Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Patricia Kitcher
Keyword(s):  
Western Philosophy ◽  
African Philosophy ◽  
Intimate Relation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Striking Contrast

No philosophical dictum is better known than Descartes’s assertion about the intimate relation between thinking and existing. What remains unknown is how we are to understand the “I” who thinks and exists. This book is about the ways that the concept of an “I” or a “self” has been developed and deployed at different times in the history of western philosophy. It also offers a striking contrast case, the “interconnected” self, who appears in some expressions of African philosophy. Appealing to philosophy to illuminate the concept of a “self” may seem unnecessary. Anyone who can read this book is a self, so why ...

The Self

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
African Philosophy ◽  
The West ◽  
Philosophy Of Psychology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Past Experiences ◽  
Striking Contrast

This book is about the ways that the concept of an ‘I’ or a ‘self’ has been developed at different times in the history of western philosophy; it also offers a striking contrast case, the ‘interconnected’ self, who appears in some expressions of African philosophy. If ‘human being’ is a biological classification, ‘I’ is a mental one. What I’s do is think. The most common theme across western accounts of ‘I’s that think’ is that they are self-conscious. A second theme (in the west) is that selves have unity: There is one self who recalls past experiences and anticipates future actions. Despite being self-conscious selves, it has proven difficult to say what a self is without paradox. Normally, the object of consciousness pre-exists the consciousness, but we cannot be a self without being self-conscious, so it seems that a self and the consciousness thereof must be coeval. How can we be self-aware and yet have no idea of what a self is? (It cannot just be a body, since a live human body might not be able to think.) The essays in this volume engage many philosophical resources—metaphysics, epistemology, phenomenology, philosophy of psychology and philosophy of language—to illuminate these puzzles. The Reflections present attempts to approach some aspects of these puzzles scientifically and also provide a sense of how central they are to human life.

Integrating African Philosophy into the Western Philosophy Curriculum

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-43
Author(s):  
Luis Cordeiro-Rodrigues ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
African Philosophy ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of

In the last three years, there has been a worldwide increase in integrating African philosophy into the philosophy curricula. Nevertheless, given that African philosophy has been largely neglected by Western academia, many philosophers in the West who do wish to integrate it are unaware of how to do it. This article aims at addressing this issue by offering some recommendations on how to integrate African philosophy into the curricula. Particularly, it offers recommendations based on how the history of ancient philosophy, metaphilosophy, ethics and political philosophy have become integrated. Additionally, there is a recommendation for how to make an entirely new module based on African political philosophy.

La ética del Otro: una introducción al pensamiento de Emmanuel Lévinas

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Carlos Alvaréz Teijeiro
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Essential Question ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
First Philosophy

Emmanuel Lévinas, the philosopher of ethics par excellence in the twentieth century, and by own merit one of the most important ethical philosophers in the history of western philosophy, is also the philosopher of the Other. Thereby, it can be said that no thought has deepened like his in the ups and downs of the ethical relationship between subject and otherness. The general objective of this work is to expose in a simple and understandable way some ideas that tend to be quite dark in the philosophical work of the author, since his profuse religious production will not be analyzed here. It is expected to show that his ideas about the being and the Other are relevant to better understand interpersonal relationships in times of 4.0 (re)evolution. As specific objectives, this work aims to expose in chronological order the main works of the thinker, with special emphasis on his ethical implications: Of the evasion (1935), The time and the Other (1947), From the existence to the existent (1947), Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (1961) and, last, Otherwise than being, or beyond essence (1974). In the judgment of Lévinas, history of western philosophy starting with Greece, has shown an unusual concern for the Being, this is, it has basically been an ontology and, accordingly, it has relegated ethics to a second or third plane. On the other hand and in a clear going against the tide movement, our author supports that ethics should be considered the first philosophy and more, even previous to the proper philosophize. This novel approach implies, as it is supposed, that the essential question of the philosophy slows down its origin around the Being in order to inquire about the Other: it is a philosophy in first person. Such a radical change of perspective generates an underlying change in how we conceive interpersonal relationships, the complex framework of meanings around the relationship Me and You, which also philosopher Martin Buber had already spoken of. As Lévinas postulates that ethics is the first philosophy, this involves that the Other claims all our attention, intellectual and emotional, to the point of considering that the relationship with the Other is one of the measures of our identity. Thus, “natural” attitude –husserlian word not used by Lévinas- would be to be in permanent disposition regarding to the meeting with the Other, to be in permanent opening state to let ourselves be questioned by him. Ontology, as the author says, being worried about the Being, has been likewise concerned about the Existence, when the matter is to concern about the particular Existent that every otherness supposes for us. In conclusion it can be affirmed that levinasian ethics of the meeting with the Other, particular Face, irreducible to the assumption, can contribute with an innovative looking to (re)evolving the interpersonal relationships in a 4.0 context.

Mathematics—Application and Applicability

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Steiner
Keyword(s):  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Major Premise ◽  
Great Books ◽  
Applicability Of Mathematics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theory Of Forms

To an unappreciated degree, the history of Western philosophy is the history of attempts to understand why mathematics is applicable to Nature, despite apparently good reasons to believe that it should not be. A cursory look at the great books of philosophy bears this out. Plato's Republic invokes the theory of “participation” to explain why, for instance, geometry is applicable to ballistics and the practice of war, despite the Theory of Forms, which places mathematical entities in a different (higher) realm of being than that of empirical Nature. This argument is part of Plato's general claim that theoretical learning, in the end, is more useful than “practical” pursuits. John Stuart Mill's account of the applicability of mathematics to nature is unique: it is the only one of the major Western philosophies which denies the major premise upon which all other accounts are based. Mill simply asserts that mathematics itself is empirical, so there is no problem to begin with.

scholarly journals TIME THROUGH TIME: ITS EVOLUTION THROUGH WESTERN PHILOSOPHY IN SEVEN IDEAS

Think ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (58) ◽  
pp. 23-38
Author(s):  
Emily Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Western Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Over Time

ABSTRACTWhat is time? Just like everything else in the world, our understanding of time has changed continually over time. This article tracks this question through the history of Western philosophy and looks at major answers from the likes of Aristotle, Kant, and McTaggart.

Passion's Fictions from Shakespeare to Richardson

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benedict S. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Theoretical Knowledge ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Critical Moment ◽  
Intimate Relation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Scenes

Passion’s Fictions traces the intimate links between literature and the sciences of soul and mind from the age of Shakespeare to the rise of the novel. It chronicles the emergence of new sciences of the passions between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries out of and in some ways against a received “science of the soul,” and it argues that this history was shaped by rhetoric, which contained the most extensively particularized discourse on the passions, offering principles for moving and affecting the passions of others in concrete social scenes. This rhetoric of the passions centered on narrative as the instrument of a non-theoretical knowledge of the passions in their particularity, predicated on an account of passion as an intimate relation between an empassioned mind and an empassioning world: rhetoric offers a kind of externalist psychology, formalized in the relation of passion to action and underwriting an account of narrative as a means of both moving passion and knowing it. This book describes the psychology of the passions before the discipline of psychology, tracing the influence of rhetoric on theories of the passions from Francis Bacon to Adam Smith and using that history to read literary works by Shakespeare, Milton, Haywood, Richardson, and others. Narrative offers a means of knowing and moving the passions by tracing them to the events and objects that generate them; the history of narrative practices is thus a key part of the history of the psychology of the passions at a critical moment in its development.

scholarly journals KRITIK IMMANUEL KANT TERHADAP FAHAM RASIONALISME DAN EMPIRISME

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (02) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jauhan Budiwan
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Profound Impact ◽  
Philosophical Movement ◽  
Philosophical Background ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mind

Immanuel Kant is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western philosophy. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him. This portion will focus on his metaphysics and epistemology in one of his most important works. The Critique of Pure Reason, A large part of Kant’s work addresses the question “What can we know?” The answer, if it can be stated simply, is that our knowledge is constrained to mathematics and the science of the -natural, empirical world. It is impossible, Kant argues, to extend knowledge to the supersensible realm of speculative metaphysics. The reason that knowledge has these constraints, Kant argues, is that the mind plays an active role in constituting the features of experience and limiting the mind's access to the empirical realm of space and time. In order to understand Kant's position, we must understand the philosophical background that he was reacting to. First, 1 will present a brief overview of his predecessor's positions with a brief statement of Kant's objections, then I will return to a more detailed exposition of Kant's arguments. There are two major historical movements in the early modem period of philosophy that had a significant impact on Kant; Empiricism and Rationalism,

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