In this commentary published, I explore the difficult but urgent question: has civil society in Bangladesh failed to uphold its responsibility as a check on government power? Over the years, civil society’s silence has allowed concerning issues like electoral manipulation, human rights abuses, and corruption to go unchecked. From the forced resignation of Chief Justice Sinha to the tragic murder of Abrar Fahad, the lack of strong, collective action has left many crucial injustices unchallenged. Civil (...) society has a fundamental duty to defend democratic principles, demand transparency, and hold power accountable. But too often, our intellectuals, academics, journalists, and human rights defenders avoided direct engagement, especially during moments that called for bold stances. This silence has enabled a climate of impunity and fear that damages the very foundations of democracy. I argue that civil society owes an apology for its inaction—this isn’t merely symbolic. Admitting these past failures is the first step toward rebuilding trust and credibility. Civil society must recommit to its role as the people's voice and stand firmly against abuses of power while protecting the rights and freedoms that all Bangladeshis deserve. (shrink)

With mounting challenges to democratization and the threat of regression, one asks how do we best reclaim spaces for engagement and public participation. The paper turns to civil society and revisits the case of the Philippines. It takes a closer look at their contributions, experiences, and insights as to challenges faced by the country relative to democratic nation-building. Towards this end, the paper discusses prospects for renewed engagement towards inclusive and democratic governance.

I fill Ernest Gellner with disgust: disgust at my views and disgust at his inability to say exactly what is wrong with them (or so he once remarked in his social philosophy seminar).

It is frequently argued that to address structural injustice, individuals should participate in collective actions organized by civil society organizations (CSOs), but the role and the normative status of CSOs are rarely discussed. In this paper, we argue that CSOs semi-perfect our shared obligation to address structural injustice by defining shared goals as well as taking actions to further them. This assigns a special moral status to CSOs, which in turn gives rise to our duty to support them. (...) Thus, we do not have full discretion when deciding whether to join collective actions or not. Under certain conditions, we can even be forced by others to do our share. (shrink)

Fukuyama's 'The End of History' has referred to Kojeve's 'homogenous state' as some sort of conceptual container for the evolving idea of liberal democracy. This paper critically re-assess the homogeneity of state as final stage of liberal idea and defends civil society in terms of democratic governance. It also invites to discuss the role of scholars as public intellectuals and repels the ideological abuse of the scientific method.

This article aims to explore, through the civil society’s opinion, the polarisation between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ and the group of the ‘new excluded’, or ‘new poor’, that has emerged as a result of the European economic crisis and the social transformations that followed in the Greek society. Based on the Theory of Justice introduced by John Rawls (1971), and using the approach of Critical Discourse Analysis, this study focuses on the discourse analysis of the perception of 97 (...) representatives of local and national NGOs, both formal and informal. The main results focus on different self and others’ presentations, especially during the economic crisis, and on the creation of an unbalanced, fragmented and exclusion-cantered society. However, the definition of rich and poor appears ambiguous through the analysis of various linguistic strategies of Greek NGOs revealing a hidden face of the society. (shrink)

Riječ “intelektualac” francuskog je porijekla, nastala krajem 19. vijeka. Stvorena tokom afere Dreyfus, uglavnom se odnosi na one mislioce koji su spremni da interveniraju u javnom forumu, čak i ako to znači da sebe izlažu riziku (Le Sueur 2001:2). Teoretičari kao što su Edward Said, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Paul Sartre i Michael Waltzer dali su doprinos diskusiji o intelektualcima: intelektualca Said vidi kao kritički nastrojenog autsajdera, Ricoeur kao političkog edukatora, Sartre kao čovjeka od akcije, a Waltzer kao brižnog insajdera. Opisati intelektualca (...) na ovaj način, pak, ne spominje prostor unutar kojeg intelektualac djeluje, tj. građansko društvo. Upravo se u takvom prostoru ljudskog udruživanja i odnosnih mreža može promovirati kultura dijaloga, tolerancije, umjerenosti i uzajamno korisnog rješavanja sukoba, upravo onakva kultura kakva otjelotvorava stavove i vrijednosti demokratizacije. Mada intelektualac, onakav kakav je gore opisan, igra značajnu ulogu u održavanju dobro razvijenih demokratskih društava, u postkonfliktnim društvima, kakva su i kosovsko i bosanskohercegovačko, pojavljuje se potreba za intelektualcem koji je više od pukog kritičara društva, edukatora, čovjeka od akcije i saosjećajnog pojedinca. I tu na scenu stupa hiperintelektualac. Najupečatljivija karakteristika hiperintelektualca je možda upravo stepen u kojem se intelektualac bavi društvenom kritikom, političkim obrazovanjem, akcijom i “insajderizmom”, ne kao ideolog, već kao nestranačka fi gura. Društvena kritika i političko obrazovanje hiperintelektualca manifestiraju se na nestranački način, tako da se jasno čuje sve što je moguće i napadati i braniti, i sa jedne i sa druge strane. To je poseb-. (shrink)

Economic theory has tended to reduce all social bonds and relations to forms of contract, whereas social theory has seen contracts as opposed to, and destructive of, genuine social bonds. Bruni sees these contrapositions as ideological (‘left’ against ‘right’, p. xi). His main goal is to overcome them; to show that three forms of reciprocity, covering the ideological spectrum from left to right, are complementary and simultaneously required in a healthy society. These three forms are, in his words: ‘(1) (...) the reciprocity of contract or ‘cautious’; (2) the reciprocity of friendship or philia and (3) the ‘unconditional’ reciprocity, the one more controversial . . .’ (p. x). (shrink)

Water is regarded as indefeasible necessity of human civilization. In the South Asia region, the groundwater resource is poised as essence of life, security and development. Bangladesh is not an exception from that. Due to scarcity as well as disproportionate availability of surface water supply, the groundwater resource is veered into vital source to undergird heavy demand of water supply for livelihoods, industrial and agricultural purposes. Considering these, the groundwater resource governance is crucial since it is the mainstay of upholding (...) economic, social and development rights; failure to ensure proper governance would only drag the country into the tentacles of environmental scourge, conflict and food insecurity. The paper endeavors to analyze the role and significance of civil society on groundwater resource management. It explores the nature of challenges that civil society is encountering during its engagement with groundwater resource governance. This paper undertakes to outline national legislative and policy response to groundwater resource management in Bangladesh. It also scrutinizes in detail of groundwater resource aspect in international law and would reveal that, considering the gravity of the issue, both the domain of international law and national law contribute below the par to the issue. The paper further contends that existing legislative and policy structure of Bangladesh eventually maims the civil society from contributing and bars it to facilitate effective participation of the commons. In the concluding remarks, the paper highlights suggested recommendations stemming from discussions, observations and policy reports to bolster the affiliation of civil society in the governance of groundwater resource. (shrink)

Although successive generations of digital technology have become increasingly powerful in the past 20 years, digital democracy has yet to realize its potential for deliberative transformation. The undemocratic exploitation of massive social media systems continued this trend, but it only worsened an existing problem of modern democracies, which were already struggling to develop deliberative infrastructure independent of digital technologies. There have been many creative conceptions of civic tech, but implementation has lagged behind innovation. This article argues for implementing one such (...) vision of digital democracy through the establishment of a public corporation. Modeled on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the United States, this entity would foster the creation of new digital technology by providing a stable source of funding to nonprofit technologists, interest groups, civic organizations, government, researchers, private companies, and the public. Funded entities would produce and maintain software infrastructure for public benefit. The concluding sections identify what circumstances might create and sustain such an entity. (shrink)

The concept of Environment is an ethical concept which was discussed by Greek philosophers at ancient time. Plato (347-427 BC) in his book Laws asks everyone who changes the environment to fix it as well. For example, if anyone pollutes the water well, they would also need to try to treat the pollution problem and compensate people for their loss due to the pollution problem. The Environment Ethics is a contemporary branch of philosophy. It has its own concepts that make (...) it different from other branches of human sciences. Furthermore, it focuses on the human-being in any place of the world and looks at the current world as a cooperative world controlled by Environment Responsibility and Unit-determination. Environment Ethics is also used to measure the culture of nations and to what degree they are civilized. To be civilized is not just to earn a high degree in any of the branches of sciences but it means to act in a civil manner and at a high level. To this end, culture plays an important role for these decisions to be implemented. For example, a society with civil citizens means you find a clean environment. This clean environment is an indicator of the cultural level of the particular society. -/- In this paper, I will discuss the aforementioned areas of Environmental Ethics and relationships between environment and society. (shrink)

It has been commonplace to equate Foucault’s 1979 series of lectures at the Collège de France with the claim that for neoliberalism, unlike for classical liberalism, the market needs to be artificially constructed. The article expands this claim to its full expression, taking it beyond what otherwise would be a simple divulgation of a basic neoliberal tenet. It zeroes in on Foucault’s own insight: that neoliberal constructivism is not directed at the market as such, but, in principle, at society, (...) arguing that the value of this insight goes beyond the critique of a neoliberal present. The neoliberal rationale rather helps him to reveal a unique historical architecture, a latent approach to the social dissimilar to the one that has long predominated in the human sciences. The inversion of homo œconomicus in neoliberal theory amounted to the unearthing of a ‘social subject of interest’ within civil society. Such a subject, barely recognized by neoliberals who simply instrumentalize it for the sake of the market, demonstrates that the social is not necessarily the natural product of ethical subjects; that society may also need to be constructed. (shrink)

The article aims to show that by its very nature Western civilization is well suited for making a significant contribution to build the open society based on intercivilizational dialogue. In the age of global migration, there is an obvious need for developing tools which would effectively transform the threat of a clash of civilizations into a creative dialogue between them. As a civilization of the dialogue, Western civilization seems to be an ideal instrument to meet that need. The article (...) raises the following questions: Is there any connection between the idea of the open society and the heritage of Western civilization? Is liberal education an adequate means to resolve the paradoxes of the open society? Why is the West an arena for the clash of civilizations? (shrink)

A reconstruction of the history of the wording civil society and of the curious twist in its usage and meaning, highlighting why the term had an important role in Continental political thinking and was ignored until comparatively recently in Anglo-Saxon political discourse.

In a morally diverse society, moral agents inevitably run up against intractable disagreements. Civility functions as a valuable constraint on the sort of behaviors which moral agents might deploy in defense of their deeply held moral convictions and generally requires tolerance of other views and political liberalism, as does pluralism. However, most visions of civility are exceptionless: they require civil behavior regardless of how strong the disagreement is between two members of the same society. This seems an (...) excellent idea when those required to do the tolerating might otherwise smash us. However, the demands of civility are universal and fall upon everyone, including ourselves. They may seem to require us to tolerate the intolerable, leading us not into pluralism but rather into functional relativism, and also require the powerless to moderate their demands for redress. They also place moral agents in a very difficult position with respect to realizing our deeply held moral values. Isaiah Berlin’s pluralism, by contrast, allows us to violate tolerance when we come up against values which, put into practice, are incompatible with a form of life we can tolerate. Despite the many fronts on which civility and pluralism align, they are also pitted against each other. Only a qualified (not exceptionless) civility based in respect for persons can cohere with pluralism and thus resolve the double bind in which the moral agent seemed to be placed by exceptionless civility. I develop a rule for Accepted Exceptions that helps to explain how moral agents can be civil, value pluralism, demand redress, and maintain their own deeply held moral commitments. (shrink)

This paper argues that political civility is actually an illusionistic ideal and that, as such, realism counsels that we acknowledge both its promise and peril. Political civility is, I will argue, a tension-filled ideal. We have good normative reasons to strive for and encourage more civil political interactions, as they model our acknowledgement of others as equal citizens and facilitate high-quality democratic problem-solving. But we must simultaneously be attuned to civility’s limitations, its possible pernicious side-effects, and its potential for (...) strategic manipulation and oppressive abuse, particularly in contemporary, pluralistic and heterogeneous societies. (shrink)

This is the English translation of Chapter One of Mutsu Bunmei Ron, which was published in Japanese in 2003. Since this book’s publication I have received many requests for an English translation from people around the world. I decided to begin by publishing this first chapter under the title Painless Civilization 1 and make it available to readers who have a keen interest in this topic. * The original text of this chapter was written in 1998, more than twenty years (...) ago, but I believe what I argued there is becoming increasingly important today. Painless civilization is a pathology of contemporary society. We will be pulled much deeper into a painless stream in the future. What is needed is the wisdom to see through the fundamental structure of our painless civilization and its relationship with the meaning of life. ** Modern society seems on the verge of being swallowed up by the pathology of “painless civilization.” I have written this book for people who, in the midst of anxiety studded with pleasure, joyless repetition, and a maze from which they cannot escape no matter how far they walk, nevertheless retain in some corner of their hearts a desire to live life fully and without regrets. * When we feel a vague anxiety, like being bound in gossamer cords, in the midst of modern society, we are perhaps intuitively sensing the existence of “painless civilization.” This book is an attempt to give words to this feeling that the reader has, I am sure, already experienced at least once in their life. (shrink)

This book can be useful for college seniors or graduate students who have studied law to some extent. It also can inspire law professors, business people, Members of the National Assembly, administrative officials, in addition to all intellectuals who suffer from whipping or beating due to an incomprehensible legal structure and mandates relevant with their routine desk work. -/- Chapter 1 of this book examines the essence of existing constitution and international law theories directed to the nature of state power, (...) market and civil democracy in a rapidly developing international society in the age of globalization. Most of discussions had been expended to introduce and survey a new legal perception and its logic of reasoning as a law indebted to the concept of world law theory. Chapter 2 studies the core contents of international law according to the chapter on international law and international relations of the United States. It was spelled out to comply with the explanations and comments incorpated within the 4th edition of the Restatement of the United States. -/- Chapter 3 refers to the legal system characterized as a public law and concerning a regulatory measure over the world market by states. An idealistic class of citizens, who emerged for a capitalist hegemony, generally have a status of sovereign, which came into being as owed to their revolution. However, it is also true that the citizens as an individual or laity are required to obey the regulations of state in the market. The interstate commerce clause of the United States Constitution is generally viewed as being shunned with an intention that state governments' measures to regulate the market should not hinder the prosperity of US market at the federal level. WTO laws known to be the most important international trade law, in fact, have a structure similar to the interstate commerce clause of United States Constitution. In this point of view, scholars gave a name to WTO as the world economic constitutional system. In the same vein, WTO member countries should not hinder the prosperity of a single world market as if the Clause requires pursuing that of a single federal market. Chapter 4 summarizes the core of legal norms, which is purported to study the jurisprudence of global market in coverage of fundamental principles espousing the freedom of contract, laws of sales, contract, documentary letter of credit, basic rule on the agencies of civil law. Therefore, we will be exposed to the laws of United Nations convention on the sales contract (CISG), the United Nations contract law, popularly cllled Principles as well as short introductions for the agency laws and cases relating the civil dispute of documentary L/Cs. -/- I am unfeigned to confess that this book is neither thorough nor complete in terms of the craftsmanship of necessary exhaustiveness. So its contents may insufficiently cover issues or discussions as contrary to the author's purpose. However, I have exerted utmostly to include and cover as much as possible what I think is necessary for readers to grasp new theories and basic principles. I plan to add necessary revisions and supplements as opportunities arise. As a scholar, I always feel cautious and sorry about publishing books. However, the development of global market, civil democracy, and the universal legal system related to them is certainly Darwinistic and an evolutionary joy that can be duly sensed in the field of law. I dare to recommend that readers can enjoy. (shrink)

This is the English translation of Chapters Two and Three of Painless Civilization, which was published in Japanese in 2003. In this volume, I examine the problems of painless civilization from the perspective of philosophical psychology and ethics. I discuss how the essence of love is transformed in a society moving toward painlessness and how the painless stream penetrates each of us and makes us living corpses. In order to tackle the problems of painless civilization, we must look inside (...) our inner world because the “desire of the body” that lurks within us is the ultimate cause of our society’s movement toward painlessness. Love and the meaning of life are the central topics of discussion in the following chapters. Because the original manuscript was written in 1998, the discussion of social issues may seem slightly dated, especially when it comes to reproductive technologies and juvenile delinquency, but I believe my central argument here has not aged at all; on the contrary, I think the times have finally caught up with my theory of painless civilization. I hope readers will join me in thinking deeply about the essence of contemporary civilization. (Painless Civilization 1 is also available on PhilPapers.) . (shrink)

This paper analyzes the specific shift in the meaning of “civilization” that took place in texts and documents of early American philosophical naturalism. Particularly, it will focus on the specific role that naturalization plays in the edification of a newly secularized, science-oriented, and democratic society, as well as of a naturalized conception of culture and civilization. Indeed, as the work of many philosophers and intellectuals of the Forties highlights, naturalism represents not only the banner of a new idea of (...) civilization, but at the same time becomes the symbol of a powerful postwar ideology. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the practice of civil disagreement has robust epistemic benefits and that these benefits enable meaningful forms of reconciliation—across worldview lines and amid the challenging information environment of our age. I then engage two broad groups of objections: either that civil disagreement opposes, rather than promotes, clarity, or else that it does little to help it. If successful, my account gives us reason to include civil disagreement among what Mill calls “the real (...) morality of public discussion,” a fact that should stir us to take more seriously the decline of civility in contemporary life. (shrink)

»Civil society« with its main elements of »social democratic citizenship« and subsidiarity is an analytical approach to the present situation of democracys and offers an perspective to surrender the democratic deficit and the crisis of the welfare state in the Member states of the European Union. The concept of »Civil society« bases on an active citizenship and give intermediary civil actors, especially the charitable social welfare associations and democratic movements, the chance to reflect on their (...) position to the govemment on the one side and to the citizen on the other side in order to take account of the citizen' s civil, political and social rights. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to open a new horizon in the field of civilization studies by examining the concept of painless civilization from the perspective of the philosophy of biological evolution. Since the space is limited, the priority will be given to the clarification of an overall structure. Modern civilization has created systems that seek “comfort and pleasure” and eliminate “pain and suffering” and has spread them to every corner of our society. It is progressing like a great (...) wave in many developed countries. I have called a civilization advancing in this direction a “painless civilization.” At first glance, the elimination of pain and suffering seems like a good thing. Of course, it is considered good if unbearable suffering (such as the pain of terminal cancer) that we encounter in our lives can be avoided through technology. This is not the problem. The problem is that modern civilization is moving in a direction where various forms of suffering that we might experience in the future are going to be erased from our lives, one after another, through preventive technologies (preventive elimination of pain). ... (shrink)

This interview focuses on Arran Gare’s thinking about ecological civilization and its relationship to a new theoretical ecology, strong democracy and political philosophy based on “ecopoiesis” or “home-making.” Gare believes that it is possible to create a global ecological civilization that empowers people to augment their ecological communities. Complex transformations of the social and economic organization of societies and a radical upheaval of our conceptions of what it means to be human are required to bring about this change to a (...) new ecological (eco-human) culture. (shrink)

This paper discusses some philosophical problems lurking behind the issues of human biotechnology, particularly prenatal screening. Firstly, prenatal screening technology disempowers existing disabled people. The second problem is that it systematically deprives us of the “fundamental sense of security.” This is a sense of security that allows us to believe that we will never be looked upon by anyone with such unspoken words as, “I wish you were never born” or “I wish you would disappear from the world.” Thirdly, we (...) argue that the loss of the fundamental sense of security is connected with the disappearance of “conviction of love” in the age of human biotechnology. And finally, all these issues are examined from the viewpoint of “painless civilization.” Our society is filled with a variety of “preventive reduction of pain,” of which prenatal screening is a good example. By preventively reducing pain and suffering, we lose the chance to transform the basic structure of our way of thinking and being; as a result, we are deprived of opportunities to know precious truths indispensable to our meaningful life. Hence, it is concluded that what is most needed is an academic research on “philosophy of life.”. (shrink)

History can be understood as involving a problematic interplay between the long-term legacy of human evolution, still tempered into the human body today, and the shorter-term heritage of civilization from its beginnings to the present. Each of us lives in a tension between our indigenous bodies and our civilized selves, between the philosophy of the earth and that which I characterize as “the philosophy of escape from the earth.” The standard story of civilization is one of linear upward progress, a (...) story that I contest with an alternative philosophy of history, picturing history instead as a set of concentric circles. I have devised a new philosophy of history with a three-part approach to understanding human development, taking civilization not as a linear advance of progress, but rather as a progress in precision, paradoxically counteracted by a regression in mind: history as a contraction of mind. I describe three stages in the contraction of mind: 1) animate mind as the evolved outlook of foraging life; 2) anthropocentric mind as representing the contracting transformation of consciousness produced by agriculturally-based civilization; 3) mechanico-centric mind as representing a further contraction from human-centered to a machine-centered consciousness, produced by the rise of modern civilization and the mechanical scientific worldview. Hence, this progressive contraction is marked by a turn from original practical and reverential attunement to the living earth in hunting and gathering societies, or animate mind, to a narrower focus of anthropocentric mind beginning with the development of early civilizations, where the human element became central and the wild devalued. And it moves to an even more narrow focus of mechanico-centric mind, expanding out of late medieval Europe and the development of modern science, where the machine became model of the ultimate, the objectivist filter through which the world is to be understood and made to fit. Far from controlling nature, humans have been consuming it in an unsustainable Malthusian-like trajectory whose limits are being reached in our time. (shrink)

I argue that, in one sense, collective wisdom can save civilization. But in a more important sense, collective wisdom should be understood as a form of civilization, as the result and expression of a moral civilizing-process that comes about through the creation and transmission of collective interpretations of human experience and human nature. Collective wisdom traditions function in this manner by providing an interpretation of what it means to be human and what thoughts, skills, and actions are required to live (...) a successful human life at the most general level of analysis. Collective wisdom can have a civilizing effect on individuals, and indirectly on societies, by providing a type of orienting framework for understanding the proper relationship between the self, others, and the world. Such traditions in effect provide a “blueprint” for the successful human life as such, by providing guidance on thought and action, on what is appropriate to think, feel, desire, and do in theoretical and practical contexts. A wise individual will be a 'civilized' individual in this moral sense, an individual who is properly habituated and educated so as to now reflectively endorse and desire thinking and acting in virtuous ways. However, this understanding of collective wisdom and civilization is in many ways today controversial and met with justified critiques and skeptical criticisms. To defend this way of approaching and answering our question against these critiques, I turn to ancient wisdom traditions from ancient India, China, and Greece as paradigms for understanding exactly how collective wisdom can achieve the end of civilizing humanity. Based on this analysis, I sketch the outlines of a revitalized ancient wisdom tradition able to civilize individuals today, but such a tradition must be updated to reflect the advancement of modern natural science and to meet the demands of living in our diverse, pluralistic, and globalized world. (shrink)

Hume uses the adjectives “civilized” and “barbarous” in a variety of ways, and in a variety of contexts. He employs them to describe individuals, societies, historical eras, and forms of government. These various uses are closely related. Hume thinks that cultural and political development are intimately connected, and are mutually dependent. Civilized government goes together with civilized society. A wise ruler cannot emerge before “refinements have taken place” in the society at large and “science [becomes] known in the (...) world.” At the same time, the policy of a monarch who is “ignorant and uninstructed … for ever prevents all improvements.”. (shrink)

Drawing on Adorno and Horkheimer's oft-quoted 1944 essay, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Bernard Stiegler’s The Age of Disruption affirms that the Frankfurt School duo scrupulously envisaged a “new kind of barbarism,” or an inversion of modernity’s Enlightenment project illustrated by our contemporary political semblance. Surveying the critical social fissures that index contemporary Western civil society—from 9/11 to the 2002 Nanterre massacre and the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting—Stiegler diagnoses that our epoch is plagued by the “absence (...) of epoch,” whereby computational capitalism and algorithmic governmentality have extirpated the “transcendental imagination” underlying vital primordial narcissism. In short, these are symptoms a world increasingly “going mad,” in a thousand ways, possible because we are the bearers of “a negative protention of a becoming without future,” yet “we prefer not to say so: we do not want to know about it.”. (shrink)

Developing MacIntyre’s metaphilosophy, Whitehead’s contention that philosophy ‘is the most effective of all the intellectual pursuits’ is elucidated and defended. It is argued that the narratives through which philosophical ideas are evaluated can refigure the stories constituting societies. In this way philosophical ideas become practically effective and come to be embodied in institutions. This is illustrated by the challenge by process philosophy to scientific materialism in the face of an impending global ecological crisis. It is argued that to be successful, (...) process philosophy must be articulated into a grand narrative to challenge the dominant grand narrative of modernity. (shrink)

—Cultural studies remains one of the fields of research in the humanities that contributes to the development of the society by aiding the formulation of cultural policies towards the re-engineering of a nation’s social behavior. A functioning state benefits a lot from cultural products of cultural studies. Thus for any state, like Nigeria, to reap from cultural studies and policies, its basic democratic institutions should be strong and effective. The theoretical framework for this research is symbolic interactionism proposed by (...) Stryker and Denzin. This is because it enables the understanding of how cultural products are translated into policies that shape the society. In this paper, we demonstrated that Cultural Studies is instrumental to the development cultural policies that take seriously national identity and social integration of the Nigeria society. (shrink)

In this new edition, a hypothesis is put forward for the first time to unify the Big Bang theory and the evolutionary theory by showing both events following the same set of fundamental interrelationships. As the evolution of life is a part of the evolutions of the universe, these two events express many fundamental similarities (this is self-similarity, which means a part of the system is similar to the whole system). Based on the same principle, the evolution of multicellular organisms, (...) social evolution, development of the human body, and human technological development are all a part of the evolution of life. Thus, they all follow the same set of rules that all life follows and, at the fundamental level, the interrelationships that the Big Bang follows. Therefore, all of these events follow the fundamental interrelationships and express fundamental similarities. In other words, all these events are the specific expressions of those fundamental interrelationships – the fundamental mechanism that governs everything in the universe. -/- Upon these interrelationships, new approaches to study social development and technological development are employed. By using the knowledge of the medical sciences, including the structures (anatomy and histology), functions (physiology) and development (embryology) of a human body; knowledge of the evolution of life; and the concept of fundamental interrelationships, we can see the future beyond the horizon. Using the nerve system in parallel as a model, we can comprehensively understand the development of the information revolution. Based upon parallel interrelationships, we can see that the transformation of society due to individuals’ power increase brought by new technologies bears great similarities with the transformation from the solid state of ice to the liquid state of water due the individual molecules’ kinetic energy increase. -/- As the fundamental interrelationships govern social evolution, all events in human civilisation are simply specific expressions of those rules in which significant social events not only changed the course of civilisation but left so many unanswered mysteries: how did the Greeks build such brilliant civilisations; why did the Scientific Revolution originate from the West rather than the East such as in China; why did the Chinese society remain in feudalism for such a long time while the Western society had evolved into a higher level – industrialization and modern society; why did the Chinese civilisation fall from its ancient glory in the modern time but rapidly re-rise again to a super power in the last few decades? All these mysteries remain unanswered because of the lack of fundamental laws of physics and evolutionary biology used in the traditional methodologies of social science. As the fundamental laws of physics are the fundamental mechanism for everything and these mysteries are a part of the evolution of life, the fundamental laws of physics and evolutionary biology are used in tackling these unanswered issues. For example, upon parallel relationship, Chinese civilisation is compared with the transition from unicellular organisms to multicellular organisms. From how unicellular organisms aggregate and evolve new rules to organise themselves, we can much better understand how human individuals aggregate to form societies and evolve new cultures to organise themselves in social evolution. Furthermore, transformation from the solid state of ice to the liquid state of water is used to analyze Chinese social evolution. With these approaches the mysteries in Chinese civilisation have been answered. -/- Ultimately, all these discussions in this book have demonstrated that the Interrelationships Model has unified social science with natural science, and furthermore, science with philosophy. This is an important attempt in answering the most fundamental and intriguing question of all – the Theory of Everything. -/- Currently, this book is for FREE download. (shrink)

The well-known Kantian passage on misology in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals starts making fuller sense when located within the framework of Kant writings on philosophy of history where he contrasts civilization with moralization as two different phases in the growth of humankind. In this context, the growth of commerce and manufactures plays a distinctive role, namely that of means of fostering civilization, while pursuing a deceptive goal, namely happiness. Deception plays a basic role in the growth of (...) mankind, in so far as it allows for a hidden twofold teleology in human action. Men, while following the dictates of self-love, are systematically mistaken about the results they actually contribute in bringing about. Commerce brings different peoples into mutual relationship and thus paves the way to a cosmopolitan society. The growth of the arts and sciences provides preconditions for the growth of learned institutions, a free press, and a public opinion that are the basis on which reason may start being used in its critical capacities. This, that is Enlightenment, is a preliminary step to moralization, that is the jump of individuals from a state of minority to a state where they are masters of themselves. The twofold teleology of human action makes room for a system of "pragmatic" ends, and of laws connected to the former, that may be studied rationally in themselves and yet are connected to the higher ends established by reason in its "practical" capacities. (shrink)

Beyza Şen and Ali Tacar's interview with Masahiro Morioka on painless civilization and his recent works. "In our contemporary civilization we can experience pleasure, pleasantness, and comfort, and can avoid pain and suffering, albeit at the sacrifice of joy of life, which is indispensable for acquiring our life without regret. Of course we have a lot of pain and suffering in our society, so our lives are not painless at all, but I cannot help feeling that our contemporary scientific (...) civilization is progressing in the direction of eliminating pain and suffering irreversibly. ...". (shrink)

It is contended that to construct a social theory capable to comprehend the Russian Modernization one has to broaden first and foremost the conceptual basis of research. The basic element lacking in the orthodox Marxist conceptual scheme is the notion of ‘social unconsciousness’. It is demonstrated that Slavoj Zizek’s works represent the most ingenious fusion of post-structuralism, psychoanalysis and Marxism that treats the ability to disclose social contradictions. It is shown that the adequate comprehension of social contradictions system is possible (...) in the light of ideologies grounded on social equality values . They can reveal the main contradiction of Russian social life, i.e. the contradiction between Empire Ambitions of Russian bureaucracy and the interests and values of the ill-structured Civil Society. Key words : ideologies, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, S. Zizek, social contradictions. (shrink)

It is widely accepted among political philosophers that distributive justice should be promoted by the state. This essay challenges this presumption by making two key claims. First, the state is not the only possible mechanism for attaining distributive justice. We could rely alternatively on the voluntary efforts and interactions of individuals and associations in civil society. The question of what mechanism we should rely on is a comparative and empirical one. What matters is which mechanism better promotes distributive (...) justice. We cannot settle the question a priori in favor of the state. Second, several considerations suggest a presumption in favor of relying on civil society. (shrink)

With the early success of the deep ecology movement in attracting adherents and with the increasing threat of a global ecological catastrophe, one would have expected this movement to have triumphed. We should be in the process of radically transforming society to create a harmonious relationship between humans and the rest of nature. Instead, deep ecology has been marginalized. What has triumphed instead is an alliance of managerialism, transnational corporations and neo-liberalism committed to replacing communities with markets and transforming (...) every facet of nature and society into means for increasing the profitability of corporations and expanding GDP. This outcome is here explained by the failure of deep ecologists to understand the ideological, political and economic forces driving ecological destruction, and thereby what is required to overcome these. To regain the initiative, it is argued, it will be necessary to recover the whole project of the Radical Enlightenment upholding the Renaissance quest for liberty that was subverted by the scientific materialism and possessive individualism of the Moderate Enlightenment. Not only will it be necessary to transform science to develop a comprehensive alternative conception of nature and humanity and its destiny, it will be necessary to revive and develop the institutions of the Radical Enlightenment to subordinate markets to democratically organized communities at multiple levels, as communities of communities committed to augmenting the life of these communities, including the life of ecological communities. Doing so will involve reformulating the grand narrative of emancipation as a dialogic, polyphonic grand narrative to orient individuals, organizations and nations to create a global ecological civilization. -/- . (shrink)

This paper analyzes the current crisis of the global industrial civilization as a coincidence of external and internal reasons, mainly as a coincidence of economic and environmental crises tendencies. The analysis is based on Habermas´ distinction between four types of social formation, and according to their internal organizational principles and an extent of their social and system integration, also types of crises that can occur in the given type of the social formation. The paper shows that the common reason of (...) economic and environmental crises which are a part of system crisis of industrial civilization is an imperative of growth. This imperative, as Habermas points out, is the immanent principle of institutions and systems of capitalism. Economic and demographic growth of industrial civilization based on capitalism principles has reached its limits. However, all types of social formation, institutions and civilizations are also determined by the imperative of sustainability. The current crisis is then characterized as a display of antagonism between the imperative of growth and imperative of sustainability. This antagonism creates a new category of transformation for sustainable societies or revolution conflicts in states that break environmental and economic limits of growth. These conflicts result from food and water shortages and could bring a growing instability into the world or lead into the collapse of the industrial civilization. (shrink)

This article addresses a neglected problem in Searle’s social ontology, namely, how human civilization may collapse. In the first section, I provide the theoretical framework. In the second section, I offer the key elements to understanding Searle’s ontology as well as his philosophy of society, emphasizing the role of constitutive rules and deontic powers. In the third section I examine how they improve trust and co-operation. Global and local natural disasters are distinguished in the fourth section, because the former (...) is sufficient to undermine pacts, promises, constitutive rules and deontic powers, while the latter is neither sufficient nor necessary. In the fifth and final section, I put forward an argument via a thought experiment that allows us to anticipate what would occur if people did not keep promises and pacts, on the one hand, and did not respect constitutive rules and deontic powers, on the other hand. Such events, I argue, would result in the collapse of civilization. (shrink)

Environmental degradation is the most important complex of problems ever confronted by humanity. Humans are interfering with the world's ecosystems so severely that they are beginning to undermine the conditions for their own continued existence. They are polluting the air, the oceans and the land. They are rapidly exhausting the reserves of minerals and destroying the resources of the world on which civilization depends, while destroying other life forms on a massive scale. At the same time humans are increasingly enclosing (...) themselves in built environments which isolate them and fragment their lives, destroy their health and reduce them to either the dehumanized instruments of military-industrial complexes, or to abject poverty. The problem of the environment is also the problem of over-population, the disproportionate consumption of resources by Western nations and the starvation of those in the Third World who lose out in the struggle for the remainder. If present trends continue the total destruction of civilization is probable within a few hundred years - and the extinction of the human species is a real possibility. This situation also presents the greatest intellectual challenge of the era. It undermines the traditional idea of economic progress - the ultimate evaluative concept and the virtual telos of European civilization. It brings into question the economic, legal, political and ethical institutions of modern societies and the modes of thought on which they are based, including the natural and social sciences and the institutions supporting them. In doing so, it opens up the most fundamental questions about human existence: the nature of knowledge and value, of meaning and rationality, and of the significance of life itself. Confronting the environmental crisis requires a complete review of the way we think of ourselves and our place in the world. This book and its sequel, 'Beyond European Ciivlization: Marxism, Process Philosophy and the Environment', attempt this task. (shrink)

The Notion of ‘civilisation’ in European and post-Enlightenment writings has recently been reassessed. Critics have especially reread the works of Immanuel Kant by highlighting his racial categories. However, this Paper argues that something is missing in this contemporary literature: namely, the role of the European legal culture in the development of a racial and ethnic hierarchy of societies. The clue to this missing element rests in how ‘civilisation’ has been understood. This Paper examines how one of the leading jurists of (...) the 19th and 20th centuries, George W. Hegel (1770-1831), took for granted a sense of a legal culture that excluded indigenous inhabitants of the Americas as legal persons worthy of legal protection. -/- Such an exclusionary legal culture represented a crucial feature of ‘civilisation’ according to Hegel. This Paper identifies a series of factors which Hegel highlighted as instrumental in constituting a civilised society: Bildung, an ethos, a written legal culture, a self-creative author (the state), territorial knowledge, and a hierarchy of societies. Hegel emphasized the need of jurists to analytically “leap” from a traditional society to a legal culture before the jurist could identify a law. The traditional societies of the Americas, according to Hegel, were considered lawless because they lacked a European sense of a legal culture. Why Hegel characterised traditional communities as lacking a legal culture is then explained. The Paper ends by suggesting that the features of a legal culture that Hegel highlights remain with us today. (shrink)

Civilizations can be perceived as living human beings that are born, mature, age, and ultimately die and disappear, passing their legacy to the future generations. These transitions may be projected to the different stages of cognitive development of children. The Western Civilization, which embodies our current state of cultural advancement from the Classic Greek to the modern period, can be paralleled by the gradual transitions of human beings toward adulthood. From this perspective, the ancient Greek era resembles the toddler years (...) of humanity at which the first “why”-type questions are being asked. The theocratic period that followed until the Renaissance can be seen as our childhood, when people lived their lives under the tight boundaries set by religious authorities. The period spanning from the Enlightenment until almost the end of the 20th century can be considered as our teenage years when people rediscover their past, are liberated from superstition, and set the path forward based on reason by a manner at which the distinction between plausible and feasible is vague. Within this scheme, postmodernism also finds its place in our teenhood. The last few decades, from this perspective, signify our entrance to adulthood at which major questions are considered answered, or at least settled, and the only path forward perceived as feasible is the one that is followed already, a state that is bringing us closer to our intellectual aging and its inevitable death. Some signs of aging-related pathologies are already manifested in today’s technology-intensive society. By identifying our intellectual age and by appreciating our health status, we may be able to proactively delay or even avert our intellectual aging and death. (shrink)

The notion of ecological civilisation has become central to Chinese efforts to confront and deal with environmental problems. However, ecological civilisation is characterized by its proponents in different ways. Some see it as simply an adjunct to the existing system designed to deal with current ecological crises. Its more radical proponents argue for a socialist ecological civilisation that should be developed globally and transform every part of society, changing the way people perceive, live and relate to each other and (...) to nature, and the goals they aspire to. Ecological civilisation is a translation of the Russian notion of ecological culture, and tracing the history of ecology and the concept of culture in the Soviet Union, particularly in the 1920s, I will support this more radical view, arguing that ecological civilisation is not only underpinned by eco-socialism; it provides the means to clarify the meaning of socialism generally in a way that accords with deep assumptions of Marx’s critique of capitalism. That this notion has been officially embraced within China establishes a tradition of socialist thought that now has the potential to challenge and replace global capitalism. (shrink)

Generational differences in societies are characteristics generally attributed to people’s age that constitute a sociocultural phenomenon. Divisions in the generations differ across nations and extend even to civilizations. Perception and recognition of the different characteristics of each generation affect the cooperation between people in social, political, and economic capacities, and subsequently extend to entities in the public, informal, commercial, and nongovernmental sectors. From the perspective of social justice, it is important to draw attention to how workplace management techniques are used (...) to promote equal opportunities among representatives of various generations. (shrink)

Invitation to submit abstracts to the new special issue PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES ON TRUST AND DISTRUST IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETIES to be published by Sats. Northern European Journal of Philosophy in spring 2024.

The call by Chinese environmentalists for an ecological civilization to supersede industrial civilization, subsequently embraced by the Chinese government and now being promoted throughout the world, makes new demands on legal systems, national and international. If governments are going to prevent ecological destruction then law will be essential to this. The Chinese themselves have recognized grave deficiencies in their legal institutions. They are reassessing these and looking to Western traditions for guidance. Yet law as it has developed in the West, (...) particularly in Anglophone countries, which has crystallized as the tradition of ‘liberal legalism’, is in a state of crisis. Rather than being taken as a cause for despair at the legal traditions of East and West, this challenge could be taken as an opportunity to fundamentally rethink the basis of the law and its role in society and civilization. To overcome the deficiencies in the theory and practice of law in so-called ‘liberal democracies’ I will argue here that it will be necessary to revive and develop the philosophies of law associated with the ‘Radical Enlightenment’. (shrink)

Some progress has been made in recent decades to articulate corporate social responsibility (CSR) and, more recently, to associate CSR with international enforcement of human rights. This progress continues to be hampered, however, by the ability of a multinational corporation (MNC) that violates human rights not only to shift liability from itself to a nation-state but even to win compensation from that nation-state for loss of profits due to restrictions on its business activities. In the process, the nation-state’s sovereignty is (...) diminishing; and, in effect, though still attributed to nation-states, it is being transferred to the MNC. The main aim of this article is (1) to draw on normative considerations to claim that this MNC proto-sovereignty should be modified and (2) to contend that this can eventually be accomplished by adding to corporate adoption of CSR guidelines a regimen of global human rights enforcement. I base this contention on expectations about the internationalization of corporate criminal law and the globalization of civil society in general and of NGOs in particular. I consider various jurisdictions but I focus on US jurisprudence. (shrink)

The study of culture and cultural selection from a biological perspective has been hampered by the lack of any firm theoretical basis for how the information for cultural traits is stored and transmitted. In addition, the study of any living system with a decentralized or multi-level information structure has been somewhat restricted due to the focus in genetics on the gene and the particular hereditary structure of multicellular organisms. Here a different perspective is used, one which regards living systems as (...) self-constructing energy users that utilize their genome as a library of information, making the genetic system just another component that adds fitness to the overall integrated unit. In this framework, basic fitness is measured as the ability to gather energy for growth and reproduction, and the fitness of the genetic system is broken down into two aspects: first, the effectiveness in searching for new somatic functional information, and second, the effectiveness in searching for better structures to store and process information. With this more generalized perspective, major evolutionary transitions to higher levels of organization become competitions between different information structures; furthermore the functioning and fitness of cultural systems can be more easily described and compared with other modes of information storage within biological systems. Modern technological societies are self-constructing systems that rely on written (symbolic) information storage and very complex algorithms that effectively search for variation with a high probability of successful selection. These systems are currently competing with traditional organic systems, and this competition constitutes the latest major evolutionary transition. Upon comparison of the energy-gathering potential of symbolic-based systems with DNA-based life, it appears that symbolic systems have a tremendous fitness potential and the current shift to a higher level of selection may be as significant and far-reaching as any of the previous major evolutionary transitions. (shrink)

The two important factors in science development are the social economy (gross domestic product, GDP) and freedom. In order to follow the development of science for both old Arabic-Islamic and Western civilizations, a statistical method is used to trace the variation of scientists' population with time. The analysis shows that: 1- There is a growth in Arabic-Islamic sciences for a period of three centuries (AD 700-1000). Then it is followed by period of declination. The decay time is about of eight (...) centuries. Major factor behind that decay in science activities and the block of the science thoughts may be attributed to religious thoughts domination, and cultural or thoughtful problems, in addition to the normal social problems like wars, disasters..etc. 2- The growth in western civilization started approximately in AD 1200 and remains in its growing. It looks that the wars, political problems have no serious effect in western sciences growth. The growth behaviour has a natural growth form. That may prove that, the secular society is quite perfect for such activities. For present time Arab-Islam societies have no distinguished contributions. The most important factor for that catastrophic retardation is the absence of the freedom of thought and believes. The obtaned curve has similarities with world GDP curve. (shrink)