Suppose we accept Nietzsche’s claim that critical reflection undermines our evaluative commitments. Then it seems that we are left with a pair of unappealing options: either we engage in critical reflection and find our evaluative commitments becoming etiolated; or we somehow immunize certain evaluative commitments from the effects of critical reflection. Nietzsche considers both of these paths, labeling the person who results from the first path “the last man” and the person who results from the second “the fanatic.” I (...) consider Nietzsche’s analysis of these two character types, discuss why he thinks that in modernity these are the options with which we are faced, and ask whether Nietzsche thinks that there is a third way. (shrink)

To what extent can Nietzsche's idea of the Overman be used in connection with transhumanist notions of highly advanced humans and even posthumans?

The debate about how to interpret Foucault’s writings on neoliberalism has been going on for a while now: where some see in The Birth of Biopolitics a devastating critique of neoliberal reason, others see a laudatory exposition. Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora’s recent book The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution is the newest contribution to this dispute. In it, the two authors rearticulate in book-length the position they have previously defended in several articles and (...) book chapters: that Foucault was enticed by neoliberal thought and that his reading of Gary Becker and others significantly affected the intellectual trajectory of his later years. While the arguments about what Foucault really thought of neoliberalism are central to the book – and many will no doubt find fault with its interpretation of Foucault in this regard – I set the somewhat tired exegetical debates aside for the purposes of this review. Instead, I focus on the book’s, in my opinion, more interesting project of analysing the broader relations between neoliberalism, Foucauldian thought and Left politics. Despite being a well-written and in many places highly interesting and worthwhile book, it ultimately falls short of a compelling analysis in this regard. (shrink)

In this book, Fukuyama seeks to provide affirmative answers to two fundamental questions: Has the ideal of liberal democracy effectively triumphed throughout the world so that we can now speak of the end of humankind's ideological development and thus the end of history? If so, is this a good thing?

Abstract: Giorgio Agamben's recent works have been preoccupied with a certain obscure passage from St. Paul's 'Second Epistle to the Thessalonians,' which describes the portentous events that must occur before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ can take place---specifically, the appearance of a 'man of lawlessness' (the Antichrist?) and the exposure of who or what is currently restraining the 'man of lawlessness' from being exposed as the Antichrist: a mysterious agency called the 'katechon.' In 'The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI (...) and the End of Days,' this obscure passage is connected with the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI through certain equally obscure references to the fourth century theologian, Tyconius, although the precise connection between these apocalyptic events and their mysterious agents remains obscure. This review attempts to shed some critical light upon this cryptic subject, both by considering the world-historical context of St. Paul's epistle, and by asking what role these apocalyptic figures play in Agamben's political theology. But, to begin with, the review also asks: Who, really, is the Antichrist? a scarcely rhetorical question that demands a sardonic answer. Although various candidates from contemporary politics are proposed, the review finally argues that the Antichrist and the katechon are not specific individuals or worldly institutions, but rather refer to world-historical trends within Western European Christian civilization itself that have resulted in what Friedrich Nietzsche called 'the devaluation of all higher values' and 'the desecration of the Christian moral world-view': an apocalyptic turn of events which Nietzsche equally sardonically referred to in 'The Antichrist.'. (shrink)

I aim to show how the enigmatic phrase 'Unánime noche' in the famous first sentence of “The Circular Ruins” is inextricably linked to the story’s last words. Toward this purpose, I argue—against plausible foundational interpretations of the story—for a nonfoundational reading of the text and, moreover, that Borges’s use of ‘unánime’ (one soul) can be understood as one character or one form; namely, as an archetype of “Dreamanity” that leads to a vertiginous Third Man regress.

Darwin’s treatment of morality in The Descent of Man has generated a wide variety of responses among moral philosophers. Among these is the dismissal of evolution as irrelevant to ethics by Darwin’s contemporary Henry Sidgwick; the last, and arguably the greatest, of the Nineteenth Century British Utilitarians. This paper offers a re-examination of Sidgwick’s response to evolutionary considerations as irrelevant to ethics and the absence of any engagement with Darwin’s work in Sidgwick’s main ethical treatise, The Methods of Ethics (...) . This assessment of Sidgwick’s response to Darwin’s work is shown to have significance for a number of ongoing controversies in contemporary metaethics. (shrink)

The essay “Was ist der Mensch?” appeared for the first time in December 1944 in the German magazine with a hundred years of tradition edited by the publisher J. J. Weber Illustrierte Zeitung Leipzig [Illustrated Magazine Leipzig]. This special cultural edition, entitled Der europäische Mensch [The European Man], which was distributed exclusively abroad, was to be the last volume of the magazine after its final regular issue in September 1994 (No. 5041). Only in 1947, the text was republished, with (...) the same pagination, in a compilation made by J. J. Weber, Vom Wahren, Schönen, Guten. Aus dem Schatz europäischer Kunst und Kultur [On the True, the Beautiful, the Good. From the Treasury of European Art and Culture]. The publisher was expropriated in 1948, and three years later the company was finally removed from the German commercial registry. “Was ist der Mensch?” has never been released in any of Gadamer’s books or separately published in a journal; it also does not appear within the 10 volumes of his Gesammelte Werke [Collected Works]—the only exception is an Italian translation included in a volume devoted to Gadamer’s views on education and the notion of Bildung (cf. Gadamer 2012). The aim of this translation is to make accessible this Gadamer’s quest for the occidental interpretations of human self-consciousness, which has until now been almost unknown and in which, for the first time, Gadamer shows, from a theoretical standpoint, not only his early—although implicit—keen interest in Max Scheler’s anthropology (particularly Scheler’s considerations on the basic historical types of the occidental man’s self-perception in accordance with the basic and underlying concept of human history that still have powerful effectiveness in modern times), but also—at the historical threshold of the imminent ending of World War II—his own concern regarding possible philosophical answers to the question: “What is man?” Cf. especially Scheler 1926 (GW 9, 120–144); 1928 (GW 9, 7–71); 1929 (GW 9, 145–170). All commenting annotations to Gadamer’s text are authored by the editor and translator. (shrink)

CATEGORY: Philosophy play; historical fiction; comedy; social criticism. -/- STORYLINE: Katherine, a neurotic American lawyer, meets Christianus for a philosophy session at The Late Victorian coffee shop in London, where they also meet Wendy the waitress and Baldy the player. Will Katherine be able to overcome her deep depression by adopting some of Christianus’s satisfactionist ideas? Or will she stay unsatisfied and unhappy by stubbornly sticking to her own neti-neti nothingness philosophy? And what roles do Baldy, Wendy, and the Okefenokee (...) Man-Monster have in this connexion? -/- TOPICS: In the course of this philosophy play, Katherine and Christianus discuss many things: friendship, a Renoir painting, global warming, elephant conservation, freemasons, Prince of Wales and his tiger-hunting experience in Nepal, Victorian Chartism and a Kennington Common daguerreotype, a Mortality Proof, and, last but not least, Baldy, Wendy, and the gory plot of the Okefenokee Man-Monster. -/- NOTES: This work features elaborate footnotes and comments (including full bibliographical references) by the author, to enhance the reader's experience of the play and its philosophizing characters. (shrink)

This article considers Friedrich Kittler’s deterministic media theory as both an appropriation and mutation of Michel Foucault’s archaeological method. Focusing on these two thinkers’ similar but divergent conceptions of the “death of man,” it will be argued that Kittler’s approach attempts to expunge archaeology of its last traces of Kantian transcendentalism by locating the causal agents of epistemic change within the domain of empirical experience, but in doing so, actually amplifies the anthropological vestiges that Foucault hoped to eradicate. The (...) result is an alluring but dogmatically positivist theory of mediatic causality that, in spite of its best efforts, can only reify, rather than dispel, the image of “so-called man.”. (shrink)

Platonic religiosity is the first of two volumes devoted to the analysis of religiosity or religious feeling (pathos) in Plato. -/- (Back cover) Platonic Religiosity is a hermeneutical attempt to read Platonic works from the perspective of their religiosity. The aspects examined in the book are limited for the moment to the most basic, perhaps even the simplest, dimensions of religious feeling, those involving the representation of a relationship between man and divinity, Earth and Heaven, "low" and "high". Low and (...) high are spatial metaphors constitutive of our thinking. Although, in this case, they indicate the link between man and the super-sensible world, they also presuppose, at all times, the devout feeling (and the risk) of an insurmountable distance and remoteness that divides men from the numen. The need to affirm the relationship partly overcomes the presence of this feeling of distance, but never manages to neutralise it completely. -/- Religious feeling as such always oscillates between two terms: the need to establish a relationship with the divinity, and thus to guarantee its proximity to man, and the affirmation of its transcendence, namely the distance that divides us from the numen, up to the point, eventually, where the danger becomes the greatest: the denial of the god by man (atheism) or the human feeling of being abandoned by the god. The presence of these oscillations in the Platonic texts is analysed in several chapters of the book, devoted to different themes, such as the representations of reciprocity (do ut des), the images of the friendly god and the hostile god, the feeling of the threshold, prayers and invocations, verecundia and nostalgia, the feeling of dependence, the notion of prescience, assimilation to the god, the different types of ineffability, the role of atheism and incredulity, and lastly the notion of conversion, which substantiates Platonic religiosity by characterising it in the sense of a redemption-belief. (shrink)

The purpose of the following text is to give readers a general introduction to Gordon Pask’s conversation theory, which is considered here to be a cybernetic and epistemological account of concept-forming and concept-sharing through conversational discourse and practice. While Pask devoted three lengthy tomes to articulate the theory and its applications, I believe it is necessary to give readers who are interested in conversation theory a general introduction to what I believe are the key features of his work in this (...) area. I argue that conversation theory should be considered an inferential account of the theory of concepts rather than a representational account, by virtue of Pask’s argument that a concept must be a process that involves many other concepts. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to compile a selection of the various formalisms found in conversation theory to introduce readers to Pask's discursive algebra. In this way, the text demonstrates how concept sharing and concept formation by means of the interaction of two participants may be formalized. The approach taken in this study is to examine the formal notation system used by Pask and demonstrate how such formalisms may be used to represent concept sharing and concept formation through conversation. (...) The compilation of the discursive algebra using the framework provided by conversation theory could potentially be used as an auxiliary framework to study conversational interactions in multi-agent systems theory. (shrink)

Recent research in science indicates that we are living in a fine-tuned universe. Only a very small parameter space of universal fundamental constants in Physics is congenial for the existence of life. Moreover, recent studies in Biological evolution also reveal that fine-tuning did exist in the evolution. It seems that we are so lucky to exist as all universal fundamental constants and life-permitting factors really fall into such a very small life-allowing region. This problem is known as the fine-tuning problem. (...) Does this phenomenon need an explanation? Can the fine-tuning problem point to the existence of God? Modern Science invokes the idea of multiverse to address the fine-tuning problem. Some scientists suggest that each universe in a set of infinitely many universes contains a typical set of fundamental constants. We should not be surprised why our universe is fine-tuned because we would not exist if the constants are not the life-allowed values. Some suggest that the existence of God can explain this fine-tuning problem. The naturalistic multiverse theory and the existence of God are the two most robust proposals to address the fine-tuning problem. Moreover, some argue that the fine-tuning problem is not real because we are just subject to observational selection effect. In this thesis, I will provide a comprehensive discussion on the fine-tuning phenomena in our universe. In particular, I will use the confirmation principle and the inference to the best explanation simultaneously to evaluate different hypotheses in a more systematic way and give some of the new and updated scientific and philosophical arguments to respond to the recent criticisms of the fine-tuning arguments. I conclude that the theistic hypothesis is the best among all to address the fine-tuning problem. (shrink)

American philosopher Zhu Dien • Ba Tele that for granted with a series of related discussion, and while there are of a fixed body of the material. Bate Le read de Beauvoir's "Second Sex" that this is not Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" women's issues or situations in the application. De Beauvoir said that consciousness exists in which a person's body, and in the cultural vein, the participation in the formation of a person's gender. Ba Tele think understanding the philosophy of (...) Sartre's body, in many ways we can improve the appreciation of Beauvoir thought, and concluded that she is a thinker with originality. (shrink)

This article focuses on the imposition of modern education upon the foraging Raute people and the ways in which this project has been both reluctantly accepted and actively resisted by the Raute. The Nepalese government established schools for Raute children as part of the nation-state development policy. However, it has refused to incorporate their cultural values, traditions, customs and language into the school curriculum. This paper argues that in attempting to create forms of domination through the educational process the state (...) fosters inequality. Such an arrangement is met with everyday forms of resistance through non-collective and unorganised behaviour of Raute children at school. The Raute’s silent reaction against the government policies typifies the cultural disposition and ethos of the Raute community. This paper is based on research methods that include observation, interviews, informal discussions and document analysis, and outlines the interconnections between family, social class, students and state agency as they relate to education. In particular, it explores the Raute’s own narratives, perspectives and reactions with regard to their educational processes. This case study is presented in an effort to better understand the relations between resistance and reproduction of knowledge in foraging societies. (shrink)

This article discusses on land, landless and confiscation in Nepal during the Maoist insurgency in Nepal.

This article explore music and globalisation of Gandharva of Nepal.

This paper explain about the mythical realities in Danuwar society of Nepal.

This paper focuses on reciprocity among the nomadic hunter-gatherer Rāute and sedentary groups, ie farmers and artisans. The Rāute’s reciprocal relation depends on social contracts, trust, territorial relations and residential propinquity. These facets of reciprocity can be accepted, denied or even cancelled. I argue that the Rāute are economically prosperous because of their regular exchange of woodenwares for grains and other necessary items, though they refrain from storing resources, earning cash incomes, and eschew agricultural production and animal husbandry. Sharing, exchange, (...) gift and counter-gift engagements are obligatory or compulsory, free and voluntary, ensuring their reciprocity with neighbouring populations – which has been regulated by seasonality, foraging and population density around the vicinities of their camps. Qualitative research was employed, with informal interviews, observations, personal accounts, audio and video recording, as well as field diaries. (shrink)

In this paper, we attempt to de-naturalize the prevailing economistic imaginary of work that Max Weber and later commentators described as ‘protestant work ethic,’ epitomized in the figure of homo economicus. We do so by contrasting it with the imaginary of skillful work that can be found in vignettes about artisans in the Zhuangzi. We argue that there are interesting contrasts between these views concerning 1) direct goal achievement vs. indirect goal achievement through the cultivation of skills; 2) the hierarchization (...) of mental versus physical dimensions of work; 3) the crafting of non-dominating relationships between the working subject, their object, and their instruments of work, which leads to questions about the sustainability of these relationships; and 4) the relationship between work and well-being, which the Daoist texts conceptualize in a much more holistic, but also more presentist way than Western economic rationality. We conclude by pointing out the relevance of these differences for several contemporary debates about work, by denaturalizing a dominant imaginary of work, by distinguishing different forms of work, by suggesting a different relation between work and nature, and by raising questions about the desirability of the automation of work. (shrink)

A central question of environmental ethics remains one of how best to account for the intuitions generated by the Last Man scenarios; that is, it is a question of how to explain our experience of value in nature and, more importantly, whether that experience is justified. Seeking an alternative to extrinsic views, according to which nonhuman entities possess normative features that obligate us, I turn to constitutive views, which make value or whatever other limits nonhuman nature places on action (...) dependent on features intrinsic to human beings and constitutive of them or their obligations. After examining two kinds of constitutive views—environmental virtue ethics and Korsgaard’s Kantianism—I suggest an alternative that takes up the strengths of both while avoiding their shortcomings. On this view, we have an indirect obligation to experience nature as obligating us, although we have direct obligations only to human beings. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to present the thesis of the Japanese-American philosopher and economist Francis Fukuyama, known as the “end of history”, to reflect on the central argument of this thesis that transhumanism represents a problem for democracy. Therefore, a conceptual analysis will be carried out, based on selected excerpts, of Fukuyama's works entitledThe end of history and the last man, Our posthuman futureand “Transhumanism”.

Persons and nations agree on the importance of justice but disagree on its requirements. In The End of History and the Last Man Francis Fukuyama argues that human history moves towards liberal democracy as the final ideal for all societies. It is conceivable that liberal democratic societies will converge to similar conceptions of justice and that global spread of liberal democracies will promote consensus. This paper tries to show that consensus on justice is, nevertheless, unlikely, due to reasonable disagreement. (...) Reason does not give a single rational or reasonable solution to conflicting demands of justice. This means that apart from reason, other factors play a role in what is regarded as just. Jurisdiction is influenced by tradition and zeitgeist. This explains why also liberal democracies, which may recognize similar principles of justice, still arrive at differing rankings of these principles and divergent results of jurisdiction in time and place. (shrink)

Last year, the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” celebrated the 25 th anniversary. This article confines to this very special event and analyzes three important anthropological studies that deal with moral components of human being. The research directions have been formed at the Department since its establishment in 1992. -/- The first part of the article focuses mainly on the Kantian studies. According to Kant’s anthropology, human nature should be explored on two levels: empirical and (...) intelligible. Empirical level deals with general causality and considers the human being as the one entirely determined by nature. The second level considers the man from the perspective of freedom, moral activity, capacity to create aims and legislation. The research primarily gives a general scale of Kantian intelligible anthropology, which appears as a two-dimensional framework and consists of moral anthropological perspective and the one which Kant calls anthroponymy. Only the combination of these two aspects can allow us to comprehend the human nature as a whole. -/- The second section of this article will shed a light on the Nietzschean anthropological theory. The paper elucidates three basic dimensions of Nietzschean critical anthropology. First of all, of the author comments on Nietzsche’s critique of Christian morality. Next, he articulates the Nietzschean idea of self-overcoming. Finally, the author identifies the main features of his genealogy of morality. All those components bound together can provide a wide horizon of Nietzschean opinion on the ethical dimension of human being. -/- The last part of this article considers modern techno-anthropology in a broad sense. The problem of human and technology relation is considered in an ethical dimension, which unites all the three research directions. In this section, the author discusses the main components of technological mediation and non-neutrality. Using these two concepts, he proves that human nature (even in its ethical dimension) is not an autonomous and independent actor but the one that is deeply connected with the world and others through technology. -/- . (shrink)

Thought Experiments in Ethics, 2021 CONTENTS Preface i Chapter I The Story in Your Head: Tomoceuszkakatiti and Gyugyu 1 Chapter II How Thought Experiments Move Us: The Samaritan and His Neighbours 16 Chapter III What Makes a Thought Experiment? 34 Chapter IV Thought Experiments in Practical Philosophy and Bioethics 75 Chapter V The Experience Machine 93 Chapter VI The Last Man Argument 129 Chapter VII The Trolley Problem 158 Chapter VIII The Violinist Analogy 213 Conclusion 246 Notes 248.

Purpose of the article is the reconstruction of ancient Greek and ancient Roman models of religiosity as anthropological invariants that determine the patterns of thinking and being of subsequent eras. Theoretical basis. The author applied the statement of Protagoras that "Man is the measure of all things" to the reconstruction of the religious sphere of culture. I proceed from the fact that each historical community has a set of inherent ideas about the principles of reality, which found unique "universes of (...) meanings". The historical space acquires anthropological properties that determine the specific mythology of the respective societies, as well as their spiritual successors. In particular, the religious models of ancient Greece and ancient Rome had a huge influence on formation of the worldview of the Christian civilization of the West. Originality. Multiplicity of the Olympic mythology contributed to the diversity of the expression forms of the Greek genius, which manifested itself in different fields of cultural activity, not reducible to political, philosophical or religious unity. The poverty of Roman mythology was compensated by a clear awareness of the unity of the community, which for all historical vicissitudes had always remained an unchanging ideal, and which was conceived as a reflection of the unity of the heavens. These two approaches to the divine predetermined the formation of two interacting, but conceptually different anthropological paradigms of Antiquity. Conclusions. Western concepts of divinity are invariants of two basic theological concepts – "Greek" (naturalism and paganism) and "Roman" (transcendentalism and henotheism). These are ideal types, so these two tendencies can co-exist in one society. The Roman trend continued to be realized by the anti-Roman religion, which took Roman forms and Roman name. Iconoclasm was a Byzantine version of the Reformation, promoted by the Isaurian emperors and failed due to the strong Hellenistic naturalistic lobby. Modern "Romans" are trying to get rid of the last elements of religious naturalism, and modern "Greeks" are trying to preserve the Hellenic elements in Christianity. Patterns can be transformed, but the observational view will still be able to identify their lineage. The developed model allows a deeper understanding of the culture of both ancient societies, as well as the outlook of Western man. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the problem of anthropodicy in the philosophical system of Hermann Cohen and its interpretation by Jacob Gordin (1896—1947). Gordin was one of the last followers of Cohen in Russia. He developes his interpretation in the lecture “Anthropodicy”, which was given in the Philosophical Circle at the Petrograd University in December 1921. For the study of the problem of anthropodicy he was apparently inspired by the discussions at the Free Philosophical Association in 1919—1921. Gordin places Cohen’s (...) concept of man in the wide intellectual context given by the ideas of the Russian religious philosophy, German classical philosophy, Neo-Kantianism, and the West European and Jewish mysticism (cabbala). Gordin compares Cohen’s anthropodicy with Vladimir Soloviev’s one and shows that there is a similarity in their approaches. Both philosophers point out that the justification of man is possible only in form of the justification of humanity and not as for Berdyaiev in form of the justification of personality. But Gordin uses Soloviev’s concept of all-unity and Berdyaiev’s concept of creativity in order to “improve” Cohen’s conception and to reveal the contribution of a person to the justification of humanity. Stronger as Cohen Gordin connects the programm of anthropodicy with individuality and underlines the participation of the individual in creating culture. (shrink)

In the Vocation of Man, Fichte makes the striking claim that life is eternal, rational, our true being, and the final cause of nature in general and of death in particular. How can we make sense of this claim? I argue that the public lectures that compose the Vocation are a popular expression of Fichte’s pre-existing commitment to what I call immortalism, the view that life is the unconditioned condition of intelligibility. Casting the I as an absolutely self-active or living (...) power enables his philosophical account of both the intelligibility of objects and of what it means to die. This explains his characterization of the Wissenschaftslehre as a system in which ‘all is act, movement, and life’. In Sect. 1, I explain the context of Jacobi’s use of ‘caput mortuum’ as a term for the thing in itself. In Sects. 2 and 3, I reconstruct two immortalist arguments from Fichte’s Jena period. The first is that the I’s self-activity rules out the existence of the thing in itself and thereby vanquishes ‘death’s head’. The second is that, insofar as the I charges us with the moral perfection of nature, it is the final cause of our entire life, including its end. This is to say that the I puts our every moment into question, even our last. In Sect. 4, I use these immortalist arguments to interpret the striking claim from the Vocation. (shrink)

Purpose of the article is the reconstruction of ancient Greek and ancient Roman models of religiosity as anthropological invariants that determine the patterns of thinking and being of subsequent eras. Theoretical basis. The author applied the statement of Protagoras that "Man is the measure of all things" to the reconstruction of the religious sphere of culture. I proceed from the fact that each historical community has a set of inherent ideas about the principles of reality, which found unique "universes of (...) meanings". The historical space acquires anthropological properties that determine the specific mythology of the respective societies, as well as their spiritual successors. In particular, the religious models of ancient Greece and ancient Rome had a huge influence on formation of the worldview of the Christian civilization of the West. Originality. Multiplicity of the Olympic mythology contributed to the diversity of the expression forms of the Greek genius, which manifested itself in different fields of cultural activity, not reducible to political, philosophical or religious unity. The poverty of Roman mythology was compensated by a clear awareness of the unity of the community, which for all historical vicissitudes had always remained an unchanging ideal, and which was conceived as a reflection of the unity of the heavens. These two approaches to the divine predetermined the formation of two interacting, but conceptually different anthropological paradigms of Antiquity. Conclusions. Western concepts of divinity are invariants of two basic theological concepts – "Greek" and "Roman". These are ideal types, so these two tendencies can co-exist in one society. The Roman trend continued to be realized by the anti-Roman religion, which took Roman forms and Roman name. Iconoclasm was a Byzantine version of the Reformation, promoted by the Isaurian emperors and failed due to the strong Hellenistic naturalistic lobby. Modern "Romans" are trying to get rid of the last elements of religious naturalism, and modern "Greeks" are trying to preserve the Hellenic elements in Christianity. Patterns can be transformed, but the observational view will still be able to identify their lineage. The developed model allows a deeper understanding of the culture of both ancient societies, as well as the outlook of Western man. (shrink)

During the last two centuries, occidental philosophical meditation has triumphantly advanced through previously poorly charted fields. Science has reallocated the methods as well as the goals of philosophy, forcing scholars to advance a little further, embrace new cognitive challenges and correspond to new social needs. As a result, our everyday life has become easier and our world is a better place to live in. But still, an optimum situation is not achieved. As a matter of fact, there are more (...) things at stake in our era than there were in previous ones. Even basic prerequisites for a prosperous life are not fully met. For the first time in the history of mankind, we can not even be sure about the survival of our planet, not to mention well being of it’s living entities –man included. So far, where is the improvement? Our ancestors may not have had the luxury of fast transportation, immediate information or adequate medical treatment, still they could take some things for granted: they positively knew that they and their successors would be given the minimum of chances: they, at least, would have a place to live. (shrink)

In the last few years, a new paradigm of the knowledge of the divinity in Aristotle has emerged, affording the possibility of understanding him as efficient cause. In that case, if God is efficient cause and gives rise to teleology, this must have some existential significance for man. We can ask ourselves therefore whether the knowledge of metaphysics can offer some orientation also for ethics. Yet if this were true, the need would arise to deepen the question of how (...) much the gods love men and what would the nature of their relationship be to natural justice. Given that man is born and lives thanks to the divinity, the conclusion is that two consequences follow: a response of religious thanksgiving is needed but also, that since the will of the divinity desires the good for man, the human search for happiness is the same as the fulfillment of the divine law. All this is explained, to a certain extent, in the context of the friendship between man and the divine. (shrink)

(The Kindle book can be ordered for $3.21 from Amazon) -/- Thinking is a fundamental activity of our species – those that give names to other creatures and call themselves humans. Textbooks tell us that there is about 1.2 kg of matter called the brain inside the human body. It sounds small but actually is proportionally the biggest among all animals on Earth. -/- I became more aware of thinking at around 5th grade upon hearing about an ancient paradox. It (...) can be summarized as follows. -/- ¤ -/- Once upon a time, there was a stupid king. In his kingdom lived a sage who was highly respected for his intelligence. The King did not appreciate this fact. Maybe the Sage made fun of the King’s intellect, but I am not so sure. Anyway, one day, the King summoned the Sage, intending to kill him. -/- The King said, “Wise man, I heard you earn a living by thinking and arguing. Now I give you two options to die.” -/- The Sage said, “Please tell me the choices, Your Majesty.” -/- The King continued, “You live by your tongue, so I will let you say one sentence before you die. If what you say is true, you will die by hanging. If what you say is false, you will die by beheading.” -/- Little did the King know that this was a stupid order. After a short while, the Sage confidently spoke his “last words”, which actually were what saved his life: -/- “Your Majesty, I am about to be beheaded!” -/- ¤ -/- As a “wild animal” going out into life from a young age, my brain spent a lot of time and energy looking for food. Now that I have become older, my body no longer needs so much sustenance. However, my mind craves a different type of nourishment: food for thought. -/- Food for thought can directly lead to food (on the table). My main job as a scientist exemplifies what I have just stated. Maybe we were wrong. Maybe it has been “thought for food” all along, like in such a sequence as TFFTTTFTFFTTFFFT... -/- In the hyper-chaotic infosphere today, we are surrounded by the noises of information, not only as wavy shores or waterfalls but also mega-tsunamis, through Twitter, Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram, Youtube, etc. More than ever, tranquility and calmness are necessary. Like what you have seen in wilderness video clips, predators such as lions, bears, and alligators act lightning-fast when catching prey. But when food is served, the natural world returns to its peaceful, soothing silence. -/- This short book is in its own tidy infosphere, where each little story is also brief and self-contained. Despite this small appearance, I hope the content inside carries the value of tranquility and life observation. The book is petite, but pretty sure not malnourished. A not-too-small detail is that the way the content was shaped and distilled reflects some innovations of mine and my research team: the mindsponge theory, a new theory of serendipity, the bayesvl R package, the BMF analytics, as well as other experiences from working in the field of science. After all, scientific works were my main source of food (before this book sells well – if it does). -/- Welcome to the priceless sober moments – with a chicken-burger price tag! -/- I hope this book will bring readers some moments of calmness, peaceful smiles, and maybe a couple of good laughs too. -/- ~~~ -/- *This update: December 12, 2023 (Third edition, with additions). (shrink)

Dion is a full-bodied man. Theon is that part of him which consists of all of him except his left foot. What becomes of Dion and Theon when Dion’s left foot is amputated? Employing the doctrine of sortal essentialism, I defend a surprising answer last defended by Chrysippus: that Dion survives while the seemingly unscathed Theon perishes. For replies to critics, see my publications of 1997 and (especially) 2004.

The most important problem of modern political philosophy is the loss of politics’ independence from other spheres of human activity. Since the beginning of the last century, philosophers have sought to justify the uniqueness of political being and to update the modern politicalphilosophical vocabulary by redefining the categories of antiquity (e.g. τὸ ᾰ̓γᾰθόν, φῐλία, παρρησία, etc.). The article is devoted to the approach to the rehabilitation of the political sphere based on the political-philosophical experience of the ancient Greeks. The (...) theoretical basis of the study is H. Arendt’s solution of the issue of depoliticization in the context of her reminiscences of the ancient heritage. The author turns to the notion of civic friendship, which largely determines Arendt’s contribution to the discussions on the rehabilitation of politics and acts as a practice endowing the community with political potential. On the basis of Arendt’s interpretation of the political philosophy of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the author justifies the appeal to this notion and shows the connection of civic friendship with other categories of ancient thought (truth, opinion, Maieutics). The analysis reveals that the requirement borrowed from Socrates to eliminate truth from the sphere of human affairs puts Arendt’s philosophy in opposition to the tradition of political thought, and the use of political-philosophical categories to describe the human lifeworld allows us to consider it as a version of the hermeneutics of the subject. The author concludes that the justification of politics by means of ancient thought has an original anthropological dimension. It consists in the recognition of the significance of political action for the orientation of man in the world and the assertion of his identity in the community. (shrink)

There are many different kinds of libertarianism. The first is right libertarianism, which received its most powerful expression in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), a book that still sets the baseline for discussions of libertarianism today. The second, I will call faux libertarianism. For reasons I will explain in this paper, most ‘man-on-the-street’ libertarians and most politicians who claim to be libertarians are actually this kind of libertarian. And third, there is left libertarianism, which is what I shall (...) spend most of this paper explicating. But I will not simply be surveying the views of those who identify as left libertarians and put this forth as if I were engaged in an exegetical exercise. Instead, what I shall set forth is a kind of manifesto, a statement of why I consider myself a left libertarian, one that takes this approach to political morality well beyond where it was left around the end of the last century by the previous generation of left libertarians. My hope is to provide those who find certain left libertarian ideas attractive a guide by which they can explain and harmonise their own views, recognise left libertarianism as a distinct comprehensive political doctrine, and feel more open to identify themselves as left libertarian too. (shrink)

What are some of the distinctive virtues of the confluence approach that sets it apart from other attempts to do philosophy across cultural boundaries? First, unlike comparing and contrasting, the confluence approach remains faithful to the dominant conception of philosophy as an intellectual enterprise centered on dialogue and argumentation, in which philosophers pursue unresolved problems by building on the achievements of their acknowledged forbears. Second, confluence philosophy implements a syncretic and creative approach to doing philosophy by drawing on non-Western philosophical (...) sources while using the tools and conceptual resources of analytic philosophy. Third and last, the confluence approach highlights possible tensions when the traditions of thought brought into dialogue are on a diverging path on certain matters. Contemporary philosophy, at least in the Anglophone world and its satellites, is an avowedly secular enterprise, deferring to the sciences for its account of what can be said to exist at the most fundamental level and for its understanding of the processes that realize cognition. Buddhism at its core is often understood as a soteriological project manly concerned with overcoming suffering, which sometimes is taken to entail an insight into the emptiness of all the constitutive elements of existence and/or experience. Confluence philosophy thus makes it possible to ask whether defending a theoretical framework which affirms this truth of emptiness means that one must engage in the very sort of activity, namely, rational self-assertion, that hinders enlightenment. (shrink)

Purpose of the article is to identify the religious factor in the teaching of transhumanism, to determine its role in the ideology of this flow of thought and to identify the possible limits of technology interference in human nature. Theoretical basis. The methodological basis of the article is the idea of transhumanism. Originality. In the foreseeable future, robots will be able to pass the Turing test, become “electronic personalities” and gain political rights, although the question of the possibility of machine (...) consciousness and self-awareness remains open. In the face of robots, people create their assistants, evolutionary competition with which they will almost certainly lose with the initial data. For successful competition with robots, people will have to change, ceasing to be people in the classical sense. Changing the nature of man will require the emergence of a new – posthuman – anthropology. Conclusions. Against the background of scientific discoveries, technical breakthroughs and everyday improvements of the last decades, an anthropological revolution has taken shape, which made it possible to set the task of creating inhumanly intelligent creatures, as well as changing human nature, up to discussing options for artificial immortality. The history of man ends and the history of the posthuman begins. We can no longer turn off this path, however, in our power to preserve our human qualities in the posthuman future. The theme of the soul again reminded of itself, but from a different perspective – as the theme of consciousness and self-awareness. It became again relevant in connection with the development of computer and cloud technologies, artificial intelligence technologies, etc. If a machine ever becomes a "man", then can a man become a "machine"? However, even if such a hypothetical probability would turn into reality, we cannot talk about any form of individual immortality or about the continuation of existence in a different physical form. A digital copy of the soul will still remain a copy, and I see no fundamental possibility of isolating a substrate-independent mind from the human body. Immortality itself is necessary not so much for stopping someone’s fears or encouraging someone’s hopes, but for the final solution of a religious issue. However, the gods hold the keys to heaven hard and are unlikely to admit our modified descendants there. (shrink)

Thinking is overrated: golfers perform best when distracted and under pressure; firefighters make the right calls without a clue as to why; and you are yourself ill advised to look at your steps as you go down the stairs, or to try and remember your pin number before typing it in. Just do it, mindlessly. Both empirical psychologists and the common man have long worked out that thinking is often a bad idea, but philosophers still hang on to an intellectualist (...) picture of human action. This book challenges that picture and calls on philosophers to wake up to the power of mindlessness: it is our habits, skills and conventions that help us cope with a world way too diverse for us to hope to always reinterpret it. The book presents the empirical evidence that has been accumulating over the last few decades and offers a philosophical analysis of mindless phenomena such as habits, skilled activity, automatic actions, emotional and spontaneous reactions and social conventions, arguing that traditional philosophical theories of action should be revised to do justice to this forgotten but important part of our lives: when we act mindlessly, we are free and fully rational even though we neither deliberate nor are aware of what we are doing. (shrink)

Purpose of this article is to investigate the role that the "miraculous" – that is, everything that goes beyond “natural” – plays in the worldview of Western man. Methodology. I do not consider “miracles” as the facts of nature, but as the facts of culture, so in this article I am not talking about specific cases of violation of “laws of nature”, but about the place of “miraculous” in the view of the world of Western man and those transformations, that (...) occur with this element outlook influenced the development of information technologies. Novelty. It has been proved that miracles should be sought in mind, because the “miraculous” event does our attitude towards it. Moreover, it is impossible to determine the “true miracle”, while we are “inside” the reality. It has been demonstrated that influenced the development of society is transformed representations of gods and miracles. It has been discovered fundamental shift associated with the transition from mythology-as-faith to mythology-as-show. However, even within the latter remains a need for miracles, though, and goes to a completely different level. Conclusions. The term "miracle" has no meaning outside of accepted socio-cultural settings. The last set as the “natural” conditions and admissibility (inadmissibility) of its violation. And these installations are formed by social institutions, which in this age and at this time have a weight sufficient to impose their views to all the congregation or the greater part. Any extraordinary event can be explained by the action of internal agents unknown to us, and their ability to alter the reality is not necessarily superior to even our own capabilities. The only thing we can not do – is to change the source code of being (e.g., fundamental physical constants). This could make only creatures that are not spelled out in these source codes. However, people have not seen anything like it, and scarcely become witnesses of such events. (shrink)

The mind of man is central to the structure and functioning of the physical world. Modern physical theory indicates that the mind stands in a relationship of equals to the physical world. Both are fundamental, neither can be reduced to the other, and both require each other for their full understanding. This thesis is at odds with the view of the universe found in Newtonian mechanics as well as the generally held view among contemporary physicists of modern physical theory. Since (...) the Renaissance, man has come to understand a great deal about the physical world, and he has gained significant control over it. This increased power over the physical world has occurred hand in hand with the assumption that the structure and functioning of the physical world is essentially independent from his cognitive functioning. According to this assumption, if man’s cognitive capacity did not exist, the functioning of the physical world would not be fundamentally altered. This last statement is not in fact correct, and modern physical theory, and even fundamentals underlying Newtonian mechanics, provide evidence to attest to this. Nonetheless, contemporary physicists for the most part do not see that the relationship of human cognition to the physical world is radically altered in their own modern theory, theory that is supported by a great deal of empirical data. Instead, attempting to preserve the thesis that the structure and functioning of the physical world is independent of the mind while on a practical level relying on modern theory that contradicts this thesis, physicists have placed themselves in the position of wondering at times exactly what is the nature of the physical world at the same time they obtain experimental results concerning the physical world that can only be labeled astonishing in their precision and the scope of their implications. Modern physical theory consists of three main components: 1) the special and general theories of relativity; 2) quantum mechanics; and 3) statistical mechanics. There are very successful theories that have been developed on the basis of these three bedrock areas. An example of one is quantum electrodynamics. But these theories owe their conceptual foundation to the three components mentioned. The basic issues at the core of these three components also are expressed in these later theories. In addition, there are new unresolved issues of a fundamental nature concerning the conceptual integrity of these later theories that do not apply to quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and statistical mechanics. Quantum mechanics and relativity theory are areas I have written about for over twelve years. The nature of statistical mechanics has also been of interest to me during this time. But when I took a serious look in 1993 at Tolman’s (1938) The Principles of Statistical Mechanics, it became clear that the mind is linked to the physical world in statistical mechanics, a relationship I had found earlier in both relativity theory and quantum mechanics. It was after reading Tolman’s justification of the method of statistical mechanics in the original that I decided to write this book. When I found that the three components of modern physical theory all pointed to the same relationship between mind and the physical world, it became clear that the fundamental isolation of the mind from the physical world that has characterized our experience since the development of Newtonian mechanics is unfounded. Based on empirically supported principles of modern physical theory, I determined that the appropriate assumption for one’s experience, that the mind is linked to the physical world, could be stated with confidence. The impact of this change in assumption concerning the relationship of man to the cosmos in modern physical theory will find its way into our everyday experience. It will perhaps have no greater effect than in reducing the sense of isolation of man from the world that has characterized modern existence. (shrink)

Dion is a full-bodied man. Theon is that part of him which consists of all of him except his left foot. What becomes of Dion and Theon when Dion’s left foot is amputated? In Burke 1994, employing the doctrine of sortal essentialism, I defended a surprising position last defended by Chrysippus: that Dion survives while the seemingly unscathed Theon perishes. This paper defends that position against objections by Stone, Carter, Olson, and others. Most notably, it offers a novel, conservative (...) solution to the many-thinkers problem, a solution that enables us to accept the existence of brain-containing person-parts while denying that those person-parts are thinking, conscious beings. (shrink)

The affection of the Prophet by the ummah (belivers) contributed to keep his words on the agenda so that various formations had emerged. these formations displayed themselves especially in the field of literature. Specifically, variety in the forty hadith literature can be example of this. New‘î who was the literary man and professor of Ottoman’s in the 16. Century and produced the Works of İslamic Science and literature. In this study, the work of New‘î which is about the forty hadith (...) written in poetic has diffused and it is tried to give information about the index of that work. Also, translations and the classic sources of the hadith which given in the work are shown in tabuler form. In addition to this, the author and his Works have tried to explain with some previously unknown topics. Lastly, it has been tried to correct misplaced issues. (shrink)

In the history of interpretations of Hegel, how one reads the chapter on “Absolute Knowing” in the Phenomenology of Spirit determines one’s whole perspective. In fact, Marx’s only comments on the Phenomenology concern this final chapter, taking it as the very “secret” of Hegel’s philosophy. But what is the secret hidden within the thicket of this impenetrable prose? My suggestion is that it turns on a very specific meaning of the “abolition of time” that Hegel describes in the very (...) class='Hi'>last paragraphs. But the meaning of this idea is not what Marx criticized in his last Manuscript of 1844, that is, it is not simply a form of idealism which abolishes the finitude of man. Rather this relationship to time accepts such finitude, making it the central axis upon which the possibility of freedom turns. In this paper, I will present a reading of “Absolute Knowing” that focuses on the meaning of overcoming time, and connect it to some thoughts on “disposable time” that Marx discusses in the Grundrisse. (shrink)

Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that emerged from his criticism of the “intellectualist legend” that to do something intelligently is “to do a bit of theory and then to do a bit of practice,” and became a philosophical commonplace in the second half of the last century. In this century Jason Stanley has attacked Ryle’s distinction, arguing that “knowing-how is a species of knowing-that,” and accusing Ryle of setting up a straw man in his critique of “intellectualism.” Examining (...) the use of the terms “intellectualism” and “anti-intellectualism” in the first half of the 20th century, in a wide-ranging debate in the social sciences as well as in philosophy, I show that Ryle was not criticizing a straw man, but a live historical position. In the context of this controversy, Ryle’s position represents a third way between “intellectualism” and “anti-intellectualism,” an option that has largely gone missing in the 21st century discussion. This argument illustrates how history can inform the history of philosophy, and how the history of philosophy can inform contemporary philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

There are two tensions in Smith’s system of ideas: the first is between the postulate of an invisible “noumenal” order of the Universe and the imaginary principles through which we connect the phenomena; the second is between a hypothetical noumenal order of the world where “is” and “ought” converge and the partial and imperfect normative order issued by our sympathetic judgements and a never perfectly impartial spectator. These tensions, which gave occasion to old misrepresentations and recent ones, are tensions in (...) a unitary (though rhapsodically completed) system of ideas where the final unanswered question was the problem of evil. Against a widespread belief, Smith was no secularist but a fideist who took Bayle’s question seriously: why is man wicked and unhappy? The private ethics of prudence, justice, benevolence and the public ethics of liberty, justice, and equality were modest proposals for coping with the problem of social evil, of a “practical” kind, the only one available after Smith’s refutation of natural theology, his last word on the causes for evil. (shrink)

Retributivists are often thought to give 'deontological' theories of punishment, arguing that we should punish not for the beneficial consequences of doing so such as deterrence or incapacitation, but purely because justice demands it. Kant is often regarded as the paradigmatic retributivist. In some passages Kant does appear to give a deontological theory of punishment. For example, Kant insists that on an island where all the people were to leave the next day, forever dissolving and dispersing the community, the (...) class='Hi'>last murderer in jail would have to have his execution carried out before the diaspora--justice demands it. In other passages, however, Kant defends punishment by appealing to its beneficial consequences. For example, after supposing that one man on a life raft pushes the other off to save his own life, Kant says that the former man should not be legally punished "because that punishment would have to be death, and it would be an absurd law that threatened death to one who refuses to die voluntarily in a dangerous situation." In this passage Kant's reasoning is that state laws, by threatening us with sanctions, are intended to prevent us from violating rights--the point of these laws is to deter. A law that imposes a punishment that could not deter is an absurd law. I argue that while Kant rejects consequentialism in thinking about moral actions, he distinguishes law and morality, and in the sphere of law, an action we take is to be justified by appealing to the good it yields. The point of legal punishment is to deter violations of rights and protect us from a state of nature in which no one's freedom is assured. Kant's theory of legal (as opposed to moral) punishment is not deontological. Nevertheless we can characterize his consequentialist theory of legal punishment as retributive in some sense. The paper then considers how the passages about punishment in which Kant invokes consequentialist thinking can be reconciled with other passages where he insists on punishment regardless of the consequences. (shrink)

Before, during, and after the global financial crisis of 2008, executive pay practices were widely debated and criticized. Economists, philosophers, as well as the man on the street all seem to have strong feelings towards how much, in what ways, and on what grounds executives are paid. This thesis asks whether it is possible to morally justify current executive pay practices and, if so, on what grounds they are justified. It questions those who find no quarrel with pay practices due (...) to their minimally moralized view of the market and – perhaps more importantly – it asks for a sophisticated critique from those who criticize current pay practices. The discussion on just pay is clearly one of distributive justice. One reason for why some people consider CEO pay practices to be (fairly) unproblematic while others find them objectionable stems from the availability of different understandings of, and principles for, just pay. We tend to associate justice in pay with such things as proper incentivization, being the outcome of a fair procedure, being deserved on the basis of effort or contribution, and/or satisfying the ideal of equality. Parts of this thesis are devoted to these different understandings and what they entail for the moral justification of CEO pay. Another reason for the conflicting views on CEO pay stems from how issues of justice go beyond the confines of economics and applied ethics, extending all the way into the domain of political philosophy. Parts of this thesis explore this connection, in particular how the concept of economic desert relates to the broader concept of moral desert. Lastly, I discuss the criticism that the superrich (including executives) are being paid too much and are in possession of too much wealth. The issue at hand here is how to morally justify the interventions that seem suitable to rectify the situation. (shrink)