Century Philosophy Research Articles

Grounding the Consolationist Concept of Mood in the African Vital Force Theory

ABSTRACT The concept of vital force in African philosophy received its first full articulation in Placide Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy (1959) and has evolved over time from the ontological dimension of a universal actuation and energizing principle to an element of mind, notably in the work of Kwame Gyekye. In this essay, I present the concept of vital force and trace its evolution from the time of its first full articulation by Tempels up to its identification with spirit, or mind, in Gyekye’s thought. I try to defend the thesis that the concept of vital force can ground the notion of mood that takes a pivotal position in the twenty-first century philosophy of consolationism. I adopt an analytical and constructive method in this paper.

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meanings, its decompositional analysis of underlying sense structure, and its promise of scientific discoveries about the nature of language contradict his purely descriptive approach to meaning. 3.5. Horwich puts forth the surprising view that Wittgenstein does not deny Platonism. If there is one uncontroversial thesis about twentieth century philosophy, it is that Wittgenstein rejects abstract objects in mathematics, logic, and language. Wittgenstein's naturalism is unequivocally opposed to objects which have no spatial or temporal location, are causally inert, and incorporeal. His approach to language is unequivocally against meanings which are perceptually hidden, exist independently of us, and hence stand apart from our form of life and its social practices. His conception of philosophy is unequivocally against essences or universals which are the subject of discoveries of significance in science and philosophy. In Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Basil Blackwell, 1956), Wittgenstein frequently and consistently rejects mathematical Platonism. He has a diatribe against "mathematical alchemy" (RFM, iv. 16). He says, "The mathematician is an inventor, not a discoverer" (RFM, I, p. 167). Similarly, "I am trying to say something like this: Even if the mathematical proposition seems to point to a reality outside itself, still it only expresses acceptance of a new measure (of reality)" (RFM, II, p. 30). Further,

Philosophy of Gongcheng (Engineering): A Chinese Field Philosophy Case Study

ABSTRACT Under the influence of natural science, twentieth century philosophy departed from its Socratic heritage and increasingly isolated itself within the discipline. This new disciplinary way of doing philosophy produced a greater amount of professional knowledge and expertise, but it also separated philosophy from its broader social context. Since the mid-20th century, various efforts were made under a variety of banners to reconnect philosophical thinking with society, with field philosophy representing the most genuine break from the disciplinary paradigm. It advocates collaborative work and rejects philosophic jargon. It also shares much in common with a parallel Chinese approach called ‘philosophy of gongcheng.’ The philosophy of gongcheng is mostly initiated by top-level engineers, especially academicians with real political power, with the aim of enhancing the real-world engineering practices. This paper traces the roots of philosophy of jishu in China to reevaluate the appearance of philosophy of gongcheng, and exposes the differences between these two parallel transdisciplinary approaches. Working with engineers deepens the understanding of engineering practices and provides some fresh insights on previous philosophical theories. Both field philosophy and philosophy of engineering need to ask, is there only one way to do philosophy?

Philosophical Intuition Is the Capacity to Recognize one\u2019s Epistemic Position. An Old-Fashion Approach Based on Russell, Carnap, Wittgenstein, and Husserl

Philosophical intuition has become one of the most debated problems in recent years, largely due to the rise of the movement called experimental philosophy which challenged the conviction that philosophers have some special insight into abstract ideas such as being, knowledge, good and evil, intentional action, etc. In response to the challenge, some authors claim that there is a special cognitive faculty called philosophical intuition which delivers justification to philosophical theses, while some others deny it based on experimental results. A relatively smaller group of researchers aim at clarifying what the alleged intuition is. I follow the latter path. In this paper I argue that philosophical intuition is in the first place the capacity enabling one to what I refer to as the recognition of one’s epistemic position. The latter means becoming aware of the seemingly trivial “fact” that the way in which the world manifests itself depends on the cognitive apparatus one has, thereby propelling one to draw a distinction between appearances and reality. The recognition at stake is a very specific capacity to approach the world solely as it is experienced. This capacity, I argue, is the core and the defining feature of philosophical intuition. As part of my argumentation I also distinguish between the intuition in question and its different manifestations; and then introduce a novel notion of erotetic intuition. My argument is called “old-fashion” to emphasize the fact that I draw mostly on four figures who were pivotal in the twentieth- century philosophy and whose influence on the current debate concerning philosophical intuition should be, I believe, stronger than it is; I mean Russell, Carnap, Wittgenstein, and Husserl.

Field Philosophy: Practice and Theory

ABSTRACT Field philosophy marks out a new path for 21st century philosophy, offering both a practical and theoretical alternative to disciplinary philosophy. The balance between disciplinary philosophy and field philosophy shifted in the late 19th century: philosophers were now almost entirely to be found in one location – on campus. Contemporary philosophy has not theorized the effects that location have on philosophizing. Field philosophy rebalances the philosophical ledger – reestablishing a multiplicity of sites, identifying a new practice, and offering an accompanying theory rooted in the differences that location makes to philosophizing.

Cicero's demarcation of science: A report of shared criteria

The problem of establishing intensional criteria to demarcate science from non-science, and in particular science from pseudoscience, received a great amount of attention in the 20th century philosophy of science. It remains unsolved. This article compares demarcation criteria found in Marcus Tullius Cicero’s rejection of genethliac astrology and other pseudo-divinatory techniques in his De divinatione (44 BCE) with criteria advocated by a broad selection of modern philosophers of science and other specialists in science studies. Remarkable coincidences across two millennia are found on five basic criteria, which hints at a certain historical stability of some of the most fundamental features of a concept of “science” broadly construed.

Uniting epistemological perspectives to support contextualized knowledge development

The nature of knowledge and how it is developed have been debated in philosophy and research for centuries. In the literature on teachers’ knowledge, two perspectives have been particularly visible. One perspective stresses cognitive processes and deliberate knowledge acquisition. Another perspective stresses the situated nature of teachers’ learning and knowledge development through awareness. This theoretical article proposes that uniting both epistemological perspectives is beneficial for developing teachers’ contextualized knowledge of how to teach at all phases of career development, and especially early on. In so doing, action and reflection are positioned as central to the development of teachers’ knowledge, and affordances from both the deliberate and the aware perspectives are articulated. Specifically, this article explains why uniting the two perspectives supports better sense-making, more refined instructional planning, and more responsive teaching, before offering a united reflection model. These processes are then discussed in the context of video coaching interventions for early-career teachers. After presenting a blueprint for video-based reflection and key design features that could support teachers’ learning, important differences compared to other reflection models are discussed and implications for (the design of) teachers' professional development based upon this united perspective are presented.

Complementary Understandings of Availability: Jean Vanier in Conversation with the Philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Gabriel Marcel

There has been a significant shift in twentieth century philosophy toward ‘other-person-ness’ where availability and attentiveness to the other seem to have taken central stage. Although not always accepted as philosophers in the conventional sense, the philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Gabriel Marcel were at the forefront of this new move. This article puts Jean Vanier in conversation with Levinas and Marcel in order to tease out the complementarity of their philosophical approaches. While there is much that the three philosophers have in common, including the question of the relationship of faith to philosophy, there is also a clear progression in thinking. Levinas offers an uncompromising responsibility and availability for the other who remains an ‘absolute other’; Marcel reminds that the other is also my neighbor for whom my presence denotes my availability; Vanier in turn adds a radically new dimension. Rather than a one-way street of availability to the other, Vanier opens up a two-way street where the other, who often seems very different, reveals our mutual vulnerability and demonstrates that living by the heart can lead us all to becoming truly human.

An Overview of Speech Acts in English

Last century philosophers made a great step forward in understanding the way in which we use words in order to achieve something in the real world. They pointed to the fact that we perform speech acts when we speak. The production of speech acts is governed by some rules which help us understand the utterance meaning and decode the speaker meaning. Moreover, in a discourse, the speech acts are organized linearly in sequences of micro-speech acts, and hierarchically in macro-speech acts, which are associated with an entire piece of discourse. As the right choice of speech acts in advertisements contribute to the achievement of the advertiser’s goals, the present article selects its examples from various advertisements placed in some English magazines.

Into the Wilderness: Rediscovering Titus Smith Jr’s philosophy of nature

Except in some academic circles, Titus Smith Jr. is mostly a forgotten man. The year 2018 marked the 250th anniversary of Titus Smith Jr’s. birth in Granby, Massachusetts (1768-1850). While general articles about Smith’s life exist (Punch 1978), surprisingly there have only been three serious studies celebrating his knowledge and scientific thinking (Piers 1938, Clark 1954, Gorham 1955). Smith lived prior to the era when science hardened into specialized fields and when a single mind could move between disciplines allowing each to inform the other. Smith’s interdisciplinary methods and his belief that nature is a global force are once again coming to the forefront as climate change emerges as the single most important threat to the survival of the planet. This essay attempts to bring this 19th century philosopher of nature into a modern environmental context.

Some Examples of 21st Century Philosophers Who Have Written About Keynes’s Logical Theory of Probability, but Have Skipped Part II of the A Treatise on Probability, Where Keynes Presented His Interval – Valued Approach to Probability

Nearly one hundred years after Keynes published his A Treatise on Probability in 1921,it appears that practically no philosophers have read Part II of the A Treatise on Probability in either the 20th or 21st centuries. This simply means that no modern day philosopher is in any position to recognize that Keynes’s work on his interval valued approach to imprecise probability in 1907,1908 and 1921 makes him the founder, along with G Boole’s contributions in his 1854 The Laws of Thought ,of the imprecise theory of probability long before Koopman’s work in 1940 or the work of I. J. Good, C. Smith ,or H.E. Kyburg in the early 1960’s.

Biotechnological Processes in the Changing Evolution of Life on the Planet Earth

At the beginning of the 21st century philosophy is increasingly concerned with understanding the relationship of humanity and of the second nature – technosphere created by humans and compared in mass with the remains of the living matter on the planet. The philosophy of social and technological development of the world and the formation of the technosphere allows us to analyze the changing nature of modern natural and biological processes in the biosphere. The climatic factor plays an important role in changing the biosphere, but it is not decisive in the modern growing transformation of life on the Earth. Nowadays the interconnected social and technological transformation of the world and the degradation of the biosphere are in the forefront. This results in changing the biospheric and biological evolution of life for the artificial postbiospheric life without the biosphere as a self-developing system. Scientific and philosophical understanding of evolutionary processes allows us to identify new approaches to the industrial development of the world and their role in maintaining life processes, including such areas as cottages and gardens in urban households. The paper deals with the radical measures which new philosophy is to solve in conjunction with many sciences to overcome the ecobiospheric disaster our planet is facing in the near future, which can lead to the destruction of the biospheric life and its transformation into a global artificial nonliving world.

Xenophilia

Xenophilia STEVEN SHANKMAN We often hear about xenophobia in today’s troubled Western world, about fear of the stranger, fear of the demonized other. But we rarely, if ever, encounter the term, or the inspiring idea of, xenophilia, love of the stranger, hospitality. Rarely, that is, unless we regularly consult the Bible and the two great Homeric epics. What do these foundational works of Western culture teach us about the relation between xenophilia—the gesture of welcoming the potentially dangerous stranger—and what it means to be truly human? Let us begin with an explicit reference to the word xenophilia that appears in an essay by the great and radical 20th -century philosopher on the nature of ethical obligation, Emmanuel Levinas, written in 1959. Here Levinas remarks: “Monotheism [by which Levinas says he means Judaism, Christianity, and Islam] is not an arithmetic of the divine. . . . It is a school of xenophilia and anti-racism [Il est une école de xénophilie et d’antiracisme].”1 The relationship between monotheism, in the Abrahamic religious tradition, and xenophilia is suggested at the beginning of the eighteenth chapter of Genesis, when three strangers appear to Abraham, who runs towards them to offer them food and drink. Who are these three strangers? One of them, it turns out, is God, and the other two are angels, but their identity does not concern Abraham. What he sees are three men and he wants merely to be hospitable towards them, to serve them. At the conclusion of the previous chapter, Abraham, at the age of ninety-nine, was arion 28.2 fall 2020 74 xenophilia circumcised. He is, as you can imagine, now in great pain. The rabbis say that God, knowing that Abraham is such a hospitable person, purposely made the day very hot so as to discourage wayfarers from braving the heat and thus tempting Abraham to exert himself during his early recovery from the trauma of his belated and recent circumcision. I have indicated, in brackets, the verses in which Abraham addresses the stranger(s) in the singular and in the plural, which cannot be discerned in the translation into English: God [the ineffable Tetragrammaton ‫יהוה‬— most often pronounced Adonai today] appeared to him [Abraham] in the plains of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance of the tent in the heat of day. He lifted his eyes and saw: And behold! Three men were standing over him. He saw them and ran toward them from the entrance of the tent, and bowed toward the ground. And he said, “Adonai [meaning ‘My Lord’ or ‘My Lords’], if I find favor in Your [singular form in the Hebrew] eyes now, please pass not away [singular form of the verb] from Your [singular] servant . Let some water be brought and wash your [plural] feet, and recline [plural form of the verb] beneath the tree. I will fetch a morsel of bread that you [plural] may sustain yourselves, then go on [plural form of the verb]—inasmuch as you [plural] have passed your [plural form of the adjective] servant’s way.”2 “God appeared to him [Abraham] in the plains of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance of the tent in the heat of the day. He lifted his eyes and saw: And behold! Three men were standing over him.” Where, exactly, is God in this passage? The rabbis of the Talmud suggest that God did indeed visit Abraham, but that when the three strangers arrived, Abraham asked God to wait (can you believe such audacity?) while he, Abraham, could first meet the needs of the three wayfarers. First things first! From this the Talmud concludes that “Hospitality to wayfarers is greater than receiving the Divine Presence.”3 A beautiful thought! But the verses from Genesis are even more radical than that. We wonder whether the alternation, Steven Shankman 75 in Abraham’s address to the strangers, between his addressing them first in the plural then in the singular and then back to the plural again, does not suggest a response to our question of where God appears in this passage. Could this alternation be suggesting that the way God appears in these verses...

Intercultural philosophy as the era grasped in thought

Intercultural philosophy is regarded as a result of the 20th century philosophy development. The fact that this kind of philosophy is of great im-portance became clear due to the modern geopo-litical changes, primarily the collapse of the co-lonial system and globalization. Intercultural philosophy is shown to have grown out of com-parative philosophy, which went through the three main stages of evolution: 1) it was believed that only Western philosophy should be consid-ered as the “true” one; 2) there were different attempts to create a “synthetic philosophy”; 3) it was finally recognized that non-Western philos-ophies are autonomous and significant. It is argued that intercultural philosophy is not an alternative to philosophical comparativism; ra-ther, it is its new form developed under the cir-cumstances of the challenges of globalism, a kind of philosophical reflection which is not limited to national or civilizational boundaries. At the moment, intercultural philosophy is de-veloping from its manifestation (in the works by J. Ganeri, A. Chakrabarti) to affirmation as an independent trend. There are several ways of the development of intercultural philosophy. The first one implies justifying an intercultural ap-proach in philosophy based on the belief that there are many philosophical traditions and no one can be absolutized. The second way in-volves elimination of “cognitive modesty” (R. Mall) to study philosophical ideas and concepts elaborated in other cultures (H. Lenk, H. Paul). The third way is to recognize the multiplicity of culturally rooted philosophies and to establish an intercultural polylogue, which is helpful for everyone who participates in it. This way may lead to discovering new, previously unknown solutions to universally significant problems.

Problematyczność stosowania metafizyki do pozytywizmu prawniczego na przykładzie tezy o społecznym źródle prawa

The aim of this article is to present a legal positivist social source thesis in the context of classical metaphysical reflection. Author uses the method of analysing the source texts and abstracts theses that can be considered as metaphysical. Metaphysical theses divide into existential and essential. They are expressed directly by an author or possible to reconstruct. Reasoning was based on convenience that universality of metaphysics should be considered temporally. The thesis about the evolution of ways of understanding reality, along with the development of mankind, is one of the cardinal assumptions of positivism in general. Based on this historiosophical rule, August Comte draws further conclusions about a possible modern philosophy for the future. The denial of metaphysics leads to cursory, perhaps unconscious, acceptance of the theses that have already been developed in the history of philosophy. The reflections are essentially focused on the issue of ontological status of society. Its understanding determines the understanding of social facts and seems to have an impact on social source thesis. The main part of the reflection is placed in a historical context. It enables to examine some aspects that are difficult to consider nowadays. One of the conclusions is that metaphysics to which positivism opposes is dominant in 19th century philosophy, but in general only one of many schools of thought. Since there is no specific literature on that matter, author signalize problems considering them generally.

On the Distinction of Constative and Performative Sentences

J. Austin was the first philosopher and linguist who elaborated the performative function of language, which developed into speech act theory, one of the most important theories of early pragmatics. His elaboration of the performative function begins with the distinction of constative and performative sentences. This article reviews how J. Austin’s distinction of constative and performative was formed. It also shows the significance of the distinction for the 20th century philosophy and linguistics.

Latest Developments of Existentialism

In this paper, Pareyson provides an analysis of the existential features of the philosophies of Jaspers and Heidegger, that he considers as the two greatest philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. In Jaspers, Pareyson identifies the idea that truth is both singular and one, meaning that it can be grasped only through a personal interpretation and never in absolute terms. This implies that truth and person are inseparably tied to each other and that existence carries transcendence in itself: just as truth transcends our personal knowledge of it, Being itself transcends our personal existence. Moreover, Pareyson sees Heidegger as the initiator of an existential ontology that poses a fundamental relation between the human being and Being itself; hence, the philosophical discourse on human existence inevitably turns into a discourse on Being. Therefore, Heidegger finally manages to overcome traditional metaphysics and its forgetfulness of the question of Being itself, by giving such question a central role within philosophical reflection. In conclusion, Pareyson maintains that Jaspers and Heidegger are able to make the voice of Being been heard, in contrast with the humanist and nihilist tendencies of twentieth century philosophy.

Dominants, Subdominants, and Recedents: A Formal Analysis of Transformations in the Canonical Representation of 19th Century German Philosophy

The history of philosophy was a persistent interest in 19th century Germany. Ulrich Schneider lists 148 original works in the history of philosophy by 114 authors published from 1810 through 1899. The scale of this historiographic tradition makes it suitable for analysis through digital humanities techniques (“distant reading,” formal analysis, and innovative visualizations). This paper uses that body of publications to show how the canon of the history of German philosophy in the 19th century was formed and how it evolved. In order to uncover patterns in the attention devoted to particular 19th century philosophers, the authors undertook a formal analysis of 77 tables of contents from German textbooks in the history of philosophy. They used the results of their analysis to classify philosophers into three groups with metaphorical labels drawn from ecology: dominant, subdominant, and recedent. In addition to confirming the dominance of the “Big Four” (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel), the analysis provides a more nuanced picture of the period under consideration. For example, during the 1830s and 1840s, opinions about the significance of certain philosophers became highly polarized. In some textbooks Johann Friedrich Herbart was completely ignored, while in others his ideas were explored in more pages than those of Hegel. Kant’s writings attracted increasing attention after 1860. His share of pages increased as the number devoted to most other philosophers was dwindling. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel lose nearly half of their pages and fall closer to the subdominant category that included Herbart, Schleiermacher, and Schopenhauer. Original visualization techniques provide a graphical representation of the changes in the canon of 19th century German philosophy.

Pojęcie ramy w ujęciu filozoficznym – rola czasu i pamięci w ludzkiej egzystencji

In The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner writes: “Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops, does time come to life.” The following words relate to the role of memory frames in human life. They also begin the analysis of the ideas of twentieth and twenty-first century philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Paul Ricoeur and David Farrell Krell. Even though there is a strict reference to the Modernist thinkers, the author goes slightly deeper, reminding earlier concepts of Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and Protagoras. The second part of the article has been devoted to the notions connected with time frames and memory such as experiencing of the passage of time, reminding, forgetting, forgiving as well as postmemory.

Johannes Schefler: Mystical Poetry as a Catalyst of (Post)Modern Thought

This article deals with the history of reception of the German Baroque poet Johannes Scheffler (aka Angelus Silesius, 1624-1677), which served as a significant catalyst (to use the renowned poetological term of T. S. Eliot) on a number of writers and philosophers in the 19th and 20th century. First of all, the analysis is focused on Scheffler’s impact on Jorge Luis Borges who in reading of Scheffler’s mystical epigrams attempted to find the way out of the impasse of modernist subjectivity. Next, the article investigates the reception of the distinguished German poet by three renowned 20th century philosophers: Heidegger, Derrida, and Lacan. It becomes clear that all three have creatively appropriated the verses of Johannes Scheffler, and it has turned out that the mystical paradoxes of his poetry paved the way for the articulation of some typical postmodern concepts of these philosophers. In Heidegger’s case, Scheffler’s verses on the mystical rose helps define the ungroundedness of being. In the case of Derrida, the scope of Schefflers epigrams seems very close to that of the so-called experience of deconstruction, and in case of Lacan, Schefller’s poetry is read as the most efficient meditation on being, which in opposition to un-being (the Real) marks the successful end of the psychoanalytical process.