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1. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 45
Elena B. Agoshkova

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Systems thinking is an important factor in solving global problems. The twentieth-century has witnessed the development of a systems paradigm and different spheres of systems knowledge. However, further development of systems thinking necessitates overcoming the contradictions between different schools and unifying them into a single systems conception. With this in mind, systems problems are examined in light of the theory of knowledge. It is suggested that the gnosiological definition of the notion 'system' should be used as a basis for a single approach. An analysis of the concept 'system' leads to a logically well-structured conception of system. It follows from this that, in addition to the general theory of systems and the systems science, a non-formal theory of whole object and non-formal systems logic should form part of the systems thinking. This would set the stage for a categorical structure and a conceptual basis for systems thinking. The development of systems thinking should be regarded as the key challenge in perfecting humanity. The elaboration of a single systems conception within the philosophy of science and the methodology of scientific knowledge should be treated as a basis for meeting this challenge.

2. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 45
E. V. Altekar

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Humanity has tried to comprehend two fundamental events since time immemorial: the birth of the universe and the emergence of life. Recently, it is claimed that these events can be understood comprehensively by means of a metaphor: the 'arrow of time.' The purpose of the present paper is twofold: (1) to build an epistemological structure that underlies the principle of time's arrow; and (2) to pursue the unity of science in a novel fashion.

3. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 45
Edward J. Bartek

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There is too much factual knowledge to grasp even a speck of the whole. This makes for an excessive diversity that lacks in coherent unity. With no coherency in the parts, there will be no coherent truth in the whole. Without coherent truth there is only a relative truth. Relative truth makes for contradiction from different viewpoints, perceptions, and perspectives. Contradictions deny a common definition and meaning of truth, morality, justice, and beauty. They also deny common standards, values, principles, and virtues. Uncommon values lead to personal and social conflict and confusion, to the blocking of learning in education, to the disintegration of social unity. To have common standards and values, that a global theory of knowledge requires, concrete factual knowledge should be unified by abstract concepts that are unified by abstruse principles that are unified by symbolic structures. Such principles ultimately derive from an ultimate unity and structure. This ultimate unity is the keystone that holds the whole systematic structure of knowledge together.

4. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 45
Janos Boros

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The notions of representationalism and antirepresentationalism are introduced and used in contemporary philosophical discussions by Richard Rorty to describe his and the neopragmatists' attitude toward traditional problems of epistemology. Rorty means that the history of philosophy shows that there are no final answers to the traditional questions about knowledge, truth, and representation; consequently, they should be rejected. Rorty thinks such questions should be eliminated from philosophy since there is no possibility to get outside of our mind and language. We cannot say anything about a mind-transcendent or language-transcendent, nonlocal or eternal reality. Hilary Putnam agrees with Rorty on this, but not with the conclusion that we should reject traditional philosophical questions. For Putnam, the epistemological questions are worthwhile asking and, although we cannot find the final correct answers, we should continue our investigations as if there were final answers. Our struggles with those problems can lead to refinements of the formulations and to cognitive developments. Putnam proposes a quasirealism which is often called "internal realism." Rorty rejects every refinement of realism as still realism and believes that the questions of knowledge, truth, and representation lead to regresses ad infinitum or to circular reasoning.

5. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 45
Michael Bradie

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The most trenchant criticism of naturalistic approaches to epistemology is that they are unable to successfully deal with norms and questions of justification. Epistemology without norms, it is alleged, is epistemology in name only, an endeavor not worth doing (Stroud, Kim, Almeder, Rorty). What one makes of this depends on whether one takes epistemology to be worth doing in the first place (cf. e.g., Kim and Rorty). However, I shall argue, it is possible to account for justification within a naturalistic framework broadly construed along Quinean lines. Along the way I shall offer a corrective to Quine’s celebrated dictum that the Humean condition is the human condition.

6. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 45
Andrew Brook, Jennifer McRobert

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In the neglected 'Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection,' Kant introduces a new transcendental activity, Transcendental Deliberation (Kemp Smith calls it 'Transcendental Reflection'). It aims to determine to which faculty a representation belongs and does so by examining the representation's relationships to other representations. This enterprise yields some powerful ideas. (1) Some of the relationships studied have great interest, numerical identity in particular. Indeed, seeing Kant discuss it here, one wonders why he did not include it in the Table of Categories. (2) Kant gives a solid argument for the necessity of a sensible element in representations, something not found elsewhere in the Transcendental Analytic.

7. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 45
Andrew N. Carpenter

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I discuss the philosophical significance of Kant's great cosmological work of 1755, the Universal Natural History. I discuss how Kant's interest in Newtonian universal forces led him to affirm a peculiar version of the physical influx theory. I argue that Kant's speculations about life on other planets are highly significant because they point to a key feature of Kant's theory of physical influx, namely that "the nimble motions of the body" stand as necessary conditions of the possibility of knowledge. This work directs us to an important topic that has received little scholarly interest: the relation between the body and knowledge in Kant's philosophical writings.

8. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 45
Claudio F. Costa

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In der Arbeit wird eine "konservative" Lösung von Gettiers Problem entwickelt, wonach die klassische Wissensdefinition nicht erweitert oder ersetzt wird, sondern auf eine vereinigende Weise interpretiert. Die Hauptidee ist, daß Gettiers Beispielen prinzipiell geantwortet werden können, wenn die logische Verbindung zwischen der Bedingung der Wahrheit der Aussage und die Bedingung der Rechtfertigung des Glaubens an dieser Wahrheit explizit gemacht wird.

9. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 45
Mariano Crespo

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Uno de los problemas que han acompañado a la lógica desde sus inicios es el del esclarecimiento del estatuto de las leyes lógicas. A lo largo de toda la historia, pero de una forma especial a finales del siglo pasado e inicios de este, se mantuvo que las estas leyes no son sino leyes psicológicas que se fundan, en última instancia, en la peculair constitución psicológica del ser humano. El estudio de esta posición así como de la crítica llevada a cabo por Edmund Husserl en algunas de sus obras ponen de manifiesto toda una serie de problemas filosóficos conectados con esta cuestión. Por otra parte, los resultados positivos de la crítica husserliana del psicologismos dan lugar a una serie de tésis como la estricta distinción entre lo ideal y lo real y la consideración de las significaciones como espécies que presentan un gran interés son solamente para la historia de la fenomenología, sino también para la metafísica, la lógica y la teoría del conocimiento. En este sentido, el artículo analiza las posiciones fundamentales del psicologismo e intenta mostrar la imposibilidad de que dicha posición contribuya a una fundamentación del conocimiento.

10. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 45
Bahaa Darwish

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My aim is to raise two points against naturalizing epistemology. First, against Quine’s version of naturalizing epistemology, I claim that the traditional questions of epistemology are indispensable, in that they impose themselves in every attempt to construct an epistemology. These epistemological questions are pre- and extra-scientific questions; they are beyond the scientific domain of research, thus, for a distinct province of inquiry. Second, I claim that no naturalistic account can be given as an answer to the traditional question of justification. I take Goldman’s and Haack’s accounts as examples to support my claim. The traditional demand of justification is to start from nowhere. Naturalizing justification is to start form somewhere. The two approaches are, thus, necessarily incompatible with each other. So, the accounts given by the naturalists are not answers to the traditional problem of justification. To remain compatible with themselves, the naturalists should have conceded that the problem of justification is illegitimate or incoherent. The fact that they did not I take as additional evidence to support my claim that the traditional questions of epistemology are indispensable: they impose themselves and are, thus, hard to eliminate.

11. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 45
Gregg Ten Elshoff

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In what follows, I will offer a rejoinder to one popular and influential version of external world skepticism which avoids (i) begging questions against the skeptical conclusion, (ii) arguing from prudential considerations to a dismissal of skeptical worries, and (iii) arguing for epistemological conclusions from semantic premises.

12. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 45
James B. Freeman

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I first argue that Aristotelian intellectual intuition (recognizing archai through epagoge and seeing their truth by recognizing their explanatory power through nous) generates basic beliefs which are not inferred — inductively or deductively — from other beliefs. Both involve synthetic intuitive insight. Epagoge grasps a connection and nous sees its general applicability. I next argue that such beliefs are properly basic by adapting an argument made by Hilary Kornblith. According to Kornblith, the world is objectively divided into natural kinds. We humans perceive the world divided into natural kinds. There is empirical evidence suggesting that we divide the world not only as it is objectively divided, but in making inductive inferences, that is, in inferring that an object will have certain properties on the basis of its having others. This grounds the reliability of (certain) inductive inferences. But the leading principles (in Peirce’s sense) of these inferences are basic beliefs generated through intellectual intuition. Hence intellectual intuition generates certain properly basic beliefs.

13. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 45
Sílvio Gallo

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El conocimiento contemporáneo está marcado por una excesiva compartimentación. Esto es fruto de la disciplinaridad, que tiene un doble sentido: tanto induce a la delimitación de un campo específico como a la jerarquización y al ejercício del poder. La propuesta interdisciplinar surgió para proporcionar el tránsito entre los varios compartimentos del saber contemporáneo. Debemos preguntarnos: ¿esa propuesta da conta de superar la histórica compartimentación del saber? Este artículo defende que no, y propone su superación, tomando por basie un nuevo paradigma para la comprensión del conocimiento: el rizoma y la transversalidad.

14. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 45
Manfred Gawlina

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One needs specific initiation into the classics of transcendental philosophy (Kant’s "Criticism," Descartes’s "Metaphysics," and Fichte’s "Doctrine of Science") because all say farewell to the common sense view of things. The three types of transcendental thinking converge in conceiving rational autonomy as the ultimate ground for justification. Correspondingly, the philosophical pedagogy of all three thinkers is focused on how to seize and make that very autonomy (or active self-determination) intellectually and existentially available. In the concrete way of proceeding, however, the three models diverge. Descartes expects one to become master of oneself and "the world" by methodologically suspending his judgement on what cannot qualify itself to be undoubtable. Kant leads us to the point where we can triangulate universal conditions of the possibility of knowledge through individually acquiring the competence to judge the legitimacy of encountered propositional claims. Finally, Fichte confronts us with the idea of the identity of self-consciousness and objectivity.

15. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 45
Miriam Graciano

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In this article I present H. R. Maturana's work as an alternative that reinforces pragmatism in the task of thinking philosophy through the evolution of biological species. I try to demonstrate how Maturana's biology dilutes the principal argument against American Neo-pragmatism. This criticism uses the argument of performative contradiction as it has developed in the European Neo-Kantian philosophy. Thus, I begin by presenting Apel's arguments which are contrary the perspective of the detranscendentalization of the Post-Nietzschenian philosophy. I conclude that analytical philosophy is a fecund point of contact between Maturana's biology and American Pragmatism, and that analytic arguments help convince others of our own theoretical preferences.

16. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 45
Daniel Howard-Snyder

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BonJour argues that there can be no basic empirical beliefs. But premises three and four jointly entail ‘BonJour’s Rule’ — one’s belief that p is justified only if one justifiably believes the premises of an argument that makes p highly likely — which, given human psychology, entails global skepticism. His responses to the charge of skepticism, restricting premise three to basic beliefs and noting that the Rule does not require ‘explicit’ belief, fail. Moreover, the Rule does not express an epistemic duty. Finally, his argument against this fails since it is false that if an experiential state has representational content, then it is in need of justification. I venture the diagnosis that BonJour mistook the representational content of a cognitive state for the assertive functional role of a belief. Foundationalism may well be false, but not for BonJour’s reasons.

17. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 45
Priyedarshi Jetli

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I argue for the possibility of knowledge by invention whch is neither á priori nor á posteriori. My conception of knowledge by invention evolves from Poincaré’s conventionalism, but unlike Poincaré’s conventions, propositions known by invention have a truth value. An individuating criteria for this type of knowledge is conjectured. The proposition known through invention is: gounded historically in the discipline to which it belongs; a result of the careful, sincere and objective quest and effort of the knower; chosen freely by the inventer or knower; and, private in its invention but public once invented. I extend knowledge by invention to include the knowledge of the invented proposition by those who do not invent it but accept it as a convention for good reasons. Finally, knowledge by invention combined with a revisionist, Platonist definition of knowledge as actively justified true belief provides a pedagogical model reviving the proactive spirit of the Socratic method with an emphasis on invention and activity and a de-emphasis on information gathering and passivity.

18. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 45
Riku Juti

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This paper discusses W. K. Clifford's classic paper, "The Ethics of Belief," and the significance of his use of the locution "knowingly and willingly" in the context of morally irresponsible ignorance. It is argued that this locution can point to a very subtle and important distinction in the premisses of ethically responsible belief formation. An analysis of willful ignorance is then given. It is argued that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as willful ignorance: what is called willful ignorance in ordinary language is just the phenomena of getting oneself knowingly to believe something by willingly and knowingly altering the evidence for one's belief, rather than the genuine phenomenon of getting oneself willingly to believe something against the evidence. The former phenomenon is not, however, morally approvable. Therefore, willfulness of belief is not a necessary condition of morally irresponsible ignorance.

19. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 45
Timo Kajamies

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Some commentators maintain that Spinozistic active ideas are judgements. I shall call this view the common interpretation, since it is popular to interpret Spinoza as reacting against Descartes’ theory of ideas. According to this reading, Spinozistic ideas are considered not as Cartesian ideas but as Cartesian judgements. One clear difference between Descartes and Spinoza is that Spinoza holds that ideas are active, while Descartes does not. According to the common interpretation, Spinoza and Descartes use the concept of activity in the same way. Since Descartes holds that judgements are active, it is maintained that Spinozistic active ideas are like Cartesian judgements. I find this an overly superficial interpretation of Spinoza. I argue that, for Spinoza, activity denotes more than mere Cartesian activity. Whereas Spinoza wants to say that active ideas incorporate the property of truth or certainty, Descartes does not consider judgements in that way. In this way, Spinozistic active ideas can be called truth-expressing.

20. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 45
Hylarie Kochiras

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This paper develops an individualistic, belief-based account for a limited class of epistemic possibility statements. Section I establishes the need for such an account by reviewing a recent version of the majority view (the "Relevant Community Account") and contesting two key assumptions. I argue that some epistemic possibilities are belief-based-contra the assumption that all are knowledge-based. Against the assumption that all epistemic possibility statements are analyzable in terms of the speaker's "relevant community," I contend that the truth value of some statements is a function of the speaker's epistemic states alone. Section II develops an alternative account designed to capture those internal, individual statements. Modeling belief sets as "belief worlds," I explain our epistemic processes in terms of an ability to shift attention among our various belief worlds.