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2021 ◽  
pp. 67-75
Author(s):  
Michael Frede

This chapter assesses the proper delineation of the object of the study of the historian of philosophy, which has always been a problem, however one conceived of this study and whatever conception of philosophy one may have had. It considers how the historian can know what belongs to his history and what does not without presuming to know, without taking a position on the philosophical question, what philosophy is. One reason why this is an enormous subject is that the history of philosophy is but one aspect of general history, a strand of developments within general history, in any case so closely intertwined with other developments in general history, or with the development of other social factors, that in order to have a complete understanding of the history of philosophy one will also have to take into account all these connections and dependencies. The chapter deals with this problem by distinguishing between an internal and an external history of philosophy. The internal history of philosophy will be the history of philosophy accounted for, as far as this is possible in terms of purely philosophical considerations, rather than by factors and developments outside philosophy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Furio Pesci

The time of the pandemic is characterized by multiple painful experiences: illness, death, the limitation of personal freedoms, the fear of contagion, widespread impoverishment. It is difficult to talk about the "positive" aspects of an emergency that is not over yet, but during its course it is possible to grasp from those same experiences that characterize it a new opportunity to reflect on aspects of human existence that the consumerist mentality previously placed in the background. The restrictions imposed by the health emergency have led to a collapse in investments and consumption which, if it has complicated the economic situation of many countries, makes it possible to "discover" the possibility that life can pass peacefully even without all the comforts and possibilities previously available. With this new awareness it is possible to reflect on the "philosophical" question of the meaning of life and on what is really "essential" for a possible happiness despite the contingencies of the time we live in.


Author(s):  
Dominique Lestel

Distinguishing their work from the causalist approaches of objectivist ethology, sociobiology, or cognitive ethology, a growing number of ethologists lay claim to the possibility of describing what animals do through more or less complex narratives. Narration becomes a methodological tool in its own right. Animals thus become characters as in novels. This is an epistemological choice. Our capacity to perceive the complexity of animal lives is tied to our capacity to tell ourselves stories in which animals are the heroes. These animals are not robots. They are subjects, individuals, and even persons. From this results a new and transpecific form of third-person narration. This approach still relies, however, on a set of very carefully collected field data and requires a great familiarity with observed animals. It then becomes possible to concern oneself with the individual strategies of particular animals rather than solely with behaviors that would be common to all members of a given species. The recourse to narrative as a means of understanding animal intelligence is especially pertinent as we become increasingly aware that animals themselves tell stories and that our concepts of narrative must expand beyond the human. Knowing whether animals have narrative structures is a philosophical question before it is a biological one. The desire to extend narrativity to the animal necessarily modifies what narrativity signifies. We perceive in animals a processual narrativity, a behavioral narrativity, and a fictional narrativity. The study of animals forces to rethink what a fiction is and compels one to consider its phylogensis in a rigorous manner without locating its origins in Homo sapiens.


Author(s):  
Charles Gilbain ITOUA

This article intends to answer the question of the ethics of hospitality, according to a specific objective, that of raising the hospitality to the rank of a philosophical question, with a view to delivering it, in these days, from the calculating game of politics in search of nationalistic votes, and the media spread of the dominant news on terrorism and migrants. Such an approach presupposes that the concept of hospitality fits into the field of the thinkable, that it is welcomed as a knowable host, figure, and object of knowledge. It is a question of asking for hospitality, the cousin of ethics, to think about the welcome and being-welcomed. One of the objectives of this text is to demonstrate that the concern for transnational solidarity is not a new phenomenon and that more than two centuries ago, Immanuel Kant, without forging the concept, already theorized certain issues. It is also true that most contemporary philosophers have addressed this important subject in one way or another. As the theory of international relations is increasingly shaken by the debate between constructivists and postmodernists (or deconstructivists), it seemed interesting to us, instead of studying the contribution to the understanding of transnational solidarity of the main political scientists involved to one or the other current, to look closely at the attempts at theorizing of the founder who is Immanuel Kant. Emphasis will be placed on the duty of transnational solidarity, which is to say on the ethical aspect.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Heathwood

This Element provides an opinionated introduction to the debate in moral philosophy over identifying the basic elements of well-being and to the related debate over the nature of happiness. The question of the nature of happiness is simply the question of what happiness is (as opposed to what causes it or how to get it), and the central philosophical question about well-being is the question of what things are in themselves of ultimate benefit or harm to a person, or directly make them better or worse off.


2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Findl ◽  
Javier Suárez

AbstractCOVID-19 has substantially affected our lives during 2020. Since its beginning, several epidemiological models have been developed to investigate the specific dynamics of the disease. Early COVID-19 epidemiological models were purely statistical, based on a curve-fitting approach, and did not include causal knowledge about the disease. Yet, these models had predictive capacity; thus they were used to ground important political decisions, in virtue of the understanding of the dynamics of the pandemic that they offered. This raises a philosophical question about how purely statistical models can yield understanding, and if so, what the relationship between prediction and understanding in these models is. Drawing on the model that was developed by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, we argue that early epidemiological models yielded a modality of understanding that we call descriptive understanding, which contrasts with the so-called explanatory understanding which is assumed to be the main form of scientific understanding. We spell out the exact details of how descriptive understanding works, and efficiently yields understanding of the phenomena. Finally, we vindicate the necessity of studying other modalities of understanding that go beyond the conventionally assumed explanatory understanding.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 39
Author(s):  
Xuan Mei

How to explicate the meaning of “good” is a classic philosophical question, one reason is that “good” has metaphysical properties which are difficult to interpret. The development of ethical naturalism opens a door to answer the “good” question. This theory proposes to view the moral world and the natural world as a continuum, in that the moral world is built on the basis of the natural one. This study aims to introduce a sort of reductive ethical naturalism—end-relational theory—to interpret “good” assertions. According to this theory, most “good” assertions are end-relational and thus “good” can be reduced to “end”. By doing so, metaphysical moral meaning can be converted into concretized natural meaning, and then “good” morality will not be high up above anymore. 


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Munro

“I didn’t even know that was a question I could ask.” That remark from a student in an introductory philosophy course points to the primary body of knowledge philosophy produces: a detailed record of what we do not know. When we come to view a philosophical question as well-formed and worthwhile, it is a way of providing as specific a description as we can of something we do not know. The creation or discovery of such questions is like noting a landmark in a territory we’re exploring. When we identify reasonable, if conflicting, answers to this question, we are noting routes to and away from that landmark. And since proposed answers to philosophical questions often contain implied answers to other philosophical questions, those routes connect different landmarks. The result is a kind of map: a map of the unknown. Yet when it comes to the unknown, and all the more so to its cartography, might it not make sense to take our orientation from Borges: What’s in question here, with respect to philosophical questions, is an incipient, unlocalizable threshold—a terrain neither subjective, nor entirely objective, one neither of representation, nor finally of simple immediacy—there where the map perceptibly fails to diverge from the territory. Amid Inclemencies of weather and fringed, as per Borges, with ruin and singular figures—with Animals and Beggars—what’s enclosed is an attempt to chart the contours of this curious immanence.


Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (8) ◽  
pp. 1026
Author(s):  
Arkady Plotnitsky

This article considers a partly philosophical question: What are the ontological and epistemological reasons for using quantum-like models or theories (models and theories based on the mathematical formalism of quantum theory) vs. classical-like ones (based on the mathematics of classical physics), in considering human thinking and decision making? This question is only partly philosophical because it also concerns the scientific understanding of the phenomena considered by the theories that use mathematical models of either type, just as in physics itself, where this question also arises as a physical question. This is because this question is in effect: What are the physical reasons for using, even if not requiring, these types of theories in considering quantum phenomena, which these theories predict fully in accord with the experiment? This is clearly also a physical, rather than only philosophical, question and so is, accordingly, the question of whether one needs classical-like or quantum-like theories or both (just as in physics we use both classical and quantum theories) in considering human thinking in psychology and related fields, such as decision science. It comes as no surprise that many of these reasons are parallel to those that are responsible for the use of QM and QFT in the case of quantum phenomena. Still, the corresponding situations should be understood and justified in terms of the phenomena considered, phenomena defined by human thinking, because there are important differences between these phenomena and quantum phenomena, which this article aims to address. In order to do so, this article will first consider quantum phenomena and quantum theory, before turning to human thinking and decision making, in addressing which it will also discuss two recent quantum-like approaches to human thinking, that by M. G. D’Ariano and F. Faggin and that by A. Khrennikov. Both approaches are ontological in the sense of offering representations, different in character in each approach, of human thinking by the formalism of quantum theory. Whether such a representation, as opposed to only predicting the outcomes of relevant experiments, is possible either in quantum theory or in quantum-like theories of human thinking is one of the questions addressed in this article. The philosophical position adopted in it is that it may not be possible to make this assumption, which, however, is not the same as saying that it is impossible. I designate this view as the reality-without-realism, RWR, view and in considering strictly mental processes as the ideality-without-idealism, IWI, view, in the second case in part following, but also moving beyond, I. Kant’s philosophy.


Author(s):  
Alexey Viktorovich Suslov ◽  
Dmitrii Alekseevich Gusev ◽  
Vasilii Aleksandrovich Potaturov

The object of this research is a centuries-old worldview polemic between the philosophical representations on the world and human associated with theism, atheism and pantheism. The subject of this research is the theoretical and practical attitudes and conclusions of anthropological nature that result from these intellectual models. The authors dwell on the worldview correlations of materialism and idealism with their worldview companions, such as atheism, evolutionism, scientism, anthropological voluntarism  on the one hand, and theism, creationism, antiscientism, providentialism – on the other. Special attention is given to examination of ideological link of atheism and pantheism with the anthropocentric attitude, as well as the questions of life navigation of a human in the context of confrontation and polemics of anthropological voluntarism  and providentialism. The novelty of this research consists in substantiation of authenticity of the philosophical idealism as a model that implies theistic and creationist view of the universe and fundamental incompatibility of the central idealistic thesis on the primacy of spiritual reality with the nature of being from the perspective of pantheism. The novelty also lies in the authors’ statement on the worldview similarity of atheism and pantheism, each of which is a specific substantiation of anthropological voluntarism  that is opposed to theistic providentialism. The conclusion consists in acknowledgment of the fundamental dichotomy of the worldview choice and life orientation of a human between the anthropocentric and providential poles, despite all ideological multifacetedness and diversity of the philosophical and religious representations.


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