Recently, due to the rapid progress of computer technology, researchers develop an effective computer program to enhance the achievement of the student in learning process, which is Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS). Science is important because it influences most aspects of everyday life, including food, energy, medicine, leisure activities and more. So learning science subject at school is very useful, but the students face some problem in learning it. So we designed an ITS system to help them understand this subject (...) easily and smoothly by analyzing it and explaining it in a systematic way. In this paper, we describe the design of an Intelligent Tutoring System for teaching science for grade seven to help students know the 7 characteristics for living things smoothly. The system provides all topics of living things and generates some questions for each topic and the students should answer these questions correctly to move to the next level. In the result of an evaluation of the ITS, students like the system and they said that it is very useful for them and for their studies. (shrink)

Professor Garver’s “Living Well and Living Together” sheds light on one of the more confusing sections in Aristotle’s Politics, namely the discussion of the best way of life for individuals and city in Politics VII.1-3. At a distance, the conclusion of Aristotle’s remarks seem relatively clear: He endorses the claim that the most choice-worthy life and happiness of a city and an individual are the same. Further, the implications of such a claim for Aristotle’s political philosophy (...) also seem clear: Aristotle’s view of an “internally active” city amounts to a thorough critique of expansionist imperialism. But how these two surface level views—the best way of life for a city and the critique of imperialism—fit together is less than perspicuous. Garver’s paper goes after this text through the lens of two problems. First, Aristotle apparently argues from the nature of the best way of life or happiness for an individual to the best way of life for a city. But as Aristotle himself points out in his critique of the Republic, such an argument seems in danger of falling into a fallacy of composition. In response to such a perceived fallacy, Garver argues that Aristotle incorporates into his argument a third thing—what is the best life for a citizen or what Garver calls “common life” (p. 5, 6, of Garver’s text)—which mediates between the best life for a separate individual and for the city. As Garver puts it at one point “the best life for the citizen will be our means for discovering those [other] two” (p. 5, Garver’s text). The second problem which Garver raises concerns Aristotle’s apparent inference from energeiai to dunameis. Aristotle’s argument in Politics VII.1-3 begins from the claim that a city and individual have the same kind of happiness—namely, a sort of energeia—and extends to a claim about the structure which serves as the basis of that activity. The problem, according to Garver, is that “the virtues of the state cannot be energeiai of that part of its soul, because states don’t have souls” (p. 6, Garver’s text). The comparison between city and individual works—if it does work—only if “the psychological aspects of the virtue central to the Ethics become politically irrelevant” (p. 7, Garver’s text). Thus, Garver suggests that Aristotle’s comparison of city and individual comes at a cost, viz. that “Aristotle can talk about states being virtuous and happy only because of this psychological superficiality” (p. 9, Garver’s text). (shrink)

Pets are truly great companions. Some individuals feel that owning a pet can help them prepare for a growing family by giving them a taste of what it would be like to have children. This study also looks into the psychological well-being and life experiences of LGBT fur parents. Employing the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, the findings of this study were: (1) With the presence of fur babies, participants had the ease to overcome stressful events, especially the ones that affect (...) their mental health. With these, they have the desire to take care of their fur babies under all circumstances because they see their fur babies as family members. Fur babies are excellent sources of motivation, confidence, and happiness for fur parents. They are treated as family members because they contribute to the mental and emotional aspects of fur parents. Moreover, the majority of respondents valued their pets far more than their actual family members, however, some didn't spend as much time with their relatives and friends. This study comes to the conclusion that a stronger bond with one's dog was also linked to higher anxiety about being unloved and rejected by family members and people surrounding us, which was linked to a heavier impact on one's psychological well-being. In reality, fur parents, especially LGBT parents, offer their fur babies a lot of love and attention compared to other things. (shrink)

Recently, due to the rapid progress of computer technology, researchers develop an effective computer program to enhance the achievement of the student in learning process, which is Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS). Science is important because it influences most aspects of everyday life, including food, energy, medicine, leisure activities and more. So learning science subject at school is very useful, but the students face some problem in learning it. So we designed an ITS system to help them understand this subject (...) easily and smoothly by analyzing it and explaining it in a systematic way. In this paper, we describe the design of an Intelligent Tutoring System for teaching science for 7th grade to help students know the 7 characteristics for living things smoothly. The system provides all topics of living things and generates some questions for each topic and the students should answer these questions correctly to move to the next level. An evaluation was done for checking the students and teachers satisfaction of the ITS. The results of the evaluation showed that the students and teachers liked the system and they said that the system is very useful for them and for their studies. (shrink)

According to the orthodox view, the goodness of a life depends exclusively on the things that actually happened within it, such as its pleasures and pains, the satisfaction of its subject’s preferences, or the presence of various objective goods and bads. In this paper, I argue that the goodness of a life also depends on what could have happened, but didn’t. I then propose that this view helps us resolve ethical puzzles concerning the standards for a (...) class='Hi'>life worth living for animals and the significance of a life’s shape. (shrink)

Many of the leading accounts of what makes a life meaningful are goal-based theories, according to which it is the pursuit of some specific goal (such as love for things that are worthy of love) that gives meaning to our lives. In this chapter I consider how these goal-based theories of meaning in life interact with the two main theories of the nature of time that have been defended in the recent metaphysics literature, namely, The Dynamic Theory (...) of Time and The Static Theory of Time. I argue that The Dynamic Theory fits well with goal-based theories of meaning in life, but The Static Theory does not. Then I close with some thoughts about what a Static Theorist should make of this conclusion. (shrink)

Abstract Taking the Big Bang as the singular source of universal evolution, gives potent contemporary metaphors for understanding spirituality, life, and death. We can discover the nature of the Universe as we observe that its evolution is radically indeterminate, but manifests tendencies toward connectivity that manifest in self-organizing wholes. Like a traditional deity, the singularity that existed in the moment before the Big Bang is eternal and timeless. Everything that exists or comes into being, no matter how creative, is (...) a manifestation of that first moment of creation. That the first moment of creation is always happening; it’s happening right now. We (and every other thing) are products of that original creation and our own creativity is an expression of its creativity. This should comfort us, for it implies that when we lose our personal creativity at the end of our physical lives, we are likely to experience rejoining the original creative force of the Big Bang, just as religious faithful often expect death to reunite them with their creator God. (shrink)

Many commentators have analyzed the Papal Encyclical on the care of the environment entitled “Laudato Si’” from various angles but relatively few have written on the philosophical presuppositions that inform the overall stance of the encyclical. It is becoming increasingly evident that, to appreciate the full impact of this work, we need to uncover its ontological and epistemological commitments. This paper makes a contribution in this neglected area by focusing on the nature of life. Two main points are explored: (...) the way all lifeforms depend on other lifeforms, implying that the biosphere often functions like one single unit of life, and the issue of the intrinsic value of each living thing. By situating the encyclical’s arguments within the history of ideas on the nature of life, the environment, and ecology, this research helps to better appreciate the originality of this document. (shrink)

This dissertation is based on four backgrounds: (1) the diversity of definitions of philosophy, (2) statements by several thingkers about the death/ending of philosophy, (3) the existence of Hassan Hanafi's writings about the definition, life and death of philosophy, and (4) the limitations of specific studies on philosophy according to Hanafi. On that basis, this dissertation examines philosophy according to Hanafi, by revealing and reviewing his definition of philosophy and his views on when philosophy lives and when philosophy dies. (...) In general, this is metaphilosophical study of Hanafi's philosophy by disclosuring it descriptively and analytically on the one side, and by reviewing it falsificatively, interpretatively and axiologically on the other side. This metaphilosophical study of Hanafi philosophy found several things. First, Hanafi's definition of philosophy is still diverse and needs to be reanalyzed, so it cannot overcome the problem of the diversity of definitions of philosophy. Second, Hanafi's statement about those who kill philosophy and turn on it is inconsistent and falsifiable. Third, philosophy can still live in conditions that are considered to kill it. Fourth, although it has several weaknesses, Hanafi's philosophy is useful in particular for Muslims and researchers about Islam, Arab nations and researchers about Arab, and societies that face internal and external traditions; and also worthwhile in general for philosophy and practitioners of philosophy. Fifth, Hanafi's philosophy can overcome the problem of ongoing discourse about the death/ending of philosophy, because his philosophy can actually bring philosophy to life. (shrink)

What is so striking about Breaking Bad is how centrally impairment and disability feature in the lives of the characters of this series. It is unusual for a television series to cast characters with visible or invisible impairments. On the rare occasions that television shows do have characters with impairments, these characters serve no purpose other than to contribute to their ‘Otherness.’ Breaking Bad not only centralizes impairment, but impairment drives and sustains the story lines. I use three interrelated themes (...) from Disability Scholarship to analyze Breaking Bad. The first theme, Bodily Control, is that good bodies are controlled bodies and that uncontrolled, messy bodies are frightening, bad bodies. Indeed, the messiness of impairment and disability is so bad, that impaired and disabled individuals are excluded or shut out or excluded from many areas of public life. The second theme, Normalcy, is that the effect of hiding away impairment, of attempting to conceal disability, is that society becomes defined by, and structured around, the concept of normalcy. Normalcy, being normal, attaining and maintaining normalcy, is the preoccupation of most in society. To fail to be normal, or to fall from what is considered to be normal, is a source of tremendous anxiety for most people. These two themes, Bodily Control and Normalcy are conceptually connected: impairment, disease and dying are so feared because they are socially invisible and, therefore unknown and unknowable. They are the undiscussable taboos. The third theme, Bodily Realism, is that having a realistic view of the body, which would at minimum require accepting the fact that human bodies are fragile things, prone to disease and accident and are ultimately destined to die, makes one more at ease in the world, and able to live better lives and live as a better person. Indeed, so the argument goes, our lives would be richer, more rewarding—emotionally and morally—if we cared less about normalcy because of a dread of abnormalcy, but instead learned to accept if not positively value the physical variability of human existence. (shrink)

The Intelligible Living Thing, posited as the model of our visible and tangible universe in Plato’s Timaeus, is often taken for a richly structured whole, which is not a simple sum of its four major parts. This assumption seems unwarranted – most specifically, the dialogue contains no hint at any complex intelligible blue print of the world as a teleologically arranged whole, whose goodness is irreducible to the well-being and individual perfection of its parts. To construe the rich structure (...) of the world is necessary insofar as the Demiurge creates material likenesses of the austere immaterial species. While the life forms included in our universe conform to their intelligible paradigms, this is not, strictly speaking, true about the considerations guiding the Demiurgic activity which gives rise to the universe itself, whose goodness is also to be measured by comparing it to the disordered pre-cosmic matter. The paper discusses several implications of this austere interpretation of the model and its role in creation. It suggests that the Forms that compose the model should be understood as abstract particulars rather than universals, and critically discusses the relation of Timaeus’ account to the so-called Principle of Plenitude. (shrink)

Lilly was one of the greatest scientists and pioneers on the limits of human possibility but after his death a collective amnesia has descended and he is now almost forgotten. His Wiki is good but inevitably incomplete so here are a few missing details and viewpoints. Lilly was a generation (or more) ahead of his time. He is almost single-handedly responsible for the great interest in dolphins (which led to the Marine Mammal Protection Act in the USA and helped to (...) found the animal rights movement). In 1958 he noted that the brains of elephants and cetaceans were larger than ours, that we should not abuse them and that it was one our most important projects to communicate with them. He invented sensory isolation tanks (at NIMH in 1954) and used them extensively with and without powerful psychoactive drugs at a time when it was thought that either the brain would shut down or one would go insane if external stimuli were eliminated. He created methods for implanting electrodes in mammal brains and was planning to do it to himself. He was one of the first to make serious use of computers in bioscience research and created the hardware and software to make the first attempts to communicate with dolphins. He self experimented with dangerous physiological investigations in high altitude medicine for the military during WW2, took LSD with dolphins and movie stars, submitted himself to the rigors of various forms of yoga and of Arica training, and taught classes at Esalen. He was a computer pioneer who forsaw the rapid advances in A.I. and it's inevitable clash with humans. He was the first one to investigate the bizarre psychedelic ketamine (" vitamin K "), and his results (published in the two last chapters of his book `The Scientist`) are still the best data on the dose/effect relation of any psychedelic on one person. It cured his lifelong daily migraine headaches (see http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/UFOs/Gorightly.htm). And all this happened before most of us were born! He had courage, honesty and integrity that is rare anywhere and almost nonexistent in science. His goal was to find the ultimate truth about everything and he went about as far as anyone ever has. He had little patience with the stupid and hypocritical games one has to play to fit into monkey society. Of course the reaction of the establishment was predictable. He left the NIMH and was never given any government or academic support for the last 35 years of his life. His paper and comments at a conference on sensory deprivation were removed from the published version. He was not invited to government sponsored symposia on dolphins (he had refused to help develop them as weapons), though he clearly knew more about them than anyone in the world. He liked to live and work on the edge and few could keep up with him, as his books make clear. If you have read some of his other books it will be much easier going. He was a pioneer in consciousness research and pushed the boundaries of our understanding of who we are and what we might become. Among other things he catalogs the various states reached by drugs, meditation, and isolation, tries to determine their significance, and suggests how to use them. I very briefly review and comment on his life and work. -/- Those interested in all my writings in their most recent versions may download from this site my e-book ‘Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization Michael Starks (2016)- Articles and Reviews 2006-2016’ by Michael Starks First Ed. 662p (2016). -/- All of my papers and books have now been published in revised versions both in ebooks and in printed books. -/- Talking Monkeys: Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071HVC7YP. -/- The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle--Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071P1RP1B. -/- Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st century: Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0711R5LGX -/- . (shrink)

This essay considers three case studies of Aristotle’s use of matter, drawn from three different scientific contexts: menstrual fluid as the matter of animal generation in the Generation of Animals, the living body as matter of an organism in Aristotle’s On the Soul (De Anima), and the matter of elemental transformation in Generation and Corruption. I argue that Aristotle conceives of matter differently in these treatises (1) because of the different sorts of changes under consideration, and (2) because sometimes (...) he is considering the matter for one specific change, and sometimes the matter for all of a thing’s natural changes. My account allows me to explain some of the strange features that Aristotle ascribes to the matter for elemental transformation in Generation and Corruption II. These features were interpreted by later commentators as general features of all matter. I argue that they are a result of the specific way that Aristotle thinks about the transmutation of the elements. (shrink)

Trust is a topic of longstanding philosophical interest. It is indispensable to every kind of coordinated human activity, from sport to scientific research. Even more, trust is necessary for the successful dissemination of knowledge, and by extension, for nearly any form of practical deliberation and planning. Without trust, we could achieve few of our goals and would know very little. Despite trust’s fundamental importance in human life, there is substantial philosophical disagreement about what trust is, and further, how trusting (...) is normatively constrained and best theorized about in relation to other things we value. This entry is divided into three sections, which explore key (and sometimes interconnected) ethical and epistemological themes in the philosophy of trust: (1) The Nature of Trust; (2) The Normativity of Trust, and (3) The Value of Trust. (shrink)

There is no large number of very small bads that is worse than a small number of very large bads – or so, some maintain, it seems plausible to say. In this article, I criticize and reject two recently proposed vindications of the above intuition put forth by Dale Dorsey and Alex Voorhoeve. Dorsey advocates for a threshold marked by the interference with a person's global life projects: any bad that interferes with the satisfaction of a life project (...) is worse than any number of bads that don't interfere with such a life project. Such thresholds, I argue, are broadly implausible. Voorhoeve gives a contractualist account for the irrelevance of minor bads. His account, I argue, does not, among other things, provide the right kind of reason in defence of the above intuition. (shrink)

In pornography, standard modelling contracts often require a performer to surrender rights over their public image and sexual media in perpetuity and across mediums. Under these contracts, performers are unable to determine who accesses, for what duration, and under what conditions, their sexual media. As a result, pornography has been described by some performers as a “life sentence” - a phrase which, if true, violates some strong intuitions we share about the importance of autonomy in sexual activity. Using the (...) framework of “affirmative consent,” I argue that these contracts violate performers' rights to sexual autonomy, and ought therefore to be considered objectionable. Overall, I argue that the legal regimes we create have a strong impact on people’s lives, and more important than legislating individual outcomes, the type of infrastructure we build around people’s decisions has the potential to radically empower - or disempower - those engaged in sex work. (shrink)

This article argues, contra-Derrida, that Foucault does not essentialize or precomprehend the meaning of life or bio- in his writings on biopolitics. Instead, Foucault problematizes life and provokes genealogical questions about the meaning of modernity more broadly. In The Order of Things, the 1974-75 lecture course at the Collège de France, and Herculine Barbin, the monster is an important figure of the uncertain shape of modernity and its entangled problems (life, sex, madness, criminality, etc). Engaging Foucault’s (...) monsters, I show that the problematization of life is far from a “desire for a threshold,” à la Derrida. It is a spur to interrogating and critiquing thresholds, a fraught question mark where we have “something to do.” As Foucault puts it in “The Lives of Infamous Men,” it an ambiguous frontier where beings lived and died and they appear to us “because of an encounter with power which, in striking down a life and turning it to ashes, makes it emerge, like a flash [...]. (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)

Delivery riders became frontline workers who assisted everyone in getting their daily supplies. They transported them to their destinations when the pandemic started, and everyone had to stay home to stop the COVID-19 virus from spreading. Thus, this study explores the experiences, challenges, and coping mechanisms of 15 Female Delivery Riders in Bulacan, Philippines. The study employed Heideggerian Phenomenology and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Further, the following themes arise: (1) The Realist, (2) The Accommodated, (3) The Vulnerable, and (4) The (...) Determined. These themes highlighted the experiences and challenges faced by the participants. Moreover, it is highly suggested that female employees should be given preferential assistance given their physical capabilities and role in the family. Thus, local government units should provide an alternative source of income that will allow them to have quality time with their family, especially their children. (shrink)

The Life Worth Living investigates the exclusion of and discrimination against disabled people across the history of Western moral philosophy. Building on decades of activism and scholarship, Reynolds shows how longstanding views of disability are misguided and unjust, and he lays out a vision for an anti-ableist moral future. The introduction and first chapter are available to download here. -/- Table of Contents: Introduction: The Ableist Conflation. Part I: Pain. 1. Theories of Pain. 2. A Phenomenology of Chronic (...) Pain. Part II: Disability. 3. Theories of Disability. 4. A Phenomenology of Multiple Sclerosis. Part III: Ability. 5. Theories of Ability. 6. A Phenomenology of Ability. Conclusion: An Anti-Ableist Future. (shrink)

When this article was first planned, writing was going to be exclusively about two things - the origin of life and human evolution. But it turned out to be out of the question for the author to restrict himself to these biological and anthropological topics. A proper understanding of them required answering questions like “What is the nature of the universe – the home of life – and how did it originate?”, “How can time travel be removed (...) from fantasy and science fiction, to be made scientific and practical?”, and “How can the proposed young age of genus Homo be made to actually be reasonable – when simply stating it would be solid ground for instant rejection and dismissal?” The result is that the article also talks about subjects like Artificial Intelligence, General Relativity, and cosmology. -/- From where did life originate? God? Evolution? Panspermia? If the tendency of humans and scientists to regard undiscovered science as pseudoscience can be overcome, Einstein gave another alternative to consider when he introduced General Relativity. Time isn’t linear – progressing in a straight line from past to present to future. That assumption ignores Relativity which states that space AND TIME are curved. Where did life and the genetic code come from? Can the answer build AI? -/- The first question can be answered by the section of this article titled SETI, Evolution, and Time which says life (possibly multicellular and intelligent) and the genetic code came from humans acquiring knowledge of these things over the centuries, then applying that knowledge – via terraforming, accumulation of raw materials like amino acids and nucleic acids, genetic engineering - to a time in the past when life didn’t exist. From that origin, life evolved through innumerable mutations and adaptations, with humans once again acquiring knowledge of it in cyclic (nonlinear) time. -/- The second question is answered by saying artificial intelligence (AI) as the product of life is only half of the equation. The other half refers to Relativity’s curved space-time and violation of the notion that time always travels from past to future. We have always lived in an artificially intelligent, non-probabilistic universe where everything in time and space is connected into one thing by quantum entanglement – making the brain and genes products of binary-digit activity or artificial intelligence (life is not merely dependent on biology’s “lock and key” mechanisms but also possesses AI). -/- The earliest documented representative of the genus Homo is Homo habilis, which evolved around 2.8 million years ago. Scientists used to believe there was a straight line from H. habilis to us, Homo sapiens. This article will use the “advanced” waves loved by Physics Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, view the history of science through the lens of Conic Sections applied to Relativity’s curved space-time, and incorporate the necessity of so-called imaginary time * – popularized by Prof. Stephen Hawking. While the evolutionary proposals are more in agreement with this early straight line than with modern theories, Albert Einstein’s General Relativity is used to transform the straight line into a curved line, ultimately concluding that Homo habilis (H. habilis) originated only (and unbelievably, as far as today’s science and technology is concerned) ~250,000 years ago. Other branches and dead ends of Homo – e.g. Neanderthals – are the result of mutations and adaptations, with the resultant modifications to anatomy and physiology. The surprisingly young age of H. habilis allows nearly 200,000 years for habilis, or one of its descendants, to reach Australia … if this country’s indigenous Aboriginal population did, as claimed, reach this “island continent” 60,000 years ago. -/- * The ultraviolet catastrophe, also called the Rayleigh–Jeans catastrophe, is a failure of classical physics to predict observed phenomena: it can be shown that a blackbody - a hypothetical perfect absorber and radiator of energy - would release an infinite amount of energy, contradicting the principles of conservation of energy and indicating that a new model for the behaviour of blackbodies was needed. At the start of the 20th century, physicist Max Planck derived the correct solution by making some strange (for the time) assumptions. In particular, Planck assumed that electromagnetic radiation can only be emitted or absorbed in discrete packets, called quanta. Albert Einstein postulated that Planck's quanta were real physical particles (what we now call photons), not just a mathematical fiction. From there, Einstein developed his explanation of the photoelectric effect (when quanta or photons of light shine on certain metals, electrons are released and can form an electric current). So it appears entirely possible that another supposed mathematical trickery (imaginary time and the y-axis of Wick rotation) will find practical application in the future. -/- The article includes mathematical references to cosmology (spoiler alert – you’ll read about things like Vector-Tensor-Scalar Geometry, topology, the “eternal present”, Einstein’s Unified Field, the inverse-square law, and there being no Big Bang and no multiverse - but there will also be no equations). -/- The other subheadings in this essay are – -/- NONLINEAR TIME AND ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING (about a 2009 electrical engineering experiment at America’s Yale University, and cosmic wormholes) -/- BITS AND TOPOLOGY (base-2 maths aka Binary digiTS, Mobius strips, and figure-8 Klein bottles) -/- WICK ROTATION, CAUSALITY, AND UNITING TIME (do past, present and future co-exist in an “eternal present”?) -/- DIGITAL BRAIN, DIGITAL UNIVERSE (if the brain and the universe are ultimately composed of binary digits, we'll someday be able to do the same things with the brain and universe that we now do with computers) -/- PROPOSAL: HUMAN AND ANIMAL INSTINCTS ARE THE RESULT OF THE UNIVERSE BEING UNIFIED BY BINARY DIGITS (AND TOPOLOGY) (If everything in the universe is ultimately composed of electronic BITS, then the universe must possess Artificial Intelligence - some prefer the term Cosmic Consciousness) -/- INFORMATION THEORY CONQUERS A RED GIANT (preserving Earth by keeping the Sun near today’s level of activity forever). 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Intellectual history still quite commonly distinguishes between the episode we know as the Scientific Revolution, and its successor era, the Enlightenment, in terms of the calculatory and quantifying zeal of the former—the age of mechanics—and the rather scientifically lackadaisical mood of the latter, more concerned with freedom, public space and aesthetics. It is possible to challenge this distinction in a variety of ways, but the approach I examine here, in which the focus on an emerging scientific field or cluster of (...) disciplines—the ‘life sciences’, particularly natural history, medicine, and physiology —is, not Romantically anti-scientific, but resolutely anti-mathematical. Diderot bluntly states, in his Thoughts on the interpretation of nature, that “We are on the verge of a great revolution in the sciences. Given the taste people seem to have for morals, belles-lettres, the history of nature and experimental physics, I dare say that before a hundred years, there will not be more than three great geometricians remaining in Europe. The science will stop short where the Bernoullis, the Eulers, the Maupertuis, the Clairauts, the Fontaines and the D’Alemberts will have left it.... We will not go beyond.” Similarly, Buffon in the first discourse of his Histoire naturelle speaks of the “over-reliance on mathematical sciences,” given that mathematical truths are merely “definitional” and “demonstrative,” and thereby “abstract, intellectual and arbitrary.” Earlier in the Thoughts, Diderot judges “the thing of the mathematician” to have “as little existence in nature as that of the gambler.” Significantly, this attitude—taken by great scientists who also translated Newton or wrote careful papers on probability theory, as well as by others such as Mandeville—participates in the effort to conceptualize what we might call a new ontology for the emerging life sciences, very different from both the ‘iatromechanism’ and the ‘animism’ of earlier generations, which either failed to account for specifically living, goal-directed features of organisms, or accounted for them in supernaturalistic terms by appealing to an ‘anima’ as explanatory principle. Anti-mathematicism here is then a key component of a naturalistic, open-ended project to give a successful reductionist model of explanation in ‘natural history’, a model which is no more vitalist than it is materialist—but which is fairly far removed from early modern mechanism. (shrink)

Aim: This paper assessed the relationship of the university teachers’ work-life balance with their work commitment in Jimei University Chengyi College in creating dynamics on managing competing demands aligned with personal and professional satisfaction. -/- Methodology: A descriptive research design was used in this study. The research locale is at Jimei University Chengyi College. The purposive sampling technique was used. This study used statistical treatment wherein responses were summarized, classified, and tabulated using statistical treatment such as frequency, percentage, weighted (...) mean, standard deviation and Likert scale. -/- Results: The overall mean of 3.52 shows that the teachers strongly agree that the work-life-school balance is very highly manifested in their lives and that they are able to juggle the different responsibilities in both their personal and professional lives. Teacher’s commitment is shown to a very great extent and is indicative of their commitment being very highly manifested which shows that the teachers are very committed to their task as a teacher. Comparing the assessment of the teacher respondents on their relationship between level of work-life-school balance and work commitment, the R-value indicates a weak positive correlation between the teacher’s level of work-life-school balance and work commitment. -/- Conclusion: Teachers experience feelings of anxiety or depression if the balance between the three aspects of their lives, their work, the school, and their personal lives, is disrupted. They constantly think about many other things about their work and their personal life that ‘easily’ relaxing might not be the easiest thing to do. Teachers strongly agree that the work-life-school balance is very highly manifested in their lives and that they are able to juggle the different responsibilities in both their personal and professional lives. (shrink)

This paper is an exploration of how we do things with music—that is, the way that we use music as an esthetic technology to enact micro-practices of emotion regulation, communicative expression, identity construction, and interpersonal coordination that drive core aspects of our emotional and social existence. The main thesis is: from birth, music is directly perceived as an affordance-laden structure. Music, I argue, affords a sonic world, an exploratory space or nested acoustic environment that further affords possibilities for, among (...) other things, (1) emotion regulation and (2) social coordination. When we do things with music, we are engaged in the work of creating and cultivating the self, as well as creating and cultivating a shared world that we inhabit with others. I develop this thesis by first introducing the notion of a musical affordance . Next, I look at how emotional affordances in music are exploited to construct and regulate emotions. I summon empirical research on neonate music therapy to argue that this is something we emerge from the womb knowing how to do. I then look at social affordances in music, arguing that joint attention to social affordances in music alters how music is both perceived and appropriated by joint attenders within social listening contexts. In support, I describe the experience of listening to and engaging with music in a live concert setting. Thinking of music as an affordance-laden structure thus reaffirms the crucial role that music plays in constructing and regulating emotional and social experiences in everyday life. (shrink)

Synthetic biology is often seen as the engineering turn in biology. Philosophically speaking, entities created by synthetic biology, from synthetic cells to xenobots, challenge the ontological divide between the organic and inorganic, as well as between the natural and the artificial. Entities such as synthetic cells can be seen as hybrid or transitory objects, or neo–things. However, what has remained philosophically underexplored so far is the impact these hybrid neo–things will have on (our phenomenological experience of) the (...) class='Hi'>living world. By extrapolating from Walter Benjamin’s account of how technological reproducibility affects the aura of art, we embark upon an exploratory inquiry that seeks to fathom how the technological reproducibility of life itself may influence our experience and understanding of the living. We conclude that, much as technologies that enabled reproduction corroded the aura of original artworks (as Benjamin argued), so too will the aura of life be under siege in the era of synthetic lifeforms. This article zooms in on a specific case study, namely the research project Building a Synthetic Cell (BaSyC) and its mission to create a synthetic cell–like entity, as autonomous as possible, focusing on the properties that differentiate organic from synthetic cells. (shrink)

In everyday life, we constantly encounter and deal with useful things without pausing to inquire about the sources of their intelligibility. In Div. I of Being and Time, Heidegger undertakes just such an inquiry. According to a common reading of Heidegger's analysis, the intelligibility of our everyday encounters and dealings with useful things is ultimately constituted by practical self-understandings. In this paper, I argue that while such practical self-understandings may be sufficient to constitute the intelligibility of the (...) tools and equipment specific to many practices, these “tools of the trade” are only a small portion of the things we encounter, use, and deal with on a daily basis. Practical self-understandings cannot similarly account for the intelligibility of the more mundane things—like toothbrushes and sidewalks—used in everyday life. I consider whether an anonymous self-understanding as “one,” “anyone,” or “no one in particular” —das Man—might play this intelligibility-constituting role. In examining this possibility, another type of self-understanding comes to light: cultural identities. I show that the cultural identities into which we are “thrown,” rather than practical identities or das Man, constitute the intelligibility of the abundance of mundane things that fill our everyday lives. Finally, I spell out how this finding bears on our understanding of Heidegger's notion of authenticity. (shrink)

This dissertation addresses the ontological significance of poetry in the thought of Martin Heidegger. It gives an account of both his earlier and later thinking. The central argument of the dissertation is that poetry, as conceptualised by Heidegger, is beneficial and necessary for the living of an authentic life. The poetry of T. S Eliot features as a sustaining voice throughout the dissertation to validate Heidegger's ideas and also to demonstrate some interesting similarities in their ideas. Chapter one (...) demonstrates how effectively certain concepts from Heidegger's 'Being and Time' can be applied in an analysis of T.S. Eliots celebrated poem 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. The reading involves concepts such as angst, authenticity, inauthenticity, the they and idle talk as they appear in 'Being and Time' and then relates these to aspects of T.S Eliot's poem. Chapter two is an exegesis of Heideggers essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art' in order to understand the meaning of poetry as he describes it. The essay centres on the interpretation of a painting by Vincent van Gogh, and what the experience of the painting reveals to someone authentically engaging with the artwork. Heidegger attempts to establish what the essence of a thing is (the artwork as thing), for the 'origin' of the artwork resides in its 'thingliness'. He creates an important distinction between equipment and the artwork, as well as earth and the world in order to justify the unique, originary position that the artwork occupies. This leads Heidegger to create a new understanding of poetry (which is expanded to encompass all art forms) and to emphasise the importance of the human agent in both the creation and preservation of the artwork. Chapter three is an exploration of language in both the Heidegger of 'Being and Time' and the later Heidegger's thought. The aim is to explore the ontological effect that Heidegger's conception of language has for our existence. He places language within a primordial role arguing that it is not us who speak language, but language that speaks us. This conception has important consequences for our relationship with Being, and the way in which we understand our existence. The final chapter unifies the various themes of the dissertation into a cohesive argument. The chapter begins with a discussion on the meaning of our existence following the later Heidegger. This is nothing less than the guardianship of Being which can only be understood in its relation to our dwelling within the fourfold. In conclusion it is through the measure of the language of poetry that we can realise the possibility of authentic dwelling. (shrink)

(Draft of Feb 2023, see upcoming issue for Chalmers' reply) In Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, David Chalmers argues, among other things, that: if we are living in a full-scale simulation, we would still enjoy broad swathes of knowledge about non-psychological entities, such as atoms and shrubs; and, our lives might still be deeply meaningful. Chalmers views these claims as at least weakly connected: The former claim helps forestall a concern that if objects in the (...) simulation are not genuine (and so not knowable), then life in the simulation is illusory and therefore, not as valuable as a non-simulated life. Taking up these questions, I argue that in general, the value of social knowledge for a meaningful life dramatically swamps the value of non-social knowledge for a meaningful life. Along the way, I propose a non-additive model of the meaningfulness of life, according to which the overall effect of some potential contributor of value to a life depends in part on what is already in a life. One upshot is that the vindication of non-social knowledge, absent a correlative vindication of social knowledge, contributes either not at all or scarcely at all to the claim that our lives in the simulation might be deeply meaningful. This is so even though the vindication of non-social knowledge does forestall the concern that in the simulation, our lives might be wholly meaningless. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die by Steven NadlerJohn GreySteven Nadler. Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. Pp. x + 234. Hardback, $39.95.Think Least of Death is not just an interpretation of Spinoza, but a defense of his philosophy. Nadler develops Spinoza's arguments in ways that are intended (...) both to reflect Spinoza's views and to persuade us that the views in question are true. He uses success language throughout to describe Spinoza's ideas ("What Spinoza discovered, and what he wants us to know, is that..." [11]) and arguments ("Spinoza... has demonstrated, rigorously and a priori, that..." [188]). Nadler is not just a Spinoza scholar here; he also thinks that Spinoza basically got it right. It would be a mistake, then, to evaluate Think Least of Death solely on its interpretive merits as a reading of Spinoza's Ethics. It is more fruitful to look at the places where Nadler not only describes, but apparently endorses, Spinoza's views.Following Nadler, I will focus here on the practical philosophy. Briefly put, Spinoza takes the right way of living to consist in adherence to the dictates of reason, which prescribe "that everyone love himself, seek his own advantage... and 'absolutely, that everyone should strive to preserve his own being as far as he can'" (191). These general principles issue in more specific directives based on facts about human nature. For instance, since the nature of the human mind is such that it always benefits from further understanding, reason directs us to strive for further understanding. To the extent that a human being lives in accordance with such dictates of reason, they will feel joyful, be free, and act virtuously. Conversely, when they are driven by their passions rather than reason, they will often feel sorrow, lack autonomy, and do things that are harmful to themselves and others. This is the source of whatever motivating power these directives have: necessarily, following them conduces to our self-interest.A crucial point for Nadler is that these facts about human nature are the same for each human being. This implies that "there is in fact an objective, non-arbitrary determination of what constitutes a more perfect or ideal human being" (28), the ideal that Spinoza variously refers to as the model of human nature or the free man. On Nadler's reading, Spinoza's notion of the free man (which he treats as equivalent to the model of human nature) is not "some creature of the imagination or reflection of personal taste" (29), but a representation of "the ideal state toward which every individual [human] naturally and necessarily... strives" (29). [End Page 708]A signal contribution of the book is to show that the free person's life is a realizable goal rather than an unattainable ideal. The free person is determined to act by reason alone, yes—but this is compatible with him or her also having passions, so long as those passions do not determine his or her behavior. A free person might feel fear at the prospect of death or suffering, but that fear will not determine what he or she does. Instead, the free person's actions will be determined by the guidance of reason and the positive affects (joy, love, self-esteem, and the like).Since the life of the free person is in principle attainable, Nadler proposes that we take the free person's life as a model for how we ourselves should live. For instance, when Spinoza writes that "a free man always acts honestly" (E 4P72), the implication is that we ourselves should always act honestly. Now, there is an apparent inconsistency in this position, nicely articulated by Don Garrett ("'A Free Man Always Acts Honestly, Not Deceptively': Freedom and the Good in Spinoza's Ethics," in Nature and Necessity in Spinoza's Philosophy [New York: Oxford University Press, 2018], 441–61). The free man—living entirely according to the guidance of reason—always acts honestly. Yet reason also guides us to seek our own advantage, and sometimes the... (shrink)

Two great problems of learning confront humanity: learning about the universe, and about ourselves and other living things as a part of the universe; and learning how to create a good, civilized, enlightened, wise world. We have solved the first great problem of learning – we did that when we created modern science and technology in the 17th century. But we have not yet solved the second one. That combination of solving the first problem, failing to solve the (...) second one, is very, very, dangerous. Almost all our current global problems have arisen as a result. Modern science and technology immensely increase our powers to act (for some of us), but not our power to act wisely. Modern science and technology lead to modern industry, modern agriculture, travel, medicine, hygiene and armaments, and these in turn lead to much that is of benefit, but also to all our current global problems: population growth, habitat destruction, loss of wild life, mass extinction of species, lethal modern war, the menace of nuclear weapons, pollution of earth, sea and air, antibiotic resistance, degradation of democracy facilitated by the internet and, most serious of all, the climate crisis. Now that we have modern science and technology, wisdom has become, not a private luxury, but a public necessity. But how is it to be achieved? Here is the solution. We can learn from the solution to the first great problem of learning how to solve the second one. That was the basic idea of the 18th century Enlightenment, but in implementing it, the philosophes of the Enlightenment blundered. They got the progress-achieving methods of science wrong; they failed to generalize them properly; and they applied them, not to social life but to creating social science. Their mistakes are still built into academia today. In order to learn how to create a civilized, enlightened world, the key thing we need to do is to cure academia of the structural blunders we have inherited from the Enlightenment. We need to bring about a revolution in science, and in academia more broadly so that the basic aim becomes wisdom, and not just knowledge – wisdom being the capacity, active endeavour and desire to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others, wisdom thus including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides. The outcome of the revolution we need would be universities radically transformed, so that they become rationally and actively devoted to helping people solve problems of living, including global problems, thus making progress to as good, civilized, enlightened a world as possible. (shrink)

As things currently stand, our deaths are unavoidable and our lifespans short. It might be thought that these qualities leave room for improvement. According to a prominent line of argument in philosophy, however, this thought is mistaken. Against the idea that a longer life would be better, it is claimed that negative psychological states, such as boredom, would be unavoidable if our lives were significantly longer. Against the idea that a deathless life would be better, it is (...) claimed that such a life would be lacking in important sources of value, because death is a precondition for many of our valuing attitudes. I argue that these problems are avoided by very long lives that incorporate fading memory, limited ignorance of future events, and temporal scarcity. I conclude that very long lives are, in principle, desirable, and that death does not play an essential role in our valuing attitudes. (shrink)

An updated version of this encyclopedia entry on the concept of what, if anything, makes life worthwhile.

Two great problems of learning confront humanity: learning about the nature of the universe and about ourselves and other living things as a part of the universe, and learning how to become civilized or enlightened. 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 one. 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, inherited from the past, that is still built into the institutional/intellectual structure of academic inquiry in the 21st century. 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. The outcome would be what we so urgently need: a kind of inquiry rationally designed and devoted to helping us make progress towards a genuinely civilized world. We would succeed in doing what the Enlightenment tried but failed to do: learn from scientific progress how to go about making social progress towards as good a world as possible. (shrink)

Consulting early and medieval Christian thinkers, I theologically analyze the question of how we are to construe and live well with the sociable robot under the ancient theological concept of “glory”—the manifestation of God’s nature and life outside of himself. First, the oft-noted Western wariness toward robots may in part be rooted in protecting a certain idea of the “person” as a relational subject capable of self-gift. Historically, this understanding of the person derived from Christian belief in God the (...) Trinity, an eternally relational and self-giving God who has created all other things. According to this trinitarian anthropology, the “glory” of God is the manifestation of his life outside of himself, especially in human relationships of self-possessed empathic self-giving. Second, the material world can be drawn into this glorification of God by the invention of technologies, including robots. For Christianity, the personal transcends the material, and matter cannot simply be recombined to make a person. Nonetheless, the material world is a lesser glory that echoes fragmentarily the primal self-gift by which God exists. Human persons can marshal these material powers to serve the personal by the invention of technology, which extends the possibilities of human self-giving and, therefore, of God’s “glory.” Third, this Christian account of creation and technology shapes medieval Christian writings on humanoid robots. These “automata” uniquely draw together nature’s deep powers, but they lack true personal interiority and so cannot give themselves. Instead, they are instruments by which humans’ own relational personhood can be developed or degraded. At best, a robotic image of personhood can serve as an “icon,” directing us back to the relationality by which humans echo God. At worst, robots serve as “idols” when they become substitutes for human companions, drawing their users into a utilitarian frame that excludes self-gift by simply mirroring back to the user his or her own aims. I illustrate these outcomes by two medieval legends. In one, robots function iconically as social facilitators; in the other, as ambiguous romantic partners. And fourth, looking to an actual renaissance-era “praying” robot, I will propose that the non-subjective robot might yet “glorify God” within the religious community by representing the prayers of particular humans—thus iconically standing for rather than idolatrously standing in for the relational subject. (shrink)

It is commonly held that nature is knowable in itself and that death has no explanatory priority in knowing nature. I reject both claims as they undermine an account of the unity of human life, failing, respectively, to thematize the limitations of finite understanding and to acknowledge what’s most certain about finite existence. I use Kant’s idea of the thing in itself and Heidegger’s idea of death to solve two structurally analogous antinomies these failures leave intact. I conclude that (...) to think these ideas is to represent the telos that unifies our living as, respectively, finite knowers and finite beings. (shrink)

Bad philosophy is responsible for the climate and nature crises, and other global problems too that threaten our future. That sounds mad, but it is true. A philosophy of science, or of theatre or life is a view about what are, or ought to be, the aims and methods of science, theatre or life. It is in this entirely legitimate sense of “philosophy” that bad philosophy is responsible for the crises we face. First, and in a blatantly obvious (...) way, those institutions, organizations, corporations, businesses, endeavours, and activities of humanity that cause the crises and global problems we face, do so because of the aims they pursue (profit perhaps, or power, or heat and light for homes), and the methods adopted in pursuit of those aims – the philosophy in other words, built into the institution, organization, business, human activities, or whatever it may be. It is the philosophy of these institutions, organizations and activities that we need to change to put a stop to, or at least lessen the severity of, the crises we face, the global problems that confront us, above all the climate and nature crises. One institution has an especially crucial role in this respect: our universities. They are dominated in a multitude of ways by a particularly disastrous philosophy, a philosophy of inquiry which may be called knowledge-inquiry. This holds that the basic aim of the university is to acquire and apply knowledge. First, knowledge is to be acquired; once acquired, it can be applied to help solve social problems. But this philosophy of knowledge-inquiry is an intellectual disaster. As a result, universities are, in devastating and almost entirely unrecognized ways, humanitarian disasters too. Judged from the standpoint of helping to promote human welfare, the university shaped by the philosophy of knowledge-inquiry violates THREE of the four most elementary rules of rational problem solving conceivable in a wholesale, structural fashion, and it is this gross, wholesale, structural irrationality of the university, unnoticed by all but a few scientists and scholars, that is in part responsible for the creation of our grave global problems, and our current incapacity to learn how to solve them. The pursuit of knowledge, conducted in universities, within the framework of knowledge-inquiry over the decades and centuries, has produced much of great benefit to humanity. It has made the modern world possible. It has led to modern power production, modern industry and armaments, modern agriculture, modern hygiene and medicine, modern travel and communications, and the internet. But these very successes have also created many of our most serious current global problems: the climate crisis; the destruction of natural habitats, the catastrophic loss of wild life, and impending mass extinction of species (the nature crisis); the lethal character of modern war; the impact on the natural world of the rapid growth of the human population; the menace posed by nuclear weapons; pollution of earth, sea and air; threats to democracy caused in part by the internet and social media. All these grave global problems have been made possible by modern science and technology, pursued largely in universities within the framework of knowledge-inquiry. Nevertheless, it is not science and technology as such that are the problem, but science pursued in a way that is dissociated from a more fundamental task of the university to help humanity resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways, so that progress may be made to a better world. Science and technology, pursued within the framework of knowledge-inquiry, create for some of us the power to act, but not the power to act wisely – not the power to learn how to resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways. For that, we need our institutions of learning, above all our universities, to take as their primary task to help humanity learn how to do it. In order to do that, the philosophy of inquiry put into practice by universities needs to be dramatically transformed. We urgently need to bring about a revolution in the overall aims and methods of academic inquiry – a revolution in the philosophy of the university, all around the world, wherever possible, so that the basic aim becomes to seek and promote wisdom, construed to be the capacity, active endeavour, and perhaps desire, to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others, wisdom in this sense including knowledge, understanding and technological know-how, but much else besides, methods being dramatically modified too so as to help achieve the new academic aim. The basic task of the university would be, not to solve problems of knowledge, but rather to help people in the social world beyond the university to resolve conflicts and problems of living so that what is of value in life may be realized by everyone, insofar as that is possible. The pursuit of knowledge would be vital, but not intellectually fundamental. The intellectual and institutional revolution we so urgently need in our universities would affect every discipline and aspect of the university; it would dramatically affect both research and education, and the whole way the university is related to the rest of the social world. The revolution, from knowledge-inquiry to wisdom-inquiry would dramatically enhance the intellectual integrity and rationality of natural science, social inquiry, the humanities and technology, the character of these disciplines and the relationships they have with one another. University education throughout the university would be dramatically improved. And academic inquiry as a whole would do what, on the whole, it fails to do at present: it would help humanity resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational and, as a result, increasingly successful ways, progress at last being made to a genuinely good, civilized world – a world in which there is peace, justice, liberal democracy, individual freedom, education, reasonable equality, sustainable prosperity and worthwhile opportunities in life, all of these for everyone, insofar as this is possible. Why, it may be asked, has academic philosophy not noticed that we urgently need to transform the current bad philosophy of inquiry of knowledge-inquiry into the far more intellectually rigorous and humanly valuable philosophy of wisdom-inquiry, so that we can begin to do what so far we have failed to do so lamentably: learn how to avoid impending disasters, and even make progress to a better world, something that seems at present almost unthinkable given the horrors of war, poverty, political enslavement of the 20th century, and the horrors of this century so far too? The answer is that academic philosophy is in a particularly pitiful state, as philosophers themselves, are just beginning to realize and lament. That is why academic philosophers are blind to the intellectual and humanitarian disaster of the bad philosophy that dominates universities today, and inconceivable to them to them that they might have, as a disciplinary task, to ensure academic inquiry implements a good philosophy of inquiry, and advocate and argue for change if it does not. Once upon a time, in Europe at least, philosophy was an intellectual power in the world. In the 17th century it created modern science which massively increased and improved our knowledge and understanding of the world, which in turn led to the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, and the modern world. Philosophy was once so intellectually powerful and influential that it changed the course of history. But philosophy also made in the past three disastrous intellectual blunders: the post-Cartesian blunder, the post-Newtonian blunder, and the Enlightenment blunder. Never acknowledged and corrected by subsequent philosophy right down to the present, these unrecognized intellectual blunders rendered academic philosophy the esoteric, pathetic, and powerless discipline it is today, so that throughout the last century and, so far, throughout this one, academic philosophy has remained blind to the intellectual disaster of knowledge-inquiry, and thus failed entirely to take up its proper disciplinary task of warning fellow academics of the structural irrationality of the philosophy that prevails in the university, and of proposing what steps need to be taken to put things right. Instead of performing such an urgently needed philosophical task, so-called analytic philosophy was reduced to analysing the meaning of words. Since then, there has been hardly any discernible improvement, even if analysis of concepts no longer dominates the scene. Bad academic philosophy is indeed responsible for intellectual and humanitarian failures of the university. What the three past intellectual blunders of philosophy are, why their persistence so dramatically reduces academic philosophy to a triviality, and why, furthermore, this results in the failure of scientists and scholars to see what is so blatantly bad about the philosophy prevailing in universities around the world – the failure to see what so urgently needs to be done to put right what has been wrong for so long: all this is made clear in this book. A new kind of philosophy emerges during the course of the argument, critical fundamentalism, which has as its task to keep alive imaginative and critical – that is rational – thinking about our fundamental problem: How can our human world, the world we experience and live in – the world of living things, people, consciousness, free will, meaning and value – how can all of this exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? That problem encompasses all others of life, science and thought. Critical fundamentalism tries to improve answers to aspects of this problem; but it also seeks to encourage everyone to think about the problem, from time to time, and think about how it interacts, in both directions, with more urgent particular and specialized problems of life and thought. Critical fundamentalism sets out to help improve bad philosophy wherever it is to be found: in social, political, commercial, legal, financial, and international life; and especially in academia, in institutions of learning, so that they become devoted to enhancing the capacity of people to learn how to achieve what is of genuine value in this brief life of a few decades if we are fortunate. Critical fundamentalism does everything it can to bring about the revolution in our universities we so urgently need. If taken up by mainstream philosophy, it might really have an impact, and begin to transform universities for the better, in both intellectual and humanitarian terms, and thus, enable humanity to learn how, after the grim failures and horrors of the last century and this one, to make progress to a better world. -/- . (shrink)

There are about 100 different contradictory definitions of life. The definition of life based on symbiosis that is presented here differs fundamentally from them; it gives life a value. So this definition offers a basis for ethical and legal action e.g. in organ transplants. It is based on principles and is not an ad hoc model: Significant processes for life are basis for a theoretical concept. Quality criteria for definitions are employed to control the concept. There (...) is a graduation, not a clear division, between inanimate and animate. The graduation is based on the amount of symbiosis to be found. Life is based on symbiosis. The ideas of “ethics” and “reality” are considered in the context of this definition. (shrink)

Children are routinely treated paternalistically. There are good reasons for this. Children are quite vulnerable. They are ill-equipped to meet their most basic needs, due, in part, to deficiencies in practical and theoretical reasoning and in executing their wishes. Children’s motivations and perceptions are often not congruent with their best interests. Consequently, raising children involves facilitating their best interests synchronically and diachronically. In practice, this requires caregivers to (in some sense) manage a child’s daily life. If apposite, this management (...) will focus partly on a child’s well-being. To be ably executed, an account of children’s well-being will need to be articulated. This chapter focuses on the nature of children’s well-being. It has five sections. The first section clarifies the focus. The second section examines some hurdles to articulating a view of children’s well-being. The third section evaluates some accounts of children’s well-being. The fourth section addresses the view that children possess features essential to them that make their lives on balance prudentially bad for them. The fifth section sums things up. (shrink)

Most properties have comparatives, which are relations. For instance, the property of width has the comparative relation denoted by `_ is wider than _'. Let us say a property is reducible to its comparative if any statement that refers to the property has the same meaning as another statement that refers to the comparative instead. Width is not reducible to its comparative. To be sure, many statements that refer to width are reducible: for instance, `The Mississippi is wide' means the (...) same as `The Mississippi is wider than most rivers'. But some statements that refer to width are not reducible: for instance, `Electrons have zero width' is not. A property is not reducible to its comparative if it has absolute degrees, and specifically an absolute zero. A property's comparative relation places things in an order from those that have the property least to those that have it most. If there is an absolute zero point somewhere in this ordering, the property is not reducible to its comparative. For width, there is an absolute zero at one end of the ordering, so width is not reducible. The property of goodness is reducible to its comparative, betterness. In particular, there is no absolute zero of goodness. Things are ordered by betterness – some things are better than others – but nothing is absolutely good or absolutely bad. This is an exaggeration. In certain applications, goodness does have absolute degrees of a sort, and an absolute zero. For instance, it makes sense to say an event is good, and another event bad. These are absolute degrees of a sort, but they are themselves reducible to betterness. To say an event is good simply means the event is better than what would otherwise have happened. The goodness of lives has a different sort of absolute zero. Lives are ordered by betterness; some lives are better than others. We can make sense of the question `Where in this ordering is the division between lives that are good and those that are bad?' The division between good and bad lives is again reducible to betterness. To say a person's life is good means it is better that the person should continue living, rather than that she should die. Or it may mean it is better that her life should be lived rather than that it should never have been lived at all. As it is often put: a good life is a life worth living. Derek Parfit appears to attach a different sense to the idea of a good life. He appears to mean a life that contains a preponderance of good things (such as pleasure) over bad things (such as pain). If a life contains no good things and no bad things, it has zero goodness in this sense. In this sense, absolute goodness and the absolute zero of goodness are not reducible to betterness. However, this is a naturalistic sense of goodness, and it is subject to the open-question objection. If a life contains no good things and no bad things, it is an open question whether it has zero goodness. It might, for instance, be a bad thing that this life should be lived. In discussing the evil of death, some philosophers seem to have been searching for an absolute goodness that is not reducible to betterness. Thomas Nagel speaks of an asymmetry between what is good about life and what is bad about death. But if a person's life is good, that only means it would be better that she should continue living than that she should die. And if a person's death would be bad, that only means it would be worse that she should die than that she should continue living. So there can be no asymmetry. (shrink)

On the one hand, Hume accepts the view -- which he attributes primarily to Stoicism -- that there exists a determinate best and happiest life for human beings, a way of life led by a figure whom Hume calls "the true philosopher." On the other hand, Hume accepts that view -- which he attributes to Scepticism -- that there exists a vast plurality of good and happy lives, each potentially equally choiceworthy. In this paper, I reconcile Hume's apparently (...) conflicting commitments: I argue that Hume's "Sceptical" pluralism about the character of the happiest life need not conflict with his "Stoic" advocacy of the supreme happiness of the true philosopher, given Hume's flexible understanding of how one might live as a true philosopher. (shrink)

Aristotle is the first philosopher on record to subject the meaning of life to systematic philosophical examination: he approaches the issue from logical, psychological, biological, and anthropological perspectives in some of the central passages in the Corpus Aristotelicum and, it turns out, in some fragments from his (lost) early popular work the Protrepticus (Exhortation to Philosophy). From an Aristotelian perspective, in asking about life’s “meaning”, we may be asking either a theoretical question about the definition of the term (...) life (and this either generically or with specific reference to human life), or a practical question about the final end or purpose of life (or human life). Aristotle carefully considered both questions, and in his view answering the theoretical question is the key to answering the practical question. In brief, his theoretical view is that humans are distinguished from all other living things, and thus defined by their ability to use reason; thus his practical view is that the end or purpose of human existence is intellectual activity, especially doing philosophy. (shrink)

Tourism is one of the socio-economic trends that significantly contributes to the shift of the planetary system into the Anthropocene regime. At the same time, it is also a socio-cultural practice characteristic of the imperial mode of living, or consumerism. Thus, it is a form of commodification of nature, also a way of deepening social inequalities between a privileged minority of the global population and an exploited majority providing services to those whose socio-economic status allows them to travel for (...) fun and commoditised “experience”. This is not an inevitable activity, an activity in which environmental costs (carbon footprint, water footprint, energy consumption, and waste production) are necessary to ensure the basic resources of life. Tourism is therefore a form of luxury consumption. For any tourism model to be, not only, environmentally sustainable but also socially just, or at least acceptable, it would have to be accessible to all people. Ecotourism should also have to meet the criterion of a solidarity mode of living referred to as sufficiency. This is hardly conceivable in the climatic, demographic, and political regime of the Anthropocene. The latter is likely to be characterized by, among other things, mass migration of climate or environmental refugees on the one hand and climate apartheid of the states of the global North on the other. Ecotourism, accessible to an even smaller proportion of the world`s population than the current mass tourism, will thus be more likely to accentuate the social and environmental inequalities of which it is already a significant manifestation. Therefore, the question is whether the concept of ecotourism is not just another manifestation of greenwashing, i.e. an attempt to legitimize economic, social, and cultural activities that devastate the social and environmental environment. (shrink)

For years, philosophers have thought about what makes a life worth living. Recent research in psychology has put new light on that. This paper places itself in-between philosophy and psychology, and the thoughts about well-being. The title of this paper raises one question: Who lives a life worth living? Based on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and subsidiary, recent studies in ‘positive psychology’, this work shows that the prerequisite for a life worth living is (...) freedom; that is being free to enhance one’s capabilities. This form of freedom manifests itself as being strongly related to the logic of sense that is related to capacity. This relationship illustrate that a life can only be evaluated from its immanent mode of existence, and not by some transcendent ideas. Finally, this study discusses some of the differences between a philosophical approach and approaches like positive psychology. In conclusion, it is suggested that future debate about well-being should be less normative. (shrink)

One’s life can be meaningful, but not worth living, or worth living, but not meaningful, which demonstrates that an evaluation of whether life is worth living differs from an evaluation of whether one’s life is meaningful. But how do these evaluations differ? As I will argue, an evaluation of whether life is worth living is a more comprehensive evaluation than the evaluation of whether one’s individual life is meaningful. In judging whether (...) one finds life worth living, one takes into account, not only whether one’s life is meaningful, but undesirable aspects of life such as chronic pain and suffering. For example, a person who is suffering greatly, but who has lived a meaningful life, might still conclude that his or her life is not worth living. Although the famed question about the meaning of life has received most of the attention, I argue that the better and more fruitful question is “Is life worth living?” One should want, not just for one’s life to be meaningful, but for it to be worth living. (shrink)

By exercising their (imperfect) capacity to discriminate, people try to recognize and to understand some important differences between things that make them prefer some things to other. In this article I will use my ability to discriminate between people and societies according to a principle which plays the role of attractor, both at individual and societal levels, namely the principle of peaceable conduct. This principle allows us to discriminate at the civic level between the people who have a (...) civilized conduct and those who manifest an aggressive conduct. The category of civilized people includes individuals who (a) respect the life and bodily integrity of their fellows, (b) practice self-control, not control over others and (c) do not claim, through coercive means, the goods that their fellows have obtained by making free and peaceful use of their own faculties and capabilities. The category of aggressive people reunites (a) murderers (those who endanger the lives of their fellow), (b) tyrants (those who beslave their fellows by taking control of some of their faculties) and (c) thieves (those who claim the goods of their fellows without their consent). The civilized conduct requires high standards of action of the people who embrace it and, implicitly, considerable physical and psychical costs. The primary impulses originating in our lower Self blatantly contradict the respect for life, liberty and property of our fellows, so that it seems impossible for them to be controlled only by personal effort. Therefore, it is vital that the energy allotted to peaceable conduct by our higher Self be superior to the energy which it spontaneously mobilizes in support of the primary impulses of our lower Self. This can be achieved by feeding the people with the social energy of certain social emotions in the process of internalizing the norms of peaceable conduct. Among these emotions, contempt and shame, respectively anger and guilt stand out through the predominance of the moral dimension and force of shaping human conduct. They underlie two different moral systems – “shame morality”, and “guilt morality” respectively – that support our peaceable conduct and, ipso facto, our civilized life. (shrink)

This paper expands on another which focussed on Socrates’s question: ‘How should one live?’. The present paper also focusses on the ‘meaning of life’ and ‘meaning in life’ issues, and more on rights. To fully rationally answer Socrates’s question, we need to answer the epistemic question: ‘How can one know how one should live?’. This paper attempts to answer both. And knowing how one should live fundamentally involves knowing what values one should live by. This includes which rights (...) one should have and which rights others should have. So one’s values include how one should treat all persons (and (other) animals, the environment and so on.) All this relates to what one finds meaningful in life and the meaning or point of one’s life. In sum, all the notions in this paper’s title are interrelated. The issue of rationality is crucial here. Just one example here (qualified later) is that our rationality gives us cognitively meaningful notions. ‘Rationality’ here only concerns knowledge, e.g., ways to acquire scientific knowledge, and meta-knowledge concerning values. No values or rights as such are rational or knowledge. However:- Many factors are required for human rationality to exist and develop, e.g., life, mental health and evidence-based education. Human rationality’s need for those factors, hence their value to rationality, is rationally-unquestionable – and that applies to the practised values prescribing the prescribable factors. With this, there are rationally-unquestionable rights to those factors. Those prescribable factors require certain interrelated epistemic, moral, social, political, legal, educational and other values/rights to be practised. This implies a pro-rationality values-theory with one obligatory, general end – a uniquely rationally-unquestionable end. This end provides the basis for answering Socrates’s question as rationally (correctly) as is possible for values/rights. That end is fundamentally epistemic, namely ‘Be pro-rationality’, yet the theory has deeply-humanly-meaningful, universal applications. It has implications for current and all possible moral, social, political, legal, educational, environmental etc issues. E.g., the theory shows that human rationality crucially requires love and certain other emotions, health-care, education and upbringing. These require certain right to be respected and practised. With this, the paper discusses affection, free speech, journalism, psychotherapy, political and sexual consent, responsibilities, freedom and government. The theory’s general sub-values prescribe much prescribed by some other theories, e.g., broad and deep knowledge-acquisition (in certain areas), rationally-critical thinking, non-sexism, non-racism, general types of liberalism, holistic flourishing, happiness, unselfishness and fairness. However, all other values-theories lack pro-rationality theory’s maximum possible rational-unquestionability, internal coherence and coherence with rationality. The theory encourages (the right to) total freedom in a-rationality areas, areas irrelevant to its obligatory end. The theory inherently requires its advocates to be (self )critical, rationally viewing the theory’s necessarily human-suggested specifics as often fallible or unavoidably approximate. So the theory is a work-in-progress. (shrink)

The dominant response to Peter Singer’s defense of an extremely demanding duty of aid argues that an affluent person’s duty of aid is limited by her moral entitlement to live her own life. This paper argues that this entitlement provides a basis not for limiting an affluent person’s duty of aid but rather for the claim that she too is wronged by a world marked by widespread desperate need; and the wrong she suffers is a distinctive one: the activation (...) of a duty of aid so demanding that it dominates her life, crowding out her own valuable projects and involvements. (shrink)

The central thesis of my article is that people live a life worthy of a human being only as self-ruling members of some autarchic (or self-governing) communities. On the one hand, nobody is born as a self-ruling individual, and on the other hand, everybody can become such a person by observing progressively the non-aggression principle and, ipso facto, by behaving as a moral being. A self-ruling person has no interest in controlling her neighbors, but in mastering his own impulses, (...) needs, wishes, desires, behaviors, etc. Inasmuch as he is an imperfect being who lives in an imperfect world, he needs to share certain interests, beliefs, values, customs and other characteristics with other people, i.e. to be involved in some communities. Depending on the following four criteria – the regulatory principle, the essential resources, the specific feedback and the fundamental values –, the countless and manifold human communities can be grouped in three categories: (1) affinity communities, (2) economic communities, and (3) civic communities. In other words, every community or human behavior has an affinity, an economic, and a civic dimension. If a civic community is merely a state shaped society, it can be called a political community. All communities are intrinsically variable. Throughout time, they ceaselessly change their composition, values, interpersonal processes and relations, territory, etc. Interestingly enough, the variability is unanimously recognized and accepted in affinity and communities economic, but is denied or abusively interpreted in the case of state shaped societies. If we confuse two types of order − cosmos and taxis – and two types of rule – nomos and thesis –, as well as we exaggerate the importance of certain type of community we bring some social maladies, namely the traditionalism, the commercialism and the civism, (with the worst form of it – the politicality). Whatever the communities they are involved in, all persons relate (implicitly or explicitly) to the libertarian non-aggression principle, living their life in strict accordance with the logical implications of the position they adopt. People who respect the non-aggression axiom necessarily manifest self-control, consideration for the life and property of the others, commitment to offer value for value, love of freedom and a high level of individual responsibility. By contrast, people who violate this axiom – the villains and the statists – invariably strive to control their neighbors, behave as parasites or predators, prefer forced exchanges, reject the personal responsibility (at most accepting the idea of social responsibility), and apply double moral standards. The first category of people generates a libertarian civic discourse as a spontaneous order, and the second creates a political/ statist civic discourse as a result of the human design and will to power. As a spontaneous order, the libertarian civic discourse implies free involvement, peaceful coordination, free expression, free reproduction of ideas and the power of one. Every communication performance in the frame of the libertarian civic discourse is important and has relevant results. All participants to the libertarian civic discourse are automatically members of some self-governing communities (at least members of the general libertarian community). The most important thing for these communities is to be connected to a communicational infrastructure which would make possible free involvement, free expression and the free reproduction of ideas. Inasmuch as today democracy means the tyranny of majority and participatory democracy the tyranny of majority plus the power of vested (and illegitimate) interests, only the emergence of self-governing communities by libertarian discourse offers us a little hope. It’s high time to fall in love (again) with liberty and to embrace the non-aggression principle. We don’t have to create a perfect world, but we can strive to develop our human nature. (shrink)

Conventional ethics of how humans should eat often ignore that human life is itself a form of organic activity. Using Henri Bergson’s notions of intellect and intuition, this chapter brings a wider perspective of the human organism to the ethical question of how humans appropriate life for nutriment. The intellect’s tendency to instrumentalize living things as though they were inert seems to subtend the moral failures evident in practices such as industrial animal agriculture. Using the case (...) study of Temple Grandin’s sympathetic cattle technologies, this chapter moves beyond animal welfare concerns to ground food ethics on the phenomenal character of food that is obscured by human activities of fabrication. (shrink)

Any two things, living or non-living, countries or nations that cooperate with each other are said to be interdependent or mutually dependent. Interdependence means interconnectedness and reliance on one another socially, economically, environmentally and politically. It is a dynamic of being mutually and physically responsible for and sharing a common set of principles. Some people advocate independence as a sort of ultimate good; others do the same with devotion to their family, community, or society. Interdependence recognizes the (...) truth in each position and weaves them together. Sri Guru Granth Sahib [1-2], the holy scripture of the Sikhs, emphasizes the importance of the interdependence of all things. It stresses that preserving the natural state of things is a sine-qua-none for the sustainability of life on Earth. (shrink)