Theorising about politics and society has never had firm and settled boundaries. In the past, political theorists have sometimes been moralists, sometimes moral philosophers; now apologists for the existing order, now social engineers; they have tried both to explain society and to discuss social values; and their explanations have been variously based on empirical generalisations, a priori assumptions about human nature or general metaphysical theories. Very few aspects of knowledge have been thought irrelevant to social enquiry, and no problem has (...) been isolated as its central and necessary concern. (shrink)

‘We have the strong ground of common hatreds, though perhaps we hate on different or even opposite grounds’. Thus wrote Tocqueville the liberal of Montalembert the liberal Catholic. What lay in common was a desire for an extension of personal liberties, freedom of association, decentralisation, separation of Church and state; but, in recognizing the differences, Tocqueville tacitly acknowledges the areligious nature of his own plea for religion in modern society and asserts the aliberal nature of Montalembert’s dedication to liberal programmes. (...) Both claimed to unite what the French had set asunder, religion and liberalism; both in fact degraded one end by using it as a tool of the other. (shrink)

In this article, I would like to take a closer look at the philosophical meaning of the term “process,” which is a fundamental category in Arnold Mindell’s psychology. The Taoist origins of this concept go back to the Tao – the principle of the universe. Tao is the process of passing into each other the opposite aspects of the monastically understood Qi energy. Mindell was also inspired by the analytical psychology of Carl Gustav Jung, which emphasizes the importance of archetypal, (...) unconscious mental processes and their impact on the ego through random thoughts, fantasies or dreams. Mindell distinguishes between a primary process (mental content that we are aware of) and a secondary process (mental content that we are not aware of) to explain what connects a person with her natural living – an unadulterated existence through rigid boundaries between the two processes acquired during one’s upbringing. The purpose of this article is to explore the Jungian and Taoist roots of Mindell’s psychology and to characterize individual lives as confronting their entire processual being, thus becoming natural living. -------------------------- Received: 14/04/2022. Reviewed: 19/10/2022. Accepted: 24/10/2022. (shrink)

Explores how humans can take the lives of animals and plants while maintaining a proper respect both for ecosystems and for those who live in them.

This book proposes a bold idea. Living beings are distinguishing distinctions. Single cells and multicellular organisms maintain themselves distinct by drawing distinctions. This is what organisms are and what they do. From this starting point, key issues examined range across ontology, epistemology, phenomenology, logic, and ethics. Topics discussed include the origin of life, the nature and purpose of biology, the relation between life and logic, the nature and limits of formal logic, the nature of subjects, the subject-object relation, subject-subject (...) relationships and the deep roots of ethics. The book provides a radical new foundation to think about philosophy and biology and appeals to researchers and students in these fields. It powerfully debunks mechanical thinking about living beings and shows the vast reservoir of insights into aliveness available in the arts and humanities. (shrink)

The emerging contemporary natural philosophy provides a common ground for the integrative view of the natural, the artificial, and the human-social knowledge and practices. Learning process is central for acquiring, maintaining, and managing knowledge, both theoretical and practical. This paper explores the relationships between the present advances in understanding of learning in the sciences of the artificial, natural sciences, and philosophy. The question is, what at this stage of the development the inspiration from nature, specifically its computational (...) models such as info-computation through morphological computing, can contribute to machine learning and artificial intelligence, and how much on the other hand models and experiments in machine learning and robotics can motivate, justify, and inform research in computational cognitive science, neurosciences, and computing nature. We propose that one contribution can be understanding of the mechanisms of ‘learning to learn’, as a step towards deep learning with symbolic layer of computation/information processing in a framework linking connectionism with symbolism. As all natural systems possessing intelligence are cognitive systems, we describe the evolutionary arguments for the necessity of learning to learn for a system to reach humanlevel intelligence through evolution and development. The paper thus presents a contribution to the epistemology of the contemporary philosophy of nature. (shrink)

A guide for achieving an enlightened mind through the art of non-doing.

According to most interpreters, Aristotle explains death as the result of material processes of the body going against the nature of the living being. Yet, this description is incomplete, for it does not clarify the relationship between the process of decay and the teleological system in which it occurs: this makes it impossible to distinguish between natural and violent death. In this paper, I try to fill this gap by looking at his so-called ‘biological works’ and mainly at (...) the De Juventute. I first introduce the specific concept of life at play in this treatise and prove its complementarity with the framework of the De Anima. Then, I illustrate in detail the process of dying and the reasons why a merely material description is insufficient to account for the distinction between natural and violent death. Finally, I show that for Aristotle natural death is a by-product of teleologically directed life activities: only against the background of this teleological structure is natural death fully explained in terms of essence and causes. To support this claim, I compare death to two analogous cases in Aristotle’s biology, namely dreams and the features of GA V. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes' timeless account of the human condition, first developed in The Elements of Law (1640), which comprises Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, is a direct product of the intellectual and political strife of the seventeenth century. His analysis of the war between the individual and the group lays out the essential strands of his moral and political philosophy later made famous in Leviathan. This first ever complete paperback edition of Human Nature and De Corpore Politico is also supplemented (...) by chapters from Hobbes' later work De Corpore and "The Three Lives," never before published together in English. (shrink)

Connected Lives examines the account of human nature that is implicit in an ethics of care, a picture of human lives that emphasizes interdependency, embodiment, and social connectedness. The book makes important connections to the picture of human life found in theorists of love such as St. Augustine and Emmanuel Levinas, and shows that when care theory is articulated clearly, it provides resources for thinking through some of the difficult moral issues we face in the contemporary world, issues such as (...) assisted reproduction and the new genetic technologies. (shrink)

According to the dominant approach in the theory of vagueness, the nature of the vagueness of an expression ‘F’ consists in its presenting borderline cases in an appropriately ordered series: objects which are neither definitely F nor definitely not F (where the notion of definiteness can be semantic, ontic, epistemic, psychological or primitive). In view of the various problems faced by theories of vagueness adopting the dominant approach, the thesis proposes to reconsider the naive theory of vagueness, according to which (...) the nature of the vagueness of an expression consists in its not drawing boundaries between any neighbouring objects in an appropriately ordered series. It is argued that expressions and concepts which do present this feature play an essential role in our cognitive and practical life, allowing us to conceptualize---in a way which would otherwise be impossible---the typically coarse-grained distinctions we encounter in reality. Despite its strong initial plausibility and ability to explain many phenomena of vagueness, the naive theory is widely rejected because thought to be shown inconsistent by the sorites paradox. In reply, it is first argued that accounts of vagueness based on the dominant approach are themselves subject to higher-order sorites paradoxes. The paradox is then solved on behalf of the naive theory by rejecting the unrestricted transitivity of the consequence relation on a vague language; a family of logics apt for reasoning with vague expressions is proposed and studied (using models with partially ordered values). The characteristic philosophical and logical consequences of this novel solution are developed and defended in detail. In particular, it is shown how the analysis of what happens in the attempt of surveying a sorites series and deciding each case allows the naive theory to recover a "thin" notion of a borderline case. (shrink)

A reassessment of the influence of John Dewey's mature work, especially "Experience and Nature" on recent trends in cognitive science.

From Emily Litella to Grumpy Old Man, from Joe Blow to Drunk Uncle, Saturday Night Live has long employed guest characters as “citizen journalists” on its famous Weekend Update segment. These characters have provided a comic take on everyday issues impacting the life of citizens in the public sphere. Two of the first philosophers who take up the modern problems of participatory democracy in the public sphere are John Dewey (1859–1952) and Walter Lippmann (1889–1974). “Weekend Update” provides us with a (...) foundation to understand what Dewey and Lippmann argued about news, democracy, and the formation of public opinion. Dewey's creative response to the problems of the public in democracy was not to rely on experts, but to rely on the arts and artists to help communicate important issues in the public sphere and foster more public participation. (shrink)

The emerging contemporary natural philosophy provides a common ground for the integrative view of the natural, the artificial, and the human-social knowledge and practices. Learning process is central for acquiring, maintaining, and managing knowledge, both theoretical and practical. This paper explores the relationships between the present advances in understanding of learning in the sciences of the artificial (deep learning, robotics), natural sciences (neuroscience, cognitive science, biology), and philosophy (philosophy of computing, philosophy of mind, natural philosophy). The (...) question is, what at this stage of the development the inspiration from nature, specifically its computational models such as info-computation through morphological computing, can contribute to machine learning and artificial intelligence, and how much on the other hand models and experiments in machine learning and robotics can motivate, justify, and inform research in computational cognitive science, neurosciences, and computing nature. We propose that one contribution can be understanding of the mechanisms of ‘learning to learn’, as a step towards deep learning with symbolic layer of computation/information processing in a framework linking connectionism with symbolism. As all natural systems possessing intelligence are cognitive systems, we describe the evolutionary arguments for the necessity of learning to learn for a system to reach human-level intelligence through evolution and development. The paper thus presents a contribution to the epistemology of the contemporary philosophy of nature. (shrink)

In this article I take on the “Transcendentalist Challenge” to naturalized phenomenology, highlighting how the ontological and methodological commitments of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy point in the direction of an integration of the transcendental and the scientific, thus making room for a productive exchange between philosophy and psychological science when it comes to understanding consciousness and its place in nature. Discussing various conceptions of naturalized phenomenology, I argue that what I call an “Integrationist View” is required if we are to make sense (...) of the possibility of productive exchange between phenomenology and the sciences. My main argument is that if we conceive of consciousness as a structure of behavior ontologically prior to the distinctions between objectivity and subjectivity and third- and first-person perspectives, we arrive at a view of the transcendental as not essentially separate from the domain of science, but rather as contingent organizational norms of empirical nature that are best illuminated through a dialectical exchange between phenomenological and scientific approaches. I end by showing how Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with the “Schneider case” in an example of such an integration. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a new account of living natural products in Kant’s physical geography. I argue that Kant adopts Buffon’s twofold conception of natural history, which consists of a general theory of nature as a physical nexus of causes and a particular account of living natural products in the setting of the earth. Yet in contrast to Buffon, who placed the two parts of natural history on equal epistemic footing, Kant’s physical geography (...) can be understood as a second, pragmatic level of inquiry that stands under the formal conditions of nature outlined in Universal Natural History. On the higher, formal level, natural history provides a physical account of time and space as an expanding causal sequence. On the lower, pragmatic level, physical geography provides a causal account of particular natural products as developing within a specific place. I argue that this two-tiered account not only clarifies the relation between metaphysics and experience in Kant’s pre-critical philosophy, it also sheds light on the continuity between the method of physical geography and the systematisation of nature presented in the critical philosophy. (shrink)

Nature and Eros is an integral educational process offered to graduate students at the California Institute of Integral Studies. This course was developed in response to the illusion, operative throughout Western industrialized culture, that we are separate selves living upon the earth. Across many disciplines we are awakening to the knowledge that we are living organisms intricately woven into the ever-evolving vibrant web of life. The central aim of Nature and Eros is to support a shift in our (...) perception of this larger web and activate the lived recognition of our deepest identity as an inextricable part of cosmic evolution. (shrink)

The synthetic, integrative significance of biosemiotics as a modern interdisciplinary research program is under discussion in the article. Aimed at studying the cognitive and life activity of living beings, which are capable of recognizing signals and extracting the meanings, biosemiotics serves as a conceptual node that combines some important notions of theoretical biology, evolutionary epistemology, cognitive science, phenomenology, neuroscience and neurophilosophy as well as the theory of complex adaptive systems and network science. Worlds of perception and actions of (...) class='Hi'>living beings are built in the process of co-evolution, in structural coupling and in enactive interaction with the surrounding natural environment (Umwelt). Thereby the biosemiotic theories developed by the founders of biosemiotics (J. von Uexküll, Th. Sebeok, G. Prodi, H. Pattie) are conceptually closed to the system-structural evolutionary approach developed in synergetics by H. Haken and S.P. Kurdyumov, the conception of autopoiesis (H. Maturana and F. Varela), second-order cybernetics (H. von Foerster), the conception of enactivism in cognitive science (F. Varela, E. Thompson, A. Noë). The key to comprehending the processes of extracting and generating meanings is that every living organism lives in the subjectively built world (Umwelt), so that its Umwelt and its internal psychic organization become parts of a single autopoietic system. According to the well-known expression of G. Bateson, information is a not indifferent difference or a difference that makes a difference. Differences become information when a cognitive agent as an interpreter, acting as part of an autopoietic system, sees signs in these differences that make meanings. (shrink)

This paper will compare the concept of nature as it appears in the philosophies of the American pragmatist John Dewey and the Chinese text known as the Zhuangzi, with an aim towards mapping out a heuristic program which might be used to correct various interpretive difficulties in reading each figure. I shall argue that Dewey and Zhuangzi both held more complex and comprehensive philosophies of nature than for which either is typically credited. Such a view of nature turns on the (...) notion of continuity, particularly that between an experiencing organism [Dewey’s “live creature”] and the conditioning environment [Zhuangzi’s “crooked tree”]. Where Dewey’s and Zhuangzi’s ideas about nature converge, one finds similarities in prescriptions made for human action, and in the few places where they differ, one finds mutually complementary insights. (shrink)

This article considers the relationship between philosophy of religion and an approach to the study of religion, which prioritises the experience of lived religion. Considering how individuals and communities live out their faith challenges some of the assumptions of analytic philosophers of religion regarding the position the philosopher should adopt when approaching the investigation of religion. If philosophy is understood principally as a means for analysing belief, it will have little space for an engagement with what it feels like to (...) live out one’s faith. (shrink)

The rich blend of theories and experiences that made the history of physics possible still now enlightens the scientific method. We stress the need to learn from this method the force of making its principles explicit, while developing a rich diversity of theories, which are often incompatible. Unity is preserved by common founding principles and their mathematical form, such as the understanding of conservation properties (energy, momentum etc.) in terms of symmetries. When moving from the inert to the living (...) state of matter, new challenges are posed, beginning with biological “heterogenesis”, as “genesis of and from diversity” in a changing space of pertinent observables and parameters: the Darwinian ecosystem. The question that is posed is how we may consistently embed the theories of the inert into biology. By naturalization we mean an analysis of physics as part of the sciences of nature, not as the science governing them all. In particular, the founding symmetry principles of physical theories, often used to “naturalize” (but, actually, to “physicalize”) other sciences, will instead be framed in more general dynamics which deal with fundamental changes of symmetries, as they apply, in our views, in all historical sciences, beginning with biology. This paper will accordingly explore the notion of (non-)conservative extension of theories in a precise mathematical sense. We stress a perspectival epistemology that promotes a dialogue of theories, in search for bridges or even unity, inspired by the method of “unification” at the core of major theoretical inventions in physics. Our main motivation is the need to go beyond the strong dualistic separation of space (or of the more general “phase space”) as a pre-given container of the dynamics of matter, that biased physics from Aristotle to Newton and, in a technically different way, even Einstein. (shrink)

The paper deals with the Sartrean concept of lived experience which constitutes a bridge between phenomenology and Marxism, psychology and ontology, individual and society, as well as between philosophy and literary criticism. The notion of lived experience is rooted in psychology, at the same time being embedded in literary criticism and phenomenology. It is interlinked with the notions of facticity, contingency, singularity, intersubjectivity, and body in the Being and Nothingness, and became the theoretical base of Sartre’s essays on Baudelaire, Genet, (...) and especially of that on Flaubert. This lived experience is closely related to the Sartrean phenomenological concept of nature which consists in the non-reflexive conscience of our own presence-at-theworld, including corporeality. (shrink)

This book elaborates, illuminates, and illustrates a confident and attractive account of social and political liberalism in light of a rich understanding of flourishing and fulfilment rooted in a version of natural law theory. Examining issues in ethics, law, and politics - including consumer responsibility, the assignment of grades by teachers, deception by lawyers, war and empire, and the use of victim-impact statements in parole decisions - Gary Chartier shows how natural law theory can effectively support pluralism, diversity, (...) social equality, integrity, peace, and freedom. (shrink)

"Life must be something more than dilettante speculation. And religion a great deal more than mere gratification of the instinct for worship linked with the straight-teaching of irreproachable credos. Religion must be life made true, and life is action, growth, development—begun now and ending never."In September 2016, a first-year student at East Tennessee State University interrupted a Black Lives Matter protest on campus, parading in a gorilla mask. Clad in overalls and barefoot, the young man offered bananas to the protesting (...) students, heckling them.2 When set within a wider historical context, this student's actions evoke a legacy of intimidation in which perceived differences... (shrink)

WISDOM OF THE WILD offers a deeper appreciation of life, relationships, and experiences through the exploration of nature's spiritual offerings. This collection of life lessons focuses on aspects of the natural world and their philosophical connection to our own lives, providing insights to daily living and a deeper connection to our spiritual selves. Each entry features a phenomenon found in nature, demonstrating how readers may connect the world to their human experiences. With activities, rituals, and affirmations, this book (...) of natural wonders aligns readers' inner and outer worlds to cultivate peace, balance, and harmony. (shrink)

Descartes’s concern with the proper method of belief formation is evident in the titles of his works—e.g., The Search after Truth, The Rules for the Direction of the Mind, and The Discourse on Method of rightly conducting one’s reason and seeking the truth in the sciences. It is most apparent, however, in his famous discussions, both in the Meditations and in the Principles, of one particularly noteworthy source of our doxastic errors—namely, the misuse of one’s will. What is not widely (...) recognized, let alone appreciated and understood, is the relationship between his concern with belief formation and his concern with virtue. In fact, few seem to realize that Descartes regards doxastic errors as moral errors and as sins both because such errors are intrinsically vicious and because they entail notably deleterious social consequences. Reforming the Art of Living seeks to rectify this rather common oversight in two ways. First, it aims to elucidate the nature of Descartes’s account of virtuous belief formation. Second, it aims both (i) to illuminate the social significance of Descartes’s philosophical program as it relates to the understanding and practice not of science, but of religion and (ii) to develop a kind of Leibnizian critique of this aspect of his program. More specifically, it aims to show that Descartes’s project is “dangerous,” insofar as it is subversive not only of traditional Christianity but also of other traditional forms of religion, both in theory and in practice. (shrink)

This book offers a sustained examination of the core Stoic ethical claims and their significance for modern moral theory. The first part considers the Stoic ideas of happiness as the life according to nature and virtue as expertise in leading a happy life and explores the senses of ‘nature’ (both human and universal) relevant for ethics. It also explains the distinction in value between virtue and ‘indifferents’ and analyses virtuous practical deliberation as selection between ‘indifferents’ directed at leading a happy (...) human life. The second part studies Stoic thinking on ethical development (in their terms, learning to live naturally). It brings out the close interconnections between making progress in ethical understanding, in forming and deepening social relationships, and in emotional responses. The third part discusses how Stoic ethics, as interpreted here, can contribute to contemporary moral theory, especially virtue ethics. It suggests that Stoic thinking on the virtue-happiness relationship offers a cogent alternative to Aristotle, currently the main ancient prototype for virtue ethical theory. It explores ways in which Stoic ideas on human and universal nature can contribute to modern ethical debates, notably on how to respond effectively to the pressing challenge of climate breakdown. It also highlights the potential value of Stoic thinking on development and guidance for modern virtue ethics as well as discussing the powerful impact Stoicism has already had in contemporary ‘life-guidance’. (shrink)

`the state of men without civil society is nothing else but a mere war of all against all.' Thomas Hobbes was the first great philosopher to write in English. His account of the human condition, first developed in The Elements of Law, which comprises Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, is a direct product of the intellectural and political strife of the seventeenth century. It is also a remarkably penetrating look at human nature, and a permanently relevant analysis of the (...) fears of self-seeking that result in the war of `each against every man'. In The Elements of Law Hobbes memorably sets out both the main lines of his general philosophy, later augmented in De Corpore, and the moral and political philosophy later made famous in Leviathan. Copies of Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, until 1889 printed as separate works, are rare antiques or scarcely less rare scholarly texts; this is the first complete popular edition. It is here supplemented by chapters from De Corpore and Three Lives, two from Hobbes's original Latin. These have never before been published together in English. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

Parallel lives is an ontological model of nature in which quantum mechanics and special relativity are unified in a single universe with a single space-time. Point-like objects called lives are the only fundamental objects in this space-time, and they propagate at or below c, and interact with one another only locally at point-like events in space-time, very much like classical point particles. Lives are not alive in any sense, nor do they possess consciousness or any agency to make decisions—they are (...) simply point objects which encode memory at events in space-time. The only causes and effects in the universe occur when lives meet locally, and thus the causal structure of interaction events in space-time is Lorentz invariant. Each life traces a continuous world-line through space-time, and experiences its own relative world, fully defined by the outcomes of past events along its world-line, which are encoded in its external memory. A quantum field comprises a continuum of lives throughout space-time, and familiar physical systems like particles each comprise a sub-continuum of the lives of the field. Each life carries a hidden internal memory containing a local relative wavefunction, which is a local piece of a pure universal wavefunction, but it is the relative wavefunctions in the local memories throughout space-time which are physically real in PL, and not the universal wavefunction in configuration space. Furthermore, while the universal wavefunction tracks the average behavior of the lives of a system, it fails to track their individual dynamics and trajectories. There is always a preferred separable basis, and for an irreducible physical system, each orthogonal term in this basis is a different relative world—each containing some fraction of the lives of the system. The relative wavefunctions in the lives’ internal memories govern which lives of different systems can meet during future local interactions, and thereby enforce entanglement correlations—including Bell inequality violations. These, and many other details, are explored here, but several aspects of this framework are not yet fleshed out, and work is ongoing. (shrink)

Following the revival in the last decades of the concept of “organism”, scholarly literature in philosophy of science has shown growing historical interest in the theory of Immanuel Kant, one of the “fathers” of the concept of self-organisation. Yet some recent theoretical developments suggest that self-organisation alone cannot fully account for the all-important dimension of autonomy of the living. Autonomy appears to also have a genuine “interactive” dimension, which concerns the organism’s functional interactions with the environment and does not (...) simply derive from its internal organisation. Against this background, we focus on a family of natural philosophical approaches that historically have already strongly taken in account this aspect of autonomy, notably going beyond Kant’s perspective on self-organisation. We thus review Hegel, Plessner, and Jonas’ different perspectives on living beings, focussing in particular on four points: the distinction between organic and inorganic, the theory of biological organisation, the processuality of the living, and the “boundary” between inside and outside, through which the organism establishes its relationship to the environment. We, then, compare the three perspectives on these four points, and finally address the question of what advantages their contribution present—especially compared to Kant’s theory—with respect to the topic of organism’s autonomy. This could help—we hope—to better understand what is at the stake still today. (shrink)