Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 72-75.

Alan Stewart - Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.4 542-543 Book Review Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy Stephen Gaukroger. Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 249. Cloth, $59.95. Paper, $21.95. In Stephen Gaukroger's new study, Francis Bacon is lauded all too familiarly as the inaugurator of "the (...) transformation of philosophy into science, and philosophers into scientists" . But it's far from the old story: Gaukroger sees Bacon not as progenitor of the Scientific Revolution or revered Father of Modern Science, but as launching "the first systematic, comprehensive attempt to transform the early-modern.. (shrink)

The motif of ancient beliefs about afterlife and contemporary idea of them appears increasingly in contemporary works directed to young audience. The combination of mythology and history known from ancient sources and popular culture works is essential for reception studies. The paper presents three cases of transformation of characters connected with ancient beliefs about afterlife as protagonists or villains in works directed to youth; Hades as a villain known from Disney’s works, especially Hercules; Persephone and Hades’s love story in (...) three web comics: Underworld Love Story and Hades & Persephone Shorts by Gau Meo and Hades’ Holiday by Elvishness; and the way the Cleopatra VII Philopator’s image in Scooby Doo! in Where’s My Mummy? is different than others representations of the queen. (shrink)

In the ninth century BCE, the peoples of four distinct regions of the civilized world created the religious and philosophical traditions that have continued to nourish humanity to the present day: Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Later generations further developed these initial insights, but we have never grown beyond them. Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for example, were all secondary flowerings of the original Israelite vision. Now, in (...) The Great Transformation , Karen Armstrong reveals how the sages of this pivotal “Axial Age” can speak clearly and helpfully to the violence and desperation that we experience in our own times. Armstrong traces the development of the Axial Age chronologically, examining the contributions of such figures as the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the mystics of the Upanishads, Mencius, and Euripides. All of the Axial Age faiths began in principled and visceral recoil from the unprecedented violence of their time. Despite some differences of emphasis, there was a remarkable consensus in their call for an abandonment of selfishness and a spirituality of compassion. With regard to dealing with fear, despair, hatred, rage, and violence, the Axial sages gave their people and give us, Armstrong says, two important pieces of advice: first there must be personal responsibility and self-criticism, and it must be followed by practical, effective action. In her introduction and concluding chapter, Armstrong urges us to consider how these spiritualities challenge the way we are religious today. In our various institutions, we sometimes seem to be attempting to create exactly the kind of religion that Axial sages and prophets had hoped to eliminate. We often equate faith with doctrinal conformity, but the traditions of the Axial Age were not about dogma. All insisted on the primacy of compassion even in the midst of suffering. In each Axial Age case, a disciplined revulsion from violence and hatred proved to be the major catalyst of spiritual change. (shrink)

Hegel's objection -- Is Kant's idealism subjective? -- An ambiguity in 'subjectivism' -- The epistemological problem -- The transcendental deduction of the categories and subjectivism -- Are Kant's categories subjective? -- Hegel's suspicion : Kantian critique and subjectivism -- What is kantian philosophical criticism? -- Hegel's suspicion : initial formulation -- A shallow suspicion? -- Deepening the suspicion : criticism, autonomy, and subjectivism -- Directions of response -- Critique and suspicion : unmasking the critical philosophy -- Hegel's transformation of (...) critique -- The rejection of Kantian critique : philosophy, skepticism, and the recovery of the ancient idea -- Hegel's epistemology in the shadow of Schelling -- Schulze's skepticism contra the critical philosophy -- Ancient versus modern skepticism : Hegel's difference -- Against the modern conception of rational cognition -- Against modern self-certainty -- The history of skepticism: decline into dogmatism -- Philosophy counter culture and time -- The return to Kantian critique : recognizing the rights of ordinary consciousness -- Two conceptions of philosophical critique -- The return to critique and the relation of philosophy to its history -- The rights of ordinary consciousness and the need for critique -- Critique as the realization of the science of metaphysics -- Hegel's self-transformational criticism -- Presuppositionless philosophy -- The problem of the criterion -- Self-transformational criticism -- The problem of the we' -- Our transformation -- Hegel's alternative model : critical transformation as self-realization. (shrink)

The phenomenon of moral transformation, though important, has received little attention in virtue ethics. In this paper we propose a virtue-ethical model of moral transformation as character transformation by tracking the development of new identity-defining (‘core’) character traits, their expressions, and their priority structure, through the change in what appears as possible or impossible to the moral agent. We propose that character transformation culminates when what previously appeared as morally possible to the agent now appears impossible, (...) i.e. unconceived and unthinkable, moving through stages of transformation where some possibilities gradually disappear while others open up. While we show an example of moral transformation towards virtue, we allow that such transformation can occur in the opposite direction, hence we make claims about ‘character traits’ rather than virtues of vices. Through the example of former slave-trader Rodrigo’s transformation in the film The Mission, we follow the parallel development of new objects of value and ways of valuing (with respect to a group of indigenous people of South America) with the closing down of the possibility of disrespecting and harming them, to the end-point of transformation, where allowing their capture is for Rodrigo both unconceived and, when conceived, unthinkable. (shrink)

We present a model for several early stages of the sensorimotor transformations involved in targeted arm movement. In psychophysical experiments, human subjects pointed to the remembered locations of randomly placed targets in three-dimensional space. They made consistent errors in distance, and from these errors stages in the sensorimotor transformation were deduced. When subjects attempted to move the right index finger to a virtual target they consistently undershot the distance of the more distal targets. Other experiments indicated that the error (...) was in the sensorimotor transformation rather than in the perception of distance. The error was most consistent when evaluated using a spherical coordinate system based at the right shoulder, indicating that the neural representation of target parameters is transformed from a retinocentric representation to a shoulder-centered representation. According to the model, the error in distance results from the neural implementation of a linear approximation in the algorithm to transform shoulder-centered target parameters into a set of arm orientations appropriate for placing the finger on the target. The transformation to final arm orientations places visually derived information into a frame of reference where it can readily be combined with kinesthetically derived information about initial arm orientations. The combination of these representations of initial and final arm orientations could give rise to the representation of movement direction recorded in the motor cortex by Georgopoulos and his colleagues. Later stages, such as the transformation from kinematic to dynamic parameters, or to levels of muscle activation, are beyond the scope of the present model. (shrink)

The science confidently consolidated the idea of ​​the functions of religion, which traditionally understand the nature and direction of the influence of religion on society. But when investigating individual religions in different epochs, scientists knew about functions, but did not see the influence of religion. As in Soviet times, for example: even when it was forbidden, religion functioned in cut-down forms, underground, but did not affect the vital functions of the vast majority of people. One or another element of religion (...) played a role in the entire religious complex, but it did not nearly work for the society and individual citizens. The function should characterize the activity. Here we must speak more about functionality as ability to perform certain functions and their visible and effective manifestations. (shrink)

This essay argues that according to feminist existential phenomenology, feminist pragmatism, and feminist genealogy, our embodied condition is an important starting place for ethical living due to the inevitable role that habits play in our conduct. In bodies, the phenomenon of habit uniquely holds together the ambiguities of freedom and determinism, transcendence and immanence, and stability and plasticity. Seeing habit formation as a matter of self-growth and social justice gives fresh opportunity for thinking of “assuming ambiguity” as a lifelong endeavor (...) made up of many small projects and practices of situated resistance to stagnation. Transcendence, understood as ameliorative transformation, is found in cultivating habits of learning from our bodily living. I articulate this argument via a reading of Simone de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age, John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct, and Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures. I discuss two domains wherein the ethical significance of habit formation appears: cognitive psychological research on neural plasticity, and certain projects of self-cultivation that risk turning into overdetermining “cult of the self ” practices that close off possibilities for personal and collective transformation. (shrink)

The main interpretative challenge set by the Fundamenta Nova Theoriae Functionum Ellipticarum lies in Jacobi’s transformation theory upon which the entire theoretical edifice of the treatise depends. Unfortunately, Jacobi did not convey any indication of how he attained his general formulae for rational transformations of elliptic functions. He limited himself to providing a posteriori verification of the validity of his claims. The aim of this paper is precisely to describe the heuristic path by which in 1827 Jacobi succeeded in (...) finding these transformation formulae. The proposed historical reconstruction will hopefully shed new light upon the emergence in Jacobi’s work of the inversion process of elliptic integrals of the first kind and thus of the elliptic function sinamu\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$u$$\end{document} itself. (shrink)

Inertial frames and Lorentz transformations have a preferred status in the special theory of relativity (STR). Lorentz transformations, in turn, embody Einstein's convention that the velocity of light is isotropic, a convention that is necessary for the establishment of a standard signal synchrony. If the preferred status of Lorentz transformations in STR is not due to some particular bias introduced by a convention on signal synchronism, but to the fact that the Lorentz transformation group is the symmetry group of (...) the theory, then the signal synchronism is not a matter of convention but rather a matter of fact. In order to explore the conventionalist thesis, that within the frame of STR isotropy in the velocity of light and, hence, signal synchronism is a matter of convention, we need a generalized Lorentz transformation group that does not embody Einstein's isotropy convention, and upon which STR can be based. We present here a new approach to the resulting search for a generalized STR, which is well suited for establishing some well-known results of Winnie as well as some new results. (shrink)

This paper proposes a novel view in the historical injustice debate: Radical Reparations. Following a recent defense of reparations, Radical Reparations appeals to the Beneficiary Pays Principle to justify the assignment and distribution of reparative obligations for historical injustice among present-day agents. However, drawing on some considerations from the structural injustice literature, it argues that the relevant kind of benefits that demand redress are what I call structural benefits: the benefits of occupying powerful and privileged positions within contemporary social structures, (...) structures that are the legacies of major historical injustices like slavery and colonialism. Radical Reparations thus assigns present-day structural beneficiaries reparative obligations to support and enact various structural reforms to the social structures that produce unjust outcomes for historically marginalized groups today. This view avoids some of the problems with existing approaches to historical injustice in the philosophical literature and is better aligned with the reparations programs of recent social movements for racial and global justice. (shrink)

Bd. 1. Sprachanalytik, Semiotik, Hermeneutik. Bd. 2. Das Apriori der Kommunikationsgemeinschaft.

ABSTRACT I discuss Nadia Urbinati's argument by highlighting an alternative dimension of populism, one that departs from the same assumptions but reaches a different understanding: populism as an antisystem electoralist strategy, one that is part of the technology of democratic competition.

In Mind and World, John McDowell concludes that human beings and, principally by their initiation into language. Such of human development typically represent first-language learning as a movement from a non-rationally secured conformity with correct practice, through increasing understanding, to a state of rational mastery of correct practice. Accordingly, they tend to invoke something like Wittgenstein's concept of training to explain the first stage of this process. This essay considers the cogency of this view of learning and development. I agree (...) with Sebastian Rdl believes. I conclude by considering the relevance of McDowell's view of second nature to two striking ideas: Ian Hacking's suggestion that the development of autistic children is and Derek Parfit's claim that persons are not human beings. (shrink)

La paix entre l’État et les FARC en 2016 a fortement limité le nombre de victimes de violences mais ces dernières risquent de repartir de plus belle. La moitié des guérilleros ont été désarmés par l’ONU, ce qui laisse le pays sans encadrement territorial pour s’opposer au narcotrafic. Les anciens FARC sont assassinés par de nouvelles structures criminelles en train d’occuper le terrain.

Comparative biological morphology, incorporating the study of active reaction, is contrasted with genetics as the study of passive mutation. Geneticists investigate anatomical characters, never anatomical constructions, which are capable of reorganization when the biological-morphological equilibrium of the organism has been disturbed. The anatomy of Opisthocomus cristatus and Stringops habroptilus demonstrate that three successive disturbances in the bio-morphological equilibrium are reacted to purposively by anatomical reconstruction. These reactions are no accidental mutations, but are anatomical reactions, related to, and affecting, the organism (...) as a whole. In sharp contrast to such anatomical reaction, resulting, during phylogeny, in reorganization, are the “technics” [i.e., mechanistic bases] of individual development. The hereditary process is, like every physiological or embryological process, a fixed mechanism, which remains constant until an active reaction leads to reconstruction and at the same time an appropriate change of the mechanisms. The remolding of species is therefore no passive, “technical” process, but a creative act of the organisms themselves. [Original English abstract; not translated.]. (shrink)

In the first book-length study of American philosophy at the turn of the century, Daniel J. Wilson traces the formation of philosophy as an academic discipline. Wilson shows how the rise of the natural and physical sciences at the end of the nineteenth century precipitated a "crisis of confidence" among philosophers as to the role of their discipline. Deftly tracing the ways in which philosophers sought to incorporate scientific values and methods into their outlook and to redefine philosophy itself, Wilson (...) moves between close analysis of philosophical texts and consideration of professional careers of illustrative philosophers, such as Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, and Josiah Royce. The author situates the emergence of professional philosophy in the context of the professionalization of American higher education and articulates, in the case of philosophy, the structures and values of a professional discipline. One of the most important consequences of this transformation was a new emphasis on communal theories of truth. Peirce, Dewey, and Royce all developed sophisticated and important theories of community as they were engaged in reshaping and redefining the limits of philosophy. This book will be of great importance for those interested in the history of philosophy, the rise of professions, and American intellectual and educational history, and to all those seeking to understand the contemporary revival of pragmatic thought and theories of community. (shrink)

To extend the hypothesis that bizarre discontinuities in dreams result from the interaction of chaotic, "bottom-up" brainstem activation with "top-down" cortical synthesis, we have performed a detailed analysis of dream discontinuities using a new methodology that allows for objective characterization of this formal dream feature. Transformations of characters and objects in dream reports were found to follow definite associational rules. While there were 11 examples of character–character transformation and 7 of inanimate object–inanimate object transformation, transformations of characters into (...) inanimate objects and vice versa were never observed. Judges′ scores on a transformation-matching task further showed that the nature of the transformed character or object is highly constrained by the features of the initial character or object . We conclude that despite the threat to dream coherence posed by bizarre discontinuities, significant coherence is maintained by associational constraints, especially in the case of object and character transformations. (shrink)

What might it mean to engage in an educative struggle with death? Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich helps us to answer that question. Tolstoy’s story depicts the life of a man who, when suddenly faced with the prospect of his own death, is at first unable to comprehend the reality of his situation. He is angry, fearful, and disgusted. As he gradually comes to terms with his mortality, he undergoes a harrowing process of transformation, at the heart (...) of which lies the development of his capacity for attention. Drawing on ideas from the French philosopher and pedagogue Simone Weil, it is argued that Ivan’s experience is consistent with the passage from ‘gravity’, through the void of intense suffering, toward a state of grace. (shrink)

Andrew Cooper presents the first systematic study of Kant's account of natural history. Cooper contends that Kant made a decisive contribution to one of the most explosive and understudied revolutions in the history of science: the addition of time to the frame in which explanations are required, sought, and justified in natural science. Through addressing a wide range of Kant's works, Cooper challenges the claim that Kant's theory of science denies a developmental conception of nature and argues instead that it (...) establishes a method by which natural historians can genuinely dispute historical claims and potentially come to consensus. This method, Cooper argues, can be used to expose serious flaws in Kant's own historical reasoning, including the formation and defence of his racist views. The book will be valuable to philosophers seeking to discern both the power and limitations of Kant's theory of science, and to historians of science working on the fractured landscape of eighteenth-century Newtonianism. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Heisenberg's mature philosophy of quantum mechanics must be understood in the context of his epistemological project to reinterpret and redefine Kant's notion of the a priori. After discussions with Weizsäcker and Hermann in Leipzig in the 1930s, Heisenberg attempted to ground his interpretation of quantum mechanics on what might be termed a 'practical' transformation of Kantian philosophy. Taking as his starting point, Bohr's doctrine of the indispensability of classical concepts, Heisenberg argued that concepts (...) such as space, time and causality can be regarded as 'practically a priori', in so far as they remain the conditions for the possibility of experience and even of 'objective reality', though they are not universal and necessary in a strictly Kantian sense. We cannot avoid using classical concepts in the description of experiments in quantum theory, despite the fact that there are limits to their applicability. Such concepts are, for Heisenberg, historically contingent, yet indispensable in our time, because we have no other language through which we can describe and conceive of the interaction between 'object' and 'measuring device'. (shrink)

The concept of the "unlevel playing field" is critiqued for its tendency to take the prevailing masculinist managerial paradigm for granted. Rather than assume that both men and women should assimilate to corporate masculinity, feminist alternatives are suggested. The pervasiveness of the masculine ethic and the "myth of meritocracy" in organizations are reviewed, with the space shuttle Challenger disaster serving as a focal point to demonstrate the dysfunctionality of masculine management and the rationale for feminist-based organizational transformation to promote (...) not only gender equity, but more effective and ethical organizational behavior. (shrink)

The social model of disability claims that disadvantage from disability is primarily a result of the social response to bodily difference. Social modellers typically draw two normative conclusions: first, that society has a responsibility to address disability disadvantage as a matter of justice, not charity; second, that the appropriate way of addressing this disadvantage is to change social institutions themselves, to better fit for bodily difference, rather than to normalize bodies to fit existing institutions. This paper offers a qualified defense (...) of both inferences. Social institutions have reasons of justice to fix disability disadvantage, because the choice of institutions that contingently favor those whose bodies are statistically typical incurs responsibilities to compensate those who disfavored, in that choice. Among other things, this responsibility implies that societies should not simultaneously materially disadvantage disabled people, and also withhold symbolic resources, by demanding a presumption in favor of personal transformation – thereby, undermining the social conditions for disability pride. (shrink)

This paper is critical analysis of book by Anna Sosnowska, "Zrozumieć zacofanie. Spory historyków o Europę Wschodnią (1947-1994)" [To Understand Backwardness: Historians' Deabates about Eastern Europe (1947-1994)]. Warszawa 2004.

Philosophy emerged for the first time in ancient Greece and, according to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, it arose decisively with Plato through a triple transformation. Even today, the thought and creation of philosophy still require a triple transformation, despite the fact that the historical preconditions under which a philosopher pursues his or her task have changed since Greek antiquity. In this article, I introduce the concept of the triple transformation, which ensues from my examination of What (...) is Philosophy?, the last jointly authored book of Deleuze and Guattari. Therein they define philosophy as the activity that consists of creating concepts in order to bring forth new events... (shrink)

Nietzsche’s presentation of the eternal recurrence in Gay Science 341 is often viewed as a practical thought experiment meant to radically transform us. But exactly why and how we are supposed to be transformed is not clear. I contend that addressing these issues requires taking a close look at the psychological setting of the passage. The eternal recurrence is presented in our “loneliest loneliness.” I argue that facing the eternal recurrence from a state of profound loneliness both motivates self-transformation (...) and contributes toward helping us succeed at that project. (shrink)

This study explores a liberatory epistemic virtue that is suitable for good learning as a form of liberating socially situated epistemic agents toward ideal virtuousness. First, I demonstrate that the weak neutralization of epistemically bad stereotypes is an end of good learning. Second, I argue that weak neutralization represents a liberatory epistemic virtue, the value of which derives from liberating us as socially situated learners from epistemic blindness to epistemic freedom. Third, I explicate two distinct forms of epistemic transformation: (...) constitutive and causal epistemic transformation. I argue that compared with the ideal conception of epistemic virtue, constitutive epistemic transformation that involves good learning has a transcendent value in light of agents constantly renewing their default epistemic status toward ideal virtuousness. (shrink)

In his preface to the English edition, Apel (identified with critical theory) explains that the title of his two-volume German collection connotes both a reconstruction of the process of hermeneutic transformation in recent philosophy and the author's semiotical transformation of transcendental logic. The emphasis here is on the latter with discussions of the a priori nature of language per Wittgenstein, Peirce, and Chomsky, and its implications for a rational foundation for ethics in modern science. Includes a new foreword. (...) Name index only. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

This article traces the historical impact of the church in transforming, developing and changing society. It looks at how the church in selected periods in history, mainly in the reformation era, worked towards the transformation of society and communities. Extracting from these the author attempts to show how this can be applied to the church in the South African context. Further, the author explores the changing dynamics and characteristics of being church today and establishes that it is not so (...) much about what the church believes, but in what it does that matters most in this day and age. The author, with the latter thought in mind, expresses that community transformation has to be an integral part of the ministry of the church today. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that cases of radical selftransformation (cases in which an agent willfully changes a foundational element of their motivational structure) constitute an important philosophical puzzle. Though our inclination to hold people responsible for such changes suggests that we regard radical transformation as (in some sense) self-determined, it is difficult to conceive how a transformation that extends to the heart of an agent’s practical life can be attributed to the agent at all. While I contend (...) that the best way to solve this puzzle is to deny that radical transformations are in fact self-determined, many maintain the opposite. The defense of my thesis involves showing how the conditions that must be met in order to coherently attribute transformation to an agent are not satisfied in cases of radical transformation. Radical transformation is, thus, something that happens to an agent, not something that is done by her. (shrink)

The political public sphere is important for democracy, and it is changing – this is how the quintessence of Jürgen Habermas’s monumental study on The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989) could be summarized in simple words. In the fields of political sociology and social theory, history, but also research on social movements, cultural studies, and media and communication studies, his conception of the public sphere as a sphere mediating between the state and civil society has had a (...) decisive influence on the debate about the potential of collective reason for modern democracy. In this introduction we give a short overview of Habermas’s arguments on the rise and fall of the bourgeois public sphere, demonstrate the necessary link between the public sphere and democracy and, referring to the contributions to this special issue, sketch current transformations of the public sphere along three basic processes – digitalization, commodification, and globalization. (shrink)

The development of commercial revenue streams allows traditional nonprofit organizations to increase financial certainty in response to the reduction of traditional funding sources and increased competition. In order to capture commercial revenue-generating opportunities, traditional nonprofit organizations need to deliberately transform themselves into social enterprises. Through the theoretical lens of institutional entrepreneurship, we explore the institutional work that supports this transformation by analyzing field interviews with 64 institutional entrepreneurs from UK-based social enterprises. We find that the route to incorporate commercial (...) processes and convert traditional nonprofit organizations into social enterprises requires six distinct kinds of institutional work at three different domains; these are—“engaging commercial revenue strategies”, “creating a professionalized organizational form”, and “legitimating a socio-commercial business model”. In elaborating on social entrepreneurship research and practice, we offer a comprehensive framework delineating the key practices contributing to the transformation from traditional nonprofit organizations to social enterprises. This extends our understanding of the ex-ante strategy of incorporating commercial processes within social organizations. Furthermore, the identification of these practices also offers an important tool for scholars in this field to examine the connection of each practice with different ethical concerns of social entrepreneurship in greater depth. (shrink)