The paper addresses the following question: why do human beings, on Aristotle’s view, have an innate tendency to badness, that is, to developing desires that go beyond, and often against, their natural needs? Given Aristotle’s teleological assumptions (including the thesis that nature does nothing in vain), such tendency should not be present. I argue that the culprit is to be found in the workings of rationality. In particular, it is the presence of theoretical reason that necessitates the limitless nature of (...) human non-rational desires. (shrink)

Дослідження присвячено розгляду творчості з урахуванням головних філософських досліджень цього поняття. Діяльність творчого процесу практично доводить присутність свободи в людському бутті. Погляди на творчість віддзеркалюють ставлення конкретного мислителя до питання протистояння свободи та напередвизначеності загалом. Розглянуто полемічні моменти щодо творчості та запропоновано шляхи їх вирішення. Зокрема досліджено два протилежні погляди на творчість – Платона та Аристотеля, де талановитість людини передбачає божественне натхнення (Платон) або, відповідно, лише особистісні зусилля. Полеміку Аристотеля і Платона намагався розв’язати Микола Бердяєв через поєднання їхніх поглядів. Він (...) наділяв людину божественними властивостями і цим вказував на джерело творчості всередині самої людини. Філіп Гефнер надавав особистості статус «співтворця» і висунув теорію про те, що людина покликана удосконалити та завершити Боже творіння. Увагу в дослідженні також приділено змісту та меті творчості. Творчість заради самої творчості, про яку писав Альбер Камю, критикував М. Бердяєв, і пропонував своє бачення цього питання: творчість заради універсальної мети. Погляди Камю загалом поділяв також А. Берґсон. З огляду на згадану полеміку запропоновано актуалізацію вчення Григорія Сковороди про «споріднену працю» та аргументовано доцільність цієї актуалізації. Вітчизняний філософ оригінально врівноважував песимізм творчості Камю та заповзятий підхід Бердяєва. Свої умовиводи Сковорода підкріплював влучними практичними прикладами. (shrink)

Any living system possesses internal embedded description and exists as a superposition of different potential realisations, which are reduced in interaction with the environment. This reduction cannot be recursively deduced from the state in time present, it includes unpredictable choice and needs to be modelled also from the state in time future. Such non-recursive establishment of emerging configuration, after its memorisation via formation of reflective loop (sign-creating activity), becomes the inherited recursive action. It leads to increase of complexity of the (...) embedded description, which constitutes the rules of generative grammar defining possible directions of open evolutionary process. The states in time future can be estimated from the point of their perfection, which represents the final cause in the Aristotelian sense and may possess a selective advantage. The limits of unfolding of the reflective process, such as the golden ratio and the golden wurf are considered as the canons of perfection established in the evolutionary process. (shrink)

In this short paper we make a proposal that the second law of thermodynamics holds true for a closed physical system consisting of pure antimatter in the thermodynamical limit, but in a reversed form. We give two plausible arguments in favour to this proposal: one refers to the CPT theorem of relativistic quantum field theories while the other one is based on general thermodynamical arguments. However in our understanding the ultimate validity or invalidity of this idea can be decided only (...) by future physical experiments. As a consequence of the proposal we argue that the dynamical evolution of pure macroscopic antimatter systems can be very different from that of ordinary matter systems in the sense that sufficiently massive antimatter systems could have stronger tendency to form black holes during time evolution than their ordinary counterparts. Taking into account the various uniqueness theorems in black hole physics as well, as a result, antimatter could tracelessly disappear behind black hole event horizons faster in time than ordinary matter. The observed asymmetry of matter and antimatter could then be explained even if their presence in the Universe was symmetric in the beginning. (shrink)

Creare est unire? An outline of Teilhard de Chardin's metaphysics of union As underlying leitmotiv throughout all his work, Teilhard de Chardin develops the relationship between spirit and matter. Matter and spirit are related as follows: centricity depends on the complexity. Nothing in the universe exists but spirit in different states or degrees of organization or plurality for Teilhard. If it is defined as a thing without a trace of consciousness, matter does not exist. The Spirit comes innovatively by successive (...) synthesis, by what he calls law of central-complexity. From the central-complexity, we present here how Teilhard identifies three areas in the universe: the pre-living, the living and thinking ; and yet, we expose how he bases its philosophy of creation in a non-materialistic monism and a kind of panpsychism, to avoid a radical dualism between spirit and matter, which enables him to explain in what sense the spirit emerges from the union of matter. Hence based on its spirituality, Teilhard wants to integrate Science and Faith for a Christian worldview. (shrink)

I use Jonathan Bennett’s, Gilles Deleuze’s and Pierre Macherey’s interpretations of Spinoza to extract a theory of time and duration from Spinoza. I argue that although time can be considered a product of the imagination, duration is a real property of existing things and corresponds to their essence, taking essence (as Deleuze does) as a degree of power of existing. The article then explores the relations among time, duration, essence and eternity, arguing against the idea that Spinoza’s essences or Spinoza’s (...) eternity are atemporal. Essences and eternity both involve necessary references to time, but the time involved is not that of the “fortuitous sequence of events” apprehended through sensory experience. Rather, the “time” is that implicit in the necessity of God’s self-determination through God’s differentiation into natura naturans and natura naturata, which is involved in the production and differentiation of eternal essences. (shrink)

Conventional approaches to consciousness assume that our current science tells us within tolerable limits what physical nature is. Because nature so understood cannot explain consciousness as we seem to experience it ourselves, explaining consciousness becomes a problem. One solution is to rethink what consciousness is so that it becomes the sort of thing our current natural science could in principle explain. Whitehead takes the opposite approach, using the existence of consciousness as a clue to what nature must be if it (...) can generate something like consciousness. The justification for this approach can be found in Whitehead’s implicit indictment of descriptive phenomenology. According to Whitehead, the seemingly insoluble problem of explaining consciousness naturalistically is an artifact created by the assumption that consciousness faithfully samples the world, when in fact it obscures the very aspects of nature that are indispensable to understanding how anything, including consciousness itself, could emerge through a physical process. (shrink)

Tässä artikkelissa käsittelen Henri Bergsonin (1859–1941) intuition käsitettä ja sen suhdetta hänen filosofiseen menetelmäänsä. Bergsonin on nähty tarkoittavan intuitiolla yhtäältä filosofian metodia ja toisaalta tiettyä älyyn verrattavaa filosofialle ainutlaatuista tiedon muotoa. Esitän, että Bergsonille intuitio on samanaikaisesti näitä molempia. Se on todellisuuden ajattelemista kestona, sisäistä jatkuvuuttamme muistuttavana liikkeenä. Intuitiossa tavoitetaan todellisuuden luonne sikäli kuin se on läsnä myös meissä itsessämme tällaisena jatkuvuutena. Metodologisesti se on todellisuuden tarkastelua ajallisuuden ja muutoksen perspektiivistä. Tiedon muotona se on välitöntä ymmärrystä tarkastelun kohteesta itsestään.

Elämä on nähty merkittävänä aiheena Bergsonin filosofiassa. Elämän filosofinen merkitys Bergsonilla ilmenee selvästi hänen pääteoksessaan L'évolution créatrice (Luova evoluutio, 1907), jossa hän keskittyy inhimillisten tietokykyjen evolutiivisen alkuperän rekonstruointiin ja tieto-opillisiin seurauksiin. Bergsonin mukaan biologia tarjoaa filosofialle tietokykyjen kehitysteoreettisen näkökulman, ja filosofia metafysiikkana täsmentää biologialle sopivaa epistemologiaa. Tässä artikkelissa esittelen Bergsonin filosofisen teorian biologian ja epistemologian vastavuoroisesta suhteesta. Aloitan epistemologian, tieteen ja metafysiikan välisen suhteen selventämisellä Bergsonin teoriassa. Sen jälkeen esittelen, kuinka Bergson näkee tietokykyjen kehittymisen olennaisena osana eläinten yleistä kehityshistoriaa. Analysoimalla (...) eläinkunnan kognitiivisten kykyjen kahta taipumusta, älykkyyttä (intelligence) ja vaistoa (instinct), Bergson kehittää näkemyksen metafysiikasta, jonka avulla on mahdollista selvittää epistemologian ja biologian keskinäistä riippuvuutta ja vastavuoroisuutta. Lopuksi valaisen tätä vastavuoroisuutta Bergsonin analyysilla käsitteellisen tiedon muodostumisesta. (shrink)

A posição filosófica chamada de externismo semântico caracteriza-se pela tese segundo a qual a individuação do conteúdo de estados mentais deve recorrer a fatores que não podem ser localizados na região geralmente circunscrita pela noção mesma de mente. Tal tese implica, em todo caso, que a suposta interioridade da vida psicológica não se basta para tornar inteligível as condições de possibilidade que o pensamento conceitual requer. Assim, se fatores externos aos indivíduos são vistos como desempenhando uma contribuição decisiva na própria (...) determinação de seu conteúdo mental, isto é algo que torna necessário compreender em que sentido mente e mundo podem ser tomados como intrinsecamente relacionados. A aposta teórica do presente trabalho é a de que apenas uma concepção da individuação liberada dos grilhões substancialistas permite fornecer um solo ontológico fértil para uma teoria externista do conceito. Daí que a noção de triangulação, que Donald Davidson forjou para dar conta de alguns fatores cruciais na gênese da conceitualidade, seja lida a partir de filosofias que ressaltam o caráter decisivo da vida como referencialidade fundamental do conceito. Logo, é na ordem vital que se busca dissolver os impasses ligados à origem da normatividade e à dualidade entre interno e externo, oposição a partir da qual a subjetividade desde muito tempo tem sido pensada. (shrink)