Philosophical Origins Research Articles

1796년 워싱턴 고별사의 사상적 기원

1796년 워싱턴 고별사의 사상적 기원

근대 일본 가계부의 사회사 : 하니 모토코(羽仁もと子: 1873∼1957)의 가계부와 중류가정의 생활

In this article, I identified the “household ledger” in Japan as a case to show an aspect of modern Japanese society, and more specifically as a historical product for the living of newly emerging middle-class in modern Japanese city. In other words, a household ledger has appeared for “housewives” of middle-class families who take responsibility of both livelihood and child-care in place of husbands who work outside as salary men.BR In particular, I paid attention to the household ledger of Hani Motoko, a famous activist for women’s lives. She invented a household ledger for housewives who solely depended their households on the income of city salary men (under the anxiety of sudden unemployment without asset) around the time when household bookkeeping had incorporated into female education as more women started to take charge of their livelihood in modern Japan. Motoko’s household ledger reflected her original philosophy and style. Instead of simply recording revenues and expenditures in chronological order, her household ledger was designed to organize an annual “budget” by items based on the statistics of previous years and allowed users to check their balance frequently after spending by subdividing the budget monthly and daily. Thus, it assisted housewives to hold their expenditures below budget.BR In short, Motoko’s household ledger was not only a record of numerical figures but also a product, which reflected her philosophy as a Christian and ways of “ideal living” that she anticipated from middle-class families in modern Japan. Moreover, a household ledger is also a significant historical record, which connotes their desirable philosophy of living and thus allows comprehensive understandings of the reality of modern Japanese family life.

It Ain't What You Do (But the Way That You Do It): Will Safety II Transform the Way We Do Patient Safety? Comment on "False Dawns and New Horizons in Patient Safety Research and Practice".

Mannion and Braithwaite outline a new paradigm for studying and improving patient safety – Safety II. In this response, I argue that Safety I should not be dismissed simply because the safety management strategies that are developed and enacted in the name of Safety I are not always true to the original philosophy of ‘systems thinking.’

Konserwatywna obrona nierówności i krytyka politycznych konsekwencji idei braterstwa w myśli politycznej Jamesa Fitzjamesa Stephena

In his paper, the author analyses some premises of liberal concept of equality and its philosophical origins. He attempted to show affinities and differences between liberal and conservative approaches to legal equality. He argues that economic inequality is compatible with political and legal liberties within conservative political philosophy. Victorian lawyer James Fitzjames Stephen proved that fraternity is an ambiguous ideal conceived from utilitarian perspective mainly because that it would be political naïvete to expect love from our citizens instead of justice and respect.

Філософсько-педагогічні витоки сучасних ідей здоров’ятворення в педагогічній теорії та практиці

Філософсько-педагогічні витоки сучасних ідей здоров’ятворення в педагогічній теорії та практиці

Cultural Humility: An Open Door for Planners to Locate Themselves and Decolonize Planning Theory, Education, and Practice

Cultural humility can help planning faculty, students, and practitioners commit to ongoing self-reflection and critique of their social, cultural, racial, gendered, and other identities in an effort to identify how they are implicated in inequity, especially in relation to working in communities of color. While cultural competence has become an increasingly popular way to encourage more equitable relationships between professionals and communities, the author suggests that the colonial underpinnings of its logic make it not only less desirable than cultural humility but also a potential facilitator of inequity in planning work. Drawing from her experience as a planning theorist and faculty member, the author shows how the philosophical origins of Western colonial thinking have influenced planning. She also outlines concrete ways journal editors can relinquish their status as experts and gatekeepers of accepted knowledge, thereby decolonizing planning theory and the canon more generally. Finally, by describing two reflection activities—“What?/So What?/Now What?” and “Locating Oneself”—the author provides tools that planning educators can use to guide and reinforce reflection on students’ social, cultural, gendered, and racial identities, and to highlight injustices committed by planners. By injecting cultural humility, as opposed to cultural competency, into planning theory literature, and education, planning practice could be transformed, preventing the often-destructive history of planning practices in communities of color from being repeated.

„Czysta widzialność” w estetyce formalnej Konrada Fiedlera

Nowadays still not well known, Konrad Fiedler was an extremely original philosopher of art and an inspiring follower of Kant. He created a theory of art’s autonomy and his pioneering thought contributed not only to the formalist theory of art but also and foremost to creating an epistemology that later became a foundation of theories of art stressing the uniqueness of seeing and raising the status of visual representations. The artistic way of seeing, according to him, undiscloses the principles of how the world emerges from nothingness of chaotic sensations – it is the way of seeing that presents „pure visibility”. According to Fiedler, this way of seeing is the basis of each true artistic creative act.

Monism and Meliorism

In 1887 the Open Court Publishing Company had its founding in a philosophy of monism. The company’s proprietor Edward C. Hegeler began the enterprise in an effort to promote his personal philosophic, religious, and moral ideas. He believed that these ideas could be conciliated with the growing scientific trends of the late nineteenth century, and that monism was the intellectual framework for doing so. Paul Carus, the editor of the journals The Open Court and The Monist, joined Hegeler as an intellectual ally in this regard. For thirty years he openly defended the doctrines of monism in countless articles and books, successfully grounding the Open Court on this philosophy. This paper uncovers the historical development of the philosophical origin of the Open Court as it began with Hegeler’s personal religious motives, his ideological tension with the original editor Benjamin Underwood, and his embrace of the monistic writings of Paul Carus. It also examines Hegeler’s and Carus’s publications and personal letters from the 1880s and 1890s in order to determine the fundamental doctrines of their unique sense of monism. In Carus’s writings in particular is proposed a monism of causality that is compatible with a deterministic worldview and a unitary conception of the sciences. Also, both Carus and Hegeler propose a monistic ethics of meliorism that conceives the diverse periods of human history to be evolving toward the one final end of the moral improvement of humankind. While these are the positive doctrines that they accept, they further reject the antitheses of philosophical dualism and irreligious attitude of agnosticism of all varieties.

Radicalising philosophy of education—The case of Jean-Francois Lyotard

The origins of philosophy of education as a discipline are relatively late, and can be traced in the Anglo-American academic world from the 1960s and a specific emphasis on conceptual problems deriving from the analytical tradition of philosophy. In more recent years, however, there has been a notable ‘Continentalist’ turn in the discipline, leading to a re-evaluation of key texts and philosophers from the French and German traditions and their relation to the discourse of education. One paradigmatic example here is the work of the French postmodernist thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard. In this essay, I explore how Lyotard’s powerful critique of education in his early work, especially with regard to his influence on the May ‘68 events at Nanterre University, can be seen as crucially important, now again, to a current crisis in educational philosophy in the Western world. Moreover, Lyotard’s post-’68 work, with his paradigmatic The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge as especially important, can be seen as providing a very challenging riposte to both ‘managerialist’ and instrumentalist philosophies on the one side but also to overly simplistic ‘liberatory’ educational critiques on the other side.

Hate Speech on Social Media

This essay expounds on Raphael Cohen-Almagor’s recent book, Confronting the Internet’s Dark Side, Moral and Social Responsibility on the Free Highway, and advocates placing narrow limitations on hate speech posted to social media websites. The Internet is a limitless platform for information and data sharing. It is, in addition, however, a low-cost, high-speed dissemination mechanism that facilitates the spreading of hate speech including violent and virtual threats. Indictment and prosecution for social media posts that transgress from opinion to inciteful hate speech are appropriate in limited circumstances. This article uses various real-world examples to explore when limitations on Internet-based hate speech are appropriate. In October 2015, twenty thousand Israelis joined a civil lawsuit filed against Facebook in the Supreme Court for the State of New York. Led by the civil rights organization, Shurat HaDin, the suit alleges Facebook allows Palestinian extremists to openly recruit and train terrorists to plan violent attacks calling for the murder of Israeli Jews through their Facebook pages. The suit raises important questions, amongst them: When should the government initiate similar suits to impose criminal sanctions for targeted hate speech posted to Facebook? What constitute effective restrictions on social media that also balance society’s need for robust dialogue and free communication, subject to limitations reflecting a need for order and respect among people? Our essay progresses in four stages. First, we examine philosophical origins of free speech and the historical foundations of free speech in the United States. Second, we provide an overview of American free speech jurisprudence. Third, we address particular jurisprudence that provides a framework for imposing limitations on free speech in the context of social media. American history and jurisprudence embrace free speech as a grounding principle of democracy, yet simultaneously subject speech to limitations. Finally, through a comparative exploration of real-world examples, we address the narrow instance when limitations on inciteful and targeted hate speech are appropriate.

“Total and Radical Liberation”: The Religious and Philosophical Background of Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s Revolutionary Ideas

The article explores the religious and philosophical origins of Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s ideas of “honesty with oneself,” “omnilateral liberation,” and “concordism.” Two treatises, Vidrodzhennia natsii (Rebirth of a Nation, 1919–1920) and Konkordyzm. Systema buduvannia shchastia (Concordism. A System of Building Happiness, 1938–1945), illustrate the development of Vynnychenko’s worldview. In the first work, social revolution was considered as the answer to human problems, while, in the second, such a solution was found in becoming one with the universe. Despite his negative attitude towards religion, Volodymyr Vynnychenko actively used religious images and patterns in his writings. For instance, criticizing Christianity for its dogmatism, he nevertheless created his codex of thirteen rules of concordism, which had to harmonize the unbalanced forces of mankind with the universe. In this context, particular attention is paid to the significant influence of pagan concepts on Vynnychenko’s thinking.

The philosophical origins of vegetarianism. Greek Philosophers and Animal World

Coeval philosophical texts provide no information about the extent to which the Ancient World practiced vegetarianism or about its concrete aspects. However, they offer a rich array of the arguments used to both justify and promote it. The present paper will focus on the four main philosophical arguments in favor of vegetarianism. These arguments were proposed and revised by various authors. The four arguments that will be studied are: the ascetic-religious one, mainly used by the Orphic tradition and then taken up by various authors, especially the Pythagoreans; the one based on the biopsychological affinity of all living beings, and coherently promoted by Theophrastus; the one based on the dignity and value of the animal world, widely developed especially by Plutarch; and finally the one, central to Porphyry’s treatise, that relates abstinence from meat to the need of the soul to elevate itself to the divine and be purified of any element linking it to the body.

Crossing the divide: an integrated framework of the commons

The idea of the commons is a long-standing concept referring to anything that are held in common, ranging from tangible resources to intangible cultures, as well as the institutional welfare, and it concerns both inter-generational sustainability and intra-generational equity. However, recent discussions tend to restrict the concept of the commons to the physical resources, separating intangible cultures and institutional welfare as external settings. Indeed, commonly shared natural resources, institutional public goods and cultural sentiments reinforce each other by constructing the very meaning of the commons as something shared by all. This paper explores this important subject from a philosophical and theoretical perspective; searches for the commons from its philosophical origins; and investigates the concept of the commons, respectively, in three schools: the school of tangible commons of physical resources, the school of institutional commons of welfare, security and public goods, and the school of intangible commons of culture, identity and social capital. The paper provides an integrated framework to incorporate all the commons for analysing specific case, without externalizing any as exogenous factor. Nevertheless, a study of human behaviour requires holistic understanding of people, nature and the culture under specific sociocultural settings.

The Semiotics of Spider Diagrams

Spider diagrams are based on Euler and Venn/Peirce diagrams, forming a system which is as expressive as monadic first order logic with equality. Rather than being primarily intended for logicians, spider diagrams were developed at the end of the 1990s in the context of visual modelling and software specification. We examine the original goals of the designers, the ways in which the notation has evolved and its connection with the philosophical origins of the logical diagrams of Euler, Venn and Peirce on which spider diagrams are based. Using Peirce’s concepts and classification of signs, we analyse the ways in which different sign types are exploited in the notation. Our hope is that this analysis may be of interest beyond those readers particularly interested in spider diagrams, and act as a case study in deconstructing a simple visual logic. Along the way, we discuss the need for a deeper semiotic engagement in visual modelling.

Becoming Mountain

Like the concept of the assemblage, the body without organs is much written about, but unlike the assemblage there are no specific schools of thought associated with the body without organs, much less any agreed definitions. As such, it tends to be used in a very vague manner, with most accounts of it ignoring its practical dimension and instead focusing on its aesthetic (Artaud) and philosophical (Spinoza) origins. However, Deleuze quite explicitly positions the assemblage as a contribution to an understanding of behaviour, so the purely philosophical accounts of the body without organs that give no account of how it can be used analytically are not helpful in my view. I demonstrate that the practical conception of the body without organs is an effective way of understanding the concept. I use the example of George Mallory’s attempt to climb Everest to illustrate this point. I argue that if we focus only on the symbolic attainment of being the first person to climb the world’s tallest mountain and consign the actual act of climbing to the realm of mere entry price, then we effectively destroy the assemblage by rendering it teleological. Now, one might think that this means one should balance the equation by focusing on the bodily dimension of the climb, and certainly that is the direction we need to take, but to do that we need to conceive of a space where that physical dimension can be registered in something other than purely biological terms. If, as Spinoza and after him Deleuze have argued, we do not know what a body can do, it is because we do not have the conceptual means of capturing and expressing its capabilities. We can record its achievements, but we cannot map its capabilities because the body seems always to be capable of doing more than anyone thought possible. Until 1953 when Hillary and Norgay reached the peak of Everest climbing Everest was generally regarded as impossible. A view that was reinforced by the dozen or so failed attempts, not to mention the many deaths occasioned by those attempts, that preceded Hillary and Norgay’ success. This is why Mallory’s insouciance in 1923 was so captivating. His answer ‘because it’s there’ shrugged off the one thing that was standing in the way of the conquest of the peak, the conviction that it was impossible. It also explains why his answer passed into history.

How to Cure Narrativism with Rational Evaluation

Over the past years, narrativism has ceased to be the dominant research program in the philosophy of history and several authors have started to develop new research agendas. In his recent book, Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen presents an original postnarrativist philosophy of history as an attempt to surpass narrativism. Although he adopts what he calls the narrativist insight, he tries to avoid the problems of narrativism by focusing on epistemic questions. He is convinced that the historical enterprise is rational and also that historical works contain informal arguments which should be evaluated by rational standards. His postnarrativism is an ambitious project deserving close attention. Nevertheless, I try to show that his innovative approach shares some common features with a fairly conventional understanding of history. In conclusion I argue that it would be preferable to rethink some of the epistemic criteria he relies on rather than to embrace those which were used within the more conventional accounts.

Elementi della terminologia aristotelico-scotistica in ebraico: le glosse filosofiche in ‘Eli Habillo

This article analyses the use of Scotist terminology within the Jewish philosophical tradition, in particular by ‘Eli Habillo of Monzon (15th century). Translator from Latin into Hebrew of philosophical texts and original philosopher, Habillo displays a peculiar use of many technical terms of the Latin Scotist tradition translating them into Hebrew. The article examines some exemplar cases of Habillo’s approach and Hebrew rendering of the terms, pointing out the peculiarities of his attitude.

On the Science of Consciousness: Epistemological Reflections and Clinical Implications

Consciousness has been one of the most important and tantalizing issues ever since the origin of philosophy and medicine. The concept of consciousness and the so-called "hard problem" (i.e., the mind-brain relationship) are highly complex topics that have yet to be elucidated, involving the realms of both science and philosophy with profound epistemological implications. In the lively debate on the foundations of the science of consciousness there are several potential biases of an essentially philosophical nature, such as those related to the paradigm and axioms adopted, and the ostensible logical contradiction between monism and dualism. Their origin dates back largely to Descartes' thinking and the birth of the new sciences as a compromise with the Inquisition, but they have been handed down through the Enlightenment and Positivism. A proper investigation of consciousness and the world of subjectivity demands a careful reflection on the paradigm of scientific medicine to identify possible flaws and overcome the limits of the mechanistic-reductionist approach.

"Homo capax Dei". La posibilidad del conocimiento teórico de Dios según Leonardo Polo

The inquiry about the existence and essence of God has been a philosophical question since the origins of Philosophy. Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft gave a Copernican Turn to this issue; according to him, we cannot demonstrate the existence of God by means of the theoretical reason. In contemporary philosophy this question about God has been, by different traditions, revisited. The philosophical proposal of L. Polo –especially his contribution in theory of knowledge– could help to reconsider this topic with new tools and arguments. According to Polo the human intellect (inteligencia) in his theoretical dimension is essentiallycapax Dei. This article tries to summarize the arguments of Polo in order to support his thesis about the possibility of theoretical knowledge of God.

Cosmic metaphysics: Being versus Becoming in cosmology and astrophysics

This article offers a critical discussion on the question of the existence of the Universe, starting with creation myths of a variety of different cultures and ending with cutting-edge ideas from modern cosmology. Emphasising the polarised tension between Being and Becoming and its religious and philosophical origins, this article argues that this tension is unavoidable and still very much present. Further, the logical insolvability of the problem of the First Cause is examined, showing the conceptual inappropriateness of current scientific models that claim to offer a solution.