The discussion of the possibility of world government has been revived since the end of the Cold War and particularly after the turn of the millennium. It has engaged many authors. In this article, I provide a survey of the continuing debate on world government. I explore the leading question of the debate, whether the conditions of insecurity in which states are placed and other global problems that face contemporary humanity require the creation of a global authority, and (...) consequently, the establishment of a world state. After a careful analysis I suggest that a world state is neither necessary nor inevitable nor desirable. I argue that the plurality of nation-states that form an international society has a great advantage over a world state. It supports the diversity of character and culture, and sustains the continuous progress of humankind. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 440-442 [Access article in PDF] Reinhard Lauth. Descartes ' Konzeption des Systems der Philosophie. Stuttgart (Bad Cannstatt): Frommann-Holzboog, 1998. Pp. x + 227 pp. Cloth, DM 64.00. Reinhard Lauth's Descartes ' Konzeption des Systems der Philosophie is an interesting addition to the literature on Descartes. Written by a renowned scholar of German Idealism, it does not represent an attempt to respond (...) to scholars of Descartes, to take part in the debate regarding aspects of Descartes's philosophy, nor to explain the role of Descartes's thought in the tumultuous seventeenth century, but rather to explain to scholars of German Idealism why Descartes should be considered the first and one of the greatest transcendental philosophers. It is no accident that in the index we find close to 50 references each to Kant and Fichte, while Descartes's important "rationalist" comrades, Spinoza and Leibniz, receive half as much attention; nor is it an accident that the first and last philosopher mentioned in the book is Fichte.Lauth's book is in the tradition of Gueroult's monumental Descartes selon l ' ordre des raisons (Paris, 1968, 2nd edition) and, as the title indicates, the subject of the book is Descartes's philosophy as a system, not as a collection of independent theses about various philosophical problems. However, unlike Gueroult, who concentrated on an [End Page 440] analysis of the Meditations, Lauth draws extensively on the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Discourse on Method, Meditations, and Descartes's correspondence. That Descartes viewed philosophy as ideally constituting a system of human knowledge should not come as news to anyone who recalls Descartes's claim in the Preface to the Principles of Philosophy that all of philosophy is like a tree whose roots are metaphysics, trunk physics, and branches medicine, mechanics, and morals, or his claim in the Preface to the Meditations that there is a clear order of argumentation or reasons and that his goal is to lay bare the foundations of philosophy. How exactly Descartes's philosophy is to constitute a system is the trickier question that is Lauth's concern.According to Lauth, the order of reasons that one finds expressed in Descartes's first philosophy is not simply a series of biographical events, filling a psychological need in Descartes (cf. Alquié, La Découverte métaphysique de l ' homme chez Descartes [Paris, 1966]), but rather the "systematic path of the cogito itself" (X). And Lauth attempts to show that there is something inexorable in the way that conclusions about the world from the point of view of the thinking subject are made and follow from one another. This takes him along the well-known path of the Meditations: from the existence of the self, to the nature of the self, to the existence and nature of God, to the external world, and finally to the relation of mind and body. And here two interesting observations on Lauth's part should be singled out. First, Lauth does an admirable job in intimating the tension regarding the places of the thinking subject and God as the supreme principles in Descartes's system. On the one hand, it would seem that the thinking subject should be the highest principle in Descartes's philosophy insofar as its existence is the first thing known; but, according to Lauth, it cannot be the highest principle because it does not contain the principle of its own existence (76). On the other hand, if we claim that God is the highest principle then we must recognize that a system following from this principle must fail insofar as genuine knowledge of God surpasses the bounds of our finite, human knowledge (99-100). Second, in claiming that Descartes was a "transcendental philosopher," Lauth reminds us of the extent to which Descartes is concerned with the bounds of human knowledge as determinable from the thinking subject itself.While this work contains many useful insights—especially for those scholars of German Idealism who are looking for new ways of reflecting on their subject—it has... (shrink)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was one of the great thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is known as the last “universal genius”. He made deep and important contributions to the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, logic, philosophy of religion, as well as mathematics, physics, geology, jurisprudence, and history. Even the eighteenth century French atheist and materialist Denis Diderot, whose views could not have stood in greater opposition to those of Leibniz, could not help being awed by his achievement, (...) writing in his Encyclopedia, “Perhaps never has a man read as much, studied as much, meditated more, and written more than Leibniz… What he has composed on the world, God, nature, and the soul is of the most sublime eloquence. If his ideas had been expressed with the flair of Plato, the philosopher of Leipzig would cede nothing to the philosopher of Athens.” (Vol. 9, p. 379) Indeed, Diderot's mood was almost despairing in a remark from another piece, which also has a great deal of truth in it: “When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.” More than a century later, Gottlob Frege, who fortunately did not cast his books away in despair, expressed similar admiration, declaring that “in his writings, Leibniz threw out such a profusion of seeds of ideas that in this respect he is virtually in a class of his own.” (“Boole's logical Calculus and the Concept script” in Posthumous Writings , p. 9) The aim of this entry is primarily to introduce Leibniz's life and summarize and explicate his views in the realms of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical theology, and natural philosophy. (shrink)

I set up two axiomatic theories of inductive support within the framework of Kolmogorovian probability theory. I call these theories ‘Popperian theories of inductive support’ because I think that their specific axioms express the core meaning of the word ‘inductive support’ as used by Popper (and, presumably, by many others, including some inductivists). As is to be expected from Popperian theories of inductive support, the main theorem of each of them is an anti-induction theorem, the stronger one of them saying, (...) in fact, that the relation of inductive support is identical with the empty relation. It seems to me that an axiomatic treatment of the idea(s) of inductive support within orthodox probability theory could be worthwhile for at least three reasons. Firstly, an axiomatic treatment demands from the builder of a theory of inductive support to state clearly in the form of specific axioms what he means by ‘inductive support’. Perhaps the discussion of the new anti-induction proofs of Karl Popper and David Miller would have been more fruitful if they had given an explicit definition of what inductive support is or should be. Secondly, an axiomatic treatment of the idea(s) of inductive support within Kolmogorovian probability theory might be accommodating to those philosophers who do not completely trust Popperian probability theory for having theorems which orthodox Kolmogorovian probability theory lacks; a transparent derivation of anti-induction theorems within a Kolmogorovian frame might bring additional persuasive power to the original anti-induction proofs of Popper and Miller, developed within the framework of Popperian probability theory. Thirdly, one of the main advantages of the axiomatic method is that it facilitates criticism of its products: the axiomatic theories. On the one hand, it is much easier than usual to check whether those statements which have been distinguished as theorems really are theorems of the theory under examination. On the other hand, after we have convinced ourselves that these statements are indeed theorems, we can take a critical look at the axioms—especially if we have a negative attitude towards one of the theorems. Since anti-induction theorems are not popular at all, the adequacy of some of the axioms they are derived from will certainly be doubted. If doubt should lead to a search for alternative axioms, sheer negative attitudes might develop into constructive criticism and even lead to new discoveries. -/- I proceed as follows. In section 1, I start with a small but sufficiently strong axiomatic theory of deductive dependence, closely following Popper and Miller (1987). In section 2, I extend that starting theory to an elementary Kolmogorovian theory of unconditional probability, which I extend, in section 3, to an elementary Kolmogorovian theory of conditional probability, which in its turn gets extended, in section 4, to a standard theory of probabilistic dependence, which also gets extended, in section 5, to a standard theory of probabilistic support, the main theorem of which will be a theorem about the incompatibility of probabilistic support and deductive independence. In section 6, I extend the theory of probabilistic support to a weak Popperian theory of inductive support, which I extend, in section 7, to a strong Popperian theory of inductive support. In section 8, I reconsider Popper's anti-inductivist theses in the light of the anti-induction theorems. I conclude the paper with a short discussion of possible objections to our anti-induction theorems, paying special attention to the topic of deductive relevance, which has so far been neglected in the discussion of the anti-induction proofs of Popper and Miller. (shrink)

The view that the fundamental kind properties are intrinsic properties enjoys reflexive endorsement by most metaphysicians of science. But ontic structural realists deny that there are any fundamental intrinsic properties at all. Given that structuralists distrust intuition as a guide to truth, and given that we currently lack a fundamental physical theory that we could consult instead to order settle the issue, it might seem as if there is simply nowhere for this debate to go at present. However, I will (...) argue that there exists an as-yet untapped resource for arguing for ontic structuralism – namely, the way that fundamentality is conceptualized in our most fundamental physical frameworks. By arguing that physical objects must be subject to the ‘Goldilock's principle’ if they are to count as fundamental at all, I argue that we can no longer view the majority of properties defining them as intrinsic. As such, ontic structural realism can be regarded as the most promising metaphysics for fundamental physics, and that this is so even though we do not yet claim to know precisely what that fundamental physics is. (shrink)

The present paper aims to contribute to the substantivalism versus relationalism debate and to defend general relativity (GR) against pseudoscientific attacks in a novel, especially inclusive way. This work was initially motivated by the desire to establish the incompatibility of any ether theories with accelerated cosmic expansion and inflation (motto: where would a hypothetical medium supposedly come from so fast?). The failure of this program is of interest for emergent GR concepts in high energy particle physics. However, it becomes increasingly (...) important to guard scientific results against their misrepresentation by fundamentally anti-scientific agendas. We therefore argue that although it is not known whether the perceived space-time is fundamental (rather than a condensed state or a particular membrane), in a fundamental theory, space-time must be abstract relational: fundamental space-time is the consistent spatial-temporal arrangement of events. To pursue its own goals, this work should be accessible to a wide audience: physicists, philosophers of science, those being tempted by anti-relativity theories, but also those who vigorously defend some orthodox relativity that is not actually supported by GR. It must thus be extensive in order to satisfy the different parties’ desire to have included and understood their respective positions. (shrink)

Global Governance Futures addresses the crucial importance of thinking through the future of global governance arrangements. It considers the prospects for the governance of world order approaching the middle of the twenty-first century by exploring today's most pressing and enduring health, social, ecological, economic, and political challenges. Each of the expert contributors considers the drivers of continuity and change within systems of governance and how actors, agents, mechanisms, and resources are and could be mobilized. The aim is not merely (...) to understand state, intergovernmental, and non-state actors. It is also to draw attention to those underappreciated aspects of global governance that push understanding beyond strictures of traditional conceptualizations, and that offer better insights into the future of world order. Three sections enable readers to appreciate better the sum of forces likely to shape world order in the near and not-so-near future: "Planetary," changes wrought by continuing human domination of the Earth and by war; current and future geopolitical, civilizational, and regional contestations; and life in and between urban and non-urban environments. "Divides," including threats to human rights gains; the plight of migrants; those who have and those who do not; persistent racial, gender, religious, and sexual-orientation-based discrimination; and those who govern and those who are governed. "Challenges," of food and health insecurities; ongoing environmental degradation and species loss; the current and future politics of international assistance and data; and the wrong turns taken in the control of illicit drugs and crime. Designed to engage advanced undergraduate and graduate students in international relations, organization, law, and political economy as well as the general reader, this book invites readers to adopt both a backward- and forward-looking view of global governance. It will spark discussion and debate as to how dystopic futures might be avoided and change agents mobilized. (shrink)

Authoritarian governments are characterised by political systems with concentrated and centralised power. Healthcare is a critical component of any state. Given the powers of an authoritarian regime, we consider the opportunities they possess to derive good health outcomes. The 2019 Varsity Medical Ethics Debate convened on the motion: ‘This house believes authoritarian government is the route to good health outcomes’ with Oxford as the Proposition and Cambridge as the Opposition. This article summarises and extends key arguments made during the (...) 11th annual debate between medical students from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. By contrasting the principles underlying authoritarianism and democracy, it enables a discussion into how they translate into healthcare provision and the outcomes derived. Based on the foundation of said principles, an exploration of select cases represents examples of applications and the results. We analyse the past, present and future implications on the basis of fundamental patient-centred care. (shrink)

Many of the most skilled and educated citizens of developing countries choose to emigrate. How may those societies respond to these facts? May they ever legitimately prevent the emigration of their citizens? Gillian Brock and Michael Blake debate these questions, and offer distinct arguments about the morality of emigration.

Sovereign is he who provides the exception.…The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.In spring 2020, in response to the COVID-19 crisis, world leaders imposed severe restrictions on citizens’ civil, political, and economic liberties. These restrictions went beyond less controversial and less demanding social distancing measures seen in past epidemics. Many (...) states and countries imposed universal lockdowns. Lockdowns, as we define them here, require people to stay home; in some countries and places, citizens must have ad hoc licenses to... (shrink)

This essay examines arguments offered in support of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) by Leibniz and his followers as well as Hume's critique of the PSR. It is shown that Leibniz has a defensible argument for the PSR, whereas the arguments of his self-proclaimed followers are weak. Thus, Hume's challenge is met by Leibniz, by Wolff and Baumgarten not so much.

The agentic web refers to a vision of the internet where AI agents play a central role in facilitating interactions, automating tasks, and enhancing user experiences. Realizing this vision requires us to rethink how we govern the internet. Within the agentic web, the promise of AI systems becoming more decentralized and autonomous represents unique challenges and opportunities for governance, necessitating innovative approaches to ensure responsible integration into society. Toward this end, we propose the Know Your Agent framework, designed to (...) manage Decentralized AI agents through identity verification, behavioral monitoring, and accountability mechanisms. Our approach integrates protocol science and legal engineering, utilizing blockchain technology to support these efforts. (shrink)

Should refugees govern refugee camps? This paper argues that they should. It draws on normative political thought in consulting the all-subjected principle and an instrumental defense of democratic rule. The former holds that all those subjected to rule in a political unit should have a say in such rule. Through analyzing the conditions that pertain in refugee camps, the paper demonstrates that the all-subjected principle applies there, too. Refugee camps have developed as near distinct entities from their host states. (...) They have formed their own economic, legal and even political systems within which refugees are subjected to political rule. The paper then demonstrates that democratic rule should be preferred over any other decision-making procedure. No amount of experts can replace the institutions that would lead to the accountability of decision-makers and to the incorporation of refugees as situated and epistemically diverse knowers of the problems they face and the solutions that would work best. (shrink)

How can we make progress on the question of whether debate can do harm, and if it can, whether that’s a sufficient reason to suppress particular debates, or to adopt a ‘no debate!’ approach to particular topics ourselves? Obviously we’ll need to get clear on the key ingredients of the claim, which are what we’re counting as debate, and what we’re willing to countenance as harm. But we’ll also need to think about what exactly the harms are thought to be, (...) of debating any one of these controversial topics, and what, if anything, might be more important than avoiding those harms. I want to think about both the general question, which is whether the idea that debate can do harm makes sense and is sometimes true; and the more specific question, which is whether specific contemporary topics in which one side takes a ‘no debate!’ position or for which there is public support for not debating the topic, do in fact risk harm sufficient to justifying #nodebate tactics. (shrink)

Freedom of information laws promote transparency by permitting individuals and organizations to obtain government documents. However, exemptions from disclosure are necessary to protect privacy and to permit government officials to deliberate freely. Deliberative language is often the most challenging and burdensome exemption to detect, leading to high processing costs and delays in responding to open-records requests. This paper describes a novel deliberative-language detection model trained on a new annotated training set. The deliberative-language detection model is a component of a decision-support (...) system for open-records requests under the US Freedom of Information Act, the FOIA Assistant, that ingests documents responsive to an open-records requests, suggests passages likely to be subject to deliberative language, privacy, or other exemptions, and assists analysts in rapidly redacting suggested passages. The tool’s interface is based on extensive human-factors and usability studies with analysts and is currently in operational testing by multiple US federal agencies. (shrink)

This paper examines the philosophical justification for World Rugby’s ban of trans women athletes from the ‘Women’s’ category at elite level. It is argued that Pike’s lexical priority argument in support of this ban is flawed; that Burke’s partially concessive response to Pike leads Burke to endorse an incoherent position; and that by rejecting Pike’s lexical priority argument, Burke’s view can both be made consistent and can be defended against the two criticisms levelled to it by Imbrišević. A stronger (...) justification for WR’s ban is identified and discussed, and a diagnosis for the debate’s intractability is proposed. (shrink)

This paper looks at citizen‐facing e‐government. It considers how the non‐discretionary nature of the citizen’s relationship with government makes citizen‐facing e‐government different from business‐consumer e‐commerce. Combined with the moral basis of the state, the paper argues that there is an obligation for the state to set an example, which should affect the design of citizen‐facing e‐government, with design‐for‐all being an appropriate philosophy. Other consequences should include a preference for open standards and a wariness of unintentional endorsement of commercial (...) products. E‐government should also offer a good level of data protection and security, and has a role in educating citizens in matters of computer security. Advantages and disadvantages that may come from e‐government adoption are considered, including a number of ways in which cost savings and increases in convenience may be achieved. There are brief discussions of questions of distribution of the benefits of e‐government adoption and of the relationship of e‐government to e‐democracy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Individuation und Einzelnsein: Nietzsche, Leibniz, AristotelesBrandon C. LookPaola-Ludovika Coriando. Individuation und Einzelnsein: Nietzsche, Leibniz, Aristoteles. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2003. Pp. ix. + 318. €28,00.What is a singular thing? Is there a first or last principle that allows us to call something an individual or one? What is the relation between the particular and the universal? Does the being of a particular mean the separation from the universal, or, on (...) the contrary, is the universal a post facto aggregation of individual subjects? What constitutes the individuality of man? This book, based on a lecture course given at the University of Freiburg, addresses these difficult questions and their answers by Nietzsche, Leibniz, and Aristotle.The author claims to limit the discussion to these philosophers because their philosophies represent distinct stations in the development of the question of individuation and the nature of individuality and, at the same time, because their different positions are both explicitly and implicitly related to each other (15). Coriando begins her discussion with Nietzsche, a philosopher one might not have linked at all to the "problem of individuation" per se, and moves backward in time to Leibniz and finally to Aristotle. The point of this order of presentation, the reader is told, is to trace back the essentials of the question of individuation to its origin: Aristotle (16). This strategy is largely successful.Nietzsche's primary concern, of course, is with the nature of the individual, or more particularly, the individual Mensch, and how he is distinguished from or distinguishes himself from the rest of the world. The answer, for Nietzsche, is to be found in his concept of the "will to power," which provides what Coriando calls his "ontological principle of individuation": the inherent drive for perspectival self-affirmation and self-increase (131). There is also, however, an "ethical principle of individuation": the attitude of a person vis-à-vis the eternal recurrence of the same. In accepting and letting go of the entirety of the world and its eternal recurrence, one "becomes who one is," and one can know one's individuality.Whereas Nietzsche tries to approach the problem of individuation independently of the entire western tradition of metaphysics, Leibniz is squarely within this tradition. Indeed, [End Page 121] in his first philosophical work, the Metaphysical Disputation on the Principle of Individuation, the sixteen-year-old Leibniz throws himself into a scholastic fray, carving out a strongly nominalist position. Leibniz's belief that only genuine individuals exist would, of course, stay with him throughout his career; the problem will be, as Coriando nicely shows, to give a precise account of the nature of individual substance. Coriando focuses on two works in her discussion, On the Correction of Metaphysics and the Concept of Substance and, to a much greater extent, the Monadology. The view that she extracts from these works should not be surprising. The principle of individuation, for Leibniz, rests in the active force of a monad and in the particular representation of the rest of the world from the monad's own point of view. Put this way, there is an interesting commonality with Nietzsche at work here.A similar commonality is shown with the thought of Aristotle. Here the principal concern is to explicate Aristotle's conception of ousia in De anima and MetaphysicsZ, H, and Q. Naturally, this leads into an account of how matter can be living and a further explication of Aristotle's energeia and entelecheia. In the end, it becomes clear that the set of concepts—energeia, conatus, will to power—are all, if not equivalent, at least performing largely the same role in guaranteeing the being of individuals. What has become "lost" in Aristotle's philosophy, however, is a notion like the perspectivalism present in Leibniz and Nietzsche, something that Coriando does not discuss at any length.This book offers a broad perspective on the question of individuation, and the choice of Nietzsche, Leibniz, and Aristotle allows Coriando to highlight interesting answers to this metaphysical problem. I do have two small quibbles. First, the problem of individuation, or the desire for a principium individuationis is so much a problem associated with medieval philosophy that... (shrink)

It seems very important to us whether or not a generalization offers counter-factual support—but why? Surely what happens in other possible worlds can neither help nor hurt us? This paper explores the question whether counter-factual support does, nevertheless, have some practical value. (The question of theoretical value will be addressed but then put aside.) The following thesis is proposed: the counterfactual-supporting generalizations are those for which there exists a compact and under normal circumstances knowable basis determining the fine-grained (...) pattern of actual variation between the properties associated by the generalization (e.g., for the generalization Fs tend to be G, the exact circumstances under which any particular F is G); further, the better we understand the basis and the scope of the support offered, the greater our knowledge of fine-grained variation. We care about counterfactual support because we care about actual fine-grained variation. (shrink)

With entries written by leading scholars in the field of Modern Philosophy, this Companion is an accessible and authoritative reference guide to Leibniz's life, work and legacy. The book includes extended biographical sketches, and an up-to-date fully comprehensive bibliography. Gathering all these resources in one place, the book is an extremely valuable tool for those interested in Leibniz and the era in which he wrote"--Back cover.

This paper examines the philosophical justification for World Rugby’s ban of trans women athletes from the ‘Women’s’ category at elite level. It is argued that Pike’s lexical priority argument in support of this ban is flawed; that Burke’s partially concessive response to Pike leads Burke to endorse an incoherent position; and that by rejecting Pike’s lexical priority argument, Burke’s view can both be made consistent and can be defended against the two criticisms levelled to it by Imbrišević. A stronger (...) justification for WR’s ban is identified and discussed, and a diagnosis for the debate’s intractability is proposed. (shrink)

Known terrorists are often targeted for death by the governments of Israel and the United States. Several thousand have been killed by drones or by operatives on the ground in the last twenty years. Is this form of killing justified? Is there anything about it that should disturb us? In this for-and-against book, political theorists Jeremy Waldron and Tamar Meisels engage in extended debate to illuminate these issues. They consider the actions of targeting and hunting down named individuals, and (...) they address concerns about the possibility of this practice getting out of hand and being extended beyond the realm of counter-terrorism. (shrink)

Jacques Mehler was notoriously charitable in embracing a diversity of approaches to science and to the use of many different methodologies. One place where his ecumenism brought the two of us into disagreement is when the evidence of brain imaging was cited in support of different psychological doctrines, such as the picture-theory of mental imagery. Jacques remained steadfast in his faith in the ability of neuroscience data (where the main source of evidence has been from clinical neurology and neuro-imaging) to (...) choose among different psychological positions. I personally have seen little reason for this optimism so Jacques and I frequently found ourselves disagreeing on this issue, though I should add that we rarely disagreed on substantive issues on which we both had views. This particular bone of contention, however, kept us busy at parties and during the many commutes between New York and New Jersey, where Jacques was a frequent visitor at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. Now that I am in a position where he is a captive audience it seems an opportune time to raise the question again. (shrink)

The transparent sea urchin embryo provides a laboratory for study of morphogenesis. The calcareous endoskeleton is formed by a syncytium of mesenchyme cells in the blastocoel. The locations of mesenchyme in the blastocoel, the size of the skeleton, and even the branching pattern of the skeletal rods, are governed by interactions with the blastula wall. Now Guss and Ettensohn(1) show that the rate of deposition of CaCO3 in the skeleton is locally controlled in the mesenchymal syncytium, as is the pattern (...) of expression of three genes involved in skeleton formation. They propose that short range signals emanating from the blastula wall regulate many aspects of the biomineralization process. (shrink)

인간의 도덕적 향상을 허용해야 하는지의 문제는 신경과학 시대에서 우리가 직면한 대표적인 윤리적 쟁점 가운데 하나이다. 도덕적 향상에 관한 대립적 입장은 생명보수주의와 초인본주의의 양 극단으로 분류된다. 생명보수주의는 인간의 도덕적 향상이 결국엔 인간다음과 인간 본성을 파괴할 위험성이 크다고 경고한다. 이와는 달리 초인본주의는 인류의 도덕적 향상은 더 나은 삶의 영위를 위해 필수불가결한 것이라고 주장한다. 생명보수주의는 인간 본성의 내재적 가치를 주장하지만, 초인본주의는 인간 본성은 문제가 많으므로 개선을 필요로 한다고 본다. 이에 이 논문에서는 초인본주의의 기본 개념과 철학, 초인본주의에서의 도덕적 향상 논리 및 생명정치학적 입장에 대하여 (...) 살펴본 후에, 초인본주의의 도전에 대응하기 위한 방안을 제안하고자 하였다. 이를 위해 이 논문에서는 초인본주의에서의 도덕적 향상 논리가 지닌 문제점을 지적함과 동시에 인간의 도덕성은 기술적 개입이 아닌 도덕교육을 통해 함양될 필요가 있음을 역설하였다. (shrink)

As a result of decomposition of a system consisting of two elements as a typical management pair “subject - object” or “manager – subordinate”, and interpretation of each of its components as an element that is characterized by a certain coefficient of transformation, it has been proposed to discover such systems as “subject - object”, “object - subject”, and “object - object” with the purpose of identifying one of the above mentioned modes that will be the most efficient in achieving (...) the planned results of common functioning. An analysis of contemporary publications helped to find examples off practical use of all of the variations of interaction between a manager and a subordinate that were planned for comparative research. The research of the process of interaction between a manager and a subordinate with the use of analytical description of a classic cybernetic system of two elements that are bound by feedback, discovered that the most effective pair is the “subject - subject” pair as the only mode of cooperation of the two elements on the basis of synarchy and sintelecsy receiving of synergetic result. (shrink)

Статья посвящена обсуждению корректности тезисов о гомогенности социокультурных оснований науки раннего Нового времени и механицизме как ее базовой мировоззренческой парадигме. Обсуждение строится на материале исследовательских программ Ф. Бэкона и Р. Декарта. Для этого в статье анализируется использование слова machina и его дериватов в текстах данных авторов. Сделанные наблюдения связываются с общими установками исследовательских программ Бэкона и Декарта, а также с культурным контекстом эпох Возрождения и Реформации, обращающим к античным и средневековым идеям. Показано, что в основании различий между программами Бэкона и (...) Декарта лежит различие между моделями мира, базовыми для античности (замкнутый на себя, самодостаточный космос) и Средневековья (творение Бога). (shrink)

Развитие биологических исследований Нового времени находилось в тесной связи с общим прогрессом научного познания. Разработка механики жидких и твердых тел, широкое применение в физике экспериментальных и индуктивных методов послужили основой гносеологическому оптимизму: задача усматривалась в открытии посредством разума единых для всей природы законов и тем самым окончательном объяснении всего сущего. На изучении методов науки сконцентрировалось внимание крупнейших философов эпохи. Интеллектуальное завоевание физического мира осуществлялось весьма успешно, казалось, что цель близка. Предстояло распространить механические представления на область органической природы и социальной жизни.В (...) XVII–XVIII вв. шло интенсивное формирование «биологической реальности», включающей совокупность теоретических представлений, разработку специфических методов исследования, научного языка и накопление фактуального материала. В этот период произошло становление ряда биологических дисциплин: систематики и сравнительной анатомии, эмбриологии и физиологии растений и животных, антропологии и др. Серия важнейших открытий продемонстрировала возможности применения экспериментального метода в биологии. Однако сфера его использования оставалась ограниченной. В качестве основного приема изучения фигурировало сравнительное описание. Совершенствование классификации живых организмов способствовало пониманию единства органического мира. В этот период развития науки сформировались направления, отличные от механицизма по своим онтологическим и гносеологическим установкам. Их сторонники считали, что представление об организмах как машинах приводит к утрате специфики объекта биологических исследований. Дискуссии в биологии XVII–XVIII вв. обозначили проблему оснований науки о живой природе. (shrink)

18 ноября 2003 г. в Институте философии РАН состоялось двенадцатое заседание семинара «Проблемы рациональной философии» (руководители А.И. Дубровский, И.Т. Касавин). С докладом на тему «Релятивизм как эпистемологическая проблема» выступила Л.А. Микешина, содоклад представил М.А. Розов. Кроме этого, выступали В.С. Степин, И.Т. Касавин, Е.А. Мамчур, Л.А. Маркова, В.М. Межуев, А.Л. Никифоров и др. Некоторые из представленных материалов мы и публикуем сегодня.

In modern philosophy acquires relevance a problem of confrontation of linguistic and visual practices of philosophical knowledge. Since Antiquity, ways of contemplation are formed as ways of recognition characterized as “ocularcentrism”. In the historical and philosophical prospective “sight” and “vision” are metaphors of thinking. They are considered as internal contemplation, and as a means of establishing human cognitive abilities. It is shown that technology and models of representation in Western culture of thinking are based on practices that appeal to “visualization”. (...) The create a “videological matrix” and make certain common stratagems of visual discourse like metaphors, diagrams, representation, etc. The article emphasizes that “the ocular dictionary” of philosophy represents a wide range of options for visual metaphors that occupy an important place in a number of key philosophical concepts. On the one hand, there are metaphors that appeal to visual perception, visual experience. But on the other hand there is a traditional interpretation of philosophical activity through the prism of visual metaphors. These includes a metaphor of vision, metaphor of light, metaphor of mirror and others. The author highlights a metaphor of vision as a key metaphor of philosophical activity, in which the philosopher is a spectator, contemplating the truth, just as the spectator of a play, sport event or religious mysteries. In antiquity this kind of contemplation was a specific activity, called “theory”. Contemporary studies show that a term “theory” can establish an association between theory as specific activity in social life and a theory as a specific activity of a philosopher. Philosophical theory is an act of “contemplation”, as evidenced by the writings of Plato and Aristotle. “Theory” was also associated with a certain contemplative work, public instruction, pilgrimage. The “theory” was the action, which took place in three steps: leaving home, contemplation, returning home. A contemplation was in the center of theory as an activity. Consequently, the philosophical theory, the article says, is born with cultural practices, the origins of which are located primarily in the social life of ancient Greek. Thus, contemplation as a “theory” is understood as the process of getting information about images, ideas which is transformed into something new in the processes if intellectual activity. Consequently, the visibility immanently contained in the philosophy and describes the philosophical activity, as a way of philosophical research and is associated with philosophical thinking. Activity of a philosopher in the contest of contemplation is essentially a “metaphor of vision”, which acts as a certain type of philosophical activity. (shrink)

Studies of creative industries typically contend that creative work is profoundly precarious, taking place on a freelance basis in highly competitive, individualized and contingent labour markets. Such studies depict creative workers as correspondingly self-enterprising, self-reliant, self-interested and calculative agents who valorise care-free independence. In contrast, we adopt the ‘ethics of care’ approach to explore, recognize and appreciate the communitarian, relational and moral considerations as well as interpersonal connectedness and interdependencies that underpin creative work. Drawing on in-depth interviews with creative workers (...) in a range of marginal socio-cultural contexts, we argue that creative workers cultivate and sustain a diverse array of practices of care arising from an affective concern with the well-being of others. Far from being merely individualistic and crudely competitive actors, creative workers enact practical ethical responsibilities and affectivities towards a range of human and non-human others, including families, local communities and neighbourhoods, colleagues, artistic scenes and their adjacent genres, and surrounding national and linguistic cultures. In emphasizing the fundamental and structuring role of care in contingent labour markets our approach accords with recent trends in the social sciences that ‘affirmatively’—as opposed to ‘negatively’ and ‘suspiciously’—recognize that mutuality, solidarity and affectivity are powerful drivers of action on a par with or even exceeding market-driven self-centredness. (shrink)

This paper suggests a method to calculate a degree of validity for the proof of a statement which is derived from empirical statements by means of logic conclusions. The empirical statements are assumed not to be completely valid or their validity to be doubtful. The suggested rules are consistent with two-valued logic, yield decreasing validities with increasing number of applications of modus ponens and obey the law of the excluded middle. The actual calculation of validity values, the relation of the (...) suggested method to some truth tables of multi-valued logic and to fuzzy logic are discussed. (shrink)