Why Ethical Philosophy Needs to Be Comparative

Philosophy ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 85 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel J. Kupperman

AbstractPrinciples can seem as entrenched in moral experience as Kant thinks space, time, and the categories are in human experience of the world. However not all cultures have such a view. Classical Indian and Chinese philosophies treat modification of the self as central to ethics. Decisions in particular cases and underlying principles are much less discussed.Ethics needs comparative philosophy in order not to be narrow in its concerns. A broader view can give weight to how people sometimes can change who they are, in order to lead better lives.

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-60
Author(s):  
Mark B.N. Hansen

Drawing on American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce›s »phaneroscopy«, and particularly on its point of disjunction from more orthodox phenomenology concerning the status and necessity of reception, this article argues that today’s databases phenomenalize the aesthetic dimension of worldly sensibility. Although database phenomenalizing explicitly substitutes for the phenomenalizing performed by consciousness on standard accounts of phenomenology, the important point is that it does so without severing contact with human experience. What is ultimately at stake here is the status of the phenomenon itself: insofar as it hosts the self-manifestation of the world without necessarily manifesting it to anyone or anything, the phenomenon can be disjoined from its subjective anchoring in consciousness (or any of its avatars) and ascribed to the operationality of worldly sensibility itself. </br></br>Gestützt auf die sog. »phaneroscopy« des amerikanischen Philosophen Charles Sanders Peirce und insbesondere auf ihre Differenz zur orthodoxeren Phänomenologie in Bezug auf den Status und die Notwendigkeit der Rezeption argumentiert dieser Beitrag, dass die heutigen Datenbanken die ästhetische Dimension weltlicher Sinnlichkeit phänomenalisieren. Auch wenn die Phänomenalisierung durch Datenbanken diejenige durch Bewusstsein explizit ersetzt, bleibt es bedeutsam, dass dies geschieht, ohne den Kontakt mit menschlicher Erfahrung abzubrechen. Worum es letztlich geht, ist der Status des Phänomens selbst: Insoweit es die Selbst-Manifestation der Welt beherbergt, ohne sie notwendigerweise für irgendjemand oder irgendetwas zu manifestieren, kann das Phänomen von seiner subjektiven Verankerung im Bewusstsein (oder jedem seiner Avatare) gelöst werden und der Operationalität weltlicher Sensibilität selbst zugeschrieben werden.


Author(s):  
Yenni P. López Díaz

Reconocemos la necesidad de ampliar perspectivas metodológicas que permitan conocer en profundidad los procesos de (de)construcción del sujeto y adentrarse con ello, en el conocimiento de sí (Gusdorf, 1948), a través de la experiencia humana.  De esta manera, presentamos los avances metodológicos de una investigación Biográfico-Narrativa apoyada en la Teoría autobiográfica (Gusdorf, 1948; Leujene, 1991; Lourerio, 1991; Camarero, 2011) e interesada en aquellas experiencias (Dewey, 1938) que le permiten a la persona la apertura al mundo y reconocimiento de sí mismo y de su propia identidad dentro del que-hacer-se educativo.  Las técnicas y estrategias empleadas permitieron tender un puente para viajar a las experiencias educativas de la infancia de un grupo de educadores, a través de su memoria y sus recuerdos.  A su vez, el proceso narrativo desarrollado en la investigación demostró que la Autobiografía es un recurso fundamental que permite la deconstrucción de las vivencias y facilita la construcción y reconstrucción de las experiencias ulteriores. We recognize the need to broaden methodological perspectives allowing to know in depth the processes of (de)construction of the subject and enter in the self-knowledge (Gusdorf, 1948), through human experience.  This text presents methodological advances of Biographical-narrative research supported in the autobiographical theory (Gusdorf, 1948; Leujene, 1991; Lourerio, 1991; Camarero, 2011) and interested in those experiences (Dewey, 1938) that allow the person the openness to the world and recognition of himself and his own identity.  Techniques and strategies employed allowed to build a bridge to travel to the educational experiences of children of a group of educators, through his memory and his memories.  The narrative process present showed that the autobiography is a fundamental resource that allows the deconstruction of the experiences and facilitates the construction and reconstruction of the subsequent experiences.


2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-212
Author(s):  
ELIZABETH BULLEN

This paper investigates the high-earning children's series, A Series of Unfortunate Events, in relation to the skills young people require to survive and thrive in what Ulrich Beck calls risk society. Children's textual culture has been traditionally informed by assumptions about childhood happiness and the need to reassure young readers that the world is safe. The genre is consequently vexed by adult anxiety about children's exposure to certain kinds of knowledge. This paper discusses the implications of the representation of adversity in the Lemony Snicket series via its subversions of the conventions of children's fiction and metafictional strategies. Its central claim is that the self-consciousness or self-reflexivity of A Series of Unfortunate Events} models one of the forms of reflexivity children need to be resilient in the face of adversity and to empower them to undertake the biographical project risk society requires of them.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba

The essay discusses selected poems from Thomas Hardy's vast body of poetry, focusing on representations of the self and the world. Employing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concepts such as the body-subject, wild being, flesh, and reversibility, the essay offers an analysis of Hardy's poems in the light of phenomenological philosophy. It argues that far from demonstrating ‘cosmic indifference’, Hardy's poetry offers a sympathetic vision of interrelations governing the universe. The attunement with voices of the Earth foregrounded in the poems enables the self's entanglement in the flesh of the world, a chiasmatic intertwining of beings inserted between the leaves of the world. The relation of the self with the world is established through the act of perception, mainly visual and aural, when the body becomes intertwined with the world, thus resulting in a powerful welding. Such moments of vision are brief and elusive, which enhances a sense of transitoriness, and, yet, they are also timeless as the self becomes immersed in the experience. As time is a recurrent theme in Hardy's poetry, this essay discusses it in the context of dwelling, the provisionality of which is demonstrated in the prevalent sense of temporality, marked by seasons and birdsong, which underline the rhythms of the world.


2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (10) ◽  
pp. 74-87
Author(s):  
Irina N. Sidorenko

 The author analyzes the conceptions of ontological nihilism in the works of S. Kierkegaard, F. Nietzsche, M. Heidegger, E. Jünger. On the basis of this analysis, violence is defined as a manifestation of nihilism, of the “will to nothingness” and hypertrophy of the self-will of man. The article demonstrates the importance of the problem of nihilism. The nihilistic thinking of modern man is expressed in the attitude toward a radical transformation of the world from the position of his “absolute” righteousness. The paradox of the current situation is that there is the reverse side of this transformative activity, when there is only the appearance of action and the dilution of responsibility. Confidence in the rightness of own views and beliefs increases the risk of the violent imposition of own vision of reality. Historical and philosophical reconstruction of the conceptions of nihilism allowed to reveal the following projects of its comprehension and resolution: (1) the project of “positing of values,” which consists in the transformation of the evaluation, which is understood as another perspective of positing values, leading to the affirmation of being; (2) the project of overcoming nihilism from the space of temporality, carried out through the resoluteness to accept the historicity of own existence; (3) the project of overcoming nihilism as the oblivion of being from the spatial perspective of the “line,” allowing to realize the “glimpse” of being. The author concludes that it is impossible to solve the problem of violence and its various forms of its manifestation without overcoming “ontological nihilism.” Significant role in solving the problem of ontological violence is assigned to philosophy as a critical and responsible form of thinking, which is capable to help a person to bear the burden of the world, to provide meanings and affirm being, as well as to unite people and resist the fundamentalist claims of exclusivity and rightness.


1993 ◽  
Vol 3 (0) ◽  
pp. 173-199
Author(s):  
Hein BLOMMESTIJN
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  

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