Eight moral virtues that have figured prominently in various cultures throughout history will be discussed: altruism, empathy, gratitude, humility, and the “cardinal virtues” of justice, prudence, fortitude, and temperance. The focus will be on how to understand them and what their relationship is to happiness. It will be argued that all eight essential moral virtues enhance happiness in most people most of the time. Their favourable impact on happiness may motivate humans to become better, which includes the decision to subject (...) themselves voluntarily to moral bioenhancement (MBE)—in order to achieve this betterment. Nonetheless, the development of MBE technologies is still in its infancy and moral education remains the primary means for the moral enhancement of humans, as well as for the enhancement of their happiness. This may however change in the relatively near future. (shrink)

Analyses of Honoré de Balzac's literary works and their ethical issues, especially concerning his critique of French society and its morals of the 19th century.

Prominent critics of consequentialism hold that utilitarianism is not capable of accepting authentic human values, because the consequentialist viewpoint is impersonal. According to it consequentialist rationality has no axiological limits and it can think about doing the unthinkable. The main objective of the paper is to show that human dignity has a significant position in the author's conception of ethics of social consequences (a non-utilitarian consequentialism) arguing for a particular theory of the value of human dignity. The author argues that (...) the ethics of social consequences is capable of accepting human dignity as well as all authentic human moral values. He believes that ethical theory of social consequences (as a form of non-utilitarian consequentialism) can provide the element missing whose lack was unveiled by the critics of utilitarianism. (shrink)

Prominent critics of consequentialism hold that utilitarianism is not capable of accepting authentic human values, because the consequentialist viewpoint is impersonal. According to it consequentialist rationality has no axiological limits and it can think about doing the unthinkable. The main objective of the paper is to show that human dignity has a significant position in the author’s conception of ethics of social consequences arguing for a particular theory of the value of human dignity. The author argues that the ethics of (...) social consequences is capable of accepting human dignity as well as all authentic human moral values. He believes that ethical theory of social consequences can provide the element missing whose lack was unveiled by the critics of utilitarianism. (shrink)

It is a book review of Teodor Munz's book Listy filozofom [Letters to the Philosophers].

At the contemporary stage in the development of humanity, an increasing number of problems, affecting both individuals and society as a whole and having in the past had a local character, are acquiring in the 1970s and 80s—an epoch of ever-accelerating scientific and technical progress and further socio-economic development—a global character, touching to one degree or another the interests of all countries and peoples. Such problems cause anxiety for wide circles of the public and are attracting the increasing attention of (...) scientists, government figures, and political activists. The prospects for humanity and society on the threshold of the third millenium depend upon how fruitful the scientific analysis of global problems and the efficiency of practical measures will be. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the distinction between real-unreal content hidden under the name. The relations of mark with the concept and denotation are studied. These relations are manifested in such significant acts as characterization, attribution, interpretation, aimed at establishing the substantive values of the concepts. It is highlighted that ideological process identifies super-phrasal information about reality that lies at the intersection of ‘culture‘ and ‘nature‘. In formalized languages, the problem of connecting ‘meaningless‘ syntactic expressions with object-semantic structures is solved (...) by appeal to interpretation - a special procedure, which makes it possible to compare the names of objects and relations between them. In the circle of the interpretive procedure, the ‘empty‘ axiom, symbolic entries become statements about objects, areas of the world. Any suggestion corresponds to a statement about objects in a particular subject system. In natural languages, the relationship of signs with the object basis is set a) genealogically by rules of usage; b) metaphorically by tropic unification, equating with the introduction of harmony; c) didactically - by rules of definition and selection; d) metaphysically by expressing of philosophical indefinable. (shrink)

Phenomenological understanding is implemented as a two-phased act of attribution and identification of symbolic meanings. The theming of understanding as a mental process is engaged in semantics. On the formal side it looks so that signs - the associations, populations of abstract symbols - must be ‘translated‘ into substantive language in order to gain semiological, substantial, and meaningful identity. It is the task of semantics to work out the rules for such translation of symbolic expressions from symbolic to lexical-substantive-conceptual language (...) - a responsible movement from the abstract symbolization to specific identification. The identification has thee aspects: semiological, substantive, and semantic. The procedure of establishing the meaning is not semiotic; meaning, the truth of the characteristics of linguistic expressions constituents by appealing to non-linguistic values accumulating ‘supertext‘ information about the world. This procedure is defined by material coherence of the symbolicalness and the substantiveness, providing the link between language and objective thinking. (shrink)

On the basis of the idea of autopoetic system of human perception and reasoning, the author of the article proves the identity of truth and beauty. This identity is detected in the result of the manifestations of the ‘mental catharsis‘ inherent in the heuristic activity of the subject. The activity of the thinking subject is regulated by a mechanism of mental ordering, where the streamlining by beauty takes first place. Beauty as excess of the limit has no logical basis, but (...) it has systematic justification as a form complying its purpose. Purpose complying form is harmonious: ontologically this is manifested in the effectiveness, feasibility, and optimality as ‘vital force‘; this is manifested epistemically in reaching the depth and perfection as ‘mental strength‘. The formal aspect of ‘mental strength‘ is interpreted as logical isolation, the integration of thoughts, and coherence of parts in a whole. The content of ‘mental strength‘ is understood as synthetic system of elements combined in the unity of understanding. The unity of the understanding is the highest consolidation principle of thinking of the subject, based on the reasonable potency of the soul. Reasonable potency of the soul is emergent by its nature: the intelligence evolves by generating anticipatory concepts produced by creative autopoiesis, which develops promising ideas according to the laws of tropical connotative imagination-based approval. The operating mode of the imagination, intellectual browsing of possibilities, is supported by techniques of spontaneous changing the world, a phantasmagoric metamorphosis. That is a tropical unity of thought and speech material, which becomes joint according to the laws of harmony and beauty. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 111 One fascinating item is the author's extensive account of the most violent and extended controversy in the history of aesthetics---the veneration of images and the disputes between the Iconoclasts and the Iconophiles. This sometimes physical battle raged for over 100 years! The Byzantine society, obviously, took art seriously. Tatarkiewicz' great labor is an object lesson in historiography and bibliographic technique. At one and the same time (...) it demonstrates how much of value remains to be discovered by careful adherence to the detail of scholarship, while it also displays how much fruitful scholarship depends upon a brilliant and profoundly informed mind. Such a work, in short, could only have descended from a fully mature scholar. Publication of these volumes underscores the continuing need for publication of significant translations waiting to be made. When can we return to those conditions which make possible this kind of international scholarly achievement? The Humanities Press is now offering these two volumes for $10.00. ALLAN SHIELDS Cali/ornia State University, San Diego Tempo, Coscienza e Essere nella filosofia di Aristotele. By Luigi Ruggiu. (Brescia: Paideia Editrice, 1970. Pp. xxviii+662. L. 6,000.) Ruggiu gives us here a careful and extended account of Aristotle's view of time with special attention to the necessary connections that obtain between time and consciousness, and time and beilag. Ruggiu is also interested in saying something about the origins of later Western conceptions of time and what he calls the nihilistic tendency which runs through them. The reader who (wishing to follow Ruggiu in this 690 page enterprise) begins by trying to get a sense of the architectonic of the essay, is immediately advised to skip E. Severino's somewhat misleading preface. In his own very useful Introduction, Ruggiu rightly notes that Aristotle's review of the aporia in the notion of time found that his predecessors had tended to assimilate (or reduce) time to non-being. But Ruggiu neglects to emphasize something that would have been very helpful at this stage, and which is altogether required, for the understanding of Aristotle's view of time. This is, that Aristotle himself assimilates time, not to non-being but to change and motion. It is also fundamental to Aristotle's philosophy of time, just as it is to his philosophy as a whole, that it acknowledges the primacy of change in the realm of the conditional. Let it be emphasized, then, that generation or change in Aristotle are not from nothing into something, or from something into nothing but from one thing into another. Ruggiu is trying to recover the sense of being in Aristotle which transcends the oppositions between idealism and naturalism, subjectivism and objectivism, and which is the matrix of Aristotle's sense of, and doctrine about, time. He finds that from Plotinos to the present, the prevailing interpretation of Aristotle's conception of time has been a spatial one in which, for instance, temporal succession has been reduced to spatial co-existence. Plotinos, of course, accepted the distinction found in Aristotle between the eternal sort of being which is outside of time and the being which is in time. But in trying to deduce temporal being from eternal being Plotinos is found guilty, by Ruggiu, both of equivocating between radically opposed senses of being and of developing his notion of time on the basis of the denial of time (quite like some modern mathematical philosophers of physics). Others have been equally mistaken in approaching Aristotle with the belief that consciousness is the basis of time. But the substrate of time, in Aristotle, is change, not conscious being. According to Ruggiu time in Aristotle is more than just a mode of being whose essence consists in succes- I 12 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY sion, for the reason that time conditions the very way in which we conceptualize being. The relations between being, time, and consciousness are, so to say, intrafoundational. Existing things or processes can, of course, be thought of as not existing; so, there is a sense or mode (namely, possibility) in Aristotle in which things disappear. Ruggiu (p. 411) understands Aristotle to mean by "the possible" that which does not now exist... (shrink)

The article is devoted to the memory of Vyacheslav Semenovich Stepin and Nikita Nikolaevich Moiseev, whose multifaceted work was integrally focused on philosophical, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research of the key ideas and principles of universal human-dimensional evolutionism. Other remarkable Russian scientists V.I. Vernadsky, S.P. Kurdyumov, S.P. Kapitsa, D.S. Chernavsky worked in the same tradition of universal evolutionism. While V.I. Vernadsky and N.N. Moiseev had been the originators of that scientific approach, V.S. Stepin provided philosophical foundations for the ideas of those (...) remarkable scientists and thinkers. The scientific legacy of V.S. Stepin and N.N. Moiseev maintained the formation of a new quality of research into the philosophy of science and technology as well as into the philosophy of culture. This new quality is multidimensional and it is difficult to define unambiguously, but we presume the formation of those areas of philosophical knowledge as constructively oriented languages of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary co-participation of philosophy in the convergent-evolutionary development of scientific knowledge in general. In this regard, attention is paid to V.S. Stepin’s affirmations about non-classical nature of modern social and humanitarian knowledge. Quantum mechanics teaches us that the reality revealed through it is a hybrid construct, or symbiosis, of both mean and object of cognition. Therefore, the very act of cognitive observation constructs quantum reality. Thus, it is very close to the process of cognition in modern sociology and psychology. V.S. Stepin insisted that these principles are applicable to all complex selfdeveloping systems, and such are all “human-dimensional” objects of modern humanities. In all the phases of homeostasis changes, or crises, there is necessarily a share of chaos, instability, uncertainty in the selection process of future development scenarios, which is ineliminably affected by our observation. Therefore, a cognitive observer in the humanities should be considered as a concept of post-non-classical rationality, that is as an observer of complexity. (shrink)

Recenzio Kiraly V. Istvan Death and History c. konyverol.

Glava 1. Osmyslenie "ideala" russkim kosmizmom -- Glava 2. Analiz osnovnykh filosofsko-antropologicheskikh ideĭ v russkoĭ religioznoĭ filosofii -- Glava 3. Idei kosmizma v russkoĭ religioznoĭ filosofii -- Glava 4. V.I. Vernadskiĭ o sootnoshenii nauki, filosofii i religii -- Glava 5. Mifologicheskoe i nauchnoe v izuchenii obraza protopopa Avvakuma -- Glava 6. Ėkonomicheskoe razvitie i nravstvennai︠a︡ degradat︠s︡ii︠a︡ cheloveka i obshchestva v format︠s︡ionnom podkhode Karla Marksa i Fridrikha Ėngelʹsa.

Review the Istvan Kiraly V.'s book: Death and History.

v. 1. Obrazovanie v sud'bakh narodov. Education in the fates of nations -- v. 2. Razdumyi︠a︡. Thoughts -- v. 3. Krutogori︠a︡mi zhizni. Steep roads of the life -- v. 4. Ėstetika i tvorchestvo. Aesthetics and creativity -- v. 5. T︠S︡ivilizat︠s︡ii︠a︡ v zhizni planety. The civilization in the life of our planet.

Throughout Christianity, its activities are in one way or another connected to the historical reality of its time. Usually, for different epochs, the strength of these bonds was different, but during the Middle Ages, they were significantly stronger than before and after. It is here that perhaps the most important moment was the rise of Christianity, which spread over a relatively short period of time almost throughout Europe. It was then - and never again in all its history - that (...) the Church was able to participate in the formation of all aspects of its contemporary life, in accordance with its spirit. When solving this task, it inevitably came in close contact with the "world" and the various forms in which it was represented. (shrink)

Рассматриваются актуальные проблемы философской антропологии, проводится анализ парадоксов и противоречий, возникающих при изучении человека, тех кардинальных сдвигов в культуре, которые открыли новые стороны человеческого бытия. Для студентов.