The paper examines the evolution of modernity concepts starting from the Renaissance to the present day, emphasizing the impact on architecture and urbanism. During the period of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, people framed an evolutionary notion of history and the concept of the modern associated with the contemporary, the new, and the fleeting emerged. This period connected modernity with the idea of relativity of truth as opposed to the absolute truth of the Middle Ages. In the 18th (...) and 19th centuries, modernity clashed with tradition. This led to economic and political modernization. It also influenced artistic movements and cultural trends. The Industrial Revolution epitomized this period. It was driven by scientific and technological advancements. The paper discusses the objective and subjective perspectives of modernity, highlighting its dual nature in socioeconomic processes and personal experiences. Key thinkers like Habermas Weber and Baudelaire provide frameworks for understanding modernity's developments in science, art, and morality. The avant-garde movements influenced by Bauhaus, emphasized functionality. They also focused on rationality in architecture. However, critiques emerged, advocating the concept of unitary urbanism. This vision includes adaptable living spaces. It promotes an ever-changing urban environment, as exemplified by Constant's New Babylon. The Adorno's aesthetic theory criticized the industry's commodification of art and emphasizes art's utopian potential. Adorno's concept of mimesis and his critique of rationality and instrumental reason are explored reflecting the paradoxical nature of modernity. Finally, the paper contrasts the views of architects like Mies van der Rohe, Norberg-Schulz, and Eisenman. It concludes by reflecting on architecture's ongoing interaction with modernity. It emphasizes a balance between innovation tradition and the dynamic nature of human experience and social development. (shrink)

In modern conditions the questions of personnel management, including motivation, acquire new meaning. Particularly given the problems relevant to the service sector, where at the beginning of the XXI century employing more than 60% of the workforce in developed countries. These circumstances determine the need for a modern concept of material and immaterial motivation of service industries. Such factors determine the need for the development modern concept of material and immaterial motivation of service industries staff. To obtain indicated objective during (...) research analyzed the existing concepts and paradigm of staff motivation with highlighting their advantages and disadvantages. The results obtained allowed to establish that scientific and expert community does not have the unified approach to the classification and identification of the most effective ones. Special attention is given to modern developments and approaches to the motivation problem. This fact caused the structure of follow studies, including three interlinked vectors: analysis of the essential content of the fundamental concepts in the field of staff motivation; defining features of employee motivation at the enterprises sphere of services; introduction to the key successful international practices which apply by service companies. In general, the results obtained enabled the author’s model of the modern concept of material and non-material motivation at the enterprises the service sector and the corresponding mechanism for the implementation. (shrink)

In the mid-seventeenth century a movement of self-styled experimental philosophers emerged in Britain. Originating in the discipline of natural philosophy amongst Fellows of the fledgling Royal Society of London, it soon spread to medicine and by the eighteenth century had impacted moral and political philosophy and even aesthetics. Early modern experimental philosophers gave epistemic priority to observation and experiment over theorising and speculation. They decried the use of hypotheses and system-building without recourse to experiment and, in some quarters, developed a (...) philosophy of experiment. The movement spread to the Netherlands and France in the early eighteenth century and later impacted Germany. Its important role in early modern philosophy was subsequently eclipsed by the widespread adoption of the Kantian historiography of modern philosophy, which emphasised the distinction between rationalism and empiricism and had no place for the historical phenomenon of early modern experimental philosophy. The re-emergence of interest in early modern experimental philosophy roughly coincided with the development of contemporary x-phi and there are some important similarities between the two. (shrink)

Modernity and Contemporaneity is the 3rd volume in the Hellenic-Serbian Philosophical Dialogue Series, a project that was initiated as an emphatic token of the will and commitment to establish permanent and fruitful collaboration between two strongly bonded Departments of Philosophy, this of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and that of the University of Novi Sad respectively. This collaboration was founded from the very beginning upon friendship, mutual respect and strong engagement, as well us upon our firm resolution (...) to establish a solid continuity in the editing project. The publication of this volume allows us to entertain feelings of contentment and confidence that this objective of the project has been accomplished. (shrink)

The concept of “progress” in evolutionary theory and its relationship to a putative notion of “Progress” in a global, normatively loaded sense of “change for the better” have been the subject of debate since Darwin admonished himself in a marginal note to avoid using the terms ‘higher’ and ‘lower.’ While an increase in some kind of complexity in the natural world might seem self-evident, efforts to explicate this trend meet notorious philosophical difficulties. Numerous historians pin the Modern Synthesis as a (...) pivotal moment in this history; Michael Ruse even provocatively hypothesizes that Ernst Mayr and other “architects” of the Synthesis worked actively to eliminate Progress from evolutionary biology’s scientific purview. I evaluate these claims here with a textual analysis of the journals Evolution and Proceedings of the Royal Society B (a corpus of 27,762 documents), using a dynamic topic modeling approach to track the fate of the term ‘progress’ across the Modern Synthesis. The claim that this term declines in importance for evolutionary theorizing over this period can, indeed, be supported; more tentative evidence is also provided that the discussion of ‘progress’ is largely absent from the British context, emphasizing the role of American paleontology in the rise and fall of ‘progress’ in 20th-century evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Modern Monetary Theory and Distributive Justice shows how the macroeconomic framework called modern money theory (MMT) is relevant to the field of political philosophy called distributive justice. Many of the macroeconomic assumptions of distributive justice are unstated and unexamined. The framework of MMT illuminates these assumptions and provides an alternative vision of distributive justice analysis and prescriptions. In particular, MMT holds that modern money is a nominal state issued token (fiat), there is a distinction between nominal assets and real assets, (...) that state money as a nominal token can cause changes in real terms, and that the macroeconomy has historically not operated at capacity. The upshot of these assumptions held by MMT is that state spending can bring about changes in persons’ well-being without traditional redistributive measures via taxation. This is in contradistinction to standard assumptions in the distributive justice literature, which holds that the macroeconomy is at capacity and, thus, redistribution is the necessary mechanism for enacting improvements in well-being. This is a fundamental shift in how distributive justice can be conceived. (shrink)

Modern money theory is a conjecture concerning fiscal spending and the nature of money. I show that modern money theory provides two interesting insights into distributive justice that have not been addressed in the recent Anglo-American distributive justice literature: (i) that the nature of a sovereign fiat currency allows for some distributive conflicts to be avoided; and (ii) that recent Anglo- American distributive justice theories assume that the economy is at capacity. Based on this, I consider if the policy results (...) of modern money theory can help foster a sense of justice. (shrink)

Modern Western psychology is largely defined by its dissociation from philosophy and religion. Yet, prior to the post-medieval world, psychology, philosophy, and religion were unified—and while there was no separate name for what we now know as the formal discipline of psychology, it nonetheless existed since the earliest times. The formation of the modern world and its secularizing outlook led to the gradual divorce of metaphysics and ontology from psychology. Having discarded transcendence and the intermediary realm of the psyche, the (...) discipline has, by and large, forfeited its ability to truly heal the mind. Given its fragmented condition today, psychology is incapable of discerning the mind-body unity and its relationship to the tripartite structure of Spirit, soul, and body—something that was always recognized as central to any spiritually informed therapeutic approach. Ensuring the well-being of the human psyche requires access to a transpersonal order of reality. Only in this way can the metaphysical dimension to psychology be restored, so that it can become, once again, a true “science of the soul.”. (shrink)

A Modern Coleridge shows the interrelatedness of the discourses of cultivation, addiction and habit in Coleridge's poetry and prose, and argues that these all revolve around the problematic nexus of a post-Kantian idea of free will, essential to Coleridge's eminently modern idea of the 'human'.

This paper examines the ethics of the Australian business community’s responses to the phenomenon of modern slavery. Engaging a critical discourse approach, we draw upon a data set of submissions by businesses and business representatives to the Australian government’s Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade ‘Parliamentary Inquiry into Establishing a Modern Slavery Act in Australia’—which preceded the signing into law of Australia’s Modern Slavery Act 2018—to examine the business community’s discursive construction in their submissions of the ethical–political (...) concept of freedom. The paper shows how the concept of freedom was employed by Australian business in a manner that privileged their own subject status and advocated for legislation with minimal burden. Relating this contemporary case to a longer historical context, we show how Australian business responses towards modern slavery map onto liberal and neoliberal ethics in which the freedom of the propertied takes precedent over that of the property-less. Further, we show discursive similarities in the arguments presented by modern Australian businesses and certain historical efforts by members of the business community to privilege commercial freedoms in responses to 18th and 19th Century abolitionist movements. Overall, our research makes two important contributions: first, it highlights the value of a critical discourse lens in business ethics research to show how business and other stakeholders in the field construct and shape their own and other’s ethically-laden understanding of reality; and second, it presents a case for considerable scepticism about the motivation of business to employ the freedoms made available to it under neo/liberal discourse to confront a key human rights challenge. (shrink)

The research identified the key element on P. R. China’s incentives in modern history on techtransfer practices. With reviewing on the state funding surrogacy in the natural sciences, the author identified the key militant coercive contracting clauses in the document of the National Natural Science Foundation of China. With its combined workings with the statutory & martial laws, the analysis takes a com- parative culture approach that partially counteracts the work of the “United Front Working Group of the CPC”, which (...) constitutes as the major cyber espionage organization that manifests upon the communication & information technologies. The “United Front”’s work has substabtially undermined the premices of market economy and eroded the markets’ self-organizing & self-regulating functionalities. With heterogenous semantic networks taken into consideration, the psychosociological elements were taken into consideration even with the psychological data codings in the semantic networks of P. R. China. (shrink)

"The writer discusses the concept of kitsch. Having reviewed a variety of approaches to kitsch, he posits an historical conception of it, connecting it to modernity and defining it as a coping-mechanism for modernity. He thus suggests that kitsch is best understood as a tool in the struggle against the particular stresses of the modern world and that it uses materials at hand, fashioning from them some sort of stability largely through projecting images of nature, stasis, and continuity. (...) He discusses the relation of kitsch to fine art, arguing that fine art also has as its primary function a counter-movement to modernity. He suggests that the main difference between fine art and kitsch is that fine art, as well as its emotional function, also involves a reception context that allows it to assume an intellectual task. Among the writer's conclusions, he finds that positing a stark or absolute contrast between kitsch and fine art is unjustifiable as both have the same roots and objectives." [WilsonWeb]. (shrink)

As a grand narrative of progress, the utopian project of modernity is primarily concerned with notions of rationalism, universalism, and the development of a metalanguage. The triumph of the Moderate Enlightenment has seen logics of domination, accumulation and individualism incorporated into the project of modernity, with these logics giving rise to globalised capitalism as the metalanguage of modernity and neoliberal economics as the grand narrative of rational progress. The project of modernity is all but complete, requiring (...) only the formality of an end. However, rather than utopia, the foreseeable endpoint of modernity is environmental collapse, with neoliberal economics also serving as a grand narrative of environmental destruction. As an anti-modern response, postmodernism has been a triumphant failure. While there is much to be gained from the postmodern critique of modernity, its incredulity towards metanarratives has left it incapable of forming an adequate response to modernity, especially in regards to action on climate change. Postmodernism is better characterized as a crisis located within modernity itself and it will be argued that rather than the pursuit of the modern or the post-modern, we need to re-imagine ourselves as proto- historical to overcome the impasse of late-capitalism. (shrink)

Zygmunt Bauman wrote tirelessly on the ever-changing world that we live in, lucidly analysing our contemporary times in an intelligent and insightful manner in both oral and written discourses where the topics ranged from Holocaust reflections, modernity and postmodernity, urban and social liquidity and mobility, and utopia and dystopia, to mention but a few. In his astute observations Bauman paints an often sombre and depressing picture of society and the role we play in it. Writing at length on (...) class='Hi'>modernity and postmodernity (the latter dependent on the former for its existence), the Polish sociologist, who was impressively prolific during his lengthy career at the University of Leeds, presents us with a world in flux, one in which citizens likened to hunters lead an increasingly solitary and rootless existence in the name of staunch individualism while, all along, they seemingly push faster and increasingly desperately into an uncertain future. In Bauman’s many accounts, these members, or denizens, of the postmodern habitat lead an ambivalent existence in an apparent utopia that is far from as utopic as one would have hoped for. This article will discuss Bauman’s views on modernity and postmodernity, social fluidity and identity change, ultimately highlighting the importance of his works and the great legacy Zygmunt Bauman has left behind. -/- Key words: Zygmunt Bauman, Fluid, Liquid, Modernity, Postmodernity . (shrink)

This book analyses three of the most prevalent illnesses of late modernity: anxiety, depression and Alzheimer’s disease, in terms of their relation to cultural pathologies of the social body. Usually these conditions are interpreted clinically in terms of individualized symptoms and responded to discretely, as though for the most part unrelated to each other. However, these diseases also have a social and cultural profile that transcends their particular symptomologies and etiologies. Anxiety, depression and Alzheimer’s are diseases related to disorders (...) of the collective esprit de corps of contemporary society. Multidisciplinary in approach, the book addresses questions of how these conditions are manifest at both the individual and collective levels in relation to hegemonic biomedical and psychologistic understandings. Rejecting such reductive diagnoses, the authors argue that anxiety, depression and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as other contemporary epidemics, are to be analysed in the light of individual and collective experiences of profound and radical changes in our civilization. A diagnosis of our times, Late Modern Subjectivity and its Discontents will appeal to a broad range of scholars with interests in health and illness, the sociology of medicine and contemporary life. (shrink)

In todays advanced society, there is rising concern for data privacy and the diminution thereof on the internet. I argue from the position that for one to enjoy privacy, one must be able to effectively exercise autonomous action. I offer in this paper a survey of the many ways in which persons autonomy is severely limited due to a variety of privacy invasions that come not only through the use of modern technological apparatuses, but as well simply by existing in (...) an advanced technological society. I conclude that regarding the majority of persons whose privacy is violated, such a violations are actually initiated and upheld by the users of modern technology themselves, and that ultimately, most disruptions of privacy that occur are self-levied. (shrink)

This article looks at the role of Hellenistic thought in the historical narratives of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. To a certain extent, both see—with G. W. F. Hegel, J. G. Droysen, and Eduard Zeller—Hellenistic and Roman philosophy as a “modernity in antiquity,” but with important differences. Heidegger is generally dismissive of Hellenistic thought and comes to see it as a decisive historical turning point at which a protomodern element of subjective willing and domination is injected into the classical (...) heritage of Plato and Aristotle. Arendt, likewise, credits Stoic philosophy with the discovery of the will as an active faculty constituting a realm of subjective freedom and autonomy. While she considers Hellenistic philosophy as essentially apolitical and world-alienated—in contrast to the inherently political and practical Roman culture—it nonetheless holds for her an important but unexploited ethical and political potential. (shrink)

This article challenges the individualism and neutrality of modern moral conscience. It looks to the history of the concept to excavate an older tradition that takes conscience to be social and morally responsive, while arguing that dominant contemporary justifications of conscience in terms of integrity are inadequate without reintroducing these social and moral traits. This prompts a rethinking of the nature and value of conscience: first, by demonstrating that a morally-responsive conscience is neither a contradiction in terms nor a political (...) absurdity; second, by suggesting how a morally-responsive conscience can be informed by the social world without being a mere proxy for social power or moribund tradition. (shrink)

This essay considers the relation between Don Quixote's hunger and the disenchantment (Entzauberung) that Max Weber understood as paradigmatic of the modern condition. Whereas hunger functions within a Hegelian dialectic of desire in Cervantes' novel, literary representations of hunger from later periods (in Kafka and post-Holocaust Polish poetry) acknowledge the cosmic insignificance of human need by substituting the desire for recognition with a desire for self-abdication. While Don Quixote's hunger drives him to seek recognition for his dream world, modern literature's (...) hungry heroes respond to hunger by changing their metaphysical identities. Like desire, hunger functions in the literatures of modernity as an index of psychic wholeness or of its lack, both enabling and resisting the hero's assimilation with the world outside the self. (shrink)

Historically, many Christians have understood God’s transcendence to imply God’s properties categorically differ from any created properties. For multiple historical figures, a problem arose for religious language: how can one talk of God at all if none of our predicates apply to God? What are we to make of creeds and Biblical passages that seem to predicate creaturely properties, such as goodness and wisdom, of God? Thomas Aquinas offered a solution: God is to be spoken of only through analogy (the (...) doctrine of analogy). Gavin Hyman argues Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy was neglected prior to the early-modern period and the neglect of analogy produced the conception of a god vulnerable to atheistic arguments. Contra Hyman, in this paper, I show early-modern atheism arose in a theological context in which there was an active debate concerning analogy. Peter Browne (1665–1735) and William King (1650–1729) offered two competing conceptions of analogical predication that were debated through the 19th century, with interlocutors such as the freethinker Anthony Collins (1676–1729), theologian/philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753), and skeptic David Hume (1711–1776). Lastly, I discuss the 18th century debate over theological analogy as part of the background relevant to understanding Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. (shrink)

My aim in this chapter is to survey some of the most important developments in thinking about essence in the early modern period, highlighting ways in which thinkers in the period gradually depart from the medieval Aristotelian tradition. In this tradition, essence is thought of as selective, explanatory, and kind-determining. Whereas in the beginning of the early modern period some figures (such as René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, and Anne Conway) still adhere to this traditional view, later figures (including (...) Benedict de Spinoza, G.W. Leibniz, and John Locke) reject it. (shrink)

Broadly speaking, “empiricism” is a label that usually denotes an epistemological view that emphasizes the role that experience plays in forming concepts and acquiring and justifying knowledge. In contemporary philosophy, there are some authors who call themselves as empiricists, although there are differences in the way they define what experience consists in, how it is related to theory, and the role experience plays in discovering and justifying knowledge, etc. (e.g., Ayer 1936; Van Fraassen 2002). In contrast, in the early modern (...) period, empiricism was not a label that philosophers traditionally characterized until nowadays as empiricists (most famously, John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume) used to describe their doctrines. Indeed, as attributed to early modern philosophical authors, empiricism is not an actor’s category, but an analytic historiographical category retrospectively applied to them and confronted to rationalism, whose main representatives were considered to be Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and G.W. Leibniz. Such a narrative began to be established by the late nineteenthcentury and described early modern empiricism as an epistemological stance maintaining (1) that the origin of all mental contents lies in experience (a genetic statement), and (2) that knowledge can only be justified a posteriori (an epistemic statement). This entails that empiricists deny the existence of innate mental contents and the possibility of a purely a priori knowledge. In the history of early modern science such a dichotomy has been usually rendered in terms of the opposition between continental rationalist Cartesian science vs British empiricist Newtonian science. In the last four decades, many aspects of this traditional narrative have been criticized, and the meaning of early modern empiricism is subject of renewed studies. (shrink)

This article is focused on some conditions in today’s world of globalized media, which are producing either an uncritical acquiescence or fright in Muslim societies as a result of the interaction between these societies and the contemporary Western powers that represent modernity and postmodernity on the global stage. The rise of fundamentalism, a tendency toward returning to the roots and stringently insisting upon some pure and literal interpretation of them, in almost all the religions of the world is a (...) manifestation of this fright. The central concern of this article is to suggest that fundamentalism is neither the only nor the most reasonable response for Muslim societies in the face of contemporary modernity. Muslims need to adopt an independent and critical attitude toward modernity and reshape their societies in the light of the ethics of the Qur’an, keeping in view the historical link between Islam and science in as much as Islamic culture paved the way for emergence of modern science during European Renaissance. The necessity of a pluralistic or contextualized modernization of Muslim societies is discussed along with the need for the removal of cultural duplicity in the role of the West in relation to Muslim societies. All this leads to an overall proposal for modernization which is given towards the end. (shrink)

The research aims to identify the reality of modern methods applied in the process of performance assessments of employees in the municipalities of Gaza-strip, Complete Census method of community study was used, (571) questionnaires were distributed to all members of the community study, (524) questionnaires were recovery with rate of (91.76%). The most important findings of the study: There were statistically significant relationship differences between the applications of modern methods in the performance assessments of employees in the municipalities of Gaza-strip. (...) There was statistically significant relationship between the evaluation criteria that fit the required performance and the application of standards evaluations on performance of employees in the municipalities of Gaza-strip. There was statistically significant relationship between the use of methods, models for the evaluation of appropriate functions and the application of the performance assessments of employees in the municipalities of Gaza-strip. There was statistically significant relationship between the feedback and the application of performance assessments of employees in the municipalities of Gaza-strip. There was statistically significant relationship between the efficient, professional assessors and the application of the performance assessments of employees in the municipalities of Gaza-strip. There was statistically significant relationship between the extent of awareness of subordinates, participation in the evaluation of their performance and the application of the performance assessments of employees in the municipalities of Gaza-strip. The research also concluded a series of recommendations, including: that the design of evaluation models must be done with the participation of the employees and inform them of it, and that a date must be set to provide feedback and discuss the results with them, that they should be allowed grievance in front of an ad hoc committee in accordance with the known system. Direct manager must inform employees of their performance assessment date, discuss the results of the evaluation with them, and others should be involved with the direct manager of employees in their performance evaluation. The application of modern methods of performance evaluation through the good and purposeful planning should be used, analyzing and employing the results in administrative decisions regarding the employees, and the application of modern methods must be used in an effective and efficient performance evaluation. (shrink)

Gilson’s Being and Some Philosophers (BSP) has been widely influential well beyond Thomistic circles, but its modern historical sources and logical consequences call for further investigation. The first part of this two-part article explores three modern semantic assumptions or principles without which BSP’s innovative theory of existential judgment cannot be fully appreciated—the existential neutrality of the copula ubiquitous among modern logicians; Kant’s introduction of a positing or “thetic” function of judgment, the understanding of which evolved in nineteenth-century logic; and the (...) distinction between predication and assertion, generally accepted by late nineteenth century logicians. Part two of this paper offers a rereading of Gilson’s BSP as an implicit critique of and alternative to Maritain’s synthesis of Aquinas with these modern developments. (shrink)

On the eve of the tercentenary of Kant’s birth, just as it was a hundred years ago, Kantianism is simultaneously on the receiving end of the blows of history and attacks by rival philosophical parties, both progressivist and reactionary. The radical wings of both parties perceive modernity as a depressing, nauseating period which must be broken with by moving toward the past or toward the future. One of the most original and profound diagnoses of this attitude was offered by (...) Hans Jonas, who discerned in radical doctrines of a hundred years ago a similarity with the gnosticism of antiquity. Jonas’s diagnosis has not lost its relevance. That is why the central question addressed in this study is as follows: what prescription does the Kantian programme offer for modernity’s “gnostic dizziness?” I maintain that Kant’s critical turn is still an effective strategy by means of which to compensate for the sudden stresses and “gnostic impulses” provoked by the modern worldview revolution, bringing back an “orientation in thinking” which reorients the world process and individual activity. The imperative to always see and respect humanity in a particular individual warns against the “category mistake” committed by modern radicals who ascribe agency (subjectivity) to non-­human abstractions which cannot possess this property. In theory, Kant grounds the view that humanity should resign itself to the fact of its perspective being limited and local. Kantian practical philosophy provides the traveler with a map of regulative ideas and a “moral compass”, along with an explanation of disruptive factors, offering a working explanation of the situation and its possible outcomes. Kant’s “Copernican revolution” brings human beings back into focus and imagination to order, allowing for the hope that new challenges will be successfully met. (shrink)

Violence is one of the most pervasive problems in the world today. Despite all efforts to apply the powers of reason in order to contain, if not completely eliminate violence, violence proves to be capable of escaping capture and re-emerging in new and unexpected forms. Reason and rationality appear to be powerless against violence. The paper explores some philosophical issues that shed new light on the persistence of violence in the modern world. It argues that the failure of modernity (...) to recognize and come to grips with the process of construction that constitutes the basis of our relationship with reality plays a critical role in the continued survival of violence. (shrink)

Part one of this two-part paper looked at the modern semantic developments underlying Gilson’s innovative and highly influential semantic theory in Being and Some Philosophers (BSP)—the existential neutrality of the copula, the distinction between predication and some positing or “thetic” function of judgment, and the distinction between predication and assertion. The present part of this paper offers a rereading of Gilson’s work in light of this modern backdrop. It argues that Gilson’s BSP, rather than being a purely historical exegesis of (...) the logical writings of a thirteenth-century friar, is a work of original philosophizing inspired by Aquinas, but principally engaged with modern debates. In particular, it advances a Brentano- inspired reading of Aquinas in place of Maritain’s Pfänder-inspired reading of him. Rereading Gilson in his historical setting clarifies the meaning and implication of many phrases and theses that have become commonplaces in philosophical discourse, in part because of Gilson’s work. (shrink)

The modern philosophical establishment is a bureaucracy, and all of the philosophy it produces is an attempt to give a sheen of legitimacy to that fact.

This book treats ancient logic: the logic that originated in Greece by Aristotle and the Stoics, mainly in the hundred year period beginning about 350 BCE. Ancient logic was never completely ignored by modern logic from its Boolean origin in the middle 1800s: it was prominent in Boole’s writings and it was mentioned by Frege and by Hilbert. Nevertheless, the first century of mathematical logic did not take it seriously enough to study the ancient logic texts. A renaissance in ancient (...) logic studies occurred in the early 1950s with the publication of the landmark Aristotle’s Syllogistic by Jan Łukasiewicz, Oxford UP 1951, 2nd ed. 1957. Despite its title, it treats the logic of the Stoics as well as that of Aristotle. Łukasiewicz was a distinguished mathematical logician. He had created many-valued logic and the parenthesis-free prefix notation known as Polish notation. He co-authored with Alfred Tarski’s an important paper on metatheory of propositional logic and he was one of Tarski’s the three main teachers at the University of Warsaw. Łukasiewicz’s stature was just short of that of the giants: Aristotle, Boole, Frege, Tarski and Gödel. No mathematical logician of his caliber had ever before quoted the actual teachings of ancient logicians. -/- Not only did Łukasiewicz inject fresh hypotheses, new concepts, and imaginative modern perspectives into the field, his enormous prestige and that of the Warsaw School of Logic reflected on the whole field of ancient logic studies. Suddenly, this previously somewhat dormant and obscure field became active and gained in respectability and importance in the eyes of logicians, mathematicians, linguists, analytic philosophers, and historians. Next to Aristotle himself and perhaps the Stoic logician Chrysippus, Łukasiewicz is the most prominent figure in ancient logic studies. A huge literature traces its origins to Łukasiewicz. -/- This Ancient Logic and Its Modern Interpretations, is based on the 1973 Buffalo Symposium on Modernist Interpretations of Ancient Logic, the first conference devoted entirely to critical assessment of the state of ancient logic studies. (shrink)

This paper argues that early modern experimental philosophy emerged as the dominant member of a pair of methods in natural philosophy, the speculative versus the experimental, and that this pairing derives from an overarching distinction between speculative and operative philosophy that can be ultimately traced back to Aristotle. The paper examines the traditional classification of natural philosophy as a speculative discipline from the Stagirite to the seventeenth century; medieval and early modern attempts to articulate a scientia experimentalis; and the tensions (...) in the classification of natural magic and mechanics that led to the introduction of an operative part of natural philosophy in the writings of Francis Bacon and John Johnston. The paper concludes with a summary of the salient discontinuities between the experimental/speculative distinction of the mid-seventeenth century and its predecessors and a statement of the developments that led to the ascendance of experimental philosophy from the 1660s. (shrink)

Our late modernity has been characterized by Zygmunt Bauman and Hartmut Rosa as, respectively, “liquid” and “accelerated”. These are demanding aspects of reality that have elicited both adaptive and resisting responses. While the drive to adapt has generally been favoured, especially by the corporate sector, a certain resistance to the tendency is also notable among ordinary citizens. It will be argued in this paper, first, that while adaptation evokes Daoist insights, such an association is misleading and an unqualified kind (...) of adaptation is not a viable option; secondly, while many ritualistic and ceremonial practices are being revived as a part of the resistance, many of these are undesirable; thirdly, that an introduction of ritual inspired by the ancient Confucian understanding of li 禮 is a beneficial way to alleviate the harmful effects of late modernity; and fourthly, that this understanding of li can be strengthened and clarified through Neo-Daoist interpretations. (shrink)

Logical reflection in early modern philosophy (EMP) is marked by the instability of the period, although it is more lasting (the Port-Royal Logic was nevertheless used as a handbook in philosophy courses until the end of the nineteenth century). It started in the sixteenth century and ended in the nineteenth century, a period of 300 years during which there were deep transformations in the conceptions of authority and scientific method. For the history of twentieth-century philosophy, it was the period of (...) “classical logic,” which lasted from the Renaissance to the linguistic turn conducted by Gottlob Frege. The period was used to be thought of as centuries of little or no original contribution to logic, in which conceptions of logic were tainted by rhetoric, epistemology, and psychologism in the worst sense (Kneale and Kneale 1962; Michael 1997). From the last decades of the twentieth century, however, scholars began to regard this period more accurately with respect to reflection and changes in logic and semantics. It has recently become a promising field for historical and conceptual research; today we can say that the legacy of early modern logical reformism has a philosophical, logical, and semantic value in itself. (shrink)

Georg Henrik von Wright was not only the first interpreter of Wittgenstein, who argued that Spengler’s work had reinforced and helped Wittgenstein to articulate his view of life, but also the first to consider seriously that Wittgenstein’s attitude to his times makes him unique among the great philosophers, that the philosophical problems which Wittgenstein was struggling, indeed his view of the nature of philosophy, were somehow connected with features of our culture or civilization. -/- In this paper I draw inspiration (...) and courage from Von Wright’s insistence that trying to understand Wittgenstein in relation to his times is a philosophic task in its own right in order to probe into a relatively obscure region in Wittgenstein’s thought: his relation to the music of his times. It is a topic, on which Von Wright, and most other prominent Wittgenstein scholars, have said very little, but it is also one, which Wittgenstein himself attested was so important to him that he felt without it he was sure to be misunderstood. -/- I offer textual and historical evidence in support of my claim that, parallel to Wittgenstein’s exposure to Spengler’s Decline of the West in 1930, he was also introduced to the music theory of Heinrich Schenker, which helped him to articulate, partly by way of critique, a complex and unique position concerning the modern music of his times, which exhibits his rejection of what Von Wright later dubbed ‘the myth of progress’. As Von Wright observed in other regions of Wittgenstein’s work, he believed also with regards to the arts and to music in particular, neither in a brilliant future nor in the good old days. -/- I argue that Wittgenstein actually made a distinction between three kinds of modern music: (a) bad modern music, which is clearly a case of confusing means for ends, the hallmark of the myth of progress, as Von Wright observed; (b) vacuous modern music, which embodies some sort of diffidence, a difficulty to see through the omnipresence of what Von Wright called (following Habermas) a ‘colonialization’ of reified measures of progress; (c) good modern music, a paradoxical notion for Wittgenstein, which betokens the unlikely yet possible striving to penetrate through what appears as dissolution of the resemblances which unite this culture’s ways of life by rendering this condition as expressible and intransitively understandable. In the context of this third category, I offer an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s complex remarks on the music of Gustav Mahler, which palpably show that the problem of good modern music and the problem of philosophizing in the time of civilization were one and the same in Wittgenstein’s mind. -/- I conclude that, with regards to Von Wright’s own critical view of the modern myth of progress, we can learn from Wittgenstein that progress in the realm of art is closely aligned with the ideal of the perfection of man, yet transcending a social or political context. It is the ideal of cultural cohesion: affinity that the arts show to other human practices and cultural artifacts of its period. Wittgenstein’s tentative notion of good modern music (and its circumscription by his notion of the music of the future) may show its true colors when viewed in the context of Von Wright’s plea not to abandon work for progress as a critical task. (shrink)

Written in Japanese, the overall picture of the thoughts of modern philosophers, namely Hume, Kant, and Mill, is put forward.

This paper clarifies the significance of philosophy for traditional societies and modern societies and their evolution. In this paper ethics is the mainstream philosophy which studies and analyses the values of both the traditional societies and modern ones. This paper is only the ethical study of the traditional values and modern values. There are three ways to philosophize societies as traditional and modern: Ethical perspective, economical and theological, but this paper deals only with the ethical approach. Philosophers from ancient to (...) modern era played an important part in the transformation of traditional into modern. Morality and religion changed the mind of the nations towards development and ethical progress. In this article ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, modern philosophy and others religious philosophies of India, china, and Muslim philosophies exercised key attempts to study traditional societies and modern societies. This paper highlights the factors that are responsible for the vices in traditional societies and also the elements that are productive for the promotion of modern societies. (shrink)

The development of modern science has depended strongly on specific features of the cultures involved; however, its results are widely and trans-culturally accepted and applied. The science and technology of electricity provides a particularly interesting example. It emerged as a specific product of post-Renaissance Europe, rooted in the Greek philosophical tradition that encourages explanations of nature in theoretical terms. It did not evolve in China presumably because such encouragement was missing. The trans-cultural acceptance of modern science and technology is postulated (...) to be due, in part, to the common biological dispositions underlying human cognition, with generalizable capabilities of abstract, symbolic and strategic thought. These faculties of the human mind are main prerequisites for dynamic cultural development and differentiation. They appear to have evolved up to a stage of hunters and gatherers perhaps some 100 000 years ago. However, the extent of the correspondence between some constructions of the human mind and the order of nature, as revealed by science, is a late insight of the last centuries. Quantum physics and relativity are particularly impressive examples. (shrink)

As the chapter headings--and title--reveal, the book is about the role of causation and chance in modern science, and, in particular, in modern cosmology. However, because the book is shot through with serious conceptual confusion, anyone who is interested in actually learning something about the role of causation and chance in modern science is advised to look elsewhere.

The modern synthesis in evolutionary biology is taken to be that period in which a consensus developed among biologists about the major causes of evolution, a consensus that informed research in evolutionary biology for at least a half century. As such, it is a particularly fruitful period to consider when reflecting on the meaning and role of chance in evolutionary explanation. Biologists of this period make reference to “chance” and loose cognates of “chance,” such as: “random,” “contingent,” “accidental,” “haphazard,” or (...) “stochastic.” Of course, what an author might mean by “chance” in any specific context varies. -/- In the following, we first offer a historiographical note on the synthesis. Second, we introduce five ways in which synthesis authors spoke about chance. We do not take these to be an exhaustive taxonomy of all possible ways in which chance meaningfully figures in explanations in evolutionary biology. These are simply five common uses of the term by biologists at this period. They will serve to organize our summary of the collected references to chance and the analysis and discussion of the following questions: • What did synthesis authors understand by chance? • How did these authors see chance operating in evolution? • Did their appeals to chance increase or decrease over time during the synthesis? That is, was there a “hardening” of the synthesis, as Gould claimed (1983)? (shrink)

I claim that the underlying premises of the modern era - e-r-a - are false in a way that carries catastrophic consequences. Despite the many genuine achievements of the modern world—which I for one would not want to live without—the spirit of modernity has been one which denigrated the basic conditions of human being. In the name of freedom and knowledge, the modern era gave birth precisely to the non-empathically responding world, the schizoid ghost in the machine, which now (...) threatens to dissolve both humanity and the natural world. We must find the means to correct the mistaken premises which form the modern error. The time has come to find a new way of renewing reason, a project requiring a transformation of values and outlook as vast as those which took place in the axial age or the modern age. The renewal of reason will involve opening the gates to the entire historical and prehistorical heritage of humankind, to renew the archaic values of family, household, neighborhood and local community and the sympathetic relations they engender, to renew those organic and communicative essences of play, dreaming and mother-infant nurturance which are our human-mammalian legacy and crucial for the development of the spontaneous self, and also making a life-sustaining world culture with self-critical institutions capable of supporting and protecting the vitality of local ways. Without the hope of such a thoroughgoing transformation, we are likely to continue to go the way of the earth’s ozone shield into corrosive self-extinction . (shrink)

Polytheism is a strange view to hold in modernity. Connected as it is in the popular imagination with archaic, animistic, magical, prescientific systems of thought, we don’t hesitate much before casting it into the dustbin of history. Even if we are not monotheists, we are likely to think of monotheism as the obviously more plausible position. The traditional arguments for the existence of God, which have been enormously influential in Western philosophy of religion, do not necessarily rule out polytheism (...) but they are clearly formulated with monotheism in mind. While there could be multiple first causes, intelligent designers, or beings than which nothing greater can be conceived, the simplest and most natural... (shrink)

This introductory article outlines how this special issue contributes to existing scholarship that calls for a rethinking and re-evaluation of common assumptions about early modern philosophy. One way of challenging existing narratives is by questioning what role systems or systematicity play during this period. Another way of rethinking early modern philosophy is by considering assumptions about the role of philosophy itself and how philosophy can effect change in those who form philosophical beliefs or engage in philosophical argumentation. A further way (...) of advancing early modern scholarship is by examining the tight links between early modern views on metaphysics and epistemology, on the one hand, and moral, social, and political philosophy, on the other hand. Moreover, there are ongoing debates whether and how the traditional distinction between rationalism and empiricism, which has been questioned for several reasons, should be replaced. It has been proposed to replace it with a distinction between experimental and speculative philosophy, but this distinction cannot easily accommodate early modern debates concerning moral, social, and political philosophy. In addition to highlighting several ways how early modern philosophy has and can be rethought, we summarize how the papers in this special issue contribute to these ongoing efforts. (shrink)

Advocates of Extended Evolutionary Synthesis claim that the gene-centric framework of Modern Synthesis (MS) inadequately addresses epigenetics and extended heredity. Historically, epigenetic inheritance relates to Lamarck's inheritance of acquired characters, which was widely accepted before the dominance of MS. In this talk, I argue that the challenge posed by epigenetic inheritance to the gene-centric view arises partly from the ambiguous use of "gene," "phenotype," and "environment" concepts. A functional analysis of the gene concept played in the formal evolutionary models shows (...) that the gene can include materials like exogenes, demonstrating the flexibility of evolutionary theory beyond the verbal MS. Properly understanding the evolutionary gene concept reveals that incorporating epigenetic inheritance does not demand a radical revision of the contemporary evolutionary theory. (shrink)

Upanishads are traditionally commented upon as texts of theology and religion. But the contents of the Upanishads can also be viewed and commented from modern science point of view. Elements of modern science present in the Upanishads and Advaita Siddhanta will be listed. -/- The nature of maya will be discussed with modern scientific awareness. This awareness will be further used in understanding human mental processes and the ways to model them contributing to the natural language comprehension field of artificial (...) intelligence. -/- The nature of the Dvaita and Advaita conscious states and their implications to human cognitive processes will be discussed. The use and significance of the ‘absence of mind’ conscious state will also be presented. -/- The use of above understanding in modeling human understanding process and its comparison to physiological psychology – the physics and chemistry of psychology - will be proposed. (shrink)

Henri Lelevel’s La philosophie moderne par demandes et réponses is a very interesting as well as pretty neglected attempt to disseminate the new philosophy among a larger audience, including the non specialists. Either the style of presentation or the oversimplification of the topics discussed is clearly intended to reach people interested to a smattering of philosophy. More than the comparisons between the traditional and the new philosophy and the compendia, this work vouches for the great interest toward the new philosophy. (...) In this particular case the model is the philosophy of Malebranche, whose interpretation of Descartes thought is preferred by Lelevel, worried by the excessive twist given toward empiricism in P.-S. Régis rendering of Cartesian philosophical system. Lelevel’s logic is directed to eliminate the confusion between sense data and knowledge, echoing also Malebranche’s notion of éténdue idéale, one of the major contribution to the reconsideration of Descartes’ thought. This paper aims to sketch the mains topics discussed in the four sections of Lelevel’s work, with some cross-references to Malebranche’s writings. (shrink)

Abstract The awakening of art to self-awareness and the statement of its autonomy are modern phenomena. The way we think about art in the modern age may be derived from the Kantian “beauty without concept”. Beautiful art is the work of the genius, who creates a work of art that is valuable in itself and is admired in museums by the public. That which I call here “the modern paradigm of art” is based on an absence: the non-conceptuality of the (...) beautiful, i.e., the fact that objective qualities cannot define the beautiful. This absence establishes originality as the essential requirement for modern art and creates the possibility for artists to push the boundaries of the modern paradigm. Thus, the 20thcentury sees the appearance of strategies for overriding or substituting originality. The artist withdraws from behind her work, and the work of art is no longer an unapproachable object with an aura, just as the museum is also no longer the temple of the arts. But do these experiments overcome the frontiers of art’s modern paradigm? And, more generally, can this paradigm be overcome at all? Here I deduct three elements of the modern paradigm of art from the idea of “beauty without concept”: (1) the original artist, who is seen as a genius, (2) the work of art with an aura, and (3) the museum as the temple of art. Then I present how artists, based on the requirement of originality, worked on dismantling the frontiers of the modern paradigm. (shrink)

We develop a modern interactive libertarian dualism of physical and mental events using the concept of probability.

This paper attempts to locate modern Zen and psychoanalysis in terms of contemporary philosophy of mind, particularly in view of dominant theories of cognitivism that see the mind as informational and material, with meaning being mere information in disguise. Psychoanalysis and modern Zen hold to the contrary view that the mind is “semantic,” not “syntactic,” and that the meanings we have in our heads are not reducible to the physical informational processes from which they have emerged. Meaning, as non-reducible, is (...) infinite and uncaused. However, the structure of meaning entails a split between a knower and what is known. This split creates problems in the mind which can be confronted through more, not less, engagement with the meanings in our minds, until we are self-aware and, perhaps, self-identical, with the mechanisms of consciousness that produce the meanings in our head. Such self-awareness is seen as being self-liberating rather than self-reducing. (shrink)

A discussion of "postmodern" architecture in the sense in which the term was used in the late 1980s, namely, the introduction of historical substantive content and reference into architecture, disrupting the supposedly ahistorical purity of modernist architecture. Argues that postmodern use of history is really another version of the modern distance from history.