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Philosophical Understanding (philosophical + understanding)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences80%

Selected Abstracts

HERMENEUTICS: PHILOSOPHICAL UNDERSTANDING AND BASIC ORIENTATIONS

JOURNAL OF CHINESE PHILOSOPHY, Issue 2006
LAUREN F. PFISTER
[source]

Spinoza on the Problem of Akrasia

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY, Issue 1 2010
Eugene Marshall
Though each is intuitive in a certain way, they both fail as explanations of the most interesting cases of akrasia. Spinoza's own thoughts on bondage and the affects follow, from which a Spinozist explanation of akrasia is constructed. This account is based in Spinoza's mechanistic psychology of cognitive affects. Because Spinoza's account explains action asissuing from modes of mind that are both cognitive and affective, it captures the intuitions that motivate the two traditional views while avoiding the pitfalls that result from their one-sided approaches. This project will allow us a fuller understanding of Spinozist moral psychology. In addition to this historical value, the Spinozist theory may offer a satisfactory explanation of certain hard cases of akrasia while avoiding the problems be set by other theories. For this reason, the Spinozist account could also be seen as a useful contribution to our philosophical understanding of the phenomenon of akrasia. [source]

Legitimizing the "War on Terror": Political Myth in Official-Level Rhetoric

POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 3 2010
Joanne Esch
This paper argues that mythical discourse affects political practice by imbuing language with power, shaping what people consider to be legitimate, and driving the determination to act. Drawing on Bottici's (2007) philosophical understanding of political myth as a process of work on a common narrative that answers the human need to ground events in significance, it contributes to the study of legitimization in political discourse by examining the role of political myth in official-level U.S. war rhetoric. It explores how two ubiquitous yet largely invisible political myths, American Exceptionalism and Civilization vs. Barbarism, which have long defined America's ideal image of itself and its place in the world, have become staples in the language of the "War on Terror." Through a qualitative analysis of the content of over 50 official texts containing lexical triggers of the two myths, this paper shows that senior officials of the Bush Administration have rhetorically accessed these mythical representations of the world in ways that legitimize and normalize the practices of the "War on Terror." [source]

Free Will: From Nature to Illusion

PROCEEDINGS OF THE ARISTOTELIAN SOCIETY (HARDBACK), Issue 1 2001
Saul Smilansky
Sir Peter Strawson's ,Freedom and Resentment' was a landmark in the philosophical understanding of the free will problem. Building upon it, I attempt to defend a novel position, which purports to provide, in outline, the next step forward. The position presented is based on the descriptively central and normatively crucial role of illusion in the issue of free will. Illusion, I claim, is the vital but neglected key to the free will problem. The proposed position, which may be called ,Illusionism', is shown to follow both from the strengths and from the weaknesses of Strawson's position. [source]

Zwischen Naturphilosophie und Wissenschaftspolitik: Zum Profil der Isis oder Encyklopädischen Zeitschrift von Oken als naturwissenschaftliches Publikationsorgan in den Jahren 1817 bis 1822,

BERICHTE ZUR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE, Issue 1 2003
Katrin Stiefel
Abstract Isis oder Encyklopädische Zeitung, edited by the German natural philosopher Lorenz Oken (1779-1851), is supposed to be one of the most significant journals of natural sciences in the early 19th century. The following study, based on a quantitative analyses of all articles (1817-1822), investigates the profile of the natural sciences in this journal. The results are interpreted according to Oken's concept of the journal as well as his editorial notes. It is shown that the encyclopedically broadly designed journal focuses on the natural sciences as major part of it's content, presenting the descriptive history of natural sciences (Naturgeschichte) as main subject. The journal's research perspective follows the encyclopedical spread of issues and scientific subjects; a clear research profile of scientific disciplines can not be discerned. Although scientific subjects, issues and authors are heterogeneous, Oken preserves an inner coherence by a common perspective founded in natural philosophy: his strategy was therefore to interfere with the content of the articles by comments and footnotes. Finally it is shown that Oken's idea of encyclopedism and it's realisation in Isis comprises sciences as well as politics as two sides of the same coin: based on the philosophical understanding of the unity of nature Oken tries to educate the consciousness of his readers towards a socially and politically homogeneous nation. [source]