The ongoing conflict between the economic imperative of stimulating consumption as part of the proliferation of neoliberal ideals of consumer supremacy and growing concern to increase environmental protection presents an opportunity to focus on consumption with respect to ethical behavior. Ethical concerns regarding purchasing and consumption behavior are addressed here in relation to the adoption of principles associated with temperance as applied to self-restraint in food purchase and consumption. The paper outlines theological links to the concept of temperance as applied (...) to environmental and health concerns. Employing a virtue ethics perspective, it examines people’s proactive attitudes that value the environment by adopting waste reduction behaviors. Within the context of normative ethics, it is asked: “Is temperance able to fulfill the role of a lever in consumers’ hands and thereby contribute to minimizing negative environmental impacts associated with food waste?” The research bears witness to the role that consumer behavior may play in promotion and application of temperance in daily life. Study results from a survey conducted in Romania extend the scant information on people’s food waste behavior in relation to religion, underscoring the relationship between religion, temperance-oriented behavior and environmental concerns. (shrink)

The solitary language user is again stalking the critical fields of Europe . This pre-social individual, abstracted from all social and historical context, has been seemingly revived after what many of us saw as a death-blow dealt by Wittgenstein in his analysis of the notion of following a rule , and his related discussions bringing out the impossibilities of a ‘private’ language—what has come to be known as Wittgenstein's ‘private language argument’. Just what a ‘private language’ is has become the (...) issue. Did Wittgenstein show that language-use and rule-following essentially and necessarily involved others, and were therefore necessarily social in character ? Or did his arguments bear only against the notion of a language which was essentially and necessarily private, one which could not in principle be taught to another? (shrink)

The paper aims to make out the incoherence of the distinction between and rigid separation of ‘the linguistic’ and ‘the extra‐linguistic’ as well as to absolve Wittgenstein from any commitment to it. Insistence on a descent from the abstract to a concrete discussion allows a connection to be made between Tractatus positions such as: ‘The limits of my language indicate the limits of my world.’ and ‘The world and life are one.’ and the Investigations: ‘What has to be accepted is (...) ‐ so one could say ‐ forms of life.’ From this a picture is developed of the intimate interconnection between language, practical life, and world. (shrink)

The paper aims to make out the incoherence of the distinction between and rigid separation of ‘the linguistic’ and ‘the extra‐linguistic’ as well as to absolve Wittgenstein from any commitment to it. Insistence on a descent from the abstract to a concrete discussion allows a connection to be made between Tractatus positions such as: ‘The limits of my language indicate the limits of my world.’ and ‘The world and life are one.’ and the Investigations: ‘What has to be accepted is (...) ‐ so one could say ‐ forms of life.’ From this a picture is developed of the intimate interconnection between language, practical life, and world. (shrink)

As feudalism made God the source and the justification of its particular social arrangements and the guarantor of their eternity, so the bourgeois/capitalist order that dissolved and supplanted feudalism has used nature , drawing science into its ideological orbit, using science to found the new era's dominant world-view. My complaint against the concept of nature that has thus been given God's work to do is that it does not present itself honestly as a religious notion. It covers its transcendental tracks (...) and dresses in secular clothes. The notion of nature that has been imposed on us and the notion of its laws pretend both to stand over and yet to lie within, and even to constitute, the physical, secular world. That pretence to both a transcendental and a secular status cannot be maintained for long under examination, and what is surprising is how little critical examination it has been given. (shrink)

The paper examines the character and historical source of the mystifications of the notions of Nature and Natural Kinds in the misguided attempt to turn Nature into a secular substitute for the role played by God in the previous theological framework of thought in order to turn it into a secular one in the period of the rise of science and scientific understanding. The role and function nature was given in this would-be replacement framework turned it into a quasi-deity governing (...) the world from outside and generated the mechanical world-view in which humans were mere cogs. Against this is set Aristotle's conception of Nature and the Natural as simply 'what happens by and large and for the most part'--a description and not an explanation. (shrink)

Determinism is a spectre that has haunted our scientifically-oriented culture from the beginning. I happen to think that it is literally a ‘spectre’, a trick of the vision, an appearance with an internal cause only, and that it is no more than the ghost of our own conceptual determinations projected outward into a world in which it has no place and no proper being. From one point of view it is no more than an alienated fantasy involving a number of (...) incoherent assumptions. Of these, one of the most important, and one of the most deeply eroded by much contemporary work, is the assumption that science and scientific understanding is a potentially completable system. From another point of view, however, the deterministic picture seems an inevitable product of scientific activity. (shrink)

Determinism is a spectre that has haunted our scientifically-oriented culture from the beginning. I happen to think that it is literally a ‘spectre’, a trick of the vision, an appearance with an internal cause only, and that it is no more than the ghost of our own conceptual determinations projected outward into a world in which it has no place and no proper being. From one point of view it is no more than an alienated fantasy involving a number of (...) incoherent assumptions. Of these, one of the most important, and one of the most deeply eroded by much contemporary work, is the assumption that science and scientific understanding is a potentially completable system. From another point of view, however, the deterministic picture seems an inevitable product of scientific activity. (shrink)

Abstract The paper examines the differences between Kuhn's account, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, of the sciences as necessarily communal activities with internally set standards of procedure and achievement, and that view of the sciences which calls itself ?Scientific Realism? and regards them as striving toward, and perhaps asymptotically approaching, some external and objective reality that bestows truth or falsity on scientific theories. The main argument turns on Poincaré's demonstration that Newton's Second Law (f = ma) is not a (...) testable, provable proposition with a truth value, but something that is simply adopted. It is adopted in the light of experience, certainly, but there is no logical necessity in the adoption. My suggestion is that it is a ?way of looking? and ?a method of analysis? and that the necessity of its adoption by any individual lies in its being a necessary condition of entry into the scientific community. That community itself adopts ways of looking or methods of analysis for their fruitfulness in dealing with old problems and defining new ones. Incoherences in the ?approach? account of scientific progress are looked at, and the individualistic assumptions that motivate it. These require the sciences to be presented as the source and basis of agreement and community amongst separated individuals. This picture and its requirement inverts reality as well as Kuhn's account, which makes community and agreement the starting point. The notion of reality as a transcendental convergence point becomes redundant. The old problem of the incommensurability of paradigms is discussed by relating them to the notions of ways of looking and methods of analysis. These may be incompatible in that one cannot look at things in two different ways at once, but at the same time they cannot be measured on any common scale. (shrink)

_Philosophy and Mystification_ reflects on the nature, methods and resources of philosophic enquiry are carefully grounded in the central problems that have dogged Western philosophy in the modern era: logical necessity, machine intelligence, the relation of science and religion, determinism, scepticism and the questions of foundations and origins.