It strikes many as obvious that negative facts—such as that Justin Trudeau is not the prime minister of Australia—are not fundamental: negative facts must ultimately be explained in terms of positive facts (for instance, that Justin Trudeau is the prime minister of Canada). I focus on a particular class of negative facts: contingent negative existentials (such as that there are no 10ft tall humans). If contingent negative existentials are not fundamental, then they must be explained. But the claim (...) that contingent negative existentials are explained is in tension with the widely held view that any universal generalization can be explained by its instances together with a totality fact (i.e. a fact to the effect that the instances exhaust the relevant domain). This is because a totality fact is itself a negative existential, and equivalent to a universal generalization. If the explanation for any contingent negative existential must appeal to another contingent negative existential, then—unless there are no fundamental facts—not all contingent negative existentials can be non-fundamental. I argue that we should give up the age-old mantra that only positive facts can be fundamental. I show that at least some contingent negative existentials are fundamental. I first make the case for including a totality fact in the explanans for a contingent negative existential and show that alternative accounts for explaining such facts are inadequate. I then undermine the standard arguments for subscribing to the view that there are no negative facts—including negative existentials—at the fundamental level. (shrink)

In this essay I address the question, “What is the subject matter of phenomenological research?” I argue that in spite of the increasing popularity of phenomenology, the answers to this question have been brief and cursory. As a result, contemporary phenomenologists lack a clear framework within which to articulate the aims and results of their research, and cannot easily engage each other in constructive and critical discourse. Examining the literature on phenomenology’s identity, I show how the question of phenomenology’s subject (...) matter has been systematically neglected. It has been overshadowed by an unending concern with phenomenology’s methodological identity. However, an examination of recent contributions to this literature reveals that a concern with articulating phenomenology’s subject matter has gradually increased, although such articulations remain preliminary. In light of this, I delineate, define, and illustrate three layers of phenomenological research, which I term “existentials,” “modes,” and “prejudices.” While the delineation of these layers is drawn primarily from classical phenomenological texts, they are defined and illustrated through the use of more contemporary literature. Following the articulation of this subject matter, I briefly consider some of the debates—both foundational and applied—that can be facilitated by the adoption of this framework. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the characteristics of the conceptuality of fundamental ontology, which are presented through an analysis of existentials as the concepts typical of this philosophical position. The analysis first presents the meaning and role of existentials in relation to the main ideas of fundamental ontology as well as Heidegger’s critique of the categories. The second part of the paper then presents the conceptual character of the existentials through the analysis of the concept of the (...) world and in terms of the conceptual relations they form. The analysis draws on Heidegger’s early ideas about the essential relation between thinking and language in philosophy, according to which the language of philosophy emerges from and indicates how a particular philosopher thinks. (shrink)

Attempts to analyze negative existential statements face the following familiar problem. If a negative existential statement—say, “Hamlet does not exist” or “the golden mountain does not exist”—is true, its subject term must lack an object of reference. But, absent such an object, it seems that nothing true or false can be said about “it.” In particular, if there is no Hamlet to talk about, we surely cannot truthfully say that “he” does not exist. Hence, the truth of true negative (...) class='Hi'>existentials—and there are many—seems to preclude their truth and falsity. Call this “the negative existential problem.”. (shrink)

In this paper, I try to show that Kripke’s proposed solution to the problem of negative existentials fails. I try to show that Kripke’s proposal fails because it entails that anybody who has good reasons to believe that there are no propositions has also good reasons to believe that he or she does not exist. However, there were philosophers who had good reasons to believe that there are no propositions even though they didn’t have good reasons to believe that (...) they do not exist. I conclude that Kripke’s proposed solution to the problem of negative existentials fails. (shrink)

In a 2019 paper, Hausmann raised a new and interesting problem for Kripke’s account of negative existentials. He argued that Kripke’s account leads to the absurd consequence that anybody who has good reasons to believe that there are no propositions also has good reasons to believe that he or she does not exist. In this paper I propose a modified Kripkean theory, which is invulnerable to a Hausmann-like argument. As will be seen, the modified theory can be squarely justified (...) in light of the key observations behind Kripke’s original proposal. (shrink)

We have become estranged from the cosmic movements, according to Bataille. We are confined by the error linked to the representation of ‘the stationary earth’. We have negated the immersive immanence of the whole and made nature into a fixed world of tools and things. How then do we recognise ourselves as part of the ‘rapture of the heavens’? Bataille urges us to consider life as a solar phenomenon, the free play of solar energy on the earth. This paper argues (...) how Bataille’s cosmic vision anticipates both planetary and ecological thinking. This entails a base materialism of difference based on a radical Nietzschean and Heraclitean theory of becoming and flux. This thought is developed along Bataillean concepts such as the movement of the whole, the labyrinthine, and compound beings, ipseity, as well as the concept of a communifying movement. This materialism paired with Vladimir Vernadsky’s biosphere lays the foundation for the laws of the general economy, which also constitutes an economy inclusive of a general ecology: a tragic vision of Gaia and Dionysos. Finally, poetry is considered, as a way we might reconnect with the universe and stimulate ecological imagination. (shrink)

Thanks to the Inlaks Foundation in India, I was able to do my doctoral research on Our Talk About Nonexistents at Oxford in the early eighties. The two greatest philosophers of that heaven of analytical philosophy - Peter Strawson and Michael Dummett - supervised my work, reading and criticising all the fledgling philosophy that I wrote during those three years. At Sir Peter's request, Gareth Evans, shortly before his death, lent me an unpublished transcript of Kripke's John Locke Lectures. Work (...) on the Appendix about Indian Philosophy was supervised by the late Professor Bimal Krishna Matilal with whom informal but intense philosophical conversations used to spill over into dinner at his place almost every other day. It was Professor Matilal who sent me, over a summer, to study a tough Navya-Nyaya text under his own Nyaya teacher Pandit Visvabandhu Tarkatirtha at Calcutta. All four of these teachers were as kind to me as my life-long mentor in philosophy Professor Pranab Kumar Sen, whose clarity and depth remain the unreachable regu lative ideal of my intellect. When I came back to India, my life became blissfully free of the agonising anxiety to publish, until, after a conference at Jadavpur University where I gave an impromptu paper, ironically enough, on Non-doings, I met Derek Parfit. He had a six-hour conversation with me, explicitly planning my life. Five years had already elapsed since I had finished my D. Phil, but Derek read my thesis and liked it. (shrink)

In this paper I am concerned with an analysis of negative existential sentences that contain proper names only by using negative or neutral free logic. I will compare different versions of neutral free logic with the standard system of negative free logic (Burge, Sainsbury) and aim to defend my version of neutral free logic that I have labeled non-standard neutral free logic.

IN THE beginning Parmenides sought to deny the void. But he found himself trapped by his language and his thought into admitting what he sought to deny. Wisely, he counseled others to avoid the whole region in which the problem arises, lest they too be unwarily ensnared. Plato, being less easily intimidated and grasping for the first time the urgency of the paradox, unearthed each snare in turn until he felt he had found a safe path through the forbidden terrain (...) in a new conception of being and the derivation of its linguistic consequences in the Sophist. Aristotle evidently took Parmenides’ advice; and save for a few groping scholastics, perhaps Leibniz, Brentano, and Meinong, and Frege only in passing, no one else attempted the crossing before Russell made his spectacular dash through the posted ground from the completely new direction of linguistic reference. Again the problem lay dormant for half a century until Strawson constructed a new low road through ordinary language and Quine improved Russell’s high algebraic pass. Refinements of these routes have been forthcoming, especially from Searle and Kripke, until today it might appear that there are two super highways through Parmenides’ forbidden country of nonbeing. In this essay I will first argue that these new linguistic highways are no more than flimsy camouflage hiding but not resolving the old paradoxes. I will then show how Plato’s ontological way out, though more difficult, is the straight and narrow path. (shrink)

When describing the essential features of the Russian peasantry, Gorky draws attention to the concepts of cruelty and, as a result, pity, which are necessary for understanding its actions. Cruelty,...

In this article, we investigate how distressing background feelings can be subject to social injustice. We define background feelings as enduring feeling states that condition our perceptions of everyday situations, interpersonal dynamics, and the broader social milieu. While phenomenological psychopathology has long addressed such affective phenomena, including anxiety, guilt, and feelings of not belonging, the intersection with social injustice remains largely unexplored within the framework. To address this gap, we introduce the concept of existential injustice into phenomenological psychopathology. Existential injustice (...) pertains to the unjust formation, perpetuation, and treatment of background feelings. We contend that distressing alterations in these feeling states can stem from, or be perpetuated by, unjust social structures and practices. Existential injustice manifests as a felt inadequacy of one’s background feelings, reflecting broader societal disparities and inequities. Drawing on themes from social psychiatry, we illustrate the utility and explanatory power of the concept through two concrete examples. By shedding light on the ways in which societal dynamics shape distressing affective experiences our analysis underscores the importance of integrating aspects of social injustice into the study of affective phenomena in phenomenological psychopathology. (shrink)

While the notion of the mind as information-processor--a kind of computational system--is widely accepted, many scientists and philosophers have assumed that this account of cognition shows that the mind's operations are characterizable independent of their relationship to the external world. Existential Cognition challenges the internalist view of mind, arguing that intelligence, thought, and action cannot be understood in isolation, but only in interaction with the outside world. Arguing that the mind is essentially embedded in the external world, Ron McClamrock provides (...) a schema that allows cognitive scientists to address such long-standing problems in artificial intelligence as the "frame" problem and the issue of "bounded" rationality. Extending this schema to cover progress in other studies of behavior, including language, vision, and action, McClamrock reinterprets the importance of the organism/environment distinction. McClamrock also considers the broader philosophical question of the place of mind in the world, particularly with regard to questions of intentionality, subjectivity, and phenomenology. With implications for philosophy, cognitive and computer science, AI, and psychology, this book synthesizes state-of-the-art work in philosophy and cognitive science on how the mind interacts with the world to produce thoughts, ideas, and actions. (shrink)

Research on values is extensive. Values and value systems are concepts that have interested researchers across domains such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology. However, antecedents of values have not received sufficient attention. In this study, we develop and assess a personal value system from the ancient texts of India. The texts describe a system of existential beliefs and values or prescriptive beliefs. Existential beliefs are concerned with the nature of reality. Prescriptive beliefs or values follow from these existential beliefs, and (...) behavior is influenced by values. The content of existential beliefs and the implied values or prescriptive beliefs are extracted from the texts and a conceptual model of the belief system is developed. Scales are constructed and administered to a sample of subjects. Responses from the survey are analyzed using a structural equation modeling framework. Confirmatory factor analysis is used to assess the scales and establish their adequacy. The nomological net of existential beliefs and values is empirically assessed, and construct validity is examined. Results support the belief system described in the texts. (shrink)

This article focuses on existential feelings. To begin with, it depicts how they differ from other affective phenomena and what type of intentionality they manifest. Furthermore, a detailed analysis shows that existential feelings can be subdivided, first, into elementary and nonelementary varieties, and second, into three foci of primary relatedness: oneself, the social environment, and the world as such. Eventually, five strategies of emotion regulation are examined with respect to their applicability to existential feelings. In the case of harmful existential (...) feelings, it turns out that none seems fitting except one, attentional deployment. (shrink)

The following pages attempt to develop the main outlines of an existential phenomenology of law within the context of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phe nomenology of the social world. In so doing, the essay addresses the rather narrow scholarly question, If Merleau-Ponty had written a phenomenology of law, what would it have looked like? But this scholarly enterprise, although impeccable in itself, is also transcended by a more complicated concern for a very different sort of question. Namely, if Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological descriptions of (...) the social world are correct-as I believe they largely are-then what are the philosophical consequences for an adequate understanding of law? Such a project may well occasion a certain surprise amongst observers of the contemporary philosophical landscape, at least in what concerns the terrain of continental thought, and for two different reasons. The first is that, although interest in Merleau-Ponty's work remains strong in the· United States and Can ada, his philosophical standing in his own country has been largely eclipsed! by that of, first, his friend/estranged acquaintance, Jean-Paul Sartre; by various Marxist philosophies and critical social theories; and finally by those doing her meneutics of language. In my view, current neglect of Merleau-Ponty's thought in France is most regrettable. (shrink)

We prove that the standard cut is definable in each existentially closed model ofIΔ0+ exp by a (parameter free) П1–formula. This definition is optimal with respect to quantifier complexity and allows us to improve some previously known results on existentially closed models of fragments of arithmetic.

The provability problem in intuitionistic propositional second-order logic with existential quantifier and implication (∃,→) is proved to be undecidable in presence of free type variables (constants). This contrasts with the result that inutitionistic propositional second-order logic with existential quantifier, conjunction and negation is decidable.

Peirce’s True Gorgias is a brief dialogue from his essay “Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic”, published in 1869. The True Gorgias exposes the fallacy of existential import. It has received no sustained attention in the secondary literature, perhaps because the fallacy is now familiar. Peirce’s assessment of the fallacy involved in the reasoning, however, changes between 1865 and 1869, and he only arrives at the contemporary account of existential import in 1880. Moreover, a careful examination of the (...) context in which the True Gorgias appears reveals it provides an argument in support of Peirce’s early Aristotelian realism about universals in contradistinction to non-Aristotelian varieties of realism advocated by W.T. Harris, editor of the journal in which the True Gorgias was published. (shrink)

Purpose. To examine the existential anthropology of G. Marcel and E. Minkowski, in order to demonstrate the necessity of distinguishing the universal-spiritual, as human in human being, apart from the individual-existential in him, and to reveal the hierarchical correlation of biosocial, existential and spiritual spheres in personality. Theoretical basis. Within existential philosophy the author differentiates two separate traditions and proceeds from the insufficiency of the distinction of existential sphere, proposed by phenomenological tradition, showing the necessity of its correlation with the (...) spiritual sphere as a sphere of humanity, proposed by non-phenomenological tradition of G. Marcel and E. Minkowski. Originality. The author presents the anthropological conception of G. Marcel and E. Minkowski, in which human personality is understood as unity of individual-existential and universal-spiritual, which requires a special trans-empirical field of culture, which contains senses, images and symbols of humanity. Also, the author presents the recent developments of existential thinkers in distinguishing existential and spiritual dimensions, both not reducible to the physical and social dimensions. Conclusions. In both existential traditions, the specifically human was founded as a trans-biological and trans-social phenomenon, which appears as indefinable and non-predetermined. But in first tradition, humanity is understood as an existence, as a unique individuality, "project", variant of humanity, equivalent to other variants, and universal is understood as a community of human condition in the world. While in the second tradition, the universal is understood as spiritual. Thus, horizontal level of our private existence, as the process of movement from birth to death, is supplemented by vertical of human, universal ideals and images. Humanity appears as a task, on the way to which human being transcends beyond the limits of his individual "self" to the "super-individual", through inclusion into spiritual community, into universal culture. (shrink)

The standard argument to the conclusion that artificial intelligence (AI) constitutes an existential risk for the human species uses two premises: (1) AI may reach superintelligent levels, at which point we humans lose control (the ‘singularity claim’); (2) Any level of intelligence can go along with any goal (the ‘orthogonality thesis’). We find that the singularity claim requires a notion of ‘general intelligence’, while the orthogonality thesis requires a notion of ‘instrumental intelligence’. If this interpretation is correct, they cannot be (...) joined as premises and the argument for the existential risk of AI turns out invalid. If the interpretation is incorrect and both premises use the same notion of intelligence, then at least one of the premises is false and the orthogonality thesis remains itself orthogonal to the argument to existential risk from AI. In either case, the standard argument for existential risk from AI is not sound.—Having said that, there remains a risk of instrumental AI to cause very significant damage if designed or used badly, though this is not due to superintelligence or a singularity. (shrink)

The purpose of the book is to clarify the notion of existential dependence and cognate notions, such as supervenience and the notion of an internal relation. I defend the view that such notions are best understood in terms of the concept of metaphysical grounding, i.e. the concept of one fact obtaining in virtue of other facts, where ‘in virtue of’ has a distinctively metaphysical meaning.

This article is about the signs during the creative stage of one’s self-development. With the acceptance of the creative act as an existential phenomenon, the research considers the creative process as a genuine expression that has been actualized during one’s search for his/her existence. An artist reflects his/her existential being through his/her work to construct an original self, by facing the world and within the struggle to construct the new self that stands beyond confusion. Tarasti’s philosophical approach to “existential semiotics” (...) will be applied to the existential being of the artist Alev Ebuzziya Siesbye, and her creative act will be analyzed by means of the modalities, the semiotic square of being/doing, and the sign processes evident in the field of art. Siesbye’s existential personality and creative acts have been discussed by looking at what she has done in terms of her attitude on clay; her position in the contemporary art world and her artistic interrogations has been discussed in the existential being of the artist with the existential signs. (shrink)

Paradigmatic uses of negative existentials such as ‘Vulcan does not exist’ are problematic because they present the interpreter with a pragmatic paradox: a speaker who uses such a sentence seems to be asserting something that is incompatible with what she presupposes. An adequate solution must therefore explain why we interpret paradigmatic uses of negative existentials as saying something true, even though such uses present us with a pragmatic paradox. I provide such an explanation by analyzing paradigmatic uses of (...) negative existentials as corrections of previous assertions that are judged to suffer from referential presupposition failure. I present the explanation within the framework of a simple version of segmented discourse representation theory. (shrink)

We study algebraic and model-theoretic properties of existentially closed fields with an action of a fixed finite group. Such fields turn out to be pseudo-algebraically closed in a rather strong sense. We place this work in a more general context of the model theory of fields with a group scheme action.

‘Who argues what’ bears a certain relevance in relation to what is being argued. We are entitled to know those personal circumstances which play a significant role in relation to the argument one supports, so that we can take those circumstances into consideration when evaluating their argument. This is why journals have conflict of interest declarations, and why we value reflexivity in the social sciences. We also often perform double-blind peer review. We recognise that the evaluation of certain statements of (...) fact or value can, and sometimes ought to, be independent of any reference to their authors. Jecker et al argue that we have reasons to prioritise justice concerns over the existential risk (X-Risk) posed by artificial intelligence (AI) as we transition towards more AI-centred societies, despite the warnings about X-Risk that come from the powerful voice of tech leaders, effective altruists and longtermists. Those powerful voices, Jecker et al argue, often have conflicts of interest and are not demographically or epistemically representative. Hence, we should deprioritise their concerns. I believe the opposite may be true. Even though warnings about X-Risk come from sources and in forms we may disagree with, we have reasons to …. (shrink)

On the one hand, it is commonly agreed that we make choices in which we are guided by a core of personal commitments, wishes, feelings, etc. that we take to express who we are. On the other, it is commonly agreed that some of these ‘existential’ choices constitute who we are. When confronting these two matters, the question of agency inevitably arises: Whether and in what sense can we choose ourselves? The paper will argue for a new perspective on existential (...) choice. (shrink)

Induced abortion is as common in religious as secular cultures, but interpretations and ways to handle abortion differ. This study focuses on existential aspects of abortion, in relation to a secularized context, through in-depth interviews with 24 Swedish women. Existential questions belonging to four areas were found: Life and Death, Meaning of Life, Morality, and Self-Image. Furthermore, four different existential strategies were found: Detaching Strategies, Meaning-Making Strategies, Social Strategies, and Symbolic Strategies. Existential questions and strategies did not imply that the (...) woman regretted her abortion. However, while some women easily processed existential questions, others seemed to be more at a loss. In a secularized country, where many people are unaccustomed to dealing with existential issues, greater existential competence among abortion personnel might thus be needed. (shrink)

The study of existentially closed closure algebras begins with Lipparini’s 1982 paper. After presenting new nonelementary axioms for algebraically closed and existentially closed closure algebras and showing that these nonelementary classes are different, this paper shows that the classes of finitely generic and infinitely generic closure algebras are closed under finite products and bounded Boolean powers, extends part of Hausdorff’s theory of reducible sets to existentially closed closure algebras, and shows that finitely generic and infinitely generic closure algebras are elementarily (...) inequivalent. Special properties of algebraically closed, existentially closed, finitely generic, and infinitely generic closure algebras are established along the way. (shrink)

We analyze the behaviour of declarations of independence between existential quantifiers in quantifier prefixes of Independence-Friendly (IF) sentences; we give a syntactical criterion to decide whether a sentence beginning with such prefix exists, such that its truth values may be affected by removal of the declaration of independence. We extend the result also to equilibrium semantics values for undetermined IF sentences.

The author clarifies the existential philosophy that is implicit in Kurt Goldstein's philosophy of organism (Goldstein, 1963; 1995). Situated in response to the growing trend that psychological phenomena are reducible to the nervous system, the author argues for the reverse: that the significance of nervous system activity can only be understood by viewing it as background to foreground performances. Like the organization of perception into meaningful figure-- ground Gestalts, the existential modes of embodiment, sociality, temporality, spatiality, and attunement are organized (...) together to accomplish foreground performances. It is only within this context that the activity of the nervous system may be understood as significant or insignificant. Speech is given as an example. The article concludes with a commentary on how the trend of reducing psychological phenomena to neurological phenomena has impaired our understanding of brain disorders and psychological disorders. (shrink)

This paper offers a new semantic theory of existentials (sentences of the form There be NP pivot XP coda ) in which pivots are (second order) predicates and codas are modifiers. The theory retains the analysis of pivots as denoting generalized quantifiers (Barwise and Cooper 1981; Keenan 1987), but departs from previous analyses in analyzing codas as contextual modifiers on a par with temporal/locative frame adverbials. Existing analyses universally assume that pivots are arguments of some predicate, and that codas (...) are main or secondary predicates. It is shown that these analyses cannot account for the behavior of codas with quantifiers and for the interaction of multiple codas, both of which receive a simple treatment on the proposed theory. The assimilation of codas to frame adverbials explains several semantic properties which have not been analyzed in the semantic literature, and that distinguish existentials from their copular counterparts. Furthermore, it highlights important properties of the semantics of modification and its relation to predication. (shrink)

Existential-Phenomenological Support Groups Addressed to Parents of Childrens with Various Neurodevelopmental Disorders: Principles, Models, Implementation and Functioning Features. This article aims to present the principles, techniques and models of existential-phenomenological philosophical counseling, as well as the way in which philosophical practice can be used to support discussions within support groups addressed to parents of children with disabilities. A model of philosophical existential-phenomenological group counseling will also be proposed, addressing the parents of children diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder. The phases of (...) the group counseling process as well as individual counseling through phenomenology will be reproduced in this article, which will also propose possible themes that discussions in workshops with parents of children with disabilities can be based on. (shrink)

This paper explores the role of existential feelings in films, and the impact of theconnections between cinema and existential feelings for emotional life in general. After explaining the notion of existential feelings and illustrating them in films with Black Swan and The Help , the paper concludes that movies offer provide insights about our own existential feelings because films promote emotional awareness by the way they function as emotional laboratories. This will lead to an examination the presence and role of (...) surprise for emotional a wareness in general, and more specifically by seeing how it works within suspense movies with the illustration of Rebecca . The analysis will show how the paradox of suspense is tied to the way we can be surprised by our own feelings, including our own existential feelings. The paper concludes that the cinema is capable of providing this privileged place for exploration because it maintains our ability to feel surprise and keep open to surprise. (shrink)

By putting existential phenomenology into conversation with virtue ethics, this book offers a new interpretation of human flourishing. It rejects characterizations of flourishing as either a private subjective state or an objective worldly status, arguing that flourishing is rather a successfully negotiated self-world fit – a condition involving both the essential dependence of the self upon the world and others, and the lived normative responsiveness of the agent striving to be in the world well. A central argument of the book (...) is that there is an irreducible normative plurality arising from the different practical perspectives we can adopt – the first, second, and third-person stances – all of which make different kinds of normative claim that we understand ourselves as having reason to meet. Flourishing is human excellence within each of these normative domains (self-fulfillment, moral responsibility, and responsiveness to intersubjective standards) achieved in such a way that success in one domain does not compromise success in another. Existential Flourishing provides a correspondingly transformed interpretation of the virtues as solutions to various existential problems we face in responding to these normative domains. The book also addresses traditional problems in virtue ethics and analyzes the structure of four virtues in detail: justice, patience, modesty, and courage. (shrink)

Jukka Varelius1 ,2 and others3 have advocated that medically assisted dying should be made available on request to competent individuals experiencing ‘existential suffering’. Unlike Cassell and Rich, Varelius believes that existential sufferers do not have to be terminally ill before being helped to die. He does not regard ‘existential suffering’ on its own as sufficient to justify voluntary medically assisted dying, but believes it to be one of a set of jointly sufficient conditions . In ‘Medical expertise, existential suffering and (...) ending life’, however, he aims only to show that if physicians have the expertise required to assess when suffering consequent upon illness or injury is unbearable, that they can equally have that expertise when confronted with ‘existential suffering’. In what follows, I will neither be endeavouring to refute his more general claim , nor his argument in the present paper. Rather, I will offer two reasons for thinking that even if it is sound it is of limited practical significance.First, Varelius outlines his position without reference to relevant political considerations. He distances himself from what he terms the ‘conventional view’, namely, that voluntary medically …. (shrink)

This book offers cutting edge research on the modifications and disruptions of bodily experience in the context of anxiety, depression, trauma, chronic illness, pain, and aging. It presents original contributions in applied phenomenology, biomedical ethics, and the use of medical technologies.

In this paper I describe a specific emotional reaction to the fact that we will cease to exist, namely existential dread, and I argue that the B-theory of time, according to which reality contains a four-dimensional spacetime manifold and the present time is metaphysically on a par with past and future times, cannot accommodate it. Some may see this as an advantage of the B-theory; some may see it as a problem for the view. My aim is not to argue (...) either for or against the B-theory, but merely to show that it is incompatible with a certain common emotion. The paper is split into three sections. I begin by introducing existential dread. Next, I show how existential dread fits into a widely accepted theory of emotion according to which emotions are intentional states susceptible of being both intelligible and correct, where an emotion is intelligible if, roughly, it makes sense; and is correct if, roughly, it fits its object. The core of the paper is the third section: in that section, I introduce the B-theory of time and I argue that it is incompatible with existential dread. (shrink)

Continual pressure on managers, their efficiency, and the need to search for novel solutions to problems can lead to psychologically demanding situations. In efforts to understand the main obstacles to work and to effectively manage work-related processes, and in the need to achieve personal development, new approaches that are based on existential philosophies emerge. The aim of this article is to highlight the ways in which existential approaches have been used or discussed in management and to show that existential themes (...) and their applications in management can also be found in the Eastern tradition of thought. The paper presents six case vignettes from management practice that use Western and Eastern existential insights and offer recommendations for self-development of managers. The paper concludes that although it is difficult or impossible to create a unified framework of existential philosophy of management because of the diversity of existential approaches and because of the problematic nature of comparing Eastern and Western philosophies, it is possible to work towards gathering applicable insights and values. (shrink)