Each scientific study emerges in its own particular time and marks a new step in the development of human thought.1 Big History materialized to satisfy the human need for a unified vision of our existence. It came together in the waning decades of the twentieth century, in part, as a reaction to the specialization of scholarship and education that had taken hold around the world. While this specialization had great results, it created barriers that stood in contrast to a growing (...) unity among our global communities. These barriers were increasingly awkward to bridge, and, thus, Big History emerged as a successful new framework. (shrink)

Calls for civility have been on the rise recently, as have presumptions that civility is both an academic virtue and a prerequisite for rational engagement and discussion among those who disagree. One imperative of epistemic decolonization is to unmask the ways that familiar conceptual resources are produced within and function to uphold a settler colonial epistemological framework. I argue that rhetorical deployments of ‘civility’ uphold settler colonialism by obscuring the systematic production of state violence against marginalized populations and Indigenous peoples, (...) relying on the colonial conceptual framework of ‘civilized’ vs ‘savage’, and excusing death-promoting rhetoric under the guise of liberal disagreement. (shrink)

Civil disobedience, despite its illegal nature, can sometimes be justified vis-à-vis the duty to obey the law, and, arguably, is thereby not liable to legal punishment. However, adhering to the demands of justice and refraining from punishing justified civil disobedience may lead to a highly problematic theoretical consequence: the debilitation of civil disobedience. This is because, according to the novel analysis I propose, civil disobedience primarily functions as a costly social signal. It is effective by being reliable, reliable by being (...) costly, and costly primarily by being punished. My analysis will highlight a distinctive feature of civil disobedience: civil disobedients leverage the punitive injustice they suffer to amplify their communicative force. This will lead to two paradoxical implications. First, the instability of the moral status of both civil disobedience and its punishment to the extent where the state may be left with no permissible course of action with regard to punishing civil disobedience. Second, by refraining from punishing justified civil disobedience, the state may render uncivil disobedience—illegal political activities that fall short of the standards of civil disobedience—potentially permissible. (shrink)

The vast majority of work on the ethics of war focuses on traditional wars between states. In this chapter, I aim to show that this is an oversight worth rectifying. My strategy will be largely comparative, assessing whether certain claims often defended in discussions of interstate wars stand up in the context of civil conflicts, and whether there are principled moral differences between the two types of case. Firstly, I argue that thinking about intrastate wars can help us make progress (...) on important theoretical debates in recent just war theory. Secondly, I consider whether certain kinds of civil wars are subject to a more demanding standard of just cause, compared to interstate wars of national-defence. Finally, I assess the extent to which having popular support is an independent requirement of permissible war, and whether this renders insurgencies harder to justify than wars fought by functioning states. (shrink)

This paper investigates civility from an Aristotelian perspective and has two objectives. The first is to offer a novel account of this virtue based on Aristotle’s remarks about civic friendship. The proposed account distinguishes two main components of civility—civic benevolence and civil deliberation—and shows how Aristotle’s insights can speak to the needs of our communities today. The notion of civil deliberation is then unpacked into three main dimensions: motivational, inquiry-related, and ethical. The second objective is to illustrate how the post-truth (...) condition—in particular, the spread of misinformation typical of the digital environments we inhabit—obstructs our capacity to cultivate the virtue of civility by impairing every component of civil deliberation. The paper hopes to direct virtue theorists’ attention to the need to foster civic virtues as a means of counteracting the negative aspects of the post-truth age. (shrink)

Painless civilization is a term I coined in my Japanese book of the same title, which was published in 2003. Contemporary civilization aims to provide pleasure and comfort and eliminate pain and suffering as much as possible. This is especially evident in advanced countries. Contemporary civilization is moving toward a painless civilization. However, in a painless civilization, we are deprived of the joy of life, which is considered a fundamental source of meaning in life, and we are led toward the (...) situation of drowning in a sea of pleasure. This is a kind of dystopia, and we cannot find an easy way to escape from it. It is important to pay special attention to this aspect of contemporary civilization when we think about the future of our planet. (shrink)

The standard of proof applied in civil trials is the preponderance of evidence, often said to be met when a proposition is shown to be more than 50% likely to be true. A number of theorists have argued that this 50%+ standard is too weak – there are circumstances in which a court should find that the defendant is not liable, even though the evidence presented makes it more than 50% likely that the plaintiff’s claim is true. In this paper, (...) I will recapitulate the familiar arguments for this thesis, before defending a more radical one: The 50%+ standard is also too strong – there are circumstances in which a court should find that a defendant is liable, even though the evidence presented makes it less than 50% likely that the plaintiff’s claim is true. I will argue that the latter thesis follows naturally from the former once we accept that the parties in a civil trial are to be treated equally. I will conclude by sketching an alternative interpretation of the civil standard of proof. (shrink)

In response to the spread of COVID-19, governments across the world have, with very few exceptions, enacted sweeping restrictive lockdown policies that impede citizens’ freedom to move, work, and assemble. This paper critically responds to the central arguments for restrictive lockdown legislation. We build our critique on the following assumption: public policy that enjoys virtually unanimous support worldwide should be justified by uncontroversial moral principles. We argue that that the virtually unanimous support in favor of restrictive lockdowns is not adequately (...) justified by the arguments given in favor of them. Importantly, this is not to say that states ought not impose restrictive lockdown measures, but rather that the extent of the acceptance of these measures is not proportionate to the strength of the arguments for lockdowns. -/- We begin by exploring the case for restrictive lockdowns. We first argue that several of the principles that are used to justify the lockdowns yield unexpectedly revisionary implications for other political problems that many would be unwilling to accept. We then outline what we consider the strongest argument for a lockdown—namely, that its net welfare benefits are great enough to defeat the moral presumption against restricting citizens’ civil liberties to move, work, and assemble. However, we give a number of reasons for doubting that the lockdown’s net welfare benefits are, in fact, sufficiently high to defeat the presumption against it. (shrink)

This is the English translation of Chapter One of Mutsu Bunmei Ron, which was published in Japanese in 2003. Since this book’s publication I have received many requests for an English translation from people around the world. I decided to begin by publishing this first chapter under the title Painless Civilization 1 and make it available to readers who have a keen interest in this topic. * The original text of this chapter was written in 1998, more than twenty years (...) ago, but I believe what I argued there is becoming increasingly important today. Painless civilization is a pathology of contemporary society. We will be pulled much deeper into a painless stream in the future. What is needed is the wisdom to see through the fundamental structure of our painless civilization and its relationship with the meaning of life. ** Modern society seems on the verge of being swallowed up by the pathology of “painless civilization.” I have written this book for people who, in the midst of anxiety studded with pleasure, joyless repetition, and a maze from which they cannot escape no matter how far they walk, nevertheless retain in some corner of their hearts a desire to live life fully and without regrets. * When we feel a vague anxiety, like being bound in gossamer cords, in the midst of modern society, we are perhaps intuitively sensing the existence of “painless civilization.” This book is an attempt to give words to this feeling that the reader has, I am sure, already experienced at least once in their life. (shrink)

In 2007 the Chinese government embraced ‘ecological civilization’ as a central policy objective of the government. In 2012, the goal of achieving ecological civilization was incorporated into its constitution as a framework for China’s environmental policies, laws and education, and was included as a goal in its five-year plans. In 2017, the 19th Congress of the Communist Party called for acceleration in achieving this goal. Expenditure on technology to ameliorate environmental damage, reduce pollution and reduce greenhouse gas emissions has been (...) massively increased. It is also presented and promoted as a vision for our global future, in Cornelius Castoriadis’ terminology, a new social imaginary. (shrink)

This paper argues that political civility is actually an illusionistic ideal and that, as such, realism counsels that we acknowledge both its promise and peril. Political civility is, I will argue, a tension-filled ideal. We have good normative reasons to strive for and encourage more civil political interactions, as they model our acknowledgement of others as equal citizens and facilitate high-quality democratic problem-solving. But we must simultaneously be attuned to civility’s limitations, its possible pernicious side-effects, and its potential for strategic (...) manipulation and oppressive abuse, particularly in contemporary, pluralistic and heterogeneous societies. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that the current paradigm for AGN and quasars is essentially incomplete and a rivision is needed. Remind that the current paradigm for AGN and quasars is that their radio emission is explained by synchrotron radiation from relativistic electrons that are Doppler boosted through bulk motion. In this model, the intrinsic brightness temperatures cannot exceed 1011 to 1012 K. Typical Doppler boosting is expected to be able to raise this temperature by a factor of 10. The (...) observed brightness temperature of the most compact structures in BL Lac, constrained by baselines longer than 5.3Gλ, must indeed exceed 2×1013K and can reach as high as ˜ 3 × 1014K. This is difficult to reconcile with current incoherent synchrotron emission models from relativistic electrons, requiring alternative models such as emission from relativistic protons. However the proton, as we know, is 1836 times heavier than an electron and absolutely huge energy is required to accelerated it to sublight speed. These alternative models such as emission from relativistic protons can be suported by semiclassical gravity effect finds its roots in the singular behavior of quantum fields on curved distributional space- times presented by rotating gravitational singularities. (shrink)

This is the editorial introduction to the edition of Cosmos & History on Civilization in Crisis.

When he gave his first political work the title The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, Hobbes signalled an agenda to revise and incorporate continental Roman and Natural Law traditions for use in Great Britain, and from first to last he remained faithful to this agenda, which it took his entire corpus to complete. The success of his project is registered in the impact Hobbes had upon the continental legal system in turn, specific aspects of his theory, as for instance (...) the right to punish, entering the European civil code through Pufendorf, and remaining to this day. This is a topic of considerable importance at a time at which the UK is considering scrapping the European Union, with all the attendant the legal ramifications. But strangely, despite some acknowledgement of Hobbes’s contribution to European civil law, and specifically the German civil code, the larger legal context for his thought has not thus far been systematically addressed. -/- Key words: Hobbes, civil law, common law, jurisprudence, ‘artificial reason’, natural law, sovereignty,. (shrink)

Rawls’s notion of civil disobedience, which still dominates the literature on this subject, comprises at least these three characteristics: it involves breaking the law, is non-violent and public. But implicit in this notion is a certain tension: it shows pessisimism about the proper functioning of the public sphere as earlier normal appeals have failed, but it also displays a certain optimism about its proper functioning as it assumes that civil disobedience may be effective. In my paper I argue that Rawls (...) cannot explain how civil disobedience may be effective as a public appeal for social justice because he does not fully understand what it means for civil disobedience to be public in relation to the public sphere. His analysis would require an additional notion of publicity which, as I argue, is the notion of hermeneutical publicity. From a Bourdieusian perspective I then make a case for the claim that public spheres always suffer from hermeneutic invisibility. This may explain why non-violent appeals for social justice fail as dialogical practices. Finally I suggest how we nevertheless could understand that civil disobedience can be effective as a dialogical practice. (shrink)

Sumer was an ancient civilization in southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Ages. Although the historical records in the region do not go back much further than ca. 2900 BCE, modern historians believe that Sumer was first settled between ca. 4500 and 4000 BCE by people who may or may not have spoken the Sumerian language. These people, now called the "Ubaidians," were the first to drain the marshes for agriculture; develop trade; and establish industries including (...) weaving, leatherwork, metalwork, masonry, and pottery. (shrink)

This paper defends the institution of civil marriage against the objection that it is inconsistent with political liberalism, and so should be either totally abolished or else transformed virtually beyond recognition.

We should conceive of illegal covert animal rescue as acts of “subrevolution” rather than as civil disobedience. Subrevolutions are revolutions that aim to overthrow some part of the government rather than the entire government. This framework better captures the relevant values than the opposing suggestion that we treat illegal covert animal rescue as civil disobedience. If animals have rights like the right not to be unjustly imprisoned and mistreated, then it does not make sense that an instance of animal rescue (...) will be justifiable only if it meets criteria for justified civil disobedience, e.g., the requirement that the civil disobedient not rescue more animals than would be necessary to communicate their message. Thus, the framework of subrevolution is a more apt way to analyze animal rescue. (shrink)

Interviewet er lavet i juli 2021. Dets formål er at belyse emner, der er centrale i Celikates’ tænkning, f.eks. den voksende højrefløjspopulisme, migration, voldelige versus ikke-voldelige protester, civil ulydighed og den kritiske filosofis rolle i dag. -/- When Celikates and I sat down digitally in July 2021, the interview’s primary purpose was to examine topics central to Celikates’ thinking, such as the rise of right-wing populism, migration, violent versus non-violent protest, civil disobedience, and the role of critical philosophy today.

Is hactivism the new civil disobedience? I argue that most recent hacktivism isn't, and shouldn't be shoehorned into the category of civil disobedience. I sketch instead a broad matrix of electronic resistance, attentive to the many shapes and goals of hacktivism and I locate five clusters on it, briefly sketching possible dimensions of normative assessment for each: vigilantism, whistleblowing, guerrilla communication, electronic humanitarianism, and electronic civil disobedience.

This is the English translation of Chapters Two and Three of Painless Civilization, which was published in Japanese in 2003. In this volume, I examine the problems of painless civilization from the perspective of philosophical psychology and ethics. I discuss how the essence of love is transformed in a society moving toward painlessness and how the painless stream penetrates each of us and makes us living corpses. In order to tackle the problems of painless civilization, we must look inside our (...) inner world because the “desire of the body” that lurks within us is the ultimate cause of our society’s movement toward painlessness. Love and the meaning of life are the central topics of discussion in the following chapters. Because the original manuscript was written in 1998, the discussion of social issues may seem slightly dated, especially when it comes to reproductive technologies and juvenile delinquency, but I believe my central argument here has not aged at all; on the contrary, I think the times have finally caught up with my theory of painless civilization. I hope readers will join me in thinking deeply about the essence of contemporary civilization. (Painless Civilization 1 is also available on PhilPapers.) . (shrink)

Chinese environmentalists have called for an ecological civilization. To promote this, ecology is defended as the core science embodying process metaphysics, and it is argued that as such ecology can serve as the foundation of such a civilization. Integrating hierarchy theory and Peircian semiotics into this science, it is shown how “community” and “communities of communities,” in which communities are defined by their organization to promote the common good of their components, have to be recognized as central concepts not only (...) of ecology, but of life itself. This perspective is used to defend Lovelock’s “Gaia” hypothesis and the call of Prugh, Costanza, and Daly for strong democracy. An ethics and political philosophy is sketched based on “eco-poiesis” or “home-making,” which is equated with augmenting the life of communities, both human and non-human. (shrink)

In a morally diverse society, moral agents inevitably run up against intractable disagreements. Civility functions as a valuable constraint on the sort of behaviors which moral agents might deploy in defense of their deeply held moral convictions and generally requires tolerance of other views and political liberalism, as does pluralism. However, most visions of civility are exceptionless: they require civil behavior regardless of how strong the disagreement is between two members of the same society. This seems an excellent idea when (...) those required to do the tolerating might otherwise smash us. However, the demands of civility are universal and fall upon everyone, including ourselves. They may seem to require us to tolerate the intolerable, leading us not into pluralism but rather into functional relativism, and also require the powerless to moderate their demands for redress. They also place moral agents in a very difficult position with respect to realizing our deeply held moral values. Isaiah Berlin’s pluralism, by contrast, allows us to violate tolerance when we come up against values which, put into practice, are incompatible with a form of life we can tolerate. Despite the many fronts on which civility and pluralism align, they are also pitted against each other. Only a qualified (not exceptionless) civility based in respect for persons can cohere with pluralism and thus resolve the double bind in which the moral agent seemed to be placed by exceptionless civility. I develop a rule for Accepted Exceptions that helps to explain how moral agents can be civil, value pluralism, demand redress, and maintain their own deeply held moral commitments. (shrink)

In 1984 scientists in the former Soviet Union called for an ecological civilization. This idea was taken up in 1987 in China by Ye Qianji. Subsequently the notion of ecological civilization was promoted by the deputy director of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), Pan Yue, incorporated into the Central Commission Report to the Communist Party’s 17th Convention in November, 2007, and embraced as one of the key elements in its political guidelines. Characterized as the successor to agricultural and industrial (...) civilization, it is now being promoted as a goal for the whole of humanity in order to avert a global ecological disaster. The success or failure of this project to create an ecological civilization could determine whether humanity survives. But what does it mean to create an ecological civilization? What does ‘civilization’ mean, and then what would it mean to create an ‘ecological’ civilization? This essay seeks to answer this question. (shrink)

A reconstruction of the history of the wording civil society and of the curious twist in its usage and meaning, highlighting why the term had an important role in Continental political thinking and was ignored until comparatively recently in Anglo-Saxon political discourse.

In this new edition, a hypothesis is put forward for the first time to unify the Big Bang theory and the evolutionary theory by showing both events following the same set of fundamental interrelationships. As the evolution of life is a part of the evolutions of the universe, these two events express many fundamental similarities (this is self-similarity, which means a part of the system is similar to the whole system). Based on the same principle, the evolution of multicellular organisms, (...) social evolution, development of the human body, and human technological development are all a part of the evolution of life. Thus, they all follow the same set of rules that all life follows and, at the fundamental level, the interrelationships that the Big Bang follows. Therefore, all of these events follow the fundamental interrelationships and express fundamental similarities. In other words, all these events are the specific expressions of those fundamental interrelationships – the fundamental mechanism that governs everything in the universe. -/- Upon these interrelationships, new approaches to study social development and technological development are employed. By using the knowledge of the medical sciences, including the structures (anatomy and histology), functions (physiology) and development (embryology) of a human body; knowledge of the evolution of life; and the concept of fundamental interrelationships, we can see the future beyond the horizon. Using the nerve system in parallel as a model, we can comprehensively understand the development of the information revolution. Based upon parallel interrelationships, we can see that the transformation of society due to individuals’ power increase brought by new technologies bears great similarities with the transformation from the solid state of ice to the liquid state of water due the individual molecules’ kinetic energy increase. -/- As the fundamental interrelationships govern social evolution, all events in human civilisation are simply specific expressions of those rules in which significant social events not only changed the course of civilisation but left so many unanswered mysteries: how did the Greeks build such brilliant civilisations; why did the Scientific Revolution originate from the West rather than the East such as in China; why did the Chinese society remain in feudalism for such a long time while the Western society had evolved into a higher level – industrialization and modern society; why did the Chinese civilisation fall from its ancient glory in the modern time but rapidly re-rise again to a super power in the last few decades? All these mysteries remain unanswered because of the lack of fundamental laws of physics and evolutionary biology used in the traditional methodologies of social science. As the fundamental laws of physics are the fundamental mechanism for everything and these mysteries are a part of the evolution of life, the fundamental laws of physics and evolutionary biology are used in tackling these unanswered issues. For example, upon parallel relationship, Chinese civilisation is compared with the transition from unicellular organisms to multicellular organisms. From how unicellular organisms aggregate and evolve new rules to organise themselves, we can much better understand how human individuals aggregate to form societies and evolve new cultures to organise themselves in social evolution. Furthermore, transformation from the solid state of ice to the liquid state of water is used to analyze Chinese social evolution. With these approaches the mysteries in Chinese civilisation have been answered. -/- Ultimately, all these discussions in this book have demonstrated that the Interrelationships Model has unified social science with natural science, and furthermore, science with philosophy. This is an important attempt in answering the most fundamental and intriguing question of all – the Theory of Everything. -/- Currently, this book is for FREE download. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the practice of civil disagreement has robust epistemic benefits and that these benefits enable meaningful forms of reconciliation—across worldview lines and amid the challenging information environment of our age. I then engage two broad groups of objections: either that civil disagreement opposes, rather than promotes, clarity, or else that it does little to help it. If successful, my account gives us reason to include civil disagreement among what Mill calls “the real morality of public (...) discussion,” a fact that should stir us to take more seriously the decline of civility in contemporary life. (shrink)

Tony Milligan argues that some forms of covert non-human animal rescue, wherein activists anonymously and illegally free non-human animals from confinement, should be understood as acts of civil disobedience. However, most traditional understandings of civil disobedience require that the civil disobedient act publicly rather than covertly. Thus Milligan’s proposal is that we revise our understanding of civil disobedience to allow for covert in addition to public disobedience. I argue we should not. Milligan cannot justify using paradigm cases to expand the (...) scope of civil disobedience without justifying similar reasons to limit the scope, and he does nto give convincing reasons for discarding the communication requirement, according to which an action cannot count as civil disobedience unless it is communicative. The immediate conclusion is that animal rescue is not civil disobedience, while the broader conclusion is one about civil disobedience more broadly: an act must be public to count as civil disobedience. (shrink)

This paper discusses some philosophical problems lurking behind the issues of human biotechnology, particularly prenatal screening. Firstly, prenatal screening technology disempowers existing disabled people. The second problem is that it systematically deprives us of the “fundamental sense of security.” This is a sense of security that allows us to believe that we will never be looked upon by anyone with such unspoken words as, “I wish you were never born” or “I wish you would disappear from the world.” Thirdly, we (...) argue that the loss of the fundamental sense of security is connected with the disappearance of “conviction of love” in the age of human biotechnology. And finally, all these issues are examined from the viewpoint of “painless civilization.” Our society is filled with a variety of “preventive reduction of pain,” of which prenatal screening is a good example. By preventively reducing pain and suffering, we lose the chance to transform the basic structure of our way of thinking and being; as a result, we are deprived of opportunities to know precious truths indispensable to our meaningful life. Hence, it is concluded that what is most needed is an academic research on “philosophy of life.”. (shrink)

To say Early Confucians advocated the possession of a sense of shame as a means to moral virtue underestimates the tact and forethought they used successfully to mold natural dispositions to experience shame into a system of self, familial, and social governance. Shame represents an adaptive system of emotion, cognition, perception, and behavior in social primates for measurement of social rank. Early Confucians understood the utility of the shame system for promotion of cooperation, and they build and deploy cultural modules (...) – e.g., rituals, titles, punishments – with this in mind. These policies result in subtle alterations to components of the evolved shame system that are detectable in data form contemporary cross-cultural psychology that show that populations in the Confucian diaspora have a unique shame profile compared to Western and non-Western populations. The status of Confucian diaspora populations as outliers in the context of shame is partially explained by appeal to the cultural transmission and historical endurance of relevant Early Confucian cultural modules. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to open a new horizon in the field of civilization studies by examining the concept of painless civilization from the perspective of the philosophy of biological evolution. Since the space is limited, the priority will be given to the clarification of an overall structure. Modern civilization has created systems that seek “comfort and pleasure” and eliminate “pain and suffering” and has spread them to every corner of our society. It is progressing like a great wave (...) in many developed countries. I have called a civilization advancing in this direction a “painless civilization.” At first glance, the elimination of pain and suffering seems like a good thing. Of course, it is considered good if unbearable suffering (such as the pain of terminal cancer) that we encounter in our lives can be avoided through technology. This is not the problem. The problem is that modern civilization is moving in a direction where various forms of suffering that we might experience in the future are going to be erased from our lives, one after another, through preventive technologies (preventive elimination of pain). ... (shrink)

Developing MacIntyre’s metaphilosophy, Whitehead’s contention that philosophy ‘is the most effective of all the intellectual pursuits’ is elucidated and defended. It is argued that the narratives through which philosophical ideas are evaluated can refigure the stories constituting societies. In this way philosophical ideas become practically effective and come to be embodied in institutions. This is illustrated by the challenge by process philosophy to scientific materialism in the face of an impending global ecological crisis. It is argued that to be successful, (...) process philosophy must be articulated into a grand narrative to challenge the dominant grand narrative of modernity. (shrink)

Whereas civil discourse is usually thought to be about defusing conflict, this essay argues it may be fruitfully thought of as fighting honorably for what we believe. Thus agonistic honor, which conceives of rightness in terms of fair and respectful contest for status, will be an especially important virtue in contexts—from classrooms to courtrooms to pluralistic democracies in general—where conflict is inevitable and desirable. To motivate this claim, I take a Hobbesian approach. I begin with a rational reconstruction of honor (...) patterned after Hobbes’ rational reconstruction of justice, and imagine honor-equivalents of “rational” individuals in a “state of nature.” I then describe a multi-stage process that culminates in honorable contests among a natural aristocracy. The lessons from this exercise apply to the question of civil discourse: while the "standard model" of civil discourse aims at resolving disagreement by downplaying rivalry and ego, the more realistic agonistic model harnesses these factors to make our civil debates more culturally sustainable. (shrink)

The title of the book was chosen due to inspiration from Nietzsche’s famous book ‘Beyond good and Evil’, which has marked an unprecedented turning point in the history of philosophy. Hence, the book titled ‘Beyond Civilization and History’ is intended to outline the politico-historical debate, since the dawn of the 20th century. The discussion in the book will cover pre-modern, modern and post-modern discourse of the history of civilizations. The debate mainly focuses on the modernist and post-modernist historical context (...) especially surrounding the writings of Oswald Spengler, Norman Angell, Arnold J. Toynbee, and Alexander Dugin. (shrink)

History can be understood as involving a problematic interplay between the long-term legacy of human evolution, still tempered into the human body today, and the shorter-term heritage of civilization from its beginnings to the present. Each of us lives in a tension between our indigenous bodies and our civilized selves, between the philosophy of the earth and that which I characterize as “the philosophy of escape from the earth.” The standard story of civilization is one of linear upward progress, a (...) story that I contest with an alternative philosophy of history, picturing history instead as a set of concentric circles. I have devised a new philosophy of history with a three-part approach to understanding human development, taking civilization not as a linear advance of progress, but rather as a progress in precision, paradoxically counteracted by a regression in mind: history as a contraction of mind. I describe three stages in the contraction of mind: 1) animate mind as the evolved outlook of foraging life; 2) anthropocentric mind as representing the contracting transformation of consciousness produced by agriculturally-based civilization; 3) mechanico-centric mind as representing a further contraction from human-centered to a machine-centered consciousness, produced by the rise of modern civilization and the mechanical scientific worldview. Hence, this progressive contraction is marked by a turn from original practical and reverential attunement to the living earth in hunting and gathering societies, or animate mind, to a narrower focus of anthropocentric mind beginning with the development of early civilizations, where the human element became central and the wild devalued. And it moves to an even more narrow focus of mechanico-centric mind, expanding out of late medieval Europe and the development of modern science, where the machine became model of the ultimate, the objectivist filter through which the world is to be understood and made to fit. Far from controlling nature, humans have been consuming it in an unsustainable Malthusian-like trajectory whose limits are being reached in our time. (shrink)

This essay argues that the revolt against Cartesian dualism in the early 20th century was pivotal in the development of the modern mind and in the revolution in form that occurred in modern literature and the arts.

Is it possible to compare civilizations one with another? Is it possible, in other words, to construct some neutral and objective framework in terms of which we could establish in what respects one civilization might deserve to be ranked more highly than its competitors? Morality will surely provide one axis of such a framework (and we note in passing that believers in Islam might quite reasonably claim that their fellow-believers are characteristically more moral than are many in the West). (...) Criteria such as material well-being will need to play a role, too, as also will happiness or pleasure (and again we note that it is not clear a priori that there is more happiness in the West than there is in other civilizations). But even happiness (pace some proponents of the utilitarian philosophy) comes in different types, and to count in the civilization stakes the happiness involved would presumably need to be of the right kind. We explore what this might mean in terms of the idea of a self-chosen life plan. (shrink)

Two great problems of learning confront humanity: learning about the nature of the universe and our place in it, and learning how to become civilized. The first problem was solved, in essence, in the 17th century, with the creation of modern science. But the second problem has not yet been solved. Solving the first problem without also solving the second puts us in a situation of great danger. All our current global problems have arisen as a result. What we need (...) to do, in response to this unprecedented crisis, is learn from our solution to the first problem how to solve the second. This was the basic idea of the 18th century Enlightenment. Unfortunately, in carrying out this programme, the Enlightenment made three blunders, and it is this defective version of the Enlightenment programme that we have institutionalized in 20th century academic inquiry. In order to solve the second great problem of learning we need to correct the three blunders of the traditional Enlightenment. This involves changing the nature of social inquiry, so that social science becomes social methodology or social philosophy, concerned to help us build into social life the progress-achieving methods of aim-oriented rationality, arrived at by generalizing the progress-achieving methods of science. It also involves, more generally, bringing about a revolution in the nature of academic inquiry as a whole, so that it takes up its proper task of helping humanity learn how to become wiser by increasingly cooperatively rational means. The scientific task of improving knowledge and understanding of nature becomes a part of the broader task of improving global wisdom. (shrink)

I argue that, in one sense, collective wisdom can save civilization. But in a more important sense, collective wisdom should be understood as a form of civilization, as the result and expression of a moral civilizing-process that comes about through the creation and transmission of collective interpretations of human experience and human nature. Collective wisdom traditions function in this manner by providing an interpretation of what it means to be human and what thoughts, skills, and actions are required to live (...) a successful human life at the most general level of analysis. Collective wisdom can have a civilizing effect on individuals, and indirectly on societies, by providing a type of orienting framework for understanding the proper relationship between the self, others, and the world. Such traditions in effect provide a “blueprint” for the successful human life as such, by providing guidance on thought and action, on what is appropriate to think, feel, desire, and do in theoretical and practical contexts. A wise individual will be a 'civilized' individual in this moral sense, an individual who is properly habituated and educated so as to now reflectively endorse and desire thinking and acting in virtuous ways. However, this understanding of collective wisdom and civilization is in many ways today controversial and met with justified critiques and skeptical criticisms. To defend this way of approaching and answering our question against these critiques, I turn to ancient wisdom traditions from ancient India, China, and Greece as paradigms for understanding exactly how collective wisdom can achieve the end of civilizing humanity. Based on this analysis, I sketch the outlines of a revitalized ancient wisdom tradition able to civilize individuals today, but such a tradition must be updated to reflect the advancement of modern natural science and to meet the demands of living in our diverse, pluralistic, and globalized world. (shrink)

This interview focuses on Arran Gare’s thinking about ecological civilization and its relationship to a new theoretical ecology, strong democracy and political philosophy based on “ecopoiesis” or “home-making.” Gare believes that it is possible to create a global ecological civilization that empowers people to augment their ecological communities. Complex transformations of the social and economic organization of societies and a radical upheaval of our conceptions of what it means to be human are required to bring about this change to a (...) new ecological (eco-human) culture. (shrink)

The book addresses the broad issue of sustainability of our civilization and seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion of what many see as its systemic crisis. There is a broad agreement that new creative ideas, initiatives, and solutions are essential for dealing with the current problems. However, despite this recognition, we still know very little about the process of creation and how it works. As a result, our civilization fails to harness the enormous creative potential of humanity. This failure, (...) the book argues, is the main source of our current problems—languishing economy, deteriorating environment, continued violence, the deficit of democracy, and the lack of new fundamental breakthroughs in science. It examines some of these problems and demonstrates the connection between them and our failure to embrace the process of creation. The book offers a perspective that sheds light on the process of creation. It pays special attention to the theoretical contributions of Jean Piaget and the ongoing discussions of knowledge production that help us understand better how the process of creation works. The central argument of the book is that in order to solve our current problems and ensure the sustainability of our civilization well into the future we must embrace the process of creation and make it the central organizing principle of our social practice. Finally, the book provides an outline of the principal changes that the adoption of the new social practice organized around the process of creation will involve. (shrink)

I fill Ernest Gellner with disgust: disgust at my views and disgust at his inability to say exactly what is wrong with them (or so he once remarked in his social philosophy seminar).

In the final chapter of the Tractactus Theologico-Politicus , Spinoza declares that “the purpose of the state is, in reality, freedom.” While this remark obviously purports to tell us something important about Spinoza’s conception of the civitas , it is not clear exactly what is revealed. Recently, a number of scholars have interpreted this passage in a way that supports the view that Spinoza was a liberal for whom civic norms are rather more modest than the freedom of the Ethics (...) . Against this view, I provide an interpretation of Spinoza’s account of civil liberation that enables us to view the political writings as an extension of his larger ethical enterprise. Specifically, I show that, according to Spinoza, the state can promote robust liberty in a variety of ways, not least by influencing the behavioral patterns and affective dispositions of its citizens. (shrink)

applies Lacan to analyze racial violence and colonialism.

The well-known Kantian passage on misology in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals starts making fuller sense when located within the framework of Kant writings on philosophy of history where he contrasts civilization with moralization as two different phases in the growth of humankind. In this context, the growth of commerce and manufactures plays a distinctive role, namely that of means of fostering civilization, while pursuing a deceptive goal, namely happiness. Deception plays a basic role in the growth of (...) mankind, in so far as it allows for a hidden twofold teleology in human action. Men, while following the dictates of self-love, are systematically mistaken about the results they actually contribute in bringing about. Commerce brings different peoples into mutual relationship and thus paves the way to a cosmopolitan society. The growth of the arts and sciences provides preconditions for the growth of learned institutions, a free press, and a public opinion that are the basis on which reason may start being used in its critical capacities. This, that is Enlightenment, is a preliminary step to moralization, that is the jump of individuals from a state of minority to a state where they are masters of themselves. The twofold teleology of human action makes room for a system of "pragmatic" ends, and of laws connected to the former, that may be studied rationally in themselves and yet are connected to the higher ends established by reason in its "practical" capacities. (shrink)

The global ecological crisis is the greatest challenge humanity has ever had to confront, and humanity is failing. The triumph of the neo-liberal agenda, together with a debauched ‘scientism’, has reduced nature and people to nothing but raw materials, instruments and consumers to be efficiently managed in a global market dominated by corporate managers, media moguls and technocrats. The arts and the humanities have been devalued, genuine science has been crippled, and the quest for autonomy and democracy undermined. The resultant (...) trajectory towards global ecological destruction appears inexorable, and neither governments nor environmental movements have significantly altered this, or indeed, seem able to. The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization is a wide-ranging and scholarly analysis of this failure. This book reframes the dynamics of the debate beyond the discourses of economics, politics and techno-science. Reviving natural philosophy to align science with the humanities, it offers the categories required to reform our modes of existence and our institutions so that we augment, rather than undermine, the life of the ecosystems of which we are part. From this philosophical foundation, the author puts forth a manifesto for transforming our culture into one which could provide an effective global environmental movement and provide the foundations for a global ecological civilization. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

I argue that given the persistent injustice present within the Prison Industrial Complex in the United States, many incarcerated individuals would be justified in attempting to escape and that these prison breaks may qualify as acts of civil disobedience. After an introduction in section one, section two offers a critique of the classical liberal conception of civil disobedience envisioned by John Rawls. Contrary to Rawls, I argue that acts of civil disobedience can involve both violence and evasion of punishment, both (...) of which are necessary components of prison breaks. In section three I outline the broad circumstances in which escape attempts would be justified, which are when individuals have either been incarcerated on unjust grounds (such as coercive plea bargains, draconian laws, or institutionalized discrimination) or when individuals are subject to inhumane conditions within prison (such as physical or sexual abuse, inadequate medical care, and overcrowding). Although this framework is formulated with the U.S. criminal justice system in mind, it is potentially applicable to other instances of incarceration if they’re similarly unjust such as prisons in other countries, migrant detention centers, or psychiatric wards. I then outline four requirements which must be met for these prison breaks to qualify as civil disobedience. First, escape must be attempted as a last resort. Second, violence and other law-breaking must be reasonable, meaning it is done with precision, discretion, and proportion. Third, escapees hold the burden of proving they have been subject to injustice. Fourth and finally, the act of escape must contain other key components of civil disobedience such as persuasion, communication, and publicity, which will most likely be accomplished via coordination with non-incarcerated individuals. In section four I address the distinction between prison reform and abolition. (shrink)