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Tacktical aesthetics is a propositional aesthetic language for an art that seeks to reinforce and reproduce values present in philosophies of relationality in place of those present in contemporary systems of domination. With this text I present some partial declarations about tacktical aesthetics that draw on Indigenous and feminist philosophies of relationality and on ideas of resingularization. As well as reflecting on the value of neologisms for this type of project, I discuss the various implications for tacktical aesthetics, including its relation to contemporary art and shock tactics, and the double bind that occurs when privileges inherent in contemporary art practices that reproduce or reinforce systems of domination are brought into question. The question that remains relates to how tacktical aesthetics might develop as an art practice.
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Looking over a hundred years, it should be acknowledged that phenomenological studies in Latvia were initially carried out in the twenties and thirties of the 20th century, starting with 1) Husserl’s studies and criticism of solipsism (T.Celms), 2) phenomenological analysis of forms of community (K. Stavenhagen), and 3) development of cognitive phenomenology in Ladusāns’ many-sided gnoseology. It was not possible to work on phenomenology during the harsher years of the Soviet regime (1945–1970), but in the mid-1970s, a phenomenological circle emerged in Riga under the influence of Nelly Motroshilova and Merab Mamardashvili. Its focus was on the issues of consciousness and language, on phenomenological ontology, communication, time-consciousness. Since 1990, phenomenological studies have been expanding, four international conferences have been held in Latvia in cooperation with the World Phenomenology Institute, nine monographs on phenomenology have been published, and 56 articles from Latvia have been published in Analecta Husserliana. Themes of papers and presentations included historicity, space and time, passions, teleology, educational philosophy, aesthetics. Since 2005, nine phenomenology-related doctoral theses have been defended in Riga. Over the last decade, greater focus has been given to applied phenomenology, its relationships with medicine, social media, violence research. Phenomenologists influenced a transformation of classical philosophy towards wider horizons and reflected the necessity to consider concepts of life, nature, body, we-consciousness, it also opened the way for contemporary perspective dialogue with cognitive sciences, linguistics, identity studies and psychoanalysis.
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This article examines Paul Guyer’s claim that we should attempt to ground the principle of religious freedom on the basis of Kant’s arguments for religious liberty. I problematise Guyer’s suggestion by investigating a hypothetical ‘dogmatic conflict’ between a scientifically and a religiously grounded belief. I further suggest that considering Christian Wolff’s philosophy might provide us with an approach which shares the benefits that Guyer identifies in Kant, while at the same time avoiding the issues Kant might run into that result from the occurrence of the dogmatic conflict. I start by providing a background to Wolff’s philosophy and explaining the notion of the dogmatic conflict. Then I present a potential contemporary case of the dogmatic conflict and try to see how it would be dealt with based on Guyer’s proposal. Finally, I consider what a Wolffian solution would look like, arguing that Guyer’s project might benefit from considering Wolff.
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The main focus of the article is the analysis of Kant’s notion of Judaism and his attitude toward the Jewish nation in a new context. Kant’s views on the Jewish religion are juxtaposed with those of Mendelssohn and Spinoza in order to emphasize several interesting features of Kant’s political and religious thought. In particular, the analysis shows that, unlike Mendelssohn, Kant did not consider tolerance to be the last word of the enlightened state in matters of its coexistence with religion. The author also argues that Kant’s fascination with Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem was premature and that his later disappointment with Mendelssohn’s persistent adherence to Jewish orthodoxy reflects his understanding of the condition of Judaism in the context of the new era of Enlightenment. Moreover, the paper addresses in a novel way the relevant connections between Kant and Spinoza, showing substantive similarities between their notions of Judaism and Christianity, and provides an overview of Kant’s historical involvement with Jewish issues, which are significant given the argumentative structure of the article.
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In Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason Kant speaks of an ethical state of nature and of an ethico-civil condition, with explicit reference to the juridical state of nature and the juridico-civil condition he discusses at length in his legal-political writings. Given that the Religion is the only work where Kant introduces a parallel between these concepts, one might think that this is only a loose analogy, serving a merely illustrative function. The paper provides a first outline of the similarities and the differences between the state of nature and the civil condition in Right and in ethics. The comparison points to a deeper, structural relation between the two pairs of concepts. By doing so, it makes room for developing a unitary conception of the state of nature and of the civil condition, which would underlie both the ethical and the juridical version.
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This paper explores the implications of Manfred Kuehn’s observation that Kant’s claim in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason that the ethical community must be a community under God seems “a bit strained.” After clarifying Kant’s train of thought that results in his conception of the ethical community in the form of the “visible church,” the paper argues that the seemingly strong religious dimension may be misleading. If we understand the ethical community to be the development of the kingdom of ends in the Groundwork , it becomes apparent that Kant’s notion of God’s “sovereignty” over the ethical community is a shared sovereignty lodged in rationality and not in God’s own will. The “strain” that Kuehn senses thus suggests the potentially gratuitous nature of Kant’s references to God’s sovereignty over the ethical community. Despite the initial appearances, Kant’s account of the ethical community in the form of the visible church is, over the long term, closer to a secularizing move than to a robustly religious one.
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Commentators who lament that Kant offers no concrete guidelines for how to set up an ethical community typically neglect Kant’s claim in Religion that the ethical state of nature can transform into an ethical community only by becoming a people of God—i.e., a religious community, or “church.” Kant’s argument culminates by positing four categorial precepts for church organization. The book’s next four sections can be read as elaborating further on each precept, respectively. Kant repeatedly warns against using religious norms to control people. Accordingly, he explicitly forbids the true church from adopting any standard form of political governance; it must aim to be radically non-political. Nevertheless, churches organized according to Kant’s non-coercive theocratic model contribute something essential to the ultimate political goal of achieving perpetual peace and an end to war: by approaching the ultimate ethical goal (the highest good), the true church offers an antidote to normative fragmentation.
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In this paper I discuss the notion of old times’ sake, one which is hardly discussed by moral philosophers, and claim that it serves as a moral reason for us to act on behalf of the people we used to cherish: former friends, colleagues, neighbors, or spouses. While our relationship with them has ended, the building-blocks of our identity will continue to bear their fingerprints, and they will ever be an important part of our biography. Acting for old times’ sake reflects both our caring about them, and our caring about our own past, biography, and accumulated identity. Why the relationship has ceased will of course affect our attitude towards them. Although old times’ sake might not always be a decisive factor, it still serves as a moral reason for action.
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We provide a novel articulation of the epistemic peril of p-hacking using three resources from philosophy: predictivism, Bayesian confirmation theory, and model selection theory. We defend a nuanced position on p-hacking: p-hacking is sometimes, but not always, epistemically pernicious. Our argument requires a novel understanding of Bayesianism, since a standard criticism of Bayesian confirmation theory is that it cannot represent the influence of biased methods. We then turn to pre-analysis plans, a methodological device used to mitigate p-hacking. Some say that pre-analysis plans are epistemically meritorious while others deny this, and in practice pre-analysis plans are often violated. We resolve this debate with a modest defence of pre-analysis plans. Further, we argue that pre-analysis plans can be epistemically relevant even if the plan is not strictly followed—and suggest that allowing for flexible pre-analysis plans may be the best available policy option.
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I present the notion of epistemic injustice coined by Miranda Fricker and apply it to the situation of people with intersex traits, especially intersex children who are the subjects of “normalizing” surgery. Several studies from Polish hospitals show that both early “normalizing” surgery and the decision to postpone such surgery can result in harm to an intersex child. For this reason, I claim that “normalizing” surgery is only an expression of the epistemic hermeneutical injustice existing before the surgery and that its source is the lack of an empirically adequate notion of sex characteristics. The binary notion is too simple to grasp intersex traits, and this epistemic dysfunction turns into practical harm. In contrast to Morgan Carpenter, I defend the nonbinary gender category as being important to limiting “normalizing” surgery.
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I intend to argue that the counterexamples inspired by the Frankfurt-type cases against the necessity of an epistemic safety condition for knowledge are not plausible. The epistemic safety condition for knowledge is a modal condition recently supported by Sosa (2007) and Pritchard (2015), among others, and can be formulated as follows: (SC) If S knows that p on basis B, then S’s true belief that p could not have easily been false on basis B. I will try to argue that the safety condition, expressed in (SC), is still necessary for knowledge and that, therefore, epistemic safety is not threatened by Frankfurt-type cases. In particular, I want to show that Kelp’s counterexamples are ineffective against (SC).
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This paper defends the claim that the traditional Kantian division between two different types of judgments, judgments of personal preference (subjectively valid) and judgments of taste (intersubjectively valid), does not apply to some contexts in which metalinguistic negotiations take place. To begin, I first highlight some significant similarities between predicates of personal taste and aesthetic predicates. I sustain that aesthetic predicates are gradable and multidimensional, and that they often produce metalinguistic negotiations, characteristics that have motivated an individual treatment for predicates of personal taste. Secondly, contrary to Kant’s claim, I maintain that there are cases where judgments of personal preference are intersubjectively valid; in some contexts of metalinguistic negotiation, judgments of personal preference direct universality to a similar extent as judgments of taste. Some examples of real-life conversations will be presented to illustrate this point.
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Husserl’s phenomenology was particularly influential for a number of French philosophers and their theories. Two of the most prominent French thinkers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, turned to the instruments offered by phenomenology in their attempts to understand the notions of the body, consciousness, imagination, human being, world and many others. Both philosophers also provided their definitions of perception, but they understood this notion in very different ways. The paper describes selected aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology that were adopted by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and depicts the presumptions of their respective theories of perception, as well as the differences between them. The main thesis presented here is that theories as different as those proposed by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty may, and indeed do, lead to the same conclusion, i.e. that perception represents a different form of cognition. Despite the differences between these theories, they can both be placed in the contemporary context of phenomenological research carried out by cognitive philosophers Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher, as well as by the proponent of the enactive theory of perception, Alva Noë.
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The essay contains an analysis of selected socio-political ideas of Helmuth Plessner. The basic assumption of this study is the existence of a close categorial relationship between Plessner’s reflections in The Limits of Community (1924) and in Die Stufen des Organischen (1928). As the interpretative key, the author uses one of the pivotal concepts of Plessner’s philosophy of life, namely the category of “border.” Showing the adequacy of this category in relation to Plessner’s social and political concepts, the essay addresses the issue of the individual-society relationship, the question of social roles and their possible deviations, and the problem of political leadership.
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The goal of the paper is to, at least partly, justify the rejection of what I term the thesis of the origins of structural realism. This thesis deals with the connections, postulated by a certain metaphilosophical narrative, between the contemporary positions of epistemic/ontic structural realism and the views held by physicists and philosophers from the early 20th century. In the paper I summarize the above-mentioned positions and the relationships they are supposed to have enjoyed with the philosophy of Henri Poincaré and Ernst Cassirer. I then proceed to illustrate why such relationships are ill-founded and present conclusions about the unique nature of both structural realism and the notions of objectivity and reality in their context.
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The aim of this article is to clarify the sense of Aristotle's aporia “whether it is possible to treat oneself unjustly or not” and to argue that it is possible to treat oneself unjustly voluntarily. Two passages in NE V 9 are particularly noteworthy, namely 1136a31-1136b1 and 1136b13-25. In the first passage Aristotle proposes the hypothesis that the uncontrolled person (acratic) is capable to treat oneself unjustly voluntarily. In the second passage he gives two arguments – “from apparent loss” and “from wish” – which aim to prove that no one can treat oneself unjustly voluntarily. Both arguments do not invalidate hypothesis, nor exclude the possibility to be unjust towards oneself voluntarily.
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The consideration of the problem of healthcare allocation as a special case of distributive justice is especially alluring when we only consider consequentialist theories. I articulate here an alternative Rawlsian non-consequentialist theory which prioritizes the fairness of healthcare allocation procedures rather than directly setting distributive parameters. The theory in question stems from Rawlsian commitments that, it is argued, have a better Rawlsian pedigree than those considered as such by Tännsjö. The alternative framework is worthy of consideration on its own merits, but it also casts light on two related difficulties with Tännsjö’s approach: (i) the limits of his supposedly ecumenical methodology, which is revealed to be dialectically suspect and (ii) issues with the type of abstraction and idealization from actual judgements and preferences which the approach requires.
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L’œuvre littéraire de Saint Justin Philosophe et Martyr est particulièrement importante car il est non seulement le représentant le plus important de la littérature apologétique du deuxième siècle, mais aussi le premier père d’église qui a mené une activité littéraire plus riche. Malheureusement, beaucoup de ses écrits ont été perdus, tandis que d’autres écrits, qui lui étaient étrangers, ont été conservés sous son nom. Dans les deux Apologies, il cherche à présenter le christianisme devant le monde païen romain comme la seule religion vraie tout en le défendant des accusations que la méchanceté et les mensonges des juifs lui avaient imputé dans le monde romain
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The post-World War II decline of liberal democracies and the rise of totalitarian regimes required the introduction of new methods based on new concepts in order to reappraise the „essence” of politics. The new phenomena could not be fully grasped and described by the categories and concepts of the old tradition, but that did not mean that scholars should or could have given up the investigation of that tradition. One of the most remarkable and effective tendencies of the several conceptual and theoretical reconsiderations of politics was the one stemming from contemporary German emigrants. Their thoughts were basically determined by the fact that totalitarian regimes were partially regarded as the outcome of modern political philosophy, they decided therefore to hark back to the roots of ancient political thought. Hanna Arendt is described as a neo-Aristotelian political thinker, although Plato’s role in her philosophy was as prominent as of Aristotle’s. According to Arendt, the origin of those phenomena that placed philosophy against the polis and politics, and made hostility between them, can be discovered in Plato’s philosophical thoughts.
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