ABSTRACT The philosophical tradition approaches to morals have their grounds predominantly on metaphysical and theological concepts and theories. Among the traditional ethics concepts, the most prominent is the Divine Command Theory (DCT). As per the DCT, God gives moral foundations to the humankind by its creation and through Revelation. Morality and Divinity are inseparable since the most remote civilization. These concepts submerge in a theological framework and are largely accepted by most followers of the three Abrahamic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and (...) Islam: the greatest part of the human population. Holding faith and Revelation for its grounds, the Divine Command Theories are not strictly subject to the demonstration. The opponents to the Divine Command conception of morals, grounded in the impossibility of demonstration of its metaphysical and religious assumptions, have tried for many centuries (albeit unsuccessfully) to devalue its importance. They held the argument that it does not show material evidence and logical coherence and, for this reason, cannot be taken into account for scientific nor philosophical purposes. It is just a belief and, as so, should be understood. Besides these extreme oppositions, many other concepts contravene the Divine Command theories, in one or another way, in part or in full. Many philosophers and social scientists, from the classic Greek philosophy up to the present date, for instance, sustain that morality is only a construct, and thus culturally relative and culturally determined. However, this brings many other discussions and imposes the challenge to determine what is the meaning of culture, which elements of culture are morally determinant, and finally, what are the boundaries of such relativity. Moral determinists claim that everything related to human behavior, including morality, is determined, once free will does not exist. More recently, modern thinkers argued that there is a strict science of morality. However, the scientific method alone, despite explaining several facts and evidence, cannot enlighten the entire content and full meaning of ethics. Morals’ understanding requires a broader perception, and an agreement among philosophers, which they have never achieved. All of these questions have many different configurations depending on each philosophical strand, and start complex analysis and endless debates, as long as many of them are reciprocally conflictive. The universe and the atmosphere involving this thesis are the dominions of all these conceptual conflicts, observed from an objective and evolutionary standpoint. Irrespective of this circumstance and its intrinsic importance, however, these questions are far distant from the methodological approach of an analytical discussion on objective morals, what is, indeed, the aim and scope of this work. We should briefly revisit these prominent traditional theories because this thesis shelters a comparative study, and its assumptions at least differ profoundly from all traditional theories. Therefore, it becomes necessary offering direct and specific elements of comparison to the reader, for the right criticism, dispensing interruptive researches. However, even revisiting the traditional theories, for this comparative and critical exposure purpose, they will be kept by the side of our main concerns, as “aliena materia.” Irrespective of the validity of any or all of the elements of this discussion, and their meaning as the philosophical universe of this thesis, the purpose of this work is demonstrating and justifying the existence and meaning of prehistoric moral archetypes arisen directly from the very first social needs and efforts for survival. These archetypes are the definition of the essential foundation of ethics, its aggregation to the collective unconscious and corresponding logic organization and transmission to evolutionary stages of the human genome and different relations space-time, irrespective of any contemporary experience of the individuals. The system defined by these archetypes composes an evolutionary human social model. Is this a metaethical position? Yes, it is. Moreover, as in any metaethical reasoning, we should look carefully for the best and coherent routes, as the Analytical Philosophy offers them. Thus, this work should reasonably demonstrate that morals are not a cultural product of the civilized men or modern societies and that despite being subject to several cultural relative aggregations and subtractions, its essential foundations are archetypal and have never structurally changed. This reasoning induces that morality is an original attribute of the “homo sapiens”; it is not a property and nor an accident: it integrates the human essence and belongs to the realm of the ontological human identity. The human phenomena is a continuing process, playing its role between random determination and free will, and we need to question how morality began and how did it come to us in the present. (shrink)

Berkeley's doctrine of archetypes explains how God perceives and can have the same ideas as finite minds. His appeal of Christian neo-Platonism opens up a way to understand how the relation of mind, ideas, and their union is modeled on the Cappadocian church fathers' account of the persons of the trinity. This way of understanding Berkeley indicates why he, in contrast to Descartes or Locke, thinks that mind (spiritual substance) and ideas (the object of mind) cannot exist or be thought (...) of apart from one another. It also hints at why Gregory of Nyssa's immaterialism sounds so much like Berkeley's. (shrink)

In discussions of state surveillance, the values of privacy and security are often set against one another, and people often ask whether privacy is more important than national security.2 I will argue that in one sense privacy is more important than national security. Just what more important means is its own question, though, so I will be more precise. I will argue that national security rationales cannot by themselves justify some kinds of encroachments on individual privacy (including some kinds that (...) the United States has conducted). Specifically, I turn my attention to a recent, well publicized, and recently amended statute (section 215 of the USA Patriot Act3), a surveillance program based on that statute (the National Security Agency’s bulk metadata collection program), and a recent change to that statute that addresses some of the public controversy surrounding the surveillance program (the USA Freedom Act).4 That process (a statute enabling surveillance, a program abiding by that statute, a public controversy, and a change in the law) looks like a paradigm case of law working as it should; but I am not so sure. While the program was plausibly legal, I will argue that it was morally and legally unjustifiable. Specifically, I will argue that the interpretations of section 215 that supported the program violate what Jeremy Waldron calls “legal archetypes,”5 and that changes to the law illustrate one of the central features of legal archetypes and violation of legal archetypes. The paper proceeds as follows: I begin in Part 1 by setting out what I call the “basic argument” in favor of surveillance programs. This is strictly a moral argument about the conditions under which surveillance in the service of national security can be justified. In Part 2, I turn to section 215 and the bulk metadata surveillance program based on that section. I will argue that the program was plausibly legal, though based on an aggressive, envelope-pushing interpretation of the statute. I conclude Part 2 by describing the USA Freedom Act, which amends section 215 in important ways. In Part 3, I change tack. Rather than offering an argument for the conditions under which surveillance is justified (as in Part 1), I use the discussion of the legal interpretations underlying the metadata program to describe a key ambiguity in the basic argument, and to explain a distinct concern in the program. Specifically that it undermines a legal archetype. Moreover, while the USA Freedom Act does not violate legal archetypes, and hence meets a condition for justifiability, it helps illustrate why the bulk metadata program did violate archetypes. (shrink)

It is my goal in this paper to offer a strategy for translating universal statements about utopia into particular statements. This is accomplished by drawing out their implicit, temporally embedded, points of reference. Universal statements of the kind I find troublesome are those of the form ‘Utopia is x’, where ‘x’ can be anything from ‘the receding horizon’ to ‘the nation of the virtuous’. To such statements, I want to put the questions: ‘Which utopias?’; ‘In what sense?’; and ‘When was (...) that, is that, or will that be, the case for utopias?’ Through an exploration of these lines of questioning, I arrive at three archetypes of utopian theorizing which serve to provide the answers: namely, utopian historicism, utopian presentism, and utopian futurism. The employment of these archetypes temporally grounds statements about utopia in the past, present, or future, and thus forces discussion of discrete particulars instead of abstract universals with no meaningful referents. (shrink)

This paper aims to uncover some of the important contributions the phenomenological method can offer to philosophical issues in literary studies. It leads us to the idea that the archetypes found in fiction are intuited phenomenologically. This idea is then linked to a social constructive attainment of meaning for reality. From the intersubjectivity provided by phenomenology, empathy with characters in fiction is then displayed as more than an intellectual activity, as it becomes known to have practical implications. It is framed (...) as involving the same processes as the empathy we have with people in the real world. This equivalency allows for the plausibility of the notion that fiction-making is a necessary process for our interpretations of reality. It designates our involvement in fiction as beneficial to our experience of the real world and supports the notion it can train us to empathize. Such training is displayed to be posssible from phenomenology’s role in the process of empathy. Phenomenology's method de-centers the Cartesian ego to prevent any impasse between internal consciousness and the external world. Since they are bridged together by intentionality, we learn that phenomenology is a method that can contribute to how we conceive of empathy. (shrink)

The author interprets three stories from recently Neolithic cultures (Melanesian, African Bushman, and Inuit) and a fourth story from an oral tradition of Haitian women. All four are about women and perhaps, judging by their content, composed by women. The author trained with Edward Whitmont and developed his interpretation technique in decades of practice with dreams as a Jungian analyst. He adds a new tool, the use of repetition, in which the same point is made by a series of different (...) details. Repetition provides an internal test for the accuracy of an interpretation. The author updates Jung’s concept of archetypes to incorporate an understanding of Darwinian evolution (which Jung lacked), new knowledge of the function of genes, and new knowledge of the emergence of complexity in dynamic and adaptive systems. He compares his interpretations of the four stories with other scholars’ interpretations, in particular the extraordinary work of Michael Wessels on African Bushman legends. Though Wessels criticized Jung for imposing his ‘colonial’ theory of universal archetypes, both Jung and Wessels insisted that interpretation requires a dialogue between two agents in which both are subjects, neither being dominated or objectified. In the four stories, the author shows, symbolic consciousness began with women. The anthropologist Chris Knight proposed something similar in 1991 in his controversial book Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture. (shrink)

Les approches de la tradition philosophique de la morale reposent principalement sur des concepts et des théories métaphysiques et théologiques. Parmi les concepts éthiques traditionnels, le plus important est la théorie du commandement divin (DCT). Selon la DCT, Dieu donne des fondements moraux à l'humanité par sa création et par la Révélation. Morale et Divinité sont inséparables depuis la civilisation la plus lointaine. Ces concepts plongent dans un cadre théologique et sont principalement acceptés par la plupart des adeptes des trois (...) traditions abrahamiques : le judaïsme, le christianisme et l'islam : la partie la plus considérable de la population humaine. Tenant la foi et la Révélation pour ses fondements, les Théories du Commandement Divin ne sont pas strictement sujettes à la démonstration. Les opposants à la conception de la morale du Commandement divin, fondée sur l'impossibilité de démontrer ses présupposés métaphysiques et religieux, ont tenté pendant de nombreux siècles (mais sans succès) d'en dévaloriser l'importance. Ils ont soutenu l'argument selon lequel il ne montre pas de preuves matérielles et de cohérence logique et, pour cette raison, ne peut pas être considéré à des fins scientifiques ou philosophiques. Ce n'est qu'une croyance et, en tant que tel, doit être compris. Outre ces oppositions extrêmes, de nombreux autres concepts contreviennent aux théories du Commandement Divin, d'une manière ou d'une autre, en partie ou en totalité. (shrink)

John Locke’s claims about relations (such as cause and effect) and mixed modes (such as beauty and murder) have been controversial since the publication of the Essay. His earliest critics read him as a thoroughgoing anti-realist who denies that such things exist. More charitable readers have sought to read Locke’s claims away. Against both, I argue that Locke is making ontological claims, but that his views do not have the absurd consequences his defenders fear. By examining Locke’s texts, as well (...) as the intellectual context in which they were written, I show that Locke’s position is at once radical and thoroughly traditional. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to find a middle ground between the formalist critic, Vladimir Propp, and the psychoanalytic critic, Carl Jung. I argue that, instead of regarding Russian formalism and psychoanalysis as irreconcilable adversaries, the theories of the two figures can (and should) be unified; the result of which can be devised to establish a theory of what I call an ‘‘archetypal narrative’’. To be more explicit, Propp’s Morphology and Jung’s archetypal psychoanalysis are reconciled to bring about an archetypal (...) narrative theory, in which the underlying structure of narratives lies in the collective unconscious of humanity. (shrink)

The study examines the creative process using the logical and methodological analysis of Plato’s concepts. It presents the modern scientific research related directly or indirectly to his philosophical views (the structural analogy method, the theory of archetypes and fractals and many others). A number of modern studies and concepts, such as the theory of fractals, evolutionary epistemology, the concept of autopoiesis, and others, confirm Plato’s views on the structure of the world and creativity. For this reason, the authors define creativity (...) as the activity of a rational and social subject to produce a qualitatively new thing based on universal patterns of the fractal and archetype nature in accordance with the ideal. This activity needs in creativeness which is the state of love as a creative force arising from social interaction as a desire to create and expand space for life, connecting space inside the subject of creativity and outside it, creating a resonance between the creative self and other persons. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the attention paid to Prometheus by Goethe and Schlegel. Prometheus serves as an archetypal figure for Goethe, in particular, and as such the Titan can be viewed as a figure whose various appearances represent genuine metamorphoses or transformations of the archetype in much the same manner that Goethe takes the archetypes of leaf or vertebrae to function in the plant and animal kingdoms. Schlegel’s treatment of Prometheus takes the organic analogy even further. In his fragmentary (...) work Lucinde Schlegel exploits the metaphorical possibilities provided by plant life when thinking about not only the sessile structure of the text as a whole but indeed the internal literary devices capable of simulating the environmental impacts required for the flowering of the plot. The fact that Goethe and Schlegel deliberately leave their discussions in a fragmentary form is discussed in the final section of the essay in a manner that ties the open-ended quality of such productions to Gadamer’s discussion of the Vollzug or performative character of poetry and other works of art. (shrink)

I argue that Carl Jung's theory of archetypes is incompatible with the darwinian theory of evolution.

Jung’s individuation process, the central process of human development, relies heavily on several core philosophical and psychological ideas including the unconscious, complexes, the archetype of the Self, and the religious function of the psyche. While working to find empirical evidence of the psyche’s religious function, Jung studied a variety of subjects including the Eastern liberatory traditions of Buddhism and Patañjali’s Classical Yoga. In these traditions, Jung found substantiation of his ideas on psychospiritual development. Although Jung’s career in soul work (...) was lengthy, throughout, he aimed to steer clear of metaphysics. Patañjali’s metaphysics, on the other hand, are straightforward, and his ontological commitments are evident. Because Jung’s ontological commitments were not explicit, his theories, when seen through Patañjali’s lens, confuse ontological questions with epistemic issues. As a result, when comparing the Jungian and Patañjalian notions of the Self, Jung’s insightful ideas seem to be constructed upon a considerably shaky foundation. Yet, utilizing the exceptionally consistent ontological and epistemological commitments of Patañjali Yoga, as well as the objective measures of affective neuroscience, brings credence to the innate aspects and instinctual nature of Jung’s archetype of the Self, and assists in answering the question of whether the archetype is innate or emergent. (shrink)

Psychoanalytic self-psychology as outlined by such depth psychologists as Jung, Fordham, Winnicott and Kohut provide a framework for conceptualizing a relationship of complementarity between psychic and immune defence as well as loss of bodily and self integration in disease. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s thesis that the so-called “arrow of time” does not necessarily deal a mortal blow to its creator is reminiscent of the concept of timeless dimensions of the unconscious mind and the Self in Analytical Psychology, manifest for instance, in (...) dream content and archetypal symbols. These notions are not only consistent with the concepts of timelessness and meaningful coincidence (synchronicity) in psychoanalysis. They are also implicitly spiritual with intimations of a numinous dimension of the evolutionary process in which humanity participates. This includes the idea that an evolving God becomes conscious through and is completed by humankind in a process (Incarnational) theology which regards the numinous as both immanent and transcendent. And concepts of mind which transcend the individual in a transpersonal sense. The treatment of the psychophysical problem by depth psychologist Carl Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli with their notion of the unconscious archetypes as timeless, cosmic ordering and regulating principles creating a bridge between mind and matter in a relationship of complementarity is compatible with such a perspective on the numinous which might in turn be useful for contemporary theology and spirituality. (shrink)

The mystery of the images and an unknown book.

I argue a case for interpreting Yeats through the metaphysics of The Order of the Golden Dawn and the human/cosmic life cycle of their Rider-Waite tarot deck. In doing so, I will explain how the metaphysics of Indian and Egyptian sacred geometry inform his poetry, and his plays, in particular, ‘A Vision’ (1925) and ‘The Herne’s Egg’ (1938).

This work deconstructs the subjective experience, and identifies the role of empathy in experience as being capable of reconciling the mob mindedness that accompanies ideologies. The essence of the paper is to discuss and elucidate the societal impact of empathetic being, and the correlation with such states of being as an avenue for learning which identifies and interprets reality rather than realizing it. The idea is that by empathetically interpreting our experience and empathetically informing our modes of expression, one becomes (...) capable of interpreting universal archetypes. Much like what Plato described as being the difference between the sage and the philosopher. (shrink)

The emancipation of women has become a strong critical discourse in Bengali literature since the 19th century. Only since the second half of the 20th century, however, have female writers markedly stepped out of the shadow of their male colleagues, and the writings on women become more and more often articulated by women themselves. In this article, I focus on particular concepts of femininity in selected texts of two outstanding writers of different generations, a prose writer, and a woman poet: (...) Mahasweta Debi (b. 1926) and Mallika Sengupta (1960–2011). Analyzing Mahasweta’s female characters, I focus on the issue of the double marginalization of dalit tribal women; we can find here impacts of intersectional discrimination of class, gender and caste. Debi is very radical in her social criticism but is quite reluctant to accept the label of feminism. Mallika, on the other hand, represents a movement among the female writers of her generation that openly declares her support for feminist ideologies, which can be demonstrated on some of the examples referred to here. Another important strand of Mallika’s constructions of femininity are archetypal images — mythological metaphors of femininity (in the Hindu context) which may in some cases be interpreted in accordance with difference feminism, in others as a critique of the essentialized and dichotomous concepts of masculinity and femininity. While Mahasweta’s emancipation drive is more deeply grounded in her field research and journalistic activism in the tribal areas she writes about, Mallika’s has been more strongly linked with the academia and has joined the theoretical feminist discourse. Through a close reading the women’s emancipation discourse of these two protagonists in Bengali literature, we can speak of a shift from a practical, concrete criticism, to a theoretically founded radicalism. (shrink)

The paper aims to show that by abstracting from a specific mythical historical- stylistic context and “ideation” of the notion of the Proto-Slavic deities Perun and Veles, especially in Croatian tradition, symbolic archetypes and abstract notions of form and primordial matter (materia prima) can be extracted from mythical content. We refer to mythical texts and contents according to the reconstructions and materials brought by Radoslav Katičić, and comparative analysis by Mislav Ježić. We distinguish form (1) as that in which identity (...) and possibility of a thing consists, (2) as the reasonableness of judgment and the form of existence, and (3) as the specific structure of a thing, which unites its parts and aspects as a whole and constitutes its internal necessity. These formative notions are relativized and nullified in Veles’ appearances, in which the archetypal notion of primordial matter is encoded. Examples of Platō’s dialogues historically confirm certain aspects of decoding myth as constitutive of philosophy. The above approach also opens a view of the roots of Croatian philosophical thought, which in its genesis can be traced back to Proto-Slavic mythical archetypes. With the implementation of Christianity, the questions of identity, reason and the structure of the whole are raised radically and sharply, as shown by the text of Trpimir’s grant (852). (shrink)

Gaston Bachelard occupies a unique position in the history of European thinking. As a philosopher of science, he developed a profound interest in genres of the imagination, notably poetry and novels. While emphatically acknowledging the strength, precision and reliability of scientific knowledge compared to every-day experience, he saw literary phantasies as important supplementary sources of insight. Although he significantly influenced authors such as Lacan, Althusser, Foucault and others, while some of his key concepts are still widely used, his oeuvre tends (...) to be overlooked. And yet, as I will argue, Bachelard’s extended series of books opens up an intriguing perspective on contemporary science. First, I will point to a remarkable duality that runs through Bachelard’s oeuvre. His philosophy of science consists of two sub-oeuvres: a psychoanalysis of technoscience, complemented by a poetics of elementary imagination. I will point out how these two branches deal with complementary themes: technoscientific artefacts and literary fictions, two realms of human experience separated by an epistemological rupture. Whereas Bachelard’s work initially entails a panegyric in praise of scientific practice, he becomes increasingly intrigued by the imaginary and its basic images, such as the Mother Earth archetype. (shrink)

In this chapter, I investigate a problem for Kant’s claim that metaphysics can reach the status of science. The problem arises when one considers Kant’s account of the “architectonic unity” of metaphysics in the Architectonic of Pure Reason. Attaining architectonic unity is a condition for becoming a science for any body of cognitions that purports to be such. This is achieved when the cognitions belonging to a science are systematically organized according to the “idea of reason” which lies at the (...) basis of that science. However, Kant suggests that nobody can ever legitimately claim to have matched the idea of the philosopher, where this appears to imply that nobody can justifiably claim that she has fully grasped the idea of metaphysics. This generates a problem. I suggest that when Kant claims that the idea of the philosopher must remain an ideal or an archetype, he has a particular conception of philosophy in mind, that is, philosophy as a doctrine of wisdom. According to this understanding, philosophy must provide an example of how one can become virtuous. However, this is only a partial solution to our problem, for reasons that will be illustrated. (shrink)

As the title, The Entangled State of God and Humanity suggests, this lecture dispenses with the pre-Copernican, patriarchal, anthropomorphic image of God while presenting a case for a third millennium theology illuminated by insights from archetypal depth psychology, quantum physics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. It attempts to smash the conceptual barriers between science and religion and in so doing, it may contribute to a Copernican revolution which reconciles both perspectives which have been apparently irreconcilable opposites since the sixteenth century. The (...) published work of C.G. Jung, Wolfgang Pauli, David Bohm and Teilhard de Chardin outline a process whereby matter evolves in increasing complexity from sub-atomic particles to the human brain and the emergence of a reflective consciousness leading to a noosphere evolving towards an Omega point. The noosphere is the envelope of consciousness and meaning superimposed upon the biosphere a concept central to the evolutionary thought of visionary Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon of Man). -/- His central ideas, like those of Jung with his archetypes, in particular that of the Self, provide intimations of a numinous principle implicit in cosmology and the discovery that in and through humanity, evolution becomes not only conscious of itself but also directed and purposive. Although in Jung’s conception it was a “late-born offspring of the unconscious soul”, consciousness has become the mirror which the universe has evolved to reflect upon itself and in which its very existence is revealed. Without consciousness, the universe would not know itself. The implication for process theology is that God and humanity are in an entangled state so that the evolution of God cannot be separated from that of humankind. -/- A process (Incarnational) theology inseminated by the theory of evolution is one in which humankind completes the individuation of God towards the wholeness represented for instance in cosmic mandala symbols (Jung, Collected Works, vol. 11). Jung believed that God needs humankind to become conscious, whole and complete, a thesis explored in my book The Individuation of God: Integrating Science and Religion (Wilmette, IL: Chiron Publications 2012). This process theology like that implicit in the work of Teilhard de Chardin, is panentheistic so that God is immanent in nature though not identical with it (Atmanspacher: 2014: 284). (shrink)

The article discusses some facts of C. G. Jung's direct appeal to the ideas of I. Kant. The main part of the article is preceded by statistical data on the mention of various philosophers in the Collected Works of Jung. It is not surprising that Kant leads in the number of links to his ideas or personality in Jung’s heritage. Then I show examples of the mention of Kant in Jung’s correspondence, which allow understand the fundamental philosophical background of analytical (...) psychology better. For this purpose in particular I give excerpts from which it becomes clear that the creator of the analytical psychology, unlike his predecessor C. G. Carus, never hypostasized the collective unconscious, because Jung believed that this is a thing in itself. Also by correspondence it is clear that Jung grasped Kant’s criticism of the rational proofs of existence of God well. Then I point out how apriorism is manifested in analytical psychology. Also I explain briefly how to understand that archetypes and instincts are necessary a priori conditions for the formation of psychic experience. In conclusion, the reasons are given for which Kant and Jung rejected the fundamental possibility of the existence of psychology in the status of strict science. -/- В статье рассматриваются некоторые факты прямого обращения К. Г. Юнга к идеям И. Канта. Основная часть статьи предваряется статистическими данными по упоминанию различных философов в 20-томном академическом собрании сочинений Юнга. Совершенно не удивительно, что по количеству ссылок лидирует Кант. Далее приводятся конкретные примеры упоминания родоначальника немецкой классической философии в переписке Юнга, что позволяет лучше понять фундаментальную философскую подоплёку аналитической психологии. Так, приводятся отрывки, из которых становится ясно, что создатель аналитической психологии, в отличие от своего предшественника К. Г. Каруса, никогда не гипостазировал коллективное бессознательное, считая, что это вещь в себе. Также по переписке видно, что Юнг усвоил произведённую Кантом критику доказательств бытия Божия. Затем в статье указывается, каким образом в аналитической психологии проявляется априоризм. Кратко объясняется, как следует понимать то, что архетипы и инстинкты являются необходимыми априорными условиями формирования психического опыта. В заключение приводятся основания, по которым Кант и Юнг отвергали принципиальную возможность существования психологии в статусе строгой науки, и которые до сих пор не преодолены. (shrink)

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

In this pages the author suggests a spiritual interpretation of Jungian epistemology as a way towards authenticity. He also argues that Martin Heidegger's philosophy and panpsychism can confirm the possibility offered by Jung - with his alchemical - archetypical description of human nature - to achieve a deeper and more authentic awareness of our existence.

This chapter analyzes traditional archetypes of divan literature—‘āşık (lover), ma‘şūk (beloved), and rakīb (opponent)—to show the presence of a dialectical discourse in classical Ottoman divan love poems. In both style and content divan poems display a comprehensive understanding of the postclassical Islamic philosophical conception of dialectic and argumentation theory, known as ādāb al-baḥth wa al-munāẓara. The focus on Ottoman love poetry and argumentation theory in this paper aims to demonstrate how the love poetry that developed in Ottoman culture is more (...) dialectical in form and content than Ottoman literary studies have recognized. (shrink)

Mythopoetry, the imagistic voice of the muses which manifests in myth and natural poetry, has been invoked as an impression of ideal curriculum with which to cherish intimate, vital experience (and to oppose its exile from educational life). In this statement, I intend to see through the pleasant surface of the label, mythopoetry, to see what image may lie just out of sight, beyond the "inspired writing" that mythopoetry implies. Beyond words themselves, meaning is found in sound and in expressive (...) representation. “Music, when soft voices die, / Vibrates in the memory” (Shelley). (shrink)

Metaphors allow us to come to terms with abstract and complex information, by comparing it to something which is structured, familiar and concrete. Although modern science is “iconoclastic”, as Gaston Bachelard phrases it, scientists are at the same time prolific producers of metaphoric images themselves. Synthetic biology is an outstanding example of a technoscientific discourse replete with metaphors, including textual metaphors such as the “Morse code” of life, the “barcode” of life and the “book” of life. This paper focuses on (...) a different type of metaphor, however, namely on the archetypal metaphor of the mandala as a symbol of restored unity and wholeness. Notably, mandala images emerge in textual materials related to one of the new “frontiers” of contemporary technoscience, namely the building of a synthetic cell: a laboratory artefact that functions like a cell and is even able to replicate itself. The mandala symbol suggests that, after living systems have been successfully reduced to the elementary building blocks and barcodes of life, the time has now come to put these fragments together again. We can only claim to understand life, synthetic cell experts argue, if we are able to technically reproduce a fully functioning cell. This holistic turn towards the cell as a meaningful whole also requires convergence at the “subject pole”: the building of a synthetic cell as a practice of the self, representing a turn towards integration, of multiple perspectives and various forms of expertise. (shrink)

The article focuses on the nature of the modern knowledge society, which is characterized, first of all, by a sharp increase in intellectual capital (education, experience, skills, competencies, know-how, the price of personnel in the labor market, patents, etc.) in the amount of capitalization of large business. The knowledge society is a society of high social dynamics, the embodiment of the migration archetype, of rational discourse and intellectual work, which realizes the well-known thesis “Knowledge is power” in a new (...) way. The last three decades, Nico Stehr, a well-known German sociologist and philosopher has been rethinking, reformulating, and substantiating the theories of the knowledge society, which appeared in the 1960s. The article investigates Stehr’s concept, expresses arguments in its support, and highlights some blank spots that remain inexplicable for him in the light of the social realities of recent years. The conclusion runs that the knowledge society represents a significant social trend in the formation of science and technology as a leading productive force. It also manifests a form of the urban discourse of freedom — the cognitive self-realization of the individual in the spectrum of wide possibilities of the public good as a subject-matter of epistemological urban studies. However, this trend is countered by modern knowledge capitalism (privatization, fencing off of knowledge, including that with the help of patents), as well as by the high degree of risk and uncertainty that dominates the modern world. (shrink)

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that ideas give us the rule for organizing experience and ideals serve as archetypes or standards against which one can measure copies. Further, he states that ideas and ideals can be practical. Understanding how precisely these concepts should function presents a challenging and understudied philosophical puzzle. I offer a reconstruction of how ideas and ideals might be practical in order to uphold, to my mind, a conceptually worthy distinction. A practical idea, I (...) argue, is best understood as a reference to the categorical imperative (and its various formulations), which guides conduct directly as a rule. A practical ideal, by contrast, I think is a substrate that serves two functions: one that (a) helps us gauge moral deficiencies and another that (b) reveals the potential for moral improvement. In response to well-grounded sceptical concerns, I argue that ideals are indirectly practical in that they ground the possibility to recognise moral states of affairs and be moral in the first place. (shrink)

Winner of the American Philosophical Association’s 2019 Essay Prize in Latin American Thought | Western imperialism has received many different types of moral-political justifications, but one of the most historically influential justifications appeals to an allegedly universal form of human nature. In the early modern period this traditional conception of human nature—based on a Western archetype, e.g. Spanish, Dutch, British, French, German—opens up a logical space for considering the inhabitants of previously unknown lands as having a ‘less-than-human’ nature. This (...) appeal to human nature originally found its inspiration in the philosophy of Aristotle, whose ethical thought pervaded the work of European philosophers at the outset of the early modern period and the modern age of empire. Indeed some Spanish writers—most famously, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (b. 1494)—explicitly appealed to Aristotle’s moral-political philosophy in order to justify the conquest of the Americas in the early sixteenth century, for instance to justify war against the Aztecs and other indigenous peoples. At the time of European arrival, the Aztec civilization was easily the greatest in Mesoamerica—and yet the Europeans generally considered the Aztec people to be ‘barbaric,’ i.e. less-than-fully-human. (shrink)

This paper investigates the degree to which information theory, and the derived uses that make it work as a metaphor of our age, can be helpful in thinking about God’s immanence and transcendance. We ask when it is possible to say that a consciousness has to be behind the information we encounter. If God is to be thought about as a communicator of information, we need to ask whether a communication system has to pre-exist to the divine and impose itself (...) to God. If we want God to be Creator, and not someone who would work like a human being, ‘creating’ will mean sustaining in being as much the channel, the material system, as the message. Is information control? It seems that God’s actions are not going to be informational control of everything. To clarify the issue, we attempt to distinguish two kinds of ‘genialities’ in nature, as a way to evaluate the likelihood of God from nature. We investigate concepts and images of God, in terms of the history of ideas but also in terms of philosophical theology, metaphysics, and religious ontology. (shrink)

Transformations are not only conditioned by facts encompassing narrower or wider panoramas: from concentrating on death and one (political) role (the ode of Horace), through recalling Cleopatra’s mature life and love (the drama of Shakespeare), to creating an image embracing the heroine’s whole life with its numerous roles, but as a mother and a daughter in the first place, because even her lovers resemble a father and a child (the fictional biography of Karen Essex). Above all, they appear to be (...) more connected with different attitudes towards universal references lying within human cognitive abilities. Horace’s didactic opposition of contradictory patterns leads to the victory of one of them — and it is a linear pattern, as an equivalent of modern myth, which is accepted by the author himself. In Shakespeare, it takes a form of tragedy resulting from the fragmentary character of each pattern, one of which introduces change (archaic myth) and the other constancy (modern myth), and from a painful attempt to combine them. In Essex, the vision of the world in which archaic myth, strongly represented by a child, triumphs is utopian. Irrespective of the differences, all the works realize the essential role played by images developed by heroes, and especially by authors, in human cognition. (shrink)

Policing in many parts of the world—the United States in particular—has embraced an archetypal model: a conception of the police based on the tenets of individuated archetypes, such as the heroic police “warrior” or “guardian.” Such policing has in part motivated moves to (1) a reallocative model: reallocating societal resources such that the police are no longer needed in society (defunding and abolishing) because reform strategies cannot fix the way societal problems become manifest in (archetypal) policing; and (2) an algorithmic (...) model: subsuming policing into technocratic judgements encoded in algorithms through strategies such as predictive policing (mitigating archetypal bias). This paper begins by considering the normative basis of the relationship between political community and policing. It then examines the justification of reallocative and algorithmic models in light of the relationship between political community and police. Given commitments to the depth and distribution of security—and proscriptions against dehumanizing strategies—the paper concludes that a nonideal-theory priority rule promoting respect for personhood (manifest in community and dignity-promoting policing strategies) is a necessary condition for the justification of the above models. (shrink)

In this article, the results of conceptualization of the definition of mind as an object of interdisciplinary applied research are described. The purpose of the theoretical analysis is to generate a methodological discourse suitable for a functional understanding of the mind in the context of the problem of natural language processing as one of the components of developments in the field of artificial intelligence. The conceptual discourse was realized with the help of the author's method of structural-ontological analysis, and developed (...) in the mainstream of the system-methodological tradition of the school of G.P. Shchedrovitsky and intended for descriptive research of subject areas of interdisciplinary objects of scientific study. As a result of the structural and ontological analysis of the super-system, the relevant place and role of the directly studied system (mind) are determined, and its primary process and material are localized and structural and functional connections are described. At the basic level, the mind is conceptualized as an energy process unfolding in a spatio-temporal environment and accompanied by archetypal structuring of neural impulses into images. The genesis of the system is separately analyzed by constructing a structural-ontological matrix that reflects the initial stage of the development of the mind. The primary process is concretized with the help of hetero- and homeostatic dichotomy, and also the most significant features of the consistent transformation of the material of the system and its ascent to verbal morphology are described. The structural-ontological comparison of the functioning of the verbal intelligence with the preverbal level has been carried out. The transformation of neural impulses of needs into words, as verbal units fixing semiotic values is analyzed. Structural-ontological connections that determine the reactive and prospective characteristics of the functioning of the system are disclosed. The position of the chronological primacy of "semiotic readiness" for language with respect to the debut of the latter as an information-sign model of the environment is argued. The hypothesis of domination at the initial stage of the development of the mind of exopsychic functions over endopsychic ones is formulated. The theoretical substantiation of the hypothesis of the inevitability of the ontology of language in the functional understanding of the mind is given, corresponding structural and ontological arguments are given, including those based on the ideas about the information relationship between affects and needs, according to the views of P.V. Simonov. The arguments are presented in favor of the non-alternative methodology of A. Turing in studies of artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Researchers often talk about a powerful heuristic potential of the Kantian heritage, but sometimes they do not show concrete examples in defense of this opinion outside Kantianism and Neo- Kantianism. This article contains an attempt to demonstrate that on the example of how efficiently C.G. Jung used Kant’s ideas to construct the theoretical basis of analytical psychology in general and his conception of archetypes in particular, we can see the urgency of Kant’s heritage not only for his direct spiritual successors. (...) In addition the question is discussed: why did Jung claim that epistemologically he took his stand on Kant? (shrink)

This article explores the essence of the human (insān) as it is understood in Twelver Shīʿī philosophy and mysticism. It presents a Shīʿī philosophical elucidation regarding the possible existence of extraterrestrial intelligent lifeforms and what their relationship with “humanhood” might be. This line of reasoning is presented with a general sketch of how, in Shīʿī Islamic thought, a “human being” is characterized by specific traits and the relationship of human beings with the archetype of the Perfect Human (al‐Insān al‐Kāmil). (...) Following this is a review of Shīʿī Imāmī traditions regarding extraterrestrial intelligent life and the plurality of worlds. This sequence ultimately allows for a unique analysis of humanhood according to the Shīʿī philosophical viewpoint and helps determine if the term “human” can be used for other intelligent beings with similar ontological features and intelligence levels. (shrink)

In scientific communications, journal articles, and philosophical aesthetic debates the words “art”, “creativity”, and “machine” are put together more and more frequently. Since some machines are designed to, or happens to, imitate human artistic creativity, it seems natural to use the same words to talk about human artists and machines which imitate them. However, the evolution of language in light of technology may conceal specific features of the phenomena it is supposed to describe. This makes it difficult to understand what (...) machine creativity actually is and how it is connected to human creativity. The aim of the paper is to investigate why, and in what sense, the functioning of some machines may be described in terms of artistic creativity and what is the relation between machine creativity and its human archetype. I start (§1) by introducing some general ideas concerning how language evolves alongside new technologies and focusing on the case of machine creativity. In §2 I review how some creative machines have been presented to the public, thus showing that a linguistic habit which connects machines to artistic creativity has already formed. In §3 I survey the debate on machine aesthetics and I highlight the main traits of the issue. In §4 I submit a primary scheme of machine creativity which draws on the concept of functional autonomy. Finally (§5), I argue that machine creativity cannot be mistaken for a substitute of the human kind, despite the fact that the word is the same. Creative machines are technological mediums by which new forms of human aesthetic experience can be explored. The kind of creativity machines enjoy displays a functional nature. (shrink)

The current literature on environmental sustainability acknowledges that habits are often shaped in private life and that experiences with environmental activities in a non-work setting positively influence environmental behaviors in the work domain. However, the conditions that lead individuals to behave responsibly at work based on their environmental commitment outside the workplace remain poorly understood. We address this issue by pursuing two objectives. First, we outline archetypes of environmental behavior on and off the job and classify individuals into four profiles: (...) Apathetic, Conformist, Citizen and Enthusiast. Second, we examine a set of organizational and psychological variables that explain the likelihood of behaving in accordance with the principles of an archetype in terms of pro-environmental behavior at work. Our findings show that supervisory support, job self-efficacy and affective commitment increase the likelihood of being green at work but that environmental management practices do not. The results differ according to the profiles identified, allowing a better understanding of employees’ commitment to environmental sustainability. We conclude the paper by discussing the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings. (shrink)

The binary between the figure of the child and the fully human being is invoked with regularity in analyses of race, yet its centrality to the conception of race has never been fully explored. For most commentators, the figure of the child operates as a metaphoric or rhetorical trope, a non-essential strategic tool in the perpetuation of White supremacy. As I show in the following, the child/human binary does not present a contingent or merely rhetorical construction but, rather, a central (...) feature of racialization. Where Black peoples are situated as objects of violence it is often precisely because Blackness has been identified with childhood and childhood is historically identified as the archetypal site of naturalized violence and servitude. I proceed by offering a historical account of how Black peoples came to inherit the subordination and dehumanization of European childhood and how White youth were subsequently spared through their partial categorization as adults. (shrink)

This treatise covers the history, now more than 170 years long, of researches and debates concerning the biblical city of Ai. This archetypical chapter in the evolution of biblical archaeology and historiography was never presented in full. I use the historical data as a case study to explore a number of epistemological issues, such as the creation and revision of scientific knowledge, the formation and change of consensus, the Kuhnian model of paradigm shift, several models of discrimination between hypotheses about (...) the past, the interplay between scientists' values and their epistemic beliefs, and the truth-bearing of historiographic reconstruction. I show, in particular, that when scientists share common epistemic values they can modify their beliefs even when such changes go against deeply entrenched biases and preconceptions. Considerations of coherence usually constrain such modifications, and when sufficient data is available the result can be a profound change of beliefs. Several episodes of the "Ai debates" demonstrate, however, that similar change of beliefs will not occur when non-epistemic values take precedence. (shrink)

What role does the concept of naturalness play in the development of scientific knowledge and understanding? Whether naturalness is taken to be an ontological dimension of the world or a cognitive dimension of our human perspective within it, assumptions of naturalness seem to frame both concepts and practices that inform the partitioning of parts and the kinding of kinds. Within the natural sciences, knowledge of what something is as well as how it is studied rely on conceptual commitments. These conceptual (...) commitments shape how entities and processes are categorized _as_ natural depending on how naturalness has been understood within that discipline. In this paper, I explore how commitments to naturalness shape different conceptualizations of what were previously and what are now considered to be fundamental parts in plant morphology. Relying on an historically informed epistemological approach, I trace the origins and development of models of plant morphology from (1) Goethe’s classical LEAF-ROOT-STEM archetype model; (2) Agnes Arber’s revisions to Goethe’s model reconceived in her partial-shoot theory of the leaf; and (3) Rolf Sattler’s proposal for a processual model of plant morphology. These influential models posit ontologically and epistemologically inconsistent conceptualizations of the natural fundamental parts of plants and how they are related to each other. To explain what this inconsistency means for the concept of naturalness and the role it plays in plant morphology, I suggest naturalness might best be conceived of as a contextually bound classificatory concept that is made and remade through its operationalized use within a model, theory, set of practices, or discipline. (shrink)

At the end of the fifth century B.C.E., the character of Odysseus was scorned by most of the Athenians: he illustrated the archetype of the demagogic, unscrupulous and ambitious politicians that had led Athens to its doom. Against this common doxa, the most important disciples of Socrates (Antisthenes, Plato, Xenophon) rehabilitate the hero and admire his temperance and his courage. But it is most surprising to see that, in spite of Odysseus' lies and deceit, these philosophers, who condemn steadfastly (...) the sophists' deceptions, praise his rhetorical ability, his polutropia. The word polutropia is ambiguous: for Antisthenes, it means either "diversity of styles and discourses" or "diversity of dispositions, characters, or souls". It is argued that the same distinction is implicitly at work in Plato's Hippias Minor, where Socrates defends Odysseus' polutropia against the pseudo "simplicity" of Hippias' favourite hero, Achilles. However, whereas Antisthenes tries to clarify these different meanings, Plato's Socrates exploits the ambiguity to confuse his interlocutor. Such a distinction sheds a new light on the Hippias Minor: Odysseus is polutropos in the first (positive) sense, while the simplicity of Achilles should be understood as a bad kind of polutropia. It provides an explanation for the first paradoxical thesis of the dialogue which many commentators do not admit as an expression of the true Socratic view, on the ground of its supposed immorality: that he who voluntary deceives is better than he who errs, for falsehood is, in one case, only in words, while in the other, it is falsehood in the soul itself. It is thus proposed that Odysseus' skill in adapting his logos to his hearers was probably a model for Socrates himself. The analogy between the hero and Socrates is especially clear in Plato's dialogues, which show the philosopher in an Odyssey for knowledge. (shrink)

Physicalism as a worldview and framework for a mechanistic and materialist science seems not to have integrated the tectonic shift created by the rise of quantum physics with its notion of the personal equation of the observer. Psyche had been deliberately removed from a post-Enlightenment science. This paper explores a post-materialist science within a dual-aspect monist conception of nature in which both the mental and the physical exist in a relationship of complementarity so that they mutually exclude one another and (...) yet are together necessary to explain Reality while being irreducible to one another. Both mind and matter emerge from an underlying holistic domain known as the unus mundus in the Jung-Pauli formulation or as the analogous implicate order in the framing of physicist David Bohm and his colleagues. Kuhnian anomalies such as the role of reflective consciousness in evolution, and phenomena including so-called “near death experiences” (NDEs), are considered from the perspective of dual-aspect monism in conjunction with an emerging evolutionary panentheism. (shrink)

Although Kant had a high regard for Jesus as a moral teacher, interpreters typically assume that his philosophy disallows belief in Jesus as God. Those who regard Kant as a moral reductionist are especially likely to offer a negative construal of the densely-argued subsection of his 1793 Religion that relates directly to this issue. The recent “affirmative” trend in Kant-scholarship provides the basis for an alternative reading. First, theologians must regard Jesus as human so that belief in Jesus can empower (...) believers to become good. Second, theologians may refer to Jesus as divine by identifying his disposition as exemplifying the “archetype of perfect humanity.” Third, Judeo-Christian history poses an empirical problem that theologians can solve by interpreting Jesus’s divinity according to the schematism of analogy. While this does not constitute a robust (identifiably Christian) doctrine of Jesus’s divinity, it does provide clear guidelines for formulating such a tenet of historical faith. (shrink)

Bernard Williams identifies Hume as “in some ways an archetypal reconciler” who, nevertheless, displays “a striking resistance to some of the central tenets of what [Williams calls] ‘morality’”. This assessment, it is argued, is generally correct. There are, however, some significant points of difference in their views concerning moral responsibility. This includes Williams’s view that a naturalistic project of the kind that Hume pursues is of limited value when it comes to making sense of “morality’s” illusions about responsibility and blame. (...) It is, Williams maintains, only when we consider moral responsibility in genealogical terms, which gives attention to the importance of culture and history, that we can find a way of exposing the various prejudices and illusions of “the morality system”. Nevertheless, despite these differences, what Hume and Williams share is a fundamental commitment to provide a more “truthful” and “realistic” understanding of moral responsibility and our human ethical predicament. (shrink)

In The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen, among other things, discusses certain qualities any adequate theory of justice ought to incorporate. Two important qualities a theory of justice should account for are impartiality/objectivity and sensitivity to consequences. In order to motivate his discussion of sensitivity to consequences, Sen discusses the debate between Krishna and Arjuna from the religio-philosophical Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita. According to Sen, Arjuna represents a sensitivity to consequences while Krishna is an archetypal deontologist. In this paper (...) it will be argued that Sen's interpretation of the Gita is inaccurate. Further, a more adequate interpretation will be presented. What will be of significance is that the more adequate interpretation actually demonstrates the importance of an impartial spectator in moral reasoning. Finally, there will be a discussion of some lessons that can be taken from the Gita regarding justice generally. (shrink)

Embodied cognitive theories predict that linguistic conceptual representations are grounded and continually represented in real world, sensorimotor experiences. However, there is an on-going debate on whether this also holds for abstract concepts. Grammar is the archetype of abstract knowledge, and therefore constitutes a test case against embodied theories of language representation. Former studies have largely focussed on lexical-level embodied representations. In the present study we take the grounding-by-modality idea a step further by using reaction time (RT) data from the (...) linguistic processing of nominal classifiers in Chinese. We take advantage of an independent body of research, which shows that attention in hand space is biased. Specifically, objects near the hand consistently yield shorter RTs as a function of readiness for action on graspable objects within reaching space, and the same biased attention inhibits attentional disengagement. We predicted that this attention bias would equally apply to the graspable object classifier but not to the big object classifier. Chinese speakers (N = 22) judged grammatical congruency of classifier-noun combinations in two conditions: graspable object classifier and big object classifier. We found that RTs for the graspable object classifier were significantly faster in congruent combinations, and significantly slower in incongruent combinations, than the big object classifier. There was no main effect on grammatical violations, but rather an interaction effect of classifier type. Thus, we demonstrate here grammatical category- specific effects pertaining to the semantic content and by extension the visual and tactile modality of acquisition underlying the acquisition of these categories. We conclude that abstract grammatical categories are subjected to the same mechanisms as general cognitive and neurophysiological processes and may therefore be grounded. (shrink)

In 2005, Charles Mills published “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology” in Hypatia: a withering critique of much of contemporary political philosophy and ethics. For Mills such work in philosophy failed to attend to the realities of social life and politics, and in remaining silent on actual issues of domination and oppression served an ideological role in supporting the interests of white bourgeois men. Around the time that Charles Mills launched his broadside against ideal theory, trans theorists had been fighting their own (...) battle against the abstraction of theory from the realities of trans lives and oppression. Vivian Namaste (2000) and Jay Prosser (1998) argued that contemporary gender theory failed to justice to the actuality of trans life, retreating instead to understanding trans life through literary archetypes and idealized radical figures. In this chapter I’ll compare Mills’ critique of ideal theory with the transfeminist critique of 1990s gender theory, arguing that they share much in common. Centrally, both critiques share an underlying commitment to theory needing to be grounded in the actuality of oppression and power relations. This common thread, I suggest, must continue to guide transfeminist thought and action: contra Marquis Bey (2022) transfeminist thought and praxis must continue to be about trans lives, about the oppression of trans women, and about ways of actually achieving liberation from our current dire position. (shrink)