Philosophies, Volume 9, Issue 4

This article examines a problematic of the ordinary as it emerges in the poetical theology of an early poem of John Milton. This poem, Lycidas, has captured the attention of every major critic from the 18th century to the present, who has minutely ex...

This essay begins with preliminary observations about the nature of agnosticism. Based on the term’s etymology, in this essay an agnostic about some proposition (e.g., God exists) is someone who does not know whether the proposition is true. Be...

Contemporary French philosopher Michel Serres has out-of-the-rut thoughts about many things, including media. This article focuses on his understanding of the genealogy of media, the notion of exo-Darwinism, and his forward-looking attitude toward ne...

In this paper I hope to cast light on Wittgenstein enigmatic remark, “one should really only create philosophy poetically”. I discuss Wittgenstein’s ambition to overcome metaphysics by way of an appeal to ordinary language. For this...

In continental and analytical philosophy, which developed in parallel in the 20th century, there was a turn to language, which in particular was marked by the creation of a philosophy of dialogue in continental philosophy and dialogical logic in anal...

What is the riddle of Oedipus? This paper is an exploration of the philosophy involved in Sophocles’ famous play Oedipus Tyrannus. The play involves a riddler who becomes king, a man who is famously good at understanding what others find obscur...

There is a curious moment in the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. Thinking she speaks in solitude, Juliet says, “Romeo, doff thy name, / And, for thy name, which is no part of thee, / Take all myself”. Emerging from the shadows, Romeo r...

This essay assesses the relevance of Søren Kierkegaard’s non-pseudonymous, edifying writings for considering themes of desire, detachment, and humility within the religious context of Christian spiritual formation. Building on the argume...

Carpe Diem (Horace and Odes 1.11) [...]

The outputs of a Turing machine are not revealed for inputs on which the machine fails to halt. Why is an observer not allowed to see the generated output symbols as the machine operates? Building on the pioneering work of Mark Burgin, we introduce a...

Theoretically, a poem can begin in any way. What does it mean that in practice, poems often begin in a particular way—that is, by returning to a fragment of some prior thing? We see this in the encore of John Milton’s opening to Lycidas (...

Ulrika Carlsson has argued that it its justified to harbor non-moral resentment towards a person with whom one is unrequitedly in love. Anca Gheaus has rejected this with convincing arguments. This text explores the question of whether Gheaus’...

This article begins with critical discussion of why parochialism is so alluring, suggesting that we need to understand its tenacious seductions if we really aim to displace, uproot, or transcend it. Arguing that parochialism as a value is not primari...

In this paper I attempt to trace the semiotic path of meaning experience from “nothing” into “something”. Traditional communication studies are problematic in 1. focusing on the message to the effect of ignoring the communicat...

For many 20th century philosophers, the “death of God” became an opportunity to rethink the limits of the human, eliminating its claims to a transcendent foundation in order to start again, more modestly, “from below”. The new...

Christian universalism, or the theory of universal salvation, is increasingly popular among religious thinkers. A small group of scholars has put forward the contentious claim that Kierkegaard was a universalist, despite that he refers in places to t...

The relationship between science and philosophy is contentious. Quine saw philosophy as continuous with science (broadly understood), but many philosophers see a dichotomy between them. The present paper discusses cases where the relevance of certain...

This article discusses the relationship between Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and Rudolf Carnap’s philosophies of logic during the time of Wittgenstein’s interactions with the Vienna Circle and up to 1934 when the German edition of Carnap&r...

Alain Badiou in his philosophy on ethics underscores four fields of truth procedures—love, politics, art, and science—that seek to break with the existing order or conventional flow of things. These four fields indicate both collective (p...

This article delves into the theme of the death of God in Giorgio Agamben’s work from a political perspective, seeking to interpret the notion of “God” in Agamben through the concepts of “government” and “transcend...

In this paper, I approach Hegel’s philosophy under the banner of a “Keplerian Revolution”, the implicit reference being, of course, to Kant’s supposed Copernican philosophical revolution. Kepler had been an early supporter of...

Recent discussions of logical pluralism trace its origins to Rudolf Carnap’s principle of tolerance; indeed, the principle is seen as one of Carnap’s lasting philosophical contributions. In this paper, I will argue that Carnap’s rea...

Conventional wisdom holds that human bodies do not and cannot persist through beaming: scanning and destruction of the body, followed by transmission of the scan information and replication of the body in another location. I argue that given the mini...

Georg Henrik von Wright (1916–2003) started his studies in theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki in 1934. His teacher, Professor Eino Kaila (1890–1958), was an associate of the Vienna Circle who had changed the course of Fi...

This article investigates reasons to participate in non-deterministic elections, where the outcomes incorporate elements of chance beyond mere tie-breaking. The background context situates this inquiry within democratic theory, specifically non-deter...

The nature and practice of Christianity is a major, if not the primary, topic in Kierkegaard’s authorship. What it means to live a Christian life is a persistent topic in many of his major works, and yet, he spends most of his authorship critic...

This article considers the formal and critical consequences of organizing an aesthetic corpus around the philosophical concept of the fragment via a reading of Aryan Kaganof’s “Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers” (1...

Much of the debate about the mathematical refutation of Zeno’s paradoxes surrounds the logical possibility of completing supertasks—tasks made up of an infinite number of subtasks. Max Black and J.F. Thomson attempt to show that supertask...

This paper explores the philosophical perspectives of Nietzsche and Heidegger, tracing their analyses of the death of God and its aftermath. My aim is to clarify the diagnosis of this nihilism and its underlying causes, as well as evaluate the propos...

This essay forwards an intensive model of mediation contrasted with the extensive model implicit in much of media theory, which conceives of communication media as an extension of human faculties. An intensive model, instead, conceives of mediation a...

What is an artifact [...]

At Plato’s insistence to become as godlike as one can, the Neoplatonists seek their salvation in union with the first principle they call the One, identifying this union as the highest end of philosophy. As with all aspirations, the transition...

Nikk Effingham and Huw Price argue that in certain cases of Newcomb problems involving time travel and foreknowledge, being given information about the future makes it rational to choose as an evidential decision theorist would choose. Although the c...

Lewis argued that although paradoxes such as the famous Grandfather Paradox can be solved, only a limited set of time travel fiction is consistent. In this paper, I discuss how to extend a Lewisian approach to a class of time travel fiction not consi...

The ontology behind quantum mechanics has been the subject of endless debate since the theory was formulated some 100 years ago. It has been suggested, at one time or another, that the objects described by the theory may be individual particles, wave...

I have argued against the Principle of Alternative Possibilities using a time travel-based counterexample. Kelly McCormick has responded to my counterexample by arguing that the time travel scenario must be a scenario in which a time traveler’s...

The present paper argues that the standardised treatment of disaster research and practice perpetuates the production of systematic epistemic injustices against victims of disasters. On the one hand, disaster victims are often prevented from contribu...

This paper reconstructs Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical project in terms of a phenomenology of sensible transcendence. According to this framework, (i) any given data are correlative to a subjective apprehension, (ii) but they cannot be fully cap...

This essay approaches the “God is dead” theme by offering a new philosophical history addressing what would make belief in divinity, in God, sustainable and unsustainable. I claim that the death of nature and the death of God in the moder...

There are possible worlds in which time is circular and finite in duration, forming a loop of, say, 12,000 years. There are also possible worlds in which time is linear and infinite in both directions and in which history is repetitive, consisting of...

Starting from the observation that there is a gap between knowledge of the environmental sciences and practical engagement, for example, in climate change or biodiversity loss, this article explores one possible explanation for this situation—n...