Analytical Anthropology of Peter Hacker

Purpose. The article is an explication of the features of the anthropological teaching of Peter Hacker in the context of analytical philosophy with consideration to the context of European philosophy within the framework of the Oxford School of ordinary language philosophy. The theoretical basis of the research is determined by the latest research in the English-language analytical philosophical tradition, rethinking the place of anthropological problems in the system of philosophical knowledge. Originality. Referring to primary sources, we reconstructed the philosophical and anthropological teaching of Peter Hacker in the unity of its basic principles and theoretical and practical results. We determined philosophical origins of the key ideas of his philosophical anthropology and substantiated their originality, systematicity and logical argumentation. His philosophical position is defined as anthropological holism, synthesizing the reinterpreted ideas of Aristotle and Wittgenstein. Conclusions. Peter Hacker is the creator of the original version of Analytic Philosophical Anthropology. His anthropology is based on criticism of Cartesian dualism and physicalism, which underlie modern neurosciences and which he tries to overcome on the basis of Wittgenstein’s philosophical "logotherapy". The conceptual framework of his holistic anthropology is a rethought conceptual scheme of the Ordinary language philosophy. Hacker considers consciousness not as a separate mental reality, but one of the powers of human nature – an intellectual ability, which, along with emotional (passionate) and moral, belongs to a person as an integral socio-biological being. Asserting the free will of man, the Oxford thinker criticizes various forms of determinism, especially its most common form in modern science – neurobiological determinism, which is built on false philosophical foundations. This criticism allows the modern British philosopher to build an original, systematic and logically consistent anthropological concept that asserts the immutability of the highest human values – goodness, love and happiness.

Space of Experience, Horizon of Expectation. Spatiotemporal Metaphors, Philosophical Anthropology, and the Flesh

Paul Ricœur’s recourse to the metahistorical categories, space of experience and horizon of expectation, invites an inquiry into geography’s role as the guarantor of history. The ontology of the flesh provides the first indication of how one’s body is implicated in the sense of one’s place in the world. In turn, narrative inscriptions of events on the landscape transform the physical topography of a place into an array of sites where memories of ancestral wisdom and historical traumas endure. By anchoring historians’ representations of the past in the places and locales in which events took place, geography constructs a third space analogous to the third time of history. The aporias engendered by the phenomenology of time, however, have no equivalent in the phenomenology of space. The dissymmetry between the dialectic that informs the discourse of space and the one that informs the discourse of time thus keeps in place the reciprocal relation between geography and historiography.

Dostoevsky - Strakhov - Tolstoy: Toward to the Story of One Conflict

The well-known epistolary conflict between Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Strakhov over the latter's slander of the great Russian writer's terrible sins is considered in the article from the point of view a philosophical anthropology and relations not two but between three participants of this story: Dostoyevsky, Strakhov and Tolstoy. This conflict is presented through anthropological, existential, and class prisms of description, based on a reconstruction of Strakhov's concept of man as a controversial, dual, and undefined being reflected in Dostoevsky's work. A direct relation between the definition of the dual nature of man in the works of Strakhov and Dostoevsky and interpersonal conflicts within "boundary forms of literature" is substantiated. Special attention is paid to the class of seminarians, the object of Dostoevsky's targeted criticism. He saw their worst characteristics in Strakhov personality. Tolstoy plays the role of an arbiter in this controversy, assessing the situation both in terms of literary, existential and religious thought. In the course of his examination of this conflict, his unexpected closeness to Dostoevsky was discovered in regard to assessment of Strakhov. The point of their coincidence was the "pink Christianity" of the writers, who justify man in a quite similar manner, in terms of their religious consciousness.

What is a Philosophy of Education?

The article considers what is a philosophy and its relation to education . The modern academic development of philosophy has questioned the theoretical basis of specific aspects of knowledge and human experience, including education. It is an active rather than a passive or descriptive discipline. Education is defined similarly as a process by which knowledge, skills (including collecting empirical evidence and reasoning from it), cultural norms, values, and beliefs are acquired. The development of the modern philosophy of education is considered with its emphasis on conceptual analysis. Education is philosophically the conscious development of maturity requiring capacity for both intellectual and economic autonomy. Issues in the contemporary philosophy of education are then considered, particularly the challenges of post-modernism and post-truth for a philosophy of education in an Internet world. It identifies the need for comparative philosophical perspectives other than Occidental ones and suggests philosophical anthropology and comparative education as potential guides. It concludes that although there is now no consensus on how a coherent contemporary philosophy of education may be developed, analysis of concepts, metaphysical reasoning, and ethics may still provide a basis for a coherent and defensible philosophy of education whatever the comparative cultural setting.

Development of philosophical anthropology in Kyiv Weltanschauung School

The article is dedicated to the development of philosophical anthropology in the Kyiv Weltanschauung School. It is shown that in studies devoted to this school there are certain differences. They concern both the time of the school's founding and its founders. The vast majority of researchers consider Volodymyr Shynkaruk to be the founder of the Kyiv Weltanschauung School and date its emergence in 1969, when the principles of Weltanschauung school were promulgated. At the same time, there is another point of view on the abolition of this school. Some researchers associate its appearance with the name of Pavlo Kopnin, who also had noticeable humanistic motives for philosophizing. Attempts to combine Weltanschauung and logical- epistemological approaches are also noticeable. In this connection it is talked about Kyiv Weltanschauung-Epistemological School. In my opinion, there are more reasons to consider Volodymyr Shynkaruk, the founder of the Kyiv Weltanschauung School, who initiated the study of man - the world of man, which is the core of the Weltanschauung .In Ukrainian philosophical thought, the anthropological turn Kyiv Weltanschauung School took place not on blank space. Representatives of this school, first of all its founder Volodymyr Shynkaruk, continued to some extent the tradition of "philosophy of heart" of H. Skovoroda and P. Yurkevich, on the other hand, their philosophical heritage strangely reflected the mainstream of modern philosophy, namely the turn from epistemology to anthropology, to the ontology of the world of human existence. It is necessary to distinguish between the understanding of philosophical anthropology in the narrow and broad sense. In a narrow sense, it is understood as a philosophical discipline that developed in the 20-30 years of the 20th century and is represented by the names Scheler, Helen, Plesner. In a broad sense, philosophical anthropology is a philosophical reflection on man in general. In this regard, such key problems of philosophical anthropology as human transcendence, its identity, goal-setting as a way of human self-realization are considered.

Modernism, Mysticism and the Pursuit of Freedom - Bringing the initial instinct of the Modernists to its fulfilment in the model of the Christian mystic

While one can certainly debate about the forms Modernism (in the artistic sense) manifested itself in and what actually qualified as Modernism, one cannot deny that the desire for freedom was one of its underlying tenets. In the 21st century it would seem however that the desire for freedom has not been satiated. In the following essay I will explore whether emancipating art from a moral authority achieved the freedom modernist artists so deeply desired and I will question whether severing himself from objective truth the artist was allowed to fully thrive. Comparing Modernist concept’s (Stream of consciousness, that art should reflect reality and the emphasis on subjectivity etc.) with the fundamentals of Christian mysticism (i.e. the interior life) and by reconciling subjective experience with objective truth through the use of St John Paul II’s philosophical anthropology – I hope to pose an alternative path to satiate, truly satiate, the Modernist’s thirst for freedom.

Embodied Practice and Materialist Phenomenology

This chapter critically examines the Materialist-Phenomenological Method for studying religion and the work of the sociologist of religion Manuel A. Vásquez. This method focuses on the study of embodied religious practices, visual cultures, vernacular idioms, and particular locales as these are studied according to historical and often ethnographic methods of analysis. The chapter interrogates Vásquez’s work More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion, which proffers a “somatocentric” theory that aims to escape the legacy of Cartesian dualism. The chapter raises questions about Vásquez’s philosophical anthropology and shows how he repeats and reinforces the firewall separating the study of religion from reasons for studying it. In More than Belief, the chapter shows, one encounters the fact-value dualism that underwrites the ascetic ideal in religious studies, one so thoroughgoing that it prevents Vásquez from grasping the need to provide philosophical reasons to justify his theory.

Scientific Rationality and Causal Explanation

This chapter examines the work of Donald Wiebe and the Scientific-Explanatory Method. Otherwise known as the naturalistic paradigm, the Scientific-Explanatory Method insists that the study of religion should operate within a value-free, disinterested, and empirical set of parameters. The chapter examines Wiebe’s ideas and then enlists and expands on insights offered in the previous chapter to show how Wiebe’s naturalism rules out valid sources of knowledge about human experience. Drawing on the philosophical anthropology and hermeneutical ideas of Charles Taylor, it shows how naturalism drapes human conduct under the banner of behaviorism and excludes from consideration the idea that human beings are agents who act according to intersubjective reasons. The chapter concludes by arguing that the naturalistic paradigm relies on a fact-value distinction that reflects and reinforces the commitments to value-neutrality that the book identifies as afflicting the field.

Editorial

The editorial introduces the special issue in the memory of Dr. Amfilohije Radović (+2020), Metropolitan of Montenegro and the Littoral, by giving brief notes on Radović's life, education, and thought, with special reference to his interest in Byzantine philosophy and theology, and contemporary philosophical anthropology. In addition, the editorial gives a panoramic view of articles contributed to the special issue.