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Questions and analyses centered on race have become more prominent in philosophy. By employing a ‘critical philosophy of race’, thinkers become enabled to address how race and racism continue to operate in subtle and unintended ways, including within concepts, theories, principles, practices, and methodologies otherwise purported to be race-neutral. Yet, North American sports philosophy provides few examples of work that grapples with race, racism, or theories of race. In this essay, I ask why and conclude that the shortage of discussions that include explicit references to race or ethnicity in North American sport philosophy is due to the dominance and normalization of white epistemologies – white ways of experiencing, seeing, and knowing the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imitating nature is an ever more popular strategy in many fields of science and engineering research, from ecological engineering to artificial intelligence. But while biomimetics and related fields have recently attracted increased attention from philosophers, there has been relatively little engagement with what I suggest we see as their basic epistemological presupposition: that we may acquire knowledge from nature. I argue that emphasizing and exploring this presupposition opens up a new approach to epistemology, based on a shift from a conventional epistemological relationship to nature as object of knowledge to a biomimetic relationship to nature as source of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers of science have come to accept that contextual values can play unavoidable and desirable roles in science. This has raised concerns about the need to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate value influences in scientific inquiry. I discuss here four such concerns: epistemic distortion, value imposition, undermining of public trust in science, and the use of objectionable values. I contend that preserving epistemic integrity and avoiding value imposition provide good reasons to attempt to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate influences of values in science. However, the trust and the objectionable values concerns constitute no good reason for demarcation criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role do normative ideals play in politics? Since Rawls, many political philosophers have advocated what they take to be a Kantian answer to this question. Normative ideals organize and guide political decision-making and action, and a major task of political philosophy is to generate them. Recently, this position has come under renewed scrutiny among political thinkers identifying as realists and nonideal theorists. These critics argue that ideal theory is too remote from empirical politics. This article turns to Kant for an alternative conception of ideals that is both distinct from the Rawlsian account and better withstands the critiques of realists and nonideal theorists. It argues that, for Kant, ideals are aids to freedom; their aim is to guide us towards forms of autonomy we have yet to fully realize. This leaves us with a much stronger view of ideals than does ideal theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevailing narrative in the history of science maintains that the ancient Greeks did not have a concept of a 'law of nature'. This paper overturns that narrative and shows that some ancient Greek philosophers did have an idea of laws of nature and, moreover, they referred to them as 'laws of nature'. This paper analyzes specific examples of laws of nature in texts by Plato, Aristotle, Philo of Alexandria, Nicomachus of Gerasa, and Galen. These examples emerged out of the closely intertwined Platonic and Pythagorean traditions, and these philosophers' texts make reference to laws of nature when describing arithmetical methods, arithmological doctrines, or medical theories. Nicomachus' laws of nature are especially noteworthy, because they have features that historians look for in the search for the origin of the modern concept of laws of nature. Nicomachus' laws of nature are mathematical, universal, and necessary. This paper raises the possibility that the ancient Platonic and Pythagorean traditions influenced the subsequent development of the idea of laws of nature in medieval and early modern Europe, including the conception of laws of nature deployed by Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

L. J. Henderson was a central figure in Harvard discussions of the nature of science in the interwar period and served as a bridge between the sciences and the social sciences. Two key ideas were promoted by Henderson: systems and conceptual schemes, both of which spread quickly at Harvard and then beyond. In this article the focus will be on conceptual schemes , a term which had a distinctive origin in Henderson that accounts for some of the ambiguities in its adaptations. Henderson spoke as a scientist speaking to philosophers rather than doing philosophy and sharply distinguished his aims from those that followed from Immanuel Kant. Henderson's model was the scheme of ancient Greek medicine, which had persisted for millennia and was replaced by modern medicine. This was differentiated from earlier neo-Kantian and later Kuhnian variations. Henderson's account was distinctive in placing the origins of conceptual schemes in intuitions about patterns formed in practice by people operating on concrete phenomena. The resulting schemes, he thought, had to be accepted on faith by students, but were, as he put it, walking sticks to enable communication and understanding rather than exclusive dogmas. Henderson was an enthusiast for Vilfredo Pareto, who was vilified at Harvard during the war by Carl J. Friedrich, which led not to the disuse of his ideas but to the erasure of their origins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this extension to Scribbling Towards Utopia, I concentrate on two authors who make their own utopian strivings key features of their work: William Morris, the English socialist, and John Dewey, the American philosopher and liberal educator. I also borrow ideas from Jasmine Ulmer's Writing Slow Ontology to suggest that our utopian hopes will, if ever, only be attained slowly and not quickly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hope is in a twofold crises in Western societies: perceived as unavailable by some and as undesirable by others. Against this background, this introduction argues that there is a need to ask anew what (if anything) citizens should hope for. After some introductory remarks both about the current role of hope in the public arena and important developments in recent philosophical debates, I provide an overview of the contributions to the Special Issue. Through a variety of theoretical lenses and from a variety of theoretical backgrounds, the contributors systematically ask which hopes (if any) we should cultivate or whether it may sometimes be necessary to let go of certain hopes. While they agree that hope is indispensable as a way of dealing with our fragility and sustaining our resolve, it is not without dangers. What emerges is a profile of hope as a complex and ambivalent attitude that has so far received too little attention by political philosophers, despite its prominent and increasingly contested role in political practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a near consensus among philosophers of science whose research focuses on science and values that the ideal of value-free science is untenable, and that science not only is, but normatively must be, value-laden in some respect. The consensus is far from complete; with some regularity, defenses of the value-free ideal (VFI) as well as critiques of major arguments against the VFI surface in the literature. I review and respond to many of the recent defenses of the VFI and show that they generally fail to meet the mark. In the process, I articulate what the current burden of argument for a defense of the VFI ought to be, given the state of the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of philosophers of science have argued that there are important differences between robustness in modeling and experimental contexts, and—in particular—many of them have claimed that the former is non-confirmatory. In this paper, I argue for the opposite conclusion: robust hypotheses are confirmed under conditions that do not depend on the differences between and models and experiments—that is, the degree to which the robust hypothesis is confirmed depends on precisely the same factors in both situations. The positive argument turns on the fact that confirmation theory doesn't recognize a difference between different sources of evidence. Most of the paper is devoted to rebutting various objections designed to show that it should. I end by explaining why philosophers of science have (often) gone wrong on this point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many philosophers appeal to the "fallacy of approximation", or "problem of second best". However, despite the pervasiveness of such appeals, there has been only a single attempt to provide a systematic account of what the fallacy is. We identify the shortcomings of this account and propose a better one in its place. Our account not only captures all the contexts in which approximation-based reasoning occurs but also systematically explains the several different ways in which it can be in error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many suggestions for dealing with the so-called replication crisis in psychology revolve around the idea that better and more complex statistical-mathematical tools or stricter procedures are required in order to obtain reliable findings and prevent cheating or publication biases. While these aspects may play an exacerbating role, we interpret the replication crisis primarily as an epistemological crisis in psychology caused by an inadequate fit between the ontic nature of the psyche and the quantitative approach. On the basis of the philosophers of science Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and Imre Lakatos we suggest that the replication crisis is therefore a symptom of a fundamental problem in psychology, but at the same time it is also an opportunity to advance psychology as a science. In a first step, against the background of Popper's Critical Rationalism, the replication crisis is interpreted as an opportunity to eliminate inaccurate theories from the pool of theories and to correct problematic developments. Continuing this line of thought, in an interpretation along the lines of Thomas Kuhn, the replication crisis might signify a model drift or even model crisis, thus possibly heralding a new paradigm in psychology. The reasons for this are located in the structure of academic psychology on the basis of Lakatos's assumption about how sciences operate. Accordingly, one hard core that lies at the very basis of psychology may be found in the assumption that the human psyche can and is to be understood in quantitative terms. For this to be possible, the ontic structure of the psyche, i.e., its very nature, must also in some way be quantitatively constituted. Hence, the replication crisis suggests that the ontic structure of the psyche in some way (also) contains a non-quantitative dimension that can only be grasped incompletely or fragmentarily using quantitative research methods. Fluctuating and inconsistent results in psychology could therefore also be the expression of a mismatch between the ontic level of the object of investigation and the epistemic level of the investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The significance or vacuity of the statement, “Everything has just doubled in size,” attracted considerable attention last century from scientists and philosophers. Presenting his conventionalism in geometry, Poincaré insisted on the emptiness of a hypothesis that all objects have doubled in size overnight. Such expansion could have meaning, he argued, “only for those who reason as if space were absolute … it would be better to say that space being relative, nothing at all has happened.” The logical empiricists concurred, viewing the universal doubling hypothesis as illustrating the intrinsic metrical amorphousness of continuous manifolds. It is striking, therefore, to find Kant invoking a universal contraction in space and time to support his famous doctrine of transcendental idealism. In one of several completely neglected passages, he writes: “The proof that the things in space and time are mere appearances can also be grounded on the fact that the whole world could be contained in a nutshell and the entirety of elapsed time in a second without the least difference being met with.” Kant's “also” may suggest an idealist argument distinct from any proposed in published works. Here I ask: What is the meaning of Kant's Nutshell Argument for Idealism? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers often understand social categories as conferred or as social kinds. The relationship between conferralism and a social kind approach to social ontology remains unclear. Conferralism is often interpreted as a way of understanding the nature of social kinds, rather than as an alternative to a social kind approach. In this paper, I argue that these two approaches are in fact radically different, and I identify the challenges unique to each approach. The social kind approach requires social kinds to be identifiable on the basis of kind-specific social properties or relations while the conferralist approach does not, instead taking institutional classification practices and communal attitudes to be reality-conferring. While these are not mutually exclusive approaches to social ontology – some social categories are conferred and constitute social kinds – they are genuinely different. I use the debate about the existence of social races as a case study to show why it is useful to distinguish between social kind and conferralist approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper argues that people can deserve the option to give. Discussions of desert tend to focus on the benefits and burdens that people might, in some sense, receive, like wealth and jobs. But intuitively, people can also deserve the ability to decide what to do with their wealth or to select who gets a job. Shaping distributive policies and outcomes in accordance with desert is more complicated than philosophers have realised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how a formative approach to pedagogy might intervene in the conditions of higher education teaching practices, discourses, and organisational priorities today. While the higher education sector is resolutely turned towards the accumulation of skills or ‘content’ to produce a credentialed job-ready graduate, we do these graduates a disservice if how we educate fails to take account of their formation as persons, citizens, workers, neighbours, and indeed as graduates. This is a focus on what education philosopher Gert Biesta calls subjectification. Through education’s contribution to the making of populations, the neglect of this formative role of pedagogy has wider significance in the knowledge societies in which universities are operating. We first lodge the mattering of pedagogy within a contemporary moment in which calls to reform capitalism and redress democratic deconsolidation butt up against the fortunes of public knowledge and the consequences of hyper-individualist cultures. We then outline pedagogy as a formative cultural technology and provide examples and discussion from our own classroom practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholars of, and participants in, social movements, electoral politics, and organized labor are deeply engaged in contrasting different theories of how political actors should organize, little recent philosophical work has asked what social organizing is. This paper aims to answer this question in a way that can make sense of typical organizing‐related claims and debates. It is intuitive that what social organizing does is bring about some kind of collectivity. However, I argue that the varieties of collectivity most amply theorized by analytic philosophers in recent years, including grouphood and collective intentionality, are not the right kinds to embed in a theory of social organizing. I ultimately argue that the sort of collectivity that organizing characteristically brings about is a special kind of causal complementarity among agents' actions— and that while this can exist alongside grouphood and collective intentionality, it is not the same thing as either. The notion of social organizing that emerges is one that can clarify, without trivializing, a number of pressing contemporary debates about how normal people should conduct themselves as interconnected political actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paradoxical nature of intentional self-deception has led many philosophers to view self-deception as predominantly non-intentional. I propose that approaching self-deception from an agency-theoretic perspective allows us to rescue the idea that self-deception can at least be driven by intention. By modeling the ‘acting as if’ method of self-deception with agential layering, developed by Nguyen [2020. Games: Agency as Art. New York: Oxford University Press], I argue that intention-driven self-deception is no more mysterious than other activities that involve self-effacing ends: ends we must pursue indirectly. That is, self-deception can occur when agents pursue the self-effacing end of forming what they take to be an epistemically unjustified belief by submerging themselves in a layer of agency in which they can act as if they already hold that belief. By intentionally adopting this pretense and shaping their agency around it, they forget that their agency is layered at all, and may thereby form a full-fledged belief. This model avoids objections to views that treat self-deception itself as intentional and does so while appealing only to resources already used to explain our everyday activities. I then apply my model to a core case of bad faith from Sartre to show that intention-driven self-deception can clarify how we are responsible for inauthenticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Georges Bataille made no secret of the importance Friedrich Nietzsche’s life and work held for him. But Bataille’s encounter with Nietzsche remained paradoxical: he rejected or ignored most of Nietzsche’s major concepts while nevertheless insisting on the value of Nietzsche’s thought and experience as a necessary counterpoint to the political, religious, and social currents of modernity. This paper demonstrates the extent to which Bataille owes the content and to some degree also the form of his idiosyncratic reading of Nietzsche to the influence and example of the Russian emigré philosopher Lev Shestov (1866–1938). In 1925, Georges Bataille published a translation of Shestov’s The Idea of the Good in Tolstoy and Nietzsche: Philosophy and Preaching, co-signed with Shestov’s daughter Tatiana Beresovski-Chestov. The translation was the product of a period during which Bataille also spent time with the older man and benefited from his tutelage. It was Shestov’s interpretation of the meaning of the death of God in Nietzsche’s life and thought that would have the most decisive influence on Bataille’s own life and work and make him, in his turn, a philosopher of tragedy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the neo-Confucian response to the question, “How to achieve the state of oneness,” as put forth by Cheng Yi and Cheng Hao. While both philosophers achieve this state through internal affectivity, their interpretations diverge significantly. Cheng Yi views internal affectivity as an inherent goodness that emanates from the pre-manifested mind but warns against emotional instability and desires. He thus rejects the notion of “teaching benevolence through perception.” (yijue xunren) and instead emphasizing the primacy of the unmanifested mind in attaining oneness. Conversely, Cheng Hao stresses the inward perception of bodily sensations and supports “teaching benevolence through perception.” He argues that through sensory arousal and the transformation of vital energy, the mind and body can achieve harmony, thereby embodying the benevolence present in “heaven, earth, and all things.” This divergence in their approaches to oneness reflects their differing responses to Buddhism and contrasting views on human nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT I interpret the rich conceptual insights and empirical findings of the special issue Childhood, Migration and the Pursuit of Happiness in Middle‐Class East Asia through the lens of understanding migration as a journey of narrative quests. Drawing from moral philosopher McIntyre's theory of narrative self and the pursuit of a good life, I highlight the dialectic and dialogic aspects of ‘narrative quests’ across multiple cases of East Asian educational migration (educational migration broadly construed). I highlight key features, central themes and tensions of narrative quests among these migrant families. I also pose questions for expanding further inquiry under this theoretical framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attention has become an important focal point of recent work in ethics and epistemology, yet philosophers continue to be noncommittal about what attention is. In this paper, I defend attention as selection for action in a weak form, namely that selection for action is sufficient for attention. I show that selection for action in this conception captures how we, the folk, experience it and how the cognitive scientist studies it. That is, selection for action pulls empirical and folk‐psychology together. Accordingly, philosophers who take seriously either source have reason to work with selection for action as their starting conception of attention. This conception provides a way to bridge empirical and philosophical concerns where attention is central. The theoretical advantages of selection for action have been obscured by the common opinion that it is easily refuted. I defend the position against many of the published objections and then deploy it to provide a foundation for the intuitive, but inchoate, idea of attention being gradable, something of which there can be more or less. An analysis of the gradability of attention is then applied to consider recent work on the harms due to a surplus of attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One way in which philosophers have often sought to distinguish moral judgments from non-moral judgments is by using the “moral-conventional” distinction. I seek to raise serious questions about the significance of the moral-conventional distinction, at least for philosophers interested in moral judgment. I survey recent developments in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science that have led many to the conclusion that moral judgment is not a distinctive kind of judgment or the result of a specific, identifiable cognitive process. I argue that if this conclusion is largely correct, the moral-conventional distinction loses significance. If moral judgment does not correspond to a distinctive cognitive process, it is unclear how distinguishing between types of norms tracks anything of significance to human judgment formation. I then discuss the implications of abandoning the distinction for research in the field of moral psychology and tentatively propose a more modest way of conceiving of norm significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is a review of "Language, Mind and Value" by Severin Schroeder, a book that delves into various topics in philosophy, particularly those related to Wittgenstein's philosophy. The book contains fifteen papers that cover areas such as language, mind, action, aesthetics, ethics, and religion. The reviewer highlights the concept of "nonsense" in philosophical criticism and the discussion of aspect-perception as particularly interesting points in the book. They also mention some criticisms of Schroeder's arguments and interpretations. The article references three academic articles that explore the concept of seeing aspects and its significance in philosophy, providing valuable insights for researchers interested in this topic. [Extracted from the article]

There is a substantial disagreement in the literature over whether ‘remembering’ is a normative concept. Some philosophers have attempted to defend the normativity of ‘remembering’ by highlighting its normative importance or its conceptual affinities with ‘knowing’ or ‘duties’. This paper will first reveal defects of these existing normativist arguments. After that, I will propose and defend a new normativist argument, according to which the concept ‘remembering’ is partly constituted by a paradigmatically normative concept, namely ‘rational’. To be more specific, I argue that full possession of the concept of ‘remembering’ requires having an inclination to believe that ‘if S remembers that p, then S would be (at least defeasibly) rational in holding a memory-based belief that p’. This, according to a persuasive constitutive account of normative concepts, suffices to demonstrate the normative nature of remembering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the instruction of religious stories of Judaism at the primary school level in a Norwegian educational setting, with a focus on the perceptions of 8-year-old students regarding narratives about Moses. By integrating classroom observations and student interviews, it examines the teacher's pedagogical approach in instruction and how this influences students' perceptions. In addition, it explores student's ability to engage and express themselves independently in encounter with the stories. Theoretical perspectives of philosophy of language, particularly Bakhtin and Taylor, are employed to analyse students' expressions and perceptions. The findings are situated within the broader context of international research on teaching religious stories in elementary education. International literature highlights the pedagogical benefits of using stories to engage students in critical thinking and foster an understanding of religious narratives. The article aims to contribute to a nuanced understanding of how the youngest students navigate and interpret religious instructional material as well as their comprehension of the reasons for learning about Moses. Overall, this study contributes to a comprehension on how the youngest students engage with religious narratives and sheds light on teacher's pedagogical approaches in RE instruction at the lower primary level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study pursues three objectives. First, to expose and discuss the contributions of the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset to the phenomenological study of gestures and emotive gesture. Secondly, to critically review one of the central theses defended by Ortega, according to which "every expressive phenomenon"—including, therefore, the emotive gesture—involves "a transposition, that is to say, an essential metaphor." This thesis invites us, in the third objective, to establish a dialogue between phenomenology and cognitive linguistics (as developed by Lakoff, Langacker and Talmy), assuming an experientialist position vis‐à‐vis human reason and language, in opposition to the objectivist and formalist position of Chomsky's generative linguistics. In this interdisciplinary context, we will study the phenomenon of emotive gesture, in particular the expression of the emotion of anger, as analyzed phenomenologically by Ortega y Gasset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the 17th century philosophers, in general, was to show that, by taking as an example the success of the human mind embodied in science, definitive knowledge could be achieved in philosophy, just as in science. To this end, firstly, they described in detail the method to be followed in order to obtain the knowledge. In science, the efforts of scientists such as Kepler, Galileo, and Newton to explain the universe based on mathematics led mathematics to stand out as a way of thinking. In this period, while mathematical research methods enabled the examination of physical phenomena, philosophy, on the other hand, was seen as a model to reach exact knowledge. Rationalist philosophers such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz all agree that people should use their own minds, not authorities, and moving from this idea, mathematics is the method that will lead us to the truth. This paper aims to show how these three great philosophers applied mathematics to their own philosophies, based on their differences and similarities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The celebrated Russian philosopher, Evald Ilyenkov, draws on Spinoza to solve a key philosophical problem: how exactly does the mind connect to the real world? However, the proposed solution has come under much criticism, for example in a recent special issue of Studies of East European Thought (74, 3). This paper aims to clearly explain the solution, overcoming misunderstandings that are evident in the special issue. The kernel of the solution is an argument that human cognition rests on practical activity. In practical activity humans do not act on a fixed structure within their own bodies, in the manner, say, that the activity of water is determined by its fixed structure, H2O. Instead, human practical activity directly connects with and continually adapts to the structures and causal powers of external bodies. Awareness of practical activity thereby gives the human mind access to a mode of activity that is in direct contact and ever-greater accordance with the objects of the real world. The paper will elaborate and develop this kernel, with particular attention to the notion of 'causal powers' that it contains, by drawing from the revival in philosophy and the social sciences of what has been termed 'causal powers realism'. The paper thereby opens new insights and connections regarding the Spinoza-Ilyenkov solution, alleviating the potential for misunderstandings evident in the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short interview explores the influence of Evald Ilyenkov's work on contemporary philosopher, art theorist, and writer Keti Chukhrov. The interview focuses on Evald Ilyenkov's contributions to Soviet culture, dialectics, and epistemology. She reflects on the distinct intellectual milieu of Soviet thinkers like Ilyenkov, Vygotsky, Davidov, and Lifshitz, who established connections between Marx and the broader world culture. The interview also addresses Žižek's interpretation of Ilyenkov's cosmology, emphasizing the ethical dimension of Ilyenkov's communist spirit. Furthermore, Chukhrov touches on Ilyenkov's critique of cybernetics and its relevance in contemporary discussions about AI and philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is dedicated to the philosophical legacy of Evald Ilyenkov in Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine. The authors use the example of Ilyenkov and his legacy to show how drastically different the philosophical situation was in Soviet Ukraine in order to present a holistic viewpoint on Soviet philosophy. The authors highlight the differences between the political and philosophical circumstances in Russia and Ukraine from the 1950s to the 2010s. The Ukrainian philosophical tradition is characterized by its focus on pedagogics, aesthetics, and nonacademic forms of philosophical communication. The main organizational role in Ukrainian philosophy was played by Pavel Kopnin and Valeriy Bosenko, who introduced dialectics as logic to Kyiv universities and made an effort to create philosophical circles for students. Anatoliy Kanarskiy, the prominent Soviet philosopher who specialized in aesthetics adopted the same idea of organizing students into circles. All these personalities were connected with Ilyenkov and each other, thus proving the existence of a common tendency and tradition of thinking within the discourse of Soviet philosophy. The authors highlight that this specific tradition may be called a "Socratic tradition" with its focus on free thinking, on discussions and dialectics. This tradition goes beyond academic philosophy and roots itself in cybernetical studies by Viktor Hlushkov and exists in modern Ukraine in the form of various philosophical circles and literature clubs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soviet Marxism is often characterized by the term ontologism. The latter could be defined as a totalizing assertion about material being as inherently dialectical, often coupled with an understanding of thought as mere reflection. This fundamental assertion is said to remain unchallenged among dogmatic party philosophers and critical Marxists alike. Far from an innocent misconception, Soviet ontologism is associated with some of the harshest historical events like the Lysenko affair, where the imposition of the dialectical optic onto the natural sciences resulted in an ideological blockade of research. Various sources of this peculiarity have been identified in Soviet Marxism, from the endorsement of dialectics of nature to the rejection of Cartesian metaphysics. However, a political account of Soviet ontologism is yet to be written. This article will address the question of ontologism as it has been theorized in relation to the philosophy of Evald Ilyenkov. Tracing the history of Russian ontologism from the nineteenth century, we will recover its nationalist dimension. Then, drawing on the philosophical controversies between Lenin and Bogdanov, which in turn will be linked to Ilyenkov's intervention, we will examine the various strands of ontological thinking in Soviet Marxism and identify Ilyenkov's position. Finally, we will ask what insights can the ontological thinking of Soviet Marxism provide in the context of contemporary philosophical turns towards ontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Carolyne Larrington, legends of the past 'offer particular kinds of answers – beautiful and mysterious answers... – to very large questions through a kind of metaphorical thinking... which, in their stripped-down clarity, show us what's really important in an unfamiliar light'. The claim that 'what is really important [is disclosed] by casting it in an unfamiliar light' I take into a philosophical engagement with the figure of the ghost. Far from being of dubious interest for the philosopher of religion, the continuing fascination with ghosts and hauntings offers promising ground for the discussion of religion, for the study of ghosts holds out the possibility of engaging with the wonder and terror of the human condition. The figure of something that is dead yet alive is a creative representation of the fact that we who are alive are also mortal, destined to die. The resulting confrontation with death arouses anxiety, but also has the potential to enrich life. The wisdom of the ghost thus enables the possibility of returning philosophy of religion to the great themes of human existence – birth, suffering, loss, and death – which provide rich resources for understanding religion and its relation to the experience of being human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given that the more apophatic strand of mysticism resonates more with the way contemporary philosophers are apt to think about mystical experience, the fact that apophatic mysticism was a bit of a fringe enterprise in the Middle Ages calls for explanation. The explanations that are suggested within the pages of Christina Van Dyke's A Hidden Wisdom are not typically historical-contextual explanations, but theological ones. This article examines apophatic mysticism in terms of three of the standard theological loci : creation, Incarnation, and Trinity. In each case we will find that some of the characteristic claims of the apophatic mystics are so much at odds with the mainstream of Christian theology that the mystery is not so much their being marginalized but rather their being largely tolerated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A discussion of the metaphysics of spiritual experience requires that we are clear about the nature of metaphysics, and I take as my starting point the 'transcendent metaphysics' described and supposedly eliminated by A. J. Ayer. Most analytic philosophers agree with Ayer (and Kant) that transcendent metaphysics in the relevant sense is deeply problematic, and they associate it with platonism, theism, and religious thinking more generally. Assuming then that spiritual experience takes us into religious territory, and this territory is forbidden, a metaphysics of spiritual experience is going to involve transcendent metaphysics, and it will be similarly problematic. Ayer's conception of transcendent reality is itself deeply problematic, and I shall argue that his metaphysical framework helps to motivate atheistic spirituality by ruling out the possibility of an empirically grounded and hence defensible religious alternative. I shall challenge this framework, set out an alternative with the help of Arthur Schopenhauer, and spell out the implications for a metaphysics of spiritual experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between humanity, the creator, and the universe has been one of the most fundamental issues shaping ontological debates throughout human history, influencing the intellectual realms of philosophy, religion, and literature. The ontological theories that developed in the Anatolian region under the influence of Islam and Sufism are prominent metaphorical elements in classical Turkish poetry. The concept of "generation and corruption" introduced by philosophers during the era of Ancient Greek civilization and interpreted by numerous philosophers and scholars within the Islamic world, was developed based on the motion of matter. In Arabic, this concept is expressed by the terms "kevn" and "fesâd" and is one of the philosophically grounded phrases used in classical Turkish poetry, often in connection with the concept of the world, centered around the perception of existence. In Islamic philosophy, the idea of the continuous change and transformation of matter is reflected in the notion of generation and corruption. In poetry, however, it is commonly used to emphasize the transient, temporary, and deceptive nature of the world, influenced by this transformation. It is also noteworthy that these couplets are created with an imaginative approach to philosophical subjects. This article aims to explore the areas of use of this theory, referred to as "kevn ü fesâd" in classical poetry, and to identify the elements with which it is associated in poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Jean le Rond d'Alembert's views of metaphysical cosmology and argues that these constitute an important context for Kant's critical-period response to rational cosmology. D'Alembert is commonly taken to have dismissed cosmology from the roster of the legitimate sciences, and there is indeed evidence of his scepticism towards Maupertuis' cosmology no less than towards Wolff's cosmologia generalis. I argue, however, that a broadly Leibnizian cosmological perspective underpins d'Alembert's accounts of our knowledge and of the task of the philosopher. D'Alembert's work thus anticipates and helps bring into focus Kant's own nuanced engagement with the cosmological tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second half of the eighteenth century, with the publication of non-religious philosophy, Hume claimed that the existence of God is impossible, therefore his contemporaries viewed him as a downright atheist. Recently, and despite the interpretations of the last two centuries, Hume has not been introduced as an atheist, but as an agnostic, theist, and deist. According to these three attitudes, perhaps Hume has either suspended the claims of thick theism and thin theism, or has explicitly endorsed the existence of God, or has defended from unknown commitment regarding the existence of wisdom that is the origin, creator, and ruler of this world. This paper rejects the mentioned four readings and shows that Hume is a weak and non-dogmatic atheist. Because, this philosopher, by demonstrating that the claims of thick theism are groundless, concludes that the existence of God, with a rich set of attributes, is impossible. However, Hume's attitude to thin theism is not so sharp. Thin theism is not wrong and incredible. According to him, thin theism is empty and useless, and it does not deserve to be investigated by any skeptic. In fact, Hume neither denied, nor suspended, nor endorsed thin theism; If he denied it, he would known as downright atheist, if he suspended it, he would known as downright agnostic, and if he endorsed it, he would know as genuine theist and attenuated deist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bible testifies to the fusion of faith and love, but love was never the focus of theology and the theologians ignored it. In this paper, the factors of inattention to the concept of love in theology were first studied. This is due to accepting an image of love that separates its two types: agape love, which is not rooted in the attractive characteristics of the beloved, and erotic love, which is motivated by the characteristics of the beloved. The first type of love was admitted in classical theology, and love in relation to God and neighbor was described accordingly, but the second type was usually forbidden. The theology of love in this writing, by revising this division, accepts the definition of the erotic tradition of love in theology since it considers it a non-mysterious and explainable image of love. In criticizing the common attitude about love, the point of view of Alan Soble, a contemporary philosopher, was used; therefore, it was shown that love in relation to God is explicable in the erotic tradition and can respond to challenges. This attitude includes various elements, and in the paper, only the theological elements were discussed, including: God is personal, has emotions, is present in the world, in union with man and having care attribute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of "motion" is one of the issues that arose from the very beginning of philosophy in Iran and Greece, and therefore it became the focus of attention and emphasis of philosophers, and since then until now many treatises and books have been written about it. One of the issues that was studied under this topic is the “substantial motion of things” that Mulla Sadra initiated and proposed. This issue has been criticized and confirmed since the time it was raised and brought up and has provoked both supporters and opponents. He claims that substantial motion is “the motion that occurs in the essence of things”. This article aims to, while referring to substantial motion, briefly state the view of the contemporary philosopher Professor Abedi Shahroudi, which is titled “A Complement to the Theory of Substantial Motion”. In this theory, motion is a compositional motion, and based on the vector motion theory, the shortcomings of Mullah Sadra's theory, some of which have been mentioned in the article, will be obviated. Therefore, first, we briefly examine the substantial motion based on Mulla Sadra's definition, and then we explain Shahroudi's theory with the title “Vector Motion: A Complement to Mulla Sadra's substantial motion.” In Mulla Sadra's opinion, time is an irreversible event, contrary to Shahroudi's opinion that time is a reversible thing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are some discursive arguments that justify the proposition that the intellect and the intelligible are one unified thing. One scholar who has paid attention to this proposition is Avicenna. The examination of this proposition is one of the key principles of Avicenna’s epistemology. In his al-Mabda’ wa al-Ma’ad, Avicenna agrees with the justifying arguments for the proposition, but in his other works he seriously disagrees with it. As a prominent researcher, Lahigi deeply looked into the issue and after the description of Avicenna’s view, he criticized Avicenna’s propositional justification in al-Mabda’ wa al-Ma’ad .Viewing the importance of the earlier study in the light of the later study, the author has reported Lahigi’s view and criticism of Avicenna. In the course of his study, Lahigi has demonstrated that Avicenna’s true view on the intellect-and-intelligible union is to disagree with it and his agreement in al-Mabda’ wa al-Ma’ad along with his suggested arguments is only on the face of it. The approaches of the two philosophers to the issue reveal how they have conceived the concept of union. Accordingly, they have sought for the union of two concepts, rather than two modes of existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hannah Arendt's concept of enlarged mentality (also referred to as representative thinking) has received much attention from theorists and philosophers, but it has not been a central concept in the empirical political communication literature. This article explicates the concept of enlarged mentality and argues for its relevance to political communication theory and research. Specifically, we developed (Study 1) and validated (Study 2, Study 3) a 10-item survey instrument to measure orientation towards enlarged thinking among individuals. The Enlarged Mentality Scale was validated in two national samples (Singapore, United Kingdom) and was found to show predictive validity toward deliberative and political engagement variables. We offer suggestions on how the measure of enlarged mentality could be useful for different areas of political communication research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores experiences of surrender to an aspect of mind that is unconfined, empty of dualistic concepts, and lucidly aware. Ghent's concept of surrender, Farber's unconscious will, and Buddhist philosophers' essence of mind all link to creative processes described by Poincaré and Mozart. This impressionistic collage points to the spaciousness to know beyond our usual stories. From this essential mind more wholesome actions proceed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The case of a pioneering woman physicist and philosopher illustrates that we must look beyond hagiography to gain an accurate picture of the history of quantum physics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many philosophers have been attracted to a restricted version of the principle of indifference in the case of self‐locating belief. Roughly speaking, this principle states that, within any given possible world, one should be indifferent between different hypotheses concerning who one is within that possible world, so long as those hypotheses are compatible with one's evidence. My first goal is to defend a more precise version of this principle. After responding to several existing criticisms of such a principle, I argue that existing formulations of the principle are crucially ambiguous, and I go on to defend a particular disambiguation of the principle. According to the disambiguation I defend, how we should apply this restricted principle of indifference sensitively depends on our background metaphysical beliefs. My second goal is to apply this disambiguated principle to classical skeptical problems in epistemology. In particular, I argue that Eternalism threatens to lead us to external world skepticism, and Modal Realism threatens to lead us to inductive skepticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is anything good simpliciter? And can things count as 'good' independent of the context in which 'good' is used? Traditionally, a number of meta‐ethicists have given positive answers. But more recently, some philosophers have used observations based on natural language to argue that things can only count as 'good' relative to ends and contextual thresholds. I will use work from contemporary linguistics to argue that 'good' is ambiguous, and that it has a moral disambiguation that attributes a fixed degree of goodness. This implies that things can count as 'good' simpliciter, independent of context. Not only does this result provide support for the traditional view, but it also vindicates some aspects of the more recent view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Andrea Kelly Henderson, "Harriet Martineau's Realized Abstractions" (pp. 81–105) Critics have long noted—and often lamented—the formal incoherence of Harriet Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34). This essay argues that the tales' formal bifurcations can be understood not as a failing but as a conscious response to the absence of a contemporary consensus regarding the groundedness of economic abstractions. Martineau's aesthetic of what I call "realized abstraction" offers a solution of sorts to this epistemological problem: unable to mediate between abstractions and particulars, she simply insists on the importance of both. Berkeley the Banker, her tale devoted to banking and currency, vividly dramatizes this dichotomizing logic. In this work, the relationship of concrete value to its abstract representation in paper money is analogized to a troubled marriage, one in which the husband forces his virtuous wife to subscribe to his false representations. Martineau's story will explicitly argue for the usefulness of economic theory and paper money, but she resists the tendency of abstractions to render the concrete invisible in an act of metaphoric coverture; instead, she presents the abstract and the particular as autonomous realms. Martineau's aesthetic of juxtaposition thus aspires to virtues quite different from those of Romantic organic wholeness or realist transparency: her tales aim not only to educate readers in abstract principles and historical particulars but also to train them to discriminate between the two. In subsequent decades, philosophers of science would formulate compelling new ways to bind abstractions to particulars, and the success of that project would mean that despite the Illustrations's enormous popularity during the 1830s, they would seem to later generations to be marred by formal fragmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the work of one of Russia's greatest philosophers, Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), from the perspective of natural theology and attempts to distil the original natural theological arguments which we find in his work. Solovyov's arguments are rarely presented in clarity or with a detailed critical analysis. The current paper thus hopes to offer some amendment to this unfortunate deficiency in the secondary literature. It will become evident that Solovyov's relation to natural theology contained two distinct layers. There is, on the one hand, the external polemical and publicist layer of discourse, where Solovyov rejects natural theology outright. On the other hand, there is the deeper metaphysical layer, where Solovyov's own arguments, hidden within his elaborate metaphysical structures, can themselves be considered as a form of natural theology. The paper will conclude that, despite the overall failure of his arguments, Solovyov can still provide inspiration for Orthodox theologians by attempting a form of natural theology within an Orthodox context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neutrosophy is a branch of philosophy proposed in 1998 by Romanian philosopher and mathematician F. Smarandache, which studies the origin, nature, and scope of neutrality and its interaction with different spectra of ideas. Because it is a relatively new field, specific scientific production on this subject may be limited, but as it develops, new research and contributions are likely to emerge. This is why it is becoming more necessary to undertake studies to understand the evolution, impact, and scope of research, especially in a context where it had never been examined in depth before: in the Latin American region. This research aims to describe the scientific production of Latin American authors in the Scopus database referring to Neutrosophic Science in the period 2019-2023 by carrying out a bibliometric study of a descriptive nature. The scientific production in Neutrosophy assumes patterns of behavior that vary from international patterns with a marked social focus. Although productivity levels have not increased in recent years, the impact and recognition from the international community have grown significantly, meaning the evolution of a process of transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This dialogue, taking place between Prof. Whether and Prof. What, focuses on the nature of the relationship between ontology, conceived as the branch of philosophy concerned with the question of what entities exist, and metaphysics, conceived as the complementary part of philosophy that seeks to explain, of those entities, what they are. Most philosophers claim that it is not possible to address the first question without at the same time addressing the second, since knowing whether an entity exists requires knowing what that entity is. Prof. Whether argues against this popular position and offers a detailed analysis of the idea according to which it is possible to do ontology without engaging in metaphysics. Prof. Whether and Prof. What agree that, rather than being merely possible, in some cases it is, for methodological reasons, even preferable to start with a metaphysics-free ontology, postponing any inquiry concerning the nature of the entities included in the ontological inventory to a later stage. However, Prof. What notes that it is not always possible to do ontology without metaphysics, because there are certain kinds of entities, such as universals and possible worlds, that necessarily need a prior metaphysical characterization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]