The type of authority needed for a good environmental public policy is discussed. We looked at some authors who saw in Leviathan, a type of authority possibly compatible with a model for environmental policy and to some others who refuted it. The need for a Leviathan, what type of Leviathan and could Hobbes’s arguments be used in environmental policy is then discussed. The tragedy of the commons, a rich metaphor for environmental policy is used as the main drive. This small essay will, even though very modestly, contribute for an almost absent environmental political philosophy, where traditional concepts such as authority, sovereignty or state are being challenged and need discussion.

In this paper, I intend to dispute Marc Hauser’s thesis, sustained in Wild Minds. What Animals Really Think (2000), that we must abandon the question of whether animals have a feeling of themselves, replacing it for an objective and scientific analysis capable of disclosing the extraordinary similitude between different mental procedures animals undergo when they face common challenges.

During the last decade Castoriadis’ questioning has become a reference point in contemporary social theory. In this article I examine some of the key notions in Castoriadis’ work and explore how he strives to develop a theory on the irreducible creativity in the radical imagination of the individual and in the institution of the social-historical sphere. Firstly, I briefly discuss his conception of modem capitalism as bureaucratic capitalism, a view initiated by his criticism of the USSR regime. The following break up with Marxist theory and his psychoanalytic interests empowered him to criticize Lacan and read Freud in an imaginative, though unorthodox, fashion. I argue that this criticai enterprise assisted greatly Castoriadis in his conception of the radical imaginary and in his unveiling of the political aspects of psychoanalysis. On the issue of the radical imaginary and its methodological repercussions, I’m focusing mainly on the radical imagination o f the subject and its importance in the transition from the “psychic” to the “subject”. Taking up the notion of “Being” as a starting point, I examine the notion of autonomy, seeking its roots in the ancient Greek world. By looking at notions such as “praxis”, “doing”, “project” and “elucidation”, I show how Castoriadis sought to redefine revolution as a means for social and individual autonomy. Finally I attempt to clarify the meaning of “democracy” and “democratic society” in the context of the social imaginary and its creations, the social imaginary significations.

Aristotle is reportedly held to have been a Moderate Realist in that he would maintain that a concept derives from an act of grasping a mind-independent universal object that exists somehow inside of the many different things which the concept is predicated of. As far as a universal is independent of mind, it would stand for the proper object of a concept that subsumes a given number of things as its own instantiations. But we claim that Aristotle rejected such a view and instead did perceive and comprehend universality as a feature of thought rather than as a feature of reality in its own right. As showed in the chapters of Topics regarding the so-called logic of comparison (with the support of Albert the Great’s commentary), each predicate can be more or less consistent with the attribute of the subject of which it may be predicated. Both essential and accidental attributes assume a definite degree of being related to the degree of belonging to substance. Unlike particular things, the universality of a concept is to be understood always in comparison with another concept according to a hierarchy of predicates in terms of universality degree arranged by comparative terms such as ‘more’ (μἂλλον), ‘less’ (ἧττον), and ‘likewise ’ (όμοίως). What is really mind-independent are the truth conditions which make a universal true when exclusively referring to a set of things identically meant by the same predicate whose universality is given by the place occupied in the hierarchy of predicates.

Very early on, the works and ideas of the French socialist P.J.-Proudhon were discussed in the circle of the German young Hegelians. Also, Max Stimer mentioned him several times in Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. His critique of Proudhon’s thoughts is very important for his own définition and confrontation with the concept of property. The article analyses the different levels of his examination with this concept.

Stimer and Feyerabend, despite being historically a hundred and fifty years apart, seem to have been of the same mind in revolting against the methodological explaining of what cannot methodologically be explained. Stirner attempted an explanation in a more intuitive version, Feyerabend in a more sophisticated one. For both thinkers it is obviously important to sustain dissent with the assumption that method is the one and only vital promoter of scientific progress. They equally voice the opinion that, despite science itself producing inconsistencies as well as results, its proceedings nonetheless follow a certain rationale. But to codify a definite approach to phenomena or matter i.e. to establish a definite method for taking a look into things turns science into religion and scientists into believers. As a resuit no new insights are to be gained.

In his first work, the poetics Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus. Baumgarten frequently cites Horace’s Ars Poetica. Horace was highly esteemed by Baumgarten and his contemporaries, especially in the fields of poetics and art theory. Baumgarten uses Ars Poetica throughout Meditationes. but it is especially in the paragraphs introducing some of the key concepts of his philosophy that there is a significant amount of excerpts from Horace’s poetics. In this article, I examine if and how contemporary scholarly interpretations may have influenced these uses of Horace’s text and maybe even Baumgarten’s theory. Following a brief account of relevant commentaries as well as Horace’s position in contemporary art theory, I explore the implied interpretations of Ars Poetica in Baumgarten’s excerpts, focusing on his three key terms, phantasia. heterocosmica and methodum lucidam. Compared to the conception of Horace as expressed in the commentaries, this study suggests a complex interaction between those and Baumgarten’s art theory.

This article explores the genealogical and metaphysical grounds for the positive re-evaluation of the concept of “confusion”, which played a vital role in Baumgarten’s foundation of aesthetics as scientia cognitionis sensitivae. First, a reconsideration of Descartes’ and Leibniz’ conceptualisations of “confusion” attempts to identify the place of Baumgarten’s aesthetics within the rationalistic dilemma of evaluating moral and art-related thinking. Secondly, the way in which Baumgarten attempted to resolve the dilemma is explored by a close examination of his concept of “the aesthetic” and of how the concept changed in the course of his writings. The ultimate purpose of this article lies in illuminating an aspect of Baumgarten’s aesthetics, that is, an attempt to synthesize the cognitive and the ethical by means of a re-configuration o f the concept of “confusion”.

One of the most important concepts Baumgarten introduces in his Reflections on Poetry is the concept of sensible perfection. It is surprising that Baumgarten does not elaborate upon this concept in his Metaphysics, since it plays such an important role in the new science of aesthetics that he proposes at the end of the Reflections on Poetry and then further develops in the Aesthetics. This article considers the significance of the absence of sensible perfection from the Metaphysics and its implications for Baumgarten’s aesthetics, before tuming to the use Meier and Kant make of Baumgarten’s concept. In the end, this article shows that Baumgarten did not abandon his conception of sensible perfection in the Metaphysics, though its influence declined significantly after Kant rejected the idea that sensibility and the understanding could be distinguished by the perfections of their cognition.

Scholars are prone to emphasize A.G. Baumgarten’s foundation of aesthetics as a discipline in its own right and Kant’s use of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica as a handbook for his lectures on metaphysics. Nonetheless there are some further and deeper reasons for Baumgarten to mark a division between the so called Leibnizian-Wolffian tradition and the Kantian transcendental revolution. The goal of this paper is to take into account these reasons and to analyze them in order to show that they are rooted in psychology as it is treated in Baumgarten’s Metaphysica. The paper’s aim is to highlight Baumgarten’s methodological approach, that is, the use of Leibnizian doctrines, which are exposed through the Wolffian order. The radical originality of this procedure can be adequately assessed only by virtue of its Kantian development.

This paper defends the Principle of Sufficient Reason, taking Baumgarten as its guide. The primary aim is not to vindicate the principle, but rather to explore the kinds of resources Baumgarten originally thought sufficient to justify the PSR against its early opponents. The paper also considers Baumgarten’s possible responses to Kant’s pre-Critical objections to the proof of the PSR. The paper finds that Baumgarten possesses reasonable responses to all these objections. While the paper notes that in the absence of a response to Kant’s Critical discussion of the PSR (which is omitted here due to limitations of space), this result does not vindicate the principle, it shows how this discussion provides a deeper understanding of what, according to Baumgarten, the PSR really assumes and intends, and prepares the way for a more responsible discussion of Kant’s critical objections to Baumgarten’s supposed proof.

The article treats as significant the formal coincidence between Kant’s presentation of the science of metaphysics in the “Architectonic of Pure Reason” chapter of the first Critique and Alexander Baumgarten’s presentation of the same in the Metaphysica. From his comments on Baumgarten in the metaphysics lectures, the article shows that for Kant metaphysics in its traditional form lacked completeness and systematic order. Kant fits completeness into his architectonic plan of a scientific metaphysics by Converting Baumgartian ontology into an “analytic of the understanding”; Kant achieves the systematicity by modeling a rational “idea of the form of the whole” after Baumgarten’s tree-like ordering of the special sciences of metaphysics. Thus, Kant realizes the completeness and systematicity in a theoretical presentation of the science of metaphysics that he finds lacking in Baumgarten precisely by borrowing from the latter his scheme for metaphysics.

Ladyman and Ross’s Every Thing Must Go is a challenging text. In order to ascertain its significance, attention will be focused on their idea of Scale Relative Ontology. To do this their conception of Ontic Structural Realism will require elucidation. Its implications for Scale Relative Ontology will be explored before considering the way Scale Relative Ontology can be cast through three possible dimensions: the cosmological, the ordinary middle-sized, and scientific perspectives. In exploring the latter perspective, and applying insights derived from Peirce’s philosophy, their defence of Scientism will then be considered. In this way three different senses can be distinguished through which this doctrine can be presented, before examining what kind of Scientism they advocate and thereby its adequacy.

Against the growing trend in philosophy toward naturalistic analysis, Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment has gained significant attention. Some scholars suggest that Kant’s insights bear on our aesthetic appreciation of nature, others on our account of the life sciences. In this paper I draw these lines of inquiry together to identify two overlooked dimensions of Kant’s project: the role of moral hope in problematizing the limits of natural science and the role of culture in providing a solution. Kant argues that we cannot think consistently unless we are able to conceive of nature as a domain that is hospitable to human freedom. His response is to identify the productive capacity of the imagination to transform the material of nature into something more. While the prevailing conception of nature today is at best indifferent and at worst antagonistic to human habitation, this dimension of Kant’s work has much to bear on contemporary thought.

In this paper I focus on the analysis of the concept of the physical and its implications for the formulation of physicalism. Most of the paper is “negative,” insofar as it intends to show why the most accepted formulation of physicalism, the theory of the supervenience or complete determination of the empirical phenomena by the microphysical characteristics, has deep empirical and conceptual deficiencies: on one hand, it seems to be incompatible with the results of different sciences and, on the other, it allows us to understand neither the scientific nor the daily use of the notion of the physical. If this is the case, then we have strong reasons for constructing a non-reductive concept of physicalism that describes a world wherein some of its fundamental phenomena can be essentially macrophysical, i.e., physical phenomena which cannot be reduced to, nor understood purely in terms of the properties of their microphysical components.

The epoch of the Anthropocene is on the verge of becoming scientifically acknowledged by the science of Geology. In what way does this concern Philosophy? In this paper, we evaluate how the new concept of the Anthropocene contrasts with the classical concept of Nature, aiming to identify the territory of both. In order to do this we take as our starting point the approach of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) which separates God and Nature. This later translated into the separation of Nature and Culture. The latter dualism is contested by Philippe Descola (b.1942) who defends the convergence of both. Bruno Latour (b.1947) and Timothy Morton (b.1968) consider the concept of nature as obsolete. Ulrich Beck (1944-2015), Erie C. Ellis and Mark Lynas (b.1973) claim that science will be able to cope with whatever changes the Anthropocene brings. We consider that all these claims, albeit apparently contrasting, are grounded in belief and as a counter-proposal we aim to bring to the table the concept of spirituality as essential to re-evaluate what Nature is today in the light of the Anthropocene.

Until Speculative Realism’s arrival a few years back, few philosophers found it problematic to view nature as a cultural construct, circumscribed and dependent on human attitudes (Berleant, 1992: 53). While I share speculative realists’ goal to strengthen philosophy’s mind-independence (Immanuel Kant’s goal as well), I worry that isolating nature as beyond human minds not only absolves human responsibility, but eradicates “kinship” relations, which capture non-hu­man nature providing for and sustaining human beings, and vice versa. To develop an environmental philosophy that affords mind-independence and offers evidence, unlike Positive Aesthetics, which idealizes wilderness, I discuss: 1) the pro/cons of nature’s mind-independence, 2) the implications for aspection, 3) the need for assessment tools that guide human action, 4) the reasons for grounding ethical action in kinship, and 5) recent research that suggests biodiverse cities exemplify the kinship model. Inseparable from nature, human beings are kindred participants in shared eco-systems.