In the literature we have found correspondence of several significant traits of Jewish mysticism with traits of Buddhism and other systems of Indian religion-philosophy. Among the corresponding traits is the fundamental idea of emptiness or nothingness, shuunyataa in Sanskrit, ayin in Hebrew. Also corresponding are attempts to harmonize the idea and experience of emptiness with fullness, and with the experience of the secular world with its many things and concepts. We list eight significant traits of Jewish mysticism, which we find (...) correspond with traits of Indian religion-philosophies. We also discuss some important relations of these Indian and Jewish belief systems with modern science. We contend, that natural science is built on spontaneous sensory experiences; on this basis concepts and theories are constructed. Likewise we think, that spiritual experiences occur spontaneously and contribute to the basis of religious, mystic and some philosophical belief systems. We thus think, there are important parallels between scientific and spiritual cognition. Key words: Comparative religion; Emptiness/fullness; nothingness; God; compassion; reincarnation; cognition, scientific spiritual; spiritual experiences; Buddhism. (shrink)

The scientific study of cognition in the context of biological evolution has led to the result, that all our thoughts and cognitions, including science and philosophy, are dependent on our cognitive apparatus in its present stage of evolution. I find, that this result is in contradiction with the basic philosophy of mainstream biology, the philosophy of materialist realism, which recognizes the existence a material world independent of human observation and cognition. I therefore regard it as impossible to make a contradiction-free (...) account of CE based on materialist realism. An account of natural science, biological evolution, and CE based on an idealist philosophy is offered, and it is argued that this account is free of contradictions. Key words : Cognition and biological evolution, contradiction-free account, philosophy of science, idealist philosophy, materialist philosophy, time, psychological Now. n. (shrink)

The discussion of animal mind in this paper is based on an idealist philosophy contending that only conscious experience is real, based on the transpersonal notion of collective conscious experience. The latter has earlier been explained by the author as experience referred to a group of humans as the subject, the We. Here it is contended that also a group of humans and animals can be seen as the subject of collective conscious experiences. The author argues that the notion of (...) collective conscious experience provides a possibility for studying the problems of animal mind and the related human problem of “other minds” in a detailed and rational way. (shrink)

The basic philosophy of mainstream biology, the philosophy of materialist realism, assumes the existence of a material world independent of human observation and cognition. The scientific study of cognition in the context of biology has, however, led to the result, that all our thoughts and cognitions, including the assumption of a material world, are dependent on our cognitive apparatus in its present stage of evolution. I think this shows a contradiction within materialist philosophy, and I therefore find it is impossible (...) to make a contradiction free account of cognition based on this philosophy. An account of natural science, biological evolution, and cognition based on an idealist philosophy is offered, and it is argued, that this account is free of contradictions. In the idealist philosophy "material objects" are regarded as concepts based on sensory experiences. (shrink)

If consciousness has no influence on my behaviour,what shall I do with it ? In this paper it is contended, that even if neuroscience is right, if some conscious experiences such as emotional experiences have no influence on our behavior, they still constitute a significant part of our world, our existence. For understanding the significance of conscious experiences we should go beyond behaviour, biology and biological evolution. This paper and its understanding of consciousness and natural science is based on an (...) idealist philosophy maintaining, that only conscious experience is real. Conscious experience is supposed to be known directly or intuitively, it cannot be explained. Key words: Consciousness as existence; behaviour; communication; language; free will; idealist philosophy; collective conscious experience; cognition. (shrink)

The authors found correspondence of several significant traits of Jewish mysticism with traits of Buddhism and other systems of Indian religion and philosophy in the literature. Among the corresponding traits is the fundamental idea of emptiness or nothingness, shuunyataa in Sanskrit, ayin in Hebrew. Also corresponding are attempts to harmonise the idea and experience of emptiness with fullness, and with the experience of the secular world with its many things and concepts. They list eight significant traits of Jewish mysticism, which (...) are found to correspond with traits of Indian religion-philosophies. This is of course a study in comparative religion, but some important relations between these Indian and Jewish belief systems with modern science are also discussed. (shrink)

Certain features of perception – the quale red, for example, and other qualia – must be regarded as additions to the materialist neurophysiological picture of perception. The perception of three-dimensional volumetric objects can also be seen as qualitative additions to the neurophysiological processes in the brain, possibly without additions to the information content.

Abstract Considerable evidence indicates that the human cognitive system comprises two subsystems, one rational-scientific and the other intuitive-spiritual. Differences as well as harmonies and interactions between the two subsystems are described. Th e advent of systems science has improved the understanding of the harmonies and interactions. Consideration of cultural differences is important for understanding spirituality and communicating about it. Key-words: Spirituality and cognition, systems science and spirituality, science and religion, spiritual experience, intuition, epistemology, idealist philosophy, cultural differences.?s.

The book will be an indispensable resource for anyone interested in contemporary philosophy and the social sciences.

Het is zeer verheugend dat een nieuw boek van mevr. C.J. de Vogel verschenen is. Het is historisch van belang en de schrijfster verdient het, dat mede hierdoor nog weer eens de aandacht gevestigd wordt op haar persoon en haar werk. Daaraan wordt ook bijgedragen door de ‘Prof. dr. C.J. de Vogel Stichting ter bevordering van de wijsbegeerte der klassieke Oudheid’ die zich heeft ingezet voor het organiseren van de ‘C.J. de Vogel-Memorial lectures’. Deze vormen nu reeds bijna vijftien jaar (...) de openingslezing van de conferenties van de International Plato Society die om de drie jaar gehouden worden. (shrink)

This paper is discusses some central points in a dissertation for the degree of dr. phil., "Regulation as Productive Tool Use - a Participatory Observation in the Control Room of a District Heating System." An earlier version of the paper was presented by the author as part of the defense of the dissertation at Roskilde University Center June 14 2002. As suggested by the title, the dissertation was an empirical study of regulation in a control room. The object of the (...) authors participatory observation was how the operators in the control room followed rules when they regulated a highly automated plant. When I was shown the plant I was told that the technology ran smoothly and without error. Its control structures are based on formal logic and mechanical principles, all the same human beings are required in the control room to take care of anomalies. Among other things, the observations provide an opportunity to discuss the limitations of psychologies that study human beings on the basis of formal principles. The present paper focuses on two characteristic aspects of this discussion in the dissertation. First, it takes its point of departure in some practical problems of the control structures of the control room. It will demonstrate that the practical problems are problems of principle, and that formal principles are not adequate to study the object of human sciences, namely, human beings. Second, it sketches out what is required of a conception of human beings. As human beings are trusted to handle anomalies, we must explain how they are able to act on an incomplete understanding of the situation. And since they are able to identify what is wrong, we must explain how they develop new knowledge. The paper presented at the defense summarized the main arguments of the dissertation and alluded to an expansion of the main point using a particular instance. Here the weight is shifted to the latter expansion. (shrink)

Dr. W. Elgersma-Helleman heeft in een uitvoerig artikel haar reflecties naar aanleiding van mijn boek Geboeid door Plato vastgelegd. Het stuk bedoelt niet een recensie van het geschrift in kwestie te leveren, maar een bijdrage te zijn aan de discussie over Plato en het christelijk platonisme, gekleurd door de ervaringen van de schrijfster in Rusland, waar zij en haar echtgenoot doceren aan de Staatsuniversiteit van Moskou. Plato en de kerkvaders verdienen het, dat ze vanuit verschillende hoeken besproken en belicht worden. (...) Maar dr. Elgersma had misschien toch liever geheel onafhankelijk haar eigen betoog moeten opzetten. Nu lijkt ze haar gedachten te ontwikkelen naar aanleiding van het werk van een andere auteur, zonder werkelijk in te gaan op de kwesties die die auteur had aangemerkt als de voor hem centrale punten. (shrink)

Ancient Peripatetics and Neoplatonists had great difficulty coming up with a consistent, interpretatively reasonable, and empirically adequate Aristotelian theory of complete mixture or complexion. I explain some of the main problems, with special attention to authors with whom Avicenna was familiar. I then show how Avicenna used a new doctrine of the occultness of substantial form to address these problems. The result was in some respects an improvement, but it also gave rise to a new set of problems, which were (...) later to prove fateful in the history of early modern philosophy. (shrink)

In this pathbreaking study, Axel Honneth argues that "the struggle for recognition" is, and should be, at the center of social conflicts.

Questo volume raccoglie alcuni dei più importanti scritti pubblicati da Axel Honneth nel periodo precedente a "Lotta per il riconoscimento". Essi documentano i passaggi fondamentali dell'itinerario filosofico attraverso il quale Honneth è giunto ad elaborare la sua teoria del riconoscimento: le riflessioni sul lavoro sociale e sul conflitto di classe svolte in un orizzonte di pensiero ancora marxista, l'interlocuzione con la teoria di Habermas, l'indagine sulle forme della moralità quotidiana, il progressivo emergere della "logica morale del riconoscimento". Tutti questi (...) elementi, le cui tracce sono ancora chiaramente ravvisabili negli scritti honnethiani della maturità, compongono un panorama teorico ricco e interessante, che i testi qui raccolti (per la prima volta resi disponibili in traduzione italiana) consentono di conoscere nella sua evoluzione. (shrink)

No livro “As vozes da igualdade” (“Las voces de la igualdad. Bases para una teoría crítica de la justicia”. Ed. Proteus, 2010. 288 páginas – Ainda sem tradução para o português), o Prof. Dr. Gustavo Pereira, da Universidad de la Republica, Uruguai, procura analisar estas questões investigando as principais teorias de justiça contemporâneas que pretendem respondê-las e apresenta sua proposta de um caminho para a fundamentação de uma teoria crítica de justiça renovada, mais abrangente, que ofereça meios mais adequados e (...) eficazes para promover a justiça social e desenvolver as capacidades humanas necessárias para a construção de uma “eticidade democrática”. (shrink)

In this pathbreaking study, Axel Honneth argues that "the struggle for recognition" is, and should be, at the center of social conflicts. Moving smoothly between moral philosophy and social theory, Honneth offers insights into such issues as the social forms of recognition and nonrecognition, the moral basis of interaction in human conflicts, the relation between the recognition model and conceptions of modernity, the normative basis of social theory, and the possibility of mediating between Hegel and Kant.

Over the last decade, Axel Honneth has established himself as one of the leading social and political philosophers in the world today. Rooted in the tradition of critical theory, his writings have been central to the revitalization of critical theory and have become increasingly influential. His theory of recognition has gained worldwide attention and is seen by some as the principal counterpart to Habermass theory of discourse ethics. In this important new volume, Honneth pursues his path-breaking work on recognition (...) by exploring the moral experiences of disrespect that underpin the conduct of social and political critique. What we might conceive of as a striving for social recognition initially appears in a negative form as the experience of humiliation or disrespect. Honneth argues that disrespect constitutes the systematic key to a comprehensive theory of recognition that seeks to clarify the sense in which institutionalized patterns of social recognition generate justified demands on the way subjects treat each other. This new book by one of the leading social and political philosophers of our time will be of particular interest to students and scholars in social and political theory and philosophy. (shrink)

With his insightful and wide-ranging theory of recognition, Axel Honneth has decisively reshaped the Frankfurt School tradition of critical social theory. Combining insights from philosophy, sociology, psychology, history, political economy, and cultural critique, Honneth’s work proposes nothing less than an account of the moral infrastructure of human sociality and its relation to the perils and promise of contemporary social life. This book provides an accessible overview of Honneth’s main contributions across a variety of fields, assessing the strengths and weaknesses (...) of his thought. Christopher Zurn clearly explains Honneth’s multi-faceted theory of recognition and its relation to diverse topics: individual identity, morality, activist movements, progress, social pathologies, capitalism, justice, freedom, and critique. In so doing, he places Honneth’s theory in a broad intellectual context, encompassing classic social theorists such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Dewey, Adorno and Habermas, as well as contemporary trends in social theory and political philosophy. Treating the full range of Honneth’s corpus, including his major new work on social freedom and democratic ethical life, this book is the most up-to-date guide available. _Axel Honneth_ will be invaluable to students and scholars working across the humanities and social sciences, as well as anyone seeking a clear guide to the work of one of the most influential theorists writing today. (shrink)

The theory of justice is one of the most intensely debated areas of contemporary philosophy. Most theories of justice, however, have only attained their high level of justification at great cost. By focusing on purely normative, abstract principles, they become detached from the sphere that constitutes their “field of application” - namely, social reality. Axel Honneth proposes a different approach. He seeks to derive the currently definitive criteria of social justice directly from the normative claims that have developed within (...) Western liberal democratic societies. These criteria and these claims together make up what he terms “democratic ethical life”: a system of morally legitimate norms that are not only legally anchored, but also institutionally established. Honneth justifies this far-reaching endeavour by demonstrating that all essential spheres of action in Western societies share a single feature, as they all claim to realize a specific aspect of individual freedom. In the spirit of Hegel’s _Philosophy of Right_ and guided by the theory of recognition, Honneth shows how principles of individual freedom are generated which constitute the standard of justice in various concrete social spheres: personal relationships, economic activity in the market, and the political public sphere. Honneth seeks thereby to realize a very ambitious aim: to renew the theory of justice as an analysis of society. (shrink)

Abraham Pais's Subtle Is the Lord was a publishing phenomenon: a mathematically sophisticated exposition of the science and the life of Albert Einstein that reached a huge audience and won an American Book Award. Reviewers hailed the book as "a monument to sound scholarship and graceful style", "an extraordinary biography of an extraordinary man", and "a fine book". In this groundbreaking new volume, Pais undertakes a history of the physics of matter and of physical forces since the discovery of (...) x-rays. The book attempts to relate not only what has happened over the last hundred years but why it happened the way it did, what it was like for those scientists involved, and how what at the time may have seemed a series of bizarre or unrelated events, now with hindsight emerges as a logical sequence of events. Pais, a noted physicist, was personally involved in many of the developments he describes, and thus Inward Bound, like his earlier book, is filled with unique insights into the world of big and small physics. Between 1895 and 1983, the period he covers, the smallest distances explored have shrunk a hundred millionfold, Pais notes. Along this incompletely traveled "road inward," scientists have established markers that later generations will rank among the principal monuments of the twentieth century. In alternating technical and nontechnical sections, this magisterial survey richly conveys what has been discovered about the constituents of matter, the laws to which they are subject, and the forces that act on them. But the advances have certainly not come smoothly. The book shows that these have been times of progress and stagnation, of order and chaos, of clarity and confusion, of belief and incredulity, of the conventional and the bizarre; also of revolutionaries and conservatives, of science by individuals and by consortia, of little gadgets and big machines, and of modest funds and big money. About the Author: Abraham Pais is Detlev W. Bronk Professor of Physics at the Rockefeller University. The author of the prizewinning biography of Einstein now undertakes a history of modern physics. (shrink)

In this paper, Axel Honneth replies to the five critical accounts of Freedom's Right contained in this issue of Critical Horizons. He first discusses the methodological and systematic objections raised by Schaub and Freyenhagen, and then defends his approach vis-à-vis the other three critical accounts with reference to two social spheres – the sphere of personal relationships in the case of McNeill and McNay, and the market sphere in the case of Jütten. Among the significant clarifications of his account, (...) Honneth accepts that he should allow for the possibility of institutional revolutions and that there could be social pathologies in the spheres of social freedom. He also distinguishes more explicitly between capitalism and market societies, suggesting that market socialism might be more institutionally suited to realize social freedom in the social spheres of production and consumption than capitalism is. He insists on the distinctiveness of modern friendships; the moral superiority of modern societies based on social freedom; and the need for a teleological orientation in our critical engagement with social phenomena such as gender inequality. (shrink)

Axel Honneth has been instrumental in advancing the work of the Frankfurt School of critical theorists, rebuilding their effort to combine radical social and political analysis with rigorous philosophical inquiry.

In this volume Axel Honneth deepens and develops his highly influential theory of recognition, showing how it enables us both to rethink the concept of justice and to offer a compelling account of the relationship between social reproduction and individual identity formation. Drawing on his reassessment of Hegel’s practical philosophy, Honneth argues that our conception of social justice should be redirected from a preoccupation with the principles of distributing goods to a focus on the measures for creating symmetrical relations (...) of recognition. This theoretical reorientation has far-reaching implications for the theory of justice, as it obliges this theory to engage directly with problems concerning the organization of work and with the ideologies that stabilize relations of domination. In the final part of this volume Honneth shows how the theory of recognition provides a fruitful and illuminating way of exploring the relation between social reproduction and identity formation. Rather than seeing groups as regressive social forms that threaten the autonomy of the individual, Honneth argues that the ‘I’ is dependent on forms of social recognition embodied in groups, since neither self-respect nor self-esteem can be maintained without the supportive experience of practising shared values in the group. This important new book by one of the leading social philosophers of our time will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, sociology, politics and the humanities and social sciences generally. (shrink)

Abraham Verghese proposes to renew medicine by training physicians to read the right texts—literary fiction and patients' bodies—with skilled attention. Analyzing Verghese's proposal with reference to Foucault's idea of the "clinical gaze," I find that Verghese conceives of patients as texts that only physicians can read, meaning that physicians become the storytellers of the bodies, lives, and deaths of the people they meet as patients. I conclude that Verghese's project is unsustainable and alternatively propose thinking analogically of physicians as (...) ship captains who maintain therapeutic distance to reopen interpretative spaces for communities outside of medicine. (shrink)

Taking scientific practice as its starting point, this book charts the complex territory of models used in science. It examines what scientific models are and what their function is. Reliance on models is pervasive in science, and scientists often need to construct models in order to explain or predict anything of interest at all. The diversity of kinds of models one finds in science – ranging from toy models and scale models to theoretical and mathematical models – has attracted attention (...) not only from scientists, but also from philosophers, sociologists, and historians of science. This has given rise to a wide variety of case studies that look at the different uses to which models have been put in specific scientific contexts. By exploring current debates on the use and building of models via cutting-edge examples drawn from physics and biology, the book provides broad insight into the methodology of modelling in the natural sciences. It pairs specific arguments with introductory material relating to the ontology and the function of models, and provides some historical context to the debates as well as a sketch of general positions in the philosophy of scientific models in the process. (shrink)

_Axel Honneth: Critical Essays_ brings together critical interpretations of the work of Axel Honneth, from his earliest to his most recent writings, together with a comprehensive reply by Honneth that provides significant insights and clarifications into his project overall.

In the early 20th century, Marxist theory was enriched and rejuvenated by adopting the concept of reification, introduced by the Hungarian theorist Georg Lukács to identify and denounce the transformation of historical processes into ahistorical entities, human actions into things that seemed part of an immutable "second nature." For a variety of reasons, both theoretical and practical, the hopes placed in de-reification as a tool of revolutionary emancipation proved vain. In these original and imaginative essays, delivered as the Tanner Lectures (...) at the University of California, Berkeley in 2005, the distinguished third-generation Frankfurt School philosopher Axel Honneth attempts to rescue the concept of reification by recasting it in terms of the philosophy of recognition he has been developing over the past two decades. Three distinguished political and social theorists: Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss, and Jonathan Lear, respond with hard questions about the central anthropological premise of his argument, the assumption that prior to cognition there is a fundamental experience of intersubjective recognition that can provide a normative standard by which current social relations can be judged wanted. Honneth listens carefully to their criticism and provides a powerful defense of his position. (shrink)

What do people learn when they do not know that they are learning? Until recently, all of the work in the area of implicit learning focused on empirical questions and methods. In this book, Axel Cleeremans explores unintentional learning from an information-processing perspective. He introduces a theoretical framework that unifies existing data and models on implicit learning, along with a detailed computational model of human performance in sequence-learning situations.

"We owe a large debt to Axel Honneth for uncovering some of the theoretical affinities between the work of the Frankfurt School and that of Foucault.

69 Thompson-Schill, S.L. _et al. _(1997) Role of left inferior prefrontal cortex 59 Buckner, R.L. _et al. _(1996) Functional anatomic studies of memory in retrieval of semantic knowledge: a re-evaluation _Proc. Natl. Acad._ retrieval for auditory words and pictures _J. Neurosci. _16, 6219–6235 _Sci. U. S. A. _94, 14792–14797 60 Buckner, R.L. _et al. _(1995) Functional anatomical studies of explicit and 70 Baddeley, A. (1992) Working memory: the interface between memory implicit memory retrieval tasks _J. Neurosci. _15, 12–29 and cognition (...) _J. Cogn. Neurosci. _4, 281–288 61 Bäckman, L. _et al. _(1997) Brain activation in young and older adults 71 Petrides, M. (1994) Frontal lobes and behavior _Curr. Opin. Neurobiol._ during implicit and explicit retrieval _J. Cogn. Neurosci. _9, 378–391. (shrink)

The first book since Coady's 1992 'Testimony: A Philosophical Study' to offer a thorough survey and a philosophical introduction to testimony and its epistemological problems, while at the same time advancing a novel view that proposes independent justificatory pathways for the acceptance and rejection of testimony, respectively. // Table of Contents: // Introduction / 1. What is Testimony? / 2. The Testimonial Conundrum / 3. Testimony, Perception, Memory, and Inference / 4. Testimony and Evidence / 5. Reductionism and Anti-Reductionism / (...) 6. Hybrid Theories of Testimony / 7. Testimonial Knowledge: Transmission and Generation / 8. Trust and Assurance / 9. Expert Testimony / 10. Pathologies of Testimony / 11. Testimony and the Value of Knowledge / Glossary / Bibliography / Index. (shrink)