It seems certain to me that I will die and stay dead. By “I”, I mean me, Greg Nixon, this person, this self-identity. I am so intertwined with the chiasmus of lives, bodies, ecosystems, symbolic intersubjectivity, and life on this particular planet that I cannot imagine this identity continuing alone without them. However, one may survive one’s life by believing in universal awareness, perfection, and the peace that passes all understanding. Perhaps, we bring this back with us to the Source (...) from which we began, changing it, enriching it. Once we have lived – if we don’t choose the eternal silence of oblivion by life denial, vanity, indifference, or simple weariness – the Source learns and we awaken within it. Awareness, consciousness, is universal – it comes with the territory – so maybe you will be one of the few prepared to become unexpectedly enlightened after the loss of body and self. You may discover your own apotheosis – something you always were, but after a lifetime of primate experience, now much more. Since you are of the Source and since you have changed from life experience and yet retained the dream of ultimate awakening, plus you have brought those chaotic emotions and memories back to the Source with you (though no longer yours), your life & memories will have mattered. Those who awaken beyond the death of self will have changed Reality. (shrink)

What happens to the inner light of consciousness with the death of the individual body and brain? Reductive materialism assumes it simply fades to black. Others think of consciousness as indicating a continuation of self, a transformation, an awakening or even alternatives based on the quality of life experience. In this issue, speculation drawn from theoretic research are presented. -/- Table of Contents Epigraph: From “The Immortal”, Jorge Luis Borges iii Editor’s Introduction: I Killed a Squirrel the Other Day, Gregory (...) M. Nixon iv-xi Research Essays The Tilde Fallacy and Reincarnation: Variations on a "Skeptical" Argument Teed Rockwell 862-881 Death, Consciousness, and Phenomenology, Steve Bindeman 882-899 The Idealist View of Consciousness After Death, Bernardo Kastrup 900-909 Consciousness, a Cosmic Phenomenon—A Hypothesis, Eva Déli 910-930 The Theory of a Natural Afterlife: A Newfound, Real Possibility for What Awaits Us at Death, Bryon K. Ehlmann 931-950 Near-Death Cases Desegregating Non-Locality/Disembodiment via Quantum Mediated Consciousness: An Extended Version of the Cell-Soul Pathway, Contzen Pereira & J Shashi Kiran Reddy 951-968 On the Possible Existence of Quantum Consciousness After Brain Death, Massimo Pregnolato & Alfredo Pereira Jr. 969-991 Science and Postmortem Survival, Edward F. Kelly 992-1011 Explorations ISS Theory: Cosmic Consciousness, Self, and Life Beyond Death in a Hyperdimensional Physics, Chris H. Hardy 1012-1035 Does the Consciousness End, Remain Awake, or Transform After Death? Radivoj Stankovich (with Micho Durdevich) 1036-1050 Big Bang Spirituality, Life, and Death, Ken Bausch 1051-1063 Death, Consciousness and the Quantum Paradigm, Ronald Peter Glasberg 1064-1077 Living With Limits: The Continuum of Consciousness, Donald Brackett 1078-1098 Mysticism, Consciousness, Death, Mike Sosteric 1099-1118 What Dies? Eternalism and the Afterlife in William James, Jonathan Bricklin 1119-1140 Theories of Consciousness and Death: Does Consciousness End, Continue, Awaken, or Transform When the Body Dies? Roger Cook 1141-1153 It’s the Other Way Around: Matter is a Form of Consciousness and Death is the End of the Illusion of Life in the World, James P. Kowall & Pradeep B. Deshpande 1154-1208 Statements A Feminine Vision for the World Consciousness, & a New Outrageous Ontology, Lorna Green 1209-1217 The Mask of Eternity: The Quest for Immortality and the Afterlife, Iona Miller 1218-1228 Are We Really “such stuff as dreams are made on”? Chris Nunn 1229-1225 Is the Afterlife a Non-Question? (Let's Hope Not), Deepak Chopra 1226-1230 Life After Death? An Improbable Essay, Stuart Kauffman 1231-1236. (shrink)

This volume focuses on dialogue and argumentation in contexts which are marked by truculence and discord. The contributors include well known argumentation scholars who discuss the issues this raises from the point of view of a variety of disciplines and points of view. The authors seek to address theoretically challenging issues in a way that is relevant to both the theory and the practice of argument. The collection brings together selected essays from the 2006 11th Wake Forest University Biennial Argumentation (...) Conference held at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida and the 2012 14th Wake Forest University Biennial Argumentation Conference held at Casa Artom in Venice, Italy. (shrink)

The relevance of the chosen direction of research is that e-learning at the present stage of development of society is one of the most popular forms of organization of the educational process. This primarily applies to vocational and postgraduate education. Its main advantage is that it focuses on creating a barrier-free learning environment, ensuring the availability of quality education without separation from work and family and regardless of the place of residence. The article analyzes the features of updating the education (...) system in the postmodern era and the urgent problems of the education system that need to be addressed. Features of e-learning as a means of meeting the demand for educational services, its advantages and disadvantages are characterized. The peculiarities of functioning of open educational resources as prospects of e-learning development are analyzed. Continuation of the initiated research is to study the specific characteristics of mobile learning as one of the possible options for e-learning. (shrink)

So much of what we experience in neoliberal capitalism resembles the operation of the camp. How then can we understand the camp as a political technology of labour control recurrent in historical capitalism, and why would we want to? Driven by the perennial imperatives to govern and to accumulate, the camp as a modulation of social control allows us to explore the role of ‘meta-disciplinary’ technique in the ‘real subsumption of labour’. The aims here are to question the sanguine expectations (...) of a liberal pastorate that is inextricable from the needs of capital; to articulate the ‘techniques of domination’ experienced in the idiom of neoliberal capitalism; and to find inspiration for corresponding counter-conducts and ‘techniques of the self’. This article offers a kind of historical archaeology of ‘meta-disciplinary’ technique by resuscitating Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a surprisingly rich source of insight into the operations of the camp modulation and the counter-conducts it engenders. The analysis to follow works in the space between Marxian and Foucauldian political thought opened up by the new materialisms, and draws upon the recent works of Lordon, Lazzarato, Negri, inter alia, that are currently enriching critical theory. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article, we argue that it is possible to approach teaching from a fully affirmative perspective: as an educational practice that has its own internal logic and intrinsic value. By analysing a fragment from one of the Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts presented in this article as a teaching event, we show that when starting from an empirical example of teaching it is possible to distinguish principles and gestures that testify to an ontological dimension of teaching. This is possible, (...) however, only when a particular reading of this empirical material is applied. We call this an immanent reading, as opposed to a transcendent reading. It should be clear that this kind of inquiry we briefly demonstrate here is exactly a post-critical attempt to re-establish our affirmative relation with one of the most devalued, repressed, and neglected educational practice, namely teaching. (shrink)

Why ask ‘what after post-modernism’? This question implies that postmodernism, as a grand narrative, recently withered away, that this is an event educators should be concerned with, and that it ca...

This article argues that Mannheim's work contains three distinct accounts of utopia. Two of these - utopia in its classical meaning as opposition to the given and utopia in its association with democratic planning - are well known. The third is found in Mannheim's reflections on the problem of ecstasy. In suggesting a utopia of individualist self-defnition and `pure relationship' it anticipates the recent writings of Beck, Bauman and Giddens.

The Cynic exhortation to live according to nature is far from transparent. I defend a traditional interpretation: to live in accordance with nature is to live in accordance with human nature, which is to live as a rational animal. After discussing methodological concerns, I consider the theriophilic proposal that the ideal Cynic lives like an animal. I marshal evidence against this view and in favor of the alternative of Cynics as rational animals. Finally, I anticipate and address the concern that (...) mine is an unduly idealized and Stoicized account. (shrink)

The article refers to the issue of freedom from a philosophical perspective. First of all, it discusses Plato’s metaphor of the cave in Politeia, in which the philosopher writes of freedom in its individual and collective forms. Then the article indicates how the metaphor was read by such contemporary philosophers as Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, who interpret Plato’s metaphor from existential-phenomenological and political perspectives. Heidegger stresses the freedom of a human being, who in the light of the subjective existential (...) experience begins to live objectively in an authentic way. He frees himself up from the impersonal-I. A person, who experienced the truth as un-concealment, is not enslaved anymore to the impersonality of the crowd. He is able to face his own mortality and to take responsibility for his own fate. A special expression of freedom is shown in his care for others, even if it means risking one’s life. Hannah Arendt interprets Plato’s metaphor from the perspective of political philosophy. Her assessment becomes some kind of memento. What if the prisoners of the cave simply do not want to leave their place? Does the philosopher have a right forcefully to pull them out of the cavern? What is better, the attitude of Socrates, who dialogues with people or the attitude of Plato, who simply lectures the mob? In this way Arendt refers to the concept of freedom, as it is sketched in Plato’s cave. At the same time, she argues with Heidegger’s interpretation of the Platonic metaphor. Heidegger stresses the freedom of a human being, who in the light of the subjective existential experience begins to live objectively in an authentic way. He frees himself up from the impersonal-I. Human, who experienced the truth as un-concealment and freedom, is not enslaved anymore with the impersonality of the crowd, which reject individualism and authenticity. He is able to face his own mortality and to take responsibility for his own fate. A special expression of so understood freedom is shown in his care for others, even if this way he risks his own life. Hannah Arendt interprets Plato’s metaphor rather from the perspective of political philosophy. Her assessment, rooted in the very foundation of the political-philosophical thought becomes some kind of memento. What if the prisoners of the cave, simply do not want to leave their place? Does the philosopher have a right to forcefully pull them out of the cave of shadows? What is better, the attitude of Socrates, who dialogues with people and treats them as equal partners or the attitude of Plato, who simply lectures the mob? (shrink)

If there is one question that has perplexed the best minds in every society, it is how to raise the individuals from their present state to a higher state of existence and perfection? The answers have been tried using different formulations in history: religious, scientific and political. The common factor in all these historical formulations was that they were designed in opposition to each other and therefore left many things unaccounted. The aim of this paper is to explore the idea (...) of self-perfection as a continuous streak of infinite vertical ascension. The paper has elaborated the idea of ‘Verticality’, propounded by Peter Sloterdijk for looking in to the domains of self-perfection and the stages of vertical ascension. For our purpose, we have relied on the example of discipline of Management that has progressively theorized about different aspects and stages of existence. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to describe the significance and key challenges of philosophy for managers as perceived on the basis of a particular understanding of philosophy and my personal experience as a practitioner.The paper will be more visionary than argumentative. I recognise there are important alternative approaches but I will not engage in detailed analysis of them.2Drawing heavily on my own experience, the paper will present an outline and meta-philosophy of philosophical practices that have proven useful in actual (...) interface with practising managers. (shrink)

Certain familiar theoretic claims of both popular and academic postmodernism are examined for their implications as to the necessary and desirable limits of social life. Taken to the end, these claims promote errancy as a means of freeing conduct from the constraints of foundation. But this kind of freedom, one which treats all limitation as pernicious, generates social action that is mechanical, scattered, and without substance—it is a pyrrhic emancipation which trades content for self-sufficiency and thus constitutes an empty life (...) of unhappy social dispersion. And yet an opportunity does remain to address the way a limit can also be inspiring if we think through how interpretation, a limit which is itself limited, invites nevertheless what Derrida glossed as joyous affirmation. Interpretation, though imperfect, offers powers that are genuine and enjoyable because these powers supply life with content and thus with the vitalizing collective and individual possibility of conduct which is affirmative (and disaffirmative). Perhaps it could even be said that interpretation emancipates us from the emptiness of pure freedom. (shrink)

Volume 52, Issue 11, October 2020, Page 1120-1125.

Resumo: Este artigo parte da análise da influência de Hegel na construção do conceito de capital e de ideologia, na obra de Marx. Para tal, buscou-se analisar a passagem dos primeiros escritos humanistas de Marx à sua teoria tardia. Da ruptura realizada por Marx em relação a suas obras de juventude, surge o problema de como determinar o sujeito, uma vez que a perspectiva humanista inicial é abandonada. A ideia é a de que, paradoxalmente, quando critica a dialética hegeliana, Marx (...) termina por encontrar problemas que poderiam ser resolvidos através de conceitos hegelianos, como a questão do sujeito de classe. É o que procuraremos argumentar por meio de uma análise sobre o papel da negatividade em Hegel.: This article starts with an analysis of the influence of Hegel on the construction of the concepts of capital and ideology in Marx's work. To this end, we analyze the transition from Marx's first humanist writings to his later theory. Due to the break achieved by Marx in relation to his early works, a problem arises: the determination of the revolutionary subject once the initial humanist perspective has been abandoned. Our thesis is that when Marx leaves Hegel, he paradoxically ends up encountering problems that can only be resolved by Hegelian dialectics,. We argue this by means of an analysis of the role of negativity in Hegel. (shrink)

Significant breakthroughs in genetic research promoted by the human genome project, advances in molecular biology and new reproductive technologies have improved the understanding and the possibility of genetic interventions as a potential medication for diseases caused by differentiated disorders, especially those that originated in irregularities in individual genes. The progress achieved in contemporary studies has created the likelihood that the man has the technical capacity to modify the genes that will be transmitted to the next generations as well. These are (...) the so-called hereditary genetic modifications, i.e. any biomedical interventions which could be expected to transform the genome which a person could transfer to their offspring. The author analyses in this paper why even the hints of transformations of genes that will be passed on to future generations cause deep bioethical, theological, legal and political debates and controversies. He also believes that in the era of rapid strengthening of the social and technical and technological effects of science, it is very important that scientists, in their perceptions and insights, which particularly in the field of humanities, do not have the character of value beliefs, do not go below the achieved civilization standards of ethical and moral culture and to reflect on different themes with due care and awareness of the dilemmas that they can encounter in their professional work. An adequate interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and pluriperspective approach, as well as the awareness of the essential compatibility of scientific freedom and responsibility, should ultimately result in a different and more sophisticated attitude of the scientists themselves to the possibilities of their own discipline and the significance of its effects. (shrink)

The close ties between modes of governing, subjectivities and critique in contemporary societies challenge the role of critical social research. The classical normative ethos of the unmasking researcher unravelling various oppressive structures of dominant vs. dominated groups in society is inadequate when it comes to understand de-politicizing mechanisms and the struggles they bring about. This article argues that only a non-normative position can stay attentive to the constant and complex evolution of modes of governing and the critical operations actors themselves (...) engage in. The article outlines a non-normative but critical programme based on an ethos of re-politicizing contemporary pervasive modes of governing. The analytical advantages and limitations of such a programme are demonstrated by readings of both Foucauldian studies and the works of and debates regarding the French pragmatic sociology of Boltanski and Thévenot. (shrink)

This paper identifies experiential processes through which social structures become taken for granted, termed processes of “structure marginalization”. Passive processes of structure marginalization relegate social structures to the margin of experience without the use of higher-order cognitive acts such as evaluation and reflection. Examples include adapting to social structures via routine and habitual practices, a lack of conscious awareness of the complexity, historical formation, and other details of social structures, and rendering social structures irrelevant when they are unreflectively judged to (...) be of no value for achieving ends. Active processes of structure marginalization reflectively and discursively relegate social structures to marginal consciousness. Examples include the use of naturalistic and necessitarian explanations for the social order that implicitly justify it as inalterable or “just the way things are”, normative justifications for the status quo, and conscious awareness of one’s powerlessness to control social-structural conditions. Active processes of structure marginalization originate in passive processes. The goal of the typology is to explain, at the level of experience, why social structures typically remain unproblematic and unnoticed in everyday life, even during periods of social crisis and change or when existing structures produce harmful effects. (shrink)

Although several writers have noted significant complementary features in the respective projects of Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) and the French social thinker Henri Lefebvre (1901–91), to date there has not been a systematic comparison of them. This article seeks to redress this oversight, by exploring some of the more intriguing of these conceptual dovetailings: first, their relationship to the intellectual and cultural legacy of Romanticism; and second, their respective assessments of irony (including Romantic irony), and, more (...) specifically, of the ironic register as a potential vehicle for socio-cultural criticism. Although the positions Bakhtin and Lefebvre stake out vis-à-vis these issues reveal many similarities – such as extensive use of Socrates in the writings of each – there are also significant differences, not least because Lefebvre’s understanding of Romanticism is more fully developed than Bakhtin’s. Accordingly, the central argument advanced here is that Bakhtin’s fairly disparaging account of Romanticism, together with his scattered and often contradictory remarks on irony, can be subjected to re-envisioning and potential enrichment by reference to Lefebvre’s more considered thoughts, especially the latter’s notions of ‘Revolutionary romanticism’ and ‘Marxist irony’. (shrink)

The ancient Cynic Diogenes was the first to declare ‘I am a citizen of the world ’ and the other Cynics followed him. In The Courage of the Truth, Michel Foucault analyses the Cynic mode of parrhēsia and living in truth, however, his text expands the cosmopolitical amplitude of Cynics since the Cynics’ true life contains an inherent cosmopolitan logic. Identifying the core of the Cynic true life in the care for the self that leads to the care for the (...) others within the horizon of the possibility of another life and another world, Foucault shows how the Cynic establishes ‘an intense bond with the whole of humankind’, cares ‘for all mankind’ and for the whole world as a ‘functionary of humanity’ and, as ‘the scout of humanity’, the Cynic prefigures the future and exercises the ‘government of the universe’. This article argues that Foucault’s account on Cynics maps the very first moments of becoming cosmopolitan and offers an insightful perspective on the process of achieving a cosmopolitan subjectivity, a process displayed by different expressions of cosmopolitanism, and especially the ‘insurgent cosmopolitanism’ from the bottom up. (shrink)

Although Foucault was clearly a critical thinker, his approach also provides for the possibility of a genealogy of critique. Such an approach problematizes critique, and I trace the emergent problematization of critique in Foucault’s later works, and briefly in Latour and Boltanski. From this I move on to the ‘critical problematic’, that is, how critique operates as a form of power/knowledge, as a discourse that creates subjects through a critical regime of truth and critical truth-games. Specifically, I argue that critique (...) is a discourse which transforms and unmasks other ‘truth-claims’, replacing them with a starker vision of reality, which in the end is also a specific cultural vision. To elaborate this view, I return to Foucault’s discussion of Kant, his late lectures on Cynicism and also on ordo-liberalism. The wider circulation of critical discourses is demonstrated through an analysis of ‘cool’ or critical consumerism. In conclusion, the relationship between critique, crisis and modernity is considered. (shrink)

This article underlines and draws attention to critical insights that Esposito makes regarding the prospects of rethinking community in a globalized world. Alongside Agamben and Nancy, Esposito challenges the property prejudice found in mainstream models of community. In identity politics, collective identity is converted into a form of communal property. Borders, sovereign territories, and exclusive rights are fiercely defended in the name of communal property. Esposito responds to this problem by developing what I call a “deontological communal contract” where being (...) and ethics are prioritized over having and economics. I examine this new perspective on community in relation to mainstream models found in contemporary and classical social theory. (shrink)

The article attempts to deal with the proposition that human being’s incapacity to imagine its own death, the state of non-being necessitates the thinking of the animal. A critical and close reading of specific Brāhmaṇa and Mahābhārata texts would spotlight that it is man’s rationalizing capacity that disavows and denies the question of intelligibility of the actions of the animal. The animal is the undisclosable which man keeps and brings to light as such. The article would further investigate if the (...) question of our forgetfulness toward the fact that we are born in debt to death has any linkage to the sacrificial logic of killing animals as elaborated in Brāhmaṇical hermeneutics. It examines how the ethical is thoroughly coextensive with the animal’s act of hospitality/hostility as an affective, purposive and reasoned response toward the other. In the course of the analysis of the jantu and pakshî upākhyāns in the Àraṇyak and Śanti Parvas of the Mahābhārata, the article tries to understand and explore if the experience of the animalitas is intrinsic to the structure of human reason, complicating the nature and notion of a priori. (shrink)

Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact foregrounds claims traditionally excluded from reception, often regarded as opposed to fact, scientific claims that are increasingly seldom discussed in connection with philosophy of science save as examples of pseudoscience. I am especially concerned with scientists who question the epidemiological link between HIV and AIDS and who are thereby discounted—no matter their credentials, no matter the cogency of their arguments, no matter the sobriety of their statistics—but also with other classic examples of (...) so-called pseudoscience including homeopathy and other sciences, such as cold fusion. The pseudoscience version of the demarcation problem turns out to include some of the details that Latour articulates multifariously under a variety of species or kinds in his essay/interactive research project/monograph, ‘Biography of an Investigation’. Given the economic constraints of the current day, especially in the academy, the growing trend in almost all disc.. (shrink)

In standard theories of knowledge, issues like jokes, humour and laughter are not dealt with for the simple reason that these categories do not inhabit the world of true knowledge, and are hence not worthy of serious attention or study because these issues do not by their nature contribute to further generation of true knowledge. Taking a cue from Sigmund Freud, this article seeks to work on the possibilities of jokes, humour and even laughter, and their relation to the language (...) of the statement of truth. It may be seen that in spite of the superior claims of the so-called language of the statement of truth, and its not so veiled indignation at humour and jokes, one category is in dialogue with another in contexts and perhaps with itself. (shrink)

The pragmatic semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce has a lot of practical benefits for enhancing visual communication in illustrations. His triadic theory of Semiosis focuses on the dynamic interrelationships between the concept to be communicated, how it is represented through a semiotic sign, and how this affects the success of how the concept is eventually interpreted. Peirce's pragmatic semiotic theory uses complex language, and although Peirce is embraced in some design disciplines, the language that defines Semiosis is problematic beyond (...) academia. This paper is an attempt to address this by providing illustrators with a basic introduction to how Semiosis can help to enhance the success of the visual communication in their illustrations. This is done by translating Peircean terminology into illustrator-centric language and providing an example of how the Semiosis is implemented in an illustration. Within the limits of a short paper, illustrators can begin to understand how the triadic nature of concept/representation/interpretation can benefit them during their ideation and sketching phase to author effective images. In doing this, this paper will mostly discuss iconic, indexical, and symbolic semiotic representation within pragmatic semiotic signs of the intended concept to be communicated in an illustration. This paper's aim is to enact a pragmatic turn in illustrators, in which Semiosis theory becomes more integrated within their practical work, by providing a more illustrator-centric dissemination of Peirce's semiotic theory. (shrink)

Continental philosophies of science tend to exemplify holistic themes connecting order and contingency, questions and answers, writers and readers, speakers and hearers. Such philosophies of science also tend to feature a fundamental emphasis on the historical and cultural situatedness of discourse as significant; relevance of mutual attunement of speaker and hearer; necessity of pre-linguistic cognition based in human engagement with a common socio-cultural historical world; role of narrative and metaphor as explanatory; sustained emphasis on understanding questioning; truth seen as horizonal, (...) aletheic, or perspectival; and a tolerance for paradoxical and complex forms of expression. Continental philosophy of science is thus more comprehensive than philosophy of science in the analytic tradition, including (and as analytic philosophy of science does not tend to include) perspectives on the history of science as well as the social and practical dimensions of scientific discovery. Where analytic philosophy is about reducing or, indeed, eliminating the perennial problems of philosophy, Continental philosophy is all about thinking and that will mean, as both Heidegger and Nietzsche emphasize, making such problems more not less problematic. (shrink)

By the rise of human advancements in the era of the digital technology revolution, Illustration in all aspects of human life, especially in the creation of artwork and architecture, surpassed. In such a way, the focus of attention is on the eyes and sight of the human being. This has been expanded in the process of designing and creating space. The illustration is the basic principle of architectural design, and the neglecting of other senses reduces the level of human perception (...) and consciousness from the space. Accordingly, it can be questioned: What is the relation of the body with space? What the role of lived experience in the process of creating a place is? In this research, it has been attempted to answer these questions based on the philosophical basis of interpretation with the qualitative approach. The results of the discussion show that the components of the design process and the creation of place are found to be eternal, based on "eternal life dimensions of man" including his " lived experience", "fictitious forms in embodied memory," and "Collective and individual memories". In presentation of design process model, creating place, while responding to the practical aspect, immediately begins its journey into the world of imagination, interdisciplinary imagination, myths, and the metaphorical meaning of the presence of man, which is in the light of his consciousness, and is based on his experience of life, and all his scientific and professional skills to achieve the best respond. (shrink)