This book gathers together eight essays which are loosely united by the thin thread of gnosticism. In fact, this thread is not long enough to extend to the last three chapters which embrace a different theme, namely, philosophy of religion, broadly understood. The first and second chapters complement each other nicely. The first treats the early gnostics and in so doing raises such basic questions as the complex origins of gnosticism and the multifarious expressions which can be identified under this (...) heading. Hanratty’s specific interest is in the gnostic movement with its “spectrum of ideas and attitudes which formed the many sided heresy of the early Christian centuries”. The second chapter moves from these issues of the early gnostics to a wider investigation of gnostic thought through the centuries. These first chapters provide a useful introductory overview of certain key figures and concepts. Following F. C. Baur’s classification of Hegel as a modern gnostic, Hanratty asserts in the next essay that Hegel’s early development took place within a gnostic framework which subsequently affected his own approach to reality. The next essay turns to Simone Weil and interprets her thought within the boundaries of gnostic elitism. A similar explanation of the ideas of Carl Jung—albeit from the vantage of psychology— is advanced in the fifth essay. (shrink)

The starting-point of Plutarch's dialogue de communibus notitiis is a claim made by the Stoics that Providence sent Chrysippus to remove the confusion surrounding the ideas of ννοια and πρληψισ before the subtleties of Carneades were brought into play. Unfortunately our surviving information on the subject is so much less full than could be desired that it has again returned to an obscurity from which there are only two really detailed modern attempts to remove it. The one, by L. Stein (...) , is most unsatisfactory; the other, by A. Bonhöffer , though of the greatest value in many ways, is vitiated by the fact that it constructs a system from the use of the words by Epictetus and then attempts to attach this system to the old Stoa in the face of the evidence of the doxographers, which is emended or violently interpreted to suit Epictetus. Even if Epictetus were in general a good authority for the technicalities of Chrysippus—and in the opinion of H. von Arnim he is not— this would not be a sound method of procedure. The only safe way is to take first the statements which can be attached to the Old Stoa, and having obtained our results from these, to see whether Epictetus does in fact agree. (shrink)

This paper explores ethical debates associated with the UK COVID-19 contact tracing app that occurred in the public news media and broader public policy, and in doing so, takes ethics debate as an object for sociological study. The research question was: how did UK national newspaper news articles and grey literature frame the ethical issues about the app, and how did stakeholders associated with the development and/or governance of the app reflect on this? We examined the predominance of different ethical (...) issues in news articles and grey literature, and triangulated this using stakeholder interview data. Findings illustrate how news articles exceptionalised ethical debate around the app compared to the way they portrayed ethical issues relating to ‘manual’ contact tracing. They also narrowed the debate around specific privacy concerns. This was reflected in the grey literature, and interviewees perceived this to have emerged from a ‘privacy lobby’. We discuss the findings, and argue that this limited public ethics narrative masked broader ethical issues. (shrink)

If the contemporary rebirth of the ontological argument had its conception in Norman Malcolm's discovery of a second Anselmian argument it had its full-term delivery as a healthy philosophical progeny with Alvin Plantinga's sophisticated modal version presented in the tenth chapter of The Nature of Necessity. This latter argument has been the centre of a huge body of literature over the last fifteen years, and deservedly so. One is impressed that this version of Anselm's jewel is valid and sound if (...) any is. (shrink)

RésuméOn a beaucoup insisté ces derniers temps sur la nécessité pour la science et la philosophie de rester ouvertes, c'est‐à‐dire d'être prêtes à remettre en question leurs principes les mieux établis.L'auteur cherche à montrer, par un certain nombre d'exemples, que la tendance opposée est également légitime et garantit la cohérence de la connaissance.La méthode axiomatique, forme mathématique privilégiée de la connaissance dialectique, satisfait remarquablement à ces deux exigences. — F. F.

In this journal, Brogaard and Marlow recently argued that the relativity of simultaneity is an illusion. We claim their argument is fallacious.

At last scholars are recognizing that the great generative architectonics of idealism’s account of self-consciousness would demand or imply, from a genealogical perspective, an unconscious. Yet, between Foucaultian inspired analyses of madness in Hegel, and Slavoj Zizek’s Lacanian readings of the unconscious in the work of F. W. J. Schelling, there has been essentially no mention of J. G. Fichte. As an attempt to redress this failure, I will begin to sketch Fichte’s own unique articulation of an unconscious (Unbewusst) by (...) highlighting three unique aspects or perspectives: (a) the idea of a pre-conscious, self-affective self; (b) the notion of the self-seeing eye; and (c) his own first hand involvement with dynamic psychiatry’s phenomena of magnetic rapport. This exposition of the unconscious in Fichte has two distinct ends. First, it stands as one of the first sustained expositions of the unconscious in the work of Fichte. This analysis which places Fichte’s work in the broader genealogy of dynamic psychiatry, however, also stands as a critique of the Freudian psychoanalytic model of the unconscious. (shrink)

t. 1. Obʺektivnai︠a︡ dialektika -- t. 2. Subʺektivnai︠a︡ dialektika -- t. 3. Dialektika prirody i estestvoznanii︠a︡ -- t. 4. Dialektika obshchestvennogo razvitii︠a︡ -- t. 5. Kritika idealisticheskikh kont︠s︡ept︠s︡iĭ dialektiki.