Research Design and Methodology

This chapter presents the research design methodology. It outlines the research process and the philosophical underpinning for this research. It has set out the research problem under investigation and mapped out the various steps that were undertaken. This research adopted a mixed research method approach as the most appropriate and a survey was the most effective instrument in addressing this enquiry of SPP. The philosophical position adopted within this study was one of the pragmatists, which has the capacity to hold different world views and not be constrained by one specific philosophical position. Pragmatists are not committed to one system of philosophy and reality, and researchers are free to choose the methods, techniques, and processes that have the best fit to meet the needs of the research.

The Philosophical History of Philosophy

This chapter investigates the philosophical history of philosophy. It begins with a short account of its history before considering it systematically. The philosophical history of philosophy is best understood as a viable enterprise if one looks at it as a certain kind of retrospective history. Thus understood, the philosophical historian adopts a certain contemporary philosophical position as philosophically the correct position to take. They then proceed to look back at the history of philosophy to see how philosophers, step by step, advanced in the direction of the favoured position. This kind of retrospective history has certain inherent dangers and considerable limitations. There is the inherent danger that one takes the picture of the history of philosophy, which one thus gets, to be a representative picture of the history of philosophy. The enterprise thus interpreted seems to suffer mainly from the limitation that it yields a highly selective, rather anachronistic, and somewhat distorted picture of the history of philosophy.

Doxographical, Philosophical, and Historical Forms of the History of Philosophy

This chapter examines the doxographical, philosophical, and historical forms of the history of philosophy. The aim of doxography is to reconstruct and present philosophical views or positions that have been proposed in the past and to do so in a way that makes clear the interest they may retain for contemporary philosophical discussions. However, the inadequacy of ancient doxographical writers seems so great that the term ‘doxography’ itself has acquired a pejorative connotation. The criticism is twofold: first, one has the feeling that the ancient doxographers did not have historical awareness or a sensitivity to history; second, one tends to associate doxography with a kind of philosophical failure. People then abandoned the assumption that the positions of the past retain their philosophical importance in the contemporary context. In its place, they began to suppose that the views of the past were only of interest as stages, even if necessary ones, of the evolution of thought. This sort of history represents the philosophical study of the history of philosophy. It is precisely this philosophical position which, towards the middle of the nineteenth century, provokes a reaction. But this reaction takes two very different forms. On the one hand, it gives rise to the historical study of the history of philosophy and, on the other, to a modern form of doxography.

The History of Philosophy as a Discipline

This chapter discusses the history of philosophy as a discipline. Part of the confusion not only as to what historians of philosophy try to do but also as to how they ought to go about doing it, seems to be due to a misleading ambiguity in the term ‘history of philosophy’. Historically, it has been used in two rather different ways, each of which corresponds to a very different tradition of treating the history of philosophy, both of which persist to the present day, but which tend to get conflated. From roughly the middle of the seventeenth century onwards, we find treatises with the title ‘History of Philosophy’. These treatises show themselves to stand in a much older tradition that goes back to antiquity; namely, the doxographical tradition. But towards the end of the eighteenth century, a very different tradition emerges. As opposed to their doxographical predecessors, histories which adopt a chronological disposition are written out of the conviction that the philosophical positions of the past are no longer worth considering philosophically, that they are out of date. If they are still worth considering at all, it is because they constitute the steps through which we historically arrived at our present philosophical position.

THE EXPRESSION OF PLATO’S PHILOSOPHICAL POSITION THROUGH THE DIALOGUE FORM: CHANCE OR NECESSITY?

The importance of the dialogue form for understanding Plato’s philosophy was not recognized by researchers for a long time. The situation, however, has changed drastically in our time. In Plato’s studies, a group of researchers has emerged who build their argumentation on the basis of the dialogue form itself. According to this position, Plato’s philosophy cannot be found in his dialogues because of the “opacity” of the dialogue form. The situation can change only when we get a “document” where Plato speaks directly about which character expresses his own views. The author of the article offers to consider some arguments against this position: 1) Aristotle refers to some dialogues as the source of Plato’s philosophy; 2) the dialogues constantly repeat consideration of the same topics; 3) Plato’s direct voice is in his Letters. The dialogues are our only and primary source of Plato’s philosophy. On this basis, the author defends the thesis that Plato’s use of the dialogue form was not an accident, but an internal necessity. This was based on Plato’s own cognitive situation and some pedagogical reflections. He transferred the relation “truth-Plato” to the level “Plato-reader”. This relationship implies the impossibility of full knowledge of the truth and the limitation of its expression as long as one stays in the mortal modus of existence, with the need for constant inquiry. The dialogue form, enhanced by anonymity, irony and other artistic techniques, makes it possible to realize this relationship at the level of “Plato-reader”. Plato is present in the dialogues, but is completely elusive.

The Machine in the Ghost: Autonomy, Hyperconnectivity, and Residual Causality

This article will examine the unnamed and potentially devastating constraining effect of software on human autonomy. I call this concept residual causality, where software design decisions made long ago in different circumstances for different reasons constrain human action in an unknown future. The less aware the designers of software systems are of complexity in social systems, the more likely they are to introduce residual causality. The introduction of intricate, ordered machines, to a world largely defined by disorder and heuristics, has caused philosophical perturbations that we have not fully dealt with. The machine in the ghost is the belief that machine thinking can be applied to the environment in which the machine will operate. As hyperconnectivity increases, the ghost becomes more unpredictable, unmanageable, and even less like the machine. If we continue to indulge the machine view of the world, the design of software systems presents real dangers to the autonomy of the individual and the functioning of our societies. The steadfastness of machine ontologies in the philosophies of software architects risks creating increasing residual causality as hyperconnectivity increases. Shifting the philosophical position of software architects opens up the possibility of discovering new methods that make it easier to avoid these dangers.

Nominal Conceptualism and Logical Modelling of Agents’ Conceptions

In the view of my philosophical position ‘nominal conceptualism’, cognitive/knowledge agents, who are in some way aware of expressing the world based on their mental concepts, deal with their linguistic and/or symbolic expressions. In this paper I rely on nominal concep- tualism to logically characterise agents’ concept-based descriptions of the world and analyse a undamental logical system for conception representation.

Sensitivity to Moral Principles Predicts Both Deontological and Utilitarian Response Tendencies in Sacrificial Dilemmas

When facing sacrificial dilemmas in which harm maximizes outcomes, people appear sensitive to three moral principles: They are more averse to actively causing harm than passively allowing it ( action principle), causing harm directly than indirectly ( contact principle), and causing harm as a means than as a by-product of helping others ( intention principle). Across five studies and a meta-analysis ( N = 1,218), we examined whether individual differences in people’s sensitivity to these principles were related to participants’ moral preferences on sacrificial dilemmas. Interestingly, sensitivity to each of these principles was related to both elevated harm-rejection (i.e., deontological) as well as elevated outcome-maximization (i.e., utilitarian) response tendencies. Rather than increasing responses consistent with only one philosophical position, people sensitive to moral principles balanced moral concerns about causing harm and maximizing outcomes similar to people high in other measures of moral concern.

Re-imagining the dialogic spaces of talanoa through Samoan onto-epistemology

This article proposes a Samoan indigenous philosophical position to reconceptualise the dialogic spaces of talanoa; particularly how talanoa is applied methodologically to research practice. Talanoa within New Zealand Pacific research scholarship is problematised, raising particular tensions of the universal and humanistic ideologies that are entrenched within institutional ethics and research protocols. The dialogic relational space which is embedded throughout talanoa methodology is called into question, evoking alternative ways of knowing and being within the talanoa research assemblage[1] (including the material-world). Samoan epistemology reveals that nature is constituted within personhood (Vaai & Nabobo-Baba, 2017) and that nature is co-agentic with human in an ecology of knowing. We call for a shift in thinking material-ethics that opens talanoa to a materialist process ontology, where knowledge generation emerges through human and non-human encounters. [1] The concept of assemblage developed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refers to a process of temporary arrangements or constellations of objects, expressions, bodies, qualities and territories that create new ways of functioning. The assemblage is a multiplicity shaped by a wide range of flows and emerges from the arranging process of heterogenous elements (Livesey, 2010).

The State, Democracy, and Class Rule: Remarks on the Hoppean Approach

The subject-matter of the paper is the theory of class struggle proposed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, one of the leading representatives of libertarian political philosophy in the radical tradition of Murray N. Rothbard. The author reconstructs and critically comments on the theory at hand. The author's remarks focus on the ethical and methodological background of Hoppe's approach, the main question being whether the latter theory is consonant with the thinker's positions on ethics and methodology, as well as with his political standpoint. The author argues that not only does class analysis not contradict other core beliefs of Hoppe but it also represents an indispensable element of his libertarian philosophy. There is, however, a significant tension between the class approach and Hoppe's secondary philosophical position – his historical idealism. The article is concluded by indicating some further issues in the Hoppean theory of class that, in the author's opinion, should be subject to future inquiry.