Contemporary Western Philosophy Research Articles

Perception, Reason, and Intuition in the Development Of Expertise: Reflections on Zhuangzi and Contemporary Western Theory

AbstractIn this paper, Leonard Waks investigates connections between listening and expertise or mastery, contrasting approaches from Eastern and Western philosophy. The first section accounts for listening in the Daoist classic Zhuangzi, a work addressing themes in Chinese philosophy through metaphor and story narratives. In one story a character named “Confucius” advises a student to fast the mind and listen recklessly. The affinity between reckless and what has been called “apophatic” listening is demonstrated by the shared feature of mental emptiness — listening without the imposition of conceptual categories. The second section demonstrates close affinities between the account of listening and expertise or mastery in the Zhuangzi and in the account of expert perception in contemporary Western philosophy and psychology, as exemplified by phenomenologist Hubert Dreyfus.

The Zeitgeisty Erection of Hindu Mythology in Amish Tripathi’s The Shiva Trilogy

The fundamental theme of Amish Tripathi’s writings is spiritual realism. The portrayal of his creations only serves to promote human symbolism toward God. The universe’s morphological alterations are a result of a soul’s link to the universal force. Myths are stories that describe the way of life, habits, and culture of ancient people, which are frequently reflected in the gods they worship. India is well-known around the world for having a rich and diverse cultural legacy. Indian mythology consists of religious and cultural tales that are handed down through the generations with several variations. According to Indian spiritual academics, its suggested meaning is similar to contemporary western philosophy, which holds that there are multiple truths. Amish Tripathi reimagines the entirety of Hindu mythology in order to make it more appropriate for the contemporary era of reasoned decision-making. A mythology is a body of stories or myths concerning a specific person, culture, religion, or any group of people who hold certain beliefs. The majority of people take mythology seriously in terms of their religious beliefs, even when they don’t believe it to be entirely genuine. The goal of this study is to investigate the various aspects of Hindu mythology and philosophy that may be well-suited to leadership-related activities.

Philosophical Reflections on the Art of John Cage's 4 Minutes 33 Seconds

John Cage (1912-1992) was the most direct challenger of traditional music, a composer and musical inventor with considerable achievements in both destruction and reconstruction. He undoubtedly became the representative of the 20th century avant-garde music, and his works brought the people of the world a kind of shock and a kind of thinking. In opposition to traditional European musical art, 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds blurs the boundaries between sound and soundlessness, music creation and music appreciation, creating contemporary musical art that is purely centred on reflection. Because of the peak nature of the presentation of contemporary art, the philosophy of art also extends to the thinking of the entire philosophical community, so is the philosophical aspect of art at this time still called artistic thinking? In fact, it extends to people's thinking about the meaning of the existence of art and what is art. In Zhu Di's book Contemporary Western Philosophy of Art, he proposes that the concept of art is a "floating reference", which has a temporal transfer and presents different entities in different times.

Dark Desires and Consent: A Response to Morgan

In the paper Dark Desires, Seiriol Morgan aims to argue against the claim that universal participant consent is sufficient for the moral permissibility of a sexual act which is largely accepted in contemporary western philosophy. This article examines Morgan's argument against such a claim and improves Morgan's two illustrative cases to better support his claim. It starts by clarifying the meanings of the terms "moral permissibility", "dark desires", and "consent" to make Morgan's argument easier to tackle with. Then, the strong and weak versions of Morgan's claim will be distinguished, and their plausibility will be examined. Finally, it concludes that (i) only the weak version succeeds, and (ii) Morgan succeeds in showing consent to be insufficient for the moral permissibility of any sexual act.

Justification of the right to subsistence in contemporary Western philosophy: challenges and solutions

The article discusses the views of modern Western philosophers on the isuue of socio-economic human rights, including the right to subsistence. The purpose of the work is to answer the question of whether the right to a decent life is morally justified. The work was carried out within the framework of the analytical approach and its inherent methodology. The author identifies several types of arguments expressed in Western literature against the right to a worthy existence. They are 1) actual impossibility of guaranteeing these rights; 2) denial of non-contractual positive obligations that could correspond to this right; 3) problematization of the imperfect nature of positive obligations corresponding to this law. It is shown that these objections in themselves are not sufficient to reject the right to a worthy existence, but they show that at the abstract level this right cannot be justified only in a “negative” sense, that is, as the right to which only the negative duties of others correspond. The author proposes to consider options for solving the problems that gave rise to discussions concerning the right to a dignified existence, outside of human rights discourse. Thus, the moral basis for the fight against poverty and other features of an “unworthy” existence can be formulated by applying to the public sphere (by analogy) the categories of civil law - condiction, tort and contract, as well as taking into account the classical conditions for the onset of legal liability. Moreover, the moral justification for securing some “decent” level of existence is achieved by referring to the general principles of fair distribution of material wealth (regardless of what is considered a “decent existence”). One of these principles is the Rawlsian principle of difference, which does not depend either on the idea of a person as a “moral agent” who requires some kind of minimum (“worthy”) level of well-being, or on understanding of the human rights nature.

Philosophy as a ‘Resisting Identity’?: Taha Abdurrahman, Fethi al-Meskini, and Aziz al-Azmeh in Dialogue on Modernist Arab Philosophy

This study examines the thesis of the contemporary Moroccan philosopher Taha Abdurrahman (b. 1944) concerning the formation of a modernist Arab philosophy that explicitly contrasts with contemporary Western philosophy. Abdurrahman argues that such a philosophy can be the basis for a new Arab philosophical identity that preserves the intellectual autonomy of Arab peoples and resists what he characterizes as undesirable external influences. This article is composed of three sections. It begins by offering a systematic and descriptive presentation of this thesis from Taha Abdurrahman through a close reading of his 2002 book, The Arab Right to Philosophical Difference (al-Ḥaqq al-‘Arabī fī al-Ikhtilāf al-Falsafī). It then offers a critical and dialogical deconstruction of this thesis by placing it in interlocution with similar approaches to identity and the self that appear in Fethi al-Meskini’s (b. 1961) book, Identity and Freedom: Towards New Enlightenments (al-Huwīyya w’al-Ḥurīyya: Naḥwa Anwār Jadīda, 2011), and Aziz al-Azmeh’s (b. 1947) study of Islamic thought as a historical phenomenon, specifically in his book, The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity (2014). Following the discussion of these authors’ approaches to Arab intellectual culture and identity, this article concludes by assessing the validity and plausibility of Abdurrahman’s thesis in light of the works of the other two scholars.

Spinoza in the Light of Classical and Contemporary Western Philosophy

The article concerns the main lines of reception of the philosophical ideas of B. Spinoza. Estimates of the work of this thinker, his role and importance have undergone significant changes in the course of the development of Western European and Russian philosophical thought. It focuses on the study of the transformations occurred in the approach and nature of evaluations of the main philosophical ideas of Spinoza in the Western European philosophical space, primarily in Germany and France. At the same time, we can state that the peak of interest in the philosophy of Spinoza in these national traditions seriously diverges in time. Initially, we can talk about the predominance of interest in Spinoza’s philosophy on the part of German-speaking thinkers. For a long time, Spinoza’s philosophy was characterized as atheistic and, in connection with this, was subjected to fierce criticism. It is the German enlighteners who are credited with reviving interest in Spinoza’s philosophy at a new level. At the same time, the philosophical views of this thinker not only cease to be assessed as atheistic, but are sometimes perceived in the exact opposite way - as imbued with genuine religious faith. F. Schleiermacher can be considered here as a striking example of such an approach to Spinoza’s philosophy. In the future, interest in Spinoza’s philosophy was maintained in the German-speaking philosophical space due to the reception of his ideas by Hegel, Feuerbach, and Neo-Kantians. In French-language philosophy, interest in Spinoza wakes up much later - in the middle-second half of the 20th century, which is associated primarily with such name as Deleuze. However, this “French Renaissance” of Spinoza’s philosophy can be considered as no less significant than the Renaissance of the age of German Enlightenment. It was “French Spinozism” that brought the study of Spinoza’s philosophy to the international level, significantly expanding their conceptual framework.

Logic of Sense: 2021 Version

Logic of sense is presented as a theoretical approach which avoids the “hard problem of consciousness” pitfall. The logic of sense theory objective is to follow the consciousness development “from inside”, as an answer to the question “how can we explain the consciousness and its content on the basis of itself with no dogmatic presupposition”. Nothing is accepted, however evident or complying with common sense it may seem, if not justified from that point of view. The basic categories of the logic of sense are introduced: smysl (sense), smyslopolaganiye (sense positing), tselostnost’ (integrity, wholeness), svyaznost’ (coherence, linkage) and others, and its main theses are argued for. The pure principle of consciousness could not have been disclosed without a close scrutiny of the millennia-old non-Western big cultures which unfold, in the course of their history, the non-Western versions of consciousness, thus testifying to plurality, and not universality, of reason. The philosophy of mind, as well as philosophy on the whole, remained so far limited by the initial set of dogmatically accepted presuppositions which they could not get rid of, erroneously taking them as having no alternative. Hence the importance of an attentive study of big cultures as a precious experience of unfolding the reason alternative to the version which lies at the basis of the philosopher’s native big culture. The main lines of a logic-and-meaning study of the big Arab-Islamic culture are discussed and its results are analyzed. The principal one is the discovery of process logic (P-logic, not to be confused with what is meant by this expression in contemporary Western philosophy) as an alternative to substance logic (S-logic) which lies at the basis of the big European culture. Any of the variety of the logics of sense is first and foremost the logic of predication, i.e., the way of defining the epistemic chain unfolding itself as the technology of the subject-predicate glue-together, which explains the coherence of human consciousness at the traditionally defined levels of sense perception, speech ability and reason. The results of implementing the logic-and-meaning approach in psychology are described. The objectives of further development of the logic-and-meaning project are sketched.

Past Continuous or Present Perfect? Continuity and Change in Contemporary Indian Philosophy

Contemporary Indian philosophy is a distinct genre of philosophy that draws both on classical Indian philosophical sources and on Western materials, old and new. It is comparative philosophy without borders. In this paper, I attempt to show how contemporary Indian philosophy works through five instances from five of its protagonists: Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya (his new interpretation of the old rope-snake parable in his essay “Śaṅkara’s Doctrine of Maya”, 1925); Daya Krishna (I focus on the “moral monadism” that the theory of karma in his reading leads to, drawing on his book Discussion and Debate in Indian Philosophy, 2004); Ramchandra Gandhi (his commentary on the concept of Brahmacharya in correspondence with his grandfather, the Mahatma, in his essay “Brahmacharya”, 1981); Mukund Lath (on identity through—not despite—change, with classical Indian music, Rāga music, as his case-study, in his essay “Identity through Necessary Change”, 2003); and Rajendra Swaroop Bhatnagar (on suffering, in his paper “No Suffering if Human Beings Were Not Sensitive”, 2021). My aim is twofold. First, to introduce five contemporary Indian philosophers; and second, to raise the question of newness and philosophy. Is there anything new in philosophy, or is contemporary philosophy just a footnote—à la Whitehead—to the writings of great thinkers of the past? Is contemporary Indian philosophy, my protagonists included, just a series of footnotes to classical thinkers both in India and Europe? Footnotes to the Upaniṣads, Nāgārjuna, Dharmakīrti and Śaṅkara, as much as (let us not forget colonialism and Macaulay) to Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Hegel? Footnotes can be creative and work almost as a parallel text, interpretive, critical, even subversive. However, my contention is that contemporary Indian philosophy (I leave it to others to plea for contemporary Western philosophy) is not a footnote, it is a text with agency of its own, validity of its own, power of its own. It is wholly and thoroughly a text worth reading. In this paper, I make an attempt to substantiate this claim through the philosophical mosaic I offer, in each instance highlighting both the continuity with classical sources and my protagonists’ courageous transgressions and innovations.

Событие: философия sub specie eventi

The article argues that the philosophy of the twentieth century is characterized by a tran­sition from a view according to which the mind tends to contemplate things sub specie aeterni (Descartes, Spinoza, Hegel) to an understanding that things and the world should be taken sub specie eventi (Bakhtin, Heidegger, Deleuze). Event in its various manifesta­tions becomes the subject of philosophical comprehension. The authors point at two onto­logical characteristics of the phenomenon of an event – an event always happens, i.e. an event cannot be thought outside of time, and an event always appears as the unity of heterogeneous. Distinguishing the concepts of incident and that of event, the authors analyze the problem of the beginning of an event. Based on the ideas of synergetics, the authors argue that an event has no cause, but there are prerequisites – a state of uncertainty and an attractor that organizes the constitution of the event/incident. The authors focus their attention on the problem of the connection between meaning and event that characterizes the events of the world of human existence. It is shown that in the world of human existence a situation of uncertainty is a problematic situation. The solution to a problem situation is an event that is associated with this situation not by causal, but by casual relations, when the singularities of a given situation set the initial conditions for an action and provide real opportunities for its accomplishment. It is important here that the logic of action and the course of thought are governed not by general ideas, but by the premises given here and now. This is how a new version of the identity of “thought and being” declares itself: meaning as an intention and a productive force of the initial condition for constituting an event are identical to the event itself. Being/event is objecti­fied as res gestae, which acts as an organizing force and by this force the being acquires the ability to declare and affirm itself as integrity and organization. The authors sug­gest that the philosophical understanding of an event provides a new way to corelate the two main traditions in contemporary Western philosophy – the “continental” and the “analytic”.

The Problem of the Otherness in Contemporary Western Philosophy

This article reviews the problem of the otherness in contemporary Western philosophy . The peculiarities of the representation of the category of the otherness in the 21st-century anglophone continental philosophy were analyzed. A theoretical base of the research consists of the works by Richard Rorty, Bruno Latour, Richard Kearney, Nancy. Fraser, Dan Zahavi, Chad Kautzer, Eduardo Mendieta, and Slavoj Žižek. Within the frameworks of an Anglophone philosophy, we made a comparison of the 20th-century pragmatist approaches based on the exceptionalism and the exclusion of the Absolute Other from the intersubjective consensus and of the modern neopragmatist tendencies shaped on the principles of the generalized patience and extension of the framing of the subjectivity with the post-territorial regulation. The hermeneutical and phenomenological problems of the otherness typical for continental philosophy were covered with the analysis of the genealogy of the feeling leading to the victimization of the Other, its identification with Me, or its recognition with the preservation of the own identity. The author also analyzes ways to find a social consensus in the conditions of the antagonism between the emancipatory interests of different marginalized groups. Generally, the ways of adequate coexistence, which support the universal solidarity in a situation the global challenges humanity, had been demonstrated. That is why, finding out of a compromise in the analysis of the problem of the Otherness will be achieved with a realization of the following factors: all-affected principle, formed on the basis of the equal agency for all the subjects of communicative action for consensus with the help of a network activism, and a realization of the principles of a diacritical hermeneutics on the basis of the empathy to the Other and the termination of his/her marginalization. For this, it was offered to gain the equal rights for all the living forms for their own modes of existence to avoid antagonism between different social groups and to predict the impact of the obscurantist elites on the mass consciousness.Manuscript received 06.09.2020

Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading, Volume One

Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading, Volume One

Epistemically flawless false beliefs

A starting point for the sort of alethic epistemological approach that dominates both historical and contemporary western philosophy is that epistemic norms, standards, or ideals are to be characterized by appeal to some kind of substantively normative relationship between belief and truth. Accordingly, the alethic epistemologist maintains that false beliefs are necessarily defective, imperfect, or flawed, at least from the epistemic perspective. In this paper, I develop an action-oriented alternative to the alethic approach, an alternative that is inspired by and jives with the kind of thinking that underwrites promising and increasingly popular enactive or embodied research programs in cognitive science. Moreover, I argue that the proponent of an action-oriented epistemological approach ought to deny that falsity, in and of itself, necessarily constitutes a kind of epistemic imperfection in belief. The action-oriented epistemologist ought to embrace the possibility that there are epistemically flawless false beliefs.

Evaluating the Analytic - Continental Divide: Impact on Education in Croatia

Contemporary Western philosophy has been generally perceived as one that encompasses two divergent traditions of philosophical thought: analytic and continental. A number of writers have drawn attention to the difficulty of explaining the differences between them. A small number of authors have even questioned the credibility of the analytic-continental division. In this paper I argue that the gulf between traditions is real and has a negative impact on three elements of education in Croatia: philosophy as an academic subject, students and university professors. Before delving into the aforementioned issue, I briefly specify areas of philosophical inquiry where the gulf is the most evident. I end paper with several suppositions concerning the future path of both traditions, which are mostly based on the idea of cooperation between analytic and continental philosophers as it would profoundly contribute to the advancement of teaching philosophy.

A Review of the Study of James’s Philosophy over the Past Century in China and a Prospect of Future Research Work

William James was a major representative figure for American pragmatism. The study of James’s philosophy and the translation and publication of James’s works, both in China, are closely connected with the spread and study of pragmatic philosophy therein. The spread of Jamesian philosophy in China has gone through three stages: 1) From around the May Fourth Movement in 1919 to the 1940s, pragmatism started its journey in China; James’s thought was introduced to the circles of scholars in China, and received criticism from Chinese scholars at the same time. 2) In the 1950s and 1960s, during the criticism against pragmatism among Chinese scholars, Jamesian philosophy was also fiercely attacked. 3) From the early 1980s to the present, scholars have tried to take the attitude of seeking truth from facts in commenting pragmatism, and attempted to re-examine pragmatism, including James’s philosophy. In carrying forward the academic research on Jamesian philosophy, Chinese scholars should present its landmark achievements in the collation, edition, translation and study of classics concerning Jamesian philosophy, investigate important conceptions in James’s pragmatism, study the clue of development and academic direction of thought therein, analyze and summarize James’s position in pragmatic philosophy, and make clear the position and influence of James’s philosophy both in the history of Western philosophy and in contemporary Western philosophy. Scholars should also do comprehensive multidisciplinary research on the philosophy of value, jurisprudential thought, philosophy of mind, political philosophy and religious philosophy in James’s pragmatism, and meanwhile explore the dynamic relationship between Jamesian and Chinese philosophies from the perspective of comparative philosophy.

Франц Брентано: критика кантовской философии (материалы круглого стола)

On March the 19th 2019 a round table “Franz Brentano: The critic of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy”, dedicated to the publication of book Franz Brentano. “On the future of philosophy: Selected works” (Moscow: Akademicheskij proekt, 2018) was held at the Institute of Philosophy of the RAS. The round table was hosted by the journal “Voprosy filosofii”, Department of Contemporary Western Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of the RAS and Center for Phenomeno­logical Philosophy of the Faculty of Philosophy of the RSUH. The discussion was attended by phenomenologists, historians of philosophy, epistemologists. Their focus was on the following topics: the historical-philosophical concept of F. Brentano and his evaluation of I. Kant’s doctrine as the reference point of the phase extreme decline in philosophy; the problem of criticizing influential concepts; skepticism and science philosophy; judgment or belief: the problem of synthetic a priori judgments; difference between analytical and synthetic; space, time, categories as themes of critical analysis; ethics: the categorical imperative as psychological fiction. The most controversial topics were the philosophical-methodological problems of the unity of social-humanitarian and natural-science knowledge.

Throbbing crowds: Of dancing grannies and acoustic milieus in contemporary China

Drawing from ancient Chinese acoustic thinking and contemporary Western philosophy, this article re-interprets ‘the throbbing crowd’ (the kind of crowd organised by a certain kind of rhythm) once described by Elias Canetti (1963). Through the philosophy of qi that defines things as correlative, changing and responsive, I try to suggest that the acoustic milieu generated by groups like Chinese dancing grannies that emerged in late 1990s when the nationwide movement of laid-off workers took place, should not be reduced to a background sound. Instead, an acoustic milieu is produced by and at the same time produces creative and embodied co-relations, that is, new modalities of being-together.

Kelâm’in Kozmolojik Argümani ve Modern Bilim

Hudus delili (Günümüz batı felsefesinde Kelam’ın kozmolojik kanıtı olarak da bilinir) Tanrı’nın varlığı lehinde geliştirilmiş, evrenin zamanda bir başlangıcı olduğu fikrine dayanan bir delildir. Bazı teistler modern bilimin, özellikle modern kozmoloji ve termodinamiğinin ikinci yasasının argümanın kilit öncülü olan evrenin zamanda bir başlangıcı olduğu iddiasını desteklediğini iddia etmişlerdir. Diğer taraftan bazı ateistler Kuantum Mekaniğinin parçacıkların nedensiz olarak yaratılabileceğini gösterdiğini, bunun da başlangıcı olan her şeyin bir nedeni olduğunu ifade eden Hudus delilinin nedensellik öncülünü yanlışladığını iddia etmişlerdir. Bu makaledeki amacımız bu iddiaları değerlendirip, modern bilimin Müslüman kelamcılar tarafından geliştirilen bu delil hakkında ne söylediğini belirlemektir.

Hay’s Buddhist philosophy of gestural language

ABSTRACTThe central role of gestural language in Buddhism is widely acknowledged, as in the story of the Buddha pointing at the moon, the point being the student’s seeing beyond the finger (as object) to its gesture (as act). Gesture’s role in dance is similarly central, as noted by scholars in the emerging interdisciplinary field of dance studies. Unsurprisingly, then, the intersection of these two fields is well-populated, including the formal gestures (called “mudras”) Buddhism inherited from classical Indian dance, and the masked dance of the Mani Rimdu Festival. In this investigation, I will articulate a new Buddhist philosophy of gestural language, based on a new conception of emptiness that I locate in the work of contemporary U.S. choreographer Deborah Hay, as influenced by Nāgārjuna and Zen. And this, finally, suggests that contemporary Western philosophy should incorporate this compassion as a normative dimension to its own theorizing and practice.

Madhyamaka and Modern Western Philosophy

In the past the study of Asian philosophical traditions has often been approached by asking how the theories developed within these nonWestern cultures would help us to solve problems in contemporary Western philosophy. The present account, which summarizes results of a research project funded by the John Templeton foundation in 2015, attempts to reverse this way of studying Asian philosophy by investigating which theories, approaches and models from contemporary Western philosophy can be used to support, analyse, refine and advance insights into key questions discussed by Indian Buddhist Madhyamaka. Our discussion concentrates on six key philosophical areas that can contribute in important ways to the analysis and development of Madhyamaka thought: metaphysics, logic, semantics, cognitive science, philosophy of science, and ethics.