of philosophical thought and self-transformative practice that do not fit neatly on one side or another of the standard Western division between philosophy and religion. It contains chapters by experts on Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, Upaniṣadic and Jain philosophies, as well as ancient Greek philosophy and recent contemplative and spiritual movements. The authors problematize the notion of a European philosophical canon distinguished by "reason and rationality" in contrast to (...) “religious Eastern wisdom-traditions,” which are purportedly grounded in “faith.” These essays lay the groundwork needed to rethink dominant historical and conceptual categories from a wider global perspective to arrive at a deeper, more plural understanding of the diverse nature of both philosophy and religion. (shrink)

The higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness is a reductive representational theory of consciousness which says that what makes a mental state conscious is that there is a suitable HOT directed at that mental state. Although it seems that any neural realization of the theory must be somewhat widely distributed in the brain, it remains unclear just how widely distributed it needs to be. In section I, I provide some background and define some key terms. In section II, I argue (...) against the view that HOT theory should treat first-order (i.e. world-directed) conscious states as requiring prefrontal cortical activity though it is reasonable to suppose that conscious states are realized in the brain. In section III, I then explore some of the key background metaphysical issues involved in understanding the nature of consciousness, such as the debate between realism and idealism as well as the prospects for solving the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness. Some of the differences in question often mirror the traditional differences between Western and Eastern perspectives on the nature of consciousness. Overall, I argue that some form of realism and physicalism is more plausible than the opposing views. I also argue that materialists (and especially HOT theorists) can offer plausible replies to the hard problem. (shrink)

: Two major philosophers of the twentieth century, the German existential phenomenologist Martin Heidegger and the seminal Japanese Kyoto School philosopher Nishida Kitarō are examined here in an attempt to discern to what extent their ideas may converge. Both are viewed as expressing, each through the lens of his own tradition, a world in transition with the rise of modernity in the West and its subsequent globalization. The popularity of Heidegger's thought among Japanese philosophers, despite its own admitted limitation to (...) the Western "history of being," is connected to Nishida's opening of a uniquely Japanese path in its confrontation with Western philosophy. The focus is primarily on their later works (the post-Kehre Heidegger and the works of Nishida that have been designated "Nishida philosophy"), in which each in his own way attempts to overcome the subject-object dichotomy inherited from the tradition of Western metaphysics by looking to a deeper structure from out of which both subjectivity and objectivity are derived and which embraces both. For Heidegger, the answer lies in being as the opening of unconcealment, from out of which beings emerge, and for Nishida, it is the place of nothingness within which beings are co-determined in their oppositions and relations. Concepts such as Nishida's "discontinuous continuity," "absolutely self-contradictory identity" (between one and many, whole and part, world and things), the mutual interdependence of individuals, and the self-determination of the world through the co-relative self-determination of individuals, and Heidegger's "simultaneity" (zugleich) and "within one another" (ineinander) (of unconcealment and concealment, presencing and absencing), and their "between" (Zwischen) and "jointure" (Fuge) are examined. Through a discussion of these ideas, the suggestion is made of a possible "transition" (Übergang) of both Western and Eastern thinking, in their mutual encounter, both in relation to each other and each in relation to its own past history, leading to both a self-discovery in the other and to a simultaneous self-reconstitution. (shrink)

This is a technical treatise for the scientific-minded readers trying to expand their intellectual horizon beyond the straitjacket of materialism. It is dedicated to those scientists and philosophers who feel there is something more, but struggle with connecting the dots into a more coherent picture supported by a way of seeing that allows us to overcome the present paradigm and yet maintains a scientific and conceptual rigor, without falling into oversimplifications. Most of the topics discussed are unknown even to neuroscientists, (...) biologists, philosophers, and yet are based on the findings published in their own mainstream peer reviewed literature or on deep insights of the scientific, philosophical and spiritual giants of the past. -/- A scientific, philosophical, and spiritual overview of the relationship between science and spirituality, neuroscience and the mystery of consciousness, mind and the nature of reality, evolution and life. A plaidoyer for a science that goes beyond the curve of reason and embraces a new synthesis of knowledge. The overcoming of the limitations of the intellect into an extended vision of ourselves and Nature. A critique of physicalism, the still-dominant doctrine that believes that all reality can be reduced to matter and the laws of physics alone. A review and reassessment of the old and new philosophical and metaphysical ideas which attempts to bring closer Western and Eastern traditions where science, philosophy, consciousness, Spirit and Nature are united in a grand vision that transcends the limited conventional scientific and philosophical paradigm. A possible answer to the questions of purpose and meaning and the future evolution of humankind beyond a conception that posits a priori a purposeless and meaningless universe. A report of the new scientific discoveries of a basal intelligence in cells and plants, on the question if mind is computational, the issue of free will, the mind-body problem, and the so called ‘hard problem of consciousness’. An essay on ancient as modern philosophical conceptions, from the One of Plotinus, the God of Spinoza until the recent revival of panpsychism or the universal consciousness. A journey into quantum physics from the perspective of philosophical idealism and an invitation to adopt new ways of seeing that might help us to transform our present understanding, expanding it into an integral cosmology, with a special emphasis on the spiritual and evolutionary cosmology of the Indian seer Sri Aurobindo. -/- Not just a philosophical and metaphysical meditation but, rather, an appeal to work towards a change of consciousness, a widening of our perspective towards a new way of seeing beyond a purely mechanistic worldview to avoid a social, environmental and economic collapse. Humans are transitional beings that will have to make a choice: relapse into a pre-rational state or evolve towards a new trans-rational species supported by an ideal of human unity in diversity as the expression of a spiritual evolutionary process, the call of the Spirit on Nature. (shrink)

Parmenides expelled nonbeing from the realm of knowledge and forbade us to think or talk about it. But still there has been a long tradition of nay-sayings throughout the history of Western and Eastern philosophy. Are those philosophers talking about the same nonbeing or nothing? If not, how do their concepts of nothing differ from each other? Could there be different types of nothing? Surveying the traditional classifications of nothing or nonbeing in the East and West have led (...) me to develop a typology of nothing that consists of three main types: 1) privative nothing, commonly known as absence; 2) negative nothing, the altogether not or absolute nothing; and finally 3) original nothing, the nothing that is equivalent to being. I will test my threefold typology of nothing by comparing the similarities and differences between the conceptions of nothing in Heidegger, Daoism and Buddhism. With this study, I hope that I will clarify some confusion in the understanding of nothing in Heidegger, Daoism and Buddhism, and shed light on the central philosophical issue of “what there is not”. (shrink)

The current issue of Argument: Biannual Philosophical Journal (2015, vol. 5, no. 1) provides a platform for cross‑cultural studies of the human body, the embodied mind, agency, intentionality, and various axiological aspects of the human psychophysical identity. Out of the twenty articles that compose this issue, thirteen original papers address the leading theme, namely Psychophysical integrity of the human self. Comparative approach: philosophy, literature and art. The multidisciplinary and comparative perspectives include references to Western and eastern cultural (...) class='Hi'>traditions, as well as juxtaposing a variety of views on human corporeality and the mind‑body relationship, discussed from the perspectives of philosophical theories (Venieri, Jakubczak, Kamińska, Kołdrzak, King, Wachowski), literary works (Kamińska, Milewska) and visual artefacts (King, Staniszewska, Wałek, Popczyk, Romanowicz, Lipowicz). (shrink)

In the Pre-Qin time, pursuing “Dao” was the main task in the scholarship of most of the ancient Chinese philosophers, while the Ancient Greek philosophers considered pursuing “Truth” as their ultimate goal. While the “Dao” in ancient Chinese texts and the “Truth” in ancient Greek philosophic literature do share or cross-cover certain connotations, there are subtle and important differences between the two comparable philosophic concepts. These differences have deep and profound impact on the later development of Chinese and Western (...) philosophy and culture respectively. Interestingly, while the modern Chinese philosophy has gradually accepted and established the Western conception of “Truth” on its way towards modernization, the “post-modern” Western philosophy is just undergoing a process of deconstructing its traditional concept of “Truth”, thus, in a certain sense, going closer to the traditional Chinese “Dao”. From a comparative, relative and dynamic perspective, there could possibly be a fusion of horizon between the Chinese “Dao” and the Western “Truth”. (shrink)

Divus Augustus Pater. The cult of divine Augustus under the rule of the Julio-Claudian dynasty -/- Summary The cult of divine Augustus was one of the most important phenomena of ideological nature under the rule of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. The crucial point of its development was the apotheosis conducted on 17 September 14 AD. The new cult was derived greatly from numerous borrowings from the rites of various gods of the Roman Pantheon. As divus, Augustus received a separate priest, a (...) private priestess, and a college of priests. The first flamen Augustalis became Germanicus. The holder of this title enjoyed many privileges. It seems unlikely, however, that flamen Augustalis controlled the entire cult of divine Augustus. This was the role of the emperor as both the supreme priest and the inheritor of political power. Sodales Augustales also had special cult functions. This religious fraternity had a mixed private-state character just like many of the institutions of the early principate. It was a cult college of gens Iulia and, most of all, of Augustus. From its beginning it enjoyed high prestige. The members of this religious fraternity were recruited among the Senate elite and the family of the emperor. Sacerdos divi Augusti occupies a different place in the priesthood established to worship Augustus. This female priesthood, despite its humble cult and political role, is of great interest to scholars. In spite of discerning investigations by researchers, there seem to have been only two priestesses in the Julio-Claudian dynasty – Julia Augusta, the widow of the creator of the principate, and Antonia Augusta. There is even no certainty that the latter had preformed the function at all. Augustus, as a god, was given a separate temple under a Senate decree. However, the construction work went slowly ahead. Therefore, divus Augustus was initially worshipped in other places of worship. At first, it was the temple of Mars Ultor. He was also worshipped in the sacrarium on the Palatine. One encounters certain difficulties when trying to identify the places of Augustus’ worship in Rome. Ultimately, there seem to have been two sacraria in the capital of the Empire. There is no certainty, however, whether yet another temple was located next to the templum novum divi Augusti on the Palatine. In trying to analyse the phenomenon of the divinity of the Roman emperors, and Augustus in particular, it is necessary to refer to the genesis of Emperor worship. Within the framework of official religion it is important to distinguish such elements as genius and numen. Although the consecratio act conducted by the Senate meant the crossing of the boundary between the human Augustus and the divine Augustus, it is important to remember that Augustus had prepared his apotheosis for a long time and already enjoyed divine honours during his lifetime. Certain elements of Augustus worship developed under his rule continued to exist for some time after the death of the creator of the principate. Augustus divinity was guarded by the law of maiestas. At the beginning of the rule of Tiberius it mostly protected divus Augustus himself. Gradually, despite some opposition, the law began to serve the ruling emperor. There is little certainty of how many cases were brought under the crimen laesae maiestatis against those who insulted the divine Augustus. The issue of trials for offending the law of maiestas is accounted for one-sidedly by ancient historians, which complicates the work of contemporary researchers. There is, however, no denying that for Tiberius (Augustus’ successor) the trials on the charge of maiestas turned out to be a trap. The cult of divus Augustus was approved throughout the Empire. Nevertheless, some weaker voices of opposition could be heard. These were present in the Senate circles cherishing the memory of the last defenders of the Republic, as well as among some ethnic and religious communities. The latter included Judaism and emerging Christianity. The political consequences of Augustus’ deification were very serious. He significantly contributed to the ruling of the Julio-Claudian dynasty for over 50 years. The main reason for that was the fact that in the Rome of that time the tradition of power succession was not yet well-grounded. Directly after the principate creator’s death, his consecratio took place – he was assigned priests and many godly honours and a temple was erected in his honour. These actions obviously took place under Augustus’ successor Tiberius who, during his rule, constantly tried to emulate the divine predecessor and referred to his decrees on numerous occasions. Tiberius was the emperor who contributed to the cult of his adoptive father to the greatest extent. However, one cannot fail to notice that his actions were somehow ambiguous. It has to be remembered that, in addition to his sincere respect for the divine Augustus, Tiberius also tried to use the authority of the creator of the principate to strengthen his power. This is exemplified by the motto imprinted on coins: DIVVS AVGVSTVS PATER. Caligula took a different approach to the Augustan cult. When assuming power after Tiberius, he was in a different position. The 20-year rule by Augustus’ successor greatly contributed to the strengthening of the idea of the principate ’s stability in the minds of the Romans. This allowed Caligula to pay less heed to the Senate aristocracy, as well as other institutional elements of the Republic. Under these circumstances, the cult of Augustus underwent modifications. Divus Augustus still remained at the heart of the religious propaganda of the Roman state and gens Iulia, but also other members of the family of the young Emperor received a number of honours drawing them closer to the world of gods. Drusilla, for that matter, was made a diva. By this, the idea of domus Augusta received a new confirmation. Caligula himself did not cease to participate in, and support, the rites performed to worship his divine grandfather. The available sources lead us to believe that Augustus constituted for the young princeps a role model and a character to which he often compared himself with. For Claudius, the use of the cult of divine Augustus was important as a tool to strengthen political power. But due to the fact that his personal links with divus Augustus were rather weak, Claudius focused on the cult of his grandmother Livia, Augustus’ wife. He also emphasised the function of sacerdos divi Augusti which his mother Antonia Augusta was to fulfil. Claudius faced the task of the ‘reconstruction’ of the cult of Augustus which had deteriorated, especially during the second part of Caligula’s rule. Claudius took a different direction in imitating Augustus than his two predecessors. Augustus’ model was very capacious, allowing him to find examples which could be adjusted to fit his own political goals and personality. Claudius avoided the stiffness characteristic of Tiberius and, at the same time, respected Augustus’ traditions which he Caligula inadvertently abused. Claudius’ attitude to Augustus is not quite clear. Undoubtedly he kept alive the memory of the first princeps, however, there is a lack of testimony about the new honours conferred on divine Augustus during the rule of this Emperor. Almost all of them concentrate around the person of Claudius or his family. There are, however, no honours conferred on the creator of the principate. This type of attitude caused the cult of divine Augustus to be eclipsed by the cult of the ruling Emperor. Nero, the last representative of the Julio-Claudian dynasty descended, unlike Claudius, directly from the line of Augustus. The new emperor deified his predecessor by using the model of Augustus’ apotheosis. In the first part of his rule he drew greatly from the Augustus model of exercising power. Nero ’s ideological platform seems to be the richest in comparison with other emperors of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. The tradition of links with divus Augustus was, however, only one of many different elements. With time, the tradition appeared to play a still smaller role. The departure from the Augustus model took place on many levels. Some of the steps were very radical, whereas others were less significant. The most serious was the elimination of the members of gens Iulia and gens Claudia, and those who could prove their kinship with both the houses. The devastation in Nero ’s closest family put an end to the concept of domus Augusta. Formally, the Emperor did not renounce the divine creator of the principate but, in practice, the idea of the new domus Augusta no longer aimed at presenting Augustus’ descendants united in a single family. Nero was now alone and any creation of ideological concepts of power under those circumstances had to be based around him. These actions ended in disaster. By giving up the Augustan model, Nero lost the support of the army and, as a result, lost power. Apart from the worship of the state religion in the capital, divus Augustus was the subject of a provincial and municipal cult. Here, the worship of divine Augustus was often a continuation, sometimes in an extended form, of the honours Augustus had been granted during his lifetime. In the cult of divus Augustus, in the provinces one can observe a mutual interweaving of elements copied from the capital model and local traditions. The beginning of the provincial cult of Augustus dates back to the rule of Tiberius. The crucial point for the establishment of the provincial cult in the West was the request of the citizens of Hispania Tarraconensis to build a temple for divine Augustus. It is important to emphasise here that he was appointed on a local initiative. In the East, the genesis of the provincial cult is related to the functioning of koinon. In comparison with the western regions, the cult here was characterised not only by longer history but also an extensive system of priesthood and rich ritual. The intensity of development of municipal and private cult in the West depended on the level of social and economic development of the regions. It assumed the most complex forms in the provinces with well-developed city life – generally in the eastern provinces. Whereas the cult of divine Augustus in the western municipal provinces was similar in character to the cult of the principate’s creator in Italy. The greatest testimony to the cult’s development comes from relatively strongly romanised and, at the same time, the wealthiest regions which had been part of the Empire for a long time. These included the mainly proconsular Africa, Spain and Narbonese Gaul. The sources coming from these regions constitute not only an illustration of the development of the cult of divine Augustus and members of domus Augusta, but are also a sign of the processes of romanisation of great numbers of city populations. It is necessary to note that outside Rome we do not encounter an isolated cult of divine Augustus. Whenever we deal with information concerning temples or rituals dedicated to the deified creator of the principate, other members of the family are also worshipped. In fact, during the whole rule of the Julio-Claudian dynasty we actually deal with the cult of divine Augustus in close association with the worship of domus Augusta – domus divina. (shrink)

Eastern philosophy and western science have convergent and divergent viewpoints for their explanation of consciousness. Convergence is found for the practice of meditation allowing besides a time dependent consciousness, the experience of a timeless consciousness and its beneficial effect on psychological wellbeing and medical improvements, which are confirmed by multiple scientific publications. Theories of quantum mechanics with non-locality and timelessness also show astonishing correlation to eastern philosophy, such as the theory of Penrose-Hameroff (ORC-OR), which explains consciousness by (...) reduction of quantum superposition in the brain. Divergence appears in the interpretation of the subjective experience of timeless consciousness. In eastern philosophy, meditation at a higher level of awareness allows the personal experience of timeless and non-dual consciousness, considered as an empirical proof for the existence of pure consciousness or spirituality existing before the material world and creating it by design. Western science acknowledges the subjective, non-dual experience, and its multiple beneficial effects, however, the interpretation of spirituality designing the material universe is in disagreement with the Darwinian Theory of mutation and selection. A design should create an ideal universe without the injustice of 3% congenital birth defects and later genetic health problems. The western viewpoint of selection is more adapted to explain congenital errors. The gap between subjectivity and objectivity, the mind-body problem, is in eastern philosophy reduced to the dominance of subjectivity over objectivity, whereas western science attributes equal values to both. Nevertheless, there remains an astonishing complementarity between eastern and western practices. (shrink)

The Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are typically recognized as the world’s major monotheistic religions. However, African Traditional Religion is, despite often including lesser spirits and gods, a monotheistic religion with numerous adherents in sub-Saharan Africa; it includes the idea of a single most powerful God responsible for the creation and sustenance of everything else. This Element focuses on drawing attention to this major world religion that has been much neglected by scholars around the globe, particularly those working (...) in the West or Northern Hemisphere. It accomplishes this primarily by bringing it into conversation with topics in the Anglo-American philosophy of religion. (shrink)

This essay focuses on theories of creativity from six historical figures, while noting comparisons to several others. In Ancient Greece: (i) Plato advances the thesis that the poet is a passive vessel inspired by a muse. (ii) Aristotle replies with the antithesis that the poet creates through skilled activity. (iii) Longinus provides the synthesis. Plato is right that poets are passively inspired with original ideas – though the source is natural genius instead of some muse. But Aristotle is also right (...) that the poet must actively employ skill. In early modern Europe: (iv) Margaret Cavendish argues that through creativity women can enjoy some freedom and happiness despite oppression. (v) Alexander Gerard and Immanuel Kant both inherit the Longinian synthesis. Gerard says we form original ideas through remote associations. (vi) Kant notices that although the genius must be passive in the origination of ideas, she must also be active in the very same process, because she merits acclaim for her originality. Kant designs his theory of genius to resolve this Paradox of Creative Agency. (shrink)

In this article we focus on three key precepts shared by Confucianism and the African ethic of Ubuntu: the central value of community, the desirability of ethical partiality, and the idea that we tend to become morally better as we grow older. For each of these broad similarities, there are key differences underlying them, and we discuss those as well as speculate about the reasons for them. Our aim is not to take sides, but we do suggest ways that Ubuntu (...) and Confucianism might have something to learn from each other and perhaps come closer. We hope that our preliminary reflections can inspire further debate and thinking on a theme – dialogues between long-standing and large-scale non-Western traditions – that is bound to increase in importance as non-Western societies play a greater role in the global system and as the search continues for a 'global ethic'. (shrink)

The dominant view amongst contemporary Western philosophers about the essence of a natu­ ral object is that it is constituted by its intrinsic properties. The ontological approach salient in the African philosophical tradition, in contrast, accounts for a thing’s essence by appeal to its relational properties. The Afro­relational ontology is under­developed, with the primary aim of this article being to help rectify that weakness. Specifically, this article’s aims are: to articulate an African approach to understanding the essence of a (...) concrete, natural thing in terms of its relationships; to illustrate the Afro­relational approach with the examples of the self and of water; to contrast the Afro­relational characterization of the essence of the self and of water with a typically Western construal in terms of their intrinsic properties; and finally to provide an initial defence of the Afro­relational approach, both by responding to some objections facing it and by providing some new, positive reasons to take it seriously. (shrink)

This article looks at some of the salient analyses of moderation in the ancient Greek and the Islamic traditions and uses them to develop a contemporary view of the matter. Greek ethics played a huge role in shaping the ethical views of the Muslim philosophers and theologians, and thus the article starts with an overview of the revival of contemporary western virtue ethics--in many ways an extension of Platonic-Aristotelian ethics--and then looks at the place of moderation or temperance (...) in Platonic-Aristotelian ethics. This sets the stage for an exposition of the position taken by Ibn Miskawayh and al-Ghazali, which is then used as a backdrop for suggesting a revival of the Quran's virtue ethics. After outlining a basis for its virtue ethics, the Quranic view of wasatiyya or moderation is discussed briefly. (shrink)

The article aims to assess a change in the EU’s soft power in the Western Balkan and Eastern Partnership states in the light of the crises the bloc has undergone in recent years. Generally agreeing with the common argument that the EU’s attractiveness for those countries has decreased, the author challenges the popular wisdom that such a decrease is likely to reverse those states’ pro-EU foreign policy orientations. To prove it, the author applies Joseph Nye’s and Alexander Vuving’s (...) “power currencies” approach to operationalize soft power, considering the bloc’s attraction as a combination of “brilliance” (the actor’s relationship with its work), “benignity” (the actor’s relationship with other actors) and “beauty” (the actor’s relationship with values and ideas). Elaborating on the crises’ influence on each of these currencies, the author shows that their lessening, first, has mainly taken place in absolute rather than relative terms, so the EU’s attractiveness remains strong compared to that of its competitors, and second, it has primarily affected the bloc’s soft power potential rather than its actual behavior towards the target countries. (shrink)

This essay explores various ethical dimensions of the important concept of fihavanana and its role in Malagasy ethics. As a first pass, we can say that fihavanana is a state of peace or harmony that people can achieve with others within their communities; it is modeled on the peace, harmony, solidarity, love, and closeness that is often seen in family ties. Understanding the role that fihavanana plays in the traditional ethics of the people of Madagascar does not come close to (...) providing a complete picture of Malagasy ethics, but fihavanana is arguably the most crucial ethical concept for Malagasy. After using Malagasy proverbs (ohabolana) to sketch various ethical dimensions of fihavanana, these dimensions are compared to certain themes from Western ethics. The essay also comments on the state of fihavanana today in Madagascar and draws some lessons to be learned from this important ethical ideal. Directions for further research are sketched throughout the essay. (shrink)

Populism in Central-Eastern Europe and South-Eastern Europe has been framed through theoretical ideas and expectations based on West European experience. However, the region’s experience of populist politics has diverged from that of Western Europe in important ways. In older West European democracies, the most typical vehicle for populism are, for the moment, new or previously marginal illiberal challenger parties which confront an essentially liberal, non-populist mainstream. In Central-Eastern Europe and South-Eastern Europe, it is the “mainstream” (...) which is or has become populist. Therefore, it is important to elaborate which of these universal indicators of populism can be applied to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and Western Balkans, and what kind of particularities will crystallize as a consequence of the socialist background. The main aim of the conference is to gather scholars that are researching different aspects and manifestations of populism in the region. This conference is organized in the framework of POPREBEL project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. (shrink)

The extended dual-aspect monism framework of consciousness, based on neuroscience, consists of five components: (1) dual-aspect primal entities; (2) neural-Darwinism: co-evolution and co-development of subjective experiences (SEs) and associated neural-nets from the mental aspect (that carries the SEs/proto-experiences (PEs) in superposed and unexpressed form) and the material aspect (mass, charge, spin and space-time) of fundamental entities (elementary particles), respectively and co-tuning via sensorimotor interaction; (3) matching and selection processes: interaction of two modes, namely, (a) the non-tilde mode that is the (...) material and mental aspect of cognition (memory and attention) related feedback signals in a neural-network, which is the cognitive nearest past approaching towards present; and (b) the tilde mode that is the material and mental aspect of the feed forward signals due to external environmental input and internal endogenous input, which is the nearest future approaching towards present and is a entropy-reversed representation of non-tilde mode; (4) the segregation and integration of information, and (5) the necessary ingredients of SEs (such as wakefulness, attention, re-entry, working memory, stimulus at or above threshold level, and neural-net PEs). This framework leads to structural and functional coherence between the mind and the brain, bridges the explanatory gap (the gap between SEs and their neural-correlates), and leads to our mundane subjective experiences. This extended dual-aspect monism (eDAM) framework (Vimal, 2008, 2010, 2013, 2015a, 2015b) could be the fundamental basis of various religions and philosophies. This is a Western perspective. On the other hand, Eastern perspectives emphasize the practical methods for achieving altered experience at samadhi state. An important corollary of these methods (such as yogic method) is the sublimation of negative aspects of seven groups of self-protective energy system (desire, anger, ego, greed, attachment, jealousy, and selfish-love) into their positive aspects. Their negative aspects create war and suffering, whereas their positive aspects advance science and technology, family values, peace, and happiness. Here, the Western perspective framework is extended to include the concepts of the sublimation process to encompass Eastern perspectives. The four elements (war, suffering, peace, and happiness) are ubiquitous in both space and time because they are essential contributors to the variations for natural selection in our evolutionary system. The sublimation process optimizes the system: minimizes war and suffering, maximizes peace and happiness, and enhances family values and individual progress. This is consistent with both Eastern and Western perspectives. (shrink)

I argue that St. Augustine of Hippo was the first in the history of Christian spirituality who expressed a key tendency of Christian mysticism, which implies a gradual intellectual ascent of the human soul to God, consisting of the three main stages: external, internal, and supernal. In this ascent a Christian mystic proceeds from the knowledge of external beings to self-knowledge, and from his inner self to direct mystical contemplation of God. Similar doctrines may be found in the writings of (...) the Greek Fathers. Although there are many similarities in the overall doctrine and in particular details between them, it does not imply the direct impact of Augustine’s theological thought on the Greek Fathers but rather the influence of the Neoplatonic philosophy on both Western and Eastern Christianity, in particular, of Plotinus’ theory of intellectual cognition. (shrink)

● Sergio Cremaschi, The non-existing Island. The chapter discusses how the cleavage between the Continental and the Anglo-American philosophies originated, the (self-)images of both philosophical worlds, the converging rediscoveries from the Seventies, and recent ecumenic or anti-ecumenic strategies. I argue that pragmatism provides an important counter-instance to the familiar self-images and the fashionable ecumenic or anti-ecumenic strategies. The conclusions are: (i) the only place where Continental philosophy exists (as Euro-Communism one decade ago) is America; (ii) less obviously, also analytic philosophy (...) does not exist, or does no more exist as a current or a paradigm; what does exist is, on the one hand, philosophy of language and, on the other, philosophy of mind, that is, two disciplines; (iii) the dissolution of analytic philosophy as a school has been highly fruitful, precisely in so far as it has left room for disciplines and research programmes; (iv) what is left, of the Anglo-American/Continental cleavage is primarily differences in styles, depending partly on intellectual traditions, partly owing to sociology, history, institutional frameworks; these differences should not be blurred by rash ecumenism; besides, theoretical differences are alive as ever, but within both camps; finally, there is indeed a lag (not a difference) in the appropriation of intellectual techniques by most schools of 'Continental' philosophy, and this should be overcome through appropriation of what the best 'analytic' philosophers have produced. ● Michael Strauss, Language and sense-perception: an aspect of analytic philosophy. To test an assertion about one fact by comparing it with perceived reality seems quite unproblematic. But the very possibility of such a procedure is incompatible with the intellectualistic basis of logical positivism and atomism (as it is for example to be found in Russell's Analysis of Mind). According to the intellectualistic approach pure sensation is meaningless. Sensation receives its meaning and order from the intellect through interpretation, which is performed with the help of linguistic tools, i.e. words and sentences. Before being interpreted, sensation is not a picture or a representation, it is neither true nor false, neither an illusion nor knowledge; it does not tell us anything; it is a lifeless and order-less matter. But how can a thought (or a proposition) be compared with such a lifeless matter? This difficulty confronts the intellectualist, if on the one hand he admits the necessity of comparing thought with sense-perception, and on the other hand presupposes that we possess only intellectual and no immediate perceptual understanding of what we see and hear. In this paper I give a critical exposition of three attempts, made by Russell, Neurath and Wittgenstein, to solve this problem. The first attempt adheres to strict conventionalism, the second tends to naturalism and the third leads to an amended, very moderate version of conventionalism. This amended conventionalism looks at sense impressions as being a peculiar language, which includes primary symbols, i.e. symbols not founded on convention and not being in need of interpretation. ● Ernst Tugendhat, Phenomenology and language analysis. The paper, first published in German in 1970, by which Tugendhat gave a start to the German rediscovery of analytic philosophy. The author stages a confrontation between phenomenology and language analysis. He argues that language analysis does not differ from phenomenology as far as the topics dealt with are concerned; instead, both currents are quite different in method. The author argues that language-analytic philosophy does not simply lay out of the mainstream of transcendental philosophy, but that instead it challenges this tradition on the very level of foundations. The author criticizes the linguistic-analytic approach centred on the subject as well as any object-centred approach, while proposing inter-subjective understanding through language as the new universal framework. This is, when construed in so general terms, the same program of hermeneutics, though in a more basic version. ● Jürgen Habermas, Language game, intention and meaning. On a few suggestions by Sellars and Wittgenstein. The paper, first published in German in 1975, in which Habermas announces his own linguistic turn through a discovery of speech acts. In this essay the author wants to work out a categorical framework for a communicative theory of society; he takes Wittgenstein's concept of language game as a Leitfade and, besides, he takes advantage also of Wilfried Sellars's quasi-transcendental account of the genesis of intentionality. His goal is to single out the problems connected with a theory of consciousness oriented in a logical-linguistic sense. ● Zvie Bar-On, Isomorphism of speech acts and intentional states. This essay presents the problem of the formal relationship between speech acts and intentional states as an essential part of the perennial philosophical question of the relation between language and thought. I attempt to show how this problem had been dealt with by two prominent philosophers of different camps in our century, Edmund Husserl and John Searle. Both of them wrote extensively about the theory of intentionality. I point out an interesting, as it were unintended, continuity of their work on that theory. Searle started where Husserl left off 80 years earlier. Their meeting point could be used as the first clue in our search. They both adopted in effect the same distinction between two basic aspects of the intentional experience: its content or matter, and its quality or mode. Husserl did not yet have the concept of a speech act as contradistinguished from an intentional state. The working hypothesis, however, which he suggested, could be used as a second clue for the further elaboration of the theory. The relationship of the two levels, the mental and the linguistic, which remained for Husserl in the background only, became the cornerstone of Searle' s inquiry. He employed the speech act as the model and analysed the intentional experience by means of the conceptual apparatus of his own theory of speech acts. This procedure enabled him to mark out a number of parallelisms and correlations between the two levels. This procedure explains the phenomenon of the partial isomorphism of speech acts and intentional states. ● Roberta de Monticelli, Ontology. A dialogue among the linguistic philosopher, the naturalist, and the phenomenological philosopher. This paper proposes a comparison between two main ways of conceiving the role and scope of that fundamental part of philosophy (or of "first" philosophy) which is traditionally called "ontology". One way, originated within the analytic tradition, consists of two main streams, namely philosophy of language and (contemporary) philosophy of mind, the former yielding "reduced ontology" and the latter "neo-Aristotelian ontology". The other way of conceiving ontology is exemplified by "phenomenological ontology" (more precisely, the Husserlian, not the Heideggerian version). Ontology as a theory of reference ("reduced" ontology, or ontology as depending on semantics) is presented and justified on the basis of some classical thesis of traditional philosophy of language (from Frege to Quine). "Reduced ontology" is shown to be identifiable with one level of a traditional, Aristotelian ontology, namely the one which corresponds to one of the four "senses of being" listed in Aristotle's Metaphysics: "being" as "being true". This identification is justified on the basis of Franz Brentano's "rules for translation" of the Aristotelian table of judgements in terms of (positive and negative) existential judgments such as are easily translatable into sentences of first order predicate logic. The second part of the paper is concerned with "neo-Aristotelian ontology", i.e. with naturalism and physicalism as the main ontological options underlying most of contemporary discussion in the philosophy of mind. The qualification of such options as "neo-Aristotelian" is justified; the relationships between "neo-Aristotelian ontology" and "reduced ontology" are discussed. In the third part the fundamental tenet of "phenomenological ontology" is identified by the thesis that a logical theory of existence and being does capture a sense of "existing" and "being" which, even though not the basic one, is grounded in the basic one. An attempt is done of further clarifying this "more basic" sense of "being". An argument making use of this supposedly "more basic" sense is advanced in favour of a "phenomenological ontology". ● Kuno Lorenz, Analytic Roots in Dialogic Constructivism. Both in the Vienna Circle ad in Russell's early philosophy the division of knowledge into two kinds (or two levels), perceptual and conceptual, plays a vital role. Constructivism in philosophy, in trying to provide a pragmatic foundation - a knowing-how - to perceptual as well as conceptual competences, discovered that this is dependent on semiotic tools. Therefore, the "principle of method" had to be amended by the "principle of dialogue". Analytic philosophy being an heir of classical empiricism, conceptually grasping the "given", and constructive philosophy being an heir of classical rationalism, perceptually providing the "constructed", merge into dialogical constructivism, a contemporary development of ideas derived especially from the works of Charles S. Peirce (his pragmatic maxim as a means of giving meaning to signs) and of Ludwig Wittgenstein (his language games as tools of comparison for understanding ways of life). 7. Albrecht Wellmer, "Autonomy of meaning" and "principle of charity" from the viewpoint of the pragmatics of language. In this essay I present an interpretation of the principle of the autonomy of meaning and of the principle of charity, the two main principles of Davidson's semantic view of truth, showing how both principles may fit in a perspective dictated by the pragmatics of language. I argue that (I) the principle of the autonomy of meaning may be thoroughly reformulated in terms of the pragmatics of language, (ii) the principle of charity needs a supplement in terms of pragmatics of language in order to become really enlightening as a principle of interpretation. Besides, I argue that: (i) on the one hand, the fundamental thesis of Habermas on the pragmatic theory of meaning ("we understand a speech act when we know what makes it admissible") is correlated with the seemingly intentionalist thesis according to which we understand a speech act when we know what a speaker means; (ii) on the other hand, to say that the meaning competence of a competent speaker is basically a competence about a potential of reasons (or also of possible justifications) which is inherently connected with the meaning of statements, or with their use in utterances. ● Rüdiger Bubner, The convergence of analytic and hermeneutic philosophy This paper argues that the analytic philosophy does not exist, at least as understood by its original programs. Differences in the analytic camp have always been bigger than they were believed to be. Now these differences are coming to the fore thanks to a process of dissolution of dogmatism. Philosophical analysis is led by its own inner logic towards questions that may be fairly qualified as hermeneutic. Recent developments in analytic philosophy, e.g. Davidson, seem to indicate a growing convergence of themes between philosophical analysis and hermeneutics; thus, the familiar opposition of Anglo-Saxon and Continental philosophy might soon belong to history. The fact of an ongoing appropriation of analytical techniques by present-day German philosophers may provide a basis for a powerful argument for the unity of philosophizing, beyond its strained images privileging one technique of thinking and rejecting the remainder. Actual philosophical practice should take the dialogue between the two camps more seriously; in fact, the processes described so far are no danger to philosophical work. They may be a danger for parochial approaches to philosophizing; indeed, contrary to what happens in the natural sciences, Thomas Kuhn's "normal science" developing within the framework of one fixed paradigm is not typical for philosophical thinking. And in philosophy innovating revolutions are symptoms more of vitality than of crisis. ● Karl-Otto Apel, The impact of analytic philosophy on my intellectual biography. In my paper I try to reconstruct the history of my Auseinandersetzung mit - as I called it - "language-analytical" philosophy (including even Peircean semiotics) since the late Fifties. The heuristics of my study was predetermined by two main motives of my beginnings: the hermeneutic turn of phenomenology and the transformation of "transcendental philosophy" in the light of the "language a priori". Thus, I took issue with the early and the later Wittgenstein, logical positivism, and post-Wittgensteinian and post-empiricist philosophy of science (i.e. G.H. von Wright and the renewal of the "explanation vs understanding controversy" as well as the debate between Th. Kuhn and Popper/Lakatos); besides, with speech act theory and the debate about "transcendental arguments" since Strawson. The "pragmatic turn", started already by C.L. Morris and the later Carnap, led me to study also the relationship between Wittgensteinian "use" theory of meaning and of truth. This resulted on my side in something like a program of "transcendental semiotics", i.e. "transcendental pragmatics" and "transcendental hermeneutics". ● Ben-Ami Scharfstein, A doubt on both their houses: the blindness to non-western philosophies. The burden of my criticism is that contemporary European philosophers of all kinds have continued to think as if there were no true philosophy but that of the West. For the most part, the existentialists have been oblivious of their Eastern congeners; the hermeneuticians have yet to stretch their horizons beyond the most familiar ones; and the analysts remain unaware of the analyses and linguistic sensitivities of the ancient non-European philosophers. Briefly, ignorance still blinds almost all contemporary Western philosophers to the rich, variegated philosophical traditions outside of their familiar orbit. Both Continental and Anglo-Americans have lost the breadth of view that once characterized such thinkers as Herder and the Humboldts. The blindness that has resulted is not simply that of individual Western philosophers but of our whole, still parochial philosophical culture. (shrink)

Confucianism has a deep influence on the opinion of value priority in traditional Chinese culture, which consider the value of morality prior to that of utility; the value of moral merit prior to that of intelligent; the value of group prior to that of individuals; the value of peace and safety prior to that of freedom and liberty; the value of harmony prior to that of conflict. This kind of value priority has performed very important and positive functions in Chinese (...) culture, along with certain side-effects. Under the context of globalization, it is possible for the Chinese and Western values to complement each other in fusional harmony. (shrink)