Top Research Papers on Philosophy

Preface. Acknowledgments. Introduction. 1. The Linguistic Turn and the Conceptual Turn. 2. Taking Philosophical Questions at Face Value. 3. Metaphysical Conceptions of Analyticity. 4. Epistemological Conceptions of Analyticity. 5. Knowledge of Metaphysical Modality. 6. Thought Experiments. 7. Evidence in Philosophy. 8. Knowledge Maximization. Afterword. Must Do Better. Appendix 1. Modal Logic within Counterfactual Logic. Appendix 2. Counterfactual Donkeys. Bibliography. Index

As Apel himself notes in his preface, the expression "Transformation of Philosophy" bears an ambiguity, naming both a change that took place in the development of philosophy as well as Apel's own systematic project. As a historical approach the title characterizes the transformation that philosophy has undergone in 20th century philosophy through an emphasis on the mediation and the configuring power of language. Apel focuses on three main currents, represented by Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Peirce.

This article looks at the historical materialism approach of Karl Max and naturalism according to J.J Rousseau. Materialism is an understanding that only relies on material that does not believe in what is behind the unseen world. Not believing in the unseen world means not believing in the existence of a power that controls the universe and that automatically denies the existence of God as the creator of the universe, because according to this understanding nature and everything in it originate from one source, namely matter. Marx believed that human intellectual development was determined by...

Drawing on the phenomenological tradition in the philosophy of science and philosophy of nature, Patrick Heelan concludes that perception is a cognitive, world-building act, and is therefore never absolute or finished.

I will argue for three points. The first is on the need to make Chinese philosophy a world philosophy. The second point is that, in order to promote Chinese philosophy as a world philosophy we should not historicize philosophy. Philosophy and history are two different disciplines. As important as historical context is, overemphasizing it or even taking philosophy merely as a matter of intellectual history makes it difficult for non-specialists to study Chinese philosophy, and is therefore counter-productive to advancing it as a world philosophy. A good balance is thus needed in order to develo...

So many questions, such an imagination, endless speculation: the child seems to be a natural philosopher - until the ripe old age of eight or nine, when the spirit of inquiry mysteriously fades. What happened? Was it something we did - or didn't do? Was the child truly the philosophical being he once seemed? Gareth Matthews takes up these concerns in "The Philosophy of Childhood", an account of children's philosophical potential and of childhood as an area of philosophical inquiry. Seeking a philosophy that represents the range and depth of children's inquisitive minds, Matthews explores both ...

Even the most cursory of glances at the history of boredom reveals that boredom has been a topic of immense discussion. That same glance also reveals that there is not just one kind of boredom. There is the fastidium of Seneca, the horror loci of Lucretius, and the religious boredom of acedia. There is the sadness and listlessness of tristesse and melancholy, the void of Pascal, and the emptiness of La Rochefoucauld and of 18th-century Versailles. There is the ennui of Mme Du Deffand, of Chateubriand’s René, and of Goethe’s Werther. There is the despair of Schopenhauer, the monotony of factory...

This research examines nomenclature disputes in Islamic Philosophy of Education using historical, anagogical and philosophical approaches. The research question posed is how the disputes over terms such as 'tarbiyah', 'ta'lim' and 'ta'dib' reflect different views within the Islamic educational tradition and what the philosophical and spiritual implications are. The aim of this study is to provide a deeper understanding of the evolution and meaning of these terms and their contribution to the discourse of Islamic education. The method used is an in-depth literature analysis with a qualitative a...

The relation a true sentence bears to the world is often considered the central word-world connection, based perhaps on a relation of reference between the parts of the sentence and parts of the world. We’ll start by reading a series of articles focused on a lively contemporary debate between those who accept this common-place, who regard the analysis of this robust correspondence between a true sentence and the world as an important philosophical problem, and those who reject it (at least as the correspondence theorists intend it), holding instead that ‘truth’ is a simple syntactic device wit...

Philosophy of Psychedelics is the first scholarly monograph in English devoted to the philosophical analysis of psychedelic drugs. Its central focus is the apparent conflict between the growing use of psychedelics in psychiatry and the philosophical worldview of naturalism, which holds that the natural world is all that exists. The book reviews scientific evidence that psychedelics such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin can be given safely in controlled conditions, and can cause lasting psychological benefits with one or two administrations. Supervised psychedelic sessions c...

Abstract What is the future of Philosophy of education? Or as many of scholars and thinkers in this final ‘future-focused’ collective piece from the philosophy of education in a new key Series put it, what are the futures—plural and multiple—of the intersections of ‘philosophy’ and ‘education?’ What is ‘Philosophy’; and what is ‘Education’, and what role may ‘enquiry’ play? Is the future of education and philosophy embracing—or at least taking seriously—and thinking with Indigenous ethicoontoepistemologies? And, perhaps most importantly, what is that ‘Future’? These debates have been located i...

Review of Dokman, F., & Cornelli, E. M. (Eds.). (2022). Beyond Bantu Philosophy: Contextualizing Placide Tempels's Initiative in African Thought. London and New York: Routledge.

In this article, Whitehead's transition from a Philosophy of Evolution to a Philosophy of Organism is studied primarily on the basis of the evidence provided by the first two volumes of The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, especially the second volume that deals with the period 1925–1927 and that is subtitled General Metaphysical Problems of Science.

Abstract In its attempt to deflate of the pretensions of ‘Western knowledge’, the epistemic decolonisation movement carries on the work of Socrates, who sought to persuade those who thought that they were wise but were not, that they were not. Yet in its determination to recover and elevate indigenous systems of thought, decolonisation seems opposed to this very work, which is always corrosive of inherited belief. Decolonisation both expresses and contradicts the spirit of Socratic philosophy.

A BSTRACT : This paper examines the interplay between astrobiology and philosophy, emphasizing how each field enriches the other and poses new questions. It argues that astrobiology’s study of the origins and distribution of life in the universe requires a broader philosophical framework, termed astrophilosophy . This discipline would address fundamental questions about reality, physical laws, and the nature of life beyond Earth. The paper highlights the educational importance of recognizing and redefining concepts such as life and intelligence in a universal context, critiquing the human-centri...

The Open Science [OS] movement aims to foster the wide dissemination, scrutiny and re-use of research components for the good of science and society. This Element examines the role played by OS principles and practices within contemporary research and how this relates to the epistemology of science. After reviewing some of the concerns that have prompted calls for more openness, it highlights how the interpretation of openness as the sharing of resources, so often encountered in OS initiatives and policies, may have the unwanted effect of constraining epistemic diversity and worsening epistemi...

<jats:p />

Cannon, Susan Faye. 1978. Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period. New York: Dawson. Ette, Ottmar, ed. 2018. Alexander von Humboldt. Das Buch der Begegnungen. München: Manesse. Fiedler, Horst, and Ulrike Leitner. 2000. Alexander von Humboldts Schriften. Bibliographie der selbständig erschienenen Werke. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Wulf, Andrea. 2015. The Invention of Nature. The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science. London: John Murray.

Comprised mostly of previously published essays, Robert Pippin’s Philosophy by Other Means reads less as a monograph than a snapshot of his entire oeuvre. For those unfamiliar, that oeuvre is dense and diverse, made up of over 20 books that range from influential studies of German philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche (Pippin has published half a dozen books on Hegel alone) to philosophical examinations of literature and film (including studies of Henry James and J. M. Coetzee, as well as of Alfred Hitchcock, Douglas Sirk, film noir, and US westerns). In this regard, Pippin may very ...

This thoughtful reader represents a cooperative effort to provide an introduction to the philosophy of science focused on cultivating an understanding of both the workings of science and its historical and social context.

Envy is almost universally condemned and feared. But is its bad reputation always warranted? In this book, Sara Protasi argues that envy is more multifaceted than it seems, and that some varieties of it can be productive and even virtuous. Protasi brings together empirical evidence and philosophical research to generate a novel view according to which there are four kinds of envy: emulative, inert, aggressive, and spiteful. For each kind, she individuates different situational antecedents, phenomenological expressions, motivational tendencies, and behavioral outputs. She then develops the norm...

This study aims to reveal the relationship between Islamic philosophy and Islamic economic philosophy, both in terms of foundation, operation, and objectives. This library research (Library Research) uses documentation data collection techniques with data analysis, namely content analysis. The results showed that the relationship between sharia philosophy and sharia economic philosophy is that there is a philosophical foundation based on al-qur'am, hadith, ijma 'and qiyas, as well as operational principles, observations are made, take generalization conclusions and serve as theory, while the g...

Luxury has been associated with superficiality, consumerism and meaninglessness throughout the history of serious philosophical thought.How could something so obviously about the external possibly be existentially significant or even a profound concept?Luxury Philosophycarves out alternative modes of understanding the luxurious arguing that the negative characterization by 18th- and 19th-century philosophers of luxury as dissatisfaction or as an evil enjoyed by the idle rich gave way in the 20th century and beyond to more positive, even potentially revolutionary, theories of luxury as voluptuo...

Roman Philosophy. Although the Romans were a practical people throughout their history, the influence of the Greeks also made its presence felt in the field of philosophy. This has been increasingly configured since 168 BC, when the Romans conquered Macedonia. From this moment on, many philosophers and rhetoricians from Greece began to come to Rome. Stoicism was the most widespread and influential philosophical current in the Roman Empire, until Christianity became the state religion. Thus, Late Stoicism or New Roman Stoicism/Roman Neo-Stoicism had the most followers and admirers in Rome, both...

When we interpret statistics, we inevitably incorporate our personal knowledge and philosophical preferences. All statisticians therefore need to understand the philosophical foundation of probability and statistics, say Yudi Pawitan and Youngjo Lee – and puzzles and paradoxes can help

The notion of ‘philosophy moves’ is introduced: prominent tropes featured in contemporary academic philosophy that are tools for advancing and enriching philosophical debates and an ensemble of moves for deployment in novel contexts are collected.

This Element is a concise, high-level introduction to the philosophy of physical symmetry. It begins with the notion of 'physical representation' (the kind of empirical representation of nature that we effect in doing physics), and then lays out the historically and conceptually central case of physical symmetry that frequently falls under the rubric of 'the Relativity Principle,' or 'Galileo's Ship.' This material is then used as a point of departure to explore the key hermeneutic challenge concerning physical symmetry in the past century, namely understanding the physical significance of the...

The text emphasizes the importance of brain processes beyond those in the neocortex and then explores what makes processing in neocortex different, and considers implications of findings in neuroscience for how humans conceive of themselves and practices such as embracing norms.

This work presents two examples of interdisciplinary collaborations I have led, as a philosopher, alongside machine learning engineers, which resulted in great outcomes and significantly advanced the state of the art in the domain of online social interactions.

ABSTRACT The Philosophy of Right presents us with a vision of bureaucratic paternalism that is designed to check the excesses of free markets set in motion by the triumph of natural-law thinking, which abstracted the principles of private property and subjective freedom from the institutions that had tamed them and situated them in a stable context. Against these excesses Hegel pits the agricultural estate, which has not succumbed to natural-law thinking; and a “universal estate” of bureaucrats who are educated in Hegel’s philosophy itself, freeing them of the natural-law conflation of human n...

The paper focuses on the review of current literature on formal philosophy. Special attention is paid to the review of the book «Introduction to Formal Philosophy» [Hansson, Hendricks, 2018]. The book is a consistent introduction to the problems of formal philosophy, a research tradition that relies on the precise mathematical tools in order to study traditional philosophical problems. The methods of formal philosophy are successfully applied not only to the problems of ontology, epistemology and philosophy of language but also relevant for the problems of ethics, axiology and social philosoph...

This book represents a new approach to philosophy. It treats philosophy as not a collection of systems, but as a study of problems. It recognizes in traditional philosophical systems the historical function of having asked questions rather than having given solutions. Professor Reichenbach traces the failures of the systems to psychological causes. Speculative philosophers offered answers at a time when science had not yet provided the means to give true answers. Their search for certainty and for moral directives led them to accept pseudo-solutions. Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and many o...

Much is being made about the erosion of public trust in science. Surveys show a modest decline in the United States from a very high level of trust, but that is seen for other institutions as well. What is apparent from the surveys is that a better explanation of the nature of science—that it is revised as new data surface—would have a strong positive effect on public trust. Because scientists are so aware of this feature, it is often taken for granted that the public understands this too. A step toward addressing this problem would be revising undergraduate and graduate curricula to teach not...

Recent discussions in the history of analytic philosophy have targeted questions about the concept of ‘Analytic Philosophy’ itself. Scholars, such as Glock (2008) and Preston (2004), have argued that ‘Analytic Philosophy’ cannot plausibly be characterised in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions and that other, more pragmatic, approaches must be taken instead. In this paper, we argue that similar questions that have recently emerged about the status of ‘Western Philosophy’ can be informed by these debates in the history of analytic philosophy. Some recent scholars, most notably Platzky ...

Ethics in learning is an important thing that must exist. Where when we are studying a science then automatically we must be able to master it and understand the science. But it's not enough to just understand because one of the concepts of learning is to make a science a lesson so that we become better than before. The method that the author uses is the literature review method where the goal is to explore existing theories and encode them with other theories from other sources. The aim is to provide additional information to readers and to become material for review in the development of oth...

The contemporary relevance of unraveling the transformative power of philosophy lies in helping to secure its place in the academe and in enabling personal change for the benefit of the individual and the society in which we live. Yet formulating the transformative power of various philosophies, of different philosophic notions, and of philosophy itself as a rational discipline which addresses the mind leads to laying the ground for a new field. This is what I attempt to do on my own, yet briefly, in this article, and at length, with the help of others, in the Handbook for Transformative Philo...

Semantics and pragmatics – the study of meaning, and meaning in context, respectively – are two fundamental areas of linguistics, and as such are crucial to our understanding of how meaning is created. However, their theoretical ideas are often introduced without making clear connections between views, theories, and problems. This pioneering volume is both a textbook and a research guide, taking the reader on a journey through language and ultimately enabling them to think about meaning as linguists and philosophers would. Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, it introduces semantics, pr...

Jonathan Y. Tsou contends that the broader ideal of biological kinds offers a more promising and empirically ascertainable naturalistic standard for assessing the reality of mental disorders and the validity of psychiatric categories.

One of the traditional subjects of discussion among historians of philosophy is the question of the status of the history of philosophy as well as a discipline, as well as the tasks, possibilities, and limitations of some approaches and genres of the historiography of philosophy. The article focuses on the analysis of the contribution to these discussions of studies in the historiography of philosophy, which began in Francophone philosophy in the 1970s with the publication of the studies of L. Braun and M. Gueroult, in particular, the answers to the mentioned questions, proposed within the fra...

In recent years, the “science of science” has combined computational methods with novel data sources to understand the dynamics of research communities. Many of the questions investigated by science of science are also relevant to academic philosophy. To what extent can the discipline be divided into subfields with different methods and topics? How are prestige and credit distributed across the discipline? And how do these factors interact with other factors, such as gender, to shape job market outcomes? Using job market data for anglophone academic philosophy, this paper finds, first, evidenc...

mujtahid’s fatwa is also something I have commented on in a chapter of mine (Panjwani 2019) but more importantly represents arguably the most radical aspect of Qursawi’s socio-legal reform for Russian Muslim communities that Spannaus presents. Again, it would have valuable for Spannaus to compare Qursawi’s views with Shi’i jurists such as Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (1935–1980) and Murtada Mutahhari (1919–1979) who attempted some reform of the way in which taqlid and ijtihad were practiced and operated within their own historical context. In sum, I would highly recommend this book to scholars, rese...

Thermodynamics is regarded as a universal but not foundational theory because its laws for macroscopic quantities have not been derived from microscopic entities. Thus, to root thermodynamics into the fundamental substance, atomism is revived, thinking that the light quantum is the indivisible and permanent element. Assuming the same basic building blocks constitute everything, the state of any system can be quantified by entropy, the logarithmic probability measure multiplied by Boltzmann’s constant. Then, the change in entropy expresses the system’s evolution toward thermodynamic balance wit...

The key feature of human consciousness is our ability to access and practice svyaznost’ (coherence, connectivity) grounded in tselostnost’ (wholeness). This ability is common to humans and animals in one of its aspects (comprehending the world as an order of things), though animals do not share its other core mani­festations (coherent speech and thought as a practice of svyaznost’). The com­monplace understanding of language as a sign system falls short of grasping the development of svyaznost’ and therefore needs to be reconsidered. Though universal for humans in its unfolded state, svyaznost...

<jats:p />

Produced by Stanford University and KALW public media, Philosophy Talk is the streaming platform for the public radio program that has been on the air for almost 20 years. The philosophers and their diverse guests discuss a wide range of academic topics in an accessible and engaging manner, and there is content to support disciplines across academia, including literature, history, dance, art, political science, business, and gender studies.

One of the prevailing agenda of philosophical discourse and inquiry in the Philippine academe is to problematize the existence and status of Filipino philosophy. Filipino professors of philosophy have claimed that the existence of Filipino philosophy is already answered and no longer a legitimate subject of debate. However, the “answer” that ultimately puts this question to rest remains ambiguous. My objective in this paper is to provide an account of this ambiguity and to go through the two pathological responses towards the problem of Filipino Philosophy, namely, (1) the nostalgia for an “au...

In this paper we argue that the approach for teaching non-Western, and specifically Chinese philosophy to undergraduate Western students, does not have to be significantly different than that for teaching philosophies from “Western” traditions. Four areas will be explored. Firstly, we look at debates on teaching non-Western philosophy from the perspective of themes or traditions, suggesting that, as an overarching guideline, it is mote discussion. Secondly, in terms of making generalizations, we argue that no more explanation of the “Chineseness” of Chinese philosophy be offered than the “Germ...

Historians of science have applied Piagetian stage theory to the history of sciences and philosophy. It was found that central parts of ancient metaphysics such as animism and magic have to be accounted to certain stages well-known in developmental psychology. Greater parts of ancient physics or of Plato´s theory of ideas could be successfully illuminated by the same tool. Accordingly, the historical emergence of the formal operational stage gave birth both to the rise of the early modern philosophy and of the new physical sciences. Piagetian theory is also helpful to describe the very beginni...

A milestone in Japan's post-war philosophical thought and a dramatic turning point in Tanabe's own philosophy, Philosophy as Metanoetics calls for nothing less than a complete and radical rethinking of the philosophical task itself. It is a powerful, original work, showing vast erudition in all areas of both Eastern and Western thought.

This Element offers an introduction to selected philosophical issues that arise in contemporary particle physics, aimed at philosophers who have limited prior exposure to quantum field theory. One the one hand, it critically surveys philosophical work on the representation of particles in quantum field theory, the formal machinery and conceptual implications of renormalization and renormalization group methods, and ontological and methodological questions raised by the use of effective field theory techniques in particle physics. On the other, it identifies topics in particle physics that have...