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Displaying: 1-20 of 36 documents


1. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 6
W. M. Alexander Sartre and the Rationalization of Human Sexuality
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Sartre rationalizes sexuality much like Plato. Rationalization here refers to the way Sartre tries to facilitate explanation by changing the terms of the discussion from sexual to nonsexual concepts. As a philosophy which, above all, highlights those features of human existence which seem most resistant to explanation, one would expect existentialism to highlight sexuality as a category that is crucial for considering human existence. Descartes comes immediately to mind when one focuses on Sartre's major categories. In Sartre's case however, it is not mind and matter but consciousness and its opposite: "nothingness" and "being." This irreducible dualism is the key to the trouble human beings have with existence. Humans try to deal with the tensions implied by this dualism by trying to pretend people are not subjects but objects. Sartre calls this "bad faith." He begins by attempting to take human sexuality seriously as a fundamental category, but ends by abandoning the effort in favor of other substitutes.
2. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 6
Bethania Assy Eichmann, the Banality of Evil, and Thinking in Arendt’s Thought
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I analyze the ways in which the faculty of thinking can avoid evil action, taking into account Hannah Arendt's discussion regarding the banality of evil and thoughtlessness in connection with the Eichmann trial. I focus on the following question posed by Arendt: "Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever happens to come to pass, regardless of specific content and quite independent of results, could this activity be of such a nature that it 'conditions' men against evildoing?" Examples of the connection between evildoing and thinking include the distinction between the commonplace and the banal, and the absence of the depth characteristic of banality and the necessity of thinking as the means for depth. I then focus upon Arendt's model thinker (Socrates) and argue that the faculty of thinking works to avoid evildoing by utilizing the Socratic principle of noncontradiction.
3. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 6
Amélie Frost Benedikt On Reading Valedictory Texts: Suicide Notes, Last Wills and Testaments
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Authorial absence of a literary and literal kind is my topic. I will examine the absence of nonliving authors, in particular the suicide and the ancestor. These authors author texts intended to be read only in their absence and only by specific, intended readers. Their texts are, respectively, the suicidal note and the last will or testament. Such texts are particularly sensitive to the problem of limited information, the potential for miscommunication, the inscrutability of authorial intention, and the real consequences to others of the author's irrevocable absence. Yet, however keenly aware these instruments are to their own authorial absence, can they defy Jacques Derrida's notion of language as 'play'? These texts of radical absence express a seriousness that refuses play. Yet do they become playfully ambiguous nonetheless? I explore this question by looking at the possibility for miscommunication in valedictory texts.
4. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 6
Roberto Sánchez Benítez María Zambrano y el nihilismo
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Heidegger se refirió al nihilismo como el proceso en el cual, al final del ser como tal, "ya no queda nada." Como se sabe, resumió en una pregunta la cuestión fundamental de la metafísica occidental: "¿Por qué hay ente y no más bien la nada?" Por otro lado, no deja de ser inquietante el que en la fase del nihilismo "consumado," como le llamara Nietzsche, asistamos a un "retorno de lo religioso." La filósofa española Maria Zambrano (1904-1991) abordó el problema del nihilismo desde la perspectiva precisamente de la "nada," consideráandola como la última forma de aparición de lo sagrado. Para ella, la nada permite superar el dilema del tiempo que el "delirio" del "superhombre"nietzscheano no logra realizar, a la vez que define la acción de la piedad en los tiempos recientes como aquella actitud de aceptación de lo "otro," del misterio y los diferentes planos de ser en los que el hombre se desenvuelve. La "nada" no puede ser pensada a partir del ser: es la sombra de la conciencia y de Dios. Sólo puede ser sentida de manera originaria (Heidegger la entreveía en la angustia). Con la "nada" el hombre ha pretendido reducir las distancias con lo divino, sólo que ha aventurado esto último a destinos terrenales.
5. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 6
D.R. Bhandari Existentialist Perception Of The Human Condition: With Special Reference To Sartre
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Existentialism lays stress on the existence of humans; Sartre believed that human existence is the result of chance or accident. There is no meaning or purpose of our lives other than what our freedom creates, therefore, we must rely on our own resources. Sartre thought that existence manifests itself in the choice of actions, anxiety and freedom of the will. In this way the responsibility of building one's future is in one's hands, but the future is uncertain and so one has no escape from anxiety and despair. We are always under the shadow of anxiety; higher responsibility leads to higher anxiety. The pursuit of being leads to an awareness of nothingness, nothingness to an awareness of freedom, freedom to bad faith and bad faith to the being of consciousness which provides the condition for its own possibility. Concluding his thought, Sartre says that existentialism is not pessimism. He says that existentialism does not aim at plunging us into despair: its final goal is to prepare us through anguish, abandonment and despair for a genuine life, and it is basically concerned with the human condition as a complete form of choice. The fundamental issue, therefore, is an authentic meaning of life.
6. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 6
Purushottama Bilimoria Towards a Creative Hermeneutic of Suspicion: Recovering Ricoeur’s Intervention in the Gadamer-Habermas Debate
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In this paper I will examine a contemporary response to an important debate in the "science" of hermeneutics, along with some cross-cultural implications. I discuss Paul Ricoeur's intervention in the debate between Gadamer and Habermas concerning the proper task of hermeneutics as a mode of philosophical interrogation in the late 20th century. The confrontation between Gadamer and Habermas turns on the assessment of tradition and the place of language within it; the hermeneutical stance takes a positive stance, while ideologiekritik views tradition with a hooded-brow of suspicion, tantamount to "seeing tradition as merely the systematically distorted expression of communication under unacknowledged conditions of violence." In his own rescue operation, Ricoeur combines the reanimation of traditional sources of communicative action with the re-awakening of political responsibility towards a creative renewal of cultural heritage. His fusion or consensus adverts to specific symbols of Western eschatology, viz., liberation, salvation, and hope. What will result if we juxtaposed Buddhist, Daoist and Hindu symbols of Non-being, Nature as transcendence and Intelligence, respectively?
7. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 6
Gaetano Chiurazzi Hegel, Heidegger et la grammaire de l’être
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La compréhension ontologique de Hegel et Heidegger peut être explorée à travers le rôle que les éléments grammaticaux jouent dans leur philosophies: Hegel confère une importance incontestée au nom, et surtout à la forme nominative, la forme du Sujet; d'après Heidegger par contre on peut remarguer un usage du langage qui défie l'eactitude syntaxique, mais qui témoigne l'effort de parvenir à une compréhension non-catégorielle (et, surtout, non substantive) de l'être.
8. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 6
A. Kadir Çüçen Heidegger’s Reading of Descartes’ Dualism: The Relation of Subject and Object
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The problem of traditional epistemology is the relation of subject to external world. The distinction between subject and object makes possible the distinction between the knower and what is known. Starting with Descartes, the subject is a thinking thing that is not extended, and the object is an extended thing which does not think. Heidegger rejects this distinction between subject and object by arguing that there is no subject distinct from the external world of things because Dasein is essentially Being-in-the-world. Heidegger challenges the Cartesian legacy in epistemology in two ways. First, there is the modern tendency toward subjectivism and individualism that started with Descartes' discovery of the 'cogito.' Second, there is the technological orientation of the modern world that originated in the Cartesian understanding of the mathematical and external physical world.
9. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 6
Anthony David Lyotard on the Kantian Sublime
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In this essay I explicate J.F. Lyotard's reading of the Kantian sublime as presented in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1994) and in "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism" (1984). Lessons articulates the context in which critical thought situates itself as a zone of virtually infinite creative capacity, undetermined by principles but in search of them; "Answering the Question" explores how the virtually infinite creative capacity of thought manifests in the avant-gardes. Essentially, in both works Lyotard understands the Kantian sublime as legitimating deconstructive postmodernism.
10. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 6
Juthika Das Radhakrishnan’s Thought and Existentialism
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I attempt to show the similarities between the viewpoints of Radhakrishnan and the existentialist thinkers. The philosophy of Radhakrishnan is an attempt to reinterpret and reconstruct the Advaita Vedanta of Sankara in the light of scientific knowledge and techniques of modern time. Existentialism is an attitude and outlook that emphasizes human existence. For Radhakrishnan, the human is essentially subject, not object. The existentialists assert that the human is not an object to be known, but a subject. Both Radhakrishnan and the existentialists emphasize the immense potential and present day condition of humanity. Radhakrishnan acknowledges the reality of suffering and misery of worldly existence. The existentialists maintain that there are antinomies, contradictions and distress at the root of existence. Radhakrishnan is concerned with liberation as a state of freedom. Freedom is the central concept around which the existential enquiry revolves. Though Radhakrishnan has certain affinities with existentialism, he regards it as a stage in the human's pilgrimage through life.
11. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 6
Kristin K. DeKam Quine’s Physicalist Epistemology: A Contradictory Aesthetic Preference or Justified Bias?
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Quine, in his article "In Praise of the Observational Sentence," claims to establish naturalized epistemology and the work of science as a realist mapping of the world. Invoking Rorty's criticisms of foundationalism from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, this paper analyzes Quine's observational sentence by discussing the unresolved issue of justification. It discusses whether a causal explanation can be a justified true belief and adequate "grounding" of knowledge. I suggest that the criticisms of Quine bypass similarities between Rorty's position and Quine's. Such polemic positions - characteristic of the postmodern/modern debate - imply a false dichotomy. These criticisms of justification and grounding are best understood as a means to argue for eclectic viewpoints of human understanding. I conclude that Wittgenstein's idea of "human life form," or world-picture, provides further context for insisting upon interdisciplinary dialogue in lieu of an assumed hierarchy of specialized sciences.
12. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 6
Alexandra Deligiorgi Education without Truth in Postmodern Perspectivism
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Poststructuralist relativism, following the Nietzschean critique of Western rationalism, denounces the quest for truth as a quest to legitimize various claims on the level of universal human value, by covering up the indirect coercion of their discourse or imagery. Using perspectivism as an argument against philosophical grounding of various patterns and schemes, post-modern thinkers, under the influence of Poststructuralist relativism, try to depart from the cognitivist tradition by transforming philosophical thought to an edifying discipline (Rorty) or learning (Lyotard) liberated from a theory of knowledge, and giving into a discourse of literary or prosy character. I argue that post-modern perspectivism and the individualistic or collectivistic logic which nurtures its scope can be transcended through construction of hyperperspectivistic prisms based on alogic of interrelation animated by the interdisciplinarian spirit prevailing in the field of modern science. This latter serves as the leading thread for the foundation of a new canonicity which, without losing its historical and cultural character, can make claims to truth and validity of general acceptance. The hyperspectivistic canonicity deriving from such an interrelational logic is in a position to animate a new educational model capable of overcoming both idealistic and romantic versions of Bildung.
13. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 6
Por Jesús M. Díaz Husserl y la Crisis de la Cultura
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The topic of the crisis of culture has been common among philosophers whose thought developed during the beginning of the 20th century, and especially among those who lived through the hard times of the interwar period. Husserl was no exception. I intend in this paper a modest approach to the growth of this subject in the founder of phenomenology. I will attempt to: (1) delimit what Husserl meant by culture; (2) identify the reasons for the crisis of culture; and (3) find a solution to this crisis.
14. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 6
Mikhail Epstein Main Trends of Contemporary Russian Thought
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This paper focuses on the most recent period in the development of Russian thought (1960s-1990s). Proceeding from the cyclical patterns of Russian intellectual history, I propose to name it 'the third philosophical awakening.' I define the main tendency of this period as 'the struggle of thought against ideocracy.' I then suggest a classification of main trends in Russian thought of this period: (1) Dialectical materialism in its evolution from late Stalinism to neo-communist mysticism; (2) Neorationalism and Structuralism; (3) Neo-Slavophilism, or the Philosophy of National Spirit; (4) Personalism and Liberalism; (5) Religious Philosophy and Mysticism, both Christian Orthodox and Non-Traditional; (6) Culturology or the Philosophy of Culture; (7) Conceptualism or the Philosophy of Postmodernity.
15. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 6
Haim Gordon Heidegger On Poetry And Thinking: Some Educational Implications
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I discuss some of the educational implications emerging from Heidegger's views on poetry, thinking, and language. Specifically, Heidegger's views on the neighborhood between poetry and thinking suggest that most accepted methods of teaching poetry are in error, because they ignore this neighboring relation. The importance of this relation is presented and clarified. I then discuss the implications of Heidegger's view for teaching poetry.
16. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 6
Wanda Torres Gregory Heidegger On Traditional Language And Technological Language
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On July 18, 1962, Martin Heidegger delivered a lecture entitled Traditional Language and Technological Language in which he argues that the opposition between these two languages concerns our very essence. I examine the nature of this opposition by developing his argument within his particular context and in the general light of his reflections on language. In different sections on technology and language, I summarize much of what he had said in previous writings on the topic (viz., "Die Frage nach der Technik" and "Der Weg zur Sprache"), including his preliminary comments contrasting instruction with teaching, and characterizing this reflection in terms of its uselessness. The central issue connecting these seemingly varying themes is the status of education in our modern technological age and, more specifically, of instruction in the mother tongue. Heidegger’s concern for the status of instruction in the mother tongue is, as we will see later, directly connected to his distinction between the two forms of language.
17. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 6
Helena Gourko From Apocalyptic to Messianic: Philosophia Universalis
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Perhaps for the first time in history, the turn of a millennium is directly reflected in philosophy-as an apocalyptic end of philosophy. Recently, an attempt to channel apocalyptic into messianic has been undertaken by Derrida in his Spectres of Marx. However, Derrida's endeavor does not relate directly to philosophy and thus does not alter its apocalyptic landscape. Considering the critical state of contemporary philosophy, it is unclear whether such an alteration can be performed in the West. A radical reinterpretation appears to be much more probable when undertaken from an outside position. It may be that this is the case with the Philosophia Universalis developed by the Russian-American David Zilberman (1938-1977) from classical Hindu philosophies and applied, as a new synthesis, to Western philosophy. Major ideas of the Philosophia Universalis as well as its principal results and achievements comprise the content of this presentation.
18. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 6
Stephan Günzel Immanence and Deterritorialization: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
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In academic philosophy the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are still treated as curiosities and their importance for philosophical discussions is not recognized. In order to remedy this, I demonstrate how the very concept of philosophy expounded by the two contributes to philosophical thinking at the end of the twentieth century while also providing a possible line of thought for the next millenium. To do this, I first emphasize the influence of Deleuze's thinking, while also indicating the impact Guattari had on him. This account will therefore show Deleuze's attempts before Guattari to concieve of a non-dialectic philosophy of becoming. I will turn to rethink this approach given the influence of Guattari and his anti-psychoanalytic analysis of territorial processes. The result is a conception of philosophical activity as an act of 'becoming minor'.
19. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 6
János Boros, András Guttman On Genophilosophy
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Contemporary progress in life sciences, particularly in genetic engineering, is changing our concept of "human being" and a whole series of other philosophical and common notions. The conventional idea of "subject" will no longer be the final reference for philosophical thinking, since even the subject qua biological or psychological structure will enjoy a high degree of unpredictability. The results of gene technology require reinterpreting such concepts as reproduction, individuality, history, freedom and subjectivity. This paper focuses on the question of freedom, where freedom means the capacity to deliberate and choose between different alternatives of action. We hold that the issue of freedom is relevant for genetics. Considering that genes can "decide" between alternatives, it is possible to speak about the freedom of genes, at least in a metaphoric sense. It has been suggested that genes are "more free" than human beings because they encoded us. The human genome program thus helps us to understand what kind of structures human beings are dependent upon. The main question that we address in this paper concerns the entire human genome project and all its implications including the functions and effects of each gene, the possibility of technological manipulation, what kind of freedom, history, and "human being" will eventually "survive."
20. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 6
Mattias Iser Habermas on Virtue
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Although Habermas has never worked out a conception of virtue and indeed criticizes this notion whenever he uses it, his theory crucially depends on the virtuous attitude of participants in discourse — be it in the realm of democracy and law or that of morality. In this paper, in which I deal only with the ethical foundations of morality, I argue first that the norms of discourse which are gained from a presuppositional analysis of speech as such have to be complemented by the sensitive perception on the side of the recipients. Only when the claims are understood in their full significance for the speaker does the discourse live up to the ideal which is already anticipated in every speech act. This presuppositional analysis shows secondly that it is mainly the virtuous attitude that is morally relevant and not those capacities for acting morally that the agent already possesses. However, the virtuous attitude genuinely entails the obligation to strive to perfect all those capacities that enable us to sensitively understand the other's claim. A discussion of the (discursive) capacities that have to be promoted leads to the singling out of sensitivity as contrasted to immediate empathy. It is the reflexive transcendence of the agent's evaluative patterns that allows this emotion to sit well with a post-conventional morality. Finally, I discuss a possible caveat of Wellmer and Habermas who might claim that the proposed conception of virtue would only be valid for participants in discourse, but not for agents acting in the life-world. However, because the discursive virtue is of wide latitude, it does not fall under this objection.