Online research in philosophy

This paper examines several key aspects of the ethical environment facing the insurance industries of Poland, The Czech Republic and Hungary as they complete the transition from Communist insurance systems built upon state-owned monopolies to viable private domestic insurance markets, and then seek to harmonize their markets with the single insurance market of the European Union. Since many types of ethical problems encountered during the transition are unlikely to diminish significantly as a result of either privatization or regulation of the (...) insurance markets of these countries, measures are identified that should help to improve the ethical environments of these markets. (shrink)

This essay addresses Georges Bataille as a historical thinker by concentrating on The Accursed Share (three volumes, 1949-54), the text Bataille took as his masterwork. An amalgam of cultural criticism, anthropological and sociological research, The Accursed Share reveals Bataille's temporalised vision of his four central ideas, excess, expenditure, sovereignty and transgression. Grappling with this vision is key for understanding Bataille's oeuvre as a whole because it brings the entirety of his assessments of Western and world culture under its heading.The aim (...) of the paper is to offer a sense, on one hand, of Bataille's dystopic heterology and, on the other hand, the unique formulation of the junctures between economics, power and morality that define him as important for the irruption of post-structural thought specifically, and indeed, the postmodern era as a whole. (shrink)

In this paper I analyse the role of naturalism and objectivism in everyday life according to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Whereas Husserl attributes the naturalistic attitude mainly to science, he defines the objectivist attitude as a naiveté which equally applies to the natural attitude of everyday life. I analyse the relationship between the natural attitude and lived experience and show Husserl's hesitation regarding the task of phenomenology in describing the lived experience of everyday life, since he considers this experience to be (...) too objectivistic. I use Merleau-Ponty's work to argue that objectivism is an essential characteristic of lived experience and that phenomenology should therefore find ways to integrate it into its descriptions while simultaneously suggesting ways to overcome its rigidity in order to renew perception. I finally propose that the project of the naturalisation of phenomenology could be one of the ways to connect lived experience to the objectivism of everyday life. (shrink)