This paper explores how the Leviathan that projects power through nuclear arms exercises a unique nuclearized sovereignty. In the case of nuclear superpowers, this sovereignty extends to wielding the power to destroy human civilization as we know it across the globe. Nuclearized sovereignty depends on a hybrid form of power encompassing human decision-makers in a hierarchical chain of command, and all of the technical and computerized functions necessary to maintain command and control at every moment of the sovereign's existence: (...) this sovereign power cannot sleep. This article analyzes how the form of rationality that informs this hybrid exercise of power historically developed to be computable. By definition, computable rationality must be able to function without any intelligible grasp of the context or the comprehensive significance of decision-making outcomes. Thus, maintaining nuclearized sovereignty necessarily must be able to execute momentous life and death decisions without the type of sentience we usually associate with ethical individual and collective decisions. (shrink)

The rationality of the human being applied in science-technique in the contemporary capitalist system is distorted; the purpose, which is the good life for human beings, has become the means to sustain and feedback the technicist system of technological capitalism. Thus, the modus operandi of science, aims only to legitimize technology, apart from the ethics applied in this relationship between technology and human beings, and cut off from critical philosophical thinking. With the result presented, the problem lies in the (...) reason of the contemporary human being, who seeks to satisfy his desires and envisions the good life (eudaimonía) in material goods, suppressing the contemplative leisure of life (ataraxia); becoming a slave to the system it fosters. The objective is to demonstrate the need to reformulate the modern system, in order to earn a good life for human beings as a purpose of technical science, which should be the means for this and as technological advances in favor of the quality of human beings. and, not for capitalist reproduction. The research methodology is an exploratory bibliography, exposing and dialoguing with authors on the subject in order to forge our conclusion, that pleads for science-technical that enjoys ethics and human reason in favor of eudaimonia. (shrink)

Collective action is interpreted as a matter of people doing something together, and it is assumed that this involves their having a collective intention to do that thing together. The account of collective intention for which the author has argued elsewhere is presented. In terms that are explained, the parties are jointly committed to intend as a body that such-and-such. Collective action problems in the sense of rational choice theory—problems such as the various forms of coordination problem and the prisoner’s (...) dilemma—are then considered. An explanation is given of how, when such a problem is interpreted in terms of the parties’ inclinations, a suitable collective intention resolves the problem for agents who are rational in a broad sense other than the technical sense of game theory. Key Words: rationality • collective action • collective intention • joint commitment. (shrink)

Some arguments include imperative clauses. For example: ‘Buy me a drink; you can’t buy me that drink unless you go to the bar; so, go to the bar!’ How should we build a logic that predicts which of these arguments are good? Because imperatives aren’t truth apt and so don’t stand in relations of truth preservation, this technical question gives rise to a foundational one: What would be the subject matter of this logic? I argue that declaratives are used (...) to produce beliefs, imperatives are used to produce intentions, and beliefs and intentions are subject to rational requirements. An argument will strike us as valid when anyone whose mental state satisfies the premises is rationally required to satisfy the conclusion. For example, the above argument reflects the principle that it is irrational not to intend what one takes to be the necessary means to one’s intended ends. I argue that all intuitively good patterns of imperative inference can be explained using off-the-shelf formulations of our rational requirements. I then develop a formal-semantic theory embodying this view that predicts a range of data, including free-choice effects and Ross’s paradox. The resulting theory shows one way that our aspirations to rational agency can be discerned in the patterns of our speech, and is a case study in how the philosophy of language and the philosophy of action can be mutually illuminating. (shrink)

This article serves as either an addendum or as an expansion of ideas and work developed in my 2024 book, The Rationality Project: Across the Millennia, issued by Palgrave Macmillan. The book explores 21 potential theories for explaining rationality in terms of why and how one among these can serve in the position of explanatory power. The book does not fully explain all of these candidate theories, assigning that complete role to this addendum or work-in-progress. The main reason (...) for this abbreviation in assessing all the theories in the book is that the complete coverage—which this addendum allows—of all 21 theories would become too detailed for some philosophical readers. This addendum; one may consider, is then for the more technically minded reader—although certainly not-too-technically minded readers are welcome to explore it. If it becomes too bogged in detail for those latter kinds of readers, they may end up skimming the material in this addendum, trying at least to get the general idea of how these addendum sections fit into the book's goals. (shrink)

Modern philosophy recognizes two major ethical theories: deontology, which encourages adherence to rules and fulfillment of duties or obligations; and consequentialism, which evaluates morally significant actions strictly on the basis of their actual or anticipated outcomes. Both involve the systematic application of universal abstract principles, reflecting the culturally dominant paradigm of technical rationality. Professional societies promulgate codes of ethics with which engineers are expected to comply, while courts and the public generally assign liability to engineers primarily in accordance (...) with the results of their work, whether intended or unintended. A third option, prominent in ancient philosophy, has reemerged recently: virtue ethics, which recognizes that sensitivity to context and practical judgment are indispensable in particular concrete situations, and therefore rightly focuses on the person who acts, rather than the action itself. Beneficial character traits—i.e., virtues—are identified within a specific social practice in light of the internal goods that are unique to it. This paper proposes a comprehensive framework for implementing virtue ethics within engineering. (shrink)

The aim of this discussion is twofold.* First, I shall scrutinize certain prevailing rationales for enlisting for military service and show that these justifications are inadequate to meet the military’s recruiting needs. Larger numbers of enlistees who are fully equipped, both in technical skills and morale, for combat readiness are in great demand, but the arguments used to recruit potential enlistees are self-defeating. I shall show how and why they attract volunteers who are rendered singularly unfit to meet these (...) demands by those very arguments themselves. (shrink)

This paper intends to give a philosophical analysis of the concepts of consciousness and rationality, and particularly to display the correlation existing between what is usually called the “normal state of consciousness” and what should be called the “normal state of rationality”. Eventually, it draws consequences for the correlation existing between “altered/aberrant states of consciousness” and “altered/aberrant rationality”. Although it argues from a broad phenomenological perspective, its grounding technicalities belong to the field of process thought, as fleshed (...) out by the later Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). (shrink)

With the development of sharing economy, a consensus to study this area from the perspective of morality and ethics has been recently reached. The key point of this study is the ethical basis of sharing economy. It should be noticed that the conceptual framework of sharing economy must be grounded within the market economy, technological innovation, and the spirit of "rational cooperation". It is, therefore, necessary to realize that the sharing economy is based on the Contractual Ethics internally rooted in (...) the market economy, the Technical Ethics which is coordinated with technological innovation, and the Universal Ethics produced by the cooperative reason. The three concept of ethics lay the ethical foundation of sharing economy together. (shrink)

This article investigates the technical rationalities of modern forms of government. Conceived in a Foucauldian vein, the paper argues for an interpretation of security dispositifs which sustain the structures of modern government. The main argument developed in the article is that there is a difference between two securities diagrams: the preventive and the anticipatory. The first one is using rational devices like the actuarial table while the second is aiming to instrumentalise the imagination.

Clinical Legal Education programmes now take place in most law schools in England and Wales. However, legal education continues to be predominantly focused on the analysis and application of rules, doctrines, and theories to hypothetical scenarios or essay questions. This form of pedagogy either minimises or ignores the role of the client in terms of supplying lawyers with knowledge pertinent to their case. In other words, it overlooks the fact that the lawyer’s acquisition of knowledge is not confined to (...) class='Hi'>technical rationality. This article seeks to achieve three broad aims. First, to contribute to the debate concerning the epistemology of reflective practice. Second, to develop a theoretical reflective cycle, informed by Kant’s transcendental idealism, which seeks to maximise knowledge acquisition in legal education, namely knowledge supplied by the client. Third, to address implicit bias using the proposed reflective cycle. An optimal pedagogy for using this cycle is Clinical Legal Education, namely live client clinics. (shrink)

Although the concept of uncertainty is as old as Epicurus’s writings, and an excellent quantitative theory, with entropy as the measure of uncertainty having been developed in recent times, there has been little exploration of the qualitative theory. The purpose of the present paper is to give a qualitative axiomatization of uncertainty, in the spirit of the many studies of qualitative comparative probability. The qualitative axioms are fundamentally about the uncertainty of a partition of the probability space of events. Of (...) course, it is common to speak of the uncertainty, or randomness, of a random variable, but only the partition defined by the values of the random variable enter into the definition of uncertainty, not the actual values. It is straightforward to add axioms for decision making following the general line of Savage from the 1950s. Indeed, in the spirit of Epicurus, it is really our intuitive feeling about the uncertainty of the future that motivates much of our thinking about decisions. Here, the distinction between the concepts of probability and uncertainty can be made by citing many familiar examples. Without spelling out the technical details, the axiomatization of qualitative probability with uncertainty as the most important primitive concept, it is possible to raise a different kind of question about bounded rationality. This new question is whether or not one should bound the uncertainty in thinking and investigating any detailed framework of decision making. Discussion of this point is certainly different from the question of bounding rationality by not maximizing expected utility. In practice, we naturally bound uncertainty in our analysis of decision-making problems. As in the case of formulating an alternative for maximizing expected utility, so is the case of rational alternatives to maximizing uncertainty. There are several issues to consider. In the spirit of my other work in qualitative probability, I explore alternatives rather than attempt to give a definitive argument for one single solution. (shrink)

Questions surrounding deep disagreement have gained significant attention in recent years. One of the central debates is metaphysical, focusing on the features that make a disagreement deep. Proposals for what makes disagreements deep include theories about hinge propositions and first epistemic principles. In this paper, I criticize this metaphysical discussion by arguing that it is methodologically flawed. Deep disagreement is a technical or semi-technical term, but the metaphysical discussion mistakenly treats it as a common-sense concept to be analyzed (...) and captured by our pre-theoretical intuitions. Since the literature on deep disagreement is subject to this fundamental confusion and deep disagreement is not a helpful umbrella term either, I propose eliminating the notion of deep disagreement from the philosophical discourse. Instead of analyzing the nature of deep disagreement, we should develop theories about different forms of disagreement, including disagreement about hinge propositions and disagreement about epistemic principles, and, in particular, a theory of rationally irresolvable disagreement. (shrink)

The first decade of this century has seen the nascency of the first mathematical theory of general artificial intelligence. This theory of Universal Artificial Intelligence (UAI) has made significant contributions to many theoretical, philosophical, and practical AI questions. In a series of papers culminating in book (Hutter, 2005), an exciting sound and complete mathematical model for a super intelligent agent (AIXI) has been developed and rigorously analyzed. While nowadays most AI researchers avoid discussing intelligence, the award-winning PhD thesis (Legg, 2008) (...) provided the philosophical embedding and investigated the UAI-based universal measure of rational intelligence, which is formal, objective and non-anthropocentric. Recently, effective approximations of AIXI have been derived and experimentally investigated in JAIR paper (Veness et al. 2011). This practical breakthrough has resulted in some impressive applications, finally muting earlier critique that UAI is only a theory. For the first time, without providing any domain knowledge, the same agent is able to self-adapt to a diverse range of interactive environments. For instance, AIXI is able to learn from scratch to play TicTacToe, Pacman, Kuhn Poker, and other games by trial and error, without even providing the rules of the games. These achievements give new hope that the grand goal of Artificial General Intelligence is not elusive. This article provides an informal overview of UAI in context. It attempts to gently introduce a very theoretical, formal, and mathematical subject, and discusses philosophical and technical ingredients, traits of intelligence, some social questions, and the past and future of UAI. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence and robotics is pervasive in daily life and set to expand to new levels potentially replacing human decision-making and action. Self-driving cars, home and healthcare robots, and autonomous weapons are some examples. A distinction appears to be emerging between potentially benevolent civilian uses of the technology (eg unmanned aerial vehicles delivering medicines), and potentially malevolent military uses (eg lethal autonomous weapons killing human com- batants). Machine-mediated human interaction challenges the philosophical basis of human existence and ethical conduct. Aside (...) from technical challenges of ensuring ethical conduct in artificial intelligence and robotics, there are moral questions about the desirability of replacing human functions and the human mind with such technology. How will artificial intelligence and robotics engage in moral reasoning in order to act ethically? Is there a need for a new set of moral rules? What happens to human interaction when it is mediated by technology? Should such technology be used to end human life? Who bears responsibility for wrongdoing or harmful conduct by artificial intelligence and robotics? -/- Whilst Kant may be familiar to international lawyers for setting restraints on the use of force and rules for perpetual peace, his foundational work on ethics provides an inclusive moral philosophy for assessing ethical conduct of individuals and states and, thus, is relevant to discussions on the use and development of artificial intelligence and robotics. His philosophy is inclusive because it incorporates justifications for morals and legitimate responses to immoral conduct, and applies to all human agents irrespective of whether they are wrongdoers, unlawful combatants, or unjust enemies. Humans are at the centre of rational thinking, action, and norm-creation so that the rationale for restraints on methods and means of warfare, for example, is based on preserving human dignity as well as ensuring conditions for perpetual peace among states. Unlike utilitarian arguments which favour use of autonomous weapons on the basis of cost-benefit reasoning or the potential to save lives, Kantian ethics establish non-consequentialist and deontological rules which are good in themselves to follow and not dependent on expediency or achieving a greater public good. -/- Kantian ethics make two distinct contributions to the debate. First, they provide a human-centric ethical framework whereby human exist- ence and capacity are at the centre of a norm-creating moral philosophy guiding our understanding of moral conduct. Second, the ultimate aim of Kantian ethics is practical philosophy that is relevant and applicable to achieving moral conduct. -/- I will seek to address the moral questions outlined above by exploring how core elements of Kantian ethics relate to use of artificial intelli- gence and robotics in the civilian and military spheres. Section 2 sets out and examines core elements of Kantian ethics: the categorical imperative; autonomy of the will; rational beings and rational thinking capacity; and human dignity and humanity as an end in itself. Sections 3-7 consider how these core elements apply to artificial intelligence and robotics with discussion of fully autonomous and human-machine rule-generating approaches; types of moral reasoning; the difference be- tween ‘human will’ and ‘machine will’; and respecting human dignity. (shrink)

The expression "analytic narratives" is used to refer to a range of quite recent studies that lie on the boundaries between history, political science, and economics. These studies purport to explain specific historical events by combining the usual narrative approach of historians with the analytic tools that economists and political scientists draw from formal rational choice theories. Game theory, especially of the extensive form version, is currently prominent among these tools, but there is nothing inevitable about such a technical (...) choice. The chapter explains what analytic narratives are by reviewing the studies of the major book Analytic Narratives (1998), which are concerned with the workings of political institutions broadly speaking, as well as several cases drawn from military and security studies, which form an independent source of the analytic narratives literature. At the same time as it gradually develops a definition of analytic narratives, the chapter investigates how they fulfil one of their main purposes, which is to provide explanations of a better standing than those of traditional history. An important principle that will emerge in the course of the discussion is that narration is called upon not only to provide facts and problems, but also to contribute to the explanation itself. The chapter distinguishes between several expository schemes of analytic narratives according to the way they implement this principle. From all the arguments developed here, it seems clear that the current applications of analytic narratives do not exhaust their potential, and in particular that they deserve the attention of economic historians, if only because they are concerned with microeconomic interactions that are not currently their focus of attention. (shrink)

This thesis focuses on expressively rich languages that can formalise talk about probability. These languages have sentences that say something about probabilities of probabilities, but also sentences that say something about the probability of themselves. For example: (π): “The probability of the sentence labelled π is not greater than 1/2.” Such sentences lead to philosophical and technical challenges; but can be useful. For example they bear a close connection to situations where ones confidence in something can affect whether it (...) is the case or not. The motivating interpretation of probability as an agent's degrees of belief will be focused on throughout the thesis. -/- This thesis aims to answer two questions relevant to such frameworks, which correspond to the two parts of the thesis: “How can one develop a formal semantics for this framework?” and “What rational constraints are there on an agent once such expressive frameworks are considered?”. (shrink)

The existential insecurity of human beings has induced them to create protective spheres of symbols: myths, religions, values, belief systems, theories, etc. Rationality is one of the key factors contributing to the construction of civilisation in technical and symbolic terms. As Hankiss (2001) has emphasised, protective spheres of symbols may collapse – thus causing a profound social crisis. Social and political transformations had a tremendous impact at the end of the 20th century. As a result, management theories have (...) been revised in order to deal with transition and uncertainty. Francis Fukuyama's (2000) approach is supportive of hierarchical organisation as the best solution when facing a 'disruption'. The notion of Homo Hierarchicus has been based on, allegedly, rational presumptions. This paper contributes to the discussion on hierarchy within contemporary organisations. It criticises so-called 'natural' and 'rational' necessities justifying hierarchy. A key issue identified by the paper is the formalisation of language in claiming value-free knowledge and 'detached' observation as the basis for neutral rationality and aspired efficiency. This should be seriously reconsidered as hindering rather than aiding understanding of social complexity. All in all, Homo Hierarchicus appears to be misleading rather than helping symbolic sphere or construct. (shrink)

This paper deals with what I take to be one woman’s literary response to a philosophical problem. The woman is Jane Austen, the problem is the rationality of Hume’s ‘sensible knave’, and Austen’s response is to deepen the problem. Despite his enthusiasm for virtue, Hume reluctantly concedes in the EPM that injustice can be a rational strategy for ‘sensible knaves’, intelligent but selfish agents who feel no aversion towards thoughts of villainy or baseness. Austen agrees, but adds that ABSENT (...) CONSIDERATIONS OF A FUTURE STATE, other vices besides injustice can be rationally indulged with tolerable prospects of worldly happiness. Austen’s creation Mr Elliot in Persuasion is just such an agent – sensible and knavish but not technically ‘unjust’. Despite and partly because of his vices – ingratitude, avarice and duplicity – he manages to be both successful and reasonably happy. There are plenty of other reasonably happy knaves in Jane Austen, some of whom are not particularly sensible. This is not to say that either Austen or Hume is in favor of knavery It is just that they both think that only those with the right sensibility can be argued out of it. (shrink)

The conviction that ‘intention’ is not semantically ambiguous but has a single and distinctive meaning frames the argument of Anscombe’s masterwork Intention. What this meaning is, however, is barely recognizable in her book. One reason for this difficulty is that Intention starts from a threefold division of the appearance of the concept in our natural language and proceeds to develop its various accounts piecemeal. Another is the obscurity of the notion of ‘practical knowledge’ it introduces, precisely for shedding the light (...) that would make its topic perspicuous as a whole. The present article aims to amend this obscurity by providing both a schema of unity for the various parts of the division and an account of the fixed character of the concept. For the former task, the article recaptures Anscombe’s technical use of the term ‘a kind of statement’, uses it to clarify the nature of the division’s parts, and argues that they are co-constituted in a larger context of rational proceedings. Having done this, the article shows that the point of such proceedings is to display the validity of practical reasoning in a given case. It analyses Anscombe’s account of this kind of validity, providing thereby the representation of the fixed character of ‘intention’ as a distinct form of thinking. (shrink)

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

In the context of Ukraine’s membership in the WTO, the functioning of a free trade area with the EU, the opportunity for agricultural producers to obtain a larger share of the value added is primarily linked to the intensification of trade in domestic livestock products and their processing products. However, their production is one of the high-risk areas and requires a set of measures aimed at ensuring proper quality. Without effective solution of the problem of quality of livestock products it (...) is impossible to ensure its competitiveness in the world market, to guarantee the rational nutrition of the population of the country, the availability of the necessary components for the vital activity of the human body. The aim of the research is to determine the socio-economic factors for ensuring the quality of livestock products in Ukraine. The scientific and specific research methods were used to solve the tasks set in the work: the historical method; abstraction method; method of comparative analysis; system-structural method. The main producer of livestock products in Ukraine are households. They do not have the capabilities to implement technologies of keeping, feeding, veterinary services, programs prerequisites for guaranteeing the safety of products, adherence to the HACCP principles. In Ukraine, real technical, economic and organizational-economic prerequisites for ensuring the safety and quality of livestock products are created only in the poultry meat sector. During 2015-2017, the trends in production of almost all types of livestock products except poultry and honey were identified. One of the reasons for this situation was, firstly, decreasing in capital investment in the livestock sector, and secondly, the low profitability of production of livestock products in the context of accelerated growth in prices for resources. It is proved that insignificant market (price) incentives should be supplemented with instruments of state assistance to improve the quality parameters of products on the basis of specialized enterprises. The necessity of state support for the production of livestock products based on small and medium-sized enterprises is substantiated. This will effectively combine the processes of increasing the production of livestock products with the environmental friendliness of production and steady improvement of quality. It is shown that the low quality of certain livestock products in Ukraine is caused by insufficient living standards of the population and low incomes of the majority of households, which cause them to consume low quality products. It is determined that the problem of guaranteeing the quality of livestock products in Ukraine has deep roots cause due to the influence of socio-economic factors. Therefore, a comprehensive approach is needed to solve it, which is not limited to improving the efficiency of the state control system and successfully harmonizing of the Ukrainian technical regulation system with the European one. The problem of low quality and the danger of livestock production requires a systematic approach for its solution, which is not limited, in particular, by measures to improve the system of state control and ensure approximation of the domestic technical regulation system to the European one. In Ukraine, major high-quality animal products are economically inaccessible to a large part of households. The projected increase in safety parameters and a certain improvement in the quality of livestock products as a result of the implementation of regulations adopted in 2014-2017, will necessarily lead to an increase in its value, and therefore may lead to a decrease in market demand and even greater inaccessibility of these products to people. All this can only aggravate the situation with guaranteeing the food security of the country, forming the prerequisites for increasing the intellectual capacity of the nation. (shrink)

Disciplinary issues -- Field studies -- Appendix: Theory of law : legal ethnography, or, the theoretical fruits of the inquiries into folkways. /// Reedition of papers in English spanning from 1995 to 2008 /// DISCIPLINARY ISSUES -- LAW AS CULTURE? [2002] 9–14 // TRENDS IN COMPARATIVE LEGAL STUDIES [2002] 15–17 // COMPARATIVE LEGAL CULTURES: ATTEMPTS AT CONCEPTUALISATION [1997] 19–28: 1. Legal Culture in a Cultural-anthropological Approach 19 / 2. Legal Culture in a Sociological Approach 21 / 3. Timely Issues of (...) Central and Eastern Europe 24 // COMPARATIVE LEGAL CULTURES? [2001] 29–48: 1. Legal Comparativism Challenged 29 / 2. Comparative Legal Cultures versus Comparative Law 34 / 3. Contrasting Fields 40 [a) The Historical Understanding of Socialist Law 42 / b) Convergence of Civil Law and Common Law 44] 4. Concluding Remarks 46 // THEATRUM LEGALE MUNDI: ON LEGAL SYSTEMS CLASSIFIED [2005] 49–75: 1. Preliminaries 49 / 2. Proposals 50 / 3. Impossible Taxonomy, or the Moment of Practicality in Legal Mapping 69 / 4. Diversity as a Fundamental Quality of Human Existence 74 // LEGAL TRADITIONS? IN SEARCH FOR FAMILIES AND CULTURES IN LAW [2004] 77–97: 1. Comparative Law and the Comparative Study of Legal Traditions 78 / 2. ‘System’, ‘Family’, ‘Culture’, and ‘Tradition’ in the Classification of Law 80 / 3. Different Traditions, Differing Ways of Thinking 85 / 4. Different Expectations, Differings Institutionalisations in Law 88 / 5. Different “Rationalities”, Differing “Logics” 92 / 6. Mentality in Foundation of the Law 94 / 7. Defining a Subject for Theoretical Research in Law 96 // SOMETHING NEW, SOMETHING OLD IN THE EUROPEAN IDENTITY OF LAW? [1995] 99–102 --- FIELD STUDIES -- MEETING POINTS BETWEEN THE TRADITIONS OF ENGLISH–AMERICAN COMMON LAW AND CONTINENTAL-FRENCH CIVIL LAW: DEVELOPMENTS AND EXPERIENCE OF POSTMODERNITY IN CANADA [2002] 105–130: I. Canadian Law in General 105 / II. Canadian Legal Developments in Particular [1. The Transformation of the Role of Precedents 112 / 2. The Transformation of Law-application into a Collective, Multicultural and Multifactorial Search for a Solution 116 / 3. Practical Trends of Dissolving the Law’s Positivity 120 / 4. New Prerogatives Acquired by Courts 125 {a) Unfolding the Statutory Provisons in Principles 126 / b) Constitutionalisation of Issues 127 / c) The Supreme Court as the Nation’s Supreme Moral Authority 129}] // MAN ELEVATING HIMSELF? DILEMMAS OF RATIONALITY IN OUR AGE [2000] 131–163: I. Reason and its Adventures 1. Progress and Advance Questioned 131 / 2. The Human Search for Safety Objectified 133 / 3. Knowledge Separated from Wisdom 135 / 4. Pure Intellectuality thereby Born 137 / II. The Will-Element Formalised in Law 5. Mere Voluntas in the Foundation of Legal Positivism 141 / 6. Formalism with Operations Fragmented 145 / III. The State of America Exemplified 7. “Slouching into Gomorrah” 147 / IV. Consequences 8. Utopianism-cum-Voluntarism 154 / 9. With Logic in Posterior Control of Human Formulations Only 159 / V. Perspectives 10. And a Final Resolution Dreamed about 161 // RULE OF LAW? MANIA OF LAW? ON THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN RATIONALITY AND ANARCHY IN AMERICA [2002] 165–180: {Transformation of American Law and Legal Mentality 165 / With Repercussions on the Underlying Ethos 168 / Legislation through Processualisation 170 / With Hyperrationalism Added 172 / Example: Finding Lost Property 172 / Practicalness Veiled by Verbal Magic 173 / Ending in Jurispathy 175 / Transubstantiating the Self-interest of the Legal Profession 178 / Post-modernity, Substituting for Primitiveness 178} // TRANSFERS OF LAW: A CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS [2003] 181–207: 1. Terms 182 / 2. Technicality 190 / 3. Contrasts in Transfers of Law 200 {Contrasts 200 / Criticisms 202 / Alternatives205} 4. Conclusions 206 // THE DANGERS FOR THE SELF OF BEING SELF-CENTRED: ON STANDARDS AND VALUES [2002] 209–212 --- APPENDIX -- THEORY OF LAW – LEGAL ETHNOGRAPHY, OR THE THEORETICAL FRUITS OF THE INQUIRIES INTO FOLKWAYS [2008] 213–234 1. Encounters 213 / 2. Disciplines 218 / 3. The Lawyerly Interest 223 / 4. Law and/or Laws 226 / 5. Conclusion 233 --- Index of Subjects 235 / Index of Normative Materials 242 / Index 244 . (shrink)

Modernity is impregnated by rationality instead of natural reason, technical intelligence, and an ever more vociferous social communication. Seemingly, this interrelationship has absorbed and dissolved the traditional knitting stuff of society, known as its social tie. This image should be incorrect and insufficient. Since about thirty years, the Western world has seen the upcoming of a social mechanism strengthening and curtailing the person, or subject, to leave a portion of his conscient faculties to others, on one side, in (...) order to be rewarded in the social field, on the other side. This is explained by means of recursion to (i) the proper explanation of the energy field, its polarity, (ii) the census/reward mechanism itself, (iii) a critical comparison with the Habermasian discourse theory, and (iv) finally and in the onset an investigation into the Chinese system, in particular the so-called Social Credit System and its circumscription. (shrink)

In this paper we raise the question whether technological artifacts can properly speaking be trusted or said to be trustworthy. First, we set out some prevalent accounts of trust and trustworthiness and explain how they compare with the engineer’s notion of reliability. We distinguish between pure rational-choice accounts of trust, which do not differ in principle from mere judgments of reliability, and what we call “motivation-attributing” accounts of trust, which attribute specific motivations to trustworthy entities. Then we consider some examples (...) of technological entities that are, at first glance, best suited to serve as the objects of trust: intelligent systems that interact with users, and complex socio-technical systems. We conclude that the motivation-attributing concept of trustworthiness cannot be straightforwardly applied to these entities. Any applicable notion of trustworthy technology would have to depart significantly from the full-blown notion of trustworthiness associated with interpersonal trust. (shrink)

Heidegger’s oeuvre (> 100 volumes) contains a plethora of comments on contemporary science, or rathertechnosciencebecause, according to Heidegger, science is inherently technical. What insights can be derived from such comments for philosophers questioning technoscience as it is practiced today? Can Heidegger’s thoughts become a source of inspiration for contemporary scholars who are confronted with automated sequencing machines, magnetic resonance imaging machines and other technoscientific contrivances? This is closely related to the question of method, I will argue. Although Heidegger himself (...) was notoriously ambivalent when it came to method, especially in his later writings, his oeuvre nonetheless contains important hints for how a philosophical questioning of technoscience could be practiced, such as: paying attention to language (to the words that we use) or taking a step backwards (towards the moment of commencement of the type of rationality at work). For Heidegger, method means: being underway, and a philosophical method must be developed along the way. After discussing Heidegger’s views on method, both in his earlier and in his later writings, three dimensions of contemporary technoscience will be addressed, namely: technoscientific objects (research artefacts), technoscientific sites (laboratories as unworldly environments) and technoscience as a global enterprise. In the final section, the question will be addressed whether and how a critical encounter between philosophy and technoscience is possible. (shrink)

The principle of indifference is supposed to suffice for the rational assignation of probabilities to possibilities. Bertrand advances a probability problem, now known as his paradox, to which the principle is supposed to apply; yet, just because the problem is ill‐posed in a technical sense, applying it leads to a contradiction. Examining an ambiguity in the notion of an ill‐posed problem shows that there are precisely two strategies for resolving the paradox: the distinction strategy and the well‐posing strategy. The (...) main contenders for resolving the paradox, Marinoff and Jaynes, offer solutions which exemplify these two strategies. I show that Marinoff’s attempt at the distinction strategy fails, and I offer a general refutation of this strategy. The situation for the well‐posing strategy is more complex. Careful formulation of the paradox within measure theory shows that one of Bertrand’s original three options can be ruled out but also shows that piecemeal attempts at the well‐posing strategy will not succeed. What is required is an appeal to general principle. I show that Jaynes’s use of such a principle, the symmetry requirement, fails to resolve the paradox; that a notion of metaindifference also fails; and that, while the well‐posing strategy may not be conclusively refutable, there is no reason to think that it can succeed. So the current situation is this. The failure of Marinoff’s and Jaynes’s solutions means that the paradox remains unresolved, and of the only two strategies for resolution, one is refuted and we have no reason to think the other will succeed. Consequently, Bertrand’s paradox continues to stand in refutation of the principle of indifference. (shrink)

How ought we to evaluate and respond to expressions of anger and resentment? Can philosophical analysis of resentment as the emotional expression of a moral claim help us to distinguish which resentments ought to be taken seriously? Philosophers have tended to focus on what I call ‘reasonable’ resentments, presenting a technical, narrow account that limits resentment to the expression of recognizable moral claims. In the following paper, I defend three claims about the ethics and politics of resentment. First, if (...) we care about socially just processes of reconciliation, we have good reason to pay attention to the logic of resentments. Second, the account philosophers offer of resentment – its distinctive features, aims, rationality, and gratification – will affect the conclusions we draw about which actual resentments to take seriously, which aspects of resentful claims need addressing, and what it means to address and repair them. In contesting definitions of resentment, I argue, we do more than simply perform housekeeping in philosophical taxonomies of emotion. Restricting our understanding to essentially ‘moral’ cases may cause us to lose sight of expressly political resentments. Instead, I argue, a plausible account of resentment must acknowledge that we resent violations and threats that are not necessarily self-pertaining, may not be expressible as individual, discrete injuries, and cannot always be construed as moral threats. Second, given the dependence of moral judgments on a broader horizon of moral possibility, philosophical standards of ‘reasonable’ or ‘appropriate’ resentment cannot avoid being politically charged. Thus, the widely accepted account of ‘reasonable’ resentment cannot make philosophical sense of the most interesting and perplexing cases. Ironically, a theoretical measure designed to revalue emotional expressions of moral protest may result in the exclusion and silencing of those with the most reasons to protest. (shrink)

Kant says that it can be rational to accept propositions on the basis of non-epistemic or broadly practical considerations, even if those propositions include “transcendental ideas” of supersensible objects. He also worries, however, about how such ideas (of freedom, the soul, noumenal grounds, God, the kingdom of ends, and things-in-themselves generally) acquire genuine positive content in the absence of an appropriate connection to intuitional experience. How can we be sure that the ideas are not empty “thought-entities (Gedankendinge)”—that is, speculative fancies (...) that do not and perhaps even cannot have referents in reality? In this paper I argue for an account of the fundamental problem here (i.e. that it is based in a concern about whether or not the objects of such ideas are "really possible" in Kant's technical sense). I then critically evaluate Kant's three proposed solutions to the problem. The third one involves an appeal to the complicated doctrine of "symbolization" that becomes prominent in Kant's later works. -/- . (shrink)

PUTNAM has made highly regarded contributions to mathematics, to philosophy of logic and to philosophy of science, and in this book he brings his ideas in these three areas to bear on the traditional philosophic problem of materialism versus (objective) idealism. The book assumes that contemporary science (mathematical and physical) is largely correct as far as it goes, or at least that it is rational to believe in it. The main thesis of the book is that consistent acceptance of contemporary (...) science requires the acceptance of some sort of Platonistic idealism affirming the existence of abstract, non-temporal, non-material, non-mental entities (numbers, scientific laws, mathematical formulas, etc.). The author is thus in direct opposition to the extreme materialism which had dominated philosophy of science in the first three quarters of this century. The book can be recommended to the scientifically literate, general reader whose acquaintance with these areas is limited to the literature of the 1950’s and before, when it had been assumed that empiricistic materialism was the only philosophy compatible with a scientific outlook. To this group the book presents an eye-opening challenge fulfilling the author’s intention of “shaking up preconceptions and stimulating further discussion”. QUINE’S book is not easy to read, partly because the level of sophistication fluctuates at high frequency between remote extremes and partly because of convoluted English prose style and devilish terminology. Almost all of the minor but troublesome technical errata in the first printing have been corrected [see reviews, e.g., the reviewer, Philos. Sci. 39 (1972), no. 1, 97–99]. In the opinion of the reviewer the book is not suitable for undergraduate instruction, and without external motivation few mathematicians are likely to have the patience to appreciate it. Nevertheless, a careful study of the book will more than repay the effort and one should expect to find frequent references to this book in coming years. (shrink)

In this book I show that science suffers from a damaging but rarely noticed methodological disease, which I call rationalistic neurosis. It is not just the natural sciences which suffer from this condition. The contagion has spread to the social sciences, to philosophy, to the humanities more generally, and to education. The whole academic enterprise, indeed, suffers from versions of the disease. It has extraordinarily damaging long-term consequences. For it has the effect of preventing us from developing traditions and institutions (...) of learning rationally devoted to helping us learn how to make progress towards a wiser, more civilized world. On our fragile earth, overcrowded, fraught with injustice, inequality and conflict, menaced by unprecedented and terrifying technological and industrial means for change and destruction, we urgently need to acquire a little more wisdom and civilization if we are to avoid repeating horrors of the kind suffered by so many during the 20th century (and already suffered by many in the first few years of the 21st century). We can ill afford to have in our hands instruments of learning botched and bungled from the standpoint of helping us learn how to live more wisely. It may seem scarcely credible that something as important as our institutions of learning can suffer from wholesale, structural defects. Why has this not been noticed before? Why have not armies of scientists and scholars appreciated the point and, long ago, put the matter right? The answer will emerge as my argument unfolds. I will show that one of the most damaging features of rationalistic neurosis is that it has built-in methodological and institutional mechanisms which effectively conceal that anything is wrong. But there is also an immediately obvious reason: specialization, and the resulting fragmentation of academia, has resulted in a situation in which hardly anyone takes responsibility for the overall ideals, the overall aims and methods, of academic inquiry. Academics, these days, are specialists, furiously trying to keep abreast of developments in their own specialist fields. They have no time, and no inducement, to lift their eyes from their particular disciplines, and look at the whole endeavour. Science has long been under attack, at least since the Romantic movement. Blake objected to “Single vision & Newton’s sleep” and declared that “Art is the Tree of Life... Science is the Tree of Death”. Keats lamented that science will “clip an Angel’s wings” and “unweave a rainbow”. Whereas the Enlightenment had valued science and reason as tools for the liberation of humanity, Romanticism found science and reason oppressive and destructive, and instead valued art, imagination, inspiration, individual genius, emotional and motivational honesty rather than careful attention to objective fact. Much subsequent opposition to science stems from, or echoes, the Romantic opposition of Blake, Wordsworth, Keats and many others. There is the movement Isaiah Berlin has described as the “Counter-Enlightenment” (Berlin, 1979, ch. 1). There is existentialism, with its denunciation of the tyranny of reason, its passionate affirmation of the value and centrality of irrationality in human life, from Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Heidegger and Sartre (see, for example, Barrett, 1962). There is the attack on Enlightenment ideals concerning science and reason undertaken by the Frankfurt school, by postmodernists and others, from Horkheimer and Adorno to Lyotard, Foucault, Habermas, Derrida, MacIntyre and Rorty (see Gascardi, 1999). The soul-destroying consequences of valuing science and reason too highly is a persistent theme in literature: it is to be found in the works of writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Doris Lessing, Max Frisch, Y. Zamyatin. There is persistent opposition to modern science and technology, and to scientific rationality, often associated with the Romantic wing of the green movement, and given expression in such popular books as Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends, Berman’s The Reenchantment of the World and Appleyard’s Understanding the Present. There is the feminist critique of science and conceptions of science: see, for example, Fox Keller (1984) and Harding (1986). And there are the corrosive implications of the so-called “strong programme” in the sociology of knowledge, and of the work of social constructivist historians of science, which depict scientific knowledge as a belief system alongside many other such conflicting systems, having no more right to claim to constitute knowledge of the truth than these rivals, the scientific view of the world being no more than an elaborate myth, a social construct (see Barnes and Bloor, 1981; Bloor, 1991; Barnes, Bloor and Henry, 1996; Shapin and Schaffer, 1985; Shapin, 1994; Pickering, 1984; Latour, 1987). This latter literature has provoked a counter-attack by scientists, historians and philosophers of science seeking to defend science and traditional conceptions of scientific rationality: see Gross and Levitt (1994), Gross, Levitt and Lewis (1996), and Koertge (1998). This debate between critics and defenders of science came abruptly to public attention with the publication of Alan Sokal’s brilliant hoax article ‘Transgressing the boundaries’ in a special issue of the cultural studies journal Social Text in 1996 entitled Science Wars: see Sokal and Bricmont (1998). What does this book have to contribute, given the above avalanche of criticism of science? The criticisms of science developed in this book are diametrically opposed to the above, in so far as the above criticisms oppose scientific rationality, seek to diminish or restrict its influence, or hold that it is unattainable. My central point is that we suffer, not from too much scientific rationality, but from not enough. What is generally taken to constitute scientific rationality is actually nothing of the kind. It is rationalistic neurosis, a characteristic, influential and damaging kind of irrationality masquerading as rationality. Science is damaged by being trapped within a widely upheld but severely defective philosophy of science; free science from this defective philosophy, provide it with a more intellectually rigorous philosophy, and it will flourish in both intellectual and humanitarian terms. And more generally, as we shall see, academic inquiry as a whole is damaged by being trapped within an intellectually defective philosophy of inquiry; free it from this defective philosophy, from its rationalistic neurosis, and it will flourish in intellectual and human terms. It is not reason that is damaging, but defective pretensions to reason — rationalistic neurosis —masquerading as reason. Thus what I seek to do here is the exact opposite of what all those who oppose science and scientific rationality do. I shall argue that Reason, the authentic article, arrived at by generalizing the progress-achieving methods of science, can have profoundly liberating and enriching consequences for all worthwhile, problematic aspects of life, and thus deserves to enter into every aspect of life. The bare bones of the argument of this book can be stated quite simply like this. Science cannot proceed without making the substantial metaphysical assumption that the universe is physically comprehensible (to some extent at least). But this conflicts with the orthodox view that in science everything is assessed impartially with respect to evidence, nothing being permanently assumed independently of evidence. So the metaphysical assumption of comprehensibility is repressed. Science pretends that no such assumption is made. But this damages science. For the assumption is substantial, influential and highly problematic. It needs to be made explicit within science so that it can be critically scrutinized, so that alternatives can be developed and considered. Pretending the assumption is not being made undermines the intellectual rigour of science, its intellectual value and success. And it does not stop there. For science also makes value assumptions. Quite properly, science is concerned to discover that which is of value. New factual knowledge devoid of all value (whether intellectual or practical) does not contribute to science. But the orthodox view of science holds that values have no place within science. As in the case of metaphysics, here too, science pretends that values have no role to play within the intellectual domain of science. And this damages science. For values are, if anything, even more influential and problematic than metaphysics (in influencing the direction of research). Here too, values need to be made explicit within science so that they can be scrutinized, so that alternatives can be developed and assessed. Pretending that values play no role within the intellectual domain damages science; both the intellectual and the practical aspects of science are adversely affected. Science fails to pursue those avenues of research that lie in the best interests of humanity. And it goes further. Science is pursued in a social, cultural, economic and political context. It is a part of various social, economic and political projects which seek to achieve diverse human objectives. But the idea that science is an integral part of humanitarian or political enterprises with political ends clashes, once again, with the official view of science that the aim of science is to improve factual knowledge. The political objectives of science are repressed. And, once again, this damages science. For, of course, the political objectives of science, like all our political objectives, are profoundly problematic. These need to be made explicit so that they can be scrutinized, so that alternatives can be developed and considered. The pretence that science does not have this political dimension once again undermines the intellectual rigour of science, and its human value. It lays science open to becoming a part of economic, corporate and political enterprises that are not in the best interests of humanity. The upshot of the line of argument just indicated is that we need to bring about a revolution in the aims and methods of science, and of academic inquiry more generally. Natural science needs to change; its relationship with the rest of academic inquiry, with social inquiry and the humanities, needs to change; and most importantly and dramatically, academic inquiry as a whole needs to change. The basic task of the academic enterprise needs to become to help humanity learn how to tackle its problems of living in more cooperatively rational ways than at present. We need to put the intellectual tasks of articulating our problems of living, and proposing and critically assessing possible solutions, possible and actual actions, at the heart of academic inquiry. The basic task needs to be to help humanity learn a bit more wisdom – wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others, wisdom including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides. Natural science, despite its flaws, has massively increased our knowledge and technological know-how. This in turn has led to a massive and sometimes terrifying increase in our power to act. Often this unprecedented power to act is used for human good, as in medicine or agriculture. But it is also used to cause harm, whether unintentionally (initially at least) as when industrialization and modern agriculture lead to global warming, destruction of natural habitats and rapid extinction of species, or intentionally, as when the technology of war is used by governments and terrorists to maim and kill. Before the advent of modern science, when we lacked the means to do too much damage to ourselves and the planet, lack of wisdom did not matter too much. Now, with our unprecedented powers to act, bequeathed to us by science, lack of wisdom has become a menace. This is the crisis behind all the other current global crises: science without wisdom. In these circumstances, to continue to pursue knowledge and technological know-how dissociated from a more fundamental quest for wisdom can only deepen the crisis. As a matter of urgency, we need to free science and academia of their neuroses; we need to bring about a revolution in the academic enterprise so that the basic aim becomes to promote wisdom by intellectual and educational means. At present science and the humanities betray both reason and humanity. The argument of this book, which I have just summarized, begins with a discussion of the philosophical and methodological problems that beset theoretical physics. At once, many of those who are concerned about moral, political and environmental issues that plague our world today, will feel impatient. What have the methodological problems of theoretical physics to do with third world poverty, war and the threat of war, pollution, extinction of species, the menace of conventional, chemical, biological and nuclear armaments? I can only plead with such a reader: patience. The root cause of the sickness of our times does indeed lie, I claim, with a methodological sickness of natural science or, even more specifically, of physical science. What makes the modern world so utterly different from all previous ages is our possession of modern science and technology. This is the instrument that has changed the conditions of human life almost beyond all recognition, and put unprecedented, and sometimes terrifying, powers into our hands. One should not dismiss out of hand the suggestion that a part of our problem may lie with this instrument, this engine, of rapid change. We see, here, too, the way in which intellectual specialization, referred to above, has effectively concealed from view the nature and extent of the problem that confronts us. The argument that I shall develop in what follows begins with physics, with problems concerning the aims and methods of physics. But it then leaps to social science, to philosophy, to the humanities, to education, to psychotherapy, and to politics: in the end there is scarcely an aspect of modern life that is not touched and, potentially, affected by the argument. How many academic experts are prepared to follow, to take seriously, an argument that ranges so recklessly across such a wide range of academic disciplines? How many non-academic non-experts? But just this is what the argument and message of this book requires. I hope that the reader will endure with patience the somewhat esoteric discussion concerning the aims and methods of physics pursued in chapter one. This may not seem to have anything much to do with the urgent problems of our times, but it does. This is in part how the intellectual disaster I seek to expose in this book conceals itself from view: it buries itself in the obscure, recondite field of the philosophy of physics. Those who devote their lives to the philosophy of physics are, by and large, too myopic to see how their specialized field of study has anything to do with the great and dreadful humanitarian problems and disasters of our age; and those who are above all concerned with these humanitarian disasters have no time at all for abstruse issues concerning the aims and methods of physics. And so the connection is never made. As it happens, the methodological neurosis of physics, with which we begin in chapter one, is actually a quite simple matter to grasp. It does not require any real knowledge of physics to understand. Indeed, physicists and philosophers of physics are much more likely to find the argument difficult to follow than are non-experts. We non-scientists can stand back and see the whole wood; scientists, trained to think in terms of the current orthodox conception of science, trapped in the thickets of research, will find this much harder to do. In an attempt to take this peculiar circumstance into account, I have arranged the exposition as follows. In chapter one I give a simple exposition of the case for declaring natural science to suffer from what I call "rationalistic neurosis"; this avoids all technicalities, and goes straight to the heart of the matter. In the appendix I tackle a host of more technical objections that may be made to the elementary argument of chapter one. So, those experts in the fields of the philosophy of physics and philosophy of science who find the argument of chapter one naïve and unconvincing, should consult the appendix before tossing the book away in disgust. I write in the hope that there will be a few who will not dismiss out of hand the suggestion that the question of how we are to go about learning how to live in wiser and more civilized ways might have something to learn from scientific learning, and will take the trouble to pursue the line of argument traced out in this book. I write in the hope that these few will grasp just how desperate our situation is, how urgent the need to change the status quo, and will do everything in their power to alert others to the need to heal the methodological sickness from which our institutions and traditions of learning at present suffer. To begin with, we need a campaigning organization, modelled perhaps on "Friends of the Earth", which might be called something like "Friends of Wisdom". (shrink)

In this paper I will try to show how magic and technology might be associated taking both into account as a cultural expression of contemporary society. I will argue that technology penetrates magic, creating a specific dynamic which raises ethical dilemmas. The underlying idea, following a long tradition of thought, is that technology represents a kind of "second human nature." As Arnold Gehlen claims, the technical attitude (Technik) compensates for the structural deficiency of humans, allowing them a gradual opening (...) to the world. But magic is also an expression of this attitude, insofar as it tends to mimic natural mechanisms. Magic expresses itself with instructions, rules, and purposes, as much as technology does. Precisely for this reason magic also involves the same rationality typical of the developmental mode of technology, sharing the same objective. I will argue that Christopher Nolan's movie The Prestige (2006) shows an example of technological integration inside magic itself, highlighting two orders of problems: one ethical and the other intrinsic to the magical act and its nature. (shrink)

I defend Pascal's Wager from a particular way of evading it, the mixed strategy approach. The mixed strategies approach suggests that Pascal's Wager does not obligate one to believe in God, because one can get the same infinite expected utility from other strategies besides the strategy of believing in God. I will show that while there's nothing technically wrong with the mixed strategy approach, rationality requires it to be applied in such a way that Pascal's Wager doesn't lose any (...) force. (shrink)

Monotheism is a product of abstract thought. Although it does not exactly overlap with the view of God in today's monotheistic religious beliefs, the thought of God in Ancient Greek philosophy, that is, the creative thought other than the creature, found its cores in Plato's Demiurge [Dēmiourgos], and this thought continued to develop with Aristotle, Plotinus and St Augustine. Thus, it can be said that the Christian faith, which includes the Jewish religion in terms of belief and Greek philosophy in (...) terms of thought, easily managed to gain a place in the medieval world of thought. With the effort to rationalize and ground the Christian faith, philosophy has become an end rather than a means on this path. -/- The translation of Aristotle's logical works (by Boethius) at the beginning of the 6th century gave an important impetus to the grounding of knowledge in sacred texts. However, the real influence of Aristotle occurred after the 13th century. The Crusades (1096-1272) and the Islamic world known through trade played an important role in this because the developments in Western Philosophy until the 13th century were largely based on translations and commentary texts in the Islamic world. In the Middle Ages, the person who was seen as the best commentator of Aristotle and who took the title of "commentator" [Shareh] was Averroes (1126-1198), who was also a member of this productive Islamic world of thought. He is known as the "commentator" because he interpreted Aristotle's works by adhering to his teachings. It is also said that Averroes pioneered Aristotle's recognition by westerners. Averroes’ commentaries are divided into three as long, middle, and short. In long commentaries, he blends Aristotle's philosophy with his own thoughts; he interprets Aristotle's philosophy in the middle commentaries; in short commentaries, he gives a summary of Aristotle's thoughts. -/- Aristotle's philosophy played an active role in shaping the thought system of Averroes. So much so that his epistemology is largely similar to Aristotle's epistemology: The source of knowledge, knowledge of knowledge with causes, the processes of the formation of human knowledge, etc. Here, a point where he differs from Aristotle is the source of knowledge, since he is an Islamic thinker. According to Averroes, God is the source and cause of things, and things are the source and cause of human knowledge. The formation of human knowledge consists of three stages: outer sense, inner sense, and mind. Another important issue of his epistemology, apart from the knowledge produced by man and the knowledge of God, is causality. Through causality, knowledge is formed, and since causality is continuous and necessary, this situation brings order with it. This ensures that the information is verified and thus genuine information is obtained. -/- Averroes’ understanding of ontology is in harmony with the teachings of Islam. He mainly talks about the relationship between philosophy and religion and thinks that these two actually talk about the same reality. He explains that philosophy and religion seem to conflict with the fact that the holy book has two meanings, visible and hidden. Thus, philosophy and religion do not actually conflict and do not say contradictory things. -/- Averroes, who followed Aristotle's way in terms of epistemology and ontology, took Plato as an example, not Aristotle, in his political philosophy for technical reasons. For this reason, his thoughts on state structuring are similar to Plato's The Republic [Politeia]. Averroes’ political philosophy is based on ethics. His thoughts on politics can be summarized with the basic concepts of happiness, justice, and equality. As in Plato and Aristotle, happiness is important for Averroes and the state is responsible for providing and protecting it. For this reason, it describes a virtuous city, and the virtue of justice is, in a sense, the condition of existence for all other virtues. -/- Averroes has been an important thinker for both the East and the West. He played a significant role in the efforts of the Middle Ages to reconcile religion and philosophy and became one of the names that the Western world benefited from most in establishing its bond with Greek thought. Averroes became famous as an Aristotelian commentator, but since he did not know Greek, he got to know Aristotle through translated works and wrote his comments on these translated works. Nevertheless, Aristotle's philosophy played an active role in shaping Averroes’ thought system, as he was an Aristotle commentator. (shrink)

Fundamental aspects of modern life owe their existence to the achievements of scientific reason. In other words, science is an integral element of the modern world and simultaneously the epitome of the rational nature of a technical culture that makes up the essence of the modern world. Without science, the modern world would lose its very nature and modern society its future. Right from the start, physics forms the core of European scientific development. It is the original paradigm of (...) science, the foundation of technology and a constitutive part of a rational culture. It will remain a model methodological discipline in the future and its strengths will be used fruitfully in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration. (shrink)

PLEASE NOTE: This is the corrected 2nd eBook edition, 2021. ●●●●● _Critique of Impure Reason_ has now also been published in a printed edition. To reduce the otherwise high price of this scholarly, technical book of nearly 900 pages and make it more widely available beyond university libraries to individual readers, the non-profit publisher and the author have agreed to issue the printed edition at cost. ●●●●● The printed edition was released on September 1, 2021 and is now available (...) through all booksellers, including Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and brick-and-mortar bookstores under ISBN 978-0-578-88646-6. ●●●●● In light of the length of this book, readers who would like to have a more detailed description of the book's objectives and method may find it helpful to read the detailed and clearly written Wikipedia entry about this work: From the Wikipedia search page, use the search phrase "Critique of Impure Reason". At least at the time of this writing (11/29/2021), the Wikipedia entry is well-researched and accurate. ●●●●● In addition, a "Primer on Bartlett's CRITIQUE OF IMPURE REASON" has been made available by the author. It is available under its title through PhilPapers and other philosophy online archives. ●●●●● COMMENDATIONS OF THIS WORK, from the back cover of the published edition: ●●●●● “I admire its range of philosophical vision.” – Nicholas Rescher, Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, author of more than 100 books. ●●●●● “Bartlett’s _Critique of Impure Reason_ is an impressive, bold, and ambitious work. Careful scholarship is balanced by original analyses that lead the reader to recognize the limits of meaning, knowledge, and conceptual possibility. The work addresses a host of traditional philosophical problems, among them the nature of space, time, causality, consciousness, the self, other minds, ontology, free will and determinism, and others. The book culminates in a fascinating and profound new understanding of relativity physics and quantum theory.” – Gerhard Preyer, Professor of Philosophy, Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, author of many books including _Concepts of Meaning_, _Beyond Semantics and Pragmatics_, _Intention and Practical Thought_, and _Contextualism in Philosophy_. ●●●●● “[This work’s] goal is of a unique and difficult species: Dr. Bartlett seeks to develop a formal logical calculus on the basis of transcendental philosophical arguments; in fact, he hopes that this calculus will be the formal expression of the transcendental foundation of knowledge.... I consider Dr. Bartlett’s work soundly conceived and executed with great skill.” – C. F. von Weizsäcker, philosopher and physicist, former Director, Max-Planck-Institute, Starnberg, Germany. ●●●●● “Bartlett has written an American “Prolegomena to All Future Metaphysics.” He aims rigorously to eliminate meaningless assertions, reach bedrock, and place philosophy on a firm foundation that will enable it, like science and mathematics, to produce lasting results that generations to come can build on. This is a great book, the fruit of a lifetime of research and reflection, and it deserves serious attention.” — Martin X. Moleski, former Professor, Canisius College, Buffalo, NY, studies of scientific method, the presuppositions of thought, and the self-referential nature of epistemology. ●●●●● “Bartlett has written a book on what might be called the underpinnings of philosophy. It has fascinating depth and breadth, and is all the more striking due to its unifying perspective based on the concepts of reference and self-reference.” – Don Perlis, Professor of Computer Science, University of Maryland, author of numerous publications on self-adjusting autonomous systems and philosophical issues concerning self-reference, mind, and consciousness. ●●●●● ●●●●● The _Critique of Impure Reason: Horizons of Possibility and Meaning_ comprises a major and important contribution to philosophy. Thanks to the generosity of its publisher, this massive 885-page volume has been published as a free open access eBook (3.75MB) as well as an open access printed edition. It inaugurates a revolutionary paradigm shift in philosophical thought by providing compelling and long-sought-for solutions to a wide range of philosophical problems. In the process, the work fundamentally transforms the way in which the concepts of reference, meaning, and possibility are understood. The book includes a Foreword by the celebrated German philosopher and physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. ●●●●● In Kant’s _Critique of Pure Reason_ we find an analysis of the preconditions of experience and of knowledge. In contrast, but yet in parallel, the new _Critique_ focuses upon the ways—unfortunately very widespread and often unselfconsciously habitual—in which many of the concepts that we employ _conflict_ with the very preconditions of meaning and of knowledge. ●●●●● This is a book about the boundaries of frameworks and about the unrecognized conceptual confusions in which we become entangled when we attempt to transgress beyond the limits of the possible and meaningful. We tend either not to recognize or not to accept that we all-too-often attempt to trespass beyond the boundaries of the frameworks that make knowledge possible and the world meaningful. ●●●●● The _Critique of Impure Reason_ proposes a bold, ground-breaking, and startling thesis: that a great many of the major philosophical problems of the past can be solved through the recognition of a viciously deceptive form of thinking to which philosophers as well as non-philosophers commonly fall victim. For the first time, the book advances and justifies the criticism that a substantial number of the questions that have occupied philosophers fall into the category of “impure reason,” violating the very conditions of their possible meaningfulness. ●●●●● The purpose of the study is twofold: first, to enable us to recognize the boundaries of what is referentially forbidden—the limits beyond which reference becomes meaningless—and second, to avoid falling victims to a certain broad class of conceptual confusions that lie at the heart of many major philosophical problems. As a consequence, the boundaries of _possible meaning_ are determined. ●●●●● Bartlett, the author or editor of more than 20 books, is responsible for identifying this widespread and delusion-inducing variety of error, _metalogical projection_. It is a previously unrecognized and insidious form of erroneous thinking that undermines its own possibility of meaning. It comes about as a result of the pervasive human compulsion to seek to transcend the limits of possible reference and meaning. ●●●●● Based on original research and rigorous analysis combined with extensive scholarship, the _Critique of Impure Reason_ develops a self-validating method that makes it possible to recognize, correct, and eliminate this major and pervasive form of fallacious thinking. In so doing, the book provides at last provable and constructive solutions to a wide range of major philosophical problems. ●●●●● CONTENTS AT A GLANCE ▪▪▪▪▪ Preface ▪▪▪▪▪ Foreword by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker ▪▪▪▪▪ Acknowledgments ▪▪▪▪▪ Avant-propos: A philosopher’s rallying call ▪▪▪▪▪ Introduction ▪▪▪▪▪ A note to the reader ▪▪▪▪▪ A note on conventions ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ PART I ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ WHY PHILOSOPHY HAS MADE NO PROGRESS AND HOW IT CAN ▪▪▪▪▪ 1 Philosophical-psychological prelude ▪▪▪▪▪ 2 Putting belief in its place: Its psychology and a needed polemic ▪▪▪▪▪ 3 Turning away from the linguistic turn: From theory of reference to metalogic of reference ▪▪▪▪▪ 4 The stepladder to maximum theoretical generality ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ PART II ▪▪▪▪▪ THE METALOGIC OF REFERENCE ▪▪▪▪▪ A New Approach to Deductive, Transcendental Philosophy ▪▪▪▪▪ 5 Reference, identity, and identification ▪▪▪▪▪ 6 Self-referential argument and the metalogic of reference ▪▪▪▪▪ 7 Possibility theory ▪▪▪▪▪ 8 Presupposition logic, reference, and identification ▪▪▪▪▪ 9 Transcendental argumentation and the metalogic of reference ▪▪▪▪▪ 10 Framework relativity ▪▪▪▪▪ 11 The metalogic of meaning ▪▪▪▪▪ 12 The problem of putative meaning and the logic of meaninglessness ▪▪▪▪▪ 13 Projection ▪▪▪▪▪ 14 Horizons ▪▪▪▪▪ 15 De-projection ▪▪▪▪▪ 16 Self-validation ▪▪▪▪▪ 17 Rationality: Rules of admissibility ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ PART III ▪▪▪▪▪ PHILOSOPHICAL APPLICATIONS OF THE METALOGIC OF REFERENCE ▪▪▪▪▪ Major Problems and Questions of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Science ▪▪▪▪▪ 18 Ontology and the metalogic of reference ▪▪▪▪▪ 19 Discovery or invention in general problem-solving, mathematics, and physics ▪▪▪▪▪ 20 The conceptually unreachable: “The far side” ▪▪▪▪▪ 21 The projections of the external world, things-in-themselves, other minds, realism, and idealism ▪▪▪▪▪ 22 The projections of time, space, and space-time ▪▪▪▪▪ 23 The projections of causality, determinism, and free will ▪▪▪▪▪ 24 Projections of the self and of solipsism ▪▪▪▪▪ 25 Non-relational, agentless reference and referential fields ▪▪▪▪▪ 26 Relativity physics as seen through the lens of the metalogic of reference ▪▪▪▪▪ 27 Quantum theory as seen through the lens of the metalogic of reference ▪▪▪▪▪ 28 Epistemological lessons learned from and applicable to relativity physics and quantum theory ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ PART IV ▪▪▪▪▪ HORIZONS ▪▪▪▪▪ 29 Beyond belief ▪▪▪▪▪ 30 _Critique of Impure Reason_: Its results in retrospect ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ SUPPLEMENT ▪▪▪▪▪ The Formal Structure of the Metalogic of Reference ▪▪▪▪▪ APPENDIX I ▪▪▪▪▪ The Concept of Horizon in the Work of Other Philosophers ▪▪▪▪▪ APPENDIX II ▪▪▪▪▪ Epistemological Intelligence ▪▪▪▪▪ References ▪▪▪▪▪ Index ▪▪▪▪▪ About the author. (shrink)

The work of Gaston Bachelard is known for two crucial concepts, that of the epistemological rupture and that of phenomenotechnique. A crucial question is, however, how these two concepts relate to one another. Are they in fact essentially connected or must they be seen as two separate elements of Bachelard’s thinking? This paper aims to analyse the relation between these two Bachelardian moments and the significance of the concept of phenomenotechnique for today. This will be done by examining how the (...) concepts of Bachelard have been used from the 1960s on. From this historical perspective, one gets the impression that these two concepts are relatively independent from each other. The Althusserian school has exclusively focused on the concept of ‘epistemological break’, while scholars from Science & Technology Studies, such as Bruno Latour, seem to have only taken up the concept of phenomenotechnique. It in fact leads to two different models of how to think about science, namely the model of purification and the model of proliferation. The former starts from the idea that sciences are rational to the extent that they are purified and free from obstacles. Scientific objectivity, within this later model, is not achieved by eradicating all intermediaries, obstacles and distortions, but rather exactly by introducing as many relevant technical mediators as possible. Finally, such a strong distinction will be criticized and the argument will be made that both in Bachelard’s and Latour's thought both concepts are combined. This leads to a janus-headed view on science, where both the element of purification and the element of proliferation are combined. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the question of agency in spontaneous action via a phenomenology of musical improvisation, drawing on fieldwork conducted with large con- temporary improvising ensembles. I argue that musical improvisation is a form of ‘participatory sense-making’ in which musical decisions unfold via a feedback pro- cess with the evolving musical situation itself. I describe how musicians’ technical expertise is developed alongside a responsive expertise, and how these capacities complicate the sense in which habitual action can be (...) viewed as pre-conscious or ‘automatic.’ Nevertheless, I shall argue that the self-awareness required for expert improvisation does not amount to highly reflective deliberation, arguing instead that the practice of musical improvisation involves an exercise of practical rationality, akin to what Aristotle called phronēsis. Musical decisions – as an expressive form of sense-making – are guided by feelings of ‘rightness’ that are experienced directly and intuitively, responding to the norms and reasons that are embedded in the instruments, sounds, and practices of a particular (sub)culture. (shrink)

Given a subject so imbued with contention and conflicting theoretical stances, it is remarkable that automated instruments ever came to replace the human eye as sensitive arbiters of color specification. Yet, dramatic shifts in assumptions and practice did occur in the first half of the twentieth century. How and why was confidence transferred from careful observers to mechanized devices when the property being measured – color – had become so closely identified with human physiology and psychology? A fertile perspective on (...) the problem is via the history of science and technology, paying particular attention to social groups and disciplinary identity to determine how those factors affected their communities’ cognitive territory. There were both common and discordant threads motivating the various technical groups that took on the problems of measuring light and color from the late nineteenth century onwards, and leading them towards the development of appropriate instruments for themselves. The transition from visual to photoelectric methods could be portrayed as a natural evolution, replacing the eye by an alternative roviding more sensitivity and convenience – indeed, this is the conventional positivist view propounded by technical histories. However, the adoption of new measurement technologies seldom is simple, and frequently has a significant cultural component. Beneath this slide towards automation lay a raft of implicit assumptions about objectivity, the nature of the observer, the role of instruments, and the trade-offs between standardization and descriptive power. While espousing rational arguments for a physical detector of color, its proponents weighted their views with tacit considerations. The reassignment of trust from the eye to automated instruments was influenced as much by the historical context as by intellectual factors. I will argue that several distinct aspects were involved, which include the reductive view of color provided by the trichromatic theory; the impetus provided by its association with photometry; the expanding mood for a quantitative and objective approach to scientific observation; and, the pressures for commercial standardization. As suggested by these factors, there was another shift of authority at play: from one technical specialism to another. The regularization of color involved appropriation of the subject by a particular set of social interests: communities of physicists and engineers espousing a ‘physicalist’ interpretation, rather than psychologists and physiologists for whom color was conceived as a more complex phenomenon. Moreover, the sources for automated color measurement, and instrumentation for measuring color, were primarily from the industrial sphere rather than from academic science. To understand these shifts, then, this chapter explores differing views of the importance of observers, machines and automation. (shrink)

We live in an age of evidence-based healthcare, where the concept of evidence has been avidly and often uncritically embraced as a symbol of legitimacy, truth, and justice. By letting the evidence dictate healthcare decision making from the bedside to the policy level, the normative claims that inform decision making appear to be negotiated fairly—without subjectivity, prejudice, or bias. Thus, the term ‘‘evidence-based’’ is typically read in the health sciences as the empirically adequate standard of reasonable practice and a means (...) for increasing certainty. Supporters believe that evidence-based medicine (EBM) can introduce rational order to the deliberative processes of healthcare decision making. It is perhaps puzzling, then, to come across critical perspectives (typically arising from the humanities and the more theory-driven social sciences) raising concerns about a seeming technogovernance being introduced by this deferral to the evidence where power interests can be obfuscated by way of technical resolve. The critics holding this minority view argue that technological solutions to problems of knowledge and practice cannot replace medicine’s normative content. Against EBM’s democratic leanings toward transparency and accountability, medical criteria alone cannot decide valueladen ethically charged decisions. This paper attempts to explain and evaluate this important debate in the philosophy of medicine, focusing specifically on the dispute over 'evidence-based women's health'. (shrink)

Social networking technologies have become a ubiquitous framework for social interaction, serving to organise much of the individual’s social life. Such technological structuring affects not merely the individual’s psyche (as a psychotechnics), it also affects broader aspects of society (as a socio-technics). While social networking technologies may serve to transform society in positive ways, such technologies also have the potential to significantly encroach upon and (re) construct individual and cultural meaning in ways that must be investigated. Erich Fromm, who psychoanalytically (...) describes humans as a product of their society and the economic systems within that society, may provide insight into the influence of social networking technologies in contemporary society. He sees the relationship between the individual and society as being in a constant state of dynamic change. Utilising Fromm’s psycho-societal insight, social networking technologies are shown to conflate and confuse the relation between Thanatos and Eros – the Thanatos of a lifeless and consumerist agenda-filled mechanisation, and the Eros associated with social engagement. Thanatos and Eros are tied together via social networking technologies. This results in, firstly, social networking technologies functioning predominantly to further capitalist agendas through the monetisation of these technologies – particularly in terms of linking commodity fetishism and the foundational social drive of the individual. Secondly, social networking technologies mechanise human action according to predictable behavioural paths through the use of these technologies, especially in terms of how socialisation is possible via these technologies (shaping how platonic and romantic relationships may take place in the contemporary world). Such a mechanisation of interpersonal engagement contrasts with Erich Fromm’s assertion that interpersonal relations (vis-à-vis love) are not “mere emotion”, but rather represent an interpersonal creative capacity and interplay. Fromm’s psycho-societal insights will show how contemporary individuals may take independent and responsible rational action to establish accountable and psychologically beneficial ways of engaging with others through social networking technologies. (shrink)

The notion of habit used in neuroscience is an inheritance from a particular theoretical origin, whose main source is William James. Thus, habits have been characterized as rigid, automatic, unconscious, and opposed to goal-directed actions. This analysis leaves unexplained several aspects of human behavior and cognition where habits are of great importance. We intend to demonstrate the utility that another philosophical conception of habit, the Aristotelian, may have for neuroscientific research. We first summarize the current notion of habit in neuroscience, (...) its philosophical inspiration and the problems that arise from it, mostly centered on the sharp distinction between goal-directed actions and habitual behavior. We then introduce the Aristotelian view and we compare it with that of William James. For Aristotle, a habit is an acquired disposition to perform certain types of action. If this disposition involves an enhanced cognitive control of actions, it can be considered a “habit-as-learning”. The current view of habit in neuroscience, which lacks cognitive control and we term “habit-as-routine”, is also covered by the Aristotelian conception. He classifies habits into three categories: (1) theoretical, or the retention of learning understood as “knowing that x is so”; (2) behavioral, through which the agent achieves a rational control of emotion-permeated behavior (“knowing how to behave”); and (3) technical or learned skills (“knowing how to make or to do”). Finally, we propose new areas of research where this “novel” conception of habit could serve as a framework concept, from the cognitive enrichment of actions to the role of habits in pathological conditions. In all, this contribution may shed light on the understanding of habits as an important feature of human action. Habits, viewed as a cognitive enrichment of behavior, are a crucial resource for understanding human learning and behavioral plasticity. (shrink)

Unlike other classical arguments for the existence of God, Pascal’s Wager provides a pragmatic rationale for theistic belief. Its most popular version says that it is rationally mandatory to choose a way of life that seeks to cultivate belief in God because this is the option of maximum expected utility. Despite its initial attractiveness, this long-standing argument has been subject to various criticisms by many philosophers. What is less discussed, however, is the rationality of this choice in situations where (...) the decision-makers are confronted with greater uncertainty. In this paper, I examine the imprecise version of Pascal’s Wager: those scenarios where an agent’s credence that God exists is imprecise or vague rather than precise. After introducing some technical background on imprecise probabilities, I apply five different principles for decision-making to two cases of state uncertainty. In the final part of the paper, I argue that it is not rationally permitted to include zero as the lower probability of God’s existence. Although the conditions for what makes an act uniquely optimal vary significantly across those principles, I also show how the option of wagering for God can defeat any mixed strategy under two distinct interpretations of salvation. (shrink)

Martin Ebeling argues that a popular theory in the epistemology of disagreement--conciliationism--supports an egalitarian approach to politics. This view is mistaken for two reasons. First, even if political parties have the epistemic value that Ebeling claims, voters should not regard each other as epistemic peers--which conciliationism requires that they do. The American electorate is strikingly heterogeneous in both its knowledgeability and its rationality, and so the necessary epistemic parity relation does not hold. Second, for technical reasons, the beliefs (...) that a rational voter arrives at after conciliating with his peers do not, in general, accord with the results of egalitarian decision procedures. As its theory currently stands, the epistemology of disagreement does not support egalitarian politics. (shrink)

I intend to: a) clarify the origins and de facto meanings of the term relativism; b) reconstruct the reasons for the birth of the thesis named “cultural relativism”; d) reconstruct ethical implications of the above thesis; c) revisit the recent discussion between universalists and particularists in the light of the idea of cultural relativism.. -/- 1.Prescriptive Moral Relativism: “everybody is justified in acting in the way imposed by criteria accepted by the group he belongs to”. Universalism: there are at least (...) some judgments which are valid inter-culturally Absolutism: there are at least some particular prescriptions which are valid without exception everywhere and always -/- 2. The traditional proof of prescriptive moral relativism: the argument from variability: Judgments, rules, and shared values are de facto variable in time and space. The traditional counter-proof: examples of variability do not prove what skeptics contend. -/- 3. Pre-history of the doctrine -Ancient sophists: either immoralist or contractualist -Modern moral scepticism (xvii c.): variability as an historical and ethnographic fact supports a sceptical conclusion more moderate than sheer immoralism. - Voltaire, Kant, Reid counter-attack pointing at a universally shared moral sense - Romantics and idealists stage an even more moderate reformulation: instead of universally shared moral sense they point at the Spirit of a People which is: a)alternative to abstract and universal philosophical systems as far as it is lived ‘culture’; b) indivisible unity with an inner harmony and a source of normative standards; c) dynamic, in so far as it is a manifestation of the Spirit through the becoming of National cultures. -/- 4. The birth of Cultural Relativism and its ethical implications 4.1. The 18th c. doctrine was the noble savage (a non-historical doctrine: state of nature vs. social state) 4.2 Edward Tylor (1832-1817) and ethnocentric historicism Savage moral standards are real enough, but they are far and weaker than ours. 4.3 Boas and Malinowski and an holistic reaction to ethnocentric historicism -/- Franz Boas (1858-1942): a) Development of civilizations is not ruled by technical progress nor does it follow a one-way path; instead there are parallel developments (for ex. Agriculture does not follow stock-raising); b) racial characters have no relevance in development of civilization; c) we are not yet in a position to compare externally identical kinds of behaviour till we have not yet understood beliefs and intentions laying at their roots (for ex.: “From an ethnological point of view murder cannot be considered as a single phenomenon”; d) we should distinguish among different practices which are only superficially similar (fro ex. practices traditionally classified under the label “tabù”); e) there is as a fact just one normative ethic, constant in its contents but varying in its extension; f) the implication is not that we cannot judge behavior by members of other groups; it is only a recommendation of caution. -/- Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942): a) against Tylor’s and Frazer’s “magpie” methodology, field-work is required, a culture as a whole should be observed from inside; individual elements are incomprehensible; b) a culture is an organic whole; c) its elements are accounted for by their function (economy), avoiding non-observables (empio-criticism). -/- Ruth Benedict and Melville Herskovitz identify Boas’s approach with “cultural relativism”. Benedict: what is normal and abnormal is to be judged on a culture’s own standards, not on our own (“Anthropology and the Abnormal”). Herskovits: “Boas adumbrates what we have come to call cultural relativism” (The Mind, p. 10); “Judgements are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation” (Man and his Works). -/- 4. How analytic philosophy understood and misunderstood the discussion 4.1. At the beginning of the 20th c., the new view in ethics was non-cognitivism (emotivist and subjectivist). Eric Westermark combines this view with an old-style ethnographic approach in support of relativity of moralities. Moralities are codes, or systems of emotive ‘disinterested’ reactions selected by evolution on their usefulness in terms of survival value for the society that is the carrier of such systems or codes. The moral relativity thesis: there are cases of disagreement that cannot be settled even after agreement about facts. 4.2 Anti-realists Brandt, Mackie, Gilbert, Harman adopt Westermark’s approach in a more sophisticated version: a) moralities are codes with an overall function and may be appraised only as wholes; b) variability is an argument for moral subjectivism; c) apparent legitimacy of deriving shift from ought is legitimized only within one institution d) morality should not be described but instead made, and existing moralities may be improved. Is it ‘real’ relativism? It is clearly subjectivism (a metaethical thesis). The normative thesis is that there better and worse codes, and survival values is the normative standard. -/- 4.3 Particularists MacIntyre, Sandel, Taylor, Wiggins, McDowell ‘Wittgensteinian’ prospectivist arguments bent to support weak-relativist claims MacIntyre: there is ‘incommensurability’ between different theoretical systems in both science and ethics. No argument is possible through different systems Different traditions may coexist for a long time without being able to bring their conflicts to a rational solution. -/- 4.4 Kantian universalists Baier, Gewirth, Rawls, Apel, Habermas Shared claim: justice concerns the right and is universal in so far as it may be based on minimal assumptions Other virtues are relative to context in so far as they are related to comprehensive views of the good - O’Neill criticism: a) it is an assumption shared by both alignments; b) after an alleged crisis brought about by alleged loss of metaphysical certainties, theories of justice have dropped demanding assumptions and kept universalism, virtue theories have kept demanding assumptions and dropped universalism; c) the opposition of virtue and justice has arisen in an unjustified way. O’Neill’s positive proposal: ‘constructive’ procedures may be adopted both (i) concerning all the range of virtues and (ii) across cultures once we abandon idealization and confine ourselves to abstraction from real-world cases. -/- 4.5 A metaethical relativist and anti-relativist normative ethicists: Bernard Williams Williams: vulgar relativism may be assumed to claim that: a) 'just' means 'just in a given society'; b) 'just in a given society' is to be understood in functionalist sense; c) it is wrong for one society’s members to condemn another society’s values. It is inconsistent since in (c) uses ‘just’ in a non-relative way that has been excluded in (a). William’s positive proposal: i) keep a number of substantive or thick ethical concepts that will be different in space and time; ii) admit that public choices are to be legitimized through recourse to more abstract procedures and relying on more thin ethical concepts. -/- 5. Critical remarks 5.1 The only real relativism available is ‘vulgar’ relativism (Westermark?) 5.2. Descriptive universalism (or absolutism) has a long pedigree, from Cicero on, reaching Boas himself but it is useless as an answer to normative questions 5.3. Twentieth-century philosophical discussion seems to discuss an ad hoc doctrine reconstructed by assembling obsolete philosophical ideas but ignoring the real theory of cultural relativism as formulated by anthropologists. -/- 6. A distinction between ethoi and ethical theories as a way out of confusions a)There are systems of conventions de facto existing. These may be studies from outside as phenomena or facts. b)There is moral argument and this, when studies from outside, is a fact, but this does not influence in any degree the possible validity of claims advanced. c) the difference between the above claims and Mackie’s criticism to Searle’s argument of the promising game is that promises, arguments etc. are also phenomena, but they are also communicative phenomena with a logical and pragmatic structure. -/- 7.Conclusions: a) cultural relativism, as a name for Boas’s methodology is a valuable discovery, and in this sense we are all relativists; b) ethical relativism, as an alleged implication of cultural relativism, has been argued in a philosophically quite unsophisticated way by Benedict and Herskovits; philosophers apparently discussed ethical relativism in the basis of a rather faint impression of what cultural relativism had been. c) a full-fledged ethical relativism has hardly been defended by anybody among philosophers; virtually no modern philosopher really argued a prescriptive version of the thesis; d) we may accept the grain of truth in ethical relativism by including relativist critique to ethical absolutism into a universalist normative doctrine that be careful in separating open-textured formulations of universal claims from culturally conditioned particular prescriptions. -/- . (shrink)

Animals, the beautiful creatures of God in the Stoic and especially in Porphyry’s sense, need to be treated as rational. We know that the Stoics ask for justice for all rational beings, but there is no significant proclamation from their side that openly talks in favour of animal justice. They claim the rationality of animals but do not confer any rights to human beings. The later Neo-Platonist philosopher Porphyry magnificently deciphers this idea in his writing On Abstinence from Animal (...) Food. Aristotle’s successor Theophrastus thinks that both animals and humans are made up of the same tissues, and like a human, animals also have the same way of perception, reasoning and appetites. My next effort would be to decipher how Porphyry illustrates Theophrastus’ perspective not in the way (the technical theory of justice) the Stoics argued. Porphyry’s stance seems more humanistic that looks for the pertinent reasons for treating animal rights from the contention of justice that Aristotle, in his early writings, defied since animals can deal with reasons. The paper highlights how much we could justificatorily demand empathetic concern for animals from the outlook of the mentioned Greek thinkers and the modern animal rights thinkers as quasi-right of animals, even if my position undertakes the empathetic ground for animals in an undeserving humanitarian way. (shrink)

Current conceptions of meaning and culture tend toward extreme forms of disembodied abstraction, indicating an alienation from the original, earthy meaning of the word culture. I turn to the earlier meanings of the word and why the “cultic,” the living impulse to meaning, was and remains essential to a conception of culture as semeiosis or sign-action. Culture and biology are often treated by social scientists as though they were oil and water, not to be mixed. I am fully aware of (...) the assumed nature-culture dichotomy, but I reject it, not because I am a sociobiologist, quite the contrary, but rather because I am a semiotician, and my studies of signs have led me toward a critical reconstruction of the concepts of nature and culture. In my perspective, culture is a living, social metaboly of signs, not limited to a convention but in transaction with the inmost recesses of the person, and with the qualitative, physical, and significant environment. The question is not whether culture is a “system” or not, but whether we shall continue to conceive of culture as an inert, mechanical system or code, incapable of self-critical cultivation, or as a “living system”--a way of living--fully open to contingency, spontaneity, purposive growth and decay. Putting the “cult” back into culture requires a reconception of the relations between human biology and meaning, and between non-discursive, non-rational reason and modern rationality. Such a reconception involves considering how the technics of the biosocial human body itself form the primary source of culture. (shrink)

The use of evolutionary game theory to explain the evolution of human norms and the behavior of humans who act according to those norms is widespread. Both the aims and motivation for its use are clearly articulated by Harms and Skyrms (2008) in the following passage: "A good theory of evolution of norms might start by explaining the evolution of altruism in Prisoner’s Dilemma, of Stag Hunting, and of the equal split in the symmetric bargaining game. These are not well-explained (...) by classical game theory based on rational choice. From a technical point of view, they present different theoretical challenges. In the bargaining game, there are an infinite number of equilibria with no principled (rational choice) way to select the cooperative one. In Stag Hunt there are only two, but the non-cooperative one is selected by risk-dominance. In Prisoner’s Dilemma the state of mutual cooperation is not a Nash equilibrium at all, and cooperation flies in the face of the rational-choice principle that one does not choose less rather than more. In contrast to rational choice theory, the most common tool of evolutionary game theory is the replicator dynamics, in which the propagation rate of each strategy is determined by its current payoffs. These dynamics have a rationale in both biological and cultural evolutionary modeling, and sometimes tell us things that rational choice theory does not." We agree with the first sentence in this quotation: a good theory about the behavior under norms ought to explain altruism in the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD), playing Stag in Stag Hunt (SH), and offering equal splits in the symmetric Nash bargaining game (NB). We also agree with Harms and Skyrms about the difference in technical challenges each of these games poses. Finding a single mechanism, even one as broadly understood as evolution, that could solve these challenges en masse is no doubt a tall order. Nonetheless, in this paper, we present a single, simple, modification to SH, NB, and a general n-player PD that does just that: we introduce deontological autonomy into the models. (shrink)

The paper advances a new comprehensive complex approach to the investigation of the civilizational aspects in the development of regional associations of countries. The research starts with the overview of historical dimensions of the civilizational approach and the contribution of the founding scholars to its development. It continues with the analysis of the scientific and methodological input of the followers and the critics of this approach. The authors suggest their theoretical approach to the identification of the modern local civilizations according (...) to six parameters: natural, biological, technical, economic, social, and governing. The civilizational affiliation of countries and the civilizational structure of major 17 regional associations of countries are identified. The results demonstrate that some regional groups have been more homogeneous in terms of civilizational composition, others – less homogeneous, which does not interfere with their dynamic development. However, the logic of the historical dynamics of human development indicates the inevitability of changing the current situation through prolonged civilizational conflicts resulting in significant changes in the global social dynamics and the civilizational structure of the world and of regional associations of countries. The identification of the civilization structure of countries and regional associations contributes to the rational decision-making in the areas of international economic relations and to the formation of the integration/disintegration policies on the national and regional levels. It is predicted that from 2030 global social dynamics will undergo a fundamental breakthrough that will radically change the civilizational structure of the world and regional unions of countries. Methods. The research is based on the application of the systemic and historical approach, combined with the methods of analysis, synthesis, analogy, abstraction, generalization and method of individual expert assessment. Novelty of the research. The authors have identified the civilizational structure of countries using statistically available criteria for the six groups of factors, which allows to determine the homogeneity level of the major regional groups of countries. Practical significance. Identification of civilization structure of countries and regional associations creates the opportunity for adjusting national and subregional integration and disintegration policies. The aim of the study is to determine the civilizational structure of the regional associations of countries. To achieve this goal the following tasks are set and solved: –to analyze and optimize the existing approaches to the identification of local civilizations; –to identify the current state of the countries’ belonging to this or that civilization, their civilizational structure; –to reveal the civilizational structure of the major regional blocs. (shrink)

Purpose. Our study aims at developing a conceptual model of transdisciplinary synthesis of philosophical-anthropological, sociopolitical and epistemological aspects of co-evolution of the scientific and technical designs of High Hume class and the socio-cultural / political context in the process of anthropo-socio-cultural genesis. The relevance of the topic is justified by the technologization of all spheres of human existence and the emergence of High Hume class technologies, which can be called technology-driven equally. As a result, the concepts of "bio-power" and (...) "biopolitics" have become ones of the most frequently mentioned in modern philosophical and anthropological discourse and attract increasing attention of philosophers, sociologists, and, in the last decadecades, experts in the field of practical political science and economics (Foucault, Agamben, Žižek, Kebnik, Nadesan, etc.). Theoretical basis. It is problem-theoretical research; We synthesize the results of our publications in recent years. We proceed from the fact that the main question of the informational phase of the development of a technogenic civilization lies in the rationalization and technologization of the evolutionary process, i.e. in the removal of the fundamental ontological antinomy “Evolution versus Reasonable Design”, as a result for modern neoliberal political democracy, biopower and its theoretical understanding (biopolitics) are effective tools and technologies to form of optimal trends of the global evolutionary process, in the framework of this ideological system. We have chosen the comparative conceptual analysis combining with the results of the content analysis of Web publications by the main method of the study. Originality of the research is in the fact that the central core of such a model is the use of a conceptual and terminological apparatus for describing the mechanisms of the progressive evolution of complex systems, known as the “triple spiral” by Ledeisdorf-Itskovich. This allowed us to integrate the bio-power phenomenon into the general scheme of a stable evolutionary strategy of a technogenic civilization. The conclusions. We justified the transformation of biopolitics into the main factor in the global evolution of self-organizing human-sized systems, including the biosphere as a whole. This is achieved through the creation of a specific (bio) ethical system of imperatives and the activities of individuals in relation to themselves and other agents of social actions. Bioethics with a trail of associated conceptual areas (biosociology, bioeconomics, biohistory, etc.) turned out to be the only rationalized regulator of the process of biological and sociocultural evolution. The triple spiral biotechnology – bioeconomy – bioenergy as the material substance of the life of technological civilization is reflected in the ideal world as a triad of bioethics – biosociology – biopolitics. Both triads form closed cycles of evolutionary transformations that transmit and amplify the initial momentum of transformations on each other through a cascade mechanism with positive feedback. (shrink)