In Practicing Safe Sects F. LeRon Shults provides scientific and philosophical resources for having “the talk” about religious reproduction: where do gods come from – and what are the costs of bearing them in our culturally pluralistic, ecologically fragile environment?

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.

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.

Arthur Danto has made important contributions to both aesthetics and philosophy of history. Furthermore, as I shall try to show in this essay, his aesthetics is of great relevance to his philosophy of history, while his philosophy of history is of no less interest for his aesthetics.By focusing on the notions of representation, identity, and the identity of indiscernibles we shall discover how fruitful this cooperation of aesthetics and philosophy of history may be. Crucial to all historical writing and, hence, (...) to all philosophy of history, is the notion of identity through time and change. How could the historian write the history of x if x cannot be said to remain the same in the course of its history? It will become clear that aesthetics will provide us with a satisfactory solution for the problem, for the aestheticist notion of representation will enable us to define the notion of identity that the historian needs.Nevertheless, a certain friction can be observed between Danto's aesthetics and his philosophy of history. At the end of this essay I hope to show that Danto's philosophy of history will be our best guide to dealing adequately with this friction. (shrink)

‘Revelation’ has not appeared at all frequently in the titles of contributions to this journal . On the other hand, neither does it seem to have been formally banished. The term is occasionally used, still, without any obvious sign of unease. Perhaps the majority of contributors have tacitly abandoned it, as incompatible with a broadly phenomenological approach to religions. It is possible to describe expressions of religion and analyse their doctrinal statements ; but to use the term in description or (...) analysis might seem to concede too much. If there is a revealed religion, the others might hardly seem worth describing or dissecting. (shrink)

Problem: Starting with his personal experience the author pursues the question: How can we alter our way of living, sensoriality and reflective skills so that we can handle today’s information flows, which nowadays are so large that they create confusion and ineffective educational actions? Method: The approach to follow is called “parenthesism,” a practice based on Maturana’s theoretical frameworks of the “biology of cognition” and the “biology of love.” Results: One of the findings when a person lives in parenthesism is (...) the ability to see their own dogmatism and stubbornness when that person would otherwise be blind to his/her own convictions. Implications: Many aspects of this essay, and this manner of thinking, are circular and tautological, and hence may appear illogical to the reader. However, the author claims that existence is not solely logical, and that in a complex matrix circular and recursive relationships are common, and that these can best be understood through circular and recursive logics. Furthermore the relevance of parenthesism for UNESCO’s view on learning paradigms is reviewed in this light. (shrink)