La rivoluzione legata alla diffusione sempre più ampia delle tecnologie informatiche ha assunto i caratteri di una svolta epocale. E in questo volume il lettore non troverà una critica o una condanna ...della tecnica alla maniera di Heidegger e dei vari «pastori dell’Essere» che sulla sua linea si sono succeduti. Anzi, nella visione dell’autore, l’informatica offre una grande occasione all’umanità di entrare in una comunicazione generalizzata con se stessa, nel segno di un’integrazione possibile dell’intero genere umano. Ciò però a patto che la rivoluzione digitale sia accompagnata da una radicalizzazione dell’umanesimo, da una nuova antropologia che, in dialogo con una nuova tecnologia, metta a tema la costituzione di una «mente emozionale e materiale», capace di stringere insieme valore biologico-affettivo e valore logico-conoscitivo. Attraverso alcuni percorsi classici della filosofia (Spinoza, Kant, Hegel), mediante un recupero della psicoanalisi freudiana – al di fuori della recente volgarizzazione italiana di Lacan – e coniugando il discorso marxiano intorno alla tecnologia con un’analisi anti-heideggeriana della techne nella Grecia antica, il libro propone una propria via di uscita dall’impasse del tempo presente.
Nicht erst seit dem Aufkommen des Begriffs der »Cancel Culture« scheint es, als könne man schlicht nicht mehr miteinander reden. Die unterschiedlichen Konzeptionen von Ziel und Methode, also von der ...Strategie gesellschaftlicher Auseinandersetzungen, variieren so stark, dass sie schlicht nicht mehr kommensurabel sind. Diese Situation lässt sich als das Resultat einer langen Geschichte strategischer Entwürfe und Gegenentwürfe begreifen. Christopher Jakob Rudoll gibt anhand der Beispiele von Marxismus, Katholizismus und Feminismus einen systematischen Überblick über Debattenkulturen in Theorie und Praxis seit den 1920er-Jahren - und hilft somit, die aktuelle Sprachlosigkeit besser zu verstehen.
It has long been thought that the ancient Greeks did not take mechanics seriously as part of the workings of nature, and that therefore their natural philosophy was both primitive and marginal. In ...this book Sylvia Berryman challenges that assumption, arguing that the idea that the world works 'like a machine' can be found in ancient Greek thought, predating the early modern philosophy with which it is most closely associated. Her discussion ranges over topics including balancing and equilibrium, lifting water, sphere-making and models of the heavens, and ancient Greek pneumatic theory, with detailed analysis of thinkers such as Aristotle, Archimedes, and Hero of Alexandria. Her book shows scholars of ancient Greek philosophy why it is necessary to pay attention to mechanics, and shows historians of science why the differences between ancient and modern reactions to mechanics are not as great as was generally thought.
Christopher Norris raises some basic questions about the way that analytic philosophy has been conducted over the past 25 years. In doing so, he offers an alternative to what he sees as an ...over-specialisation of a lot of recent academic work. Arguing that analytic philosophy has led to a narrowing of sights to the point where other approaches that might be more productive are blocked from view, he goes against the grain to claim that Continental philosophy holds the resources for a creative renewal of analytic thought.
Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the point of coming to think in these terms? In The Practical Origins of Ideas, Matthieu Queloz ...presents a philosophical method designed to answer such questions: the method of pragmatic genealogy. Pragmatic genealogies are partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might have driven us to develop certain ideas in order to discover what these do for us. The book uncovers an under-appreciated tradition of pragmatic genealogy which cuts across the analytic–continental divide, running from the state-of-nature stories of David Hume and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. However, these genealogies combine fictionalizing and historicizing in ways that even philosophers sympathetic to the use of state-of-nature fictions or real history have found puzzling. To make sense of why both fictionalizing and historicizing are called for, the book offers a systematic account of pragmatic genealogies as dynamic models serving to reverse-engineer the points of ideas in relation not only to near-universal human needs, but also to socio-historically situated needs. This allows the method to offer us explanation without reduction and to help us understand what led our ideas to shed the traces of their practical origins. Far from being normatively inert, moreover, pragmatic genealogy can affect the space of reasons, guiding attempts to improve our conceptual repertoire by helping us determine whether and when our ideas are worth having.
This collection of specially commissioned essays by leading scholars presents research on Isaac Newton and his main philosophical interlocutors and critics. The essays analyze Newton's relation to ...his contemporaries, especially Barrow, Descartes, Leibniz and Locke and discuss the ways in which a broad range of figures, including Hume, Maclaurin, Maupertuis and Kant, reacted to his thought. The wide range of topics discussed includes the laws of nature, the notion of force, the relation of mathematics to nature, Newton's argument for universal gravitation, his attitude toward philosophical empiricism, his use of 'fluxions', his approach toward measurement problems and his concept of absolute motion, together with new interpretations of Newton's matter theory. The volume concludes with an extended essay that analyzes the changes in physics wrought by Newton's Principia. A substantial introduction and bibliography provide essential reference guides.
The present study seeks to learn something about the metaphysics of substance in light of four rich but for the most part neglected centuries of philosophy, running from the thirteenth through the ...seventeenth centuries. At no period in the history of philosophy, other than perhaps our own, have metaphysical problems received the sort of sustained attention they received during the later Middle Ages, and never has a whole philosophical tradition come crashing down as quickly and completely as did scholastic philosophy in the seventeenth century. The thirty chapters work through various fundamental metaphysical issues, sometimes focusing more on scholastic thought, sometimes on the seventeenth century. The volume begins with the first challenges to the classical scholasticism of Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas, runs through prominent figures like John Duns Scotus and William Ockham, and ends in the seventeenth century, with the end of the first stage of developments in post‐scholastic philosophy: on the continent, with Descartes and Gassendi, and in England, with Boyle and Locke.
This book develops a unified theory of moral progress. The author argues that there are mechanisms in place that consistently drive societies towards moral improvement and that a sophisticated, ...naturalistically respectable form of teleology can be defended. The book’s main aim is to flesh out the process of moral progress in more detail, and to show how, when the right mechanisms and institutions of moral progress are matched together, they create pressure for the desired types of moral gains to manifest. The first part of the book deals with two issues: the conceptual one about what moral progress is, and the broadly empirical one whether it is possible. It shows that cultural evolution successfully explains the origins of modern forms of morally welcome change. The second part argues that there is logical space for a moderate, scientifically credible form of teleology, and that the converse case for moral decline is weak. It addresses the types, drivers, and institutions of moral progress that allow for the storage, transmission, and cumulative improvement of our normative infrastructure over time. Finally, the third part demonstrates why moral progress cannot be accounted for in metaethically realist terms. Moral Teleology will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in ethics, moral epistemology, and moral psychology.
