scholarly journals Transformative Experience in Skepticism. The External Standpoint and the Finitude of the Human Condition

Philosophy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 95 (4) ◽  
pp. 395-417
Author(s):  
Rico Gutschmidt
Keyword(s):  
Decision Theory ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Objective Knowledge ◽  
Transformative Experience ◽  
Philosophical Practice ◽  
Transformative Experiences ◽  
Skeptical Problem ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Human Condition

AbstractAccording to its quietist readings, skepticism can be dissolved by demonstrating that the notion of ‘absolute objectivity’ is confused. The dissolution of this confusion is supposed to lead us to acquiesce in our finite and plain everyday life without being bothered anymore about the supposed need for objective knowledge. In contrast, I want to propose a transformative reading of skepticism according to which the philosophical practice of skepticism can be ‘epistemically transformative’. To this end, I will transpose L.A. Paul's notion of ‘epistemically transformative experience’ from decision theory to the realm of philosophical practice and argue that the modern skeptical problem of an external standpoint can evoke transformative experiences that lead to a new, albeit non-propositional, insight into the finitude of the human condition.

scholarly journals Beyond Quietism: Transformative Experience in Pyrrhonism and Wittgenstein

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rico Gutschmidt
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Transformative Experience ◽  
Philosophical Practice ◽  
Transformative Experiences ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Pyrrhonian Skepticism ◽  
Philosophical Questions ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Human Condition

Pyrrhonian skepticism is usually understood as a form of quietism, since it is supposed to bring us back to where we were in our everyday lives before we got disturbed by philosophical questions. Similarly, the ‘therapeutic’ and ‘resolute’ readings of Wittgenstein claim that Wittgenstein’s ‘philosophical practice’ results in the dissolution of the corresponding philosophical problems and brings us back to our everyday life. Accordingly, Wittgenstein is often linked to Pyrrhonism and classified as a quietist. Against this reading, I will employ Laurie Paul’s notion of epistemically transformative experience and argue that Pyrrhonian skepticism and Wittgenstein’s philosophy can be interpreted as a philosophical practice that changes our self-understanding in significant ways. I will argue that this practice can evoke transformative experiences and is thereby able to yield a non-propositional insight into the finitude of the human condition. This shows that Pyrrhonian skepticism and Wittgenstein’s philosophy go beyond quietism.

scholarly journals Skeptizismus und negative Theologie

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-41
Author(s):  
Rico Gutschmidt
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Negative Theology ◽  
Transformative Experience ◽  
Philosophical Practice ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Propositional Form ◽  
Knowledge Claims ◽  
The Human Condition

Abstract Scepticism and negative theology are best understood not as theoretical positions, but rather as forms of philosophical practice that performatively undermine our knowledge claims or our seeming understanding of God. In particular, I am arguing that both scepticism and negative theology invoke the failure of the attempt to understand the absolute, be it God or the notion of absolute objectivity. However, with reference to L. A. Paul’s notion of epistemically transformative experience, I am arguing that we still understand something about the absolute through the experience of failing to think it. This, of course, is a non-propositional form of understanding, and I am arguing that there is something about the finitude of the human condition that can only be understood through a transformative philosophical experience with respect to the absolute.

On the Harm of Genocide

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-49
Author(s):  
Paul Kucharski
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Community Or ◽  
The World ◽  
Scholarly Discussion ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Individual Human ◽  
The Human Condition

My aim in this essay is to advance the state of scholarly discussion on the harms of genocide. The most obvious harms inflicted by every genocide are readily evident: the physical harm inflicted upon the victims of genocide and the moral harm that the perpetrators of genocide inflict upon themselves. Instead, I will focus on a kind of harm inflicted upon those who are neither victims nor perpetrators, on those who are outside observers, so to speak. My thesis will be that when a whole community or culture is eliminated, or even deeply wounded, the world loses an avenue for insight into the human condition. My argument is as follows. In order to understand human nature, and that which promotes its flourishing, we must certainly study individual human beings. But since human beings as rational and linguistic animals are in part constituted by the communities in which they live, the study of human nature should also involve the study of communities and cultures—both those that are well ordered and those that are not. No one community or culture has expressed all that can be said about the human way of existing and flourishing. And given that the unity and wholeness of human nature can only be glimpsed in a variety of communities and cultures, then part of the harm of genocide consists in the removal of a valuable avenue for human beings to better understand themselves.

Becoming Ray Bradbury

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Eller
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Long Life ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Private Collections ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Human Condition

This book chronicles the making of an iconic American writer by exploring Ray Bradbury's childhood and early years of his long life in fiction, film, television, radio, and theater. It measures the impact of the authors, artists, illustrators, and filmmakers who stimulated Ray Bradbury's imagination throughout his first three decades. This biography follows Bradbury's development from avid reader to maturing author, making a living writing for the genre pulps and mainstream magazines. Unprecedented access to Bradbury's personal papers and other private collections provides insight into his emerging talent through his unpublished correspondence, his rare but often insightful notes on writing, and his interactions with those who mentored him during those early years. They also provide insight into his very conscious decisions, following the sudden success of The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, to voice controversial political statements in his fiction. The book illuminates the sources of Bradbury's growing interest in the human mind, the human condition, and the ambiguities of life and death—themes that became increasingly apparent in his early fiction. It elucidates the complex creative motivations that yielded Fahrenheit 451. Revealing Bradbury's emotional world as it matured, the book highlights the emerging sense of authorship at the heart of his boundless creativity.

The Joys and Challenges of Caring for Patients

2013 ◽  
pp. e327-e330
Author(s):  
Teresa Gilewski
Keyword(s):  
Patient Care ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Optimal Care ◽  
Human Interactions ◽  
The Core ◽  
Personal Effect ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Human Condition

Optimal care of patients involves the integration of both the scientific and humanistic aspects of medicine. However, the tremendous focus on technology can easily overshadow the personal effect of patient care. The complex relationship between the physician and the patient is a reciprocal one. Not only does the physician influence the experience of the patient, but the patient may leave a significant impression on the physician. Their interactions provide a myriad of opportunities for greater insight into the human condition, but may also contribute toward the struggle of physicians to maintain their own well-being. Enhanced awareness of the significance of these human interactions is at the core of caring for patients.

scholarly journals Ronald David Laing 1927–1989: an appreciation

1990 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony W. Clare
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Psychiatric Treatment ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Psychiatric Institutions ◽  
Film Directors ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Human Condition

It is unarguable that R. D. Laing was the best-known and, certainly outside mainstream psychiatry, the most influential psychiatrist of his time. His ideas have continued to exercise an astonishing appeal to writers, film directors, sociologists and philosophers. He epitomised for many the so-called anti-psychiatry movement and its portrayal of psychiatrists as agents of social control, psychiatric institutions as centres of degradation and psychiatric treatment as a process of invalidation. His rolling Glaswegian rhetoric summoned forth once again the compelling romantic concept of the psychotically ill as bearers of a potent insight into the fallibility, the malevolence and the violence at the heart of the human condition. He was, as his old teacher, and fellow-psychiatrist and Scot, Morris Carstairs, observed in a review in the Times Literary Supplement in 1976, “a guru of our time”. Now that he is no longer with us, how will time remember him?

scholarly journals “It Depends on Where You Look”: The Unusual Presentation of Scurvy and Smallpox Among Klondike Gold Rushers as Revealed Through Qualitative Data Sources

2010 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan J Highet
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Mortality Data ◽  
Canadian History ◽  
Fast Change ◽  
The Social ◽  
Full Picture ◽  
Disease And Disorders ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Human Condition

Health in the context of frontier boomtown communities represents an underdeveloped topic of research both within the social sciences and beyond. Studies of such historic communities offer insight into the human condition in past populations. They provide valuable observations with far-reaching modern-day applications, as many of the issues faced by the Klondike Gold Rushers are similarly experienced by those residing in single-industry and resource communities experiencing fast change in the remote wilderness. These communities present a unique biosocial context for the experience of disease and disorders, as is evident in the case of both scurvy and smallpox when they erupted in the Klondike gold fields. Yet, for various reasons, these diseases remained invisible when quantitative data sources only were used. The important implications that these sicknesses held for the health status of the gold rushers would thus have been undetected had analysis focused solely upon the customary morbidity and mortality data sources, resulting in a distorted view of the human condition in the context of this celebrated event in Canadian history. Only when qualitative materials are also explored does the full picture of the health in this historic population come into focus, while also revealing much more about life in this particular time and place than simply what illnesses the Klondikers suffered and died from.

To Live as a Lotus among the Flames …

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-40
Author(s):  
Deane Curtin
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Spiritual Practice ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Climate Crisis ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Human Condition

Śāntideva’s (fl. 8th c) most celebrated work, the Bodhi-caryāvatāra (A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life) provides practical, contemporary insight into the climate crisis. His spiritual practice—the practice of the bodhisattva as nurse for the human condition—encourages reframing delusion into understanding. It thus reveals the antidotes to the causes of the climate crisis, such as greed and anger. Above all, the “wicked” nature of the climate crisis is an opportunity for a new world to emerge. If we look honestly at the changing planet it will reflect back to us the truth of who we are.

Who is Rational Economic Man?

1997 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Roback Morse
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Rational Choice ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Economic Man ◽  
Present Volume ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Human Condition

There is, in Sarajevo, a man who comes out into the streets each day and plays his cello on the sidewalk. He does this at the same time each day, no matter how much shooting or shelling is going on, no matter how great the danger to himself. He describes himself as having decided to take a stand for beauty in the face of horror. Can the rational choice paradigm, as currently practiced in the various disciplines of economics, philosophy, political science, and law, offer an account of this man's decision and his behavior?This admirable man seems to be a rebuke to the philosophies of calculated self-interest. Can we offer some account of his behavior, without descending into the tautological claim that he did what he did because he wanted to? Can we offer some insight into his wants that will make him intelligible? And not only intelligible, but can we account for him in a way that highlights his admirability, rather than suggesting that he is in some way an aberration, or perhaps even a fool?There is a deep disorder within the human condition. All of the essays in the present volume point to this fact in one way or another. Some characterize the disorder as a conflict between virtue and self-interest. Others point to the dichotomy between the individual and other persons as being the source of the tension between morality and self-interest. Some of the essays attempt to resolve the tension by collapsing the two categories into each other.

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