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Unified Philosophy Interdisciplinary Metaphysics, Cyberethics, and Liberal Arts FIRST EDITION UNIFIED PHILOSOPHY INTERDISCIPLINARY METAPHYSICS, CYBERETHICS, AND LIBERAL ARTS Michael M. Kazanjian Triton College Bassim Hamadeh, CEO and Publisher Kassie Graves, Director of Acquisitions and Sales Jamie Giganti, Senior Managing Editor Miguel Macias, Senior Graphic Designer Angela Schultz, Senior Field Acquisitions Editor Michelle Piehl, Project Editor Alexa Lucido, Licensing Coordinator Abbey Hastings, Associate Production Editor Copyright © 2018 by Cognella, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information retrieval system without the written permission of Cognella, Inc. For inquiries regarding permissions, translations, foreign rights, audio rights, and any other forms of reproduction, please contact the Cognella Licensing Department at [email protected]. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Cover image copyright © 2014 iStockphoto LP/Beholding Eye. Printed in the United States of America ISBN: 978-1-5165-1806-7 (pbk) / 978-1-5165-1807-4 (br) CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS VII DEDICATION IX A NOTE ABOUT THE EXERCISES XI PREFACE XIII INTRODUCTION HUMAN FACTORS ENGINEERING SUPPORTS METAPHYSICS AND PHILOSOPHY XV CHAPTER ONE REALITY: UNIFIED GENERAL THEORY OF METAPHYSICS 1 CHAPTER TWO LINGUISTIC REALITY: SIMPLES AND IDIOMS 35 CHAPTER THREE TRUTH REALITY: INFLATION AND DEFLATION 57 CHAPTER FOUR TRUTH VALIDITY REALITY: CORRESPONDENCE AND CONSISTENCY 69 III CHAPTER FIVE PREDICTIVE REALITY: DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 81 CHAPTER SIX SOCIAL ORIGINS REALITY: COMMUNITARIAN AND CONTRACT 93 CHAPTER SEVEN UNIFIED GENERAL THEORY OF ETHICAL REALITY: DOING AND BEING 107 CHAPTER EIGHT SOCIETAL REALITY: WORKER AND FAMILY 131 CHAPTER NINE PROPERTY REALITY: PUBLIC AND PRIVATE 143 CHAPTER TEN THEOLOGICAL REALITY: GOD AND PERSON 157 CHAPTER ELEVEN KNOWLEDGE SOURCE REALITY: EMPIRICAL AND RATIONAL 171 CHAPTER TWELVE INTERDISCIPLINARY REALITY: DISCIPLINES AND PHILOSOPHY 185 IV CHAPTER THIRTEEN KNOWLEDGE REALITY: TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE/ART 203 CONCLUSION 213 REFERENCES 217 V ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Acknowledging the many people who have made this book possible has been as difficult a task as writing it. An author helped me along those lines by noting that he had been forced to omit more names than he included and that many helped him at least indirectly whose names he never knew. My friend and colleague Ralph Forsberg is responsible for making this book manageable. I originally had sixty chapters in mind. Publish a book with that many chapters, he warned, and I will not read it. How about fourteen chapters? So I brought it down to thirteen and made exercises of the remaining chapters. John Tobin, Raymond Pfeiffer, longtime friend and colleagues Kara Malenfant, Bob Lichtenbert, David Lafferty, and Doug Binckley provided more input over decades or at least years than I can count. Donald Ritchie, Corina Schusheim, and Ellen Harrow, like so many of my other friends, are unaware of the insights I have gained from them. Robert Wiar, Leke Adeofe, Eugene Muhammad, Daniele Manni, Gary Zimmerman, and other colleagues from Triton College have fingerprints throughout this book. However the people above have contributed to and are responsible for the final state of this book, the designation of it being “our” work has limits. The author, more frequently than he is willing to admit for refusing good advice, is responsible for the shortcomings. VII DEDICATION In my preface, I refer to the seeds from which this book grew. Those were the answers and outstanding teaching that my Lane Tech high school teachers, Mr. Arnold Began, Mr. Herbert Herman, and Mrs. Yvonne Childs, gave me regarding college admission and the role of liberal arts therein. They gave me advice that I was too immature, hasty, and unwilling to learn, until philosophy classes in college taught me. I dedicate my book to those three instructors. IX A NOTE ABOUT THE EXERCISES I had initially intended that this book have approximately sixty chapters. The chapters would flow from the first as a set to the second as a subset of the first, and every successive one as a subset of the former. Each chapter after the first was crucial as a subset and could not be eliminated. A colleague warned me he would not scan or read a sixty-chapter book. He advised me to have roughly thirteen chapters. Because I could not elimi- nate chapters, I decided to use the present thirteen chapters and change the remaining ones to exercises. I choose to retain what are now chapters 1 through 13. This meant relegating to exercises the remaining fifty or so chapters. Due to the flow between chapters, exercises appear after chapters 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 13. These exercises are for students to complete as chapters, each as few three pages. If students complete all exercises, they will see the flow from chapter 1 through what was intended as chapter 60. XI PREFACE Some classroom actions in high school planted the seeds of this book. I attended the Albert G. Lane Technical High School. Lane Tech, as we called it, is a selective admissions Chicago Public High School. It became selective after the Soviets caught the world off guard with Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, and Lane Tech administrators turned on a dime to impose admissions standards. They wanted only the best and brightest in order to compete with the Kremlin. Lane Tech suddenly admitted only the top two percent or so of applicants. Its students, all male when I attended, were to be self motivated, inner-driven. Their motivations showed in the incidents I mention. Most of us, including myself, were committed to enter college. In at least three classes, we occasionally took time to ask our instructors about the difficulty in being admitted to colleges and universities. Nor were we interested in just any of the 6000 colleges and univer- sities. The Ivy League, especially Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, MIT, the Service Academies, on down were our primary interests. In Mr. Began’s German, Mrs. Child’s U.S. History, and Mr. Herman’s English classes, our question was the same. And we received the same answer. We asked how difficult it was to gain admission to Harvard, University of Chicago, MIT, and so on. The answer in any case was not pleasant. The part about being difficult to enter, was disappointing. Admission was based on several things including good grades in the most difficult subjects. But confusion set in, at least for me, with a phrase the instructors used about being admitted to the major universities. I had never heard of this phrase. Asking the instructors about admissions, they repeat a phrase regarding a program of study. This was the first time I had heard of the term program or college of liberal arts and sciences, or general education. XIII XIV | My confusion involved why a student must learn general education or be liberally educated. I was to learn that specialization was insufficient. I started thinking about this. Why should a student majoring in physics study chemistry, math, or history? Why does the school require a student majoring in literature study biology, sociology, or psychology? I would learn the answers somewhat in high school, but more articulated in college. Life is not separated into physics, chemistry, and sociology. These are all part of the whole. Each discipline emerges from a generic unity. Ironically, as I decided to major in philosophy, that generic unity eventually emerged. The thoughts of Alfred North Whitehead were especially good on this. I did learn that Plato, Aristotle, and other thinkers touched on almost all subjects. But Whitehead spoke of unified learning. Then came general system theory, human factors engineering ergonomics. Ergonomics human factors engineering made a particularly deep impres- sion on me. Where society has all but ridiculed philosophy, ergonomics was tacitly doing philosophy. An engineering and therefore hard science article noted that we may have options in the degree to which to interface people with machines and automation. However, we will probably never have automation or machines without any human operator, or an operator without machines. That’s a philosophical, not engineering issue. A book on engineering, along these lines, said that ergonomics is not a choice between having and not having the user, but the extent to which we design technology for the user. That, too, is the philosophical issue. From high school on, I started researching and writing about general education or liberal arts and sciences. Two previous books, Phenomenology and Education, and Learning Values Lifelong, were first attempts at putting together my views. But thinking is always a work in progress. The following book eventually resulted as I have attempted progress. INTRODUCTION: HUMAN FACTORS ENGINEERING SUPPORTS METAPHYSICS AND PHILOSOPHY Unified Philosophy is for the student and educated citizen, but not at the exclusion of the professional intellectual. It introduces students and the literate citizen to the subject matter’s importance as foundations of all jobs. Philosophical options underlie technology, arts, and sciences. The following pages serve as a unified view of ethics, philosophy, hermeneutics, ergonomics, and metaphysics, is an ongoing introduction, a reintroduction, orienting and reorienting advances in knowledge. This volume is for colleges and universities and theological seminaries. It is for the study of philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, theology of culture, ergo- nomics, and hermeneutics. A careful perspective discerns that its scope em- braces an interdisciplinary view of theology and religion. Metaphysics allows the reader to appreciate how all remaining topics are derived reality. Religion and theology are more expansive than we think. In colleges and universities, this book is for introductions to metaphysics, ethics, hermeneutics, human factors engineering, city planning.
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