Philosophies, Volume 7, Issue 5

This article studies natural food packaging as enabling artifacts of the traditional material culture of Antioquia in Colombia. For this purpose, we consider artifacts as objective nodes that combine design and use intentions, functions, materials, h...

From the 1910s through the 1930s, the American naturalist and photographer Arthur C. Pillsbury made time-lapse and microscopic films documenting what he, in common parlance, called the “miracles of plant life”. While these films are now m...

This essay analyses the role played by okra in The Underground Railroad, together with how it functions in relation to the soil that sustains it and which allows it to grow. I argue that okra represents an otherwise lost African past for both protago...

The conventional portrait of Thomas Hobbes that emerged in twentieth century histories of philosophy is that of the quintessential mechanical philosopher, who openly broke with philosophical tradition (together with René Descartes). Hobbes&rsq...

All levels of semiosis, from the materiality of signs to their contents and the contexts of their application, are structured by a selectivity in human experience and action that foregrounds only a fraction of the situation here and now. Before Sperb...

When putting semiotics and phenomenology in juxtaposition, the first task necessarily is to find out what a study of meaning, conceiving of itself as an empirical science, has to do with a philosophical school, the business of which it is to secure t...

An effective method is a computational method that might, in principle, be executed by a human. In this paper, I argue that there are methods for computing that are not effective methods. The examples I consider are taken primarily from quantum compu...

This article provides the existential and phenomenological conditions for addiction by applying the concepts of lack, escape and ‘hypervirtuality’ in new ways to the subject matter. There are five sections. The first is a brief review of...

This paper reconstructs Margaret Cavendish’s theory of the metaphysics of artifacts. It situates her anti-mechanist account of artifactual production and the art-nature distinction against a background of Aristotelian, Scholastic, and mechanist...

Traditional martial arts continue to be interesting and inspiring to many people around the globe. Some of their contemporary adaptations attract enthusiasts for whom they are especially important. In this article, the author bases his observations o...