Showing papers in "Open Journal of Philosophy in 2011"

Bioethics and the Challenges to Its Growth in Africa

Abstract: Bioethics has now become a burgeoning interdisciplinary field of scholarly investigation which has in the past decades migrated from bedside consultations to public policy debates and wider cultural and social consultations that privilege all discourse about everyday life issues. It has made exponential progress in addressing moral issues in science, technology and medicine in the world. In spite of this progress, core bioethics issues, approaches and values are still exclusively Western dominated and largely foreign to most African societies. Although medical ethics has existed since the time of Hippocrates, in Africa, there is a noted sluggish growth and low prestige of ethics education as bioethics is not taught in most higher educational systems of learning, low understanding of its processes as researchers manifest a general lack of appreciation for bioethics and general ignorance characterize those involved in research about ethical practices. This is unfortunate, considering that various research that aim at finding solutions to the multiple problems affecting African societies and the need to address and assess these problems in ethical terms are of crucial importance to Africans. In this work, I argue that Africa lacks human, institutional, infrastructural capacities and a real African authenticity in bioethics. Additionally, African views on bioethics are neither sufficiently developed nor heard. Africans need to confront these current challenges of bioethics to their lives and communities and to develop African conceptions to incorporate African specificities and approaches.

Three philosophical problems about consciousness and their possible resolution

Abstract: Three big philosophical problems about consciousness are: Why does it exist? How do we explain and understand it? How can we explain brain-consciousness correlations? If functionalism were true, all three problems would be solved. But it is false, and that means all three problems remain unsolved (in that there is no other obvious candidate for a solution). Here, it is argued that the first problem cannot have a solution; this is inherent in the nature of explanation. The second problem is solved by recognizing that (a) there is an explanation as to why science cannot explain consciousness, and (b) consciousness can be explained by a different kind of explanation, empathic or “personalistic” explanation, compatible with, but not reducible to, scientific explanation. The third problem is solved by exploiting David Chalmers“principle of structural coherence”, and involves postulating that sensations experienced by us–visual, auditory, tactile, and so on–amount to minute scattered regions in a vast, multi dimensional “space” of all possible sensations, which vary smoothly, and in a linear way, throughout the space. There is also the space of all possible sentient brain processes. There is just one, unique one-one mapping between these two spaces that preserves continuity and linearity. It is this which provides the explanation as to why brain processes and sensations are correlated as they are. I consider objections to this unique-matching theory, and consider how the theory might be empirically confirmed.

A Plea for Agonism Between Analytic and Continental Philosophy

Abstract: Since the rise of analytic philosophy, a virtual Berlin wall seems to be inserted with respect to continental philosophy. If we take into account the difference between both traditions concerning the respective subject-matters, the pivotal goals, the modes of inquiry and scholarship, the semantic idioms, the methodological approaches, the ongoing discussions, the conferences and publications etc., it is hardly an overstatement to say that both traditions evolve insulated and have a conflicting relation. From a meta-philosophical stance, the common and prima facie reply to this split is the encouragement of merging inclinations. I argue for another strategy. Based on a discussion of the intrinsic differences and their importance, I’m inclined to conclude that unification coincides with a loss of authenticity, blurring the critical potential of both traditions. Hence, we are better of endorsing agonistic pluralism between analytic philosophy and contemporary continental philosophy. The plurality of points of view render several opportunities for productive critiques and fruitful cross-overs between both traditions. Alas, the susceptibility for these innovations is vastly counteracted due to a widespread attitude of antipathy, ignorance and occasional vulgarisation.

Postmodern Science Edification Philosophy

Abstract: The objective is to introduce and describe a new philosophy for global science edification that will determine the extent and nature of humans’ accomplishments. These will affect life quality worldwide. Science as an ultimate essence encircles theoretical and applied findings and discoveries. These can only contribute to forming a trivial core, whilst the most crucial are insightful moral surroundings. Morality is most concerned with mentorship commitments. To sustain a dense and rigid shape that progressively improves science and life quality, imagination must be complemented with harmonizing approaches. Such perceptions become an obligation as growing knowledge creates novel questions and challenges. The upper tree of science glorified with blooming branches of knowledge, particularly over the last few centuries, is predicted to undergo progressive declines in the strength of its edification foundations unless the lower tree receives most-deserving mentorship contemplations. The upper tree describes tangible science products in routin life, and the lower tree represents sustainable mentorship. Mentors must replace teachers, by definition, and commit to generating more qualified educators than themselves. Mentors are expected to welcome and manage challenges from mentees. Challenges play crucial roles in granting mentees with integrated pathways of scientific development. The resulting pictures will be eagerly prone to revisions and elaborations as mentees themselves step into the pathway. This systematic edification will strengthen science roots in mentees’ minds and will uphold a sturdy science body for society. Science pictured as an integrated circle grants a prospect to envision where humans are and where not to end up. Maintaining a definitive shape for science in any major before and while enriching central cores with experimental novelties in minds and laboratories is crucial to improving man’s fulfillment of time in the third millennium. Such integrities are an obligation to optimally preserve and utilize what humans have achieved thus far and continue to accomplish.

The Mind-Body Problem Today

Abstract: An old philosophical problem, the mind-body problem, has not been yet solved by philosophers or scientists. Even if in cognitive neuroscience has been a stunning development in the last 20 years, the mind-body problem remained unsolved. Even if the majority of researchers in this domain accept the identity theory from an ontological viewpoint, many of them reject this position from an epistemological viewpoint. In this context, I consider that it is quite possible the framework of this problem to be wrong and this is the main reason the problem could not be solved. I offer an alternative, the epistemologically different worlds perspective, that replace the world or the universe. In this new context, the mind-body problem becomes a pseudo-problem.

Is Cognition an Attribute of the Self or It Rather Belongs to the Body? Some Dialectical Considerations on Udbhatabhatta’s Position against Nyāya and Vaisesika

Abstract: In this article an attempt is made to detect what could have been the dialectical reasons that impelled the Cār-vāka thinker Udbhatabhatta to revise and reformulate the classical materialistic concept of cognition. If indeed according to ancient Cārvākas cognition is an attribute entirely dependent on the physical body, for Udbhatabhatta cognition is an independent principle that, of course, needs the presence of a human body to manifest itself and for this very reason it is said to be a peculiarity of the body. Therefore, Udbhatabhatta seems to de-scribe the cognizing faculty according to a double ontology: it is both a principle and a characteristic, both inde-pendent and dependent. Two philosophical contexts—Vaisesika and Nyāya schools—are here taken into account as possible anti-Cārvāka fault-finding points of view that spured Udbhatabhatta to reconsider the Cārvāka per-spective. Although we do not have so much textual material on this particular aspect of the ancient and medieval philosophical debate in India, it nonetheless can be supposed that Udbhatabhatta’s reformulation of the concept of cognition was a tentative response to the Vaisesika idea that cognition is not an attribute of the body, rather of the mind (which is here supposed to be eternal), and to the Naiyāyika perspective according to which cognition would be an attribute of an everlasting self. In the case of the Nyāya school, fortunately we have at our disposal the criticism put forward by Vātsyāyana against the materialistic conception of cognition during this time. By examining some Vātsyāyana’s objections, it will emerge that Udbhatabhatta’s idea of cognition really seems to have the aspect of a consistent answer to them, from a renewed materialistic point of view.

Pretense Theory and the Imported Background

Abstract: Kendall Walton’s pretense theory, like its rivals, says that what’s true in a fiction F depends in part on the importation of background propositions into F. The aim of this paper is to present, explain, and defend a brief yet straightforward argument–one which exploits the specific mechanism by which the pretense theory says propositions are imported into fictions–for the falsity of the pretense theory.

The European Regional Integration in the IR Literature:A Review of Scholarly Support and Opposition

Abstract: Most of what has been written on the ECSC/ EEC/ EC/ EU, has not been done by international relations (IR) theorists, but by comparativists, sociologists, historians, anthropologists, legal scholars, and many others. These writings are in general classified as intergovernmentalist, federalist, and supranationalist (functionalist and neo- functionalist) in most accounts of the theoretical perspectives on the EU (Webb 1983, Rosamond 2000). Wiener and Diez 2004 add a rational choice institutional category, as well, as they think that the policy analysis within the polity developed into an autonomous brand of literature. It is only Andrew Hurrell in his chapter in Fawcett and Hurrell 1995, who makes an attempt to present the EU, as a regional integration, from the point of view of diverse IR approaches. Drawing on his classification scheme, I conduct an inquiry of the IR theories about European unification from the point of view of whether they allow for the iteration of the European experience in other parts of the world or not. The basic conclusion is that almost all IR work on Europe falls in the inter- governmentalist category, which tends to conceptualize the European Union as representing an n of 1. (Inter- governmentalism is the choice of realism and neo-realism, English School, and neoliberal institutionalism.) Within the liberal IR paradigm, there is a tension between law-focused and security-focused approaches, on the one hand, and economic approaches, on the other. The first believe in the possibility of multiple integrations, while the latter does not think that they are desirable. Critical theories are also hindered by divergent normative commitments, though the class-based theorizing is very clear about pursuing the social control of markets.

Evil Human Nature: From the Perspectives of St. Augustineand Hsun Tzu

Abstract: The view of evil human nature is important in Chinese and western cultures. The thesis chooses evil human in St. Augustine’s thoughts and Hsun Tzu’s thoughts to compare and analyze evil in these two. St. Augustine, who is called “the Saint of God”, views the definition of evil, the resource of it, and salvations of it from the aspect of religious beliefs. He considers that evil is the privation of goodness and is not created by God. Because God is omnipotent and all-good, it is impossible for God to create evil. Evil results from the free will of human beings themselves. If people want to attain their salvations, they should use their free will to choose good will and follow the goodness given by God. Hsun Tzu, one of Confucian scholars, puts forward evil human nature which is totally different from good human nature in Confucianism. He views the definition of evil, the source of it, and ways to change evil into good from the angle of social reality in Warring States Period. In Hsun Tzu’s views, evil results from the uninhibited extension of sound physical needs and desires for living. Hsun Tzu believes that human nature is evil and goodness comes from nurture, therefore, converting evil into good is to change human nature through nurturing. By further comparison and analysis, the thesis further looks into these two perspectives from their differences and similarities. It states their differences from five aspects: backgrounds, ways to change evil to good, categories, historical status, and positions of human beings. Apart from those, the thesis also refers to their similarities to complement the comparative analysis. From comparison and analysis, we can draw two conclusions: first, evil human nature from Hsun Tzu is simple in connotation and relatively objective compared with the view of St. Augustine; second, St. Augustine thinks that human beings are equal in front of evil, which has positive significance compared with the ideas posed by Hsun Tzu who insists on the distinction between saint and ordinary people, between monarchs and their subjects.

Did Foucault Revolutionize History

Abstract: With the pretext of analyzing Foucault’s contribution to history, the paper is an essay on the philosophy of history. It is shaped, fundamentally, as an answer to the historian Paul Veyne’s essay, “Foucault Revolutionizes History” (1978) and his assertions on Foucault and historical methodology; Veyne claimed Foucault to have revolutionized the discipline of history thanks to his singular gaze and his profound skepticism. The paper counters Veyne’s assertions on both Foucault and Veyne’s historiography and seeks to provide a concept of history that is more nuanced and conscious of the human sciences’ ontology and duties. To do so, the paper engages with a number of historical currents, thinkers, and concepts, which shape historical inquiry.

Aristotle’s Definition of Place and of Matter

Abstract: The accuracy of Aristotle’s definition of place is defended in terms of his form-matter theory. This theory is in turn defended against the objectionable notion that it entails matter is ultimately characterless.

A Critique of Recent Criticisms of Freud on Religious Belief

Abstract: The paper is a critique of recent criticisms of Sigmund Freud’s theory that religion is based on wishful thinking. The criticisms made by authors such as Alvin Plantinga, John Hick, William P. Alston, William Rowe, and Merol Westphal are critically examined. I defend Freud’s critique of religion as a satisfaction of our deepest desires for a heavenly father showing inductively that those desires render religious belief as unlikely to be true.

Passive Knowledge: How to Make Sense of Kant’s A Priori——Or How Not to Be “Too Busily Subsuming”

Abstract: Subjectivists, taking the “collapse” of the observation-interpretation contrast much too seriously, are led to imagine that even perceptual knowledge is active. And therefore subject dependent. Turning the tables on this popular trend, I argue that even conceptual knowledge is passive. Kant’s epistemology is conceptual. But if also active, then incoherent. If synthetic a priori truths are to follow upon our mental activity, they were neither true nor, far less, a priori before that activity. “A priori” and “active” are contradictory attributes of knowledge. As, indeed, are “a priori” and “subject-dependent” to begin with. Nothing a priori can be dependent on anything except itself, and least of all on the human subject. Kant does consider the active aspect of thought. The difference is that for him the more active it becomes, the less it is to be trusted. For we are no longer in the province of the Understanding, and its necessary truths, but in the realm of Pure Reason and its dialectical antinomies. Cognition activists who take a liking to Kant have simply mistaken Reason for the Understanding. And Reason is to Kant “the seat of all transcendental illusion”.

New Zeno and Actual Infinity

Abstract: In 1964 Jose Benardete invented the “New Zeno Paradox” about an infinity of gods trying to prevent a traveller from reaching his destination. In this paper it is argued, contra Priest and Yablo, that the paradox must be resolved by rejecting the possibility of actual infinity. Further, it is shown that this paradox has the same logical form as Yablo’s Paradox. It is suggested that constructivism can serve as the basis of a common solution to New Zeno and the paradoxes of truth, and a constructivist interpretation of Kripke’s theory of truth is given.

Theistic Panpsychic Communicative Rationality

Abstract: The difference between a scientific system and the non scientific system is only a matter of forms of rationality: so also the difference between empirical system and non empirical system explainable in terms of the kinds of rationality systems in their structures. Similarly, the classification of civilized cultures and primitive cultures or the black civilization and western civilization is all about forms of rationalizations. That is because the form of explanation of European Society is different from the form of explanation of the Black African animistic society. However, structural functionalism is an attempt on a large scale to combine the methods of both functionalism and structuralism which is not only extant in African philosophy but also embedded in the practice of tradition. Indeed Theistic Panpsychic rationality is culturally structural and functional thereby qualifying to be described as structural functional Panpsychic communicative animism.