Whitehead's intellectual adventure

1999 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-75
Author(s):  
Lewis S. Ford
Keyword(s):  
Single Unit ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Infinitely Divisible ◽  
Temporal Experience ◽  
Concept Of God ◽  
Concepts Of God ◽  
The World ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

This article traces Whitehead's own adventure of ideas, . especially the way in which he gradually worked out his concept of God. This adventure had its own dark side. Whitehead was impatient with the process of preparing his manuscript for publication. In Science and the Modern World, he left his original lectures intact, even though his additions espouse a very different orientation to time. The original lectures are about events, each infinitely divisible, while the additions examine occasions, which are atomistic and not further divisible without loss of actuality. This is often overlooked because we tend to assume a book should represent a single unit of interpretation. In this case the book is read as if it were all about occasions, when most of the book is about events. In Process and Reality Whitehead determined to leave everything he had written intact, even though he seems to have changed his mind on crucial points some 13 times. Because all these passages are simply placed side by side, they offer valuable clues as to his intellectual adventure, which is examined in this essay in terms of its three successive concepts of God: God as non-temporal, as the conceptual realization of all forms and as the temporal experience of the world.

scholarly journals Christian-orthodox view of the world and environmental problem

Sabornost ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 13-22
Author(s):  
Ignatije Midić
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Problem ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Orthodox View ◽  
Entire Planet ◽  
Ecological Catastrophe ◽  
The Way

Pollution of environment and the irreversible destruction of nature has become the way of life of the modern world. The consequences of that are obviously tragic for human life and for the survival of the entire planet Earth. This article has an aim to answer the question: what can the Orthodox Church do to stop this problem, if it cannot regain what has already been lost? To answer this question, the author first analyzes the causes of the ecological catastrophe, and then offers a theological answer to the posed problem.

Languages and langages

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-36
Keyword(s):  
Modern World ◽  
Important Distinction ◽  
The World ◽  
Oral Expression ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Way

This chapter in fact covers a range of subjects: the need for literature to express the ‘world totality’; the difference between ‘atavistic’ and ‘composite’ (i.e., creolized) communities; the ‘Chaos-world’ (Glissant’s term for the unpredictability that he sees as characterizing the modern world); the transition from written to oral expression; and the rejection of ‘monolingualism’ – i.e., the recognition that even if we only speak one language, we nevertheless write ‘in the presence of all the world’s languages’, and this awareness transforms the way we use our own language. There is an important distinction between a language (Creole, French, English, etc.) and a langage (for which there is no equivalent term in English), which is defined as the speaker’s or writer’s subjective relationship to the language that he or she uses. Speakers of different languages can share the same langage: thus there is a langage that is common to the Caribbean as a whole. Finally, Glissant discusses the art and the importance of translation.

On the Rationality of Radical Theological Non-Naturalism

1978 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Necessary Condition ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Concept Of God ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Time And Being ◽  
Clear Idea ◽  
The Way

In my Contemporary Critiques of Religion and in my Scepticism, I argue that non-anthropomorphic conceptions of God do not make sense. By this I mean that we do not have sound grounds for believing that the central truth-claims of Christianity are genuine truth-claims and that we do not have a religiously viable concept of God. I argue that this is so principally because of three interrelated features about God-talk. (I) While purporting to be factual assertions, central bits of God-talk, e.g. ‘God exists’ and ‘God loves man-kind’, are not even in principle verifiable (confirmable or disconfirmable) in such a way that we can say what experienceable states of affairs would count for these putative assertions and against their denials, such that we could say what it would be like to have evidence which would make either their assertion or their denial more or less probably true. (2) Personal predicates, e.g. ‘loves’, ‘creates’, are at least seemingly essential in the use of God-talk, yet they suffer from such an attenuation of meaning in their employment in religious linguistic environments that it at least appears to be the case that we have in such environments unwittingly emptied these predicates of all intelligible meaning so that we do not understand what we are asserting or denying when we utter ‘God loves mankind’ or ‘God created the heavens and the earth’ and the like. (3) When we make well-formed assertions, it appears at least to be the case that a necessary condition for such wellformedness is that we should be able successfully to identify the subject of that putative statement so that we can understand what it is that we are talking about and thus understand that a genuine statement has actually been made. But, where God is conceived non-anthropomorphically, we have no even tolerably clear idea about how God, an infinite individual, occupying no particular place or existing at no particular time, and being utterly transcendent to the world, can be identified. Indeed we have no coherent idea of what it would be like to identify him and this means we have no coherent idea of what it would be like for God even to be a person or an it. He cannot be picked out and identified in the way persons and things can.

The good, the bad and the ugly: a guide to the preparation of an ideal curriculum vitae

2014 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. e9-e12
Author(s):  
NI Markham
Keyword(s):  
Critical Item ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The World ◽  
Curriculum Vitae ◽  
The Way

The curriculum vitae (CV) is the surgeon’s window to the world; it says more about him or her than any other document can. While the content is vital, so too is the way it is constructed and presented. Nobody can afford to have their CV not looking as good as it possibly can. Although job applications in the modern world might not always ask for a CV to be submitted, the document is, nonetheless, such a critical item that it is a wonder that many surgical juniors appear not to have taken as much trouble over its construction as one might hope.

scholarly journals NEUROMARKETING IN THE CONTEXT OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT PHILOSOPHY

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 61-67
Author(s):  
Olena Martyniuk ◽  
Tetiana Poplavska
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Marketing Ethics ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
Self Healing ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

This document aims to conduct a literature review in order to identify evolution and research trends in the area of neuromarketing end marketing ethics. The fact of deep systemic crisis of the modern civilization has been discussed by politicians, scientists and philosophers for at least last fifty years. Since then, more than forty of them have been published, that was base for the scientific thought development towards the formation of the concept of sustainable development of mankind. Self-healing changes are extremely slow, despite the enormous efforts of scientists, politicians and public figures. This is partly caused by the fact that in modern politics and economics the neuroscience achievements are used widely but these achievements are applied for narrowly selfish purposes that contradict the main goals and objectives of the concept of sustainable development. Therefore, it is relevant to turn to the analysis of a relatively new direction in modern economic science – neuromarketing, which is gaining the more influence in the society and is actively developing in use. As the world history experience shows, the most important prerequisite for the new civilization formation is a radical transformation of the spiritual (value-semantic) sphere of life. In turn, such transformation is unthinkable without the philosophical project of reconstruction and neoholism, the fundamental value of which is the eidos of harmony, can become such a project. In the modern world dominates the ideology of consumption, the products of which are the presence of fashion, wastefulness, profit orientation in decision making, etc. Consumption is the act of receiving goods or services. Overconsumption (or irrational consumption) that dominates in the world and is imposed by the entire marketing system is the phenomenon of receiving goods and services more than need – to a greater extent than a person needs. This is a dead end, because of which the entire system is going through a deep crisis. Some scientists believe that the way out of the crisis is possible through the interaction of science and economics, or rather neurosciences and economics, which leads to overconsumption of goods and services, which means the growth of incomes of large and medium-sized capital. Others see the way out in the new thinking development, a new philosophical paradigm, which must be introduced into the mass consciousness by means of education, thereby raising the level of consciousness and expanding the potential of a person. The most famous firms that have used neuromarketing techniques to achieve their goals are Coca-Cola, General Motors, Google Mars, Nestle and many other corporations. It is important to mention that the neuromarketing cost is increasing every year, for example, in 2015 the United States spent $25 billion on neuromarketing research. At the present stage, there are three main research methods in neuromarketing: electrical activity of the brain (EEG), oculography (eye movement, eye tracking) and analysis of facial expressions and non-verbal gestures. For example, in the evaluation process of the TV commercials effectiveness, specialists monitor the eyes and determine the speed of pupil movement. Analyzing the above, it can be argued that neuromarketing in the modern world is one of the leading and promising technologies for the society influencing. It is possible that its potential has not yet been fully formed and studied, but these studies are the highly paid item of expenditure in the large corporations.

Marx and Me

2021 ◽  
pp. 194277862110361
Author(s):  
Sarah Glynn
Keyword(s):  
Political Activism ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
The World ◽  
Freedom Movement ◽  
Cultural Turn ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

This is the story of how I encountered Marxism and how I have used it to make sense of the world, and hence to inform my political activism. I describe how humanist materialism has helped me interrogate social structures so as to discover underlying interacting forces and the role played by human praxis and understandings. On the way, I examine debates about the researcher as outsider; criticisms of political multiculturalism; difficulties of being a Marxist after the cultural turn when many academics will no longer even engage with Marxist arguments; problems in writing about and working with Islamists; struggles to excavate housing studies from being buried in policy detail; uncomfortable truths about immigration and the reserve army of labour; and warnings from the failure of revolutionary stages theory. I end with lessons from the Kurdish freedom movement on human relationships and bottom-up democracy, and with its inspirational example of a society attempting to live as if in the early days of a better world.

of supposing that there are intrinsic qualitative features of mental representations—I doubt that this is a mistake—but the mistake of supposing that these intrinsic qualitative features represent the world by mirroring or picturing it so that representation goes first and foremost by way of intrinsic similarity. What could be intrinsically similar to an array of sense qualities across a sense field? Answer: an array of qualities across space and time. If this is what is primarily represented by a perceptual representation then the problem is how it is we arrive at representational contents to the effect that there are persisting objects. The natural answer is that we derive such contents; it is as if we infer them demonstratively or non-demonstratively from what is primarily represented. So persisting objects are either constructions out of distributions of qualities or the inferred causes of such distributions. It is this whole empiricist problematic which must be rejected. Representation is our characteristic activity. What justifies a particular kind of representation or judgement made immediately as a result of perceptual experience is not that it mirrors or pictures or is intrinsically similar to an independently characterizable reality but that it is the representation or judgement which we would standardly and non-collusively make under just those conditions of perceptual experience. So it is with perceptual judgements of persistence. We spontaneously and non-collusively make them on the basis of perceptual experience. Although particular judgements of persistence may be overturned by the discovery of the sort of trickery mentioned above, the overturning takes place by means of accounting for the illusory appearance of persistence as due to the causal powers of a more inclusive framework of persisting objects. The global commitment to the effect that the world is made up of persisting objects is not a reasoned consequence of some prior commitment to the effect that the world contains at least distributions of qualities over space­ time. It is something we spontaneously and dogmatically employ as a fundamental theme in our everyday representation of the way the world is. How do we earn the right to this dogmatism? How do we earn the right to spontaneously go in for representations as of persisting objects? (By what right do we so synthesize the

2013 ◽  
pp. 216-217
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Mental Representations ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Perceptual Representation ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

XII. Narrative and Perspective; Values and Appropriate Emotions

2003 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 201-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Goldie
Keyword(s):  
The World ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

To the realists.—You sober people who feel well armed against passion and fantasies and would like to turn your emptiness into a matter of pride and ornament: you call yourselves realists and hint that the world really is the way it appears to you. As if reality stood unveiled before you only, and you yourselves were perhaps the best part of it … But in your unveiled state are not even you still very passionate and dark creatures compared to fish, and still far too similar to an artist in love? And what is ‘reality’ for an artist in love? You are still burdened with those estimates of things that have their origin in the passions and loves of former centuries. Your sobriety still contains a secret and inextinguishable drunkenness. Your love of ‘reality’, for example-—oh, that is a primeval ‘love’ … Subtract the phantasm and every human contribution from it, my sober friends! If you can! If you can forget your descent, your past, your training—all of your humanity and animality. (F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book Two, extract from Section 57)

scholarly journals Physicalism, Not Scientism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alyssa Ney
Keyword(s):  
Half Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
The World ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Philosophical Community ◽  
Past Half ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

Although physicalism has been a received view in the philosophical community over the past half-century, scientism is by contrast a much more maligned position. And yet standard formulations of physicalism, as the view that the world is in totality the way physics says it is, can make physicalism look as if it is simply a reductionistic form of scientism. This chapter argues that attention to more subtle formulations of physicalism reveals the difference between these attitudes.

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