Tabatabai’s theory about the meaning of life can be referred to as active objectivism, where a man plays an important role in achieving the meaningful life, rather than merely discovering the divine view about his existence. If the man chooses the divine purpose from a “real life” perspective as his meaning of life, God’s purpose and man’s purpose will converge in order to shape a meaningful life and the ultimate achievement of Pure Life. However, if he chooses the (...) unreal counterpart, he will be trapped in an unreal life which is referred to as the “pseudo-meaningful life.” It is necessary that human beings discover the divine purpose with the help of conceptual intellect, define the essentials of achieving the purpose with his practical intellect and ultimately, choose the essentials with his own free will. To achieving compliance of a man’s purpose with the divine goal requires faith and good deeds. (shrink)

Tabatabai’s theory about the meaning of life can be referred to as active objectivism, where a man plays an important role in achieving the meaningful life, rather than merely discovering the divine view about his existence. If the man chooses the divine purpose from a “real life” perspective as his meaning of life, God’s purpose and man’s purpose will converge in order to shape a meaningful life and the ultimate achievement of Pure Life. However, if he chooses the (...) unreal counterpart, he will be trapped in an unreal life which is referred to as the “pseudo-meaningful life.” It is necessary that human beings discover the divine purpose with the help of conceptual intellect, define the essentials of achieving the purpose with his practical intellect and ultimately, choose the essentials with his own free will. To achieving compliance of a man’s purpose with the divine goal requires faith and good deeds. (shrink)

Hermeneutics, as a discipline of the humanities, is often assumed to be in thrall to the same subjectivity of every interpretive method, in direct contract to the objectivity prized by the natural sciences. This book argues that there is a false dichotomy here, and that ancient and modern ideas of knowledge can be utilized to create a new active form of hermeneutics. One capable of creating a standard by which to judge better and worse models of understanding. This book (...) explores decisive aspects over which the future of hermeneutics-a future inexplicably tied to a history of hermeneutics-will continue to struggle, namely the limits and possibilities of situated human understanding. This book is located in the middle of a number of major, converging discussions within contemporary intellectual discourse. Drawing upon a wide range of ancient and modern hermeneutical thought, including Aristotle, Bernstein, Heidegger, Kant, and Gadamer, the result is a hermeneutical approach that pushes beyond the traditional limits of human understanding. This is a bold attempt to move hermeneutics into a new phase. As such, it will be of significant interest to scholars and academics working in General Hermeneutics, Theology, and the Philosophy of Religion. (shrink)

Environmental activism, like all great activisms, is fundamentally normative, its principal beliefs contestable, its most powerful arguments rebuttable on the grounds that they are subjective. Environmental activists, as political tacticians with complex goals, have become skilled at presenting objectified versions of their own motivations when trying to broaden support for specific policies or take advantage of regulatory or legal opportunities. While instrumentally tempting and often expedient, this practice of objectifying moral arguments is in some respects disingenuous, and its successes as (...) well as its failures bring with them characteristic risks, short-term and long-term. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to characterise and analyse Paul Amselek’s research approach to legal hermeneutics. The text provides an outline of Amselek’s assumptions and theses about legal interpretation, considered in the broad context of hermeneutics, and in the narrower context of legal logic and argument. In point of fact, one of the methodological aims of Amselek’s philosophical reflection is to harmonise the two indicated contexts for framing interpretation — the wide context of hermeneutics, and the more narrow context (...) of legal logic and argument. Amselek refers to issues in communication theory, reaching beyond the hermeneutic concept of text interpretation and evocation of the original authorial intention. He analyses the legal text-message in its content and argument layers, he also endeavours to specify the methodological possibilities of interpreting the attitudes and motivations of subjects — participants in communication situation. He also inquires about the ethical attitudes of jurisdiction authorities, performing the interpretation of a body of law — the subjects responsible for lawmaking and the execution of law. Adopting post-Enlightenment anthropological assumptions, Amselek accepts the primacy of rationality in cognition, decision making, and activity of the human individual. However, in his considerations on interpretation he concurrently underscores the role of affective factors, motivating many choices and actions made by legal subjects. (shrink)

Different explanations of color vision favor different philosophical positions: Computational vision is more compatible with objectivism (the color is in the object), psychophysics and neurophysiology with subjectivism (the color is in the head). Comparative research suggests that an explanation of color must be both experientialist (unlike objectivism) and ecological (unlike subjectivism). Computational vision's emphasis on optimally prespecified features of the environment (i.e., distal properties, independent of the sensory-motor capacities of the animal) is unsatisfactory. Conceiving of visual perception instead (...) as the visual guidance of activity in an environment that is determined largely by that very activity suggests new directions for research. (shrink)

Two recently published oral histories highlight the long-term trend concerning the mainstreaming of Objectivism, the political and economic ideas of the libertarian conservative writer and ideologue, Ayn Rand. Scott McConnell’s sympathetic interview collection focuses on supporters and acquaintances from Rand’s active period in the 1960s and 1970s. These supporters and acquaintances include former Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, who provides McConnell with his considered views concerning Rand. Gary Weiss’s critical interview collection focusses on her more recent supporters, with (...) one displeased and insightful interviewee to be found in both collections. Weiss’s collection reveals the role played by Objectivists in galvanizing the focus of the populist Tea Party movement. Both oral histories reveal the role played by the media and popular culture in mainstreaming Rand’s views. The review ends by comparing Randolph Stow’s socially responsive individualism as described in his novel 'Tourmaline' with Rand’s transactional individualism as described in 'Atlas Shrugged.'. (shrink)

Ayn Rand's career as a writer of fiction, accordingly, was preceded and accompanied by her work on the system of philosophic thought she ultimately called Objectivism. This chapter introduces her writing by showing how the chosen actions of a life consciously devoted to a conscious purpose were integrated with the texts she crafted, in both fiction and non‐fiction. Ayn Rand's major project was The Fountainhead. The money from the movie rights to The Fountainhead bought Ayn Rand time to begin (...) her next novel, Atlas Shrugged. Whereas the theme of The Fountainhead was individualism versus collectivism, not in politics but in man's soul, The Strike (as Atlas Shrugged was initially called) was designed to dramatize the conflict between individualism and collectivism within the political/economic realm. Rand was active in the American Writers Association and the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. (shrink)

Subjectivism states that meaning in life is determined by what subjects regard as meaningful. Objectivism denies this. The main argument against subjectivism is that it allows for seemingly worthless, or even immoral, sources of meaning. Objectivism, on the other hand, does not do justice to the role of subjective perspectives in the quest for meaning. This paper addresses the shortcomings of both positions by referring to the objective value of ‘meaning autonomy’, defined here as the freedom to determine (...) for oneself what is meaningful in life. While the notion of meaning autonomy is compatible with realist objectivism, objectivity is understood in a non-realist sense in this paper, as being based on cultural standards of meaningfulness. Subjective meaning may be attached to ‘worthless’ activities, but it cannot contradict the moral norms of the society that grants its members meaning autonomy. (shrink)

By following the arguments developed by Vygotsky and employing the cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) in addition to dialectical logic, this paper attempts to investigate the interaction between psychology and artificial intelligence (AI) to confront the epistemological and methodological challenges encountered in AI research. The paper proposes that AI is facing an epistemological and methodological crisis inherited from psychology based on dualist ontology. The roots of this crisis lie in the duality between rationalism and objectivism or in the mind-body rupture (...) that has governed the production of scientific thought and the proliferation of approaches. In addition, by highlighting the sociohistorical conditions of AI, this paper investigates the historical characteristics of the shift of the crisis from psychology to AI. Additionally, we examine the epistemological and methodological roots of the main challenges encountered in AI research by noting that empiricism is the dominant tendency in the field. Empiricism gives rise to methodological and practical challenges, including challenges related to the emergence of meaning, abstraction, generalization, the emergence of symbols, concept formation, functional reflection of reality, and the emergence of higher psychological functions. Furthermore, through discussing attempts to formalize dialectical logic, the paper, based on contradiction formation, proposes a qualitative epistemological, methodological, and formal alternative by using a preliminary algorithmic model that grasps the formation of meaning as an essential ability for the qualitative reflection of reality and the emergence of other mental functions. (shrink)

In this book, John Dryzek criticizes the dominance of instrumental rationality and objectivism in political institutions and public policy and in the practice of political science. He argues that the reliance on these kinds of politics and to technocracies of expert cultures that are not only repressive, but surprisingly ill-equipped for dealing with complex social problems. Drawing on critical theory, he outlines an alternative program for the organization of political institutions advocating a form of communicatively rational democracy, which he (...) terms discursive democracy, that stresses the importance of active citizenship and public discourse. He draws out the limitations of instrumental rationality and investigates how policy analysis and political science may be reformed to help constitute and comprehend democracy. Discursive Democracy examines how the political process can be made more vital and meaningful. At the same time it shows how such an invigorated process will serve as a more effective agent for social problem solving. (shrink)

I defend moral objectivism against charges that it cannot plausibly preserve or explain morality's action-guiding nature. I take as my starting point the intuitive view that morality has a special connection to motivation: one who genuinely accepts a moral verdict must have a motivating reason to follow its dictates and, indeed, must often enough be motivated to act as it recommends. ;Many have argued that this connection vindicates subjectivism. Some argue that there can be no universally accessible truths whose (...) acknowledgements necessarily give one reason to act, because all reasons for action are based on desires that vary across rational agents. I argue against the Humean doctrine, implicit in this claim, that beliefs alone cannot move rational agents. The 18th-century metaphors of "passive" belief and "active" desire rest on arguments which either beg the question, equivocate, or misunderstand what would be involved in attributing the appropriate motivational power to belief. Others ground their objection in morality's holistic tie to desire, claiming that desires distort truth, rather than reveal it to us. I argue that there is nothing mysterious about the idea that possession of certain desires can be preconditions to seeing how things are. (shrink)

One sees how subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and passivity, lose their antithetical character, and hence their ...

It is largely agreed that if constructivism contributes anything to meta-ethics it is by proposing that we understand ethical objectivity “in terms of a suitably constructed point of view that all can accept” (Rawls 1980/1999: 307). Constructivists defend this “practical” conception of objectivity in contrast to the realist or “ontological” conception of objectivity, understood as an accurate representation of an independent metaphysical order. Because of their objectivist but not realist commitments, Kantian constructivists place their theory “somewhere in the space between (...) realist and relativist accounts of ethics” (O’Neill 1988: 1). Furthermore, they argue that their practical conception of objectivity succeeds in making sense of certain features of morality, such as its categorical authority and its relation to rational agency, which escape rival theories (Korsgaard 1996b, Korsgaard 2003b). To this extent, constructivism claims a privileged place in meta-ethics. The legitimacy of this claim is widely challenged. Precisely because of its practical conception of objectivity, many – including some constructivists — regard constructivism as a first-order normative theory, rather than as a meta-ethical position, hence not on a par with realism. Some critics object that constructivism fails to offer a distinct meta-ethics because it is structurally incomplete and thus must be combined with a fully-fledged meta-ethics (Hussain and Shah 2006); others argue that it tacitly relies on realism (Timmons 2003; Shafer-Landau 2003; Larmore 2008). Thus far, the debate about the prospects of constructivism as a meta-ethical theory has been driven by the conviction that the case for or against constructivism depends on its ontological commitments. In this chapter, I propose a change in perspective. My aim is to defend constructivism as an objectivist account of practical knowledge. Its defining feature is the claim that practical knowledge is knowledge by principles. Its task is to establish a constitutive relation between knowledge of oneself as a practical subject and knowledge about what one ought to do. By focusing on the issue of practical knowledge I hope to show that the difficulty in situating Kantian constructivism firmly on the meta-ethical map, along with other meta-ethical theories, reflects ambiguities and oscillations about the practical significance of ethics. Even though the term is ambiguous, I retain the qualification “Kantian” for the constructivist theory I outline, and for two reasons. First, while the theory I outline differs from current agnostic or anti-realist variants, it is closer to its origins, since Kant treats practical reason as a cognitive capacity and takes moral judgments to be objective moral cognitions, which importantly differ from other sorts of rational cognitions because they bind us in the first person. Practical cognitions are common knowledge because they are such that all subjects endowed with rationality can arrive at them by reasoning and find them authoritative. Thus understood, Kantian constructivism carves a distinct logical space in the meta-ethical debate that other sorts of constructivism fail to identify. This is the second reason for keeping the qualification “Kantian”. On this formulation, constructivism is antagonistic to non-cognitivist theories denying that moral judgments have cognitive contents, because they deny that there is something to be known; but it is also a rival to cognitivist theories denying that knowledge can be practical in itself. How constructivism differs over the realist theories of practical reason is the least understood aspect of this debate. This essay aims to make the case that practical reason is both discursive and emotional. In contrast to foundational and anti-realist accounts of practical reasoning, it attempts to show that the moral feeling of respect plays a cognitive but non-evidential role in the account of the cognitive and practical powers of reason. The argument proceeds as follows. In section 1, I consider some prominent constructivist arguments against the model of applied knowledge and show that they are driven by non-cognitivist assumptions about the practicality of ethics and the legitimacy of epistemological claims. In section 2, I argue that these arguments do not succeed in disposing of the idea of practical knowledge as incoherent, because they trade on an ambiguity regarding the proper object of practical knowledge. To solve this ambiguity, I turn to Anscombe’s contrast between “practical” and “speculative” knowledge as models for understanding action. I thus suggest that Anscombe’s account of practical knowledge as knowledge of oneself as an agent is an important resource for Kantian constructivism. This finding prompts us to reset the current dispute about the ontological and epistemological commitments of Kantian constructivism, as illustrated in section 3. While constructivism does not postulate any moral ontology prior to reasoning, it attributes to reasoning the cognitive powers to establish a distinctive relation between the agent and her action. The task of sections 4-7 is to account for the distinctive features of Kantian constructivism understood as an objectivist account of practical knowledge. In section 4, I argue that in order for reasoning to accomplish its normative tasks, it should be conceived as a self-legislating activity. I respond to some objections to the idea of self-legislation as the form of rational willing by offering a dialogical view of practical reason. In section 5, I propose a non-standard interpretation of Kant’s argument of “the fact of reason” to show that the constructivist account of self-legislation does not build on realism about value, as its detractors claim. The “basis of construction” is the subjective experience of respect for the self-legislative capacity itself. This moral feeling conveys our awareness of rational agency and shows our responsiveness to the demands of practical reason. It is an emotional mode of practical knowledge of oneself as an agent (in the sense specified in section 2), but not as a mode of moral discernment. In section 6, I show how practical knowledge of oneself as an agent relates to practical knowledge about what one ought to do. I thus account for the relation between respect as emotional moral consciousness and respect as a deliberative constraint. Finally, in section 7, I reply to the objection of subjectivism. I explain how the complex sort of objectivity that Kantian constructivism affords is at the same time more ambitious and more modest than is generally assumed. (shrink)

Ethnomethodology criticises sociological objectivism in a double sense: a) concerning the idea of “objectively” given social facts; b) concerning the idea of objectivity as a realistic claim of common sense and scientific knowledge. The theoretical alternative presented by Garfinkel and his followers consists a) in an analysis of the interpretative procedures, by which common sense beliefs in the objectivity of reality are constituted; b) in the intention, to take practical reasoning not as a source, but as a topic of (...) empirical study. The paper argues that while the proposed analysis of practical activities conveys a useful approach, its epistemological implications lead to inconsistencies and problematical consequences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Science Wars and BeyondHarold FrommScandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human, by Barbara Herrnstein Smith; viii & 198 pp. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, $21.95 paper.Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism, by Paul Boghossian; 139 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, $24.95.Barbara H. Smith, a professor of comparative and English literature at both Duke and Brown, has read widely in philosophy and the sciences. "Scandalous knowledge" is her (...) phrase to describe not the "science wars" (to use the title of the notorious Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text) but the epistemology wars. The chief antagonists in these wars consist, on the one side, of traditional proponents of "classical" philosophy's normative, analytic, justifying, and stable methodologies and proponents, on the other, of such twentieth-century constructivist epistemologies as those of Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, David Bloor, and Bruno Latour. "The scandal," Smith explains, is classical philosophy's "apparent inability to show how, when and why we can be sure that we know something or, indeed, that we know anything" (p. 1). In her well-executed Introduction, perhaps the best chapter in the book (for its panoramic picture of today's "Theory of Knowledge" conflicts), Smith prepares us for her espousal of constructivist methodologies but first distinguishes between "epistemological constructivism"—a philosophical methodology with an antagonism toward universal rationalities, philosophical "realism," in-itselfness, or [End Page 580] the Correspondence Theory of Truth—and the cultural critique often called "social constructionism," a distinction she acknowledges to be sometimes difficult and hazy. Social constructionism, a highly political activity, is critical of traditional notions of the normative and is engaged with the workings of cultural critics, ethicists, feminists, gender theorists, critics of institutional power, and the "goes without saying" of mainstream assumptions in the treatment of race, sexuality, the "natural" and the innate. In a word, the global conflict she describes is between "reason" (a contested term) and politics (not very contested, except for who and what are political), between the putative eternal verities of thought and the contingencies of daily life. Whereas a "constructivist" sociologist of science would stress the social, collective, intersubjective, institutional aspects of scientific knowledge, questioning "the standard understandings and treatments of such terms as fact, discovery, evidence, proof, objectivity and, of course, knowledge and science themselves" (p. 7), the "social constructionist" would be more likely to focus on class, politics, economics, and culture seen as a congeries of power structures.Smith is particularly distressed by the claims of traditional philosophy when she asks, "May it not be the case that the strict distinctions and divisions of labor that underwrite philosophy's self-honoring role in the study of science and knowledge beg all the relevant questions and, where maintained, insure philosophy's self-confinement?" (p. 10). She sees knowledge as assembled from multiple sources: philosophy, science, social sciences, human animality and subjectivity but she is not suggesting an abandonment of the notion of "truth," just a curbing of the notion of absolute knowledge, or knowledge of things-in-themselves (though even traditionalists believe being known can't be an aspect of a thing-in-itself.) In the process of constructing truths, "reason is not 'abandoned' for 'irrationalism'; scientific knowledge is not 'equated with' myth or ideology; and so forth... but are reconceived as variable gradients rather than fixed, distinct and polar opposites" (p. 11). She prefers to speak of the "superiority" of certain claims rather than their fixed universality via "rationalist-realist-positivist epistemology." As her overall theme, Smith wants to defend constructivist epistemology as the appropriate one for the twenty-first century and, to a slightly lesser extent, the goals of social construction, while deriding as unfounded the attacks against their purported relativism, nihilism, fatuous egalitarianism, and political correctness. Her performance is undeniably impressive but her success is mixed.The stronger first half of the book mounts a plausible defense of [End Page 581] constructivist epistemology. Starting off with a quick survey of "Pre-Post-Modern" relativists from Heraclitus to Wittgenstein, Smith moves on to twentieth-century modernist questioners of objectivist-universalist epistemes, from Heidegger and Einstein to Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Lenin, and in the arts Woolf, Stravinsky... (shrink)

We consider the evolutionary scheme of morality proposed by Tomasello to defend the idea that the ability to orient the learning of offspring using signs of approval/disapproval could be a decisive and necessary step in the evolution of human morality. Those basic forms of intentional evaluative feedback, something we have called assessor teaching, allow parents to transmit their accumulated experience to their children, both about the behaviors that should be learned as well as how they should be copied. The rationale (...) underlying this process is as follows: if a behavior is approved, then it is good; if it is disapproved, then it is bad. The evaluative guidance on how to behave most probably spread among peers in situations of mutual benefit, such as cooperative child rearing. We argue that our hominin ancestors provided with this capacity for assessor teaching were ideally positioned to develop the two specifically human levels of morality proposed by Tomasello: the morality of fairness and the morality of justice. Assessor teaching could have facilitated the genesis of rudimentary codes of behavior tied with the need to agree about how to behave to succeed in joint cooperative activities. Moreover, learning through assessor teaching provides a plausible explanation for the origin of the objectivist and prescriptive dimensions of human morality. First, we emphasize that individuals feel that they evaluate the behavior of others objectively to guide their learning, and, second, we underline the imperative intention that any moral manifestation possesses. (shrink)

In recent years there have been attempts to integrate first-person phenomenology into naturalistic science. Traditionally, however, Husserlian phenomenology has been resolutely anti-naturalist. Husserl identified naturalism as the dominant tendency of twentieth-century science and philosophy and he regarded it as an essentially self-refuting doctrine. Naturalism is a point of view or attitude (a reification of the natural attitude into the naturalistic attitude) that does not know that it is an attitude. For phenomenology, naturalism is objectivism. But phenomenology maintains that objectivity (...) is constituted through the intentional activity of cooperating subjects. Understanding the role of cooperating subjects in producing the experience of the one, shared, objective world keeps phenomenology committed to a resolutely anti-naturalist (or ) philosophy. (shrink)

I defend a necessary condition of local autonomy inspired by Aristotle and Marx. One does something autonomously, I argue, only if one does it for its own sake and not for the sake of further ends alone. I show that this idea steers an attractive middle path between the subjectivism of Dworkin- and Frankfurt-style theories of autonomy on the one hand and the objectivism of Raz-style theories on the other. By doing so, it vindicates and explains two important pieces (...) of common sense of which those theories struggle to make sense. First, it explains how external sources of compulsion, such as coercion by other people and duress by unfavorable circumstances, can compromise the autonomy of an activity. Second, it explains this by articulating the sense in which to act autonomously is to do what one really or truly wants to do, and the correlative sense in which to do something unfreely is instead to be forced or necessitated to do it. At the same time, my proposal brings into view distinctive species of external unfreedom beyond the traditional paradigm cases of coercion and duress. Most importantly, it implies that toil—labor which is not valued intrinsically but is done purely on account of its instrumental necessity—is essentially unfree. (shrink)

In recent years there have been attempts to integrate first-person phenomenology into naturalistic science. Traditionally, however, Husserlian phenomenology has been resolutely anti-naturalist. Husserl identified naturalism as the dominant tendency of twentieth-century science and philosophy and he regarded it as an essentially self-refuting doctrine. Naturalism is a point of view or attitude (a reification of the natural attitude into the naturalistic attitude) that does not know that it is an attitude. For phenomenology, naturalism is objectivism. But phenomenology maintains that objectivity (...) is constituted through the intentional activity of cooperating subjects. Understanding the role of cooperating subjects in producing the experience of the one, shared, objective world keeps phenomenology committed to a resolutely anti-naturalist (or ‘transcendental’) philosophy. (shrink)

In recent years an orthodox Marxist-Leninist ethics has been developing in the Soviet Union. It is metaphysically based, teleologically oriented, and objectivist in its claims. Soviet ethical writings encompass five different activities: description, interpretative classification, prescription, content-analysis, and refutation. Among the distinctive features of the new Soviet Moral Code are its requirement of devotion to the Communist cause, its exclusively social orientation, and its emphasis on work. Upon analysis it turns out to prescribe a completely externalized and provincial morality. A (...) comparison of Soviet ethics with recent ethical writings from other East-European countries, however, shows that Marxist ethics need not follow the Soviet pattern. (shrink)

This article explores some implications of using a critical realist theoretical framework for the study of education, in particular the core activities of learning and teaching. Many approaches have been made to understanding learning and teaching, but they tend to fall into one of two camps. The first includes approaches known as objectivism, instructivism and behaviourism, and is interpreted here as embodying principles of empiricism. The second comprises various takes on constructivism, particularly social constructivism, and is interpreted here as (...) embodying idealism. This paper does not wholly endorse or reject either objectivism or constructivism, but draws elements from each. The key difference for educators is that the starting position is not the transmission of knowledge, as in objectivism, or the construction of knowledge by learners, as in social constructivism. Instead it foregrounds the learning environment, arising from the realist premise that the possibilities for knowledge are given in the ontology. For educators this means the learning environment is not simply the location of learning, as widely construed, but the set of conditions that enable and constrain learning. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 56–58 Nechvatal, Joseph, Immersion Into Noise , Open Humanities Press, 2011, 267 pp, $23.99 (pbk), ISBN 1-60785-241-1. As someone who’s knowledge of “art” mostly began with the domestic (Western) and Japanese punk and noise scenes of the late 80’s and early 90’s, practices and theories of noise fall rather close to my heart. It is peeking into the esoteric enclaves of weird music and noise that helped me understand what I think I might like art to be: (...) A way of learning about the world through perturbation—exploration by incitement and speculation of possible conditions. What I have always loved about artistic investigations influenced by noisy aesthetics or sensibilities is that they can be simultaneously transcendent and absurd, amusing and revelatory, singular and pluralistic, mindless and intensely penetrating. The provocative friction that noise brings to bear on aesthetic experience, artistic practice, and “the” Art World acts as a kind of impulse response, proposing new energies while revealing underlying structure; noise signals are a simultaneous synthesis and analysis of spaces, subjects and relations. About two weeks prior to Christmas 2011, Joseph Nechvatal was generous enough to spend some time with me at 39 Quai des Grands Augustins, Paris . We each had one glass of red wine, briefly discussed common acquaintances, shared points of interest, and his published writings. We also, I recall, disagreed lightheartedly about how much contemporary relevance the ideas of telematic-artist Roy Ascott have for today’s art-and-technology practitioner (Joseph > Jamie). After the encounter, I read through a PDF version of Immersion Into Noise Joseph was kind enough to send me ( the HTML version is here ). A number of points of entry into cultures of “noise” are available these days. There are the acoustic-spatial approaches of thinkers like Douglas Kahn, Brandon LaBelle and Salome Voegelin; the techno-cultural musicologies of Jonathan Sterne and David Toop; the political writings of Jacques Attali, former adviser to President François Mitterrand, in his Noise: The Political Economy of Music (spoiler alert: It’s not really about music). Enter the new writings of one Joseph Nechvatal, with his invitation of an Immersion Into Noise . Nechvatal has been active for over 20 years in on- and off-line discussions of art, technology, virtuality, as well as his own set of art-theoretical departures and terminologies. A practicing artist, and instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Immersion Into Noise , is Nechvatal’s third published volume. His writings, broadly, address a concern with the possibilities of a synthesis between the biological and the virtual, and the contemporary artistic resonances that these possibilities suggest. Nechvatal’s project is to try to name contemporary currents of artistic practice within our technologized culture. He comes at this through art history, post-modern philosophy, anthropology and consciousness studies. Portions of Immersion Into Noise have appeared in his PhD dissertation, as well as online art publications like Zing Magazine . An open-access publication, and part of the impressive and heartening activities of the Open Humanities Press, Nechvatal’s book is a somewhat unexpected addition to the Critical Climate Change series edited by Tom Cohen of SUNY University and Claire Colebrook of Penn State. Other titles in the series have address themes of post-globalism and cultures of threat. Joseph Nachvetal’s title is the first to focus entirely on art history, art practice and aesthetics. It is awkward to too easily fit Nechvatal’s writings in with the aforementioned burgeoning canon of cultural and artistic practice in, and writings on, noise (Russolo, Schaeffer, Cage and Yves Klein through to Kahn, LaBelle, Voegelin, et. al). Immersion Into Noise is not primarily an examination of sound-noise or phenomenologies of sound, and the relativist, non-objectivist possibilities arising therefrom in social, public, and exhibition art practices. Although Nechvatal makes mention of sonic practice and experience (his own encounter in 1968 with the technological complex was set in motion at a Jimi Hendrix concert at the Chicago Coliseum), he does so only by way of introducing a broader concept of “art-noise.” The noise-scape can envelope various kinds of involvement in all kinds of art, by artists, audiences, and distributed amalgams of all of these. Midway through the book, we are offered characteristics of an “immersive noise vision theory.” This theory, leading to an even more syncretic thinking about the art experience, is sketched out through further reference to the author’s personal observation, as well as his art-historical research and notes. Personal examples take on the reflex of a kind of art-noise-travel-writing, as Nechvatal visits Ryoji Ikeda’s Datamatics [ver 2.0] installation at the Centre Pompidou, Paris), hears Cecil Taylor at Alice Tully Hall in New York, spends time with the cave paintings of Lascaux, France, and explores the Wagner-inspired Venus Grotto of Linderhof, Bavaria, to name a few. These site-events, to varying degrees, are renderings of noise-art’s potential to “place us back into a ritual position by dragging art down into the felt 360° noise-perspective of the enthusiastic and participatory.” (p.103) The arc of the ideas proposed here position immersiveness, saturation and “scopic all-over tension” as most productively foundational to noise art, or art-noise. An itinerary from the most ancient of artistic expressions (cave drawings) to the most digital of presentations is charted (Ikeda’s minimal/maximal bitwise works for synchronized audio and visual projection). The harsh sonic onslaught of Masami Akita (a.k.a. Merzbow), is, under this analysis, not so far from colossal denseness of the churches of the High Baroque (Nechvatal visits the Rosario Chapel in Santo Domingo Church, Puebla, Mexico). And there is much more here, eaten up by noise: A rethinking of the work of Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Nicolas Schöffler (whom Nechvatal names the true “the Father of Cybernetic Art”) and the Happenings of Alan Kaprow, all as art-noise in their own right. Each of these artists and moments demonstrate techniques of destabilization, immersiveness, frame-breaking and “all-over fullness and fervor.” Here is writing on art and art history that is as ambitious as it is promising: “wildly visionary,” Nechvatal states as in conclusion. Self-admittedly far-reaching to the point of verging on totalization, we are asked to consider that the moments, spaces, arts and artists Nechvatal appreciates in the book all derive from an increasingly prevalent “noise consciousness.” Along the way we gain an appreciation of noise as a productive and proactive tension in art, rather than an unwanted signal or unwelcome intrusion. Most promising here for me are Nechvatal’s revealing descriptions of the potential for noise to make manifest the material-perceptual framework of individual and collective art experience. How might we allow what we have been repeatedly taught is our contemporary condition of “information overload” to transform itself into a calm, warm, sympathetic kind of inundation. Treatment of experience in this way, dissolves boundaries between the bodily, informational, material and technical complexes that make up our world, and is the promise of a radical, if momentary, Immersion Into Noise. (shrink)

This paper considers the electoral engineering within the framework of systemic-cybernetic and synergetic scientific approaches. As a result of the study, it is concluded that the basis for consideration of the electoral engineering is the systemic-cybernetic approach, since the electoral sphere in its essence is a computational mechanism that, according to certain mathematical algorithms (electoral formula), translates the votes of electors (input data) into representative mandates (output data). Main components of the electoral engineering (the subject, the object and the process (...) of the electoral engineering) can be fully considered within the framework of the systemic-cybernetic approach as a cybernetic system with the controlling and controlled components, where the management and feedback processes are running. The controlling component here is the subject of the electoral engineering (planning and carrying out of the electoral engineering activities), whereas the controlled component is the object of the electoral engineering (parameters of the electoral system and organization of the electoral process); management is the process of the electoral engineering itself. However, the electoral sphere is a constituent part of the political system, and it is possible to apply both the systemic-cybernetic approach and synergetic approach to its study. Therefore, application of the synergetic approach to the electoral engineering is possible only in an indirect way, i.e. through consideration of the political system in the context of synergetics (the electoral engineering in this case is considered as an activity within the political system). The bases for applying the synergetic approach to the electoral engineering carried out in practice are the following: 1) objectivist basis – the electoral engineering is carried out within the framework of a political system being a part of the social reality, and therefore cannot be fully modeled and predicted with the use of the systemic-cybernetic approach; 2) subjectivist basis – subjects engaged in the electoral engineering activities are political actors pursuing their own subjective goals and interests. (shrink)

This book comprises essays centered on Aristotle’s objectivist conception of eudaimonia, especially the roles played in it by activities of theoretical and practical intellect and the quality of our relationships with one another. Common objections to grounding this conception in the “proper function” of a human being are answered by appeal to the role played by Aristotle’s teleologically driven essentialism. His struggle to reconcile living in accordance with distinctively human virtues with the ideal of living a “divine” contemplative life is (...) explored, along with puzzles about how to reconcile his conception of eudaimonia as the ultimate end of human action with the parallel requirements that virtuous agents choose to engage in virtuous action “for itself” and that friends love their friends “for themselves.” Readings of Aristotle’s “eudaimonism” as a form of rational egoism are challenged by appeal to an original account of the ideal friend as an “other self,” one that stresses appreciation of the friend’s character “for itself” (apart from any relationships in which it happens to stand to the agent’s own needs and/or tastes) but acknowledges the role played by pleasure in “character friendship.” The friend’s good is not, as on “colonizing ego” readings, part of the agent’s own. Rather, the ideal friend recognizes the value her friend’s activity has for him and she take pleasure in his activity as such. This explains why even the maximally self-sufficient (and so most godlike) agent, who needs nothing from a friend, will nevertheless want to have at least one. (shrink)

Contemporary Russian philosophical traditions cannot be reduced to Marxist works and research in religious philosophy. Russian philosophers developed philosophy and methodology of social sciences and humanities as early as at the end of the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth century. In particular, S.N. Bulgakov’s social philosophy of science is closely related to European thinkers’ works and ideas. Problems of social determinism in scientific cognition are among them. These problems are topical now as seen in the well-known (...) discussion about the nature and meaning of various forms of determinism in which different stands are taken by R. Thomas, E. Morin and I. Prigogine. A new level of research of social determinism is presented in Russia in the second-half of the twentieth century. The identification of determination with causality is overcome. Necessary and contingent, dynamic and statistical determination, self-determination, and so on, come under examination. In the 1970s mechanistic and objectivistic determination is overcome and human factors, such as the will and systems of values, are taken into account. S.L. Frank turns to the methodology of social sciences in 1922 and continues his studies in 1930 in Europe. Frank creates a holistic, fully secular doctrine of social philosophy, sociology, philosophy of law and history. The changing situation in Russia at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty first century allows us to re-evaluate ideas and works of Russian thinkers who studied mainly rationalist themes, including philosophy and methodology of science, its hermeneutic and semiotic aspects. Russian and European philosophies are used and essentially enriched. G.G. Shpet’s ideas are examined. Studying the sphere of language and meaning, recognizing the essential importance of hermeneutics for knowledge in the humanities, he brings forward a semiotic conception of ethnic psychology to precede, in particular, American anthropologist and ethnographer C. Geertz’s theory of culture. Russian philosophers are quite aware that any reconstruction of real cognition cannot limit itself to the transcendental epistemological agent or “consciousness in general”. It is necessary to change the level of abstraction of the subject matter of the non-classical—social, cultural and historical—epistemology to draw closer to the real manifestations of cognitive activity. (shrink)

This book successfully achieves to serve two different purposes. On the one hand, it is a readable physics-based introduction into the philosophy of science, written in an informal and accessible style. The author, himself a professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame and active in the philosophy of science for almost twenty years, carefully develops his metatheoretical arguments on a solid basis provided by an extensive survey along the lines of the historical development of physics. On the (...) other hand, this book supplies one long argument for Cushing´s own attitude in the philosophy of science. While former studies of the author, from which this book draws in part, focused each on one special episode in the history of science, this book gathers case material from many different parts of physics and epochs. The main goal of this book is ”to impress upon the reader the essential and ineliminable role that philosophical considerations have played in the actual practice of science” (p. xv). The book is beautifully edited and produced; it contains a wealth of illustrative figures, well-chosen short quotations from original sources and contemporary commentators (some longer quotations are relegated in an appendix at the end of a chapter) and does not dispense with insightful mathematical arguments in the main text (some advanced deductions are, however, relegated in the appendices). It contains nine parts, whereas only the first and the last one are exclusively devoted to philosophical issues. The seven remaining parts, each subdivided into three chapters, centre around one major episode (a theory, a world view, etc.) in the history of physics. The author presents this material in a clear and philosophically unbiased way so that also readers who do not share Cushing’s subsequent philosophical conclusions will find this inspiring book extremely useful. Part 1 (”The scientific enterprise”) discusses some traditional (”objectivist”) views concerning the status of scientific knowledge, ”the” scientific method, and the relation.... (shrink)

Two competing models of metaaxiological justification of politics are analyzed. Politics is understood broadly, as actions which aim at organizing social life. I will be, first of all, interested in law making activities. When I talk about metaaxiological justification I think not so much about determinations of what is good, but about determinations refering to the way the good is founded, in short: determinations which answer the question why something is good. In the first model, which is described here as (...) objectivistic, it is assumed that determining that which is good is a matter of cognition; in the second model, which could be described here as voluntaristic or excedingly liberal, it is assumed that determining good is not a matter of cognition but of will – something is good because it is wanted. In the latter model, the cognoscibility of good is rejected and therefore the objective criteria for evaluation of which ‘will’ is better and which is worse are rejected. As a consequence, negative freedom becomes the fundamental value of social order and the basic requirement is that of maximizing the sphere of individual’s free actions, the sphere which is free from interference of other individuals or institutions. I am going to argue that none of these models is acceptable as a basis of oragnizing social life, and at least because of one reason. Each of them leads to a certain version of totalitarianism. In the conclusion I am going to present a mixed model, which, in my opinion, reflexes well the practice of democratic states. Analysis of these three models allows, first of all, to identify more clearly some of the problems appearing in making law, including procedural questions. By pointing at the interdependence of the foundations of good and law making procedures it is argued that the choice of the concept of good (a metaaxiological choice) is primary to the choice of law making procedures. (shrink)

En este artículo se busca indagar, por un lado, las aporías que Gadamer detecta en la propuesta epistemológica de Dilthey y, por el otro lado, las aporías que el propio Dilthey encuentra en el obrar de las ciencias del espíritu. El objetivo de este artículo será mostrar las limitaciones de la crítica gadameriana y reconocer que la obra de Dilthey excede el análisis exclusivamente objetivista. Esto permitirá demostrar que la filosofía de Dilthey es una indagación del mundo humano entendido como (...) mundo activo. En otros términos, sus estudios son más que una investigación epistemológica. Se buscará sostener que la fundamentación de las ciencias del espíritu desarrollada por él se sostiene gracias a su investigación sobre la dinámica de la vida humana, del mundo común e histórico donde actúa el hombre. This paper seeks to investigate, on one hand, the aporiae that Gadamer detects in Dilthey's epistemological theory, and, on the other hand, the aporiae that Dilthey himself finds in the work of the human sciences. The goal of this paper is to show the limitations of Gadamer's critique and to recognize that Dilthey's work exceeds the objectivist analysis. This will allow proving that Dilthey's philosophy is an inquiry into the human world understood as an active world. In other words, his studies are more than an epistemological investigation. I will seek to claim that the basis of the human sciences developed by him is the result of his research on the dynamics of human life, on the common and historical world where man acts. (shrink)

In the third section of his paper ‘Inductivism in 19th Century Economics’ Karl Milford presents us with a useful résumé of the impact of methodological con-siderations, especially amongst economists in the German-speaking world, on more properly economic problems, especially the development of price theory. It is interesting to learn from his report how diverse were the various approaches, both axiologically and methodologically. Each combination of objectivism or subjectivism with individualism or collectivism had distinguished representa-tives: the objectivism with regard (...) to values of Smith and Marx contradicted the subjectivism of Hufeland and Roscher, while the individualism of Smith and Hufeland contradicted the collectivism of Marx and Roscher. As Milford tells the story, it was only with publication of Menger’s Grundsätze in 1871, and his Untersuchungen in 1883, that the combination of subjectivism and individualism espoused by Hufeland finally attained a dominant position. The success of Menger’s approach seems to be attributable on the one side to the per-sistent inability of objectivist theories of values and prices to explain adequately the activity of the market; and on the methodological side, to his devastating attack on some aspects of the naively unaffected inductivism underlying most collectivist thinking. In fact Menger too was an inductivist who, in response to Hume’s attack on all modes of content-increasing inference, introduced and defended an a priori principle of induction. (shrink)

In the third section of his paper ‘Inductivism in 19th Century Economics’ Karl Milford presents us with a useful résumé of the impact of methodological con-siderations, especially amongst economists in the German-speaking world, on more properly economic problems, especially the development of price theory. It is interesting to learn from his report how diverse were the various approaches, both axiologically and methodologically. Each combination of objectivism or subjectivism with individualism or collectivism had distinguished representa-tives: the objectivism with regard (...) to values of Smith and Marx contradicted the subjectivism of Hufeland and Roscher, while the individualism of Smith and Hufeland contradicted the collectivism of Marx and Roscher . As Milford tells the story , it was only with publication of Menger’s Grundsätze in 1871, and his Untersuchungen in 1883, that the combination of subjectivism and individualism espoused by Hufeland finally attained a dominant position. The success of Menger’s approach seems to be attributable on the one side to the per-sistent inability of objectivist theories of values and prices to explain adequately the activity of the market; and on the methodological side, to his devastating attack on some aspects of the naively unaffected inductivism underlying most collectivist thinking . In fact Menger too was an inductivist who, in response to Hume’s attack on all modes of content-increasing inference, introduced and defended an a priori principle of induction. (shrink)

Popper proposed his theory of objective knowledge to eliminate subjectivist epistemologies. Popper’s objectivism culminated in the theory of the autonomous World 3 characterized by its independence from the subjective factors belonging to World 2. I argue that Popper did not succeed in unifying his idea of the autonomy of knowledge with the requirement of the creative role of the critical subject in cognition. Moreover, his effort to desubjectivize knowledge undermined the vital importance of the critical activity that ensures the (...) dynamism of the growth of knowledge. In this respect, Popper suppressed the most interesting feature of his philosophical contribution. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS Shadow History tl9 Richard Watson's essay looks as if it is breaking new ground, but on re-re-reading it, it seems to me that several incommensurable and unrelated problems and phenomena are being treated together. If separated into constituent parts, there may be less here than meets the eye. First of all, the phenomenon of "shadow history," and its role as foundation for a philosophy or a (...) philosophical position goes back, I think, at least to Aristotle's account of his predecessors, especially of his teacher, and beyond that perhaps to Plato's account of the Sophists. It appears in Maimonides's account of Arabic occasionalism, which was used to justify medieval Aristotelianism (and this account was accepted uncritically by Leibniz, Malebranche, and others in the seventeenth century). Bacon's, Descartes's, and Locke's presentation of Scholasticism is definitely "shadow history" that was used as the start of the "new" way of ideas, and as its justification.. Hegel's view of the history of philosophy is another major "shadow history." Hence the fact that Russell, Ayer, Ryle and Rorty adopted similar strategies of using a spurious or dubious history of their predecessors is not so strange. Any historian of philosophy worth her or his salt is aware that historical philosophical personnages have used their own views of their predecessors' philosophies as ways of making their own "original" philosophical views more exciting or important or credible. We have learned long ago how to separate the alleged past from the historical past, and even to see that the alleged past plays a significant role in the writings of various philosophers. Watson has put it neatly in his four examples, but these are only intriguing because so litde history of analytic philosophy has been written up to this time. We have much, maybe too much, literature about how Kant misrepresented Hume, Hume misrepresented Berkeley, etc. In the decades to come we may have much about Russell, Ayer, Ryle and Rorty as misrepresenters. Then, Watson's point can help separate the charge that they were poor historians from the realization that they used history creatively as "shadow history." And we may even have historical evidence from the Russell papers and other archives that they knew full well what they were doing, and were not pretending to be good historians, or, on the other hand, that they themselves did not realize they were writing "shadow history," but thought they were actually real historians. Watson tries to make the activity of creating "shadow history" a challenge to historians of philosophy, and a plus for the creative philosophers. In the cases he discusses the "shadow histories" have had great influence on the development of twentiethcentury philosophy in England and America. Even though I am a sceptic, I have no doubt that historians of Anglo-American philosophy will explore his points, and distinguish the "shadow histories" from the best available historical interpretations of what previous philosophers said and meant. Both interpreting and understanding the "shadow histories" and the best available histories will change and develop depending on future interests and information. Watson uses "historians" without really making clear who he is talking about. Only three people are mentioned: Gregor Sebba, Etienne Gilson and Paul Oskar Kristeller. 120 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31 : 1 JANUARY 1993 There are many others who consider themselves historians of philosophy, or are considered as such in the profession; I doubt that they are all as objectivist as Watson thinks, believing that they can ascertain exactly what happened in the past. But I think most of us share a view that we can do better or worse at this, depending on materials and techniques used, perspectives employed, etc. Almost all of us would contend that being able to read the basic source material in the original language and being able to understand it in context, yields a better understanding of what a historical philosopher said and meant. Watson appears to agree, but then says this does not matter, because a "shadow history" may be longer remembered and used in creative philosophy than a historian's history. The example he offers is that of Yolton's Locke... (shrink)

The article discusses the theoretical status of the category of uncertainty. Instead of the classical definitions of uncertainty as an ontological or epistemological concept, a composite theoretical construct is proposed. In classical science, the objectivist representation of the subject of research was preferred. With the nonclassical type of rationality, there rises problem of including subjective elements in a theoretical description. Attention to subject-subject-object methodologies is increasing due to the complication of communicative interactions in science and society in the digital era. (...) One of the consequences of active innovative projective activity on a planetary scale and increasing risks is the perception in the public mind of uncertainty as a challenge. The author considers it appropriate to study the uncertainty-certainty as a paired category. The category of uncertainty was considered in philosophy, science, and management. The status of uncertainty as infinity and formlessness was recognized by Greek natural philosophers. Classical science developed the methodology of knowing the “infinite limit” through the construction of theoretical schemes (forms) and types of empirical testing. The paradox served as a means of destroying dogmatic schemes. In the context of increasingly complex communications in science, the importance of cognitive problems in the study of collective thinking and the personal beginning of creativity is increasing. Modern economic positivism is distinguished by its rejection of objective uncertainty, and the installation of the ability to efficiently manage exclusively accurate calculations is brought to extremes. (shrink)

The idea of reality as construction maybe one of the most recurrent themes cutting across Modern and Contemporary thinking. Objectivist realism has professed reality to be external and independent of subjectivity and maintained that experience was the capacity of being affected by things through the senses and of reproducing them as representative mental contents. As a reaction, Modernity will establish: a) that consciousness is not merely receptive passivity but a configurant activity; b) that reality is not reflected by consciousness but, (...) rather, is somehow constructed by it. Our time rescues such heritage in a particularly fecund manner in the semiological discourse. Intersubjectively constructed reality is a web of meanings and values which man institutes around himself in the world. Reality sediments in systems of sign vehiculation and becomes fixed m codes. Therefore the question: if reality, as construction, has the limits and scope of code, how does consciousness behave concerning the non-codified, the non-constructed, in the absence of a code? This article deals with some views of this other of consciousness, presented as declensions of metaphor of absence.Talvez o tema mais recorrente do discurso filosófico que atravessa o pensamento moderno e a contemporaneidade seja a idéia da realidade como construção. Como reação ao realismo objetivista, que acreditava ser a realidade exterior e independente da subjetividade e para quem a experiência é a capacidade de ser afetado pelas coisas através dos sentidos e de reproduzi-las em conteúdos mentais representativos, a modernidade vai estabelecer que: a) a consciência não é uma mera passividade receptiva, mas atividade configurante; b) a realidade não é refletida pela consciência, mas por ela, de certa forma, construída. A nossa época recolhe esta herança de maneira fecunda particularmente no discurso semiológico: a realidade construída intersubjetivamente é uma teia de significados e valores que o homem institui ao redor de si no mundo. Ela sedimenta-se em sistemas de veiculação sêmicos e se fixa em códigos. Daí emerge a questão: tendo a realidade, enquanto construção, os limites e alcance do código, como se comporta a consciência e seus registros perante o não-codificado, o não-construído, a sua ausência? Algumas abordagens desse outro da consciência, apresentadas como declinações de metáforas da ausência, é aquilo que esse artigo pretende apresentar. (shrink)

The idea of reality as construction maybe one of the most recurrent themes cutting across Modern and Contemporary thinking. Objectivist realism has professed reality to be external and independent of subjectivity and maintained that experience was the capacity of being affected by things through the senses and of reproducing them as representative mental contents. As a reaction, Modernity will establish: a) that consciousness is not merely receptive passivity but a configurant activity; b) that reality is not reflected by consciousness but, (...) rather, is somehow constructed by it. Our time rescues such heritage in a particularly fecund manner in the semiological discourse. Intersubjectively constructed reality is a web of meanings and values which man institutes around himself in the world. Reality sediments in systems of sign vehiculation and becomes fixed m codes. Therefore the question: if reality, as construction, has the limits and scope of code, how does consciousness behave concerning the non-codified, the non-constructed, in the absence of a code? This article deals with some views of this other of consciousness, presented as declensions of metaphor of absence.Talvez o tema mais recorrente do discurso filosófico que atravessa o pensamento moderno e a contemporaneidade seja a idéia da realidade como construção. Como reação ao realismo objetivista, que acreditava ser a realidade exterior e independente da subjetividade e para quem a experiência é a capacidade de ser afetado pelas coisas através dos sentidos e de reproduzi-las em conteúdos mentais representativos, a modernidade vai estabelecer que: a) a consciência não é uma mera passividade receptiva, mas atividade configurante; b) a realidade não é refletida pela consciência, mas por ela, de certa forma, construída. A nossa época recolhe esta herança de maneira fecunda particularmente no discurso semiológico: a realidade construída intersubjetivamente é uma teia de significados e valores que o homem institui ao redor de si no mundo. Ela sedimenta-se em sistemas de veiculação sêmicos e se fixa em códigos. Daí emerge a questão: tendo a realidade, enquanto construção, os limites e alcance do código, como se comporta a consciência e seus registros perante o não-codificado, o não-construído, a sua ausência? Algumas abordagens desse outro da consciência, apresentadas como declinações de metáforas da ausência, é aquilo que esse artigo pretende apresentar. (shrink)

This paper provides a brief overview and critique of the dominant objectivist understanding and use of illness narrative in Enlightenment (scientific) medicine and ethics, as well as several revisionist accounts, which reflect the evolution of this approach. In light of certain limitations and difficulties endemic in the objectivist understanding of illness narrative, an alternative phronesis approach to medical ethics influenced by Charles Taylor’s account of the interpretive nature of human agency and language is examined. To this end, the account of (...) interpretive medical responsibility previously described by Schultz and Carnevale as "clinical phronesis" (based upon Taylor’s notion of "strong" or "radical evaluation") is reviewed and expanded. The thesis of this paper is that illness narrative has the ability to benefit patients as well as the potential to cause harm or iatrogenic effects. This benefit or harm is contingent upon how the story is told and understood. Consequently, these tales are not simply "nice stories," cathartic gestures, or mere supplements to scientific procedures and decision making, as suggested by the objectivist approach. Rather, they open the agent to meanings that provide a context for explanation and evaluation of illness episodes and therapeutic activities. This understanding provides indicators (guides) for right action. Hence, medical responsibility as clinical phronesis involves, first, the patient and provider’s coformulation and cointerpretation of what is going on in the patient’s illness narrative, and second, the patient and provider’s response to interpretation of the facts of illness and what they signify–not simply a response to the brute facts of illness, alone. The appeal to medical responsibility as clinical phronesis thus underscores the importance of getting the patient’s story of illness right. It is anticipated that further elaboration concerning the idea of clinical phronesis as interpretive illness narrative will provide a new foundation for medical ethics and decision making. (shrink)

This commentary on Isabelle Stengers's article “Comparison as a Matter of Concern,” takes its entry point in a battle between comparisons: imposed comparisons, where extraneous, irrelevant criteria are laid down, and active, interested comparisons, where rapport is established between the scientist and the phenomenon she studies. According to Stengers, the comparison, which establishes rapport, is a crucial ingredient in good science. In the context of a symposium titled “Comparative Relativism,” perhaps the crucial point to make about what characterizes Stengers's (...) matter of concern is that, in being utterly uninterested in defining absolute scales for comparison and in focusing only on the generative potential of comparing, she relativizes the very act of comparing. What matters to her is how experimental devices simultaneously sensitize their users to the phenomena at hand and to the workings of particular comparisons. Since (a relativized) comparison is a matter of concern to the scientists involved, finding out what other ways of comparing there are (besides objectivist comparison) should be a matter of concern to those of us who are engaged in studying knowledge production. This commentary suggests that “knowledge economy” researchers begin unpacking the science/industry collaboration through participation and careful analysis as a way of staying with the present moment. (shrink)

The definitive principle of actualism is that the world is composed wholly of actual or factual entities, including concreta like a horse and abstracta like his neigh, and the sums and the sets thereof, all on the one plane of particular and definite existents. There are no substrata of potency or prime matter, no forces or virtues, no blur of indefiniteness or press of tendency; no superstructure of unexampled essences or disembodied possibilities or transcendental acts of Be-ing. Our actual entities, (...) I specify further, are all either simple qualia, or relations belonging to one of three primitive categories, or some compound of these. The relational categories which I think sufficient and necessary are the whole-part or "merological" relations, resemblances or "comparisons," and locative distances and directions, not necessarily the physical geometry of space-time, but at least some analogous modes of deployment. "Factualism" here is a rhyming synonym of "actualism" and does not connote the very dubious doctrine of the young Wittgenstein that the world is the sum of "facts" in the sense of Sachverhalten. Nor does "actualism" connote the doctrine, so popular in New York and environs, that things must be active, though quite likely most of them are. (shrink)

It need occasion no surprise that Recherche de la Liberté by Daniel Christoff 1957, 220 pp., is devoted to philosophy of value. Freedom, one wants to say in this sort of context, is the attribute or even the essence of, for example, Sartre's pour soi; but since such a description would be, in existentialist language, a contradiction in terms, freedom had better be identified with the means whereby the dynamic self escapes from its essence, as Sartre would say. Because of (...) this dynamic role of freedom in Continental philosophy it is natural that M. Christoff should be happier talking of liberation than of liberty. The word liberation refers to the process of value-making, and perhaps it is chosen in order that such question-begging terms as “creation of values” may be avoided. Question-begging because, although M. Christoff is by no means an exponent of the “objectivist” theory of values, he does not play down the importance of the concept in the interest of what is strictly never done but always in process of being done. He denies that rational thinking is “an immobile system of concepts”, and sees an alternation of conceptualization and valuation as the activity of mind. It is not only in his view of liberty as liberation that M. Christoff reminds one of Lavelle and Gabriel Marcel, but also in his particular brand of altruism. He seems to see Sartre's point of view about “others” without sharing it. (shrink)

An argument is made for the relevance of phenomenological hermeneutics to economics, with special attention to recent debates on hermeneutics among economists of the Austrian school of Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. Hermeneutics is explicated in the context of Husserlian phenomenology, with special attention to phenomenology's Aristotelian roots. Naive and methodological forms of ?objectivism?; are contrasted with hermeneutics, which recovers the horizons of scientific knowledge: the whole, and the activities of the human knower. Finally, the charges that (...) hermeneutics entails pernicious forms of relativism and historicism are confronted. (shrink)

La philosophie contemporaine opère une critique radicale de la notion de subjectivité et ne voit dans l’humanisme qui lui est lié que le masque d’une volonté de puissance déguisée. La pensée de Gentile, bien que postérieure à Nietzsche et contemporaine de Husserl, continue de se réclamer de l’hégélianisme. Pourtant, si l’on va au-delà de son classicisme affiché, la pensée de Gentile constitue une forme de dépassement de la subjectivité de l’intérieur. En radicalisant au maximum le principe de la subjectivité, Gentile (...) va parvenir à penser un sujet qui s’identifie à l’advenir du monde. Nous percevons ce passage lorsque Gentile remplace la conception hégélienne de l’éternité de l’Esprit Absolu par la conception de l’actualité de la pensée dont l’activité devient le principe a priori de toute rationalité, évitant ainsi toute retombée dans l’objectivisme. De plus, Gentile conçoit l’activité spirituelle sous la forme d’une patiente historiographie qui loin de s’approprier le réel travaille à en dégager le sens. Ainsi, le travail de Gentile peut prendre place à coté de celui de Husserl, dans une même volonté de dégager le sens d’une expérience pure.Contemporary philosophy radically deconstructs the notion of subjectivity and exposes the humanism that grew out of as being a masq for the thirst for power that hides behind it. Although Gentile’s thought dates from later than Nietzsche, being contemporaneous with Husserl’s, it claims to have its roots in Hegel. Yet, beyond the classicism that it proclaims Gentile’s thought transends subjectivity from within. By carrying the principle of subjectivity to its utmost limit Gentile eventually conceives of a subject that identifies with the world-in-becoming. The decisive step consisted in the replacing the hegelian conception of eternity of the Absolute Spirit with the conception of the actuality of the mind, in whose activity he sees the a priori principle of rationality itself. Which makes a lapse into objectivism impossible. Besides, Gentile conceives the Mind’s activity to be a patient historiography, the aim of which is not to appropriate the real but to work out its meaning. Thus Gentile’s thought moves abreast of Husserl’s as both philosophers seek to work out the meaning of pure experience. (shrink)

Marxist philosophers are increasingly beginning to elaborate a philosophical axiology of their own, to articulate the meaning of socialism in axiological terms. Traditionally, Marxist doctrine has been very eager to present socialism and its motivation as a matter of scientific prediction rather than in terms of value judgments, wishes, or the proclamation of ideals. A more accurate analysis, however, shows that the Marxist undertanding of human social practice presupposes some active striving in relation to which all objects and circumstances (...) of human life receive a positive or negative meaning. It is just this practical relation of human subjects to their world (and of their world to them) that is conceptually grasped by the notion of value.From the theoretical point of view, Marxist axiology is not oriented towards some “realm of values” all values and value relations are understood strictly in anthropological terms as components of human and social practice, as some particular aspects which objects and circumstances assume in relation to actively striving beings and their qualitatively determined self-affirmation on a definite historical level. Marxist axiology presents itself both as a theoretical analysis of these value qualities and relations, and at the same time as a doctrine of practical involvement whose aim is to clarify and strengthen the socialist value consciousness.The basis of all these value relations lies in the system of human needs. According to Marxism, this system proves to be multi-dimensional, encompassing as its fundament the complex of “material needs” which are to be satisfied through work. But equally important and urgent for human beings are those needs and requirements in relation to which all social relations are characterized as being “worthy” or “unworthy” of man (such judgments being in accordance with some historical standard of claims). Finally, there are also those peculiar needs basic to the “aesthetic” qualities of objects as well as to the free (not imposed by natural or social necessities) and “purposeless” activities of human play and self-realization. The desideratum of socialism is to bring about a harmoniously proportioned synthesis in the satisfaction of the totality of human needs for the totality of human beings. Socialism is not only necessary and predictable in a scientific sense but also valuable and desirable for people.Several Marxist (and especially Soviet) authors have worked out the outlines of a Marxist philosophical axiology (V. P. Tugarinov, O. M. Bakuradze, V. A. Vasilenko and others). The opponents of such an enterprise (O. G. Drobnickij and others) have more or less radically contested the value and legitimacy of such a theory of value, for they consider value consciousness as a part of a pre-scientific way of thought. On the theoretical level the abstract specification of such value relationships constitute an artificial separation of the theoretical-practical unity and totality of human relations to the world.The author finds these objections not convincing because the danger of hypostatizing and isolating the “values”, of presenting them as some kind of substantial eternal entities, can fully be overcome by anthropological integration and sociological concretization of the “value aspect”. In a Marxist “philosophy of practice” something is not valuable in itself but is either positively or negatively significant for human beings. Certainly this development of axiology in Marxism is an attempt to set up a counterweight to the traditional scientific objectivism of the Marxist doctrine by confirming the right of people to judge and act “subjectively” on certain issues. (shrink)

Brand Blanshard devotes a substantial part of his book Reason and Goodness to a discussion of ethical subjectivism. It need hardly be said that his discussion is critical; Blanshard is a thoroughgoing ethical objectivist. Nevertheless, although he rejects subjectivism as an ethical theory, he is fully appreciative of the importance of subjective elements—emotions, feelings, attitudes—in our ordinary, practical moral activities. He recognizes these, along with reason, to be essential parts of the good life for human beings.

The article presents the philosopher A. B. Stępień (born 1931). In the first part, against the background of philosophical trends of the 20th century, the main components of A. B. Stępień’s philosophical standpoint are characterised. The author of the article includes among them: in epistemology − anti-sceptical, anti-relativist and realist views; in metaphysics − theism and stress on the possibility of rational argumentation for existence of God; in axiology − objectivist views, especially in the field of existence of moral values (...) and norms derived from them. The next part of the article is devoted to a discussion of A. B. Stępień’s didactic activities with a special stress on his contribution to the development of Polish philosophy after World War II. (shrink)

The article presents the philosopher A. B. Stępień (born 1931). In the first part, against the background of philosophical trends of the 20th century, the main components of A. B. Stępień’s philosophical standpoint are characterised. The author of the article includes among them: in epistemology − anti-sceptical, anti-relativist and realist views; in metaphysics − theism and stress on the possibility of rational argumentation for existence of God; in axiology − objectivist views, especially in the field of existence of moral values (...) and norms derived from them. The next part of the article is devoted to a discussion of A. B. Stępień’s didactic activities with a special stress on his contribution to the development of Polish philosophy after World War II. (shrink)