The central thesis of Dooyeweerd's book concerns this point. He insists that a religiously neutral, objective, and in this sense scientific philosophy is an inner and intrinsic impossibility. Modern philosophy was mistaken in its assumption that it was merely "theoretical" and therefore as valid in its methods, principles, theories and doctrines as mathematics or physics. It was rather the result of a kind of religious conviction, although this conviction was humanistic and secular: a belief in the sovereignty of the (...) human personality and in the possibility of dominating nature by means of scientific discovery of nature's processes and energies. These quasi-religious convictions were not theoretically demonstrable but presuppositions guiding man's labour and all his cultural purposes and procedures. (shrink)

This article aims to demonstrate the unity of faith and reason as irrational and rational elements of the theoretical religious discourse on instances of Christian theoretical thought. This unity was represented as a dialectical contradiction, the violation of which led to the destruction of religious discourse. The contradictory unity of faith and reason was researched in European medieval philosophy and Russian religious philosophy in the first half of the 20th century and in the theoretical systems that (...) were considered ways of explaining the relationship between faith and reason in Christian thought. This article reveals two historical types of the dynamic unity of faith and reason as well as violations of this unity: when medieval authors attempted to find the most effective relationship between faith and reason for Christian theology; and when Russian philosophers attempted to transmit theological knowledge by means of philosophy in the secular age. The results of the dynamic unity violations in both traditions are investigated as the conceptions that had been denied by these traditions. The main conclusion of the article is that Christian theoretical thought maintained the contradictions between faith and reason as a search for its development. (shrink)

(First paragraphs.) The idea that our language somehow influences our thought can be found in philosophical and scientific traditions of different continents and with different roots and objectives. Yet, beyond the mere theoretical, explorations of the idea are relatively scarce, and are mostly limited to relations between very concrete conceptual categories and subjective experiencing and remembering – to some kind of ‘psychologies of folk-ontology’. Thought as process, reasoning or ‘thinking’, and the role of more complex or abstract (...) concepts in (such) thought tend to be mostly ignored in psychology and philosophy. Conceptual and intellectual history, on the other hand, cannot be accused of such neglect, but the common lack of a comparative perspective in those fields precludes any generalized inference. Furthermore, while a comparative study on the role of complex or abstract concepts in thought as process and its products (the aggregate ‘thought’ of schools, ages, and regions) could result in a considerable enrichment of our understanding of the relationships between language and thought, it would not necessarily be recognized as such because of a fundamental difference in the nature of the concepts involved, affecting the boundary of ‘language’ in the pair ‘language and thought’. More concretely, while the concepts of the ‘psychologies of folk-ontology’ are rather concrete categories of ‘things’ or aspects of experienced reality (hence, ‘folk-ontology’), the abstract concepts of (comparative) conceptual history, such as ‘society’ or ‘reason’, are categories of ideas. Consequently, conceptual history is inseparably tied to the history of ideas, and there is no strict boundary line between concepts, theories, ideas, and aggregate thought in general. It could, therefore, be argued that a comparative conceptual history would be a study of the influence of ideas on thought, rather than of language on thought. That argument, however, would either void language of content, or make the dubious claim that folk-ontology is a fundamentally different type of content than theoretical content. The ‘psychologies of folk-ontology’ study the influence of folk-ontological categories on folk-ontological thought (experiencing and remembering), and a comparative conceptual history would study the influence of theoretical categories (or conceptualized ideas) on theoretical thought (thinking, reasoning, etc.), and there does not seem to be a good reason to exclude either type of categories from ‘language’. Perhaps it should be argued instead that the ambiguous term ‘language’ in the pair ‘language and thought’ would better be replaced with ‘concepts’ or ‘categories’. (shrink)

Many thought experiments are used to probe theoretical statements. One crucial strategy for doing this, or so I will argue, is the following. A TE reveals an inconsistency in part of our previously held, sometimes empirically well-established, theoretical statements. A TEer or her critic then proposes a resolution in the form of a conjecture, a hypothesis that merits further investigation. To explore this characterisation of the epistemic function of such TEs, I clarify the nature of the inconsistencies (...) revealed by TEs, and how TEs reveal and resolve them. I argue that this can be done without settling the question of which cognitive processes are involved in performing a TE; be they propositional or non-propositional. The upshot is that TEs’ reliability, like real experiments, is to be found, in part, in their replicability by the epistemic community, not in their cognitive underpinnings. (shrink)

Investingating mediations between the social total complex and its partial complexes, Lukács emphasised language and law as aents having the sole function to mediate. Ideology as part of human's societal existence is itself organic component of the ontology of social existence. The way we think in is part of what we truly are. Juristic world-view as the deontoloy of the legal profession is one of the factors of the law's social existence. Actual decision making in law is modelled by the (...) logic of problem solving with open chanes within an open referential frame, upon which the logic of justification is built as added to the former posteriorly. Lukács designated the settling of the conflict of interests involved through the law's system of fulfilment as manipulation. This substantiates the personal responsibility of the decision maker. (shrink)

Perhaps the central categories of the practical area are 'intention' and 'intentional action.' As Hampshire says, "The notion of the will, of action, the relation of thought and action, the relation of a person's mind and body, the difference between observing a convention or rule and merely having a habit--all these problems find their meeting place in the notion of intention". Certainly if 'intention' and 'intentional action' are clarified the whole practical field will be illuminated. Miss Anscombe thinks that (...) 'intention' itself can best be got at by concentrating on 'intentional action.'. (shrink)

Thought Theory seems to provide an answer to the paradox of fiction which has the ontological merits of current pretence accounts without, however, assuming mere pretence emotions. This article will question whether present formulations of TT live up to what they promise. Whenever its current versions try to include evaluative beliefs in a TT framework in order to comply with a cognitivist account of emotions, they either stop being a genuine thought theory or endorse the irrationalism of fictional (...) emotions. This unfortunate outcome can be prevented by shifting the focus to thoughts, and specifically to the genetic dynamics of how we come to think of the objects in question. This is at least what we can learn from Edmund Husserl, who developed a still underestimated account according to which it is possible to have the belief that x merits evaluation as appearing emotion-worthy without this belief implying that x merits being believed to exist. (shrink)

In this essay, Cavarero thematically highlights the main issues of feminist thought, by criticizing the patriarchal system and its theoretical products—such as the concepts of complementarity of the sexes and of equality—through the lens of sexual difference. In doing so, she radically criticizes the so-called binary economy, namely the interpretative model on which the patriarchal system is based, in which the sole male sex is self-represented, establishing at the same time a representation of the female sex that is (...) functional to men. Accordingly, by criticizing both the traditional and the postmodern approach, she aims to rethink from a feminist point of view the question of the subject, of the identity, and of the self. In this respect, she advances an account of the self as relational, namely a self that is given only through its relationship with others, hence rejecting the abstract universality of the male subject of traditional metaphysics. Subsequently, Cavarero presents a notion of identity as an interplay of relations that makes it fluid and dynamic, and not as fixed and permanent, as per the metaphysical tradition that understands it as universal substance. In conclusion, she argues that the unicity of the self—and of each human being—can be grasped only through a narrative discourse that counterposes the philosophical investigations on the essence of an absolute and universal principle of reality, and emphasizes the singular and unrepeatable nature of the self. (shrink)

Making Sense of Inner Sense 'Terra cognita' is terra incognita. It is difficult to find someone not taken abackand fascinated by the incomprehensible but indisputable fact: there are material systems which are aware of themselves. Consciousness is self-cognizing code. During homo sapiens's relentness and often frustrated search for self-understanding various theories of consciousness have been and continue to be proposed. However, it remains unclear whether and at what level the problems of consciousness and intelligent thought can be resolved. Science's (...) greatest challenge is to answer the fundamental question: what precisely does a cognitive state amount to in physical terms? Albert Einstein insisted that the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple and can be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone. When one thinks about the complexities which present themselves in modern physics and even more so in the physics of life, one may wonder whether Einstein really meant what he said. Are we to consider the fundamental problem of the mind, whose understanding seems to lie outside the limits of the mind, to be essentially simple too? Knowledge is neither automatic nor universally deductive. Great new ideas are typically counterintuitive and outrageous, and connecting them by simple logical steps to existing knowledge is often a hard undertaking. The notion of a tensor was needed to provide the general theory of relativity; the notion of entropy had to be developed before we could get full insight into the laws of thermodynamics; the notice of information bit is crucial for communication theory, just as the concept of a Turing machine is instrumental in the deep understanding of a computer. To understand something, consciousness must reach an adequate intellectual level, even more so in order to understand itself. Reality is full of unending mysteries, the true explanation of which requires very technical knowledge, often involving notions not given directly to intuition. Even though the entire content and the results of this study are contained in the eight pages of the mathematical abstract, it would be unrealistic and impractical to suggest that anyone can gain full insight into the theory that presented here after just reading abstract. In our quest for knowledge we are exploring the remotest areas of the macrocosm and probing the invisible particles of the microcosm, from tiny neutrinos and strange quarks to black holes and the Big Bang. But the greatest mystery is very close to home: the greatest mystery is human consciousness. The question before us is whether the logical brain has evolved to a conceptual level where it is able to understand itself. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Accurate self‐administration of antiretroviral medication therapy for HIV/aids is a significant clinical and ethical concern because of its implications for individual morbidity and mortality, the health of the public, and escalating healthcare costs. However, the traditional construction of patient medication adherence is oversimplified, myopic, and ethically problematic. Adherence relies on existing social power structures and western normative assumptions about the proper roles of patients and providers, and principally focuses on patient variables, obscuring the powerful socioeconomic and institutional influences on (...) behaviour. Some professionals advocate for alternate approaches to adherence, but many of the available alternatives remain conceptually underdeveloped. Using HIV/aids as an exemplar, this paper presents medication practice as a theoretical reconstruction and explicates its conceptual and ethical evolution. We first propose that one of these alternatives, medication practice, broadens the understanding of individuals’ medication‐taking behaviour, speaks to the inherent power inequities in the patient‐provider interaction, and addresses the ethical shortcomings in the traditional construal. We then integrate medication practice with feminist thought, further validating individuals’ situated knowledge, choices, and multiple roles; more fully recognizing the individual as a multidimensional, autonomous human being; and reducing notions of obedience and deference to authority. Blame is thus extricated from the healthcare relationship, reshaping the traditionally adversarial components of the interaction, and eliminating the view of adherence as a patient problem in need of patient‐centred interventions. (shrink)

In ten years of reform, China has captured the attention of the entire world, and the achievements have been extraordinary. At the same time, however, there have been frequent appearances of unexpected difficulties, mistakes, and setbacks. These mistakes and setbacks have made us pay a heavy price, and yet they have also provided us with sociohistorical experiences and lessons as we go forward to reexamine the questions of reform and the laws of modernization construction.

This is the first volume of the first ever comprehensive edition of the works of Immanuel Kant in English translation. The eleven essays in this volume constitute Kant's theoretical, pre-critical philosophical writings from 1755 to 1770. Several of these pieces have never been translated into English before; others have long been unavailable in English. We can trace in these works the development of Kant's thought to the eventual emergence in 1770 of the two chief tenets of his mature (...) philosophy: the subjectivity of space and time, and the phenomena-noumena distinction. The volume has been furnished with substantial editorial apparatus, including a general introduction to the main themes of Kant's early thought, introduction to the individual works and re;sume;s of their contents, linguistic and factual notes, bibliographies, a glossary of key terms, and biographical-bibliographical sketches of persons mentioned by Kant. (shrink)

Students and philosophers alike often find Dooyeweerd’s writings unclear and inaccessible, and the ideas expressed in them obscure and difficult to grasp. In this paper I will first explore the issue of unclarity in Dooyeweerd’s work—for example, what makes Dooyeweerdian writings difficult to understand? Why is it that his meaning is often unclear? And does this imply that something is wrong with his writings? Second, and as a case in point regarding unclarity in Dooyeweerd’s work, I will examine an important (...) distinction drawn in Reformational philosophy, namely, between naive experience and theoretical thinking. In his paper “The Amsterdam Philosophy: A Preliminary Critique,” philosopher and theologian John Frame criticizes Dooyeweerd for his unclear writings and for drawing an implausibly sharp distinction between naive experience and theoretical thinking. Assessing Frame’s critique will serve as a framework for the discussion of these two related issues. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Accurate self‐administration of antiretroviral medication therapy for HIV/aids is a significant clinical and ethical concern because of its implications for individual morbidity and mortality, the health of the public, and escalating healthcare costs. However, the traditional construction of patient medication adherence is oversimplified, myopic, and ethically problematic. Adherence relies on existing social power structures and western normative assumptions about the proper roles of patients and providers, and principally focuses on patient variables, obscuring the powerful socioeconomic and institutional influences on (...) behaviour. Some professionals advocate for alternate approaches to adherence, but many of the available alternatives remain conceptually underdeveloped. Using HIV/aids as an exemplar, this paper presents medication practice as a theoretical reconstruction and explicates its conceptual and ethical evolution. We first propose that one of these alternatives, medication practice, broadens the understanding of individuals’ medication‐taking behaviour, speaks to the inherent power inequities in the patient‐provider interaction, and addresses the ethical shortcomings in the traditional construal. We then integrate medication practice with feminist thought, further validating individuals’ situated knowledge, choices, and multiple roles; more fully recognizing the individual as a multidimensional, autonomous human being; and reducing notions of obedience and deference to authority. Blame is thus extricated from the healthcare relationship, reshaping the traditionally adversarial components of the interaction, and eliminating the view of adherence as a patient problem in need of patient‐centred interventions. (shrink)

Quantum mechanics and relativity spurred the Third Industrial Revolution, presenting no contradictions in applied engineering but significant theoretical discord. The electronic computer, another major achievement of this era, transformed humanity through the rise of information networks, marking information science as another critical outcome of the revolution. Matter transforms into energy, energy into matter, and mechanics serve as profound conduits for information, even enabling the creation of robots. Modern physics now faces interpretative divides, having seemingly overlooked philosophy and information science’s (...) foundational roles. Human intellect, while reaching new heights through material philosophy, finds itself tangled in confusion. Has science achieved the apex of thought, or does it face an intellectual dead end? This question hints at a revolutionary awakening in human thought. This paper delves deeply into these questions by analyzing and reflecting on the “Scientific Cosmological Ontology,” “Modern Physical Philosophy Framework,” “The Physical Principles of Natural Philosophy,” and “Reflections on the Philosophy of Science.”. (shrink)

El pensamiento ético y bioético es una de las áreas de conocimiento recurrentes en el ejercicio reflexivo del profesional de la salud en Cuba; sin embargo, se detectan insuficiencias relacionadas con imprecisiones y falta de claridad en el pensamiento ético-moral por parte de este personal, según se observa en materiales evaluados para su publicación, en los ejercicios para el proceso de obtención de categorías docentes y en la presentación de las evaluaciones de posgrados. El artículo tiene el objetivo de argumentar (...) precisiones teórico- metodológicas para la elaboración de trabajos en ética y bioética. The ethical and bioethical thought is one of the recurrent areas of knowledge in the reflexive exercise of health professionals in Cuba. However, according to the observations of evaluated materials for their publication, in the exercises for the process of obtaining educational categories and in the presentation of postgraduate evaluations, inadequacies related with imprecision and lack of clarity are detected in the ethical-moral thought on the part of health professionals. The article has the objective of arguing theoretical- methodological precisions for the elaboration of works in ethics and bioethics. (shrink)

The Diagnostic Understanding of Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy: In accordance with the basic thoughts of the Guideline, Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy acts on the conviction that diagnostic revelations and therapeutic change processes are inseparable. Even if each of them is related to different functions and thus to particular demands, an efficient patient support requires the professional and proper interplay of discovery and change processes throughout her therapy. Each new discovery is per se related to a change and may set off (...) a series of further changes, which may again trigger off new discoveries. As widely known, this may also happen when this whole process and this cause-and-effect-relation are neither intended, nor planned, nor insightfully administered or understood. The authors of the Guideline are, therefore, right to not only ascertain the fact that discovering and changing in psychotherapy are joint and intertwining processes, but also to postulate that the psychotherapist has to work on this intertwining process consciously and deliberately, guided by and in accordance with her particular scientific-methodological approach. Even in the diagnostic strand of psychotherapeutic work, Gestalt Theoretical psychotherapists let themselves be guided by the “characteristics of working at the living”, as they were elaborated by Wolfgang Metzger (1962) and transferred to psychotherapeutic applications by Hans-Jürgen P. Walter (1977) and his colleagues. Simultaneously, essential anthropological, epistemological and ethical home positions of Gestalt theory are concisely expressed therein. I am going to mention them briefly, reformulating them in reference to the diagnostic remit. By doing so, the accordance with the major viewpoints of the Guideline in the description of diagnostic processes in psychotherapy should become apparent. (shrink)

We analyze different aspects of our quantum modeling approach of human concepts and, more specifically, focus on the quantum effects of contextuality, interference, entanglement, and emergence, illustrating how each of them makes its appearance in specific situations of the dynamics of human concepts and their combinations. We point out the relation of our approach, which is based on an ontology of a concept as an entity in a state changing under influence of a context, with the main traditional concept theories, (...) that is, prototype theory, exemplar theory, and theory theory. We ponder about the question why quantum theory performs so well in its modeling of human concepts, and we shed light on this question by analyzing the role of complex amplitudes, showing how they allow to describe interference in the statistics of measurement outcomes, while in the traditional theories statistics of outcomes originates in classical probability weights, without the possibility of interference. The relevance of complex numbers, the appearance of entanglement, and the role of Fock space in explaining contextual emergence, all as unique features of the quantum modeling, are explicitly revealed in this article by analyzing human concepts and their dynamics. (shrink)

죽음의 문제는 모든 사람들의 인생에 있어서 매우 중요한 과제 가운데의 하나라고 말할 수 있다. 사람들이 죽음에 직면했을 때, 마땅히 어떠한 태도를 취해야만이 죽음의 공포로부터 자유로워 질 수 있을 것인가 하는 문제는 대부분의 사람들이 상당히 중시하는 문제라고 할 수 있다. 이러한 죽음의 문제와 관련하여 고대 중국사상에서는 다음과 같은 중요한 개념을 도출하고 있는데, 그것은 바로 ‘형신’이라고 하는 것이다. ‘형’은 인간의 육체를 의미하고, ‘신’은 인간의 정신 혹은 영혼, 의식 등을 의미한다. 고대 중국의 사상가들은 이 두 개념 사이의 관계에 대하여 저마다 각기 다른 시각을 (...) 가지고 접근하여, 두 개념 사이의 복잡하고 다양하게 얽혀있는 관계망을 분명하게 규명하고자 했다. 또한 그들은 이러한 규명 작업을 통하여 사람들에게 생명의 진정한 이치를 이해하고자 했다. 위진남북조 시기는 중국 역사에 있어서 다양하게 사상이 발전했던 시기 가운데의 하나였다고 할 수 있다. 이러한 풍조는 양한시기에 사상의 주류를 독점했던 경학이 동한 왕조가 멸망한 후에 주도적인 지위를 상실하게 되자, 각양각색의 학술사상이 우후죽순처럼 출현한 결과로 파생된 현상이라고 할 수 있다. 다른 한편으로는 동한 시기 말기에 발생한 정치적 소요는 사회적 혼란을 야기하여 일반 백성들의 삶은 매우 참혹한 지경에 이르렀고, 게다가 사방에서 일어난 황건적의 난동으로 인간의 생명은 매우 경시되었다. 라함은 이러한 시대적 아픔을 통감하고 삶과 죽음의 문제에 관한 자신의 견해를 담은 을 집필하여 세상 사람들에게 삶과 죽음의 공포로부터 자유로워 질 수 있는 여건을 마련해준다. 본문에서는 라함의 의 기본적인 문제들에 대하여 ‘형신’의 의미와 ‘갱생’의 의미 및 연원 그리고 을 지필하게 된 이유와 갱생론과 인과응보설의 관계를 중심으로 논의를 진행했다. (shrink)

After a time of theoretical condemnation common sense as well as academic curiosity have rediscovered again the all-permeating powers of narration. Narrativity and culture are, this is a conviction grounding this essay, closely interwoven. But from this doesn’t follow that narration has to be seen as a guardian of general order. On the contrary, if we contemplate the appearance of narratives in everyday life and in literature we may detect differences but also affinities in subverting common beliefs. Yet, literary (...) narrations tend to work in their own way through what in philosophical discourse is reduced to conceptualizing. The topics dealt with in this essay include Schiller’s substantiation of aesthetic awareness and Goethe’s narrative response; the great master-narratives of the 20th century: Proust, Joyce and Beckett; and the question, what an advanced art of narration can contribute to an experience which is yearning to break open the iron cage of traditions in thought as well as in literary invention. (shrink)

To these rather restrained opinions, one must add the unremitting efforts of the media but also of academia—these powers and institutions are decidedly united—who aim to ridicule and discredit for ever more literary theory’s encroachment, or attemptedencroachment, of its authority on literature. It may seem paradoxical that such a sparing, abstract, or even, as they say, insignificant activity should elicit such an... eroticization. Why so much passion for such an elusive object? We must look back to the beginningsof theoretical (...) thought in the area of arts and literature, in order to attempt to uncover the reasons for this apparent anomaly. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore how, and to what extent, Italian thought – by its focalization on pre-modern theoretical issues and its distance from classical modern topics, such as the philosophy of conscience or the transcendence of language – can offer a different insight on contemporary social theory and critical theory, after the dissolution of the idea of totality as a foundational concept of modernity. In the last decades, a frame named ‘Italian theory’ has started (...) to circulate in international theoretical debates, often with the aim of replacing the exhausted paradigms of poststructuralism, postmodernism and deconstructionism. Indeed, ‘Italian thought’ seems to offer new insights, thinking about the ‘post-totality’ era in a different way. In the article we present a synthetic cartography of Italian thought and we analyse the way in which it can contribute to design new horizons for social theory. (shrink)

Main object of present work is to analyze thought embodied by Nietzsche’s aphorism from fourth part of Beyond Good and Evil: “The thought of suicide is a strong means of comfort: it helps get us through many an evil night” as potential tool to restore control over one’s own life during the strong existential crisis. An idiographic approach is assumed. There are proposed three theoretical cases which are the results of author’s direct life experiences and reflections. These (...) cases of applying Nietzsche’s thought are considered from an interdisciplinary perspective. Three possible effects of implementing Nietzsche’s thought discussed in this paper indicate that the power of his words may bring relief to an individual in times of suffering. Their potential real impact may result from liberation from framework of good and evil as well as experience catharsis-like state with use of the mechanism of aversive stimulus. (shrink)

The political philosophy of early Confucianism mainly focuses on the “ shi ± (scholar).” It is built on ideas such as that of “establishing a ruler in consideration of the people,” “taking yi 义 (righteousness) as li 利 (benefit)” and “following the Dao but not the ruler,” which demonstrate the foundations of political legitimacy, justice as a political principle, and principles of a scholar to become an official. Although the political thought of early Confucianism has its historical limitations, such (...) as the lack of both political equality and the universal recognition of rights, there is both a demand for and possibility of democratic politics in the philosophy. Thus, how to extend awareness of scholars to awareness of people and how to transform a focus on virtue into a focus on rights become the crucial theoretical questions that Confucianism faces in the contemporary world. (shrink)

How to deal with the ever more complex religious relationships is not only a significant issue for Chinese central government and the Communist Party but also a cutting-edge topic for the religious academy at home and abroad. Based on the review of the latest internationally acknowledged four theoretical orientations, namely religious market model, religious ecological model, religious compatibilism, and religious praxism, this article proposes an innovated framework, positive orientating theory of Chinese religious relations. The author intends to explore more (...) active thoughts on theories and policies that would particularly reflect on and align with the typical characteristics of religious relationships in Chinese context. Contribution: Based on the review of the latest internationally acknowledged four theoretical orientations, namely religious market model, religious ecological model, religious compatibilism, and religious praxism, this article proposes an innovated framework, positive orientating theory of Chinese religious relations. (shrink)