Many believe that paternalism is less wrong in intimate relationships. In this paper, we argue that this view cannot be justified by appeal to (i) beneficence, (ii) shared projects, (iii) vulnerability, (iv) epistemic access, (v) expressivism, or (vi) autonomy as nonalienation. We finally provide an error theory for why many may have believed that paternalism is less wrong in intimate relations.

This article tries to make sense of the concept of repetition in Søren Kierkegaard’s works. According to Kierkegaard repetition is a temporal movement of existence. What is repetition and what is its meaning for human existence? In answering this question the Danish philosopher depicts repetition by comparing three different approaches to life. Throughout the article I try to develop a coherent argument on ‘the new philosophical category’by analysing the three types of repetition and their corresponding human prototypes. I consider repetition (...) a key concept in summarizing Kierkegaard’s theory of existence, where existence pictures the becoming of the human-self that follows several stages. Constantin Constantius’s repetition is an unsuccessful attempt, an aesthetic expression of human-life. The young lover’s repetition is spiritual, albeit not yet authentic, religious, but more poetic, even if he regains his self. Only Job’s repetition is an authentic movement of existence, an expression of a spiritual trial and of genuine faith. (shrink)

This essay calls attention to an aspect of Confucius's notion of ren that has often been overlooked or even denied in much recent discussion of the topic. While the egalitarian aspect of ren, i.e., the idea that every human being has the potential to become a ren person, is frequently asserted, the leadership dimension of ren has for the most part been given short shrift. I argue that for Confucius, ren is the leadership virtue. This conclusion is mainly based on (...) a careful and systematic analysis of what may be called ?the definitional ren passages? and some ?elucidative ren passages? in the Analects. (shrink)

Passages from the recently excavated Guodian manuscripts bear a surprising resemblance to a position ascribed to Gaozi and his followers in the Mengzi at 6A4-5, namely that righteousness is “external.” Although such a resemblance has been noted, the philosophical implications of it for the debate between Gaozi and Mengzi and, by extension, for Mengzian ethics have been largely unexplored. I argue that a Guodian-inspired reading of 6A4-5 is one that takes the debate to be about whether standing in certain family (...) relations makes a difference to whether one’s actions are righteous. Gaozi denies that it does, holding the view that one’s family relations, i.e., relations internal to the household, are irrelevant when it comes to matters of righteousness, while Mengzi disagrees, arguing that all relational properties, including family relations, are just as much reason-giving properties for performing righteous actions as they are in the case of performing benevolent actions. I argue that such a Guodian-based reading provides us a simple, yet explanatorily powerful reading of 6A4-5 that has broader implications for Mengzian ethics and our understanding of the early Chinese intellectual milieu in general. (shrink)

This paper is a pastiche of the Lacanian philosopher Renata Salecl, my fourth attempt, combined with a note. In it I present a response I anticipate from analytic philosophy to the thesis that the signifier has priority over the signified: that this thesis is either trivially true or obviously false.

This paper contains my attempt to pastiche the Lacanian philosopher and social theorist Renata Salecl. The pastiche focuses on the effects of coronavirus on liberal societies, the invasion of Ukraine, and offers a definition which I think is of interest to analytic philosophy.

How can we explain why certain historically discriminated groups are under-represented in English-speaking analytic philosophy? I present a hypothesis which appeals to rules, rather than relying upon the social theories of Pierre Bourdieu. I do by means of an attempted pastiche of Renata Salecl, my third attempt.

Brief discussion of Niels Bohr's place in the history of philosophy (including his philosophical forebears, Søren Kierkegaard, Rasmus Nielsen, and Harald Høffding).

In this essay, I argue that Søren Kierkegaard’s oeuvre can be seen as a theater of ideas. This argument is developed in three steps. First, I will briefly introduce a theoretical framework for addressing the theatrical dimension of Kierkegaard’s works. This framework is based on a distinction between“performative writing strategies” and “categories of performativity.” As a second step, I will focus on Repetition: A Venture in Experimenting Psychology, by Constantin Constantius, one of the best examples of Kierkegaard’s innovative way of (...) doing philosophy. This strange and elusive book introduces the difficult and counter-intuitive notion of repetition. Repetition is a category of performativity that aims to activate the subjectivity of the reader. This performative effect is achieved by confronting the reader with an “unresolved”existential problem that is not yet drawn into clarity but is staged in all its confusions and contradictions. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Constantius relies here on a performative writing strategy that is animated by a dialectic of advance and withdrawal. In the last and third step, I will analyze Constantius’s own reflection on the performative dimension of his text. Constantius has left several clues behind, each of which suggests that he deliberately developed a performative writing strategy. (shrink)

Søren Kierkegaard’s influence on the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin has received relatively little attention from Bakhtin scholars (and hardly any attention from Bakhtin scholars in the English-speaking world). Yet, as I argue in this paper, Kierkegaard was among the most important formative influences on Bakhtin's work. This influence is most evident in Bakhtin's early ethical philosophy, but remains highly relevant in later periods. Reading Bakhtin as a follower and developer of Kierkegaard's fundamental philosophical insights provides us with a key to (...) the unity of Bakhtin's thought. (shrink)

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) conceived of himself as the Socrates of nineteenth century Copenhagen. Having devoted the bulk of his first major work, *The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates*, to the problem of the historical Socrates, Kierkegaard maintained at the end of his life that it is to Socrates that we must turn if we are to understand his own philosophical undertaking: "The only analogy I have before me is Socrates; my task is a Socratic (...) task." The overall aim of my dissertation is to examine and critically assess this claim, and ultimately to argue that the Socratic nature of Kierkegaard's endeavor finds its fullest expression in the activity and writings of one of his best-known literary creations, Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of *Philosophical Fragments* and *Concluding Unscientific Postscript*. The first part of my dissertation addresses Kierkegaard's own status as a Socratic figure. I examine Kierkegaard's claim that his refusal to call himself a Christian--in a context where it was the social norm to do so--is methodologically analogous to Socrates' stance of ignorance. I also consider how the use of a pseudonymous manner of writing allows Kierkegaard to employ a Socratic method. In the second part of my dissertation I focus on Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus and his claim that his contemporaries suffer from a peculiar kind of ethical and religious forgetfulness. I argue that Climacus adopts two Socratic stances in order to address this condition. In *Philosophical Fragments* he adopts the stance of someone who has intentionally "forgotten" the phenomenon of Christianity, whereas in the *Postscript* he adopts the stance of someone who openly declares that he is not a Christian. In the process, he develops a conception of philosophy that places a premium on self-restraint and an individual's ability to employ the first personal "I." As Climacus emerges as Kierkegaard's Socratic pseudonym par excellence, we obtain two significant results: a deeper understanding of Kierkegaard's conception of Socrates and Socratic method, and a compelling conception of philosophy rooted in Greek antiquity. (shrink)

This essay narrates what I have learned from Søren Kierkegaard & John Dewey about teaching philosophy. It consists of three sections: 1) a Deweyan pragmatist’s translation of Kierkegaard’s religious insights on Christianity, as a way of life, into ethical insights on philosophy, as a way of life; 2) a brief description of the introductory course that I teach most frequently: Ethics, Happiness, & The Good Life; and 3) an exploration of three spiritual exercises from the course: a) self-cultivation by means (...) of writing in an Ethics Notebook, b) an “existential experiment” in which we practice one of Aristotle’s virtues for a week, and c) a 15-hour service-learning component. (shrink)

This essay strikes new paths for investigating the politics of translation and the (non-) universality of the concept of “human rights” by engaging them in a critical dialogue. Part I of my essay argues that a truly universal concept would have available linguistic equivalents in all languages. On this basis, I develop translation into a tool for disproving the claim that the concept human rights is universal. An inaccurate claim to universality could be made to look valid, however, if one (...) culture dominates over others, and manages to impose its own concepts and exclude competitors. Part II explores how human rights, initially a modern Western concept, became more and more universalized as a result of the global reach of Western political and economic power. I attempt to shed new light on the subject by investigating the role of translation in bringing about the global hegemony of Western legal and political languages and concepts. Since translation always involves a choice of foregrounding one of the two languages and cultures involved, the translator is a power broker who can promote one voice at the expense of the other. My examples for conducting this investigation are the key contributions made by China and the West to the drafting of the UDHR: with ren and rights representing respectively the West and China’s proposed solutions to crimes against humanity in the immediate aftermath of World War II. While the concept rights became increasingly assimilated into the Chinese language along with her repeated defeats by colonial powers (and was already firmly established in the Chinese vocabulary by the time of the drafting of the UDHR), ren by contrast has never been included by any Western language and culture. (shrink)

In this essay, I advance a reading of Philosophical Crumbs or a Crumb of Philosophy, published by Søren Kierkegaard under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus. I argue that this book is animated by a poetics of self-incrimination. Climacus keeps accusing himself of having stolen his words from someone else. In this way, he deliberately adopts the identity of a thief as an incognito. To understand this poetics of self-incrimination, I analyze the hypothetical thought-project that Climacus develops in an attempt to show (...) what it means to go further than Socrates. In my reading, I distinguish between a Socratic and a non-Socratic conception of education, both of which rely on an incognito. Socrates takes on the maieutic incognito of an ignorant bystander in order to force his interlocutors to turn inward so that the truth that is already within them can be born. In contrast, the non-Socratic education that Climacus advances as a hypothesis relies on what I call ‘the incognito as a true form’. It is an incognito insofar as it confronts the pupils with a paradox on which the understanding runs aground. It is a true form insofar as its immediate appearance is not a disguise, but a true form. This indirect mode of communication is necessary, without it pupils will not be able to encounter a truth that is not inherent within them. Climacus’ poetics of self-incrimination, I argue, tries to repeat this indirect mode of communication by adopting the incognito of a thief as a true form. (shrink)

The point of psychotherapy has occasionally been associated with talk of ‘life’s meaning’. However, the literature on meaning in life written by contemporary philosophers has yet to be systematically applied to literature on the point of psychotherapy. My broad aim in this chapter is to indicate some plausible ways to merge these two tracks of material that have run in parallel up to now. More specifically, my hunch is that the connection between meaning as philosophers understand it and therapy as (...) psychotherapists ought to practice it is much closer than is suggested by the field of existential psychotherapy, which expressly addresses the topic of life’s meaning and appeals to ideas from classic philosophers such Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and the like. I instead proffer the claim that psychodynamic and humanistic therapy, clinical psychology, and counselling psychology as such, not a particular branch of them, are best understood as enterprises in search of meaning in life, in the way many present-day philosophers understand this phrase. In this chapter, I spell out what I mean by this bold hypothesis and provide some good reason to take it seriously. (shrink)

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Schlegel developed an influential theory of irony that anticipated some of the central concerns of postmodernity. His most vocal contemporary critic, the philosopher Hegel, sought to demonstrate that Schlegel’s theory of irony tacitly relied on certain problematic aspects of Fichte’s philosophy. While Schlegel’s theory of irony has generated seemingly endless commentary in recent critical discourse, Hegel’s critique of Schlegelian irony has gone neglected. This essay’s primary aim is to defend Hegel’s critique of (...) Schlegel by isolating irony’s underlying Fichtean epistemology. Drawing on Søren Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony in the final section of this essay, I argue that Hegel’s critique of irony can motivate a dialectical hermeneutics that offers a powerful alternative both to Paul de Man’s poststructuralist hermeneutics and to recent cultural-studies-oriented criticism that tends to reduce literary texts to sociohistorical epiphenomena. (shrink)

Max Weber, who was a well-known sociologist both of his own time and of today, has been one of the most influential names – besides, Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche - for Karl Jaspers, who is one of the original names that come into minds when the 20th-century existential philosophy is mentioned. In fact, it can easily be asserted that Weber had a huge personal role in Jaspers’ carrier as a philosopher. Karl Jaspers is known for his uniquely (...) discussed concepts such as freedom (Freiheit), communication (Kommunikation), Existenz, limit situations (Grenzsituationen), the encompassing (das Umgreifende), guilt (Schuld), and responsibility (Verantwortung). And it is obvious that Jaspers was affected by Weber considering his two specific concepts: guilt and responsibility. This is the case because Jaspers himself explains how and in what ways he was influenced by Weber. In this article, we will discuss Weber from the perspective of Jaspers. This discussion will be held in two aspects: i) personal features of Weber given by Jaspers, and ii) Weber’s effects on Jaspers from the viewpoint of Jaspers and what they share considering politics and ethics at the theoretical level. (shrink)

Is there, according to Bakhtin, such a thing as nobody’s or neutral words? Going over Bakhtin’s writings we might encounter an intriguing variety of answers to this question, ranging from a clear negative – there is no such thing – to a radical positive – all words are neutral, are “nobody’s” – and with a few other variants in between. This paper examines this puzzle both in its own right and from the perspective of what it can teach us about (...) reading Bakhtin’s texts. I propose that Bakhtin’s conception of language has remained stable (even if not quite unchanged) in works from all periods, and link this conception to his early ethical philosophy (with an emphasis on the influence of Søren Kierkegaard on it). Bakhtin is firmly committed to the position that nobody’s words exist only in the abstract world of theory, and not in language as we speak it. This description also pertains to his own writing, which I maintain should be approached with a view to how other people’s voices are manipulated in it, rather than in the more literal fashion, in which scholarly works are usually studied. (shrink)

abstract Postdiction effects are phenomena in which a stimulus influences the appearance of events taking place before it. In metacontrast masking, for instance, a masking stimulus can ren- der a target stimulus shown before the mask invisible. This and other postdiction effects have been considered incompatible with a simple explanation according to which (i) our perceptual experiences are delayed for only the time it takes for a distal stimulus to reach our sensory receptors and for our neural mechanisms to process (...) it, and (ii) the order in which the processing of stimuli is completed corresponds with the apparent temporal order of stimuli. As a result, the theories that account for more than a single postdiction effect reject at least one of these theses. This paper presents a new framework for the tim- ing of experiences—the non-linear latency difference view—in which the three most dis- cussed postdiction effects—apparent motion, the flash-lag effect, and metacontrast masking—can be accounted for while simultaneously holding theses (i) and (ii). This view is grounded in the local reentrant processes, which are known to have a crucial role in perception. Accordingly, the non-linear latency difference view is both more parsimonious and more empirically plausible than the competing theories, all of which remain largely silent about the neural implementation of the mechanisms they postulate. (shrink)

Classically, gratitude is a tri-polar construal, logically ordering a benefactor, a benefice, and a beneficiary in a favour-giving-receiving situation. Grammatically, the poles are distinguished and bound together by the prepositions ”to’ and ”for’; so I call this classic concept ”to-for’ gratitude. Classic religious gratitude follows this schema, with God as the benefactor. Such gratitude, when felt, is a religious experience, and a reliable readiness or ”habit’ of such construal is a religious virtue. However, atheists have sometimes felt an urge or (...) need for an analogous experience and virtue of gratitude, and theists sometimes feel intellectual discomfort with classical theistic gratitude on consideration of the misfortunes that characterize our life along with its blessings. In response, another conception of religious gratitude has been attempted, a construal that lacks the to-for structure. This paper probes the significance of the benefactor for gratitude, both secular and religious, and, with Søren Kierkegaard’s help, some features of the theology of classical religious gratitude that dissolve the problem of misfortunes. (shrink)

Manifold expressions of a particular critique appear throughout Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous corpus: for Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms faith is categorically not a first immediacy, and it is certainly not the first immediate, the annulment of which concludes the first movement of Hegelian philosophy. Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms make it clear that he holds the Hegelian dogmaticians responsible for the promulgation of this misconception, but when Kierkegaard’s journals and papers are consulted another transgressor emerges: the renowned anti-idealist F.D.E. Schleiermacher. I address the extent (...) to which this particular indictment is justified; over-against Gerhard Schreiber, I argue that this characterization of Schleiermacher’s view of religion is indeed a de facto critique. I begin by presenting and demonstrating the ubiquity of the phenomenon at the heart of Schleiermacher’s conception of perfect God-consciousness, then proceed to apply criticisms raised by Kierkegaardian pseudonyms Judge William, Vigilius Haufniensis, Johannes Climacus, and Anti-Climacus, supplemented with concerns raised by Kierkegaard himself, in order to demonstrate that these criticisms do indeed apply to and problematize Schleiermacher’s view. (shrink)

This essay analyzes two diverse interpretations of Christian love in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and Josiah Royce. Through the comparison of these two positions, I attempt to show not only the embeddedness of a conception of love in an entire theological vision but its usefulness as a lens for examining that position. I argue that Kierkegaard's interpretation of love tends to foster social inequality, a tendency rooted in his basic ontology. The Roycean view of love, resting upon a radically (...) different ontology, avoids such problematic ethical implications. (shrink)

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir diagnoses “woman” as the “lost sex,” torn between her individual autonomy and her “feminine destiny.” Becoming a “real woman” in patriarchal societies demands that women lose their authentic, autonomous selves to become the “inessential Other” for Man. To better understand this diagnosis and how women might refind themselves, I rehabilitate the influence of Søren Kierkegaard and his concept of repetition as what must be lost to be found again in Beauvoir’s account of freedom (...) and, specifically, the liberation of women. Beauvoir offers a dual account of repetition, that of mundane repetition and sacrificial repetition, bringing them to bear both on her diagnosis of women’s oppression and her theorization of our liberation. Sacrificial repetition becomes a temporality for freedom—one must be able to repeat or retake their autonomy continuously toward an open future. For this to happen concretely, Beauvoir insists that we must sacrifice the (racist, classist) patriarchal ideals of the “real woman” and “real man” as we retake our autonomy and reconfigure the meaning of sex difference anew. (shrink)

In light of Jacques Derrida’s writings on death and mourning, it may seem that the Christian teaching that the dead will be raised is a betrayal of others, a failure to take up one’s responsibility to testify to those who have died. In conversation with Emmanuel Falque’s work on finitude, Martin Heidegger’s reading of 1 Thessalonians, and Søren Kierkegaard’s reading of Abraham, I respond in two movements to this objection to faith that God will raise the dead. First, I propose (...) that even for the Christian, the death of the other remains a loss, since the Christian must surrender the other to God. It is, however, this very surrender of the other to God that seems to be an abdication of responsibility. Second, therefore, I argue that faith in the resurrection decenters the self and challenges our understanding of responsibility even more than does Derrida’s own analysis. Faith, I conclude, means giving up the desire to cling to one’s own responsibility. (shrink)

There are few institutions that talk about virtues as much as military organizations. These military virtues are not, however, possessed by individuals in isolation; they are inculcated and influenced by the countless ways in which values are shared, both among military members and between individuals and the military itself. Unfortunately, a normative framework that is extremely well-suited to capture this significant link between individual virtue and shared valuing, namely Confucian virtue theory, is too often underappreciated in militaries in general and (...) in military moral education in particular. Focusing on the normative significance of ritual and decorum, I analyze this shortcoming and consider how more explicitly incorporating Confucian virtue theory into military education could provide a sturdier foundation for the essential link between individual virtue and collective valuing. -/- Analyzing the Confucian the virtue of princispled ritual etiquette (li 禮), I demonstrate that while such attention to ritual might seem questionable when considering the classic rituals often used as examples, once the pervasive presence of military rituals becomes apparent, such attention to principled ritual etiquette begins to seem far less anachronistic. Analyzing principled ritual etiquette in relationship to righteousness (yi 義) and benevolence (ren 仁), I argue that Confucian virtue theory provides a significant and distinct way to analyze modern military virtues, concluding with an analysis of how that framework can highlight the significance of ritualistic behavior on virtue development without promoting excessive and corrosive subservience. -/- . (shrink)

‘...if you learn to think like Peter Cave – with freshness, humour, objectivity and penetration – you will have been amply rewarded.’ :::: Prof. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, University of Notre Dame __________________ Chapter Titles:>>> ___ 1 Lao Tzu: The Way to Tao >>> 2 Sappho: Lover >>> 3 Zeno of Elea: Tortoise Backer, Parmenidean Helper >>> 4 Gadfly: aka ‘Socrates’ >>> 5 Plato: Charioteer, Magnificent Footnote Inspirer – ‘Nobody Does It Better’ >>> 6 Aristotle: Earth-Bound, Walking >>> 7 Epicurus: Gardener, Curing (...) the Soul, Ably Assisted by Lucretius >>> 8 Avicenna: Flying Man, Unifier >>> 9 Descartes: With Princess, With Queen >>> 10 Spinoza: God-Intoxicated Atheist >>> 11 Leibniz: Monad Man >>> 12 Bishop Berkeley, ‘That Paradoxical Irishman’: Immaterialist, Tar-Water Advocate >>> 13 David Hume: The Great Infidel or Le Bon David >>> 14 Kant: Duty Calls, Categorically >>> 15 Schopenhauer: Pessimism With Flute >>> 16 John Stuart Mill: Utility Man, With Harriet, Soul-Mate >>> 17 Søren Kierkegaard: Who? >>> 18 Karl Marx: Hegelian, Freedom-Fighter >>> 19 Lewis Carroll: Curiouser and Curiouser >>> 20 Nietzsche: God-Slaying Jester, Trans-Valuer >>>> 21 Bertrand Russell: Radical, Aristocrat >>> 22 G. E. Moore: Common-Sense Defender, Bloomsbury’s Sage >>> 23 Heidegger: Hyphenater >>> 24 Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialist, Novelist, French >>> 25 Simone Weil: Refuser and Would-Be Rescuer >>> 26 Simone de Beauvoir: Situated, Protester, Feminist >>> 27 Ludwig Wittgenstein: Therapist >>> 28 Hannah Arendt: Controversialist, Journalist? >>> 29 Iris Murdoch: Attender >>> 30 Samuel Beckett: Not I >>>. (shrink)

Mengzi maintained that both benevolence (ren 仁) and rightness (yi 義) are naturally-given in human nature. This view has occupied a dominant place in Confucian intellectual history. In Mencius 6A, Mengzi's interlocutor, Gaozi, contests this view, arguing that rightness is determined by (doing what is fitting, in line with) external circumstances. I discuss here some passages from the excavated Guodian texts, which lend weight to Gaozi's view. The texts reveal nuanced considerations of relational proximity and its limits, setting up requirements (...) for moral action in scenarios where relational ties do not play a motivational role. I set out yi's complexity in these discussions, highlighting its implications for (i) the nei-wai debate; (ii) the notion of yi as "rightness," or doing the right thing; and (iii) how we can understand the connection between virtue and right action in these early Confucian debates. This material from the excavated texts not only provides new perspectives on a longstanding investigation of human nature and morality, it also challenges prevailing views on Warring States Confucian intellectual history. In the well-known debate between Mengzi and Gaozi in Mencius 6A, Mengzi maintained that both ren and yi are naturally-given 1 in human nature. The figure 1 To say that ren and yi are naturally-given is not to say that they are fully-developed from the start. I use the phrase "naturally-given" throughout the paper to indicate where a particular capacity or resource (ren or yi) may be found, rather than its final polished state. (shrink)

Nineteenth century Christian thought about self and relationality was stamped by the reception of Kant’s groundbreaking revision to the Cartesian cogito. For René Descartes (1596-1650), the self is a thinking thing (res cogitans), a simple substance retaining its unity and identity over time. For Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), on the other hand, consciousness is not a substance but an ongoing activity having a double constitution, or two moments: first, the original activity of consciousness, what Kant would call original apperception, and second, (...) the reflected self, the “I think” as object of reflection. Both are essential to the possibility of an awareness of a unified experience. Such an awareness is achieved only insofar as the self is capable of reflecting on its activity of thinking. As such, the possibility of self-consciousness, or the capacity to reflect on one’s own acts of thought is essential to the constitution of the self. This new model of the mind became the starting point to the thought of central 19th century figures such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), J. G. Fichte (1762-1814), Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). This chapter will explore their reception of Kant’s model of self-consciousness, the controversies surrounding its development and exposition, and the advantages of this model for theological reflection. The idea of mind as essentially capable of reflection provided an account of how the self can stand in an ontologically immediate relation to God constitutive of the self, while at the same time allowing that the self’s consciousness of itself is distinct from this original moment, so that a limited or false consciousness of self is possible. As such the task of the self is to recognize (that is, to realize in and through self-consciousness) who it most truly is, both in relation to God, and in relation to self and other. (shrink)

We may correctly say that Søren Kierkegaard is one of the most influential Christian-religious thinkers of the modern era, but are we equally justified in categorizing his writings as foundationally religious? This paper challenges a prevailing exclusive-theological interpretation that contends that Kierkegaard principally writes from a Christian dogmatic viewpoint. I argue that Kierkegaard’s religion is better understood as an outcome of his philosophical analysis of human nature. Conclusively, we should appreciate Kierkegaard first as a philosopher, whose aim is the explication (...) of human subjectivity, and not primarily as an orator of Christian orthodoxy. (shrink)

1 Introduction1 In the 1980s, hermeneutics was often incorporated into deconstructionism and literary theory. Rather than focus on authorial intentions, the nature of writing itself including codes used to construct meaning, socio-economic contexts and inequalities of power,2 Gadamer introduced a different perspective; the interplay between effects of history on a reader’s understanding and the tradition(s) handed down in writing. This interplay in which a reader’s prejudices are called into question and modified by the text in a fusion of understanding and (...) topic revitalized the study of the printed word. Gadamer’s turn to language for understanding the meaning of Being also appealed to the post-modern antipathy toward modernity and metaphysics.3 If the truth and validity of interpretations are limited to communities of language, then our mode of being in history cannot but be historical. This point of view rendered Gadamer’s phenomenological hermeneutics vulnerable to the critique of moral and epistemological relativism. However, Gadamer’s theory of interpretation also stems from re-examination of the beginning of knowledge in the Pre-Socratics and Plato, and on this basis, is receptive to another dimension of inquiry than that which was trending in North America. -/- At the East-West Center, University of Hawai’i at Manoa in 1982, Chung-ying Cheng for the first time introduced onto-hermeneutics to an audience of esteemed philosophers including Li Zehou, Ren Jiyu, Feng Youlan, and Zhang Liwen.4 In contrast to schools of deconstruction and literary theory that had disengaged the interpreter from trans-historical sources of meaning and truth, Cheng explained that interpreters exist within a cosmological order inextricable from responsibility to harmonize Heaven and Earth in creative acts of interpretation. By integrating Chinese cosmology into hermeneutics through ontology, he tacitly challenged philosophers in the West to re-examine assumptions about humanity’s place in nature and by implication, Gadamer’s recovery of the beginnings of knowledge in Western philosophy. -/- Cheng’s Neo-Confucianism is inspired by the method and goals of Thomé H. Fang. The following words by Fang seem to prefigure, although in an indistinct and bundled way, aspects of Cheng’s philosophy including a Mencian theory of human nature, comprehensive observation, and creativity: “In the very process of living in concord with creative Nature, Man is charged with an ideal to be fully realized in the light of the principle of comprehensive harmony.”5 Like Fang, Cheng reinvigorates Chinese culture and language, but not solely in order to vindicate the insights of Neo-Confucianism. He has studied Western thought, from pragmatism and the analytic school to German idealism and phenomenology, to unlock and clarify philosophical concepts within the Yijing tradition and thereby render them intelligible to Anglophones. The result has been an awakening of Western scholars to the moral and cultural consequences of decoupling their thought from metaphysical foundations that are neither dogmatic nor doctrinal. -/- Not unlike the dialectic of Gadamer’s dialogue form, onto-generative hermeneutics integrates contrary positions on the same topic in order to blend both sides into a world philosophy, or as Cheng says, a “totalizing or integrative theory,”6 not to be confused with a theoretical rewording of a theory. On the contrary, the universal scope and relevance of hermeneutics stems from personal experience. Just as Gadamer, in response to faction and strife, immersed himself in Plato during the war years, and developed a method with which to harmonize opposites, so too, according to On-cho Ng, was Cheng moved by faction, strife and political persecution to develop a path toward unity.7 Gadamer taught at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and Cheng at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa among other institutions in North America. They facilitated trans-continental educational and cultural ties. Similar experiences yield similar insights irrespective of differences of time and place. Hence, authors in this issue who reside in Europe, China and North America, delineate the differences between Gadamer and Cheng, yet also, in light of Cheng’s onto-generative method and cosmology, develop integrative theories. Due to the page-budget restriction of the publisher, certain articles of this special theme will be subsequently published in the next issue. -/- 2 Integrative Theory This special issue of The Journal of Chinese Philosophy confirms a dimension of hermeneutics that Cheng has both motivated and inspired. The contributors do not abide by the conviction that since thought is mediated by language, interpretations cannot transcend culture. On the contrary, their research exemplifies the fruits of trans-historical onto-dialogical hermeneutics within limits defined by their field inquiry, organized into Parts I and II, around three themes: language, the philosophy of history and ethics. -/- Andrew Fuyarchuk introduces the theme of ontology in relation to Gadamer’s turn to language. Fuyarchuk argues that Chung-ying Cheng’s criticism of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is informed by Heidegger’s concept of Dasein and thereby overlooks how Gadamer’s Platonic-Pythagorean problem of the division between the One and Many is harmonized in the event of language, which in turn positions Gadamer in proximity to the presupposed grounds of receptivity in Cheng’s onto-generative hermeneutics. Lauren Pfister’s contributing article addresses the year 2000 meeting between Cheng and Gadamer in Heidelberg and expands the transhistorical grounds of meaning in Gadamer to matters of theology. Pfister’s summary of the written Chinese record of their conversation indicates that Cheng does not address the role of Christian philosophy and hence, the role of the inner word in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. This is important not only for detecting changes in Cheng’s philosophical development, but also for modifying his hermeneutics along the lines of a living conversation, possibilities explored by Pfister in a sequel to the article submitted to this issue. Nevertheless, by raising the issue of how Gadamer’s turn to language for understanding the meaning of Being extends possibilities in Cheng’s thought, Pfister anticipates the article by Katarina Gajdosova. She returns to the roots of Chinese thought during the Warring States period and broadens the meaning of names in recently excavated texts. Contrary to the conventions about how to understand terms, she appeals to both Heidegger’s ontology and Cheng’s notion of receptivity and creativity to reinterpret naming in relation to cosmology. Along the same lines, insofar as the event of Being is lingual, Jay Goulding captures its emergent structure in an evolving community of scholars and scholarship. He recalls his philosophical journey toward Cheng’s philosophy that begins in conversations with Gadamer at McMaster University in Hamilton, leads to Heidegger and Asian thought, expands into turning points with teachers and colleagues from various backgrounds that by increments contributed to Goulding’s formulation of “Daoist phenomenology.” -/- Although differing traditions guide their inquiries and research, Cheng and Gadamer recall the wisdom of the past to ameliorate the fragmentation in contemporary life. This leads them to re-examine the origins of philosophy; historical roots and thus sources of creative re-interpretations East and West whose affinities are developed in contributions by Hyun Höchsmann and Friederike Assandri. Höchsmann assesses convergences and divergences in the origins of Chinese and Western philosophy (Confucius and Socrates, the Yijing and Pre-Socratics) that culminates in pairing Gadamer’s understanding of paideia in the context of Plato’s political cosmology in the Timaeus with moral and social cultivation in The Western Inscription. She delineates the limits of this comparison which in turn justifies introducing Vattimo’s notion of locality. Assandri’s comparative analysis moves between India and China, Buddhism and Tang Daoism. Based on Gadamer’s argument that writing detaches concepts from their cultural moorings, she defines and applies three levels of understanding in onto-generative hermeneutics to Buddhist terms that were assimilated into the Benji Jing and in so doing clarifies essential dimensions of Daoism. -/- Contributions by Stephen Palmquist and Nicholas Brasovan position Cheng in relation to Kant and Gadamer by way of Aristotle’s ethics respectively. On the one hand, Palmquist plots Cheng’s evolving criticism of Kant’s moral philosophy and draws on crucial dimensions of Gadamer’s hermeneutics to reposition that criticism in a constructive relation to Kant’s emphasis on the philosophical conditions of morality while also indicating how religious dimensions of his thought answer Cheng’s concerns for lived moral action. For Palmquist, Gadamer enables a constructive criticism of Cheng. On the other hand, Brasovan compares Cheng’s Yijing-based account of moral deliberation with Gadamer’s Aristotelian-based ethics and reasons that in contrast to Cheng, Gadamer’s hermeneutical consciousness is disengaged from practical knowledge. For Brasovan, Cheng is a constructive critic of Gadamer. Palmquist and Brasovan’s divergent angles on Gadamer and Cheng map onto a dialectic of contrast and complementarity that constitutes the inner logic of Cheng’s philosophy. In other words, Gadamer and Cheng ought to be read alongside one another for the sake of removing discrepancies and contradictions, which constitutes the organic structure of their thinking. -/- 3 Our Mode of Being in History Is Not Historical The conversations between Cheng and Gadamer in this issue of The Journal of Chinese Philosophy pivot on language, philosophy of history and ethics within a comparative framework of analysis, but also explore the grounds that make the comparisons possible. Those grounds are informed by Chinese cosmology, and function to wrest Gadamer from the shadow of Heideggerian facticity and reposition him within the range of Cheng’s ideas about our place in nature that is embedded in his question about how mind emerges from inorganic matter.8 -/- For Gadamer scholars of Heidegger, human finitude, our ownmost individuating death ensures that hermeneutics is always open to the other as other, always on the way toward understanding the meaning of Being. To arrest the process in a concept of “the Absolute” cannot but represent someone’s point of view, and thereby render hermeneutics indistinguishable from ideology. However, insofar as finitude is defined by them in terms of an onto-theological concept of immorality, finitude is a metaphysical concept consistent with epistemologies and confuse beings with the meaning of Being. As a result, the celebrated political value of hermeneutics to always be on the way toward an understanding of the meaning of Being admits subtle variations on the same worldview that are insufficiently self-critical. -/- Gadamer scholars of Heidegger are right. A transformation in ethos and opening to the meaning of Being depends on awareness of finitude. Yet this awareness does not yield openness to more of the same, i.e., discourse structurally incapable of coming to unity but instead, for both Gadamer and Cheng, openness to a distinctly different ontological dimension of reality. As Sandra Wawrytko and So-Seong Park indicate,9 this ontological dimension is prefigured in the experience of being-as-a-whole or the totality of all possible relations in both Chinese totemic shamanistic rituals,10 and Greek Dionysian festivals.11 Through these religious experiences human ethos and therefore consciousness is expanded and elevated from being centered on one’s ownmost concerns toward an affinity with all sentient beings from insects and plants to animals. The channel for this affinity is an auditory disposition and hence, the emotions, compassion, and feeling response. -/- The capacity for an auditory disposition, or as Gadamer calls it, listening consciousness to respond to the inter-relationality and therefore inherent balance of nature is developed through music, song and dance of the religious rituals and festivals. They facilitate the unity of mind with nature. This use of music, that transforms ordinary consciousness, explains Cheng’s emphasis on the receptivity of feeling response in comprehensive observation, and Gadamer’s emphasis on openness to the other in attunement. However, an auditory disposition characteristic of pre-literate oral cultures that reveals the “All” need not rely on religion. As theorists about the evolution of language have explained,12 modern languages preserve their pre-historical past in music or prosody. That is to say, the song and dance that revealed the totality of inter-related beings to an ethos of comprehensive observation and attunement toward beings in classical civilizations is retained in the back-and-forth movement or rhythm of the dialogue form. Our mode of being in history is a mode of being in nature – through the music of language. -/- While alerting the reader to the limits of a nominalist interpretation, Gadamer expresses the inner law of the nature as follows: “in perishing there is always becoming, and in becoming there is always perishing.”13 Considered in process, opposites generate and blend into each other. This law of nature applies to everything.14 Hence, in a manner comparable to Pfister’s concluding insights, onto-dialogical hermeneutics is not only open to discrete events of otherness but moreover, to the moving structure of reality expressed, as Gajdosova suggests, in the existential moment of naming. Considered as interplay of tension and resolution with a life of its own, the dialectic of a dialogue is self-similar to the way in which an organism grows (by instinct). There is, therefore, a sense in which the art of interpretation extends the human mind into the eternal cycles of nature such that we participate in the articulation of the inner telos/homeostasis toward which all beings strive and importantly for Gadamer scholars of Heidegger, within the material limits of energy to which our embodied minds are self-evidently subject. In mortality there is always immortality. (shrink)

Ölümcül Hastalık Umutsuzluk adlı eserinde umutsuzluğu, ben’in bir hastalığı ve kendine yönelen bir ilişkinin sonucu olarak ele alan Danimarkalı filozof Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, bu hastalığın kişide üç farklı şekilde görülebileceğini öne sürmüştür: “(a) bir ben’i olduğunun farkında olmayan umutsuz kişi, (b) kendisi olmak isteyen umutsuz kişi ve (c) kendisi olmak istemeyen umutsuz kişi.” Kierkegaard’a göre kendi ben’ininden kurtulmak isteyen kişi, “olmak istediği ben” hâline gelemediği için olduğu ben’ine katlanamamakta ve bu nedenle umutsuzluk yaşamaktadır. Bu çalışma kapsamında Kierkegaard’ın benlik ve umutsuzluk (...) ilişkisi üzerine yaptığı bu tespitin, sosyal psikoloji alanının önde gelen araştırmacılarından biri olan Edward Tory Higgins’ın Benlik Uyuşmazlıkları Kuramı üzerinden okunabileceği öngörülmektedir. Higgins, geliştirdiği kuramda çoklu bir benlik ayrımına gitmekte ve benliği gerçek benlik, ideal benlik ve olması gereken benlik olmak üzere üç alana ayırmaktadır. Bu ayrıma göre gerçek benlik, kişinin sahip olduğunu düşündüğü özelliklerin; ideal benlik, kişinin kendisi olmak için idealde sahip olmayı arzu ettiği özelliklerin; olması gereken benlik ise kişinin taşımak zorunda olduğunu düşündüğü özelliklerin bir bütününü temsil etmektedir. Söz konusu özellikler, kişinin kendi kişisel bakış açısına dayalı olabileceği gibi başkalarının bakış açısından da kaynaklanabilmektedir. Higgins’a göre ikili benlik durumları arasındaki uyuşmazlık (örneğin gerçek benlik-ideal benlik ya da gerçek benlik-olması gereken benlik) kişide, kendi beklentilerini ya da başkalarının beklentilerini karşılamada yetersiz kaldığı yönünde negatif duyuşlar yaratmaktadır. Bu duyuşlar arasında depresyonun bir parçası olan umutsuzluk da yer almaktadır. Şimdiki çalışma Kierkegaard’ın tasvir ettiği “olmak istediği ben hâline gelemediği için olduğu ben’ine katlanamayıp umutsuzluğa yakalanan” kişinin içinde bulunduğu durumu, Higgins’ın öne sürdüğü “gerçek benlik-ideal benlik uyuşmazlığının depresyonla (dolayısıyla umutsuzlukla) ilişkili olabileceği” argümanıyla ilişkili bir biçimde ele almayı ve bu yolla benlik ve umutsuzluk ilişkisini felsefe ve psikoloji disiplinlerinin kesişiminde incelemeyi amaçlamaktadır. (shrink)

Although Disney films are sometimes denigrated as popular or “low” art forms, this article argues that they often engage deeply with, and thereby communicate, significant moral truths. The capitalistic enterprise of contemporary modern cinema demands that cinematic moral pedagogy be sublimated into non-partisan forms, often by substituting secular proxies for otherwise divine or spiritual components. By adapting Søren Kierkegaard’s tripartite existential anthropology of the self, I analyze the subjective experiences of the protagonists in three recent animated fairy tales—Disney’s Frozen, Moana, (...) and Tangled—to demonstrate how these princess movies bridge the imaginative gap between the mundane and the divine. (shrink)

English title: The Reception of Søren Kierkegaard’s Thought in Józef Tischner’s Philosophy. The aim of this article is to indicate sources of Józef Tischner’s philosophical inspiration in Søren Kierkegaard’s texts. For Tischner Kierkegaard apperared as a great expert of human matters and as a exquisite, subtle romantic writer. In his refined use of metaphors Tischner searches material to describe a network of almost imperceptible connections of values, norms and customs, by which a human being is wrapped in his/her everyday life. (...) This network Tischener calls a „little axiology of everyday life”. He does not penetrate in all the structure of the very complicated existential philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, but using his quasi-fenomenological descriptions our philosopher performs his own analises in the sphere of philosophy of drama and philosophy of meeting. Tischner devotes a lot of attention to a phenomenon of existential dispair, and to a certain degree he has a dispute with Kierkegaard. In the last part of this article were indicated philosophical divergences of both philosophers, which have the source in different Christian profession and in historical differences of national cultures. (shrink)

This article looks at “faith-in” and what Jonathan Kvanvig calls the “belittler objection” by comparing Hegel’s and Kierkegaard’s interpretations of Abram (later known as Abraham). I first argue that Hegel’s treatment of Abram in Spirit of Christianity and its Fate is an objection to faith-in. Building on this with additional Hegelian texts, I argue that Hegel’s objection employs his social command account of morality. I then turn to Johannes de Silentio’s treatments of Abraham in Fear and Trembling and Søren Kierkegaard’s (...) Works of Love to argue that Kierkegaard defends faith-in as part of a moderate divine command account of moral knowledge. Finally, this article suggests that the belittler objection is ultimately an objection to faith-in as a divine command source of moral knowledge or obligation rather than social command. (shrink)

What are the freedom-relevant conditions necessary for someone to be a morally responsible person? I examine several key authors beginning with Harry Frankfurt that have contributed to this debate in recent years, and then look back to the writings or Søren Kierkegaard to provide a solution to the debate. In this project I investigate the claims of semi-compatibilism and argue that while its proponents have identified a fundamental question concerning free will and moral responsibility—namely, that the agential properties necessary for (...) moral responsibility ascriptions are found in scenarios where the agent acts on her own as opposed to her action resulting from freedom undermining external causes such as manipulation, phobias, etc.—they have failed to show that the freedom-relevant agential properties identified in those actual-sequence scenarios are compatible with causal determinism. My argument is that only a voluntarist-libertarian theory can adequately account for the kinds of cases that the semicompatibilist identify. I argue that there are three freedom-relevant conditions necessary for someone to be a morally responsible person: a hierarchical understanding of human desires [specifically and mental states generally], an incompatibilist (non-deterministic) understanding of human action, and a historical understanding of character development. The ability to reflect critically about one’s own desires and emotions, and thus to have a kind of self-knowledge and understanding with regard to the springs of one’s own actions, is required to make it possible for the agent to be the “source” of her own actions and character. The non-deterministic understanding of human action is needed for a similar reason: if determinism is true, then every action a person performs can be ultimately traced to and exhaustively explained in terms of factors outside the agent’s control, thus making the agent’s responsibility for his actions an illusion. And finally,human nature must be such that, over time, one’s choices leave a dispositional residue self-understanding and motivation in the person’s self, out of which, in mature understanding and motivation, the person acts as a fully responsible agent. (shrink)

In this review, I will focus on how William Irwin’s The Free Market Existentialist manages to take a broad definition of existentialism and narrow it into dogma. Such narrowing limits the appeal of this book and causes an interesting discussion to fall short of its promised goal: a demonstration that libertarianism is compatible, and perhaps a natural fit, with existentialism.

My aim in this paper is to explore how we might understand the relation of Deleuze’s early works to ethics, and to develop the connections between this way of understanding Deleuze and the work of Søren Kierkegaard. I will claim that we can view both figures as arguing that the sense or meaning we take from the world, and the metaphysical structure we ascribe to it, is secondary to an ethical stance we take in the face of a world of (...) becoming. As such, the central preoccupation of both Kierkegaard and Deleuze is how we make sense of an existence which is necessarily temporal. As we shall see, recognizing the importance of temporality involves a move away from the traditional resolution of the problem of sense that operates by making temporality an accidental aspect of a world. In the first half of this paper, I want to explore this claim in relation to Deleuze’s reading of Plato, tying his claim that Plato is essentially developing an ethical rather than metaphysical doctrine with the claim that “the task of modern philosophy has been defined: to overturn [renversement] Platonism” (DR 59). My emphasis in this section is how Deleuze, rather than “overturning” Platonism by simply rejecting the priority it gives to Forms or essences over appearances, the renversement of Deleuze’s reading inverts the relation to show how the search for essence is in fact grounded in an ethical decision, or “selection,” in the world of appearances/simulacra itself. As such, both Plato and Deleuze can be seen as presenting different trajectories for making sense of a world of becoming, either by grounding it in a transcendent, atemporal realm, or by seeing it as an intensive field of processes. In the second half, I will argue that Kierkegaard’s philosophy rests on a claim, similar to the one we find in Deleuze’s work, that we need to develop a logic of sense in response to a world of becoming. I will conclude that Deleuze’s reading of Kierkegaard is limited by a focus on the theological aspects of his thought, and that Kierkegaard provides a sophisticated and complementary taxonomy of the ways in which we try to make sense of our existence in a world of becoming by developing diverse ethical postures. (shrink)

"Kierkegaard’s output is vast and earlier, was not available in English. Had they been available then certainly [Edith] Stein, [Simone] Weil, [Hannah] Arendt, and [Susan] Neiman would have constructed their theodicies around Kierkegaard more fully, abandoning the charlatanism of Martin Heidegger’s Nazi histrionics. These Princeton hardbacks, handsomely bound, with appealing fonts and meticulous notes will help disseminate Kierkegaard’s writings to a broader audience." This is how this review focussed on Kierkegaard's theodicy sees the volume under review. The reviewer thanks the (...) Ramakrishna Mission for getting the hardcopy of this book to this reviewer who is a recluse in a non-glamorous backwater within Kolkata; India. If the Ramakrishna Mission weren't generous enough; then this reviewer would not have been able to get his hardcover copy. The review thanks the Ramakrishna Mission for getting the hardcopy of this book to this reviewer who is a recluse in a non-glamorous backwater within Kolkata; India. Indian lives too matter! First world scholars do not read what people like I write. They in their white hot rage take it as a given that our writings don't matter. But the Ramakrishna Mission will outlast this reviewer and hundred others who will come by. In this sense; this review matters and those named in this review which, at the cost of reiterating, will be remembered two hundred years hence. Even IVY League Presses do not have the resources to archive everything, come the looming COVID 19 recession. & as Dr Anthony Fauci honestly says over and over, COVID 19 is going nowhere. And Ebola is out of the Congo. So, there we go...Indian writers on European thinkers do matter and will matter. All said and done, it was great fun reviewing these volumes. Kierkegaard gets it dot on mark that Christianity, or for that matter, any religion is all about the mystery of suffering. (shrink)

Through an analysis of Kierkegaard’s and Dostoevsky’s approaches to the theme of the death of Christ – one of the major leitmotifs in the debate of their contemporaries conveyed through theological and philosophical considerations, but also expressed in novels and in art – I show how the thinkers comprehended and articulated in their works the religious challenges awaiting the modern man.

This paper aims at investigating the influence of biblical concepts on Søren Kierkegaard’s theory of stages. Starting with a terminological analysis on the term ‘stage’, in which several biblical references resound, I shed light on the typological structure which lies at the core of the three spheres of existence according to Kierkegaard: the aesthetic one (“first immediacy”), the ethical one (“infinite requirement”), and the religious one (“fulfillment”). Eventually, I show that a study of Kierkegaard’s biblical background can help to understand (...) the paradoxical transition from each stage to next one, which can be conceived as the ontological passage from not-being to being (creation/Adam), from being to not being (annihilating power of the law/Moses), and from not being to being again (new creation/Christ). (shrink)

Alison Assiter has put together a work that has the potential to create an exciting and stimulating debate in Kierkegaard circles. Mostly because she portrays Kierkegaard as an idealist ontologist, that is, a philosopher of not just human nature (i.e. subjectivity), but also nature in its cosmic totality. Thus, what I find most admirable is that with Assiter we have a thinker who has the philosophical courage to suggest that the purported relationship between Schelling and Kierkegaard leads necessarily to bold (...) philosophical consequences. Since Günther Figal’s 1980 article, Schelling und Kierkegaards Freiheitsbegriff, which gave us the first clue of the Kierkegaardian connection to Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift, scholars have primarily focused on reemphasizing the actual possibility of (the early) Schellingean heritage in Kierkegaard, meanwhile forgetting to ask themselves what consequences this connection might have on our interpretation of Kierkegaard’s corpus. Assiter’s book is an attempt to draw such a long needed consequence. (shrink)

A mysterious remark to Friedrich Waismann on 30 December 1929 marks the only occasion where Wittgenstein refers to both Heidegger and Kierkegaard. Yet although this has generated much controversy, little attention has been paid to the charge of nonsense that Wittgenstein here appears to bring against Heidegger; thus, the supporting argument that may be latent has not been unearthed. Through analysis of this remark, Wittgenstein's arguments in the Tractatus and 'A Lecture on Ethics', and Heidegger's account of anxiety (Angst) in (...) Being and Time, I argue that we can extract an argument against the central question of Heidegger's philosophy: the question of being. To understand this, I examine the Kierkegaardian ideas employed by Wittgenstein and Heidegger and attempt to show that this argument can be partly understood in Kierkegaardian terms. I further argue that examining what Heidegger means by 'being' (Sein) shows that Wittgenstein's argument does not meet its target. (shrink)

Antithetical desires displayed throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship indicate the disjunctive assumption that the individual exists either in a state of increasing autonomy, expressed negatively as striving for freedom from divine constraint, or in a state of self-annihilating submission, expressed positively in terms of kenotic unification. Proximity to the divine thereby entails forfeiture of individuality, contrary to the explicit aim of Kierkegaard’s authorial project, and aversion to materiality. This essay enunciates the conflict (I), traces the crescendo of loss that births the pseudonymous (...) authorship and ends in realized longing for death (II), and approaches a more holistic vision of psycho-spiritual development (III). (shrink)

In the debates regarding the ethics of human organoid biobanking, the locus of donor autonomy has been identified in processes of consent. The problem is that, by focusing on consent, biobanking processes preclude adequate engagement with donor autonomy because they are unable to adequately recognise or respond to factors that determine authentic choice. This is particularly problematic in biobanking contexts associated with organoid research or the clinical application of organoids because, given the probability of unforeseen and varying purposes for which (...) a donor’s organoids could be employed and given the different ways in which a donor can relate to her biospecimens, a donor can value her organoids differently in different contexts and her reasons for autonomously permitting use of her cells and tissues in one case may not support an autonomous decision in another. In response, this paper has three aims: firstly, to make the case for why organoid biobanks ought to respect donor autonomy conceived as authentic choice; secondly, to explore the autonomy-respecting limits of established and widely prevalent models of biobank consent; and thirdly, to propose certain conditions that organoid biobanks ought to support or facilitate in order to respect donor autonomy. (shrink)

The problem of other minds has a distinguished philosophical history stretching back more than two hundred years. Taken at face value, it is an epistemological question: it concerns how we can have knowledge of, or at least justified belief in, the existence of minds other than our own. In recent decades, philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists and primatologists have debated a related question: how we actually go about attributing mental states to others (regardless of whether we ever achieve knowledge or rational (...) justification in this domain). Until the mid-nineties, the latter debate – which sometimes goes under the name of the “mindreading” debate – was characterized by a fairly clear-cut opposition between two theoretical outlooks: “theory-theory” (TT) and “simulation theory” (ST). Theory-theorists typically argued that we attribute mental states to others on the basis of a “theory of mind” that is either constructed in early infancy and subsequently revised and modified (Gopnik 1996), or else is the result of maturation of innate mindreading “modules” (Baron-Cohen 1995). (shrink)

Phenomenology gives rise to certain ontological considerations that have far-reaching implications for standard conceptions of patient autonomy in medical ethics, and, as a result, the obligations of and to patients in clinical decision-making contexts. One such consideration is the phenomenological reduction in classical phenomenology, a core feature of which is the characterisation of our primary experiences as immediately and inherently meaningful. This paper builds on and extends the analyses of the phenomenological reduction in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty (...) in order to identify and explain its implications for our current understanding of the principle of respect for patient autonomy and the norms of clinical decision making. (shrink)

“Bodily autonomy” has received significant attention in bioethics, medical ethics, and medical law in terms of the general inviolability of a patient’s bodily sovereignty and the rights of patients to make choices (e.g., reproductive choices) that concern their own body. However, the role of the body in terms of how it can or does contribute to a patient’s capacity for, or exercises of their autonomy in clinical decision-making situations has not been explicitly addressed. The approach to autonomy in this paper (...) is aligned with traditional theories that conceive autonomy in terms of an individual’s capacities for, and exercises of rational reflection. However, at the same time, this paper extends these accounts by arguing that autonomy is, in part, embodied. Specifically, by drawing on phenomenological conceptions of the experience of autonomy, we argue that, in principle, the body is a necessary component of the capacity for autonomy. Secondly, through the presentation of two different cases, we highlight ways in which a patient’s body can contribute to the autonomy of treatment choices. Ultimately, we hope to encourage others to explore additional conditions under which a concept of embodied autonomy should be employed in medical decision making, how its underlying principles might be operationalised in clinical situations, and its consequences for approaches to patient autonomy in healthcare practice, policy, and law. (shrink)

The feeling (quale) brings the "Hard Problem" to philosophy of mind. Does the subjective feeling have a non-ignorable impact on Intelligence? If so, can the feeling be realized in Artificial Intelligence (AI)? To discuss the problems, we have to figure out what the feeling means, by giving a clear definition. In this paper, we primarily give some mainstream perspectives on the topic of the mind, especially the topic of the feeling (or qualia, subjective experience, etc.). Then, a definition of the (...) feeling is proposed through a thought experiment, the "semi-transparent room". The feeling, roughly to say, is defined as "a tendency of changing input representations by representing its inner state". Also, a formalized definition is given. The definition does not help to verify "having the feeling", but it helps to provide evidence. Based on the definition, we think these are the hard problems of intelligence — whether the "innate" feeling plays an important role in Intelligence, whether the difference between the "simulated" feeling and the "innate" feeling will have a significant influence on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and, if so, where the "innate" feeling comes from and how to make an artificial agent possess it. (shrink)