In recent years, the educational-system development specialization of the MA program in the University of Haifa’s Faculty of Education has held an annual seminar on Philosophy for/with Children (P4wC). Under my guidance, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Druze, and Circassian students have formed a group embodying a living and breathing dialogical space. Despite the global spread of P4wC principles following the emergence of the P4C movement promoted by the International Council of Philosophical Inquiry and its practice in dozens of (...) national and regional centers, neither approach is formally taught in Israeli universities and colleges. Both thus remain outside the pedagogical mainstream, the University of Haifa—where I teach—being the only institution at which they can be studied at an MA level. I have also established the Israeli Academic Forum for Philosophy with Children, which conducts seminars and offers professional development, etc. (shrink)

Philosophy and Cosmology is an open access, peer-reviewed and refereed journal that focuses on theoretical and conceptual problems and issues in philosophical and cosmological research. Philosophy and Cosmology is published by International Society of Philosophy and Cosmology. The objective of Philosophy and Cosmology is to promote exchange and collaboration among philosophers, social, technical and natural science researchers throughout the world. In pursuit of this objective the journal not only publishes high quality research papers but also (...) ensures that the published papers achieve broad international credibility. Philosophy and Cosmology publishes original papers, review papers, conceptual frameworks, analytical and simulation models, case studies, empirical research, and book reviews. At present scientific-philosophical Journal Philosophy and Cosmology is an annual printing issue which focuses on publishing of researches at the sphere of philosophy of Space also with creation of integrated informational area for Space observation and outer space exploration. (shrink)

The main foci of this paper are to delineate the distinction between appearance and reality in the light of Sree Sankara’s Advaita Philosophy and to look at how Sankara’s notion of appearance and reality is enjoying a contemporary revival, and it is important to try to develop an understanding of why this is so. The central theme of the notion of Sankara philosophy is that Brahman or the absolute spirit is the only reality and everything else is an (...) illusory appearance of Brahman. The major essence of Sankara’s Philosophy can be expressed in the form of a half verse, ‘Brahma Satyam Jagat Mitya Jivo Brahmaiva Na apara' which means ‘Brahman is real the world is unreal and the so-called jiva nondifferent from Brahman'. In the current consciousness study, Sree Sankara’s notion of Brahman and Jagat is so conundrum in the material life of postmodern people. But it is inevitable to believe that Sree Sankara’s philosophy is not a conundrum for common people in contemporary society but the very conundrum for the non-common people. (shrink)

In order to better cope with the pressures and stresses of the current day, modern psychology is anxiously seeking to find new therapies to address the increasing disorders within the human psyche. In the process new fields of research, such as humanistic and transpersonal psychology, curiously appear to borrow more and more from the wisdom of the ages. This volume, containing eighteen articles by noteworthy expositors of the perennial philosophy such as Huston Smith, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Frithjof (...) Schuon, presents the spiritual psychology of the wisdom traditions as a much-needed antidote to the current impasse in modern psychology. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy (...) which has followed, has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

This article offers a review of Richard Rorty’s attempts to come to terms with the role of religion in our public and intellectual life by tracing the key developments in his position, partially in response to the ubiquitous criticisms of his distinction between private and public projects. Since Rorty rejects the possibility of dismissing religion on purely epistemic grounds, he is determined to treat it, instead, as a matter of politics. My suggestion is that, in this respect, Rorty’s position is (...) best construed as that of a humanist rather than a post-modernist. Ultimately, it appears that, in his view, the positive element of religion—i.e. the idea of religion as a social gospel—has been absorbed and transformed into a utopian striving which humanists associate with the ideal of democracy. Hence, in this regard, religion can be considered obsolete. Yet, without explicitly invoking the usual epistemic grounds, Rorty’s arguments for excluding religion from the public sphere remain rather thin, and an interest in reforming rather than excluding religion would have been more consistent with his general outlook. (shrink)

At the invitation of the Commission for World Mission and Evangelism (CWME) of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in collaboration with different associations involved in mission and ecumenical studies, the Regional Center for Central and Eastern Europe convened at the Faculty of Orthodox Theology of the Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, through its Center for Mission and Nomocanonical Studies (CMNS, in collaboration with the Central and Eastern European Association for Mission Studies (CEEAMS). Its aim was to (...) reflect on how the International Missionary Council (IMC) has influenced mission theology and practice in Central and Eastern Europe, taking into account different contextual realities. (shrink)

This Special Issue is an outcome of the lectures and discussions on ‘Cross-cutting Themes and Concepts in Human Rights’, offered as a Seminar Course to the students of the MA Programme, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. As part of the Course, a Webinar on ‘Rethinking Rights and Justice for Non-Humans’ was held in 2022, in which the participants advanced some of the most compelling arguments for the meaningful representation of non-human entities in law and governance. In (...) the three sessions of the webinar, the participants explored the terrain of relevant concepts, emerging norms, and moral justifications that underline the case of non-human entities: (i) The Limits of Animal Rights: Exploring the Case for Multispecies Justice, (ii) Humanist Dimensions of Machines, and (iii) Representing Nature: Rights, Crimes, and Diplomacy. Scholarly literature on the subject matter sheds light on the gaps in existing legal frameworks concerning the responsibilities of human beings towards non-human life forms. There is evidence of a growing universal consciousness embedded in the worth and sacredness of non-human life forms. A series of developments in the fields of technology, philosophy, and other disciplines have moved non-human entities to the forefront of legal reforms, domestic and international. (shrink)

This book is a collection of all the papers and the essay published in the special issue “Philosophy and Meaning in Life Vol.3,” Journal of Philosophy of Life, Vol.11, No.1, 2021, pp.1-154. We held the Third International Conference on Philosophy and Meaning in Life online at the University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK, on July 21–23, 2020. This conference was co-hosted by the Birmingham Centre for Philosophy of Religion, and the Waseda Institute of Life and Death (...) Studies. We accepted about 50 presentations from around the world. Professor Lisa Bortolotti and I gave keynote lectures. After the conference, we called for papers for publication from the speakers, and we accepted seven papers and an essay for the special issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Life. We would like to give special thanks to the anonymous referees who kindly reviewed the submitted manuscripts. The accepted papers deal with a variety of topics, such as the subjective/objective debate, narrative meaning, Simone de Beauvoir, and Alain Badiou, and they are all discussed from the perspective of the philosophy of meaning in life. (shrink)

This paper discusses how the general and abstract concept of legitimacy applies to international institutions, using the United Nations Security Council as an example. We argue that the evaluation of the Security Council’s legitimacy requires considering three significant and interrelated aspects: its purpose, competences, and procedural standards. We consider two possible interpretations of the Security Council’s purpose: on the one hand, maintaining peace and security, and, on the other, ensuring broader respect for human rights. Both of (...) these purposes are minimally morally acceptable for legitimacy. Second, we distinguish between three different competences of the UNSC: 1) the decision-making competence, 2) the quasi-legislative competence, and 3) the referral competence. On this basis, we argue that different procedural standards are required to legitimise these competences, which leads to a more differentiated understanding of the Security Council’s legitimacy. While maintaining that the membership structure of the Council is a severe problem for its legitimacy, we suggest other procedural standards that can help to improve its overall legitimacy, which include broad transparency, deliberation, and the revisability of the very terms of accountability themselves. (shrink)

[This piece is written for those working in social gerontology and aging studies, with the aim of bringing insights from disability studies and philosophy of disability to bear on enduring debates in those fields.] The guiding question of humanistic age-studies—What does it mean to grow old?—cannot be answered without reflecting on disability. This is not simply because growing old invariably means becoming impaired in various ways, but also because the discriminations and stigmas involved in ageism (...) are often rooted in ableism. We here draw on research in the philosophy of disability as well as the interdisciplinary field of disability studies to explore the relationship between ageism and ableism. (shrink)

Cosmopolis A Review of Cosmopolitics -/- 2015/3-4 -/- Editorial Dominique de Courcelles & Paul Ghils -/- This issue addresses the general concept of “spirituality” as it appears in various cultural contexts and timeframes, through contrasting ideological views. Without necessarily going back to artistic and religious remains of primitive men, which unquestionably show pursuits beyond the biophysical dimension and illustrate practices seeking to unveil the hidden significance of life and death, the following papers deal with a number of interpretations covering a (...) wide field extending from belief to theory, from emotions to concepts, from the wisdom of personal experience to the most sophisticated doctrines. Spirit and spirituality are indeed many-faceted notions. They may refer to the intricate world of the interacting spirits which inhabit living beings in animistic traditions, without excluding a “grand force” linking human beings within a dynamic whole on which their very existence rely . They also bear upon more atomistic and either/or approaches of Western philosophy, which have become embodied in Cartesian dualism against a monotheist background, to the point of freezing the essence of individuals and culminating in the extreme individualism that characterizes our contemporaries. However, this equally refers to the opposite conception of materialism, across times and cultures, from ancient India and Greece (Cārvāka, originally known as Lokāyata, or some Buddhist doctrines for the former, Democritus or Lucretius for the latter) to more contemporary materialistic schools, whether modern or postmodern. -/- The following papers look at the contrasting forms of the philosophy and spirit of the human factor set into a whole, with no artificial disjoint between the psychical and the physical levels, as Wittgenstein put it: “And how can a body have a soul?”. This approach is not unrelated to the notion of anthropocene examined in a recent issue of Cosmopolis, with provides another comprehensive framework open to a spiritual life emerging from the very environment that generated it. -/- *** The first section of this issue was edited by Dominique de Courcelles, director at the National French Research Centre (CNRS), whom we wish to thank for collecting relevant studies relating to the religious and political questions, with a view to focusing on the war of ideas inevitably waged behind images, concepts and perceptions, taking an asymmetrical approach. To the extent that they are mindful of global/local interactions and include representations, opinions and beliefs, such disciplines as philosophy, philology, history and social sciences can provide useful studies accounting for new practices in geopolitics and a fair diplomacy. -/- In her introduction, Dominique de Courcelles first poses the question of how the religious and political spheres interrelate, with their corresponding religious demands and humanistic values. She then suggests that the right question today may be breaking with the philosophy of human rights concerned with the defense of human beings against the hazards of arbitrary politics or the instrumental use of religion, in favour of a fair philosophy of humankind, a new humanism. This would consist in recognizing a common loyalty of all towards one interhuman, not only interstate community, to protect it from both the autonomy demanded by individuals and the instrumental use of minorities. -/- Considering the fact of diversity, so important today in terms of both politics and religion, Abdelhai Azarkan looks at the conditions under which tolerance could obtain the double status of right and duty. He revisits to two philosophers, John Locke and Voltaire, who thought about it from the historical reality of religious wars. The former made tolerance into a right, basing his analysis on the political-legal level, while the latter saw tolerance as a duty, from an analysis based on ethical-political criteria. -/- Mathieu Guidère examines what he calls semantic denominationalism, a term which implies religious attributes and identities, whichever national loyalties or personal belonging they may have at the same time. Since the early 2000s, thie phenomenon has expanded tremendously, compounded by the “war on terror” and the over media-oriented terrorist actions. Denominational expressions act as formal names for ordinary and high-profile players in domestic and foreign policies of democratic states. These systems reveal a receding secularization, while the powerful comeback of religious identities signals the failure of nation-states and the weakening of the humanist spirit. -/- Barbara De Poli retraces the history of a contemporary jihadism claiming its Islamic essence and asserting the truth of genuine coranic principles via the war on infidels, with a view to restoring the Caliphate. After defining the term jihad, she shows that even if this contemporary jiadism is spreading in the Muslim world, it radically departs from Islamic law and the received use of the term jihad, in so far as it is rooted in the early radical thinking of Islamic ideologues in the 20th century, starting with with Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. This current has been fueled by by international conflicts since the outbreak of the war in Afghanistan, in which the so-called Western countries bear a major responsibility. -/- Abderrazak Sayadi starts from the Tunisian experience to ask the question of humanist values and democracy within the relationships between the religious and political spheres. As a historian of religion, he is brought to demystify certain islamic principles and to paying attention to the reform of law, seeing the separation of religion and politics as a precondition to a successful democratic gamble and the establishment of a renewed humanism. -/- Dominique de Courcelles reminds us that getting a better knowledge of narrations and words makes it possible to better understand how logical and rhetorical thinking works for those who wage an asymetriccal war, re-enchanting and mystifying the world to better take control. As soon as 1932, an exchange of letters between Einstein and Freud made it clear that, in order to free man from fatality and war, education understood as culture was fundamental. Such illustrations as the exécution of Oussama ben Laden and the Caliph’s speech in Mossoul show that a premiminary analysis of images and words is essential to a fair diplomacy conducted by people from civil society, whose culture and wisdom allow justice and force to speak together and better resist war. -/- Marcel Boisard thinks that on the day the guns fall silent, exhausted by war, we will not return to the state borders that have prevailed for a century as an outcome of the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. It is time to prepare the “day after”, which will be a huge challenge. To this end, a summit of Middle-East nations is urgently needed to globally decide the fate of those peoples. On the condition that we know who the enemy is and accept to name it, to understand the history of the countries, groups and alliances, and to question any false or self-interested sense of certainty. -/- *** In the second section, Paul Schafer provides the author’s experiences to explain how culture, from the artistic to the biological, has the power to to open the doors to spirituality, from the inner self to the global environment. He asks himself whether a relative permanence of spirituality can arise from the specific moments that characterize it. Laurent Ledoux synthesizes the conclusion of a symposium held on 22 January 2015 on the links between philosophy and management, on the basis of the spiritual dimension conceived as “natural” and the answers it may suggest to the issues that face the organizations in a “contemporaniversal” world. Jacques Rifflet makes that question in a secular perspective, based on the wellsprings of personal commitment before it can be caught by any religious creed or scientific theory. In this sense spirituality, in alliance with reason, both inspires human consciousness and illuminates its destiny. Sami Aldeeb asks himself whether Islam can be reconciled with human rights. Caught between the belief in an absolute and final Word descended from the sky, and evidence showing that any religion is the creation of a given culture and a society situated in time and space, the Makkan and … contexts et médinois call for differentiated, if not opposite answers and exegeses. Bernard Carmona provides the outline of a dialogical framework, which is known to be a feature of debates between the various philosophical schools of classical India, exemplified here by the transdisciplinary perspective of debates within a Buddhist context. *** The articles not focused on the previous topic include a study by Landry Signé on China’s strategy, competing with the United States to control African resources. The author deals with the specific case of China’s rapprochement with Southern Sudan since Sudan was broken up. In the last paper, Goran Fejić and Rada Iveković, return to the essential role that women should play, and comments upon the role of some international legal instruments related in particular to the elimination of all forms of discrimination. The perspective is transnational and transethnic and is based on secular criteria, as regards nation-building and more generally society-building. Considering the persistence of widespread violence, whether in times of armed conflict or in times of peace, the question remains whether it is possible to fully implement rights and justice instruments. (shrink)

What is the relevance of the history of philosophy to philosophy as such? This is not the question, what is the reason for studying the history of philosophy? This question is easy to answer. Philosophy is part of our culture, and the history of our culture is worth studying, if anything is. Nor is it the question, should academic institutions teach the history of philosophy as part of a philosophical education? It is widely accepted that (...) students should be taught the history of philosophy, even if philosophy itself is not considered an essentially historical discipline. An education in the history of philosophy is part of a broadly humanistic university education, and something of value for this reason alone, without it being necessary for anyone who actually pursues philosophy creatively and systematically to have to take history into account. (shrink)

It is well known in contemporary Madhyamaka studies that the seventh century Indian philosopher Candrakīrti rejects the foundationalist Abhidharma epistemology. The question that is still open to debate is: Does Candrakīrti offer any alternative Madhyamaka epistemology? One possible way of addressing this question is to find out what Candrakīrti says about the nature of buddha’s epistemic processes. We know that Candrakīrti has made some puzzling remarks on that score. On the one hand, he claims buddha is the pramāṇabhūta-puruṣa (person (...) of epistemic and moral authority), sarvākārajñatājñānaṃ (omniscient, wise), pratyakṣalakṣaṇam (exclusively perceptual in characteristic) [Candrakīrti (MABh VI.214)], and claims that there are clearly four pramāṇas—epistemic warrants—direct perception (pratyakṣa), inference (anumāna), testimony (āgama) and analogy (upamāna) [Candrakīrti (Pp I.3), cf. MacDonald 2015, pp. 287–288]. On the other hand, somewhat paradoxically, Candrakīrti claims that buddhahood is an embodiment of a complete cessation of “mind and mental processes” [Candrakīrti (MABh XI.1, 155a; MAB XI.17d)] Now how are we to make sense of these two seemingly contradictory statements? Do these statements reflect any deeper conflicts within Candrakīrti’s system or is there a coherent way to interpret these statements? The Tibetan Prāsaṅgika interpreters of Candrakīrti’s Madhyamaka largely agree that there is no internal contradiction in Candrakīrti’s system, and agree there is a way to make coherent sense of these statements. Nevertheless, the Tibetans exegetes bring to the table two radically conflicting proposals to approach Candrakīrti’s Mādhyamaka; both claiming to successfully address the apparent tension arising from Candrakīrti’s statements. One proposal is made by Tsongkhapa Losang Dakpa (Tsong kha pa bLo bzang grags pa, 1357–1419), who maintains the tension can be plausibly resolved by demonstrating that Candrakīrti’s unique non-foundationalist epistemological program renders him an epistemological coherentist. In contrast Taktsang Lotsawa Sherap Rinchen (sTag tshang Lo tsā ba Shes rab rin chen, 1405–1477) argues that according to Candrakīrti buddha is a global agnostic, on the ground of the nonexistence of mind and mental processes for those who have attained fully awakening. Taktsang instead proposes the no-mind thesis as a more plausible way to resolve the tension in Candrakīrti’s philosophy, categorically refusing to attribute to buddha any cognitive processes and epistemic warrants. This paper is an analysis of Taktsang’s no-mind thesis—the claim that buddhas utterly lack any knowledge of the world because they do not have epistemic processes and warrants to perceive the world—in what follows a rational reconstruction of his arguments is developed in order to evaluate his thesis. We shall then assess the implications of accepting Taktsang’s no-mind thesis. (shrink)

This article connects François Laruelle's non-philosophical experiments with the axiomatic method to non-philosophy's anti-hermeneutic stance. Focusing on two texts from 1987 composed using the axiomatic method, "The Truth According to Hermes" and "Theorems on the Good News," I demonstrate how non-philosophy utilizes structural mechanisms to both expand and contract the field of potential models allowed by non-philosophy. This demonstration involves developing a notion of interpretation, which synthesizes Rocco Gangle's work on model theory with respect to non-philosophy (...) with Laruelle's critique of hermeneutics. I use Alexander Galloway's interpretation of "The Truth According to Hermes" as a case study of the limits non-philosophy sets upon its use as a basis for philosophical models, in contrast to arguments by Gangle regarding non-philosophy's greater genericity in comparison to philosophy. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to clarify under what conditions a philosophical problem arises. I will describe two ways in which we might perceive a question as a problem. First, when we fnd ourselves inclined to believe in propositions that appear incompatible with each other. Second, when we fnd ourselves inclined to believe in propositions that seem incompatible with our desires. I will discuss both of these cases and articulate a didactic strategy – the Clash Strategy – which can (...) be used in order to plan and facilitate dialogic inquiry in the classroom. This strategy suggests introducing stimuli that will help students appreciate the clash that drives the philosophical question to be explored during the dialogue. In summary, this paper aims to ofer insights to all teachers interested in promoting dialogic inquiry, whether philosophical or otherwise, in education. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the notion of philosophy as a way of life as a recovery pathway for individuals in addiction recovery. My hypothesis is that philosophy as a way of life can be a compelling, and legitimate recovery pathway for individuals in addiction recovery, as one of many recovery pathways. I will focus on logic-based therapy applied in the context of addiction recovery. The aim of presenting a case study is to show how a client receiving (...) LBT is provided with techniques and a worldview that can contribute to a philosophically oriented recovery program. In the case study the client was advised to apply the moral philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as an uplifting philosophical framework to counteract his unproductive worldview and fallacious thinking. Considering that there is an ostensibly low efficacy rate for the treatment of addiction, articulating the value of philosophy as a way of life as a recovery pathway provides a conceptual and methodological framework for the development of novel philosophically-based addiction treatment and recovery-oriented programs—thus expanding the treatment and recovery options available for those seeking recovery from addiction. (shrink)

This paper clarifies the significance of philosophy for traditional societies and modern societies and their evolution. In this paper ethics is the mainstream philosophy which studies and analyses the values of both the traditional societies and modern ones. This paper is only the ethical study of the traditional values and modern values. There are three ways to philosophize societies as traditional and modern: Ethical perspective, economical and theological, but this paper deals only with the ethical approach. Philosophers (...) from ancient to modern era played an important part in the transformation of traditional into modern. Morality and religion changed the mind of the nations towards development and ethical progress. In this article ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, modern philosophy and others religious philosophies of India, china, and Muslim philosophies exercised key attempts to study traditional societies and modern societies. This paper highlights the factors that are responsible for the vices in traditional societies and also the elements that are productive for the promotion of modern societies. (shrink)

This article focuses on the idea of ‘human rights city’ and explores its practice. It starts from the concepts of human rights cities and subsidiarity to explain what a human rights city is and delves into the existing literature identifying the challenges to guarantee human rights in local contexts, such as the legal framework, education and training, the institutional structure, and the resources. Our article is based on an empirical-based study of Madrid Human Rights Plan (2017–2019). We carried out semi-structured (...) interviews, focus group, and participant observation to grasp the obstacles that civil servants encounter in the implementation of the Plan. We identify five types of obstacles that we classify as conceptual, ideological, legal, organisational, and budgetary. Our study questions the idea that the local context, just because of its proximity to the citizenry, is the best equipped level of government to guarantee human rights. Without proper training and resources human rights can be lost in translation. Through the identification of such obstacles in a specific case study, we contribute to the academic debate on human rights in practice with the aim of fostering its guarantee in local contexts. (shrink)

This report presents the features of the organisation and the main ideas of the international scientific conference “‘No Right of Sedition’. Kant and the Problem of Revolution in the 18th—21st Century Philosophy.” The conference was held at the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University (IKBFU) in Kaliningrad on November 9—10, 2017 and was dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The event was organised by the Academia Kantiana — a research unit on comparative studies on Russian (...) and Western philosophy at the IKBFU’s Institute for the Humanities. The reports presented at the conference focused on the analysis of the phenomenon of revolution from Kant to the present day as well as the conceptions of revolution that appeared around the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917. The report summarises all the presentations and discussions that took place at the confe­rence in accordance with the thematic clusters. The conference confirmed that Kant’s ideas on the state and the revolution are still relevant today. (shrink)

Proceedings of the 2023 International Conference of the Association for the Promotion of African Studies (APAS) held at the University of Nigeria Nsukka on 24th - 27th May.

In this essay Ernst Cassirer addresses two currents of the philosophical reflection about man and culture that emerged at the end of the 18th century. Th e naturalistic one, conceives of man and culture as an outcome of the processes that takes place beyond the reach of human will and consciousness. Among such naturalistically oriented philosophies Cassirer includes Hegel’s idealism, Taine’s positivism and Spengler’s psychologism. All of them imply a characteristic kind of historical fatalism. In opposition to such a deterministic (...) vision of human development stands a philosophy that emphasizes the importance of individual decision and responsibility for the course of history. Cassirer names it “humanistic” as it places man in the very middle of its research. The initiators of this tradition were Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt, foremost representatives of the German romantic movement. The philosopher who took up their humanistic thought and elevated it to the importance of a distinct knowledge was Wilhelm Dilthey. While bearing in mind who is the real creator of culture all these thinkers pay special attention to the question of man’s responsibility for culture as well as for himself. The problem of human responsibility that totally escaped the attention of naturalistically oriented philosophers is somehow a distinguishing characteristic of all humanistic philosophies of culture. (shrink)

Dialogue on African Philosophy and Development: Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference of the Association for the Promotion of African Studies.

The present book, “Essays on Positive Philosophy” is an anthology of revised papers presented in several places. I am thankful to the organizers of the seminars who gave me an opportunity to share my ideas on their platform. The first paper “Philosophy and Values in Public Affairs: An Appraisal” presented in National Seminar on Philosophy in Practice: Making Sense of Human Existence organized by Society for Philosophical Praxis Counselling and Spiritual Healing held on 23rd Feb, 2014 at (...) Department of Philosophy, University of Rajasthan, Jaipur. This paper discusses the nature of philosophy and different values and their use in public affairs. Second paper “Higher Education and Research in India: An Overview” presented in 28th National Conference of Council for Teacher Education on the theme “Emerging Perspectives in Indian Teacher Education: Search for Identity and Building Humane Society” held on November 1-2, 2014 organized by CTE (HSC) at Kurukshetra which discuss status of higher education and research. The last paper, “The Role of Religious and Spiritual Values in Shaping Humanity (A Study of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s Religious Philosophy) in 3rd International Dharma-Dhamma Conference on Harmony of Religions: Welfare of Humankind, held on 24-26 October, 2015 at Indore (MP). This paper is related to the religious philosophy of Dr. B.R.Ambedkar. Since philosophy, education and religion are highly inter-related subjects, you can find my views about them in my these papers. Hope this short volume will help us to understand some basics of these subjects. (shrink)

The Journal «Philosophy and Cosmology» (ISSN 2307-3705) was established by Oleg Bazaluk as a press organ of International Society of Philosophy and Cosmology at 2004. This Society was established in the setting of Pereyaslav-Khmelnitskiy State Pedagogical University. Initially the Journal was printed as a special edition of Ukrainian philosophical journal «Sententiae» (one’s Chief Editor is Oleg Khoma) and covered academic scientific, philosophical and amateur researches of the space problematic. Since 2008, Journal «Philosopy and Cosmology» is an independent (...) printed issue at the suit of Oleg Khoma. Since 2009, together with coming of G.Alyaev, Journal «Philosopy and Cosmology» has an International status printing advanced researches at the spheres of cosmic education, social philosophy, philosophy of Space, philosophic anthropology, philosophy of cognition, philosophy of science and technology, philosophy of religion, futurology. The Journal printed the papers of leading specialists form Russia: E.Vitol, G.Gladyshev, A.Kononov, S.Krichevskiy, I.Lantsev, T.Lolaev, M.Prokopenko, M.Prokhorov, K.Khrutskiy, V.Yakovlev; from Ukraine: G.Alyaev, O.Bazaluk, I.Vladlenova, G.Zheleznyak, V.Okorokov, N.Malysheva; form Kazakhstan: S.Kolchigin; from Georgia: L.Djakhaia; form USA: A.Khazen. -/- At present scientific-philosophical Journal «Philosophy and Cosmology» is an annual printing issue which focuses on publishing of researches at the sphere of philosophy of Space also with creation of integrated informational area for Space observation and outer space exploration. (shrink)

Philosophy and Cosmology is an open access, peer-reviewed and refereed journal that focuses on theoretical and conceptual problems and issues in philosophical and cosmological research. Philosophy and Cosmology is published by International Society of Philosophy and Cosmology. The objective of Philosophy and Cosmology is to promote exchange and collaboration among philosophers, social, technical and natural science researchers throughout the world. In pursuit of this objective the journal not only publishes high quality research papers but also (...) ensures that the published papers achieve broad international credibility. Philosophy and Cosmology publishes original papers, review papers, conceptual frameworks, analytical and simulation models, case studies, empirical research, and book reviews. (shrink)

Philosophy and Cosmology is an open access, peer-reviewed and refereed journal that focuses on theoretical and conceptual problems and issues in philosophical and cosmological research. Philosophy and Cosmology is published by International Society of Philosophy and Cosmology. The objective of Philosophy and Cosmology is to promote exchange and collaboration among philosophers, social, technical and natural science researchers throughout the world. In pursuit of this objective the journal not only publishes high quality research papers but also (...) ensures that the published papers achieve broad international credibility. Philosophy and Cosmology publishes original papers, review papers, conceptual frameworks, analytical and simulation models, case studies, empirical research, and book reviews. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: This article explores the role of principal leadership in creating a thinking school. It contributes to the school leadership literature by exploring the intersection of two important areas of study in education  school leadership and education for thinking  which is a particularly apt area of study, because effective school leadership is crucial if students are to learn to be critical and creative thinkers, yet this connection has not be widely investigated. We describe how one principal, Hinton, turned (...) around an underperforming school by using critical and creative philosophical thinking as the focus for students, staff and parents. Then, drawing on the school leadership literature, the article describes seven attributes of school leadership beginning with four articulated by Leithwood and colleagues (2006) (building vision and setting direction; redesigning the organisation; understanding and developing people; managing the teaching and learning program), and adding three others (influence; self-development; and responding to context). This framework is then used in a case study format in a collaboration between practitioner and researchers to first explore evidence from empirical studies and personal reflection about Hinton’s leadership of Buranda State School, and second to illuminate how these general features of school leadership apply to creating a thinking school. Based on the case study and using the general characteristics of school leadership, a framework for leading a thinking school is described. Because the framework is based on a turnaround school, this framework has wide applicability: to schools that are doing well as an indication of how to implement a contemporary approach to curriculum and pedagogy; and to schools that are underperforming and want a rigorous, high expectation and contemporary way to improve student learning. (shrink)

For Hannah Arendt, the federal system is an effective mode of organizing different sources of power while avoiding sovereign politics. This article aims to contribute two specific claims to the burgeoning scholarship on Arendt's international federalism. First, Arendt's international thoughts call for balancing two demands: the domestic need for human greatness and flourishing and the international demand for regulation and cooperation. Second, her reflections on council-based federalism offer a nuanced position that views the dual elements of (...) equality in politics (intra-state and interstate equality) as neither contradictory nor reconciliatory but rather as ideal types along a continuum. This study shows that, through the unique form of federalism emphasizing the need to balance two demands of free politics with a clear acknowledgement of its precariousness, Arendt's thinking adds much-needed sensitivity to international discourse. (shrink)

The third issue of the Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind and the Arts is centered on a series of questions related to the nature of images. What properties characterize them? Do they exist also in our minds? What relationship do they have with phenomena such as perception, memory, language and interpretation? The authors participating in this issue have been asked to answer these and other questions starting from and in dialogue with the two philosophical perspectives that have (...) most enriched the study of our object of research since the second half of the twentieth century: analytical philosophy and visual culture studies. The first four essays address problems related to ontology (Didi-Huberman, Prinz, Bantinaki, Manzotti). In their pages the question will be asked not only about the nature of images but also about what it means for an image to represent an object or an action realistically. The second part contains discussions related to the topics of perception, appreciation and creation of pictures (Ferretti; Gavaler, Goldberg; Pigoni, Coraci, Carlenzi). The third section goes through the problems related to the very concept of representing by images (Biggs; Weichert; Derby). The last section of the issue is devoted to two cases in which images are used not so much and not only to represent something, but also to convey ethical-political values (Fasnacht; Olesiejuk). (shrink)

The intersection between philosophy and psychedelics is explored in the book “Philosophy and Psychedelics: Frameworks for Exceptional Experience”. The authors aim to develop a dialogue between the two disciplines and explore the various frameworks for understanding exceptional experiences that psychedelics have afforded human beings. The book delves into foundational, ontological, and epistemological questions, including the hard problem of consciousness, the metaphysical understanding of the self, and the aesthetic meaning of the sublime in psychedelic experience. The book provides valuable (...) exploration of questions concerning prevailing metaphysical frameworks, epistemic belief structures, and modes of inquiry, and the effort made by the authors to bring into dialogue multiple dialectics and practices, perspectives and methods is commendable. (shrink)

When we talk of African philosophy as a different philosophical tradition we do not wish to suggest that it studies different range of realities from those that concern the other philosophical traditions. What we demonstrate is the difference that arises in approach or method naturally informed by the resident logic. Thus in African philosophy we study ultimate reality of which being is at the center. What being and even nothingness mean for us is not the same with (...) what they mean in other traditions. Unity: we sometimes say that being is one single whole without wishing to say that this view is monistic. In this light we hold that being is complete with both physical and spiritual aspects. Duality: we also share the view on the duality in nature without insisting that this is strict and permanent. Duality for Africans is essentially a point of inferential departure not a terminal point. The dual arrangement of things in nature is to necessarily lead to a tripartite conception. Triadic conception: this is the terminal point of all inferences in African thought. Yes, there is duality in nature but they exist as fragments and contraries i.e. incomplete in themselves but capable of coming together to form a whole. Obtaining this fusion of contrary fragments represents an inference from duality to triadic conception of reality. What this African conception is all about is not that being is tripartite or dual but that the coming together of two aspects of being is necessary for the formation of being. (shrink)

This dissertation is based on four backgrounds: (1) the diversity of definitions of philosophy, (2) statements by several thingkers about the death/ending of philosophy, (3) the existence of Hassan Hanafi's writings about the definition, life and death of philosophy, and (4) the limitations of specific studies on philosophy according to Hanafi. On that basis, this dissertation examines philosophy according to Hanafi, by revealing and reviewing his definition of philosophy and his views on when (...) philosophy lives and when philosophy dies. In general, this is metaphilosophical study of Hanafi's philosophy by disclosuring it descriptively and analytically on the one side, and by reviewing it falsificatively, interpretatively and axiologically on the other side. This metaphilosophical study of Hanafi philosophy found several things. First, Hanafi's definition of philosophy is still diverse and needs to be reanalyzed, so it cannot overcome the problem of the diversity of definitions of philosophy. Second, Hanafi's statement about those who kill philosophy and turn on it is inconsistent and falsifiable. Third, philosophy can still live in conditions that are considered to kill it. Fourth, although it has several weaknesses, Hanafi's philosophy is useful in particular for Muslims and researchers about Islam, Arab nations and researchers about Arab, and societies that face internal and external traditions; and also worthwhile in general for philosophy and practitioners of philosophy. Fifth, Hanafi's philosophy can overcome the problem of ongoing discourse about the death/ending of philosophy, because his philosophy can actually bring philosophy to life. (shrink)

An account of presentations at an historic (4/30/1977) meeting of the recently formed Society for Philosophy and Technology in conjunction with the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association in Chicago. Speakers on theoretical topics included David Lovekin, Michael Zimmerman, Bernard Gendron and Nancy Holmstrom, and several individuals involved in "outreach activities.".

This essay investigates the possibilities and limits of interdisciplinary research into terrorism. It is shown that approaches that combine philosophy and international law are necessary, and when such an approach needs to be adopted. However, it is also important not to underestimate how much of a challenge is posed by the absence of agreement concerning the definition of terrorism, and also by the structural differences in the way the two disciplines address the problem and formulate the issues. Not (...) least, the discussion enables us to reach conclusions as to how terrorism research that combines philosophy and international law in particular, and interdisciplinary research into terrorism in general, can be meaningfully implemented. The individual aspects are clarified on the basis of the discussion surrounding justified measures for combating terrorism and the justification of the targeted killing of terrorists. (shrink)

The present research studies more thoroughly and extends from global perspectives the ideas elaborated in a former study dedicated to that which was named there – related to libraries, but not exclusively – symbolic marketing, embodied and objectified as a metaphor. “Living”, active and efficient metaphor. The analyses focus, on the one hand, on the theoretical, conceptual – and even philosophical – aspects of “symbolic marketing”. On the other hand, applying these theoretical considerations, we present and examine as a (...) case study the journal entitled Philobiblon (http://www.bcucluj.ro/philo/), edited by the Lucian Blaga Central University Library (Cluj, Romania), and the marketing procedures associated with it. The periodical is a transdisciplinary scientific organ published in English, destined from its beginnings to the market of international interlibrary publication exchange, which has developed an entire network of peculiar, individual and characteristic marketing structures and initiatives: living, objectified symbolic-metaphoric structures which are evolving and getting diversified not only in the context but also with a view to globalization. (shrink)

The book gives up-to-date, multi-aspect exposition of the philosophy and methodology of information, and related areas within the nascent field of the study of information. It presents the most recent achievements, ideas and opinions of leading researchers in this domain, as well as from physicists, biologists and social scientists. Collaboration of researchers from different areas and fields opens new perspectives for the understanding of information essential in the innovative development of science, technology and society. -/- The book is meant (...) for readers conducting research into any aspect of information, information society and information technology. The ideas presented give new insights for those who develop or implement scientific, technological or social applications. They are especially for those who are participating in setting the goals for science in general and sciences of information in particular. (shrink)

A Study of Perennial Philosophy and Psychedelic Experience, with a Proposal to Revise W. T. Stace’s Core Characteristics of Mystical Experience ©Ed D’Angelo 2018 -/- Abstract -/- According to the prevailing paradigm in psychedelic research today, when used within an appropriate set and setting, psychedelics can reliably produce an authentic mystical experience. According to the prevailing paradigm, an authentic mystical experience is one that possesses the common or universal characteristics of mystical experience as identified by the philosopher W. T. (...) Stace in his 1960 work Mysticism and Philosophy. Stace’s common characteristics of mystical experience are the basis for the Hood Mysticism Questionnaire, which is the most widely used quantitative measure of mystical experience in experimental studies of psychedelic experience. In this paper, I trace the historical roots of Stace’s common characteristics of mystical experience back to Christian Neoplatonism and apophatic theology, and I trace those, in turn, back to Plato’s concept of the Good and to Aristotle’s concept of God as active intellect. I argue that Stace’s common characteristics of mystical experience are not universal or culturally invariant but are the product of a specifically Christian religious and moral tradition that has its roots in ancient Greek metaphysics. My paper concludes with a revised list of common characteristics of psychedelic experience that is a better candidate for a list of invariant structures of psychedelic experience than Stace’s common characteristics of Christian mystical experience. (shrink)

In this paper, I describe some strategies for teaching an introductory philosophy of science course to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) students, with reference to my own experience teaching a philosophy of science course in the Fall of 2020. The most important strategy that I advocate is what I call the “Second Philosophy” approach, according to which instructors ought to emphasize that the problems that concern philosophers of science are not manufactured and imposed by philosophers from (...) the outside, but rather are ones that arise internally, during the practice of science itself. To justify this approach, I appeal to considerations from both educational research and the epistemology of testimony. In addition, I defend some distinctive learning goals that philosophy of science instructors ought to adopt when teaching STEM students, which include rectifying empirically well-documented shortcomings in students’ conceptions of the “scientific method” and the “nature of science.” Although my primary focus will be on teaching philosophy of science to STEM students, much of what I propose can be applied to non-philosophy majors generally. Ultimately, as I argue, a successful philosophy of science course for non-philosophy majors must be one that advances a student’s science education. The strategies that I describe and defend here are aimed at precisely that end. (shrink)

International relations (IR) scholars have increasingly integrated Hannah Arendt into their works. Her fierce critique of the conventional ideas of politics driven by rulership, enforcement, and violence has a particular resonance for theorists seeking to critically revisit the basic assumptions of IR scholarship. Arendt’s thinking, however, contains complexity and nuance that need careful treatment when extended beyond domestic politics. In particular, Arendt’s vision of free politics—characterized by the dualistic emphasis on agonistic action and institutional stability—raises two crucial issues that (...) need further elaboration for IR research that appropriates her thinking. One involves the orientation of her international thoughts. Although Arendt shows “idealistic” aspirations for authentic politics practiced by diverse equals in an institutionally articulated space of freedom, she never loses interest in the extant situation of “non-idealistic” politics. Engaging with Arendt’s theory orientation requires a careful analysis of difficult topics, such as her distinctive conception of the political and her critiques of the nation-state and international law. The other topic that needs clarification when Arendt’s thoughts are applied to IR involves specific ways of associating different sites of power. A close examination of Arendt’s council-based federalism reveals her distinctive idea of international politics, based on her acute awareness of the fundamental complexity that lies in power association and state agency. Bringing IR topics like state agency into conversation with her works generates illuminating questions for Arendt scholarship. Likewise, the ongoing debate on agonistic and institutional features of Arendt’s thoughts can provide crucial insights into critical studies of international politics. (shrink)

This book provides a concise overview, with excellent historical and systematic coverage, of the problems of the philosophy of language in the analytic tradition. Howard Callaway explains and explores the relation of language to the philosophy of mind and culture, to the theory of knowledge, and to ontology. He places the question of linguistic meaning at the center of his investigations. The teachings of authors who have become classics in the field, including Frege, Russell, Carnap, Quine, Davidson, and (...) Putnam are critically analyzed. I share completely his conviction that contemporary Anglo-American philosophy follows the spirit of the enlightenment in insisting on intellectual sincerity, clarity, and the willingness to meet scientific doubts or objections openly. --Professor Henri Lauener, Editor of Dialectica. (shrink)

[This is an edited and improved version of "You Are Not Your Brain: Against 'Teaching to the Brain'" previously published in *Review of Higher Education and Self-Learning* 5(15), Summer 2012.] Since educators are always looking for ways to improve their practice, and since empirical science is now accepted in our worldview as the final arbiter of truth, it is no surprise they have been lured toward cognitive neuroscience in hopes that discovering how the brain learns will provide a nutshell explanation (...) for student learning in general. I argue that identifying the person with the brain is scientism (not science), that the brain is not the person, and that it is the person who learns. In fact the brain only responds to the learning of embodied experience within the extra-neural network of intersubjective communications. Learning is a dynamic, cultural activity, not a neural program. Brain-based learning is unnecessary for educators and may be dangerous in that a culturally narrow ontology is taken for granted, thus restricting our creativity and imagination, and narrowing the human community. (shrink)

In Vietnam, patriotism is the highest value in the nation's spiritual value system. Patriotic feelings were formed from the very beginning of the founding of the country and continue to grow strongly to this day. It soon became the reason for life, the ideal, and the belief in the spiritual life of the Vietnamese people. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive and in-depth view of patriotism as a specific philosophy of the Vietnamese nation. To that (...) end, the paper focuses on analyzing what patriotism is and its expressions. It discusses the basic tenets of Vietnamese patriotism: the spirit of independence, self-reliance, the sense of national self-reliance, solidarity in national construction and defense and a humanistic spirit. The paper thus highlights the peculiarities of the patriotic philosophy of the Vietnamese nation and how it manifests in the rural villages. (shrink)

In Chronopathologies, the Australian philosopher Jack Reynolds gives an exciting analysis of the intimate connection between time and politics in three trajectories of contemporary philosophy: analytic philosophy, poststructuralism and phenomenology. These trajectories are incompatible in the sense that internalizing the norms of any one of them 'makes taking the other(s) seriously very difficult' (p. 225). Given this incompatibility, Reynolds convincingly argues that the only way forward is to draw out the differences between these trajectories, in order to address (...) the problems and limitations of each from the perspective of the others. Reynolds's fruitful approach uncovers that each trajectory is threatened by a disease of time or 'chronopathology' (a key term that is never fully defined). Such a chronopathology can be characterized as a pathological condition that is the result of two factors: the reduction of the plurality of time to only one of its dimensions; a biased and one-sided view on ethics and politics. Reynolds convincingly identifies the root of the threat. He develops his diagnosis in three steps. 1. Analytic philosophy over-emphasizes the synchronic dimension of time, without making any room for its diachronic dimension. 2. Poststructuralism acknowledges the necessity of a reciprocal relation between the synchronic and the diachronic dimension of time, but ultimately privileges the latter (i.e., the relation remains asymmetrical). 3. An embodied phenomenology opens up a way to bring the synchronic and diachronic dimension of time in a reciprocal and symmetrical relation that does not privilege the one over the other. (shrink)

The study aims to identify the reality of management of electronic documents and electronic archiving retirement in the Palestinian Pension Agency -analytical study, as well as to recognize the reality of the current document management system in the Palestinian Pension Agency. The study found the following results: that the reality of the current system for the management of documents in the agency is weak and suffers from many jams. Employee in the agency understand the importance and benefits of the management (...) of electronic documents system, where the application of electronic document management system provide important features and benefits most of which reduce the loss of documents between departments, illustrates the flow path, the speed, accuracy, transparency, and reduce the proportion of damage and destruction of files. Furthermore, the electronic documents system cost will be less than the cost of the current system and it will reduce the tasks assigned for the staff. The existence of a clear adoption of the agency for the policies and procedures established for the application of electronic documents management system. There are weak plans for training and developing of staff in the agency to raise their efficiency. The study found a set of recommendations, including: increased interest and awareness of the need to implement policies, mechanisms, and procedures to ensure the success of electronic document management system through benefiting from the experiences of other organizations and the private sector. The agency need to increase and develop its services for retirees in order to encourage the private sector, universities, and institutions to join the agency, and open the way for all segments of society in Gaza and West Bank and enhance its competitiveness between international social security institutions. The need to focus its attention on developing and publishing appropriate clear plans and specific goals about management of electronic documents and the agency should be committed to apply them. The need to focus on the establishment of a public management of archiving in the structure dealing with all technical operations and having competent and qualified employees in the field of electronic document management. The need to focus on the Palestinian National Archives and the follow-up with the international standards by the International Council Archives (ICA). (shrink)

This paper argues for the philosophical and semantic importance of attitudinal objects, entities such as judgments, claims, beliefs, demands, and desires, as an ontological category distinct from that of events and states and from that of propositions. The paper presents significant revisions and refinements of the notion of an attitudinal object as it was developed in my previous work.

Joseph T. O’Connell drew attention to the relative scarcity of academic work on religion in South Asia, and o ered as a plausible explanation for this state of a airs the tension between secular and religio‐political communal interests. This paper explores the potential role of phi‐ losophy as an established academic discipline within this situation, in the context of India. It argues that objective study, including evaluation, of the truth claims of various religious traditions is an important aspect of academic (...) as opposed to confessional engagement with religion, and that philosophy in India is especially well suited to undertake such re ection and to provide corresponding education. Unlike Western countries, philosophy and religion were never clearly separated in India and did not evolve in tension with one another. The history of Indian philosophy therefore includes and is included within the history of its ‘religions’, in a way that makes philosophical examination of the truth claims of Indian religions internal to those religions themselves. By tracing this history, the discipline of philosophy can help to unsettle the idea of religion as a matter of xed dogma. It can also continue the procedure of interpreting and evaluating metaphysical and epistemological theses that has been an intrinsic component of Indian religious thought for most of its history. (shrink)

This volume collects selected papers delivered at the 15th Conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies, which was held at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in July 2018. It includes papers dealing with the past, present, and future of utilitarianism – the theory that human happiness is the fundamental moral value – as well as on its applications to animal ethics, population ethics, and the future of humanity, among other topics.

In recent years, the practice of tax exemption for churches has become a source of open scrutiny, argument, and controversy on the part of both government and religious leaders. The study attempted to assess the main principles that government base on to impose taxes on its citizenry and to assess the tax exemption status of the churches in Ghana. Exploratory, descriptive and cross-section surveys were used to investigate and discover from respondent’s information on the topic to provide a report on (...) the background, facts, settings and concerns about the principles of taxation and the tax exemption status of churches. The study considered 120 people as its targeted sample of which 114 responded by the use of questionnaires. Also, descriptive analysis such as frequency and percentages were used to analyse the data. From the information gathered on the research, it was revealed that most Ghanaians representing 65.8% prefer the government to allocate taxes based on the benefits that taxpayers receive for paying taxes rather than the ability to pay or any other principle for the allocation of taxes. In addition, 57% of Ghanaians would like the religious organizations to enjoy their tax-exempt status despite allegation by critics that they are amassing wealth for themselves and not contributing to the development of Ghana. Some of the reasons given were that: churches are not profit-making businesses; churches contribute to the development of the nation; churches care for the people more than the government. Some of them concluded that failure to grant the church tax exemption may give room for the churches to engage in business activities. For those with the opposing view, some gave reasons such as: churches have become some sort of commerce; the churches have more money in this world; the payment of taxes by churches may as well boost the revenue of the government. Despite the various arguments, there was an agreement that the Ghana Revenue Authority should check the sales of rosaries, anointing oil, holy water, charge of consultation fees, as these should attract taxation. The paper recommends that Tax-Exempt Division should develop policies and administer tax exempt organizations (including religious organizations) laws. The division should be responsible for exempt organizations tax education and training to enable them understand their tax law obligations. This will improve tax compliance by the exempt organizations. (shrink)

In the last decades a growing body of literature in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cognitive Science (CS) has approached the problem of narrative understanding by means of computational systems. Narrative, in fact, is an ubiquitous element in our everyday activity and the ability to generate and understand stories, and their structures, is a crucial cue of our intelligence. However, despite the fact that - from an historical standpoint - narrative (and narrative structures) have been an important topic of investigation in (...) both these areas, a more comprehensive approach coupling them with narratology, digital humanities and literary studies was still lacking. With the aim of covering this empty space, in the last years, a multidisciplinary effort has been made in order to create an international meeting open to computer scientist, psychologists, digital humanists, linguists, narratologists etc.. This event has been named CMN (for Computational Models of Narrative) and was launched in the 2009 by the MIT scholars Mark A. Finlayson and Patrick H. Winston1. (shrink)