This article is an attempt to show Karl Marx from the humanistic perspective in order to prove that it is unauthorized to blame him for all the evil of totalitarianism. The semantic content of the presented material includes three key areas. The first figure refers to Karl Marx, his personal characteristics and activity. Secondly, a question of philosophical foundations on which the thought of Marx is set. The third aspect of the problem concerns his economic theory. All these planes are (...) explored through the prism of Marx’s humanism. The article is summarised by a short reflection which denudes errors in Marx is dogmatism and reflect son the pertinence of setting Marx in a series of dictator criminals. (shrink)

An important milestone of 20th Century philosophy was the rise of personalism. After the crimes and atrocities against millions of human beings in two World Wars, especially the Second, some philosophers and other thinkers began to seek arguments showing the value of each human being, to expose and denounce the folly of political structures that violate the inalienable rights of the individual person. -/- Karol Wojtyla appeals to the ancient concept of 'person' to emphasize the particular value of each (...) human being. The person is unique because of their subjectivity by which they possesses an unrepeatable interior world in the history of humanity. Their rational nature grants them a special character among living beings, among which is the transcendence to the infinite. Wojtyla magisterially shows how each human being's personhood is rooted in a conscious and free subjectivity, which is marked also by personal and social responsibility. Wojtyla's original philosophical analysis takes for its starting point the human act, in which consciousness and experience consolidate voluntary choices, which are objectively efficacious. By their acts, the person determines their own personhood. This self-dominion manifests the person and enables them to live together in a community in which one's neighbor can be a companion on the voyage of life. -/- This work provides a clear guide to Karol Wojtyla's principal philosophical work, Person and Act, rigorously analyzing the meaning that the author intended in his exposition. An important feature of the work is that the authors rely on the original Polish text, Osoba i czyn, as well as the best translations into Italian and Spanish, rather than on a flawed and sometimes misleading English edition of the work. -/- Besides the analysis of Wojtyla's masterwork, this volume offers three chapters examining the impact of Wojtyla's anthropology on the relationship between faith and reason. (shrink)

This work raises the philosophical implications of the contemporary Taiwanese as a Chinese cultural people that socio-philosophically defined herself as a moral or ethical person. The political history of Taiwan has been marked by her struggle for self-determination. Self-determination based and reflected on a self-affirmation and self-identification that is internationally recognized and legitimized. This, no doubt, beyond the generalized bent by all nations towards globalization and multi-culturalism, there has been a more and more openness to the western nations. As she (...) looks towards the West, she ipso facto looks away from the Main Land China. This work is neither an investigation in political science nor a historical critique and reconstruction. It is rather a philosophical critique on the philosophical anthropology of a people that is fundamentally ethical, that is now facing and open to climes of which their philosophical anthropology is not in essence ethical. Put differently, it is an evaluation on the notion of “the Taiwanese person”. An evaluation on how “the Taiwanese person” from the standpoint of philosophical anthropology could still be claimed to be a Confucian. The question is: could the Taiwanese person today be said to be「仁者」, if Confucian philosophical anthropology asserts, 「仁者人也」? Hence, this work will attempt to respond to this question by a philosophical analysis of the notion of 「仁者」as an ethical person based on Karol Wojtyłian notion of the ethical person. To understand the notion of the “ethical” or “moral” person, the concept of “ethics” or “moral” and “person” ought to be exposed. Therefore, in this work Wojtyłian philosophy shall be employed as the epistemological foundation for the definition and explication of the concepts: ethics, moral and person. The writer considers the philosophy of Karol Wojtyłian as a plausible paradigm amongst the western philosophies in the exposition of Confucian ethics and philosophical anthropology. The conception of person as “Person-revealed-in-action” or as it is popularly known, the “Acting Person”, underpins properties of the human person that are very fundamental in the Confucian conception of the person. This “person- revealed-in-action”, is an ethical person, as 「仁者」is 「人」in the Confucian Philosophy. This is as a result of the similarity in the fundamental claims maintained both in the Confucian ethics and philosophical anthropology and in that of Karol Wojtyła. Thus, this work is executed as follows: 1. Exposition of the Problematic. 2. Exposition of Confucian Philosophical Anthropology. 3. Exposition of Karol Wojtyła Ethical Person. 4. A Wojtyłain Reconstruction of 「仁者」and the Notion of Ethical Person. 5. Critique of the Taiwanese Person as「仁者」and Conclusion. (shrink)

"Filozofjo po ślōnsku, czyli heft do historje filozofje Dziadka Kika" to podróż przez dzieje filozofii światowej napisane ze śląskiej perspektywy przez doktora filozofii Marcina Kika. Tyn heft niy jest tak ruby jak niywtore buchy, ale to jest heft, w kerym wjela ciykawygo i ważnygo możno znolyź… I to żech tam znoloz dlo siebje. Ale najsamprzōd musza pedzieć, że jest to heft, w kerym dziadek szukoł som siebje i chcioł sie dowjedzieć czegoś ô sobje samym i śwjecie, w kerym –szczynśliwje lub (...) niy, jak sie to wto forszteluje – prziszło mu żyć. A napisane na niym było "Filozofjo" – prawje jak heft do jakigoś przedmjotu we szkole. Wstęp dr hab. Jacek Surzyn: "Autor przeprowadza czytelnika przez historię filozofii, opowiada ją po śląsku, pewnym siebie głosem zatrzymując go tam, gdzie trzeba na chwilę przystanąć. Jest to historia nie w sensie faktograficznym, ale historia jako proces rozwoju problematyki filozoficznej, to znaczy jest to wędrówka przez odpowiedzi na najważniejsze i podstawowe filozoficzne pytania." Strony: 257 SPIS FILOZOFÓW Presokratycy 24 Sokrates 32 Sofiści, cynicy, cyrenaicy i megarejczycy 36 Platon 41 Arystoteles 45 Sceptycyzm, stoicyzm i epikureizm 49 Plotyn 56 Aureliusz Augustyn z Hippony 59 Tomasz z Akwinu 63 William z Ockham 68 Jean Buridan 70 Mikołaj z Kuzy 72 Francis Bacon 75 Kartezjusz (René Descartes) 79 Baruch Spinoza 83 Blaise Pascal 87 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 90 John Locke 94 George Berkley 98 David Hume 100 Jeremy Bentham 103 John Stuart Mill 106 Bernard de Mandeville 108 Jean Jacques Rousseau 110 Immanuel Kant 114 Arthur Schopenhauer 122 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 126 Ludwig Feuerbach 131 Max Stirner 134 Karol Marks 136 Sigmunt Freud 143 Søren Kierkegaard 149 Friedrich Nietzche 155 Henri Bergson 162 Edmund Husserl 166 Martin Heidegger 172 Max Scheler 177 Nicolai Hartmann 181 Karl Jaspers 187 Egzystencjalizm 191 William James 198 Helmuth Plessner 202 Arnold Gehlen 206 Ludwig Wittgenstein 209 Emmanuel Mounier 213 Karol Wojtyła 217 Gabriel Marcel 221 Emmanuel Lévinas 224 Jozef Tischner 228 Jean-François Lyotard 232 Zygmunt Bauman 236 Karl Raimund Popper 239 Viktor Emil Frankl 243. (shrink)

The year 2001 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Jan Karol Dorda, a Jesuit who devoted a substantial part of his life in the priesthood to literary work, and scientific, especially philosophical enquiry - alongside his pastoral and administrative duties in the Society of Jesus. Father Dorda held a degree in mathematics and physics, but had a special interest in philosophy. In this paper I shall be concerned with his philosophical opinions, only some of which have (...) been published, while the majority of his unpublished manuscripts are preserved in the archives of the Southern Polish Province of the Society of Jesus in Cracow. The reason why his work has never been published is not because of low quality, but due to the difficult conditions prevalent in the post-war Communist period in Poland, and also because of the cautious attitude adopted by the censors and reviewers to whom Dorda submitted his work for assessment. (shrink)

The year 2001 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Jan Karol Dorda, a Jesuit who devoted a substantial part of his life in the priesthood to literary work, and scientific, especially philosophical enquiry - alongside his pastoral and administrative duties in the Society of Jesus. Father Dorda held a degree in mathematics and physics, but had a special interest in philosophy. In this paper I shall be concerned with his philosophical opinions, only some of which have (...) been published, while the majority of his unpublished manuscripts are preserved in the archives of the Southern Polish Province of the Society of Jesus in Cracow. The reason why his work has never been published is not because of low quality, but due to the difficult conditions prevalent in the post-war Communist period in Poland, and also because of the cautious attitude adopted by the censors and reviewers to whom Dorda submitted his work for assessment. (shrink)

An examination of split-brain syndrome, and whether split-brain patients have two minds.

This book offers a novel critique of public-private partnerships in public health. The author argues these relationships create webs of influence that undermine the integrity of public health agencies, and imperil public health. He makes a compelling case that the paradigm interaction between governments and corporations should be at arm's length: separation, not collaboration.

This book draws on fields as diverse as biochemistry, physiology, pharmacology, psychology, psychiatry, and ethology, to form a fascinating synthesis of information on the nature of fear and of panic and anxiety disorders. Dr. Marks offers both a detailed discussion of the clinical aspects of fear-related syndromes and a broad exploration of the sources and mechanisms of fear and defensive behavior. Dealing first with normal fear, he establishes a firm, scientific basis for understanding it. He then presents a thorough (...) analysis of the development, symptoms and treatment of fear-related syndromes. Phobic and obsessive-compulsive disorders are examined in detail. The book is illustrated with examples of fear and defensive behavior in other living organisms. By drawing provocative analogies between animal and human behavior, it sheds new light on the origins of fears, phobias, and obsessive-compulsive problems, as well as on their treatment by drugs and psychological means. Clinical psychologists, ethologists, and anyone interested in the mechanisms of behavior will be fascinated by this authoritative study. The text is intriguing and informative, and the bibliography of over 2,100 entries makes it an invaluable reference. (shrink)

I argue that emotions are belief/desire sets characterized by strong desire.

Volume 19, Issue 5, May 2019, Page 70-72.

A defense of amorality as both philosophically justified and practicably livable. While in synch with their underlying aim of grounding human existence in a naturalistic metaphysics, this book takes both the new atheism and the mainstream of modern ethical philosophy to task for maintaining a complacent embrace of morality. It advocates instead replacing the language of morality with a language of desire. The book begins with an analysis of what morality is and then argues that the concept is not instantiated (...) in reality. Following this, the question of belief in morality is addressed: How would human life be affected if we accepted that morality does not exist? The book argues that at the very least, a moralist would have little to complain about in an amoral world, and at best we might hope for a world that was more to our liking overall. An extended look at the human encounter with nonhuman animals serves as an illustration of amorality’s potential to make both theoretical and practical headway in resolving heretofore intractable ethical problems. (shrink)

This book examines current debates about the emergence of an international legal norm of democratic governance and also considers some of the wider theoretical issues to which those debates give rise. It asks; should international law seek to promote democratic political arrangements? If so, on what basis, and using which of the many competing conceptions of democracy?

We prove a number of results motivated by global questions of uniformity in computabi- lity theory, and universality of countable Borel equivalence relations. Our main technical tool is a game for constructing functions on free products of countable groups. We begin by investigating the notion of uniform universality, first proposed by Montalbán, Reimann and Slaman. This notion is a strengthened form of a countable Borel equivalence relation being universal, which we conjecture is equivalent to the usual notion. With this additional (...) uniformity hypothesis, we can answer many questions concerning how countable groups, probability measures, the subset relation, and increasing unions interact with universality. For many natural classes of countable Borel equivalence relations, we can also classify exactly which are uniformly universal. We also show the existence of refinements of Martin’s ultrafilter on Turing invariant Borel sets to the invariant Borel sets of equivalence relations that are much finer than Turing equivalence. For example, we construct such an ultrafilter for the orbit equivalence relation of the shift action of the free group on countably many generators. These ultrafilters imply a number of structural properties for these equivalence relations. (shrink)

Chow's one-tailed null-hypothesis significance-test procedure, with its rationale based on the elimination of chance influences, is not appropriate for theory-corroboration experiments. Estimated effect sizes and their associated standard errors or confidence limits will always suffice.

This article will briefly explore some of the ways in which the past has been used as a means to talk about psychotherapy as a practice and as a profession, its impact on individuals and society, and the ethical debates at stake. It will show how, despite the multiple and competing claims about psychotherapy’s history and its meanings, historians themselves have, to a large degree, not attended to the intellectual and cultural development of many therapeutic approaches. This absence has the (...) potential consequence of implying that therapies have emerged as value-free techniques, outside of a social, economic and political context. The relative neglect of psychotherapy, by contrast with the attention historians have paid to other professions, particularly psychiatry, has also underplayed its societal impact. This article will foreground some of the instances where psychotherapy has become an object of emerging historical interest, including the new research that forms the substance of this special issue of History of the Human Sciences. (shrink)

This article looks at Deleuze and Guattari's understanding of molecular biology, focusing particularly on their reading of two highly influential works by the eminent French molecular biologists François Jacob and Jacques Monod, La logique du vivant and Le hasard et la nécessité. In these two works, Jacob and Monod present the significance of molecular biology in broadly reductionist terms. What is more, the lac operon model of gene regulation that they propose serves to reinforce the so-called Central Dogma of molecular (...) biology, according to which information passes from DNA to RNA to proteins, with no reverse route. However, Deleuze and Guattari discover intensive potentials within the descriptions of molecular biology offered by both writers. It is argued that Jacob's work in particular, as it has developed in the years since the publication of La logique du vivant in 1970, has itself developed these intensive potentials. (shrink)

Psychotherapy was an invention of European modernity, but as the 20th century unfolded, and we trace how it crossed national and continental borders, its goals and the particular techniques by which it operated become harder to pin down. This introduction briefly draws together the historical literature on psychotherapy in Europe, asking comparative questions about the role of location and culture, and networks of transmission and transformation. It introduces the six articles in this special issue on Greece, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Russia, Britain (...) and Sweden as well as its parallel special issue of History of Psychology on ‘Psychotherapy in the Americas’. It traces what these articles tell us about how therapeutic developments were entangled with the dramatic, and often traumatic, political events across the continent: in the wake of the Second World War, the emergence of Communist and authoritarian regimes, the establishment of welfare states and the advance of neoliberalism. (shrink)

The conference on Health, Law and Human Rights: Exploring the Connections held last fall in Philadelphia was a telling moment in the complex history of a movement — the “health and human rights movement” for want of a better term — inaugurated by the pioneering work of Jonathan Mann, whose memory the Conference honored. The François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights — founded by Mann and carrying on his legacy — was pleased to co-sponsor the conference. The conference (...) and this symposium issue containing the main papers provide an excellent opportunity to take stock of that movement by means of a commentary based on the papers. This commentary is made from a resolutely human rights perspective, with the aim of engaging the authors in a dialogue on whether and to what extent each article advances knowledge about the interconnectedness and mutually reinforcing character of health and human rights, which is the lasting legacy of Jonathan Mann. (shrink)

Collection of original essays on the theory of desire by Robert Audi, Annette Baier, Wayne Davis, Ronald de Sousa, Robert Gordon, O.H. Green, Joel Marks, Dennis Stampe, Mitchell Staude, Michael Stocker, and C.C.W. Taylor.

In this way a domain for the theory of desire will be sketched out. One preliminary clarification: In the beginning is the word, "desire. ...

My invitation to respond to Lepora and Goodin may be the result of my work on complicity—in particular, the participation of health professionals in torture and aggressive interrogation in the so-called ‘war on terror’.1,2 However, instead of responding to the précis, I intend to address the section of the authors' book dealing with compromise and to explore the implications of their approach for some pressing public health issues.3,4 In their chapter entitled ‘Compromise as a Template’, Lepora and Goodin contend that (...) ‘[i]t is only when the intra-personal conflict forces an agent to choose among items of principled concern … to her that a compromise is genuinely involved’ (p. 19). The authors are right to emphasise the ethical significance of setting aside, forsaking or violating one's principles to reach an agreement. There may be serious implications for the integrity of an individual or an institution that makes such a compromise. But we should ensure that the intrapersonal focus does not lead to the neglect of other important ethical dimensions. A compromise may be problematic because of its impact on others who are affected by, but are not …. (shrink)

The book examines current debates about the emergence of an international legal norm of democratic governance and also considers some of the wider theoretical issues to which those debates give rise. It asks should international law seek to promote democratic political arrangements? If so, on what basis, and using which of the many competing conceptions of democracy?

There is overwhelming evidence that the opioid crisis—which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars (and counting)—has been created or exacerbated by webs of influence woven by several pharmaceutical companies. These webs involve health professionals, patient advocacy groups, medical professional societies, research universities, teaching hospitals, public health agencies, policymakers, and legislators. Opioid companies built these webs as part of corporate strategies of influence that were designed to expand the opioid market from cancer patients to larger groups (...) of patients with acute or chronic pain, to increase dosage as well as opioid use, to downplay the risks of addiction and abuse, and to characterize physicians’ concerns about the addiction and abuse risks as “opiophobia.” In the face of these pervasive strategies, conflict of interest policies have proven insufficient for addressing corporate influence in medical practice, medical research, and public health policy. Governments, the academy, and civil society need to develop counterstrategies to insulate themselves from corporate influence and to preserve their integrity and public trust. These strategies require a paradigm shift—from partnerships with the private sector, which are ordinarily vehicles for corporate influence, to a norm of separation. (shrink)