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Displaying: 1-11 of 11 documents


1. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 17
Alexandr Bilyk, Yaroslaw Bilyk

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Any philosophical work is not only the aggregate of ideas, but is also the work of literature. The myth, used for the transmission of philosophical ideas, has a particular importance. Take for example the Homeric cycle. Philosophers often use topics bound up with the adventures of Odysseus: the salutation from Sirens, from Scylla and Haribdis, from Cyclop, from the witchcraft of Circe and the lotus-eaters. This paper will explore these issues.

2. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 17
M.E. Orellana Benado, Andrés Bobenrieth, Carlos Verdugo

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In a famous passage, Kant claimed that controversy and the lack of agreement in metaphysics — here understood as philosophy as a whole — was a ‘scandal.’ Attempting to motivate his critique of pure reason, a project aimed at both ending the scandal and setting philosophy on the ‘secure path of science,’ Kant endorsed the view that for as long as disagreement reigned sovereign in philosophy, there would be little to be learned from it as a science. The success of philosophy begins when controversy ends and culminates when the discipline itself as it has been known disappears. On the other hand, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century, many have despaired of the very possibility of philosophy constituting the search for truth, that is to say, a cognitive human activity, and constituting thus a source of knowledge. This paper seeks to sketch a research program that is motivated by an intuition that opposes both of these views.

3. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 17
Herman Cappelen, Douglas G. Winblad

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This paper examines two attempts to justify the way in which intuitions about specific cases are used as evidence for and against philosophical theories. According to the concept model, intuitions about cases are trustworthy applications of one’s typically tacit grasp of certain concepts. We argue that regardless of whether externalist or internalist accounts of conceptual content are correct, the concept model flounders. The second justification rests on the less familiar belief model, which has it that intuitions in philosophy derive from one’s (often tacit) beliefs. Although more promising than the concept model, the belief model fails to justify traditional philosophical use of intuitions because it is not clear a priori that the beliefs at issue are true. The latter model may, however, legitimize a less a prioristic approach to intuitions.

4. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 17
Daniel H. Cohen

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With the possible exception of completely formal exercises in logic, philosophy is thoroughly metaphorical and largely conditional. Moreover, the purposes served by metaphors and conditionals in it are similar. Metaphors ask us to imagine the world in a new way, while conditionals may ask to imagine a new world. Yet some conditionals and metaphors are incompatible. There are limits to how metaphors can occur in conditionals, and how conditionals can themselves be metaphors. Specifically, only certain kinds of metaphors can be accommodated in the antecedents of conditionals, and even then only within a restricted class of conditionals. This paper focuses on the linguistic tension between metaphors and conditionals. I argue that this echoes a tension at the heart of philosophy between two modes of philosophizing: a speculative-revisionary mode that is metaphorical and an analytic-explanatory mode that is conditional. The tasks are generally complementary so that the difference can be ignored with impunity. However, if we do not respect that difference, we may find ourselves analyzing metaphors and seeing logical analyses as metaphorical, and thus missing the point on both fronts.

5. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 17
Margret E. Grebowicz

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Both Husserl and Popper share the sentiment that philosophy should model itself after something called "science," despite their differing attitudes toward the Galilean tradition. I begin by describing their respective approaches to the problem of objectivity by examining their accounts of the origins of science in Husserl's Vienna Lecture and Popper's Conjectures and Refutations. Each of them explicitly takes up the problem of objectivity in The Origin of Geometry and Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject, respectively, and it is here that they develop their notions of the role played by subjectivity in science. I argue that Popper suffers from a commitment to subjectivism even in the course of renouncing the subject as irrelevant for science. Husserl, on the other hand, sees in the possibility of crisis the need to reinstate subjectivist concerns in order for any discourse to be capable of saying something about the world. Husserl thus proposes a scientism which takes account of the fact that the world is, first and foremost, experienced by subjects. I contend that Popper can ultimately be held to the same position, and thus be forced to qualify his strong dismissal of subjectivity.

6. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 17
V.A. Iakovlev

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The principle of universal significance of the creative process is promoted in this thesis. The principles of the ecology of creation and of the subject's humanistic orientation of the cognitive and practical activity, will also be investigated.

7. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 17
Pablo López

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In a radical and philosophical sense, technique is the way of rationally and systematically putting forward an ultimate cause of humanity in the world. Due to the increasing development of techniques in the last two centuries, technique has moved into the limelight of contemporary philosophy. A technological outlook favors some philosophical positions, but it raises perennial questions in a new fashion. Likewise the technique of philosophy is also considered. Philosophy has its own way or method of rational and systematic doing. Of course, there are varied methods in philosophy, but they must share some basic identity in order not to be confused with those not being philosophic. Also, since philosophy cannot examine techniques used by other domains, there cannot be a philosophy of technique without a self-examination of philosophy concerning its own techniques. What is more, our vision both of philosophy of technique and of technique itself corresponds to a vision both of the technique of philosophy and of philosophy itself. In terms of the limits of our human nature in its historical environment, technique can be understood as the historical way that human reason overcomes its limits. Nature and technique can merge and live together, provided that we are open to integrating them within ourselves.

8. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 17
Constanze Peres

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This paper deals with the question of whether metaphors are sufficient for the fulfillment of philosophical tasks, and, if they are, which cognitive or methodological place metaphors can have within philosophical discourse. We can distinguish three attitudes toward metaphors. First is the general rejection of metaphors in philosophy. Second is the unrestricted affirmation of metaphors as ‘absolute’ and as compensating for metaphysics. This conception will be analyzed critically and shown to be self-contradictory. The third position can be described as the restricted affirmation of using metaphors. According to this view, metaphors can be characterized as-strictly speaking-non-philosophical but extrinsic to constitutive forms in constructing theories. In this view, their function is not to explain, and they cannot be used as arguments. But, often they contain numerous implications with value for innovation, as they can anticipate holistic projections which are not yet fulfilled by theoretical analysis.

9. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 17
Richard Rickert

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The power of paradigm in science is ascendant, as exemplified in the growing debate over the role of DNA in natural selection, which Dennett (1995, 1996) has sustained with opponents like Gould (1996) and Fodor (1996). Here I focus on Dennett's quest for a dominating theory of natural selection and the ways in which two key issues of scientific method escape the notice of all debaters. In a scientific report or expository book a summary is an essential component of method — work which authors should do, not readers. Experience demonstrates its superiority in research analysis, reporting and conclusions. The second omission in Dennett's DNA model is any summary admission of limitations and of types of potential confounding factors which might be overlooked. In Dennett's case, the force of his material object reductionism and his rejection of Penrose's suggestions on quantum effects apparently prevents him from recognizing other field effects on DNA molecular dynamics, such as EMF and other radiation sources. I then introduce an amended version of the DNA paradigm in evolutionary causation, based on a range of evidence that researchers need to address. There are reports of certain types of adverse health effects of EMF proximity that have not, to my knowledge, been denied. But given DNA components of complex atoms bonded into a dynamic structure, it is prima facie implausible that proximate EMF fields have no influence on DNA dynamics, whether or not influence can be proved negative.

10. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 17
Josef Seifert

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In the ontological argument and the method of Anselm, we find many phenomenological elements. The proximity of the ontological argument to phenomenology shows itself especially from a parallel between Anselm's and Husserl's deriving a necessity of thinking from a necessity of being. But, Medieval proofs for the existence of God appear to contradict the principles of phenomenological method, particularly the 'bodily self-givenness,' the epoché as bracketing the real existence as well as the transcendence of essence vis-àvis consciousness. The phenomenological method must indeed be rethought and reformulated to allow a transition from returning to 'things themselves' to a philosophical knowledge of God. It must be freed from Husserl's subjectivistic theory of 'constitution' and from any generalization of the methodological principle of epoché. In this way, Anselm's position contains the germ for a critical rethinking of the phenomenological method in the vein of realist phenomenology.

11. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 17
John Tomarchio

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This paper reports a procedure which I employed with two computational research instruments, the Index Thomisticus and its companion St. Thomas CD-ROM, in order to research the Thomistic axiom, ‘whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.’ My procedure extends to the lexicological methods developed by the pioneering creator of the Index, Roberto Busa, from single terms to a proposition. More importantly, the paper shows how the emerging results of the lexicological searches guided my formation of a philosophical thesis about the axiom’s import for Aquinas’s existential metaphysics.