scholarly journals Will and Volition: Personal Conditions of Possibility of Being an Agent

2021 ◽  
Vol - (4) ◽  
pp. 153-162
Author(s):  
Anna Laktionova
Keyword(s):  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Philosophical Concept ◽  
Very Old ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Personal Attitude ◽  
The World ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Rational Actions

Will is a very old important philosophical concept, an analysis of which is very specific, if not odd, comparatively with the others (when it fruitfully proceeds in terms of criteria). This concept (‘will’) is going to be used to provide and clarify conditions of possibility for person of being an agent. In doing that I refer to the correspondent pieces of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations; and to their interpretations by M. Alvarez in “Wittgenstein on Action and Will” (2009) and D. K. Levy in “Morality without Agency” (2017). Person is essentially constituted by ‘powerless’ will in terms of ‘understanding’ that is experienced during her life. Action depends on and manifests understanding by will of a personal attitude to some states of affairs. Will does not incline a person to particular desires about preferable states of affairs or actions. Will is not about states of affairs. By willing I value the world, its portions, they appear significant, important to me. Volition is treated as related to will. Both are personal conditions of being an agent with priority of agency as capacity realized by rational actions.

scholarly journals Begriff (Concept)

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Clark Muenzer
Keyword(s):  
Close Relation ◽  
Expressive Power ◽  
Reflective Judgment ◽  
Philosophical Concept ◽  
Limit Setting ◽  
Systematic Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Dynamic Perspective ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Dynamic Plane

The lexeme Begriff marks Goethe’s ongoing reconstruction of the traditional philosophical concept across a variety of disciplinary practices. In its most developed articulations, it also works transcendentally to establish the conditions of possibility for thought and intelligibility on a dynamic plane of verbal experimentation and reinvention that cuts immanently through the world. Unlike the clear and distinct concepts of rationalist metaphysics, which function as fixed universals beyond the reach of the senses, Goethe’s extensive usages and ongoing conceptualizations of Begriff draw on an expressive power within language to generate sequences of cognitive moves and moments of transitional understanding that stand in close relation to each other and can be gathered in graded series to be saved for further observation, description, reflection, and reconfiguration. Through its successive linguistic manifestations, moreover, and in line with Goethe’s heterodox approach to systematic philosophy, Begriff lays out force fields of verbal and philosophical activity and discovery with fluid and permeable borders. In ways comparable to the power of reflective judgment in Kant’s third critique, which dispenses with the categories of the understanding and their determining judgments to work intuitively within the world of living forms (Gestalten), Goethe’s lebendiger Begriff (living concept) proves to be a more encompassing structure of thought and its processes than the conceptual machinery of orthodox metaphysical systems with their regulatory regimes of limit-setting terms. Redeployed as an experimental object of experience, Begriff is, therefore, also anschaulich (visual, accessible to intuition). By offering a dynamic perspective onto the fugitive things of the world—including its thought things—it continually reveals the hidden secrets of its own perpetual becomings.

Artefacts as Social Things

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 400-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michał Piekarski ◽  
Witold Wachowski ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Design Practice ◽  
Cognitive Ecology ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Relational Properties ◽  
Relevant Today ◽  
The World ◽  
Forms Of Life

In these reflections, we want to prove a thesis whereby normativity of rules and norms may be linked to the domain of artefacts which we understand as social things. We claim that some norms and rules are situated in human socio-material ecosystems especially when it comes to the role played by affordances. The thesis advanced in this article will also enable us to indicate one of the potential interpretations of Wittgenstein’s ‘forms of life’ concept, demonstrating that some solutions suggested by the author of Philosophical Investigations are still relevant today. We will relate the issue of the normativity of artefacts to the problem of rule recognition which Wittgenstein also raises in some of his later studies. We will demonstrate that the problem of normativity recognition is linked to (1) relational properties of objects, that is affordances; (2) structured nature of the world of human communities; and (3) the ability to recognise affordances related to the ability to create predictions about future states of affairs. The analyses presented herein will show that it is possible to link the perspectives of cognitive ecology, design practice and philosophical analyses focused on the problem of normativity.

Are there Non-Propositional Intentional States?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. Searle
Keyword(s):  
Intentional State ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Intentional States ◽  
The World ◽  
Essential Idea ◽  
Limited Class ◽  
The Mind

Intentionality is that feature of the mind by which it is directed at or about objects and states of affairs in the world. Intentionality is simply aboutness or directedness. “Proposition” is more difficult, but the essential idea is this: every intentional state has a content. Sometimes it seems that the content just enables a state to refer to an object. So if John loves Sally, then it appears that the content of his love is simply “Sally”. But if John believes that it is raining, then the specification of the content requires an entire “that” clause. “Are there non-propositional intentional states?” amounts to the question, “Are there intentional states whose content does not require specification with a ‘that’ clause?” This chapter explores whether there are any non-propositional states, and suggest that a very limited class, such as boredom, is in fact non-propositional.

King Leur: A Psychological Study

1859 ◽  
Vol 5 (29) ◽  
pp. 301-348
Author(s):  
J. C. B.
Keyword(s):  
Deep Foundations ◽  
Very Old ◽  
Psychological Study ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Moral Personality ◽  
The World ◽  
Single Moment ◽  
Small Gauge ◽  
Mountain Summit ◽  
The Senses

Aye, every inch a King, in all his pompous vanity, his reckless passion, his unstable judgment, a thorough king, whom even madness could not dethrone from the royal habits of authority, of strenuous will, and of proud predominance. As the highest mountain summit becomes the fearful beacon of volcanic flame, testifying in lurid characters to the world's deep heart-throes, so this kingliest of minds—he who in his little world has been the summit and the cope of things—becomes, in the creative hand of the poet, the visible outlet of those forces which devastate the soul. We stand by in reverential awe, despairing, with our small gauge of criticism, to estimate the forces of this human Etna. Oppressed by the power and magnitude of the passions, as depicted in this most sublime and awful of poetic creations, it is only after the senses have become accustomed to the roar and turmoil that we throw off the stupor, and dare to look down upon the throes of the Titan, and begin to recognize the distinctive features of the fierce commotion. Even then we must stand afar off; for not in Lear, as in others of the poet's great characters, can one for a single moment perform the act of mental transmutation. In Hamlet, for instance, the most complex of all, many a man may see reflected the depths of his own soul. But Lear is more and less than human in its isolated grandeur, in the force and depths of its passions, in its abstraction from accidental qualities. In the breadth of his strength and weakness he is painted like one of those old gods, older and greater than the heathen representatives of small virtues and vices—the usurping vulgarities of polytheism. The true divinities of Lear were old, like himself very old and kingly—Saturn and Rhea, the autochthones of the heavens; even as his qualities are laid upon the dark and far off, yet solid and deep foundations of moral personality. Well might this King of sorrows exclaim, in the words of the World-spirit, to those who attempt to tear his passions to tatters before the footlights; yea, even to the more reverent efforts of critics— “Du gleichst dem Geist den du begreifst, Nicht mir!”

scholarly journals Welcome to Ceramics: A New Open Access Scientific Journal on Ceramics Science and Engineering

Ceramics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Gilbert Fantozzi
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Human Activity ◽  
Scientific Journal ◽  
Science And Engineering ◽  
Very Old ◽  
The World

The word ceramics comes from the Greek word keramikos, which means pottery and corresponds to a very old human activity. Indeed, one of the oldest materials fabricated in the world is ceramic pottery [...]

scholarly journals Concepts of Digital Labour: Schelling's Naturphilosophie

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Michael Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Self Awareness ◽  
Care Of The Self ◽  
Online Activity ◽  
Digital Infrastructure ◽  
Personal Interaction ◽  
The World ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
State Of Power ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
Point Of Departure

This paper uses F.W.J. Schelling’s Naturphilsophie as a point of departure to theorize the concept of digital labour. Beginning with Marx’s distinction between fulfilling and unfulfilling labour, it is argued that the former is labour that is immanent to, and in line with, the Schellingian notion of Nature as process and ungrounded ground, while the unfulfilling variant externalizes Nature and attempts to use it against itself in the service of capital, and the establishment of what I call a state-of-power. Schelling’s The Ages of the World is re-interpreted by exchanging his version of immaterial spirituality for digital virtuality, and as a result, digital labour is viewed as a consequence of previous forms of world historical developments. While digital virtuality is in fact materialist in terms of both the labour that activates it, and the substrate that sustains it, the materiality of the digital is often overlooked in favour of an anti-materialist stance that works to disconnect the digital labourer from their online activity, and preclude the critical self-awareness necessary for the acknowledgement of their online “playful” activity as work. It ends with an analysis of Mark Zuckerberg’s ideational attempt to “re-wire” the world via Facebook’s digital infrastructure, which begins to set the conditions of possibility for inter-personal interaction, and explores the possibilities for resistance available in Foucault’s notion of the care of the self.

scholarly journals The Authentic and Inauthentic Sport in the Hermeneutic and Phenomenological Perspectives

2018 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Ivo Jirásek ◽  
Josef Oborný ◽  
Emanuel Hurych
Keyword(s):  
Social Groups ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Specific Kind ◽  
Philosophical Concept ◽  
Opposite Pole ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Sport Events ◽  
Time And Being

Summary The philosophical concept of hermeneutics presents the opposite pole of human mental activities than positivism. Phenomenology, together with hermeneutics, also presents a kind of opposition to the positivistic reduction of learning the world. This paper focuses on the topic of authenticity of sport from these two (hermeneutic and phenomenological) approaches. As a basic theoretical platform Martin Heidegger’s book Time and Being is used. The authors develop a specific kind of categorization of the social groups engaged in sport events via the ancient concepts of “TECHNÉ ATHLETIKÉ” and “TECHNÉ GYMNASTIKÉ”. Two different phenomena: sport and “sport” are examined within the next part of the paper. There are some reasons mentioned in conclusions coming from the hermeneutic and phenomenological approach which help us to understand and accept the opinion that a kind of return to “techné gymnastiké” can support the authentic modes of being in human approach to sport.

What Cries Out

Atopias ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frédéric Neyrat
Keyword(s):  
Political Life ◽  
Philosophical Concept ◽  
Its Analysis ◽  
The World ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Sense Of Wonder ◽  
Living Being

The conclusion, “What Cries Out,” argues that there is no relation without atopia. Here the book unfolds the implications of its analysis for translation, ecology, and political life. When each philosophical concept and each living being contains an out-of-place, then the world is a relational field composed of out-of-fields. The metaphysical propositions of philosophy make liveable the space between the immemorial and the end of time, restoring a sense of wonder about the existence of the universe.

Some Evaluations

1970 ◽  
pp. 129-146
Author(s):  
Francis E. Reilly
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Theoretical Knowledge ◽  
Personal Attitude ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Personal Philosophy

This chapter evaluates two aspects of Peirce's thought: his Greek insistence on the primacy of theoretical knowledge, and his almost Teilhardian synthesis of evolutionary themes. It reflects the author's own personal attitude toward both of these topics in Peirce, which is one of endorsement, though some criticisms are also offered. Concerning the first aspect, Peirce was not only an outstanding philosopher but also a man well acquainted with the history of philosophy. His knowledge of history, going back to Plato, Aristotle, and other Greeks, contributed to the formation of his own personal philosophy. One obvious Greek attitude that he made his own was the dedication to theoretical knowledge. On the second topic, the chapter argues that Peirce understood evolution as one of the chief characteristics of the world. It is not restricted to the biological sphere, but extends to the whole cosmos and to the historical development of science. In proposing this synthetic, post-Darwinian view of evolution, Peirce was decades ahead of his time.

Schelling’s Romanticism

2020 ◽  
pp. 32-50
Author(s):  
Joan Steigerwald
Keyword(s):  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
The Other ◽  
Johann Gottlieb Fichte ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
The World ◽  
Dark Ground

This paper is a contribution to recent scholarly interest in the intersections of post-Kantian idealism and Romanticism. It traces overlapping concerns in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s and Novalis’ works. Both thinkers began their philosophical studies with critical engagements of the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, developing similar arguments for the duplicity of relationships of identity and the problem of their mediation. Novalis and Schelling also explored the intersections of mind and nature through notions of potentiation and depotentiation, stimulated by their respective philosophical examinations of contemporary mathematics and natural sciences. Finally, both thinkers introduced figures of a dark ground or night—Novalis in Hymns to the Night and Schelling in works as diverse as On the World Soul and Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom—to present the unpresentability of the infinite. Although there is little historical documentation of direct borrowings of one thinker from the other, these overlapping concerns are richly suggestive.

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