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The paper is about the Soviet philosopher Valentin Ferdinandovich Asmus (1894–1975) and his criticism of the fascist and Nazi appropriation of Hegel's philosophy. The status of the Hegelian legacy was very controversial in Marxism-Leninism throughout the Stalinist era. Unlike the majority of Soviet academics of this time, Asmus did not recognize any valid intellectual legacy at the base of German fascism. Asmus heavily criticized attempts to portray Hegel as a pro-fascist thinker. When many Soviet philosophers defended only the method, dialectics, Asmus defended Hegel's social and political views as humanistic and liberal. The first part of the article describes the "official" Soviet philosophy within the context of which Asmus had to act. The second part offers a comprehensive analysis of the criticism of Hegel's fascist interpretation in Asmus' Fascist Falsification of Classical German Philosophy (1942). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the original critical dialectical approach of the Soviet philosopher Valentin F. Asmus. His publications on the heritage of Western philosophical thought in the journal Pod znamenem marksizma are examples of this approach. In the 1920s and 1930s, Asmus published a number of articles analyzing a variety of the ideas developed by Western European philosophers: "An Advocate for Philosophical Intuition (Bergson and His Critique of the Intellect)" (1926); "The Alogism of William James" (1927); "The Dialectics of Necessity and Freedom in Spinoza's Ethics" (1927); "Kant's General and Transcendental Logic" (1928); "Cosmogony and Cosmology of Descartes" (1937); "Fichte and the Vocation of Scholar" (1937); "Nicholas of Cusa. Selected Philosophical Works" (1938); and "Tommaso Campanella" (1939). These articles differed from the journal's usual rhetoric, which was shaped in accordance with the official Soviet state ideology. Asmus, through the thinkers he examined, showed the fundamental importance of philosophy for the human personality. This article argues that Asmus, despite his closeness to dialectical materialism, adapted the official terminology and issues in his historical and philosophical articles in a way that he advanced the human right to spirituality, creative activity, and individual freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cosmology of Xenophanes of Colophon, for which we have only fragmentary evidence, contains several aspects which remain unclear. The extant texts tend to agree that Xenophanes believed the Earth to be boundless in the downward direction. Scholars consequently usually conclude that the surface of the Earth was the only boundary dividing the Earth and the heavens in Xenophanes’ cosmology. The Earth thus either stretched endlessly downwards, whereby new heavenly bodies always moved in a straight line into infinity above its surface, or – alternatively – it filled the lower part of a spherical universe and heavenly bodies moved in arcs and regularly came into existence and perished. One can also argue, however, that we should instead understand references to the endlessness of the Earth in the sense of Earth forming the lower boundary of the entire universe, whereby the Earth itself was limited and the heavens stretched above its surface. Heavenly bodies were permanent, although meteorological in their nature, and moving above a flat Earth. Although several testimonies attribute a spherical shape of both the divinity and the totality to Xenophanes, it is much more likely that the notion of a spherical universe appeared only later in the work of Parmenides. Although Xenophanes is often linked to the Eleatic philosophers, his cosmology and concept of the Earth in fact fully belonged to the Ionian tradition. It can also be argued that many of the unclear aspects of Xenophanes’ cosmology are due to the thinker’s poetic way of expressing his thoughts, which later doxographers interpreted in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term “God of the philosophers” refers to the concept of God as understood and discussed in philosophical discourse. It is a philosophical concept of God that is often considered distinct from the concept of God found in religious traditions. Throughout history, various philosophers and theologians have used the term to refer to God whose existence and attributes have been the subject of philosophical reasoning and reflection. In this study, I explore Ibn Sīnā’s way of reconciling two concepts of God. I argue that Ibn Sînâ, a philosopher with an Aristotelian and Neoplatonic heritage, sees no contradiction between the God of the philosophers and the God of the scriptures. Ibn Sina’s way is interesting because it is an attempt to bridge the gap between two concepts of God without compromising the classical theistic understanding of divine attributes. First, I will briefly present the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic contexts of Ibn Sīnā’s philosophy to show his way of reconciliation. Second, I will give an account of Ibn Sīnā’s concept of God as it is revealed in his understanding of the divine attribute of immutability. Finally, I will examine his views in which he most explicitly offers the concept of a God who is responsive, who is present, and who is engaged with human beings. His ideas about God’s agency, petitionary prayer, and divine providence provide ample evidence that the God of Ibn Sīnā is the God of the religious traditions known to and worshipped by human beings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

J.L. Schellenberg and likeminded philosophers have offered a compelling argument against the existence of God known as the hiddenness argument. The idea that a loving God would not permit nonresistant nonbelief seems intuitive at first. Many theists have provided strong rebuttals to the hiddenness argument, attacking one or more of its controversial premises. I attempt to provide a new way forward in rebutting the hiddenness argument by challenging the assumed understanding of love that motivates many of the intuitions behind the hiddenness argument. I offer objections to the account of love that Schellenberg uncritically assumes and applies to divine-human relationships, and then go on to reconstruct the hiddenness argument with other accounts of love that are offered in contemporary philosophical literature discussion. In each case, the hiddenness argument is rendered unsuccessful. Throughout the essay, I comment on the theological merits of these various accounts of love as they are applied to divine-human relationships in order to show that, while not all of them are equally viable, Christian theists have several plausible ways of avoiding the conclusion of the hiddenness argument by adopting a different account of divine love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Niklas Luhmann, causality is both an impossibility and a necessity in education. On the one hand, the task of the teacher is an impossible one, because teaching as communication is a closed system that cannot determine the learning of pupils' psychical system in any causal sense. On the other hand, one cannot practice as a teacher without a belief in causality, i.e., in a causal connection between teaching and learning. In his article "The Child as the Medium of Education," Luhmann focuses on the enablement of education, despite its impossibility. His answer is that one thing that makes education possible is the emergence of the symbolically generalized medium "the child." In this article, Lars Qvortrup focuses on Luhmann's understanding of causality. According to Luhmann, causality is not a simple, ontological fact, but the result of the attribution of certain causes to certain effects. The conclusion is that causality as an attribution category — and not causality as an ontological fact — is another thing that makes education possible. Qvortrup also concludes, however, that Luhmann is not alone in criticizing the traditional, mechanical concept of causality. Other contemporary philosophers and sociologists have pointed out that in order to analyze causality in complex social systems, one has to select some causal factors and ignore others. While others do this based on seemingly pure scientific and statistical criteria, Luhmann focuses on attribution as a social construction of causality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are... So, to reframe the inquiry: who are we on a metaphysical level? Which aspects of ourselves are the most universally representative of who we are? How do we fare in the face of the passage of time? For decades, philosophers have debated the concept of diachronic personal identity, which focuses on the question of what keeps us alive. An intricate debate has developed between those who hold the body view (animalism) and those who hold the psychological view (memory) on the question of who we are. The two groups will eventually become so firmly set in their views that they will be unable to compromise. Hylomorphic animalism, or the view that humans are rational animals, living bodies made of prime matter and a rational soul, is an alternative answer to this divisive question that I propose in this study, following in the footsteps of Aristotle and Aquinas. We only survive if matter and rational souls do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In some point of view, neither Michel Foucault nor Ibn Khaldun are considered philosophers in the conventional classifications, but both are very important in intellectual and, of course, in philosophical contexts, especially for those who are interested in the deep study of human life from the perspective of political thought. The main concern of two thinkers, one in the 14th century, the other in the 20th century, is the issue of power, although neither of them provided a precise definition of it. In this article, an attempt has been made to show the place of power and domination in the political thought of both thinkers by examining the thoughts of two thinkers. And in search of an answer to this question, how did Asabiyyah and industry of religion in Ibn Khaldun's thought and social control through selftechnology and discipline in Foucault's thought lead to the expansion of the domination of power? This article is written by analytically comparing the opinions of two thinkers based on Ibn Khaldun's most important book called Muqaddimah and Foucault's late works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fantasy literature has grown, diversified, and become famous in recent decades. One such phenomenon is Harry Potter, which has a readership base from all over the world to make this fantasy literary novel one of the world's most famous cultures. However, it is crucial to know how popular culture influences moral practices in its readers, so it is necessary to identify what kind of moral representation appears in the text. This study aims to examine the representation of ideology through moral conceptions. Fairclough's critical discourse analysis was applied to discover the reality behind the text of the Harry Potter novels and The Philosopher's Stone. The finding of this study is that there are ten discourses of moral representation related to morality in education, morality in private and public interactions, morality formed based on social strata, and morality in the view of norms and ethics. Morality is not only about good and bad but how it affects the order of life in social life, even though it is represented in an unlimited imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers of science often make reference - whether tacitly or explicitly - to the notion of a scientific community. Sometimes, such references are useful to make our object of analysis tractable in the philosophy of science. For others, tracking or understanding particular features of the development of science proves to be tied to notions of a scientific community either as a target of theoretical or social intervention. We argue that the structure of contemporary scientific research poses two unappreciated, or at least underappreciated, challenges to this concept of the "scientific community" in the philosophy of science. In particular, we will present two case studies from robotics research, broadly construed, which show that (1) the boundedness of the scientific community is threatened when private citizens can develop scientific and technological advances at minimal expense (democratization), and (2) the discreteness of scientific research programs is threatened by the complexly interrelated environment of contemporary scientific work (interconnectivity). Taken together, the extent of democratization and interconnectivity present a significant challenge for any practically oriented philosophy of science, one which we hope will be taken on directly by philosophers in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many philosophers tacitly accept the View: consciousness is necessary for being a welfare subject. That is, in order to be an eligible bearer of welfare goods and bads, an entity must be capable of phenomenal consciousness. However, this paper argues that, in the absence of a compelling rationale, we are not licensed to accept the View, because doing so amounts to fallacious reasoning in theorizing about welfare: insisting on the View when consciousness is not in fact important for welfare value in a systematic and significant way is objectionably "consciousist." As a result, the View does not advance our understanding of the value of consciousness. The paper further diagnoses why we may be attracted to the View, and what we should accept instead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recurring theme dominates recent philosophical debates about the nature of conscious perception: naïve realism's opponents claim that the view is directly contradicted by empirical science. I argue that, despite their current popularity, empirical arguments against naïve realism are fundamentally flawed. The non‐empirical premises needed to get from empirical scientific findings to substantive philosophical conclusions are ones the naïve realist is known to reject. Even granting the contentious premises, the empirical findings do not undermine the theory, given its overall philosophical commitments. Thus, contemporary empirical research fails to supply any new argumentative force against naïve realism. I conclude that, as philosophers of mind, we would be better served spending a bit less time trying to wield empirical science as a cudgel against our opponents, and a bit more time working through the implications of each other's views – something we can accomplish perfectly well from the comfort of our armchairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the different ideas of the great philosophers regarding the optimal age to make philosophy, this article aims to expose the essential arguments that justify the importance of philosophical debates among children, as well as the purpose of philosophy in childhood. In addition, attempts are made to provide answers to the question: What prevails in childhood: good or bad? It is thus found that although bad is present during childhood, it can also have beneficial effects in the further development of the child. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her 2014 monograph, philosopher Neera Badhwar develops a neo-Aristotelian account of well-being according to which well-being consists in happiness in an objectively worthwhile life. An objectively worthwhile life is a life that is virtuous, but virtue is not enough for well-being: a person also must find pleasure and purpose in what the ancients called "external goods," that is, goods "external to the soul" like wealth, health, and friendships. Badhwar argues that these goods contribute to well-being directly, and she rejects the Stoic view that they are valuable only as the instruments and material of virtue. In this paper, I defend the Stoic view she rejects and make the case that if one claims that virtue is primary in well-being, as Neo-Aristotelians like Badhwar do, then one should adopt the Stoic view that well-being consists only in virtuous activity. While Badhwar and others dismiss that view as implausible, I defend its plausibility by arguing that its critics misunderstand it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the use of stringed instruments (and in particular the harpsichord) as models of brain and cognitive function in eighteenth-century French medicine and natural philosophy. These comparisons were founded in part on the anatomical investigations of the latter half of the seventeenth century, which had established both the "fibrous" structure of the white and gray matter of the cerebrum and the vibratory movement the brain underwent in the performance of its functions. Musical instruments—and in particular the harpsichord—helped these philosophers speculate about how the brain worked as the material instrument of sensation and thought: they were machines at once mechanical and affective, grounded in the materiality of their wooden boards and metal strings, yet symbolizing the rational—and immaterial—harmonies of music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aims and approaches of the emergent field of information history are explored in a Socratic dialogue. The philosopher Aspasia and her student Socrates are on their return to Athens from the harbor town of Piraeus when they begin discussing the proper subject of information history. After some deliberation, they come to realize that information history is not about information per se. Instead, information history seeks to provide a historical understanding of the nature of information practices—activities that include collecting, organizing, and preserving, among others. In the end, they conclude that information history is the study of information becoming information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1973, a conference was held in Toronto to mark the bicentenary of James Mill's birth and the centenary of John Stuart Mill's death. By that time, Toronto had emerged as the centre of Mill studies. Between 1963 and 1973, the University of Toronto Press had published, in a scholarly edition, eleven volumes of Mill's Collected works. A further twenty-two volumes would appear in the eighteen years that followed. Only two of the nine presenters at the 1973 conference were members of a Philosophy Department. Philosophers had a modest part in the production of Mill's Collected works. Yet, philosophers came to dominate Mill studies in the decades after the Mill edition wrapped up in 1991. Philosophers contributed ten of the fourteen essays featured in The Cambridge companion to Mill (1998), edited by John Skorupski. Philosophers constituted twenty-six of the thirty-seven contributors to A companion to Mill (2017), published by Wiley Blackwell and edited by Christopher Macleod and Dale E. Miller. This communication explains the relative unimportance of philosophers in the creation of the Collected works , and comments on the forces shaping the subsequent pre-eminence of philosophers in Mill studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers have often debated the truth of microstructural essentialism about chemical substances: whether or not the structure of a chemical substance at the molecular scale is what makes it the substance it is. Oddly they have tended to pursue this debate without identifying what a structure is, and with some confusion and about what a chemical substance is. In this paper I draw on chemistry to rectify those omissions, providing a pluralist account of structure, clarifying what (according to chemistry) a chemical substance is and defending microstructural essentialism, as I understand that position. I then give an account of the existence of composite substances and objects in chemistry, an issue that goes back to Aristotle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I propose a theory of living organisms that captures the insights of both traditional Aristotelian hylomorphism and John Dupré's "biological processualism". Like traditional Aristotelian hylomorphism, the proposed theory understands material objects to be comprised of both matter and form. Unlike contemporary structural varieties of hylomorphism, however, it does not understand the form of a material object to be a relation, configuration, or structure exhibited by its parts but an activity or process in which its matter is continuously engaged. Following Mark Steen, I call the proposed theory "Hyloenergeism". As a version of hylomorphism, hyloenergeism better captures the inherent dynamism of living organisms than contemporary structural approaches. And it does so not by abandoning the substantialist paradigm, as Dupré's biological processualism does, but by reconceptualizing the nature of material substances as possessing a processual core. Hyloenergeism, then, paves a middle way for those looking for a substance view of living organisms sensitive to the concerns raised by contemporary processualist philosophers of biology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the concept of social philosophy and its relationship to the individual and the social totality. The author explores the ideas of Max Horkheimer, who argued that social philosophy should focus on the fate of humans as members of a community, rather than as isolated individuals. Horkheimer emphasized the importance of understanding the overarching structures of being that exist in the social totality. The article also draws connections between Horkheimer's ideas and the work of philosophers such as Hegel and Rawls, highlighting the role of moral grounding and the possibility of a convergence of differing comprehensive views in a liberal constitutional democracy. [Extracted from the article]

During the Covid-19 pandemic we increasingly turned to technology to stay in touch with our family, friends, and colleagues. Even as lockdowns and restrictions ease many are encouraging us to embrace the replacement of face-to-face encounters with technologically mediated ones. Yet, as philosophers of technology have highlighted, technology can transform the situations we find ourselves in. Drawing insights from the phenomenology of sociality, we consider how digitally-enabled forms of communication and sociality impact our experience of one another. In particular, we draw attention to the way in which our embodied experience of one another is altered when we meet in digital spaces, taking as our focus the themes of perceptual access, intercorporeality, shared space, transitional spaces, and self-presentation. In light of the way in which technological mediation alters various dimensions of our social encounters, we argue that digital encounters constitute their own forms of sociality requiring their own phenomenological analysis. We conclude our paper by raising some broader concerns about the very framework of thinking about digitally and non-digitally mediated social encounters simply in terms of replacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been growing excitement in recent years about "dual‐character" concepts. Philosophers have argued that such concepts can help us make progress on a range of philosophical issues, from aesthetics to law to metaphysics. Dual‐character concepts are thought to have a distinctive internal structure, which relates a set of descriptive features to an abstract value, and which allows people to use either the descriptive features or the abstract value for determining the extension of the concept. Here, we skeptically investigate the central argument in favor of their existence. Across three new empirical studies, we systematically demonstrate that the linguistic patterns that dual‐character concepts were originally posited to explain are likely better explained by much more general features of language use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neural decoding studies seem to show that the "private" experiences of others are more accessible than philosophers have traditionally believed. While these studies have many limitations, they do demonstrate that by capturing patterns in brain activity, we can discover a great deal about what a subject is experiencing. We present a thought experiment about a super‐decoder — the Atlantis machine — and argue that given plausible assumptions, an Atlantis machine could one day be built. On the basis of this argument, we then argue for the rejection of robust notions of consciousness, which have generated numerous puzzles, including puzzles about the possibility of philosophical zombies. In light of the Atlantis machine, it can be seen that robust notions of consciousness do not earn their explanatory or descriptive keep. More modest concepts of consciousness are sufficient to account for all phenomena — in both senses of the term. This kind of antirobustness about consciousness is a deflationary approach to conscious experience that differs in important ways from illusionist approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers a largely overlooked phenomenological account of nonconceptual experience that turns on experience having a sense that is unique to intuition, and which can be invoked to explain how we come to view what we experience in objective terms without referring to ready‐made concepts. The two early phenomenologists Edith Stein and Gertrud Kuznitzky are discussed as having elaborated two distinct, yet related, versions of this intuitive sense. My discussion identifies two common assumptions of both philosophers: firstly, the idea that the objective character of intuition hinges on the structure of apprehension, which is found by investigating the regularities of the appearance of objects; secondly, the objective character of intuition presupposes a metaphysical notion of things having a sense in themselves. Importantly, both philosophers do not take this "sense in itself" to be a direct part of the contents of experience, showing objectivity to arise out of intuition instead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The normativity of meaning—introduced by Kripke in 1982, and the subject of active debate since the early 1990s—has been exclusively understood in terms of duty‐imposing norms. But there are norms of another type, well‐known within the philosophy of law: authority‐conferring norms. Philosophers thinking and writing about the normativity of meaning—normativists, anti‐normativists, and even Kripke himself—seem to have failed to consider the possibility that semantic norms are authority‐conferring. I argue that semantic norms should be understood as having an authority‐conferring structure, and show how this allows normativism about meaning to escape the two most popular arguments against it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Nature's version of machine learning, evolution has solved many extraordinarily complex problems, none perhaps more remarkable than learning to harness an increase in chemical entropy (disorder) to generate directed chemical forces (order). Using muscle as a model system, here I describe the basic mechanism by which life creates order from disorder. In short, evolution tuned the physical properties of certain proteins to contain changes in chemical entropy. As it happens these are the "sensible" properties Gibbs postulated were needed to solve a paradox that has intrigued and challenged scientists and philosophers for over 100 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Derived from Proclus's Elementatio Theologica, Liber de Causis (LDC), with the concept of "creation" at its core, provides a substantial monotheistic adaptation of the former that was absorbed and criticized by medieval philosophers represented by Aquinas. Taking Aquinas's classical distinction between being and essence as the axis of inquiry, this paper first points out that, in contrast to Proclus, LDC not only introduces the concept of creation but also includes in this concept the distinction between being and essence. By reviewing the different readings of Avicenna and Aquinas on the division, this paper then sketches out two different tendencies in the medieval Arab and Latin worlds to either accept the concept of creation in LDC that both being and essence of individua are given from the One via intelligence or to take a further monotheistical transformation, which declaims the One bestowing the being of creations directly. Through this case study, this paper attempts to show the influence of LDC on Aquinas's thought and demonstrate the civilizational transitions, fusions, and exchanges that characterized medieval philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Neoplatonic philosophers developed a complicated and quite ingenious concept of the grades of virtue, starting with such common human virtues, as the natural, ethical and political, and finishing which those attainable only by the real seekers of the highest truth, such as the purificatory, contemplative, paradigmatic, and hieratic. In the paper I trace the evolution of the Neoplatonic grades of virtue by means of the select passages from Damascius' "Philosophical History," which deal specifically with the character of Damascius' revered teacher. The life of Isidore is presented by his student as an ascent along the path of Neoplatonic perfection, moreover, by chance or not, but in the surviving fragments of this work, which tells about many remarkable philosophers and theurgists, it is Isidore who ultimately attains the last seventh degree of virtue. Possessing outstanding personal qualities and even the gift of the seer, he was a teacher of the Socratic type, most eager to help students achieve the purificatory virtues that alone determine the further path of philosophical perfection. The position of Damascius and his attitude to the philosophical way of life is further illustrated by a series of lively portraits of Athenian and Alexandrian philosophers of his time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the Cultural Dynamics book forum on Denise Ferreira da Silva's Unpayable Debt. The book examines the epistemological principles of Western thinking that make raciality and its practical implications for the contemporary world possible. Among Ferreira da Silva's targets is Karl Marx's theory of value. Commentators respond to the author's argument, with debates on whether Marx's approach sufficiently addresses the role of race within capitalism. This introduction adds to the debate wondering whether Ferreira da Silva's framing of Marx's ideas inadvertently mirrors the post-Enlightenment pillars she criticizes in other philosophers, suggesting a potential misunderstanding of Marx's dialectics. The article winds up by emphasizing the significance of Marx's dialectics as a transformative tool to critique the commodity form and its power dynamics in a racialized world economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wouter Kusters argues that madness has much to offer philosophy, as does philosophy to madness. In this paper, I support both claims by drawing on a mad phenomenon which I label Radical Psychotic Doubt, or RPD. First, although skepticism is a minority position in epistemology, it has been claimed that anti-skeptical arguments remain unsatisfying. I argue that this complaint can be clarified and strengthened by showing that anti-skeptical arguments are irrelevant to RPD sufferers. Second, there's a debate about whether so-called hinge commitments are beliefs or not. I argue that RPD can be used to strengthen the case that they are. Moreover, if hinges are beliefs, some madpeople are more epistemically rational than some sane philosophers. Third, drawing on my own mad experiences, I challenge evidentialism by presenting a better candidate for a truly forced choice about what to believe than William James' traditional religious example. I further show that in certain psychiatric contexts, evidentialism has more radical implications than Jamesian pragmatism, which comes out as more conservative. Finally, I discuss how philosophical theories like pragmatism and Pyrrhonism can provide inspiration for new and much – needed coping strategies for RPD sufferers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here is a widespread but controversial idea: those animals who represent correctly are likely to be selected over those who misrepresent. While various versions of this claim have been traditionally endorsed by the vast majority of philosophers of mind, recently, it has been argued that this is just plainly wrong. My aim in this paper is to argue for an intermediate position: that the correctness of some but not all representations is indeed selectively advantageous. It is selectively advantageous to have correct representations that are directly involved in bringing about and guiding the organism's action. I start with the standard objection to the claim that it is selectively advantageous to represent correctly, the 'better safe than sorry' argument gand then generalize it with the help of Peter Godfrey Smith's distinction between Cartesian and Jamesian reliability and the trade‐off between them. This generalized argument rules out a positive answer to our question at least as far as the vast majority of our representational apparatus is concerned. But this argument fails to apply in the case of the correctness of a special kind of representation, one that is directly involved in bringing about, and in guiding, actions. We can still maintain that it is selectively advantageous to have a reliable mechanism for producing representations of this kind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some philosophers think that if someone acts wrongly while falsely believing that her act is permissible, this moral mistake cannot excuse her wrongdoing. And some think that this is because it is morally blameworthy to fail to appreciate the moral significance of non‐moral facts of which one is aware, such that mistakenly believing that one's act is permissible when it is in fact wrong is itself morally blameworthy. Here I challenge the view that it is blameworthy to fail to appreciate the moral significance of non‐moral facts of which one is aware. This view seems okay if we focus on examples of people mistakenly believing that their wrongful acts are permissible. But it is not remotely plausible when we consider other varieties of moral mistake – such as believing that one's action is required when it is in fact supererogatory, believing that one's action is wrong when it is in fact permissible, and believing false things about the moral properties of others' actions and of merely possible actions. The upshot is that those who maintain that moral mistakes cannot excuse are sent back to the drawing board; we need a new explanation of why this would be the case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Rorty's work has become a touchstone for evaluating the metaphilosophical stance appropriate for pragmatism, the suspicion prevails that his 'neopragmatism' (NeoP) is undermined by a failure to take first-order philosophical problems seriously. We propose that this imputation is grounded in the assumption that he attempts to distinguish metaphilosophy from philosophy in order to insulate the former from the latter, and against it argue that pragmatism's experimental attitude towards inquiry entails that there is and can be no such separation. We go on to suggest that philosophers such as Misak who define their 'new pragmatist' (NewP) position partly in opposition to Rorty's, insist on this separation because they feel themselves answerable to some 'transcendental' urge. The conviction that to reject that urge is to reject the calling of philosophy itself is manifest in the debate between NeoP and NewP on the role of truth-talk. We argue that acceding to this urge prevents us from taking philosophy seriously, and by extension from taking Rorty's contribution to philosophy in like fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sheds light on some aspects of what contemporary clinical theory calls "borderline" condition providing a description of a key figure of late-modern culture that I will call Homo dissipans (from Latin dissipatio, -onis = scattering, dispersion). Homo dissipans is the opposite of Homo œconomicus, the form that "narcissism" takes on in contemporary "achievement society," solely concerned with rational action aimed to utility and production. In order to define Homo dissipans, I follow French philosopher, anthropologist, and novelist Georges Bataille's descriptions of two core phenomena: "excess" and "expenditure." The former can be defined as a surplus of energy that according to Bataille characterizes human existence, animated by a general movement of exudation and dilapidation and an inexhaustible drive to "pour out" of oneself, especially outside the limits of composure and reasonableness. The latter is an ethical attitude which gives its approval to excess and to its metamorphic and destructive power. The Homo dissipans' credo is to profitlessly dissipate the surplus of energy, escape into a world of pure intensities in which all forms – including identity – dissolve and surrender themselves to transformation. I argue that Bataille's ideas about "dissipation" can help us reconsider two features attributed to borderline personality disorder which have been extensively described and sometimes stigmatized – "identity diffusion" and "stable instability" – and to better recognize, understand, and make sense of their phenomenology in the clinical context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, originally presented as a keynote address at the 2019 McCain conference, proposes that we must take seriously the "moral" component of moral injury. In addition to psychological treatment, wounded warriors suffering moral injury require atonement for genuine transgressions, and insight when the conduct they regard as transgression actually is not. The article defines the dimensions of moral injury as parallel to those of physical injury: pain, loss of functionality, and (in some cases) disfigurement. It then asks how atonement can be achieved, turning to an unusual source for inspiration: the laws of atonement set out by the medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides. Maimonides proposes four requirements: verbal confession, repentance, reparation, and apology. The article explains their meaning in the context of contemporary wounded warriors. Finally, it argues that Judaism's unique tradition of collective atonement offers an important model for the armed services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a summary of a collective volume titled "Perspectives on Origen and the History of his Reception," edited by Alfons Fürst. The volume consists of essays that explore various aspects of Origen's legacy and reception throughout history. It covers topics such as Origen's role as a philosopher, his impact on theology, his views on human freedom and dignity, and his interpretation of biblical texts. The volume also examines the reception of Origen's work by authors in late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern era. It presents Origen as a systematic philosopher who emphasized individual freedom and human dignity. The author suggests that future research should focus on Origen's biblical exegesis, his relationship with his patron Ambrose, and the intersection of his work with pagan grammatical tradition. The volume is recommended as a valuable resource for those interested in studying Origen. [Extracted from the article]

Reformed moral philosophers in the period of early orthodoxy (ca. 1550–ca. 1650) continue a medieval tradition of engaging moral questions in conversation with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and they often address the moral status of self-love in connection with the virtue of friendship. There is broad agreement among these authors that self-love is not only not necessarily sinful, but that some kinds of self-love are morally good and that self-love is the source and rule for love of one's neighbor. Lambert Daneau's Ethices Christianae, however, stands in a more complex relationship to this consensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Georg Simmel is the sociologist of the city. He spent almost his entire life in Berlin where he tried to make an academic career at his home town university. He had from early on remarkable success and published a number of classical books, most well-known among them his "Philosophy of Money." But the intellectual merits did not translate into professional success. In Berlin he remained a "Privatdozent"—a teaching person without salary—and an "Extraordinarius"—a professor not remunerated. Simmel's status inconsistency—a globally famous philosopher and sociologist yet without a full professorship—expressed an interesting meritocratic formula: failure by success. Simmel could endure this complicated fate only by putting on a mask which made strangeness his home. This thesis is developed in three steps: First, by looking on young Simmel who combined intellectual success with critical reception, in short: philosophe maudit. Secondly, by referring to his private life and life style as far as this can be reconstructed at all because Simmel turned all matters private into a secret. Thirdly, by discussing his predominate topics (city, prostitution, sociability, secret, and the stranger) we try to show how he made his personal existence possible philosophically, sociologically, and psychologically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educators, philosophers, and commentators in the popular media often assume that students and adult citizens alike should engage in dialogue regarding ethical, social, and political issues, particularly with people who hold different views. Debates about the value of such dialogue tend to focus on the political implications of these exchanges and neglect the ontological and epistemological assumptions that could make sense of why people should talk their way to greater understanding. This focus on the political implications of dialogue also obscures conceptions of personhood that could call into question the relationship between dialogue and understanding. Drawing on conceptual resources available in the work of Charles Taylor, this article argues that ethical insight may best be cultivated when dialogue is interdependent with a quieting of the linguistic, conceptual mind. Taylor insists that articulation is indispensable to moral orientation. However for Taylor, rather than merely identifying or entirely constructing the good, language "grants access" to the good. This suggests that language is a vehicle for sources that exist outside of articulation. Education meant to cultivate students' capacity for judgment in discussions of ethical, social, and political issues might then be enhanced through practices that reserve space for that which lies outside of language. In particular, educators could cultivate students' capacity to produce reasons through dialogue not in isolation but in relationship to students' receptivity to non-verbal insight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relationship between philosophers and war, raising questions about how philosophers should ethically and politically relate to war and the military, as well as the powers and limits of philosophical inquiry in military matters. The article reviews Steven Umbrello's book, "Designed for Death: Controlling Killer Robots," which explores the concept of meaningful human control over autonomous weapon systems. While the author acknowledges the value of Umbrello's argument, they also criticize his failure to address the ethical implications of designing and deploying "killer robots." Overall, the article suggests that Umbrello's work contributes to the literature on autonomous weapon systems but could benefit from a more politically ambitious approach. [Extracted from the article]

In the article, we present, comment and analyse some elements of our cultural and evangelical history, which have been marked by numerous philosophers and theologians starting from the ancient Church to the present day. Closing into the present actually means a ban on living. Present life has its roots in the past and offers its promises, expectations and courage to the future. History exists, and man can dwell in history, without which there is no creative culture, only when three dimensions of time are lived organically. In this context, we also observe the contribution of an immense procession of thinkers like St Thomas Aquinas in successive historical periods. In the article, we explore the possible contribution of metaphysics to the questions posed to the modern man. The evangelical influence on culture, which is a complex phenomenon, should certainly be shed light on. Furthermore, it can be more or less deep. It can be hidden, more or less conscious. It is not always strongly present where it is most required, it is not real where it is explicitly ordered. In addition to authentic fruits, one should also be aware of counterfeits and hypocritical activities. In short, its paths are different and manifold. It seems important to point this out so that we could evaluate this influence, which is authenticated and credibly confirmed in the eyes of Christian orthodoxy, and which establishes piety. Certain errors, exaggerations and deviations are not imaginable outside the Christian horizon, which unmask it or wage a battle with it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This talk, given at the London Library, traces the links between the Library, its members and the women's suffrage campaign. Founded in 1841 by, among others, John Stuart Mill, the Liberal philosopher and MP who, 25 years later, gave the women's suffrage campaign its first impetus, the London Library was always open to women subscribers, although in the nineteenth and early twentieth early twentieth centuries they had little influence on decision-making. However, by studying the Library's membership forms and its successive catalogues, and by interrogating the books on its open-access shelves, it has been possible to discover something of those women members sympathetic to the suffrage cause, and of the way they influenced the Library's holdings of books on the suffrage question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through concepts such as the act of transgression, the idea of the pursuit of luxury can be radically transformed by reconsidering the work of the French philosopher Georges Bataille on sovereignty and desire within contemporary culture. This article on the relations between transgression, luxury, sovereignty, and desire constitutes a reworking of Bataille's thought. Offering an exploration and development of the key notions which run through current work on luxury, from sumptuous living to human lives in search of lavishness, the article places these important concepts in their intellectual and historical contexts and goes on to trace their considerable possibilities for contemporary French thought. In this manner, the article not only makes the idea of the pursuit of luxury accessible, but also invites readers to make their own critical judgements of such a pursuit. The article concludes with an account of the pursuit of luxury and acts of transgression as a moral vision, and with the perpetual problems of luxury and necessity. The notion of the pursuit of luxury is now impossible to disregard for anybody who is serious-minded about contemporary acts of transgression, and this article affords the ideal companion to the wide-ranging diversity of Bataille's critical texts on sovereignty and desire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, Malcom X's autobiography is considered as a testament to the various people and ways he sustained himself in the face of the social death of racism. The article begins with brief explanations of racism and social death, viewing each in terms of the work of political philosophers Axel Honneth and Avishai Margalit, as well as the notions of faith and care. These two political philosophers situate the concept of sustaining in the political realm, while the concepts of faith and care highlight racism's existential perfidy and carelessness. The following section uses the concept of sustaining as an interpretive lens vis-à-vis Malcolm X's autobiography, noting how, at different moments of his life, he was sustained by various persons, beliefs, and values in the midst of the vicissitudes of a racist society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hans Kelsen has been praised for his defense of democracy but that defense has also been criticized, most notably by Carl Schmitt. Leo Strauss was just as critical but his critique has gone unnoticed. Much of this neglect is because the relevant works remained unpublished. In one work Strauss contends that his conception of authority guarantees order and security whereas Kelsen's notion of democracy leads to anarchy and chaos. This essay is intended to fill this gap by providing an examination of Strauss' criticism of Kelsen's democratic liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces the development of Isaiah Berlin's conception of history from the 1930s to the 1960s, extrapolating the ways in which he responded to and dismantled the monist and determinist claims by logical positivists and scientific rationalists, which were alleged to repudiate unrealised possibilities and men's voluntary power in history. Berlin's elaboration of such notions as 'concepts and categories' as governing principles dictating the intellectual features of a given society not only lays a conceptual foundation for intellectual history, but also underscores historicity as a dimension of paramount importance to the study of mankind. Making use of Berlin's correspondence with the American philosopher Morton White, this essay examines their abortive project on the philosophy of history. Apathetic about any analytic anatomy of historical knowledge, Berlin was much more interested in exploring the emergence of historical understanding as a distinctive type of knowledge demarcated from other—in particular scientific—forms of knowledge in European history of ideas. Berlin's ideas of history thus make a case for the history of ideas as an intellectual practice, whereas his history of ideas delineates the development of a particular idea of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies an overlapping critique of technology in the work of four influential Cold War political thinkers: Adorno, Horkheimer, Arendt and Ellul, illustrating how a widely shared critique of technology mediated much thinking about political modernity during this era. Modern technology possesses a certain dynamism, they argue, and can no longer be considered a neutral 'tool' but rather a process by which modern politics is being continuously reshaped. Technology, as such, is a critical problem of modernity for these thinkers. Focusing particularly on their analyses of the impact of modern media and communication technologies, the article highlights some of the ways in which technology is seen to influence contemporary politics, specifically through the use of propaganda and the shifting relationship between the public and private in modernity. Whilst technology does not wholly determine politics, it has done much to shape it, these theorists believe, and the modern age presents a politics which is uniquely unfree, they contend, largely because of the cumulative effect of modern technology. Thinking in terms of technology, therefore, is key to understanding the claim, central to the work of each of these political thinkers, that the character of modernity is essentially hostile to freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to promote the integration of knowledge and life based on a phenomenological description of sexuality and erotic relations. To carry out this task, I will follow the approaches of the French philosopher Michel Henry in order to extract the anthropological consequences of a phenomenology of incarnation pertaining to sexuality. Both the peculiar union produced by the sexual act and its perpetually threatened condition through the "event" of nihilation of the flesh will be the object of reflection throughout this work. In my search for the reintegration of the human being through the sexual act, I will show the importance of woman and her spiritual superiority in deepening the intimate meaning of sexuality. Further, I will argue that the intersubjective experience lived in sexual practice demands a consideration of human beings from their ultimate condition of relational possibility (Life), emphasizing their engendered, not merely created, condition. Thus, the salvation of human beings and their involvement in the coming of Life to them is intrinsically related to that carnal disposition which aids to unify them, beyond their diversity, in their self-revelation in Life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's popularity among the German New Right is attributable to the fact that his perspective is identifiably conservative while eschewing rote traditionalism and anti-intellectual sloganeering. Sloterdijk portrays his critics as disingenuous or hysterical, but by harnessing the trappings of counterculture to undermine the perceived hegemony of liberal values, Sloterdijk's self-identified "left-conservatism" serves as both a model for the New Right and a gateway to their ideas for a mainstream audience. This paper explores why the primary concern of Sloterdijk's critics is the disinhibiting effect of his interventions on hierarchical instincts constrained by modest progress toward egalitarianism and inclusivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, philosophers who write about moral responsibility and accountability practices invoke the concept of "standing," a term they claim to borrow from legal contexts. Yet critics point out that these philosophers have been maddeningly unclear about what standing is. Worse yet, no single account of the concept of "standing" seems to accommodate its current usage. This essay presents a thin account of standing, defends its usefulness in philosophical analyses of accountability practices, and develops further conceptual tools for thinking about standing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]