In this volume, G. Marian Kinget's classic work, On Being Human, can be read for the first time in light of a second, previously unpublished work, Pleasure And Pain. Taken together, these two works offer a new generation of readers a comprehensive picture of the insights, principles, and goals of humanistic psychology. On Being Human, Kinget's pioneering work, which arose from the original humanistic revolution in psychology, systematically describes the characteristics that make human beings different from all (...) other forms of life. In this work, Kinget explores man in his full nature not solely as a biological organism modified by experience and culture. She presents a person as a symbolic entity capable of pondering his existence, and lending it meaning and direction. Man is the only animal who knowingly exists in space and time, manifesting transcendental and metaphysical concern throughout history and culture. On Being Human presents the fundamentals of any valid approach to psychology as well as to other fields concerned with the individuality of the human being. It describes the specific human capacities for reflective thought and declarative language, and it discusses the unique ability of humans to devise culture and question origins. Pleasure and Pain considers the interdependence of human pleasure and pain. This idea, which leads to unnecessary fears and unwarranted expectations, goes unrecognized in a contemporary western society focused on the accumulation of pleasure without any awareness of the duality of the pleasure-pain experience. Kinget refutes the widespread fallacy that fun lies in the means, when it actually lies in the subject, and she discusses the human potential for autonomous "management" of the pleasure-pain dimension of human existence. (shrink)

This article demonstrates that ritual plays an ambivalent role in the interaction between religion and violence. Ritual triggers and gives meaning to violence, or it enforces peace and coexistence. The first part of the article defines the ambivalence of ritual in the context of violence. The second part surveys standard rituals of peace and violence from Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The third part focuses on the ambivalent nature of Orthodox Christian rituals.

Using a religious studies methodology, this paper offers a detailed contextual mapping and a structural configuration of how collective violence is justified in Orthodox Christianity. The research design is explanatory, whereby the functional perspectives of doctrine, ethics and worship are all investigated and probed as phenomena of lived religion and orthopraxy. While predominantly initiatory and pedagogical, the paper also proposes a systematic platform for advanced research on this subject, by flagging contexts, themes and areas of inquiry that a researcher might (...) examine in order to untangle the inner workings of the justification of violence in the mind of the Orthodox. Given the ongoing Russian War on Ukraine, relevant samples are drawn from this case.Contribution: This paper outlines the Orthodox Christian justification of violence from the perspectives of doctrine, ethics and ritual and identifies pivotal areas of ambiguity between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. (shrink)

While the majority of organised religions determine the origins of religion itself in an act of divine revelation, social science literature takes an evolutionary perspective. Without engaging the question of origin of religion from either perspective, this article proposes seven correlations between interpersonal violence and the progression of organised religion by suggesting that interpersonal violence plays a significant role in the institutionalising process of organised religion. Although interpersonal violence does not necessarily cause the structuring of faith, it reinforces and provides (...) solutions to the existing patterns of threat faced by the community, which together lead to the organisation of religion. The first part of this article (stages 1–4) surveys the psychology of violence by focusing on the theories of frustration–aggression, mimetic rivalry, triangulation and the genesis of scapegoating and guilt. The second part (stages 5–6) marks the transition from personal to social psychology and surveys violence in the primitive religion, as manifested in the ritualising process of the scapegoat, and the genesis of sacrifice. The third part (stage 7) highlights the complexity of ritual, ethics and doctrine, in the evolution of religion from a primitive state to an advanced organised institution. (shrink)

What is the temporal course of gratitude and indebtedness and how do these feelings influence helping in the context of reciprocity? In an online-game tapping real-life behaviour, Study 1 (N = 106) finds that while gratitude towards a benefactor remains elevated after an opportunity to reciprocate, indebtedness declines along with helping. Yet, indebtedness rather than gratitude better predicts real-life helping of a benefactor. Using a vignette-based experiment, Study 2 (N = 217) finds that after reciprocation indebtedness and likelihood of helping (...) a benefactor reset to a baseline level while gratitude endures. Furthermore, the decrease in helping after reciprocation is better explained by indebtedness than by gratitude. Study 3 (N = 217) assessed the unique influences of gratitude and indebtedness on helping by comparing contexts in which gratitude is at a baseline level but indebtedness is elevated (e.g. before a monetary payment for a service received) to contexts in which indebtedness is at a baseline level but gratitude is elevated (e.g. after reciprocation of benefits freely given by a friend). People are more likely to help in the former compared to latter context, and this difference is better explained by indebtedness rather than by gratitude. We discuss the interrelated and understudied relationships between gratitude, indebtedness, and reciprocity. (shrink)

« Lorsque la philosophie peint sa grisaille dans la grisaille, une manifestation de la vie achève de vieillir. On ne peut pas la rajeunir avec du gris sur du gris, mais seulement la connaître. Ce n’est qu’au début du crépuscule que la chouette de Minerve prend son vol. » G. F. W. Hegel, Principes de la philosophie du droit La métaphore de Hegel concernant le retard de la philosophie sur le réel pourrait s’appliquer aussi au cas de l’anthropologie du socialisme (...) réel qui émerge comme champ de t.. (shrink)

Experiential education produces numerous benefits to students in terms of higher order thinking skills such as the ability to evaluate, analyze, and synthesizeinformation , engagement , and work-readiness . Partnering with community organizations provides a means to create experiential education opportunities for students. In this symposium, we discussed three examples of experiential education to promote learning around themes of sustainability, providing a brief outline of the activities, the intended outcomes, and the lessons learned from our experiences. We concluded with a (...) meditation on the importance of working with community partners and managing expectations so that students, the community, and the institutions gain the best possible outcomes when creating town-gown partnerships for sustainability education. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that contextualism cannot explain (dis)agreements concerning matters of personal taste because it treats sentences involving predicates of taste as indexical. I aim to weaken this charge. Given the idea that people sometimes use indexical sentences to express (dis)agreements about taste, two kinds of (dis)agreement are distinguished, namely doxastic and non-doxastic. Taste (dis)agreements are better explained in terms of the later kind, in which case they become amenable to contextualist treatment. It is argued that if something instantiates (...) a taste property (like being tasty for A), it has to instantiate a corresponding attitudinal property (like being liked by A). Based on this, utterances of taste sentences express propositions that concern tastiness of something (e.g., that X is tasty for A) and these propositions entail other propositions that concern non-doxastic attitudes the speakers bear toward something (e.g., that X is liked by A). One speaker is claimed to (dis)agree with another speaker provided their respective entailed propositions feature (in)compatible non-doxastic attitudes. Although this explanation is similar to hybrid accounts that are currently growing in popularity, it departs from them in some notable respects. (shrink)

The issue of the crisis of democracy has been debated abundantly and intensively in recent years. The body of academic literature on the topic has gradually increased. However, a similar debate took place almost one-hundred years ago in the Central European region. At that time, the debate was closely intertwined with the geopolitical situation, especially with the rise of fascism and Nazism. The paper conceptualizes the intellectual discussion on the reasons of the democratic crisis in the 1930s in Czechoslovakia from (...) a sociological and philosophical perspective. The opinions of important Czech intellectuals, such as František Modráček, Emanuel Rádl, Karel Čapek, Edvard Beneš, František Žilka, F.X. Šalda, T.G. Masaryk, J.B. Kozák, and J.L. Fischer, are clarified. Furthermore, some main features of the nature of the past and present crises of democracy are compared. (shrink)

Th e present paper examines three kinds of theories concerning the rigidity of general terms—extensionalist, essentialist and intensionalist theories. It is argued that both essentialist and intensionalist theories cannot deal successfully with a number of problems and that the notions of rigidity they propose for general terms lack suffi cient explanatory power. A version of the extensionalist theory, supplemented with a hierarchy of intensions, is defended. Th e theory has surprising consequences, e.g., that ‘tiger’ and some other natural kind terms (...) are, contrary to the widespread opinion, non-rigid. (shrink)

The problem of the possible occurrence of silicon porphyrins in the living organisms has been put forward in the context of the hypothesis of siliceous life forms and the study of the molecular evolution of porphyrin systems. Some properties of the tetrapyrrole complexes of silicon as well as essential data and theories from domains of silicon biochemistry and paleobiochemistry have been reviewed.This has been a basis for doing some extrapolations and showing connections with bioelectronics, whereas some possible functions of hypothetical (...) Si-porphyrins in biostructures, e.g. catalytic ones, have been shown. In the bioplasma concept, a possible use of Si-tetrapyrrole complexes as a model useful in the study of the plasma mechanism of enzymatic catalysis has been proposed, and a role of silicon analogues of chlorophyll-like compounds in primordial photosynthesis has been suggested. (shrink)

The paper is aimed to show that directly referring terms have to be rigid designators. Since directly referring expressions refer to something on the basis of semantic conventions alone and since the conventions are independent of possible worlds, there cannot be a directly referring expression with shifting reference across possible worlds. Although this claim seems to be indubitable and widely recognized, it was questioned recently. Drawing on D. Lewis’ ontology of counterparts, G. Martí has shown that a directly referring expression (...) is capable to refer to different objects in different possible worlds. A directly referring term designating an object in our world is supposed to designate its counterparts in other possible world. The paper tries to show that the purported directly referring terms assumed by Martí’s argument are not, in fact, directly referring.U ovome članku nastoji se pokazati da izravno referirajući termini moraju biti kruti označitelji. Budući da izravno referirajući izrazi referiraju na nešto samo na osnovi semantičkih konvencija i budući da su konvencije neovisne o mogućim svjetovima, ne može postojati izravno referirajući izraz s referencijom koja se pomiče duž mogućih svjetova. Iako se ta tvrdnja čini neprijepornom i široko prihvaćenom, u novije je vrijeme dovedena u pitanje. Oslanjajući se na Lewisovu ontologiju parnjakâ, G. Martí je pokazala da izravno referirajući izraz može referirati na različite predmete u različitim mogućim svjetovima. Izravno referirajući termin koji označava predmet u našem svijetu trebao bi označavati svoje parnjake u drugome mogućem svijetu. U članku se pokušava pokazati da navodno izravno referirajući termini koji su pretpostavljeni Martínim argumentom zapravo nisu izravno referirajući. (shrink)

Though Fregeś second semantical theory is worked out excellently, he did not precisely and explicitly answer the question, which of the two semantical notions he used in his semantics - sense and reference -, could be taken as proper explication of an intuitive notion of meaning. Intuitively, meaning of a word can be connected with an understanding of the word: if we understand the word, we know its meaning. Our problem seems to be accute in connection with present tendency to (...) render words "meaning" and "význam" as proper translations of German word "Bedeutung", used by Frege to refer to named or signed objects . Fregeś basic concepts of both periods of developing of his thinking - Inhalt, Sinn and Bedeutung -, having been outlined, the author tries to explicate this intuitive notion of meaning as wordś content, or wordś sense and reference, respectively. This attempt is aimed to give a possible Fregeś answer to the above question. Then the discussion about a few counter-arguments follows and its main profit is in illumination of some less clear aspects of our interpretation of Fregeś conceptual apparatus. In the end the author argues that the word "meaning" as translation of "Bedeutung" does not cohere with Fregeś possible intentions, and defends the words like e. g. "denotation" as much better and clearer translations than the above one. (shrink)

Ludwig Feuerbach, the German philosopher and a founding member of the Young Hegelians, a group of radical thinkers influenced by G. W. F. Hegel, was an outspoken critic of religion, and the 1841 publication of this work established his reputation. In the first part of the book he examines what he calls the 'anthropological essence' of religion, and in the second he looks at its 'false or theological essence', arguing that the idea of God is a manifestation of human consciousness. (...) These ideas provoked strong reactions in Germany, and soon other European intellectuals wanted to read Feuerbach's book. The 1843 second edition was translated by Marian Evans - who would become better known by her pen name of George Eliot - and published in Britain in 1854. Evans was influenced by Feuerbach's work, and many of his humanist ideas about religion are reflected in her novels. (shrink)

This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.

MacIntyre is a major defender of the resurgence of the Aristotelian approach in ethical and political theory. He considers Aristotelianism not only a feasible, but also an intellectually superior alternative to most contemporary dominant ideologies, and to liberalism in particular. There is, however, an important and instructive modification to his view of what is admissible from Aristotle that should be accounted for. The paper traces MacIntyre’s search for a defensible restatement of the Aristotelian ethics and examines in particular his changing (...) attitude to metaphysics as the basis for ethics within his project. Different stages of the development to his proposed Aristotelian alternative are analyzed and evaluated. The paper tries to show that despite the fact that MacIntyre initially repudiated Aristotle’s metaphysical biology, nevertheless his account has always been (implicitly or explicitly) metaphysical. (shrink)

The author presents and defends three theses: (1) "the first is that it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology." (2) "the second is that the concepts of obligation, And duty... And of what is morally right and wrong, And of the moral sense of 'ought', Ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible...." (3) "the third thesis is that (...) the differences between the well-Known english writers on moral philosophy from sidgwick to the present day are of little importance." (staff). (shrink)

Murray N. Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe build their libertarian theory of justice on two axioms concerning self-ownership and homesteading, which are bolstered by two key arguments: reductio ad absurdum and performative contradiction. Each of these arguments is designed to demonstrate that libertarianism is the only theory of justice that can be justified. If either of these arguments were valid, it would prove the libertarian claim that the state is an unjust political arrangement. Giving due weight to the importance of the (...) libertarian anarchist claim, this article exposes and criticizes the arguments that substantiate it. (shrink)

This book offers an introduction to the Sophists of fifth-century Athens and a new overall interpretation of their thought. Since Plato first animadverted on their activities, the Sophists have commonly been presented as little better than intellectual mountebanks - a picture which Professor Kerferd forcefully challenges here. Interpreting the evidence with care, he shows them to have been part of an exciting and historically crucial intellectual movement. At the centre of their teaching was a form of relativism, most famously expressed (...) by Protagoras as 'Man is the measure of all things', and which they developed in a wide range of views - on knowledge and argument, virtue, government, society, and the gods. On all these subjects the Sophists did far more than simply provoke Plato to thought. Their contributions were substantial and serious; they inaugurated the debate on many central philosophical questions and decisively shifted the focus of philosophical attention from the cosmos to man. (shrink)

In a world increasingly concerned with the human species and its future, Marian Stamp Dawkins argues that we need to rethink some of the fundamental questions regarding animal welfare. How are we justified in projecting human emotions on to animals? What kind of mental lives do they have? What can science tell us about their quality of life?

This book explores the language and arguments Jacques Derrida uses in his writings, and how this is at the core of his work. Marian Hobson explores the French language in which Derrida's philosophy is written in, and the ways his ideas are organized, to suggest that this has an overriding affect on how his translated work affects our understanding of his thought.