You can’t build if you don’t dwell first. This sentence is counterintuitive. It is usually thought that first you build, and then you dwell where you have built. But if you don’t dwell where you want to build, you may not understand the landscape, and the building will be weak or crippled.In Latin, “to dwell” is habitare, which comes from the verb habere, “to own.” The phrase “You can’t build if you don’t dwell first” can be considered the leitmotif of (...) the “Yes to Life” Congress, held in Vatican City in 2019. The goal of the conference was to overcome prejudices and preconceptions about the correct approach to end-of-life cases in perinatology. Overcoming prejudices about this particular stage of life is hard in... (shrink)

This work examines the range of work in which value theorists are engaging in the first decade of the 21st century with essays illustrating the ways in which theorists from different parts of thw world draw on an increasingly broad range of intellectual thought.

Plato wrote dialogues, and he praised dialectic, or conversation, as a suitable style for fruitful philosophical investigation. His works are great literature; and nodoubt this quality derives much from their form as dialogues. They also have definite philosophical content; and an important part of this content is their dialecticalepistemology. Dialectic is part of the content of Plato's philosophy. Can we reconcile this content with his literary style? I shall examine and sharpen the sense of this problem by referring to four (...) passages from different works of Plato: Parmenides 132b-c, Protagoras 351-2, Sophist 248-9, Republic 592. In these passages we can distinguish a main position, which represents what it is natural to label Platonism, from a line of thought which diverges from that position and yet also seems authentically Platonic. I argue that the solution to this tension lies in the notion of dialectic as a tentative and exploratory method of philosophy. This view of dialectic is in some conflict with Plato's official account of the method as guaranteed to deliver fundamental truth; but that conflict presents one more version of the phenomenon which I am exploring. The theory of dialectic provides philosophical support for the method of dialogue. That is how philosophy and literature are linked in Plato's pursuit of truth. (shrink)

Plato wrote dialogues, and he praised dialectic, or conversation, as a suitable style for fruitful philosophical investigation. His works are great literature; and nodoubt this quality derives much from their form as dialogues. They also have definite philosophical content; and an important part of this content is their dialecticalepistemology. Dialectic is part of the content of Plato's philosophy. Can we reconcile this content with his literary style? I shall examine and sharpen the sense of this problem by referring to four (...) passages from different works of Plato: Parmenides 132b-c, Protagoras 351-2, Sophist 248-9, Republic 592. In these passages we can distinguish a main position, which represents what it is natural to label Platonism, from a line of thought which diverges from that position and yet also seems authentically Platonic. I argue that the solution to this tension lies in the notion of dialectic as a tentative and exploratory method of philosophy. This view of dialectic is in some conflict with Plato's official account of the method as guaranteed to deliver fundamental truth; but that conflict presents one more version of the phenomenon which I am exploring. The theory of dialectic provides philosophical support for the method of dialogue. That is how philosophy and literature are linked in Plato's pursuit of truth. (shrink)

The article mainly tries to discuss the dialogue between China and Western countries from the aspect of logic. There were three sources of logic, including formal logic in ancient Greek, logic in Early Qin of China as well as logic in ancient India. While, among all the schools in ancient China, Mohist and Virtuoso valued logic most. But as the rulers of Han Dynasty only paid their homage to Confucianism, the two schools gradually sank, logic in Early Qin of (...) China discontinued, without entering the main headstream of logic development worldwide. Later, logic in China had little influence on Chinese society although Indian logic was introduced in Tang Dynasty, a scholar-bureaucrat named Zhizao Li in Ming Dynasty, translated logic textbook Discussion of Name and Science, and German philosopher G.W. Leibniz explained Chinese changing theory with binary system. In the early 1900s, during the process of introducing western science, logic, regarded as the basis of science and a tool of scientific research, was highly valued by Chinese scholars, in fact, western logic entered China through two channels. After Chinese scholars learnt from western logic, they made their contribution to the development of logic. (shrink)

In “The Law of Peoples,” John Rawls proposes a model for multi-culural dialogue based upon agreement. In liberal societies, we find agreement on issues such as human rights. However, I argue here that this proposal overcomes neither Eurocentrism nor Western-centrism, as liberal nations would decide which nations are “well organized hierarchical societies.” This second circle of nations would be merely invited peoples, who would not be allowed to contribute new proposals but only to accept the proposals of the liberal (...) nations. I propose a model for attaining human rights through truly universal dialogue in which the representatives of all peoples are able to speak, make proposals, and accept the proposals of others on an equal basis. (shrink)

American ed. published under title: Truth and dialogue in world religions.

'Saṃvāda' is the live report of a dialogue between two philosophical traditions, the Indian and the western, transcribed and edited from the tapes of a week-long seminar held at Pune in 1983. The central issue whether one need postulate 'propositions' as entities to account for our understanding of sentences which are false or those whose truth and faksity is not yet known. The Indian answer is a definitive 'No.'.

For several decades, tourism has mainly been identified as an activity that helps people escape their everyday routines, contributes to understanding between cultures, and promotes economic wellbeing. These assumptions have been questioned in both the public sphere and academic research, however. In this context, tourism research is increasingly drawing on ethical frameworks to support its criticism of tourism. Some of the most outstanding research on this issue is by Dean MacCannell, Emeritus Professor at the University of California at Davis and (...) author of one of the seminal works of the social theory of tourism: The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976). MacCannell examines the moral and ethical aspects of tourism in all his writing, but they are the focal point of his book The Ethics of Sightseeing (2011), in which he identifies the tourists’ responsibility to mediate between their understanding of their own pleasure and the ethical repercussions of the late modern imperative, “Enjoy!”. During the Touriscape congress in Malaga, Spain, in February 2018, MacCannell talked about ethics and tourism with José Luis López, who prepared this interview for Recerca. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper is about the context of Albert Einstein's concerns at the time of a most intense intellectual effort — his own and that of a small group of scientists concerned with classical quantum theory. I describe contemporaneous interactions and differing views about the prospects for and the significance of the First Solvay Congress of 1911 as voiced by major participants. There are two axes around which the paper evolves: the Einstein-Nernst-Lorentz dialogue and the public institutional creation of (...) the “Solvay” stage. In certain ways, this paper is about personal and institutional patronage: the working out of a difficult theoretical impasse requires individual and collective moral support. It is about the forging of the identity of a scientific problem and the personal and institutional setting, the public space, in which this problem was collectively addressed. But I also uncover heuristic playfulness and flexibility which accompanies theoretical change. (shrink)

This paper explores the political implications of the tension between tradition and dialogue in Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneu tics. The premise of the paper is this: Gadamer's account of human existence challenges two very influential modes of thinking within contemporary political philosophy, which are exemplified, arguably at their best, in Martin Heidegger's early thought and Jürgen Habermas's project of communicative action. In contemporary political philosophy the Enlightenment heritage has been interpreted in such a way that tradition has come to (...) be conceived as inevitably opposed to the ideals of Enlightenment, and that the extension of one as a major constitutive element in social and political affairs implies the retraction of the other. However, this paper attempts to conceive the problem of tradition in a more articulated context, suggesting that Gadamer's work offers a useful corrective both to Habermas's project and to the relativistic implications of Heidegger's early thought. By drawing on Gadamer's work, with particular emphasis upon his notion of the fusion of horizons, as well as on the work of thinkers such as Charles Taylor and Alasdair Maclntyre, this paper attempts to articulate a hermeneutical, dialogical interpretation of tradition, which suggests that Gadamer's thought acknowledges that living traditions are the site of ongoing debates, internal revisions, and critical turns, and that the notion of a closed horizon that is supposed to enclose a culture is an abstraction. In so doing it goes beyond the caricaturised account of tradition that is bandied about both in modernist thought and in the conservative outlook. (shrink)

This paper sets out to establish that dialogue defines truth in a world of divergent cultures and worldviews. It argues that culture has enormous influence on truth for which truth through monologue has inherent strong potentials that limit intellectual union and discusses how philosophy in its western tradition has served topromote this trend with its hegemony on different world cultures; the effect of which is the quest for difference by other world cultures through cultural philosophies that attempt to infuse (...) reason and logic on their cultural achievement. The result then is an unending ambition for difference which promotes conflict of values in our world. The paper contends that truths realized in such a world is inherently deficient. It recommends dialogue as the basis for truth. Truth in a multi-cultural world would then not be the correspondence to, coherence with and pragmatic to reality but the ability to defy difference to promote the equality of difference. Bylooking at the several ways a thing could not have been for which it is an item, idea or value can then be considered to be true. (shrink)

This paper explores the political implications of the tension between tradition and dialogue in Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneu tics. The premise of the paper is this: Gadamer's account of human existence challenges two very influential modes of thinking within contemporary political philosophy, which are exemplified, arguably at their best, in Martin Heidegger's early thought and Jürgen Habermas's project of communicative action. In contemporary political philosophy the Enlightenment heritage has been interpreted in such a way that tradition has come to (...) be conceived as inevitably opposed to the ideals of Enlightenment, and that the extension of one as a major constitutive element in social and political affairs implies the retraction of the other. However, this paper attempts to conceive the problem of tradition in a more articulated context, suggesting that Gadamer's work offers a useful corrective both to Habermas's project and to the relativistic implications of Heidegger's early thought. By drawing on Gadamer's work, with particular emphasis upon his notion of the fusion of horizons, as well as on the work of thinkers such as Charles Taylor and Alasdair Maclntyre, this paper attempts to articulate a hermeneutical, dialogical interpretation of tradition, which suggests that Gadamer's thought acknowledges that living traditions are the site of ongoing debates, internal revisions, and critical turns, and that the notion of a closed horizon that is supposed to enclose a culture is an abstraction. In so doing it goes beyond the caricaturised account of tradition that is bandied about both in modernist thought and in the conservative outlook. (shrink)

Please note that this book review was written in August 2017, prior to The World Congress of Philosophy in Beijing In 2011 Africa and China in Dialogue: Philosophical South-East Dialogues from a Western Perspective by the German philosopher Heinz Kimmerle and the Dutch psychologist Hans van Rappard was published in Dutch, and was then followed in 2013 by a German translation by the first author. In this book, an appeal is made for establishing dialogues between philosophies from Africa and (...) the East. Africa and China in Dialogue is one of the first published dialogues between African and Chinese philosophies and one of the few from an East-South perspective. In it a... (shrink)

Dating back to the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt argued that workers were entitled to a wage that allowed them to enjoy a decent standard of living—a conviction that led the president to propose the first federally-mandated minimum wage. Mr. Roosevelt’s proposal was met with highly partisan resistance in congress and the courts—reactions not different in kind from the highly partisan resistance former President Obama experienced in his proposal to increase the federal minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 (...) per hour. Reflecting President Roosevelt’s convictions, it is clear that many low wage workers today are not, and cannot, enjoying a decent standard of living at current minimum wage levels. Further, many of the economic arguments raised in opposition to increasing the minimum wage have been thoroughly discredited: empirical evidence suggests that increased minimum wages would not lead to dramatic spikes in unemployment, massive substitutions of capital for labor, business closings, and significantly increased consumer prices. However, as compelling as arguments for increasing the minimum wage may be, the reality is that this may not be sufficient to alleviate the plight of low income workers, particularly given the political nature of minimum wage adjustments. Indeed, it may be time to shift the national focus away from the minimum wage to an emphasis on viable living wage legislation, a proposition consistent with the social justice perspective of contemporary ethicists. (shrink)

Logic and linguistics have engaged in a many-faceted dialogue since the very beginnings of both disciplines in Antiquity. While participants may have had diverse views over the ages, arguably, the dialogue has always revolved around the relationship between human thought and natural language. While there are those who see these two domains as one and the same, or as a case of one-directional influence , we beg to differ. To us, the long historical tradition of authors such as (...) Arnauld, Boole, Turing, or Jespersen demonstrates the much richer perspectives on language and reasoning that are needed, including connections with intelligence and computability.Another major historical theme in the above dialogue are similarities or convergences between natural and artificial languages. It is clear that natural languages are not only semantically broader, but also much closer to human communication than artificial languages, and so linguistic grammars have long dealt with a larger set of problems than logical formalism. This specal issue of JoLLI consists six selected papers presented in the "Logic and Linguisics" Workshop in UNI-LOG 2013 in Rio de Janeiro, plus two papers by invited authors: Johan van Benthem, and Marcus Kracht and Uno Klein. It contains a number of samples of what is intriguing and promising work at the interfaces of logic and language. (shrink)

This essay, which is part of an ongoing monographic study of the Société Européenne de Culture, looks at the SEC's relationship with Europe's communist intelligentsia during the first phase of the Cold War. European intellectual life during this period is generally associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Yet the SEC, the membership of which included some of Europe's most eminent figures, ranging from Camus and Jaspers, to Adorno and Merleau-Ponty, to Lukács and Sartre, can be seen as having provided (...) a reference point particularly for the European left, not least because of its unique openness to communist participation. Giving special attention to the Dialogue Est-Ouest (Venice, March 1956), one of the earliest encounters between Europe's eastern and western intellectuals since before the war, this essay considers how the SEC's engagement with contemporary Marxist theory there not only embedded the dialectic as the SEC's operational method. It also provided an early indication of that institution's imminent shift from a preoccupation with universal values to an awareness of cultural difference and diversity, as a result of the critique of current western liberal ideology and its cultures, undertaken by the SEC in light of the Thaw. (shrink)

Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion may be read in the way Cleanthes reads Nature, as analogous to human artifice and contrivance. The Dialogues and Nature then are both texts, with an intelligent author or Author, and analogies may be started from these five facts of Hume's text: the independence of Hume's characters; the non-straightforwardness of the characters' discourse; the way the characters interact and live; the entanglements of Pamphilus as an internal author; and the ways in which a reader is (...) also involved in making a dialogue. These and other analogies should reflect upon the Author of Nature as they do upon Hume's authorship: They do not prove the existence of their respective authors, but may well shed some light on the nature of these disparate beings. (shrink)

Workshop organized by Fraunhofer-Institut f'ur Arbeitswirtschaft und Organisation.".

The modern times proclaimed ‘God’s death’ and the post‐modern times did ‘the death of Man/Subject. And recently our society suffers from ‘the death of the humanities’. The death appearing along with is ‘the death of philosophy’. What on earth does the notice of death of philosophy mean by in the life of human beings living in the modern times? This writer is groping for the point to revive the modern significance of philosophy facing the tragic situations called ‘Death’ through the (...) inquiry of the rendezvous between philosophy and therapy. This writer will study the features of the philosophical therapy in philosophizing in the ancient times, firstly in the relation of philosophy and therapy, secondly the soul as the subject and object of mind‐therapy, thirdly the self‐awareness (gnôthiseautón) as the way of mind‐therapy, fourth the self‐care (epimeleia heautou) as the goal of mind‐therapy, and finally the dialogue as the method of mind‐ therapy, during which I am going to form a solid foundation instead to study the spirit of philosophical therapy dwelling in philosophizing. (shrink)

La langue latine du Moyen Age inclut dans sa substance même une réflexion sur le temps : langue du passé pourtant toujours présente, langue apprise sans être langue morte, et de ce fait inlassablement réinventée, au gré de leurs besoins, de leurs compétences ou de leurs aspirations, par ceux qui en usent, elle fournit le paradigme du rapport entre l'écoulement temporel et l'immutabilité de l'idéal. Dès lors, le thème du "sens du temps" a semblé aux organisateurs du VIIe Congrès du (...) Comité International de Latin médiéval, qui s'est tenu à Lyon du 10 au 13 septembre 2014, propre à favoriser le dialogue entre spécialistes de grammaire et d'historiographie, de philosophie et de poésie, d'histoire des sciences et de théologie, tous aptes à alimenter une réflexion sur le sujet à partir des documents les plus divers. C'est ce souci d'interdisciplinarité qu'entend refléter ici un large choix de communications présentées à l'occasion du Congrès. (shrink)

For 34 years, the Fondation pour une entraide intellectuelle européenne was involved in promoting cultural dialogue across the Iron Curtain. This article looks at its relations with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, its agenda, and its impact on intellectual debates. It also analyses the ideological evolution of this organization after the 1960s and its transformation as it merged into the Open Society Foundation created by philanthropist George Soros.

If political dialogue is to identify and redress existing forms of injustice, participants in the dialogue must be able to appeal to the concept of objectivity in order to exchange claims, attitudes, and background beliefs which distort or conceal various forms of injustice. The conceptions of objectivity traditionally employed in liberal democratic political philosophy are not well-suited to play this role because they are insufficiently sensitive to the social and ideological pluralism of modern societies. Some liberal political philosophers (...) have recently offered more context-sensitive and pluralistic conceptions of objectivity, requiring participants in political dialogue to frame their demands for justice in terms of a conception of justice acceptable to all participants in the dialogue. I argue that this conception of objectivity constitutes an improvement over traditional liberal conceptions. However, it is ultimately unacceptable because it does not take adequate account of the limited and distorted knowledge that members of dominant social groups tend to possess about the oppression experienced by members of subordinate and marginalized groups. As a result, this conception of objectivity wrongly deems the demands for justice voiced by members of subordinate and marginalized groups to be subjective simply because they seem unreasonable from the limited and distorting standpoint of dominant social groups. (shrink)

The educational method Philosophy for Children is a combined thinking skills program and a democratic dialogic approach, implemented in approximately 50 countries and translated into about 20 languages. Lately, with P4C as a point of departure, the area of philosophical dialogue has extended into the inclusion of a range of contextualized methods with different starting points for the dialogues. In this paper, two arguments for having films as starting points for philosophical dialogues are presented: a) The argument from perspective (...) taking, and b) The argument from emotional content and response. Briefly, the arguments state that films, through the perceptual input, offer the opportunity to take shared emotional content and an array of different perspectives as starting points in philosophical dialogue. These arguments are supported by warranted theses in contemporary film theory and empirical data from participants’ evaluations of philosophical dialogues during the PhilosoFilmFestival, a Swedish film festival with basic principles of P4C as a point of departure. (shrink)

When contemplating the origins of philosophical paideia one is tempted to think of Socrates, perhaps because we feel that Socrates has been a philosophical educator to us all. But it is Plato and his literary genius that we have to thank as his dialogues preserve not just Socratic philosophy, but also the Socratic educational experience. Educators would do well to better understand Plato's pedagogical objectives in the Socratic dialogues so that we may appreciate and utilize them in our own educational (...) endeavors, and so that we may adapt the Socratic experience to new interactive educational technologies. Plato designed his Socratic dialogues to arm students for real world challenges and temptations. First, in both form and function the dialogues attempt to replicate the Socratic experience for their audience. They demand from their readers what Socrates demanded from his students: active learning, self-examination, and an appreciation for the complexity and importance of wisdom. Second, the dialogues challenge the conflation of professional and personal excellence, best exemplified by sophists such as Hippias, and exhort their reader to pursue personal aretê separately from and alongside practical and professional skills or technai. Third, they aim not to transmit some prepackaged formula for success, but to teach students to learn for themselves; that is to love and pursue wisdom. The Socratic dialogues, and philosophic dialogue itself, are educationally important in that they teach us to be philosophers in the literal sense. (shrink)

In her introduction to this collection, Tymieniecka presents her phenomenology of life - the leitmotif of the three-volume anniversary publication of Analecta Husserliana - as something that stands out from preceding historical attempts to investigate life in an 'integral' or 'scientific' way. After an incubation lasting throughout the 2000 years of Occidental philosophy, this scientific phenomenology/philosophy of life at last uncovers the entire area of the 'inner workings of Nature', exposing the way in which the 'sufficient reason' and the 'ground' (...) of beingness as such crystallise out of the 'onto poietic' process. This onto-poietic process, continuing as it does in the human creative condition, also reveals the authentic genius of the works of the human spirit. This new and original philosophy, free of fallacious simplifications, speculations and reductionism, opens up a basic starting point for all philosophy. Life, 'the theme of our times', at last receives a profound philosophical treatment. (shrink)