Philosophy of Religion in Latin America and Europe

Philosophy of Religion in Latin America and Europe

Author: Michael Schulz

Publisher: V&R Unipress

Published: 2021-04-12

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 3847012908

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The title of this publication suggests a double meaning: on the one hand, most of the contributions outline philosophies of religion relevant for Latin America, without, however, betraying an explicit Latin American perspective. Does not philosophical reason always articulate itself in the same way, whether in Berlin or Rio de Janeiro? On the other hand, the title refers to a specific form of philosophy that has developed regionally and bears explicit traces of its origins that differentiate it from philosophy in Europe. Does not philosophical reason always articulate itself in a specific cultural context? The charm of the book lies in the encounter of these two variants to think philosophically.


Evolutionary Debunking Arguments

Evolutionary Debunking Arguments

Author: Diego E. Machuca

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-09-09

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 1000648591

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Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in evolutionary debunking arguments directed against certain types of belief, particularly moral and religious beliefs. According to those arguments, the evolutionary origins of the cognitive mechanisms that produce the targeted beliefs render these beliefs epistemically unjustified. The reason is that natural selection cares for reproduction and survival rather than truth, and false beliefs can in principle be as evolutionarily advantageous as true beliefs. The present volume brings together fourteen essays that examine evolutionary debunking arguments not only in ethics and philosophy of religion, but also in philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, and epistemology. The essays move forward research on those arguments by shedding fresh light on old problems and proposing new lines of inquiry. The book will appeal to scholars and graduate students interested in the possible skeptical implications of evolutionary theory in any of the above domains.


Human Enactment Of Intelligent Technologies: Towards Metis And Mindfulness

Human Enactment Of Intelligent Technologies: Towards Metis And Mindfulness

Author: W David Holford

Publisher: World Scientific

Published: 2021-08-05

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9811237298

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This book demystifies what artificial intelligence is, examines its strength and limitations in comparison to what humans are capable of, and investigates the nature of human adaptive expertise across the concept of mètis. It also examines a particular family of mindsets that we as humans have adopted over the ages, namely epistemologies of representational knowledge. These representational perspectives have followed us into numerous fields, including how we perceive and comprehend human cognition — leading to 'with a hammer everything looks like a nail' syndrome. As such, this book presents the alternative phenomenological viewpoint of embodied direct reality within the cognitive sciences in the form of radical embodied cognition and, more importantly, how it allows us to better highlight and comprehend human mètis and its adaptive expertise. We then examine why we collectively continue to enact and perpetuate predominant mindsets of representations across the phenomena of mindlessness. To counter this, we re-visit the practice of individual and collective mindfulness, providing a potential 'beachhead' in our re-appropriation of technology (artificial intelligence) towards achieving the best of both worlds — that is, allowing human creativity and ingenuity to be expressed with artificial intelligence as a tool to help us do just that across meaningful human control. Finally, we conclude by examining current top-of-the-horizon activities and debates regarding quantum physics in relation to the human mind and artificial intelligence and how, once again, representational mindsets need not be the only tool in town.


A Metaphysics of Platonic Universals and their Instantiations

A Metaphysics of Platonic Universals and their Instantiations

Author: José Tomás Alvarado

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-10-27

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 303053393X

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This book offers a detailed defense of a metaphysics of Platonic universals and a conception of particular objects that is coherent with said metaphysics. The work discusses all the main alternatives in metaphysics of properties and tries to show why universals are the entities that best satisfy the theoretical roles required for a property. The work also explains the advantages of Platonic over Aristotelian universals in the metaphysics of modality and natural laws. Moreover, it is argued that only Platonic universals are coherent with the grounding profile required for universals. The traditional objections against Platonism are discussed and answered. The third part of the book, finally, offers a conception of particular objects as nuclear bundles of tropes that is coherent with the Platonic ontology of universals. This book is of interest to anyone that wants to understand the current –and intricate– debate in metaphysics of properties and its incidence in many other areas in philosophy.


Diagnosing Social Pathology

Diagnosing Social Pathology

Author: Frederick Neuhouser

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-10-27

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 1009235052

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Can a human society suffer from illness like a living thing? And if so, how does such a malaise manifest itself? In this thought-provoking book, Fred Neuhouser explains and defends the idea of social pathology, demonstrating what it means to describe societies as 'ill', or 'sick', and why we are so often drawn to conceiving of social problems as ailments or maladies. He shows how Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Durkheim – four key philosophers who are seldom taken to constitute a 'tradition' – deploy the idea of social pathology in comparable ways, and then explores the connections between societal illnesses and the phenomena those thinkers made famous: alienation, anomie, ideology, and social dysfunction. His book is a rich and compelling illumination of both the idea of social disease and the importance it has had, and continues to have, for philosophical views of society.


The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing

The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing

Author: Andrew Feenberg

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2023-02-28

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1804290831

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How Marcuse helps us understand the ecological crisis of the 21st century For several years after 1968, Herbert Marcuse was one of the most famous philosophers in the world. He became the face of Frankfurt School Critical Theory for a generation in turmoil. His fame rested on two remarkable books, Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man. These two books represent the utopian hopes and dystopian fears of the time. In the 1960s and 70s, young people seeking a theoretical basis for their revolution found it in his work. Marcuse not only supported their struggles against imperialism and race and gender discrimination, he foresaw the far-reaching implications of the destruction of the natural environment. Marcuse’s Marxism was influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, Hegel and Freud. These eclectic sources grounded an original critique of advanced capitalism focused on the social construction of subjectivity and technology. Marcuse contrasted the “one-dimensionality” of conformist experience with the “new sensibility” of the New Left. The movement challenged a society that “delivered the goods” but devastated the planet with its destructive science and technology. A socialist revolution would fail if it did not transform these instruments into means of liberation, both of nature and human beings. This aspiration is alive today in the radical struggle over climate change. Marcuse offers theoretical resources for understanding that struggle.


Secularization, Desecularization, and Toleration

Secularization, Desecularization, and Toleration

Author: Vyacheslav Karpov

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-10-22

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 3030540464

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This book challenges the modern myth that tolerance grows as societies become less religious. The myth inseparably links the progress of toleration to the secularization of modern society. This volume scrutinizes this grand narrative theoretically and empirically, and proposes alternative accounts of the varied relationships between diverse interpretations of religion and secularity and multiple secularizations, desecularizations, and forms of toleration. The authors show how both secular and religious orthodoxies inform toleration and persecution, and how secularizations and desecularizations engender repressive or pluralistic regimes. Ultimately, the book offers an agency-focused perspective which links the variation in toleration and persecution to the actors of secularization and desecularization and their cultural programs.


Immanent Reasoning or Equality in Action

Immanent Reasoning or Equality in Action

Author: Shahid Rahman

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-08-16

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 331991149X

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This monograph proposes a new way of implementing interaction in logic. It also provides an elementary introduction to Constructive Type Theory (CTT). The authors equally emphasize basic ideas and finer technical details. In addition, many worked out exercises and examples will help readers to better understand the concepts under discussion. One of the chief ideas animating this study is that the dialogical understanding of definitional equality and its execution provide both a simple and a direct way of implementing the CTT approach within a game-theoretical conception of meaning. In addition, the importance of the play level over the strategy level is stressed, binding together the matter of execution with that of equality and the finitary perspective on games constituting meaning. According to this perspective the emergence of concepts are not only games of giving and asking for reasons (games involving Why-questions), they are also games that include moves establishing how it is that the reasons brought forward accomplish their explicative task. Thus, immanent reasoning games are dialogical games of Why and How.


Normative Reasons

Normative Reasons

Author: Artūrs Logins

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-08-04

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1009084119

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Reasons matter greatly to us in both ordinary and theoretical contexts, being connected to two fundamental normative concerns: figuring out what we should do and what attitudes to have, and understanding the duties and responsibilities that apply to us. This book introduces and critiques most of the contemporary theories of normative reasons considerations that speak in favor of an action, belief, or emotion - to explore how they work. Artūrs Logins develops and defends a new theory: the Erotetic view of reasons, according to which normative reasons are appropriate answers to normative why questions (Why should I do this?). This theory draws on evidence of how why-questions work in informal logic, language and philosophy of science. The resulting view is able to avoid the problems of previous accounts, while retaining all of their attractive features, and it also suggests exciting directions for future research. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.