Dialectic and Dialogue in Plato
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What Is That Thing Called Philosophy of Technology? - R
HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY – Vol. IV - What Is That Thing Called Philosophy of Technology? - R. J. Gómez WHAT IS THAT THING CALLED PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY? R. J. Gómez Department of Philosophy. California State University (LA). USA Keywords: Adorno, Aristotle, Bunge, Ellul, Feenberg, Habermas, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Jonas, Latour, Marcuse, Mumford, Naess, Shrader-Frechette, artifact, assessment, determinism, ecosophy, ends, enlightenment, efficiency, epistemology, enframing, ideology, life-form, megamachine, metaphysics, method, naturalistic, fallacy, new, ethics, progress, rationality, rule, science, techno-philosophy Contents 1. Introduction 2. Locating technology with respect to science 2.1. Structure and Content 2.2. Method 2.3. Aim 2.4. Pattern of Change 3. Locating philosophy of technology 4. Early philosophies of technology 4.1. Aristotelianism 4.2. Technological Pessimism 4.3. Technological Optimism 4.4. Heidegger’s Existentialism and the Essence of Technology 4.5. Mumford’s Megamachinism 4.6. Neomarxism 4.6.1. Adorno-Horkheimer 4.6.2. Marcuse 4.6.3. Habermas 5. Recent philosophies of technology 5.1. L. Winner 5.2. A. Feenberg 5.3. EcosophyUNESCO – EOLSS 6. Technology and values 6.1. Shrader-Frechette Claims 6.2. H Jonas 7. Conclusions SAMPLE CHAPTERS Glossary Bibliography Biographical Sketch Summary A philosophy of technology is mainly a critical reflection on technology from the point of view of the main chapters of philosophy, e.g., metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. Technology has had a fast development since the middle of the 20th century , especially ©Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS) HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY – Vol. IV - What Is That Thing Called Philosophy of Technology? - R. -
Curriculum Vitae
BAS C. VAN FRAASSEN Curriculum Vitae Last updated 3/6/2019 I. Personal and Academic History .................................................................................................................... 1 List of Degrees Earned ........................................................................................................................................................ 1 Title of Ph.D. Thesis ........................................................................................................................................................... 1 Positions held ..................................................................................................................................................................... 1 Invited lectures and lecture series ........................................................................................................................................ 1 List of Honors, Prizes ......................................................................................................................................................... 4 Research Grants .................................................................................................................................................................. 4 Non-Academic Publications ................................................................................................................................................ 5 II. Professional Activities ................................................................................................................................. -
Philosophical Analysis on the Nature and Forms of Information—From the Perspective of Marxist Philosophy †
Proceedings Philosophical Analysis on the Nature and Forms of Information—From the Perspective of Marxist Philosophy † Mingfang Feng 1 and Liang Feng 2,* 1 School of Economics & Law, Shaanxi University of Technology, No.1, First Eastern Ring Road, Hanzhong 723001, China; [email protected] 2 School of Marxism Studies, Xi’an Jiaotong University, No.28 Xianning West Road, Xi’an 710049, China * Correspondence: [email protected] † Presented at the IS4SI 2017 Summit DIGITALISATION FOR A SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY, Gothenburg, Sweden, 12–16 June 2017. Published: 8 June 2017 Abstract: The aim of this research essay attempt to reveal the nature of information form the perspective of Marxist Philosophy. The nature of Information is the first question that philosophy of information science and technology research must be answered, thus the problem is still debated. According to Marxist dialectical materialism method to the essence of information has made the analysis and argumentation, points out the essence of information between what is and its internal contact things, and this contact information is presented. Due to the connection between the protean and endless things, thus produce the endless, full of beautiful things in eyes, each are not identical information. To grasp the nature of information, must pay attention to and the specific form of information and information processing, the reorganization, transmission, storage, use and so on. Keywords: information; nature; connection; philosophy of information 1. Introduction The development of information science and technology has spar ked the nature of information exploration after World War II. The question that ‘What is the nature of information?’ is always unable to avoid in information science and philosophical technology research. -
The Tyranny of Method: a Pragmatic Defense of Philosophical Pluralism
THE TYRANNY OF METHOD: A PRAGMATIC DEFENSE OF PHILOSOPHICAL PLURALISM Vincent M. Colapietro Abstract: The history of philosophy is in no small measure a series of attempts to institute a fail-safe method. In response to what they take to be the scandal of disagreement (disagreement itself being judged as scandalous), a number of historically influential philosophers (e.g., Descartes, Peirce, Husserl, and Carnap) have time and again tried to craft a method for guaranteeing agreement. In light of the failure of these attempts, this tendency might be seen as remotely analogous to what is called in psychoanalytic parlance a “repetition compulsion.” In any event, historical reflections on this repeated tendency promise to be illuminating. But there is a polemical purpose animating these historical reflections. The author tries, in light of these reflections, to render plausible the suggestion that this tendency amounts to a tyranny of method and, in turn, such tyranny results in an inevitable impoverishment of philosophical thought. THE TOPIC of my essay is best brought into focus by recalling a central figure in the history of Western philosophy. 1 This recollection is, however, far from methodologically innocent. My deliberate turn toward a pivotal moment in our intellectual history – in brief, my turn toward history – will provide the basis for my critique of what I am disposed to identify as the tyranny of method. This tyranny is not so much exercised by any particular method as by the repeated impulse to institute a philosophical method of allegedly revolutionary significance. Most often, this impulse is bound up with the hope that philosophy can transform itself into a science (an unquestionable form of certain knowledge) either by adopting the method of science itself (e.g., the efforts of C. -
Obscurantism in Social Sciences
Diogenes http://dio.sagepub.com/ Hard and Soft Obscurantism in the Humanities and Social Sciences Jon Elster Diogenes 2011 58: 159 DOI: 10.1177/0392192112444984 The online version of this article can be found at: http://dio.sagepub.com/content/58/1-2/159 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of: International Council for Philosophy and Human Studiess Additional services and information for Diogenes can be found at: Email Alerts: http://dio.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://dio.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://dio.sagepub.com/content/58/1-2/159.refs.html >> Version of Record - Jul 11, 2012 What is This? Downloaded from dio.sagepub.com at Kings College London - ISS on November 3, 2013 Article DIOGENES Diogenes 58(1–2) 159–170 Hard and Soft Obscurantism in the Copyright Ó ICPHS 2012 Reprints and permission: Humanities and Social Sciences sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0392192112444984 dio.sagepub.com Jon Elster Colle`ge de France Scholarship is a risky activity, in which there is always the possibility of failure. Many scholars fail honorably, and sometimes tragically, if they have devoted their career to pursuing an hypoth- esis that was finally disproved. The topic of this article is dishonorable failures. In other words, the thrust of the argument will be overwhelmingly negative.1 I shall argue that there are many schools of thought in the humanities and the social sciences that are obscurantist, by which I mean that one can say ahead of time that pursuits within these paradigms are unlikely to yield anything of value. -
Plato's Symposium: the Ethics of Desire
Plato’s Symposium: The Ethics of Desire FRISBEE C. C. SHEFFIELD 1 Contents Introduction 1 1. Ero¯s and the Good Life 8 2. Socrates’ Speech: The Nature of Ero¯s 40 3. Socrates’ Speech: The Aim of Ero¯s 75 4. Socrates’ Speech: The Activity of Ero¯s 112 5. Socrates’ Speech: Concern for Others? 154 6. ‘Nothing to do with Human AVairs?’: Alcibiades’ Response to Socrates 183 7. Shadow Lovers: The Symposiasts and Socrates 207 Conclusion 225 Appendix : Socratic Psychology or Tripartition in the Symposium? 227 References 240 Index 249 Introduction In the Symposium Plato invites us to imagine the following scene: A pair of lovers are locked in an embrace and Hephaestus stands over them with his mending tools asking: ‘What is it that you human beings really want from each other?’ The lovers are puzzled, and he asks them again: ‘Is this your heart’s desire, for the two of you to become parts of the same whole, and never to separate, day or night? If that is your desire, I’d like to weld you together and join you into something whole, so that the two of you are made into one. Look at your love and see if this is what you desire: wouldn’t this be all that you want?’ No one, apparently, would think that mere sex is the reason each lover takes such deep joy in being with the other. The soul of each lover apparently longs for something else, but cannot say what it is. The beloved holds out the promise of something beyond itself, but that something lovers are unable to name.1 Hephaestus’ question is a pressing one. -
What Is a Philosophical Analysis?
JEFFREY C. KING WHAT IS A PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS? (Received 24 January 1996) It is common for philosophers to offer philosophical accounts or analyses, as they are sometimes called, of knowledge, autonomy, representation, (moral) goodness, reference, and even modesty.1 These philosophical analyses raise deep questions. What is it that is being analyzed (i.e. what sorts of things are the objects of analysis)? What sort of thing is the analysis itself (a proposition? sentence?)? Under what conditions is an analysis correct? How can a correct analysis be informative? How, if at all, does the production of philo- sophical analyses differ from what scientists do? The purpose of the present paper is to provide answers to these questions. The traditional answers to the ®rst and last of these questions are that concepts are the objects of philosophical analysis and that philo- sophical analyses differ from the results of scienti®c investigation in being conceptual analyses. Like many philosophers I am suspicious of the notions of concept and conceptual analysis as traditionally understood. Though the critique of these notions is beyond the scope of the present work, the answers I shall give to the questions raised above shall not invoke concepts (understood as things distinct from properties).2 I count it as a virtue of my account that it is able to provide answers to the questions raised above without an appeal to concepts. And to the extent that it has been felt that concepts are needed to answer these questions, the present account weakens the case for positing concepts. Before addressing these questions, however, we shall make the simplifying assumption that analyses are given in a ªcanonical formº. -
Burns* (Skidmore College)
Klesis – Revue philosophique – 2011 : 19 – Autour de Leo Strauss Leo Strauss’s Life and Work Timothy Burns* (Skidmore College) I. Life Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was a German-born American political philosopher of Jewish heritage who revived the study of political philosophy in the 20 th century. His complex philosophical reflections exercise a quietly growing, deep influence in America, Europe, and Asia. Strauss was born in the rural town of Kirchhain in Hesse-Nassau, Prussia, on September 20, 1899, to Hugo and Jenny David Strauss. He attended Kirchhain’s Volksschule and the Rektoratsschule before enrolling, in 1912, at the Gymnasium Philippinum in Marburg, graduating in 1917. The adolescent Strauss was immersed in Hermann Cohen’s neo-Kantianism, the most progressive German-Jewish thinking. “Cohen,” Strauss states, “was the center of attraction for philosophically minded Jews who were devoted to Judaism.” After serving in the German army for a year and a half, Strauss began attending the University at Marburg, where he met Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacob Klein. In 1921 he went to Hamburg, where he wrote his doctoral thesis under Ernst Cassirer. In 1922, Strauss went to the University of Freiburg-im-Breisgau for a post- doctoral year, in order to see and hear Edmund Husserl, but he also attended lecture courses given by Martin Heidegger. He participated in Franz Rosenzweig’s Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus in Frankfurt-am-Main, and published articles in Der Jude and the Jüdische Rundschau . One of these articles, on Cohen’s analysis of Spinoza, brought Strauss to the attention of Julius Guttmann, who in 1925 offered him a position researching Jewish Philosophy at the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. -
The Theory of Descriptions 1. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970): Mathematician, Logician, and Philosopher
Louis deRosset { Spring 2019 Russell: The Theory of Descriptions 1. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970): mathematician, logician, and philosopher. He's one of the founders of analytic philosophy. \On Denoting" is a founding document of analytic philosophy. It is a paradigm of philosophical analysis. An analysis of a concept/phenomenon c: a recipe for eliminating c-vocabulary from our theories which still captures all of the facts the c-vocabulary targets. FOR EXAMPLE: \The Name View Analysis of Identity." 2. Russell's target: Denoting Phrases By a \denoting phrase" I mean a phrase such as any one of the following: a man, some man, any man, every man, all men, the present King of England, the present King of France, the centre of mass of the Solar System at the first instant of the twentieth century, the revolution of the earth round the sun, the revolution of the sun round the earth. (479) Includes: • universals: \all F 's" (\each"/\every") • existentials: \some F " (\at least one") • indefinite descriptions: \an F " • definite descriptions: \the F " Later additions: • negative existentials: \no F 's" (480) • Genitives: \my F " (\your"/\their"/\Joe's"/etc.) (484) • Empty Proper Names: \Apollo", \Hamlet", etc. (491) Russell proposes to analyze denoting phrases. 3. Why Analyze Denoting Phrases? Russell's Project: The distinction between acquaintance and knowledge about is the distinction between the things we have presentation of, and the things we only reach by means of denoting phrases. [. ] In perception we have acquaintance with the objects of perception, and in thought we have acquaintance with objects of a more abstract logical character; but we do not necessarily have acquaintance with the objects denoted by phrases composed of words with whose meanings we are ac- quainted. -
Postmodernist Gibberish: Derrida Dumbfounds the Positivists
New York Journal of Sociology, 2008, Vol. 1, pp. 187-206 NY JS POSTMODERNIST GIBBERISH: DERRIDA DUMBFOUNDS THE POSITIVISTS Ben Agger University of Texas Arlington Jacques Derrida (1978), the enfant terrible of Continental philosophy who passed away recently, made many mad: analytical philosophers, positivists in the sciences and social sciences, the right, stupid people generally. That Derrida was brilliant is somewhat beside the point. What is on point is the way he read—texts and indeed the whole western philosophical tradition— aggressively, so much so that we could conclude that Derrida meant that reading is a form of writing. That is one of the main things I take away from his oeuvre. Another is that every text is ‘undecidable,’ that is, it cannot perfectly clarify and ex- haust its topic. This is because every definition needs to be defined, ad infi- nitum. There is no vantage outside of writing from which one can achieve that Archimedean insight about the truth or essence of the world. This rebut- tal of absolutism is extremely maddening to those who pretend apodictic knowledge, especially the gang we sometimes call positivists. To be sure, positivism died within physics by 1905, with Einstein’s first papers on the special theory of relativity. Newton was overthrown, except in the largely American social sciences, where it still prevails, even though there are challengers nibbling at the edges of the mainstream social-science disciplines. Newton only survives in sociology, political science, economics and parts of psychology. It is in these disciplines that Derrida is especially scandalous, although rear-guard actions are also being fought in English by those who dislike ‘the- ory’ and want the great books instead. -
Politics and Philosophy in the Left Vienna Circle
Intersubjective Accountability: Politics and Philosophy in the Left Vienna Circle Thomas Uebel The University of Manchester In different places Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath affirmed “a noteworthy agreement” and an “inner link” between their philosophy of science and political movements agitating for radical socio-economic change. Given the normative abstinence of Vienna Circle philosophy, indeed the metaethical com- mitments of its verificationism, this claim presents a major interpretive chal- lenge that is only heightened when Neurath’s engagement for the socialization of national economies is taken into account. It is argued here that Carnap’s and Neurath’s positions are saved from inconsistency once some careful distinc- tions are understood and it is recognized that they, together with the other members of the Circle, adhered to an epistemic norm here called “intersubjective accountability.” 1. Introduction The question of the political potential possessed by the philosophies of the Vienna Circle is complex for more than one reason. It is so partly due to the politically heterogeneous membership of the Circle, partly due to the dif- ficult if not extreme political circumstances under which they had to operate, and partly due to the variable meanings of the parameter “political,” some of which are and some of which are not compatible with, in turn, variable ver- sions of the doctrine of the value-neutrality of science. For instance, philos- ophies of science may steadfastly be standing guard against pseudo-scientific nonsense being paraded as worthy of credence in public discourse, this con- cern for intellectual hygene becoming “political” depending on who spouts An earlier version of this paper was presented at the workshop “Positivismus als gesellschaftliches und politsches Projekt” convened by Eric Hilgendorf at the University of Münster in January 2017 and I thank the participants for discussions. -
Historical Review: Issues in Rhetorical Invention
3 Historical Review: Issues in Rhetorical Invention The inventional issues discussed in Chapter 1 extend back through rhetorical history to the Sophists. Many of the oppositional posi- tions seen in contemporary work on invention can be found in pre- vious eras. Major rhetoricians and their subsequent interpreters have disagreed over the nature, purpose, and epistemology of invention. Contemporary scholars also point out that in earlier periods rheto- ricians held narrow views of who could hold the subject position of rhetor, i.e., who could engage in rhetoric and hence in invention. This text offers a sample of these divergent points of view on invention, as the following quotations and the remainder of the chapter illustrate: As things are now, those who have composed Arts of Speech have worked on a small part of the subject; for only pisteis [proofs] are artistic (other things are sup- plementary), and these writers say nothing about en- thymemes, which is the “body” of persuasion, while they give most of their attention to matters external to the subject. (Aristotle, On Rhetoric 30) There are two parts of rhetoric: Style (elocutio) and Delivery (prenuntiatio); these are of course the only parts, the ones proper to the art. [. .] Rhetoric there- fore will keep this particular task, that it takes the matter found and related by Dialectic, and laid out in clear and correct speech by Grammar, and then it 11 12 Janice M. Lauer embellishes it with the splendor of the ornaments of style, and renders it acceptable with the grace of vocal tone and gesture. (Peter Ramus, Arguments against Quintilian, 27-28) The invention of speech or argument is not properly an invention: for to invent is to discover that we know not, and not to recover or resummon that which we already know: and the use of this invention is no other but, out of the knowledge whereof our mind is already possessed, to draw forth or call before us that which may be pertinent to the purpose which we take into our consideration.