Form Of Philosophy Research Articles

Contradiction Is Not Disappointing: An Interview with Michael Hardt

Michael Hardt is a theorist whose work examines philosophical and material forms of domination and forces of liberation. In the internationally acclaimed Empire books – Empire (2000), Multitude (20...

REORIENTASI PENDIDIKAN ISLAM DI ERA REVOLUSI INDUSTRI 4.0

The implementation of Islamic education is still oriented towards the romanticism of the past rather than looking at the future. The main challenges in the industrial era 4.0 include the issue of the quality of teaching resources. Therefore this study wants to answer; the orientation of the educational paradigm as an epistemological framework which underlies the set of ideas or concepts in the implementation of education as well as the actualization and evaluation of education. The effort to transform Islamic education uses an integrated approach between the reasoning of Bayani, Burhani, and Irfani. The hope, the integrated paradigm produces a scientific structure that emphasizes the creation of know-why and know-how competencies, rather than know-what. In this case it is a philosophical form of Islamic education in its axiological and epistemological aspects, so that professional Islamic education can give birth to a generation of knowledgeable knowledge, mastering technology in addition to holding fast to the religion of God.

Darkenfloxx™ for Two: Kantian Morality and the Presentations of Suicide in George Saunders'sTenth of Decemberand David Foster Wallace's “Good Old Neon”

AbstractGeorge Saunders and David Foster Wallace are two American prose writers who rose to prominence in the late twentieth century. This article reads their short stories alongside the formal philosophy of Immanuel Kant, an eighteenth-century German philosopher who argues that rationality is the source of morality. Fictional discourse informs, invigorates and deepens Kant's philosophical theories. The dialogue between Kant's universal moral laws and the particularized aesthetic treatment of existence in Saunders's Tenth of December and Wallace's “Good Old Neon” illuminates our understanding of suicide and self-worth. The short stories explore suicide as the occasion of self-discovery and autonomy and collectively establish an ethical model of human relations where the individual's value is not self-inherent as Kant argues, but embedded within societal claims.

Proust’s Natural History Museum

Abstract This essay takes the last pages of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time at its word: at the moment the narrator achieves a definitive conception of the work he intends to write, he sees society composed, not of people of flesh and blood, but of monsters fit for a museum of natural history. As the novel culminates in images and concepts that are essentially nonhuman, inhuman, or posthuman in character, it demonstrates an exacting knowledge of what the present is only now beginning to realize: after two world wars and humanity’s recent entry into what is called the age of the Anthropocene, certain fundamental relations (between subject and object, between nature and history, between past, present, and future) must be rethought to account for both the eclipse of the human as well as nature’s ultimate survival. This essay seeks to develop a philosophical form that would approximate the novel’s discovery of this posthuman natural history.

The invention of human nature: the intention and reception of Pufendorf’s entia moralia doctrine

ABSTRACTIn treating human nature as a ‘moral entity’, imposed by God for reasons into which man could have no direct insight, Samuel Pufendorf reconfigured the architecture of natural law thought in a fundamental way. For this meant that rather than deducing norms from a nature in which they had been embedded by God and could be discerned by self-reflective reason, man had to derive them by observing the requirements of the exigent condition in which he happened to find himself; and it further meant that such observation would be gathered via erudite citation of humanist authorities, rather than from philosophical reflection or introspection. As a result of this reconstruction, Pufendorfian natural law was opened to the normative structure of historically existing juridical-constitutional orders, for which it supplied both a propaedeutic and an abstract rationale. At the same time, however, theological and philosophical forms of natural law, based on normative moral anthropologies, continued unabated, this giving rise to a partitioning of the field into an introspective philosophy of law, and an observational legal humanism.

Konstruksi Teori Pendidikan Berbasis Filsafat Jawa Kuno

This research aims to compile the philosophical formulation and construction of educational theory based on the ancient Javanese philosophy book, Sang Hyang Tatwa Jnana and Sang Hyang Nawa Ruci. To achieve these research objectives, carried out by studying and compiling philosophical formulations and educational theories that originate from ancient Javanese philosophy. This research uses document analysis method. The documents used are the books of Sang Hyang Tatwajnana and Sang Hyang Nawa Ruci, which were compiled and reinterpreted by Damar Shashangka in his book entitled Ancient Javanese Science. Ancient Javanese Theory of Education can be formulated as follows: (1) the general purpose of education is to release egoism, greed, and hatred, (2) Students have potential abilities derived from experiences gained from previous births (reincarnations), (3) Contents education is divided into two, namely soft skills and hard skills. Soft skill is learning related to awareness, perception and affective while hard skills are related to cognitive and psychomotor abilities to support the fulfillment of life needs, (4) The ideal teacher in general is a person who has reached maturity marked by Satva character (stable and calm), ( 5) Learning strategies based on the use of meditation to improve concentration of learning, (6) There are 5 dimensions that must be developed in the educational process namely awareness, perception, cognitive, affective and psychomotor.

Small Reviews (About the Event of Thought and the Crisis of Subject)

The following text is a response to the publication of the journal in the rubric “Philosophy and history of science”. This text is called “Small Reviews”. Why? First of all, because the author has not set the task of a comprehensive analysis of publications. The text focuses on the pedagogical pragmatics of the peer-reviewed articles. In D.G. Ryndin’s article the author was attracted by that part, where the pedagogical practice of M.K. Mamardashvili was analyzed. Assessing the article of D.G. Ryndin as a whole positively, the reviewer believes that the author failed to convincingly show the poetics of philosophical speech and the fundamental relationship between the content and form of philosophizing and adduces her arguments for such an assessment. In the article devoted to the epistemological crisis of the subject, the reviewer has found many sources for pedagogical reflection and formulated them in the form of several provisions that should obviously be guided by each teacher. The reviewer believes that if the authors gave due consideration to the pedagogical theory and pedagogical characteristics of the subject, they would have enriched the their ideas about the crisis of education, its causes and consequences.

Концептуальный фильм как форма философствования (экзистенциальная проблематика фильмов В. Вендерса)

Концептуальный фильм как форма философствования (экзистенциальная проблематика фильмов В. Вендерса)

Forms and Figures of the Sensitive: The Question of Science and Technology

Figure is the idea one has of the world, whereas form is the totality of determinations, it is the essence in its phenomenal manifestation. Human knowledge takes three forms, that is, ordinary, scientific and philosophical. In the ordinary form men can have knowledge without recourse to particular wits; in scientific form knowledge is organized and disciplined and seeks to establish constant relations between phenomena, in the last instance, in the philosophical form knowledge has the characteristic of offering ultimate explanations to all phenomena. The split between science and philosophy that began in the seventeenth century with Descartes's dissociation between the thinking/self, the ego cogitans, and the material thing, the extended Res, creates a tragic problem in science: science is not known, does not have the self-reflective ability. This drama also concerns philosophy, which, no longer being empirically nourished, suffered the agony of the philosophy of nature and the failure of the philosophy of life; There was as much extralucidity in Husserl when he diagnosed the crisis of scientific knowledge as metaphysical delusion, stratospheric evasion in the idea of transcendental ego. This study is articulated in three points 1) figures and forms of sensitive2) science, technique and technology and 3) Cultural meaning of technologies.

Человеческая идентичность в диалоге Платона «Алкивиад I» (к вопросу об антропологической проблематике в древнегреческой философии)

The article is devoted to Plato’s Alcibiades I and explores its main question: what is your proper self? The author pays special attention to the concept of “ayto to ayto”, which he takes to mean “selfhood”. This concept is analyzed as the first fundamental philosophical form of understanding of human identity, which Plato viewed as a soul. Plato fundamentally distinguishes essence of a person (ayto to ayto) from things that belong to a person, the attributes of human being (such as his body and material property). The author explores the Platonic understanding of human identity in the context of ancient ontology and anthropology, which includes an analysis of the relationship of a single person and universal being, authentic and inauthentic Ego, the soul (mind) and the body, the significance of “care about self” (epimeilea heautou) and “cognition of self” (gnothi seautou), etc. The concept of Plato represents the first experience of comprehending the human identity ("ayto to ayto" as soul) which appears as impersonal subject and media Being, but realized in perspective of self-correlation "care of self" and "cognition of self" by particular man.

Humanity and Humanitarianism: An Ambiguous Connection

The article discusses the relationship between the concepts of humanitarianism and humanity, which the author dissociates from each other, also separating them from the concept of humanism. The author believes that these concepts are often confused, they form a “semantic cloud,” intuitively comprehended as integrity and referring us to the image of man as the center of the world and the subject matter of discussion in ethics, aesthetics, psychology as well as philosophy and other “free arts.” However, these concepts need to be distinguished. Humanism represents a conceptual theoretical setting for considering a person as a free, independent and active being, while, in the author’s opinion, humanitarianism is a literary (philosophical and artistic) form of statements about a person. At the same time, humanity is meant as a characteristic of behavior and attitudes that motivate this behavior, such as the motives of kindness, philanthropy, benevolence. The article reveals the main features of humanitarianism and also shows that humanitarian texts are not always texts originating from attitudes of humanity and pursuing humanity. Literary reflection on the subject of a man does not necessarily need kindness and benevolence. The article provides examples of both the coincidence of humanitarianism and humanity and their divergence. The author draws attention to the existence of humanitarian but not humane texts, some of which cannot be attributed as philanthropic and other ones – as optimistic. The author considers it necessary not to confuse closely related concepts, denoting different aspects of human life and culture.

The Status of Saying: Witness against Rhetoric in Levinas’s Philosophy

In regard to rhetoric, Emmanuel Levinas stands against its violence. In spite of the rhetoric, he justifies the notion of discourse in Totality and Infinity in order to prove the possibility of the ethical relationship between the Same and the Other. In later works, he also criticizes the ontological language, which is used in the tradition of occidental philosophy. He explores a third way and proposes the notion of Saying, opposed to Said, as ethical language, witness in Otherwise than Being. However, there is a paradoxical structure of language. Although the Saying precedes the Said, the system of language and even the ontological language, it has to be reduced to this latter when it is expressed as philosophical form. The present study situates what is at stake in the criticism of rhetoric and ontological language by Levinas and examines the notion of witness as opposed to these forms of language. Witness is a concrete form of ethical language that consists in “for the other” of the ultimate passivity of the subjectivity. Therefore, the Saying is possible only as witness where the subject is exposed to “a calling into question” by the Other.

Restoring the African origins of philosophy

The standard bias is that philosophy originated in Miletus, in the Greek province of Ionia in Asia Minor. The bias also upholds Thales, a citizen of Miletus to be the first human ever to engage in formal philosophy. The creed of the bias is that the blessings of philosophy spread to the rest of the world from this salvific Greek city. The world owe it to the ingenuity of the Greeks, the appearance of philosophy and science as formal enterprises of learning. This is the “truth”, at least according to mainstream Western literature. Abundance of documentary evidence stating otherwise did not matter. It did not matter also that Thales himself travelled to Egypt and spent many years there, studying philosophy. It did not matter also, that Thales merely reechoed in Ionia, the teachings he received from the school he attended in Egypt. But facts are sacred; biases are optional. Philosophy, indeed had been formally taught in Egypt for thousands of years before Thales ever travelled to Egypt. Literature abounds to that effect. However, the Greeks played a pivotal role in the spread of philosophy to the rest of Europe. The Greeks were the first European nation to philosophize. But that did not amount to the origin of philosophy. It was an epoch in the spread and popularization of philosophy. The fall of Egypt to the invading armies of Alexander the Great, the edits of emperors Theodosius and Justinian of the Roman empire, the invasion of Islam, the slave trade, the experience of colonialism and the subsequent racism changed all that. Africa came to be denigrated as the “Dark Continent”, and as such was deemed incapable of culture and intellectual advancement. This bias significantly influenced, and has arguably continued to colour Western discourse on African themes, covertly and overtly. African intellectuals and researchers all over the world, owe it to posterity, the duty to render the truth about the origins of philosophy. This research relies solely on library research in unearthing oft neglected classical documents that point abundantly to the African origin of philosophy.

Enchanted nature, dissected nature: the case of Galen's anatomical theology.

Through the historical portrait of Galen, I argue that even an enchanted nature does not prevent the performance of violence against nature. Galen (129-c.216 CE), the great physician-philosopher of antiquity, is best known for his systematization and innovation of the Hippocratic medical tradition, whose thought was the reigning medical orthodoxy from the medieval period into the Renaissance. His works on anatomy were the standard that Vesalius' works on anatomy overturned. What is less known about Galen's study of anatomy, however, is its philosophical and theological edge. In this paper, I show that it is precisely because nature is enchanted that Galen undertakes the grisly practices of anatomical dissection and vivisection, which entail violence against nature. First, I illustrate the violent character of Galen's anatomical experiments. Second, I elucidate Galen's anatomical methodology as a form of philosophizing and theologizing with a scalpel. Third, I explicate the importance of the demonstration of divine teleology that anatomical dissection reveals. Fourth, I sketch how anatomical dissection as a way of knowing nature and God becomes a kind of anatomical, liturgical theology. I conclude that, at least for Galen, an enchanted nature is not in itself exempt from violence.

Religious Pluralism within the Limits of Thought

There is an aporia to finitude: if I am limited as a finite being, I cannot know what the limits of my finitude are, because if I knew what those limits are, then I would have transcended them. I refer to this aporia as the "hard problem of finitude," interpreted through Graham Priest's work on inclosure paradoxes. Here I offer an interpretation of François Laruelle's theory of the Philosophical Decision in terms of his attempt to resolve this aporia through his suspension of standard philosophy's form of ontological dualism. Next, I apply non-standard philosophy to the problem of religious pluralism, presenting a novel theory of "standard religion" and the "Hierophanic Decision" through a non-standard reading of Mircea Eliade's philosophy of religion, and end by pointing towards what a consistently performative and finite form of religious pluralism might look like from within the "democracy-of-thought," here rendered as the "parliament of religions."

Serendipitous Insights and Kairos Playfulness

Phenomenology, peekaboo, and play are notions that may not tempt the reader to take a paper very seriously. Phenomenology is a philosophical form of qualitative research that is guided more often by the fortuitous serendipity of contemplative insights than by the rationality of reproducible social science procedures. Peekaboo is an infant game of the eyes that hardly seems worth addressing in a self-respectful research journal, and the topic of play is equally suspect to scientists for whom the cheerful idleness of play is the opposite of the seriousness and purposiveness of work or labor. However, here I will propose that (a) peekaboo may give us inceptual insights into the phenomenon of eye contact; (b) idle play is not just a counter concept of seriousness and work, but a phenomenon in its own right; (3) phenomenology is a serendipitous form of research that is philosophic and may give us compelling insights into the lived meanings of quotidian experiences in our lives, and (d) the mythological figure of Kairos speaks to the enigma of our humanness and provides an understanding of time as the discontinuous instant of the now and of the phenomenological method as intuitive grasping of meaning. Phenomenological writing is rarely easy and yet it can be highly satisfying in its results. I aim to show that meaningful insights are gained through a patient and attentively alert surrender to Kairos time and serendipitous moments.

Spatial phenomena in material places. Reflections on sensory substitution, shape perception, and the external nature of the senses

From the outside, our senses are spatially integrated in our body in manifestly different ways. This paper starts from the suggestion that the philosophical formulation of the problem of spatial perception, as it flows from the modern opposition of mind and world, is partly responsible for the fact that philosophers have often explicitly disregarded the spatial nature of the senses themselves. An indirect consequence is that much philosophical work focuses on how the senses can – or cannot – perceive the same spatial features of objects in the same way, while disregarding the massive differences in performance among the senses. This paper explores the ways in which the spatial integration of our senses determines what each of our senses excels in, and hence what they contribute to our spatial relation to a physical environment. By juxtaposing descriptive analyses of a variety of selected cases, the paper gives priority to how various aspects of the world appear to us in order to obtain insight into the meaning of spatiality for different senses.

Roman Ingarden’s “The Logical Attempt at a New Formulation of Philosophy: A Critical Remark”

Translated by Bernard Linsky
 This is the first English translation of Roman Ingarden’s paper presented at the 8th World Congress of Philosophy held in Prague in 1934: “Der Logistische Versuch einer Neugestaltung der Philosophie: Eine Kritische Bemerkung”, translated here as “The Logical Attempt at a New Formulation of Philosophy: A Critical Remark”. Also translated here are brief discussions by Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath. These essays were published in the original German in the Proceedings of the Congress in 1936. This statement of Ingarden’s criticisms of the doctrines of the Vienna Circle has been mentioned in print, but his views have not been discussed, or indeed accurately reported to date.

The Resistant Interlocutor

Dialogue, as a philosophical form, enables the exploration of the conditions, limits, and consequences of understanding arguments. Two philosophers who undertook to write dialogues—Plato and Heidegger—feature moments in philosophical conversation in which understanding, on its own, fails to convince an interlocutor of an argument. In this article, I examine the philosophical stakes of the collisions which unfold in Plato’s Gorgias, between Socrates and Callicles, and in Heidegger’s “Triadic Conversation,” between the Guide and the Scientist. Plato’s Socrates is ostensibly unsuccessful in persuading Callicles to adopt his position while Heidegger’s Guide is able to support the Scientist in learning a new way of thinking. I argue that it is Heidegger’s attention to feeling as a philosophically significant phenomenon which can overcome trans-rational resistance which may persist even after truth has been determined.

What Is the Proper Content of a Course in Professional Ethics?

What is the proper content of a course in professional ethics, such as business ethics, engineering ethics, or medical ethics? Though courses in professional ethics have been present in colleges and universities for decades, the question remains largely unsettled, even among philosophers. This state of affairs helps to sustain and even exacerbate public misconceptions about ethics and professional ethical training in higher education. I argue that the proper content of such courses remains a potential source of confusion because the term ‘ethics’ is ambiguous between philosophical and nonphilosophical forms of normative inquiry into behavior, where the former involves broad, context-sensitive reflection on moral obligation, and the latter involves the narrower analysis and codification of behavioral norms with less sensitivity to context. Failure to distinguish between these two senses of ethics can result in conflicting conceptions of and expectations for training and courses in professional ethics. I sketch some of the specific problems generated by the ambiguity. I conclude by proposing an initial step toward a solution, one which focuses on making more explicit the distinction between courses that aim to teach professional policy and “best practices” and those that encourage genuine philosophical inquiry into morality and the good life.