Some philosophers have thought that life could only be meaningful if there is no God. For Sartre and Nagel, for example, a God of the traditional classical theistic sort would constrain our powers of self-creative autonomy in ways that would severely detract from the meaning of our lives, possibly even evacuate our lives of all meaning. Some philosophers, by contrast, have thought that life could only be meaningful if there is a God. God and the Meanings of Life is interested (...) in exploring the truth in both these schools of thought, seeking to discover what God could and couldn't do to make life meaningful (as well as what he would and wouldn't do). Mawson espouses a version of the 'amalgam' or 'pluralism' thesis about the issue of life's meaning – in essence, that there are a number of different legitimate meanings of 'meaning' (and indeed 'life') in the question of life's meaning. According to Mawson, God, were he to exist, would help make life meaningful in some of these senses and hinder in some others. He argues that whilst there could be meaning in a Godless universe, there could be other sorts of meaning in a Godly one and that these would be deeper. (shrink)

_Purpose._ This paper aims to investigate the phenomenon of a human being within the Confucian tradition as well as its interpretations from intercultural perspective. _Theoretical basis._ One of the ways to understand the deepest level of the intercultural dialogue is to reveal the interpretations of a human being in philosophical traditions, since they refer to the formation of personality and identity within a given culture including interpersonal, intergroup, and intercultural relations. Humanism based on the unity of Human and Heaven runs (...) like a red thread through the philosophical teachings of Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Zhu Xi, Wang Yangming defining the ideas of human nature, his/her duties, his/her place and roles in society that shaped the Chinese mentality. _Originality._ Quite often, Chinese concepts (for example, human dignity beyond the ideas of democracy and mass political participation, guanxi, mianzi) are incomprehensible to the representatives of the Western civilization, which leads to the challenges in intercultural communication. The interpretation of these ideas in the context of Confucianism allows to understand them from the perspective of Others and expand the set of patterns of cultural perception. This ultimately leads to the awareness that there are many social, political, cultural realities, which we perceive through the lens of our own concepts and attitudes. The participants of an intercultural dialogue realize that each of them has a unique experience, own way of posing a problem and resolving it, and no one is better or worse. _Conclusions._ Confucian philosophy shaped the worldview of Chinese people, defined values, goals, meanings, attitudes, communication models, which affected all spheres of Chinese life and culture. The study of the philosophical heritage of the great Chinese civilization enhances the cultural competence of the intercultural communicators and expands the field of dialogue to the level of global communication. (shrink)

How do we think about animals? How do we decide what they deserve and how we ought to treat them? Subhuman takes an interdisciplinary approach to these questions, drawing from research in philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, law, history, sociology, economics, and anthropology. Subhuman argues that our attitudes to nonhuman animals, both positive and negative, largely arise from our need to compare ourselves to them.

This is the first wide-ranging, multi-authored handbook in the field of philosophy of medicine, covering the underlying conceptual issues of many important social, political and ethical issues in health care. It introduces and develops over 70 topics, concepts, and issues in the field. It is written by distinguished specialists from multiple disciplines, including philosophy, health sciences, nursing, sociology, political theory, and medicine. Many difficult social and ethical issues in health care are based on conceptual problems, most prominently on (...) the definitions of health and disease, or on epistemological issues regarding causality or diagnosis. Philosophy is the discipline that deals with such conceptual, metaphysical, epistemological, methodological, and axiological matters. (shrink)

Explores the nature and types of mystical experience and discusses the value of mysticism for humanity.

Knowledge, theory of; Islamic philosophy; philosophy, Arab; interpretation and construction.

Logic; Islamic philosophy; Islam--doctrines.

Describes Bradley's doctrine of 'immediate experience' as a starting point of knowledge, then traces the development of the of subject and object out of immediate experience, with the question of independence, and with the precise meaning of the term 'objectivity.'.

This book includes critical editions, Turkish translations and short studies of two treatises by Taşköprüzade, one of the most important Ottoman philosophers of the sixteenth century.

This book includes a critical edition and a Turkish translation and a study of an Arabic treatise by Taşköprüzade, one of the most important Ottoman philosophers of the sixteenth century.

Thinking about Animals in the Age of the Anthropocene makes connections between the Anthropocene discourse and human-animal studies, thus facilitating further interdisciplinary work on the topic of animals in the Anthropocene.

Commentary on Hetvābhāsasāmānyanirukti, portion of Tattvacintāmaṇi of Gaṅgeśa, dealing with the definition of fallacies middle term in Navya Nyāya philosophy.

Entry on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A summary of the literature on whether externalism about thought content precludes non-empirical knowledge of one's own thoughts.

From the time of Locke, discussions of personal identity have often ignored the question of our basic metaphysical nature: whether we human people are biological organisms, spatial or temporal parts of organisms, bundles of perceptions, or what have you. The result of this neglect has been centuries of wild proposals and clashing intuitions. What Are We? is the first general study of this important question. It beings by explaining what the question means and how it differs from others, such as (...) questions of personal identity and the mind-body problem. It then examines in some depth the main possible accounts of our metaphysical nature, detailing both their theoretical virtues and the often grave difficulties they face. The book does not endorse any particular account of what we are, but argues that the matter turns on more general issues in the ontology of material things. If composition is universal--if any material things whatever make up something bigger--then we are temporal parts of organisms. If things never compose anything bigger, so that there are only mereological simples, then we too are simples--perhaps the immaterial substances of Descartes--or else we do not exist at all (a view Olson takes very seriously). The intermediate view that some things compose bigger things and others do not leads almost inevitably to the conclusion that we are organisms. So we can discover what we are by working out when composition occurs. (shrink)

Arabic literature; history and criticism.

. Ill BERGSONS THEORY OF ART . . .141 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTENSIVE MANIFOLDS I I CINDERS ..... 215 APPENDICES A. REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE . . 249 B. PLAN FOR A ...

Can an ugly experiment be a good experiment? Philosophers have identified many beautiful experiments and explored ways in which their beauty might be connected to their epistemic value. In contrast, the present chapter seeks out (and celebrates) ugly experiments. Among the ugliest are those being designed by AI algorithms. Interestingly, in the contexts where such experiments tend to be deployed, low aesthetic value correlates with high epistemic value. In other words, ugly experiments can be good. Given this, we should conclude (...) that beauty is not generally necessary or sufficient for epistemic value, and increasing beauty will not generally tend to increase epistemic value. (shrink)

Phenomenology, a philosophical movement that takes the firsthand, conscious experience of individuals as its focal point, is a philosophy of the mundane: it reveals ordinary, everyday experience. What makes The Good Place phenomenological is its attention to the banality of space. The appeal to depth is a mainstay of philosophical thinking. Shallowness has been understood as a fault, failure, and deficiency in aesthetics, epistemology, and ethics. The portrayal of Chidi as the philosopher who is unable to commit is the (...) driving comedic force in The Good Place. Ethics turns out to be about the messy details of life more than about the universal truths of humankind. The Good Place uses the postmodern strategy of gazing at surfaces to articulate a critique of philosophy. It is effective as a piece of “serious” art precisely because it offers an effective critique of moral seriousness. (shrink)

Comprehensive analysis of fundaentals of Sankhya philosophy with reference to Vedic literature and Śaṅkarācārya.

Contributed research papers on various aspects of Hindu philoosphy.

I. Wesen und entwicklung des humanitätsgedankens.--II. Der socialismus.--III. Der individualismus.--IV. Der utilitarianismus.--V. Der pessimismus.--VI. Der evolutionismus.--VII. Der positivismus.--VIII. Nietzsches uebermensch.--IX. Die hauptgrundsätze einer modernen humanitätsethik.

On the classic Hindu philosophies of Nyaya and Vaiśeṣika ; autocommentary on Bhāṣāpariccheda with Sanskrit and Hindi commentaries.