Today we are talking about the transition to a new type of social structure, and this transition to something new always entails complexity in adaptation and some breaking of familiar stereotypes. The mankind has faced again the necessity to develop new norms. In this article, from the point of view of philosophy, one of the most complex phenomena of the modern information age, is characterized, namely: the modern stage of the human society and its role in the formation (...) and development of human thinking, is studied and analyzed. The article analyses the processes in which the mechanisms of human interaction with the environment manifest themselves, as well as ways to address the destructive processes in the minds and behavior of modern man. Thanks to an extensive historical-philosophical and sociocultural discourse, the main milestones of the transformation of understanding and attitude of a person to the basic existential elements of his being in a crisis situation are shown. (shrink)

"What is the purpose and meaning of life if death is, as it appears to an ever-broadening segment of modern secularized humanity, total annihilation of the conscious personality?" This is the profound question asked by Jacques Choron in his new book, Modern Man and Mortality. And in his investigation of man's confrontation with the fact of death, he offers the most comprehensive, most objective study ever published on this subject.

It is now a commonplace that premodern reflection, whether mythical, philosophical, or theological, was terminally “anthropomorphic,” given to the erroneous supposition that the human shape offers genuine insight into the shape of everything else.1 It is also commonly assumed that modern philosophy distinguishes itself from its precursors by placing the human being at the center of its concerns. Thus Kant, for example, claimed that the question “what is man?” recapitulates the whole of systematic philosophical inquiry.2 First impressions notwithstanding, these (...) two convictions are not really at odds. For it is precisely through their “turn to the subject” that modern thinkers…. (shrink)

Chapter I Modern Suicidism I WAS not yet ten years old when, for the first time, I began to think a great deal about suicide. Perhaps I had heard something ...

From the very beginnings of his thought, Thomas Garrigue Masaryk was convinced that modern man, and likewise the culturally and politically emancipated Czech nation, was in a deep existential crisis closely linked with the spread of irreligiosity. Masaryk gradually came to believe that this crisis could be positively overcome on two levels. On a theoretical level, he relied on his specific classification and systematization of the sciences. On a practical level, which was directly based on his notion of positive (...) sciences and a strictly rational scientific approach, it was a matter of developing a new direction and method, which he characteristically conceived of as realism. On the eve of the First World War, Masaryk’s position became understandably radicalized. He distanced himself from a more objectivist view of religion and countered theism with a scientific and philosophical anthropism. (shrink)

Stanisław Brzozowski formulated the ideal of modern man in the polemic with the contemporary man, who has ceased to believe in truth and moral values and is devoid of the will to act. For Brzozowski modernity involves the discovery of truth about the human condition: about man as an autonomous subject, a creator of values, who struggles with non-human reality. This truth was formulated in Kant’s idea of autonomy and in Marx’ idea of a collective conquest of the world (...) of nature. For Brzozowski, ideal modern man is “the conscious labourer,” who labours because he wants to proudly impose a human law on the non-human world. At the same time Brzozowski used the term “modernity” to describe life of constant change in the modern world, understood as a set of results of man’s reign over nature. For the sake of human maturity, Brzozowski expected the truly modern man to perceive modern life as an unquestionable value. Undoubtedly, there is an evident tension in Brzozowski’s ideal of modern man between the affirmation of creativity in the world of change and the necessity of disciplined production, including unchangeable moral foundations of labour. There is also a major shift in this ideal, stemming from Brzozowski’s change of attitude towards religion. (shrink)

Bringing together an international team of historians of science and philosophy to discuss the fate of matter and form, this volume shows how disputes about matter and form spurred innovation as well as conservatism in early modern science ...

The main theme of these lectures is man's struggle to understand himself as a social being. A discussion of the major problems confronting man in his attempts to come to grips with the modern social world ends with a plea for liberalism and rationalism as the political and intellectual foundations of freedom and progress.

Mahatma Gandhi and Sun Yat-sen are regarded as the respective founding fathers of modern India and China. Given this shared significance, their writings ought to be duly considered as the basis for comparative thought on postcolonial nation-building. Yet a survey of the literature points to the paucity of such study. The article is therefore an attempt to fill in this gap by juxtaposing Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj and Sun’s San Min Chu I as treatises on postcolonial nation-building. Such juxtaposition yields (...) important contrasts between the two regarding postcolonial nationhood at the crossroad of non-western civilization and modernity. Beyond identifying these differences, the author uses the lack of comparative study on the subject as an occasion for pondering over the contrasting contemporary global legacy of the two figures. At stake are two visions of postcolonial nationhood that are lost to the ubiquity of global development. (shrink)

An examination of secular attempts—literary, psychiatric, and philosophical—to come to terms with death. The author assumes that for most moderns, apparently including himself, religious solutions are not viable alternatives. His knowledge of Western literature on the subject is vast, and he provides extensive bibliography and notes. Critical analysis is often schematic, however. There is also an inclination to substitute psychoanalysis of an author for argument against his theories. Ironically, the primary impressions left by this book are, first, the inadequacy of (...) most secular views, and second, the proximity of the author's conclusion to that of many theologians, a relationship of which he seems unaware.—R. J. W. (shrink)

The processes of changing the way of thinking, typical for modern people, and subsequently shaping a new “Homo clicking” individual are analyzed. The authors consider a specific mindset of “Homo clicking” illustrating it with some patterns and modes of action that characterize individuals in the human–machine interface. Under this frame, the influence of modern converging technologies upon human conduct is examined and functional redistribution between human beings and technical devices is outlined. In the literature, the latter phenomenon is (...) referred to as “life outsourcing.” This material is used to introduce several principles that form the basis for a new type of thought and actions of “Home clicking”: snapping, transforming trust into knowledge, and action reduction. Reducing the traditional classic understanding of a human act of thinking to a pattern of a thinking act as a need-satisfying act is described. In the last section, we introduce an extension of Searle’s Chinese room, which can be seen as a possible consequence of intensive exploitation of technologies. (shrink)

Articles on modern concepts of science and their relation to Indian philosophical ideas.

Highlighting early modern medicine's program of explanation and intervention, I claim that there are two distinctive features of the physician's naturalism. These are, first, an explicit recognition that each patient had her own individual and highly particularized nature and, second, a self-conscious use of normative descriptions when characterizing a patient's nature as healthy (ordered) or unhealthy (disordered). I go on to maintain that in spite of the well documented Cartesian rejection of Aristotelian natures in favor of laws of nature, (...) Descartes and his most important medical disciple accepted both features of the physician's naturalism where human medicine was concerned. Thus, in this article I critically engage with standard portraits of Cartesianism and naturalism by integrating the histories of science, medicine and philosophy, but especially medicine and philosophy. (shrink)

Bhaktivedanta Swami, the founder of ISKCON, had a complex relationship with science and modernity, and many of his followers have consequently allied themselves with various kinds of critiques of the modern project. A favourite enemy has been Darwin’s theory of evolution. This article undertakes a close reading of the book Rethinking Darwinism, written by a Danish member of the society, Leif A. Jensen, and published by the movement’s official publishing house, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust in 2010. Contextualising the book within (...) the history of ISKCON’s relationship with science, the article asks what the motivations for challenging Darwin here are, how it is done, and what the consequences of it are for a movement often taken to be a fundamentalist one. (shrink)