Journal Description
Philosophies
Philosophies
is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal promoting re-integration of diverse forms of philosophical reflection and scientific research on fundamental issues in science, technology and culture, published bimonthly online by MDPI. The International Society for Information Studies (IS4SI) is affiliated with Philosophies and their members receive a discount on the article processing charge.
- Open Access— free for readers, with article processing charges (APC) paid by authors or their institutions.
- High Visibility: indexed within Scopus, ESCI (Web of Science), PhilPapers, and other databases.
- Journal Rank: CiteScore - Q1 (Philosophy)
- Rapid Publication: manuscripts are peer-reviewed and a first decision is provided to authors approximately 29.9 days after submission; acceptance to publication is undertaken in 6.8 days (median values for papers published in this journal in the second half of 2022).
- Recognition of Reviewers: reviewers who provide timely, thorough peer-review reports receive vouchers entitling them to a discount on the APC of their next publication in any MDPI journal, in appreciation of the work done.
Latest Articles
Bensaïd’s Jeanne: Strategic Mythopoesis for Difficult Times
Philosophies 2023, 8(1), 12; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8010012 - 31 Jan 2023
Abstract
In this essay, I consider the significance of Daniel Bensaïd’s work on Jeanne d’Arc with regard to dealing with the “difficult times” in which we live. (1) I first consider some of the background in early critical theory in order to show that
[...] Read more.
In this essay, I consider the significance of Daniel Bensaïd’s work on Jeanne d’Arc with regard to dealing with the “difficult times” in which we live. (1) I first consider some of the background in early critical theory in order to show that Bensaïd’s aim to recover Benjamin’s notion of a “weak messianic power” requires following through with Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of enlightenment, and that this implies a critical rehabilitation of myth and mythopoesis. (2) Approaching Bensaïd’s account of Jeanne in the light of Blumenberg’s notion of “work on myth”, I show how he portrays her in a way that establishes a concrete connection between the discordant temporalities of contingency and necessity, but that this is best understood in the radically immanent terms of prereflective embodied action as based on the corporeal sedimentation of an intercorporeal ethical habitus. Bensaïd’s account of Jeanne thus offers a new lens of historical perception that can help reveal otherwise hidden possibilities for transformative historical agency in embodied coexistence today. (3) By way of conclusion, I briefly consider the deeper meaning and significance of this in terms of offering a non-Promethean mythico-political framework.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Current French Philosophy in Difficult Times)
Open AccessArticle
Civic Solidarity and Public Health Ethics
Philosophies 2023, 8(1), 11; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8010011 - 18 Jan 2023
Abstract
Is solidarity in bioethics or public health ethics necessary? If so, why? Is there room for a principle of obligatory solidarity in bioethics or in public health ethics? In the first part of this paper, I assess the meaning of the value of
[...] Read more.
Is solidarity in bioethics or public health ethics necessary? If so, why? Is there room for a principle of obligatory solidarity in bioethics or in public health ethics? In the first part of this paper, I assess the meaning of the value of solidarity in ethics. In the second part, I propose insights into the republican interpretation of solidarity, or, more correctly, “civic” solidarity. This is crucial to be able to distinguish between different sources of, and justifications for, solidarity, some legitimate and some not legitimate. In the third part of the paper, I apply the republican concept of civic solidarity to the field of bioethics and public health ethics. This is intended to show how civic republicanism can correct both liberal deficiencies and communitarian excesses in bioethics. Civic solidarity is essential to finding this middle way. It is a key concept, considering the challenges that we face as citizens, health professionals and patients. Finally, the paper concludes with a summary and a plan for further research in this area.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Solidarity in Bioethics)
Open AccessEditorial
Acknowledgment to the Reviewers of Philosophies in 2022
Philosophies 2023, 8(1), 10; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8010010 - 16 Jan 2023
Abstract
High-quality academic publishing is built on rigorous peer review [...]
Full article
Open AccessArticle
‘What Am I Going to Do with My Philodendron?’ Looking at a Plant in Desk Set
Philosophies 2023, 8(1), 9; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8010009 - 13 Jan 2023
Abstract
Desk Set, a 1957 20th Century Fox studio comedy, made with the sponsorship of IBM, charts the relationship between a reference librarian, Bunny Watson, and Richard Sumner, the inventor of a computer which appears to threaten her job. The film displays a
[...] Read more.
Desk Set, a 1957 20th Century Fox studio comedy, made with the sponsorship of IBM, charts the relationship between a reference librarian, Bunny Watson, and Richard Sumner, the inventor of a computer which appears to threaten her job. The film displays a thriving philodendron within Bunny’s skyscraper office, illustrating her organic style of thinking, and implicitly inviting us to see the plant in opposition to the computer. The suggestion that the plant is in some sense excessive, claiming attention beyond the norms of the ornamental background houseplant, opens questions about how we look at plants on film. We find here a reframing of figure and ground, which relates the philodendron to moments where plants become conspicuous in early film and in horror. Desk Set reflects a vegetal landscape characterised by all the commonplace instrumentalising of plants in modernity, amongst which the philodendron emerges as an exception. The plant does not point outwards to a putative wilderness. Instead, our looking at it allows us to contemplate it as an individuated specimen, and to move from that act of looking to recognise its deep entanglement with the urban environment, and with human care.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Thinking Cinema—With Plants)
►▼
Show Figures

Figure 1
Open AccessArticle
Turing’s Biological Philosophy: Morphogenesis, Mechanisms and Organicism
Philosophies 2023, 8(1), 8; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8010008 - 13 Jan 2023
Abstract
Alan M. Turing’s last published work and some posthumously published manuscripts were dedicated to the development of his theory of organic pattern formation. In “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis” (1952), he provided an elaborated mathematical formulation of the theory of the origins
[...] Read more.
Alan M. Turing’s last published work and some posthumously published manuscripts were dedicated to the development of his theory of organic pattern formation. In “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis” (1952), he provided an elaborated mathematical formulation of the theory of the origins of biological form that had been first proposed by Sir D’Arcy Wendworth Thompson in On Growth and Form (1917/1942). While arguably his most mathematically detailed and his systematically most ambitious effort, Turing’s morphogenetical writings also form the most thematically self-contained and least philosophically explored part of his work. We dedicate our inquiry to the reasons and the implications of Turing’s choice of biological topic and viewpoint. We will probe for possible factors in Turing’s choice that go beyond availability and acquaintance with On Growth and Form. On these grounds, we will explore how and to what extent his theory of morphogenesis actually ties in with his concept of mechanistic computation. Notably, Thompson’s pioneering work in biological ‘structuralism’ was organicist in outlook and explicitly critical of the Darwinian approaches that were popular with Turing’s cyberneticist contemporaries—and partly used by Turing himself in his proto-connectionist models of learning. Resolving this apparent dichotomy, we demonstrate how Turing’s quest for mechanistic explanations of how organisation emerges in nature leaves room for a non-mechanist view of nature.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Turing the Philosopher: Established Debates and New Developments)
Open AccessArticle
Common Grounds: Thinking with Ruderal Plants about (Other) Filmic Histories
Philosophies 2023, 8(1), 7; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8010007 - 11 Jan 2023
Abstract
This article explores the connections between film and ruderal plants: plants that grow spontaneously in anthropized environments and that we often call “weeds”. Thriving across damaged lands, ruderals are not only exceptional companions for thinking with at a time of ecological rupture, but
[...] Read more.
This article explores the connections between film and ruderal plants: plants that grow spontaneously in anthropized environments and that we often call “weeds”. Thriving across damaged lands, ruderals are not only exceptional companions for thinking with at a time of ecological rupture, but also a way of engaging with less anthropocentric histories. As argued in this paper, such histories also pertain to film. Despite its timid representational interest in ruderals and “weeds”, cinema is concerned with the stories of collaborative survival, companionship and contaminated diversity raised by such turbulent creatures. Framed by a reflection on our ruderal condition, a discussion around some recent artists’ films allows us to explore some of these problems, while putting an accent on the idea of affective ecologies and involutionary modes of perception.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Thinking Cinema—With Plants)
►▼
Show Figures

Figure 1
Open AccessArticle
“Surveyability” in Hilbert, Wittgenstein and Turing
by
Philosophies 2023, 8(1), 6; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8010006 - 11 Jan 2023
Abstract
An investigation of the concept of “surveyability” as traced through the thought of Hilbert, Wittgenstein, and Turing. The communicability and reproducibility of proof, with certainty, are seen as earmarked by the “surveyability” of symbols, sequences, and structures of proof in all these thinkers.
[...] Read more.
An investigation of the concept of “surveyability” as traced through the thought of Hilbert, Wittgenstein, and Turing. The communicability and reproducibility of proof, with certainty, are seen as earmarked by the “surveyability” of symbols, sequences, and structures of proof in all these thinkers. Hilbert initiated the idea within his metamathematics, Wittgenstein took up a kind of game formalism in the 1920s and early 1930s in response. Turing carried Hilbert’s conception of the “surveyability” of proof in metamathematics through into his analysis of what a formal system (what a step in a computation) is in “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (1936). Wittgenstein’s 1939 investigations of the significance of surveyability to the concept of “proof “in Principia Mathematica were influenced, both by Turing’s remarkable everyday analysis of the Hilbertian idea, and by conversations with Turing. Although Turing does not use the word “surveyability” explicitly, it is clear that the Hilbertian idea plays a recurrent role in his work, refracted through his engagement with Wittgenstein’s idea of a “language-game”. This is evinced in some of his later writings, where the “reform” of mathematical notation for the sake of human surveyability (1944/45) may be seen to draw out the Hilbertian idea. For Turing, as for Wittgenstein, the need for “surveyability” earmarks the evolving culture of humans located in an evolving social and scientific world, just as it had for Hilbert.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Turing the Philosopher: Established Debates and New Developments)
Open AccessArticle
The Mythologist as a Virologist: Barthes’ Myths as Viruses
Philosophies 2023, 8(1), 5; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8010005 - 11 Jan 2023
Abstract
This article is an attempt to explore and explain the complex processes and mechanisms involved in creating myth signs as presented in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1957) through an interdisciplinary and an interdiscursive approach. The article presupposes that the mythic system of signification occupies
[...] Read more.
This article is an attempt to explore and explain the complex processes and mechanisms involved in creating myth signs as presented in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1957) through an interdisciplinary and an interdiscursive approach. The article presupposes that the mythic system of signification occupies a liminal space of a multiplicity of disciplines and discourses. The mythic sign integrates a myriad of epistemological spaces philosophical, scientific, and cultural. Therefore, this article wants to cross the borderlines between fields of knowledge to understand the unique position of the mythic sign. We are going to use scientific discourse of virology to investigate the parasitic and viral nature of the mythic sign. Moreover, we investigate the role of the mythologist in exploring the signs that are infected by ideology and how to demystify their intentionality and artificiality. Finally, we are going to rely on quantum physics to investigate the superposition of the mythologist and the role this position plays in understanding the ambiguous and multidimensional nature of the mythic sign.
Full article
Open AccessArticle
The Digital Mind: How Computers (Re)Structure Human Consciousness
by
Philosophies 2023, 8(1), 4; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8010004 - 11 Jan 2023
Abstract
►▼
Show Figures
Technologies of communication condition human sense-making. They do so by creating the social environment we inhabit and extending their structural biases and logics through human use. As such, this essay inquires into the prevailing habits of mind in the digital era. Employing a
[...] Read more.
Technologies of communication condition human sense-making. They do so by creating the social environment we inhabit and extending their structural biases and logics through human use. As such, this essay inquires into the prevailing habits of mind in the digital era. Employing a media ecology of communication, I argue that digital computers and microprocessors are defined by three structural properties and, hence, underlying logics: digitization (binary code), algorithmic execution (input/output), and efficiency (machine logic). Repeated exposure to these logics cultivates a digital mind, a model of thinking, communicating, and sense-making characterized by intransigence, impertinence, and impulsivity. I conclude the essay by exploring the broader implications of a digital mind, paying particular attention to the challenges it poses to democratic politics.
Full article

Figure 1
Open AccessArticle
The Poetics of Physics
Philosophies 2023, 8(1), 3; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8010003 - 05 Jan 2023
Abstract
►▼
Show Figures
Physics has been thought to truly represent reality since at least Galileo, and the foundations of physics are always established using philosophical ideas. In particular, the elegant naming of physical entities is usually very influential in the acceptance of physical theories. We here
[...] Read more.
Physics has been thought to truly represent reality since at least Galileo, and the foundations of physics are always established using philosophical ideas. In particular, the elegant naming of physical entities is usually very influential in the acceptance of physical theories. We here demonstrate (using current developments in thermodynamics as an example) that both the epistemology and the ontology of physics ultimately rest on poetic language. What we understand depends essentially on the language we use. We wish to establish our knowledge securely, but strictly speaking this is impossible using only analytic language. Knowledge of the meanings of things must use a natural language designed to express meaning, that is, poetic language. Although the world is really there, and although we can indeed know it truly, this knowledge is never either complete or certain but ultimately must rest on intuition. Reading a recently discovered artefact with a palaeo-Hebrew inscription as from the first century, we demonstrate from it that this ontological understanding long predates the Hellenic period. Poetic language is primary, both logically and temporally.
Full article

Figure 1
Open AccessArticle
Practical Nihilism
Philosophies 2023, 8(1), 2; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8010002 - 27 Dec 2022
Abstract
Nihilism about practical reasoning is the thesis that there is no such thing as practical rationality—as rationally figuring out what to do. While other philosophers have defended a theoretically oriented version of the thesis, usually called “error theory”, a case is made for
[...] Read more.
Nihilism about practical reasoning is the thesis that there is no such thing as practical rationality—as rationally figuring out what to do. While other philosophers have defended a theoretically oriented version of the thesis, usually called “error theory”, a case is made for a fully practical version of it: that we are so bad at figuring out what to do that we do not really know what doing it right would so much as look like. In particular, much of our control of instrumental (or means-end) rationality is illusory, and we are almost entirely incompetent at managing the defeating conditions of our practical inferences—that is, of knowing when not to draw an apparently acceptable conclusion. If that is right, then instead of trying to reason more successfully, we should be trying to make failure pay.
Full article
Open AccessFeature PaperArticle
A Semiotic Reading of Aron Gurwitsch’s Transcendental Phenomenology
Philosophies 2023, 8(1), 1; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8010001 - 23 Dec 2022
Abstract
The aim of the paper is to show the relevancy of Aron Gurwitsch’s transcendental-phenomenological theory of the field of consciousness for semiotics and the theory of meaning. After a brief biographical introduction, the paper will focus upon the key theoretical points that define
[...] Read more.
The aim of the paper is to show the relevancy of Aron Gurwitsch’s transcendental-phenomenological theory of the field of consciousness for semiotics and the theory of meaning. After a brief biographical introduction, the paper will focus upon the key theoretical points that define Gurwitsch’s theory of the field of consciousness and will consider some of Gurwitsch’s reflections on linguistic and semiotic issues. Finally, it will be shown that the latter are strictly connected with Gurwitsch’s general philosophical framework and, accordingly, that it is possible (and fruitful) to provide a semiotic understanding of Gurwitsch’s phenomenology.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Semiotics and Phenomenology: New Perspectives)
Open AccessArticle
Hélène Cixous, Laida Lertxundi, and the Fruits of the Feminine
by
Philosophies 2022, 7(6), 145; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7060145 - 14 Dec 2022
Abstract
In the fields of experimental writing and experimental filmmaking, respectively, Hélène Cixous and Laida Lertxundi gather images of fruits: apples, oranges and lemons. Although Cixous and Lertxundi are well-known for seeking something of the feminine for writing and filmmaking, in these texts and
[...] Read more.
In the fields of experimental writing and experimental filmmaking, respectively, Hélène Cixous and Laida Lertxundi gather images of fruits: apples, oranges and lemons. Although Cixous and Lertxundi are well-known for seeking something of the feminine for writing and filmmaking, in these texts and these films, fruit is not equivalent to feminine anatomy and the juiciness of neither apple, nor orange, nor lemon is mere metaphor for feminine jouissance. While Cixous and Lertxundi recognise in art, literature and philosophy an historical relation of women to nature, an essentialist equation of one to the other is loosened as the texts and the films situate apples, oranges and lemons as organic things in the world. Neither Cixous nor Lertxundi, then, eradicate the distance between human and non-human on the ground of the feminine: fruit is not entwined with women—but women do look, from time to time, at fruit. As if photosynthetically towards the sun, both Cixous and Lertxundi turn from the self towards the world, taken by the beauty and the light of fruit. In an addition to recent ecofeminist philosophy (Donna Haraway, Luce Irigaray) and also to recent feminist film-philosophy on attention (by way of Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil), I refer throughout the article to Kaja Silverman’s philosophy of ‘world spectatorship’ (2000) as I outline the way Cixous and Lertxundi each post-deconstructively combine a language of desire—feminine appetite, curiosity and pleasure—with a language of things to affirm, with women’s eyes on a simple piece of fruit, the world anew.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Thinking Cinema—With Plants)
►▼
Show Figures

Figure 1
Open AccessArticle
The Science of Emotion: Mind, Body, and Culture
by
Philosophies 2022, 7(6), 144; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7060144 - 13 Dec 2022
Abstract
In this paper, I give readers an idea of what some scholars are interested in, what I found interesting, and what may be of future interest in the philosophy of emotion. I begin with a brief overview of the general topics of interests
[...] Read more.
In this paper, I give readers an idea of what some scholars are interested in, what I found interesting, and what may be of future interest in the philosophy of emotion. I begin with a brief overview of the general topics of interests in the philosophy of emotion. I then discuss what I believe to be some of the most interesting topics in the contemporary discourse, including questions about how philosophy can inform the science of emotion, responses to aspects of the mind–body problem, and concerns about perception, cognition, and emotion, along with questions about the place of 4E approaches and meta-semantic pluraliste approaches in the embodied cognitive tradition. I also discuss the natural kind–social construction debate in the philosophy of emotion, the emerging field of cultural evolution, the import of a dual-inheritance theory in this emerging field, and I propose a possible way to integrate the frameworks of dual-inheritance theory and meta-semantic pluralisme to demonstrate at least one way in which the philosophy of emotion can contribute to the emerging field of cultural evolution. I conclude with a brief summary of this paper and note at least one significant implication of my proposal for the natural kind–social construction debate in the philosophy of emotion.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Philosophical Aspect of Emotions)
Open AccessArticle
Paper Flowers: Jane Campion, Plant Life, and The Power of the Dog (2021)
by
Philosophies 2022, 7(6), 143; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7060143 - 13 Dec 2022
Abstract
Taking as its point of departure the place of the vegetal realm within Jane Campion’s filmmaking, this article attends to both living and artificial plants, homing in on the exquisitely crafted paper flowers of The Power of the Dog to explore their entanglement
[...] Read more.
Taking as its point of departure the place of the vegetal realm within Jane Campion’s filmmaking, this article attends to both living and artificial plants, homing in on the exquisitely crafted paper flowers of The Power of the Dog to explore their entanglement with human power relations. Manmade flowers are clearly distinct from the flowers of the garden or the prairie, but in this Western, they form part of a broader floral aesthetic with their living kin. Drawing upon thought that stems from actual plants (Deleuze and Guattari’s arboreal-rhizomatic thinking) and vegetal philosophy (Marder, Coccia), as well as parallel botany’s attention to the artificial (Lionni), I follow the fate of one paper flower as it intersects with the gendered history of artificial flower making and floral sexual symbolism. Thinking with this paper flower, I engage with theories that variously question binary power relations (Cixous, Barthes, Steinbock), reading these alongside scholarship on sex, gender, and masculinity in the Western (Neale, Mulvey, Bruzzi), and broaching the hierarchies of settler colonialism. The film’s floral aesthetic, I argue, challenges the either/or logic of male or female, masculine or feminine, and even though it cannot fully break away from the binaries it critiques, it is indebted to registering the importance of the nuance (Barthes) in the unthreading of power.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Thinking Cinema—With Plants)
►▼
Show Figures

Figure 1
Open AccessEssay
The Lack of Philosophical Knowledge in Che Guevara’s Pedagogy: Fetishizing Love for Justice and Rage against Imperialism at the Expense of Logos
Philosophies 2022, 7(6), 142; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7060142 - 13 Dec 2022
Abstract
Most research on Ernesto “Che” Guevara has been concerned with emphasizing his ideological Marxist commitments and anti-imperial material objectives. These scholarly concerns usually constellate recycled subjective themes highlighting the revolutionary leader hating injustice, and loving justice, in tandem with the objective of eliminating
[...] Read more.
Most research on Ernesto “Che” Guevara has been concerned with emphasizing his ideological Marxist commitments and anti-imperial material objectives. These scholarly concerns usually constellate recycled subjective themes highlighting the revolutionary leader hating injustice, and loving justice, in tandem with the objective of eliminating imperialism and advancing a Third World project. In 2012, Che’s Apuntes filósoficos (Eng. Philosophical Notes) were published and highlighted that his exposure to philosophy regrettably occurred late in his life, and surprisingly, the difficulty he had in reading Marx and Hegel. The objective, therefore, of this multidisciplinary research navigating law, theology, philosophy, and politics is threefold. First, it alludes to and critiques the familiar pedagogy of Guevara emphasizing the importance of developing a “theory in action”, “learning through action”, being a “humanist”, and “leading by example”. Secondly, it considers the consequences of Che reifying emotion (eros) over reason (logos) thereby providing a possible answer to his “failed revolutionary story” in the Congo and Bolivia with his pedagogy involving an unstable compound mixing the emotion of compassion with rage thus clouding his reason. Finally, the third section highlights that we should not relegate emotion away from the sphere of political discourse, but rather harmonize it with reason to avoid chaotic and unpredictable errors based on subjective truths. Emphasizing the former at the expense of the latter—as maintained by a realist approach to International Relations and positivist jurisprudence accenting International Law—risks undermining scholarship challenging the immoral consequences arising from a naturalized assumption separating reason and revelation thus decriminalizing colonial practices characterizing the North and South.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Section Virtues)
Open AccessArticle
Gödel, Turing and the Iconic/Performative Axis
Philosophies 2022, 7(6), 141; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7060141 - 12 Dec 2022
Abstract
1936 was a watershed year for computability. Debates among Gödel, Church and others over the correct analysis of the intuitive concept “human effectively computable”, an analysis at the heart of the Incompleteness Theorems, the Entscheidungsproblem, the question of what a finite computation is,
[...] Read more.
1936 was a watershed year for computability. Debates among Gödel, Church and others over the correct analysis of the intuitive concept “human effectively computable”, an analysis at the heart of the Incompleteness Theorems, the Entscheidungsproblem, the question of what a finite computation is, and most urgently—for Gödel—the generality of the Incompleteness Theorems, were definitively set to rest with the appearance, in that year, of the Turing Machine. The question I explore here is, do the mathematical facts exhaust what is to be said about the thinking behind the “confluence of ideas in 1936”? I will argue for a cultural role in Gödel’s, and, by extension, the larger logical community’s absorption of Turing’s 1936 model. As scaffolding I employ a conceptual framework due to the critic Leo Marx of the technological sublime; I also make use of the distinction within the technological sublime due to Caroline Jones, between its iconic and performative modes—a distinction operating within the conceptual art of the 1960s, but serving the history of computability equally well.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Turing the Philosopher: Established Debates and New Developments)
Open AccessArticle
The Illusions of Time Passage: Why Time Passage Is Real
by
and
Philosophies 2022, 7(6), 140; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7060140 - 10 Dec 2022
Abstract
The passage of time pertains to the dynamic happening of anticipated future events merging into a present actuality and subsequently becoming the past. Philosophers and scientists alike often endorse the view that the passage of time is an illusion. Here we instead account
[...] Read more.
The passage of time pertains to the dynamic happening of anticipated future events merging into a present actuality and subsequently becoming the past. Philosophers and scientists alike often endorse the view that the passage of time is an illusion. Here we instead account for the phenomenology of time passage as a real psycho-biological phenomenon. We argue that the experience of time passage has a real and measurable basis as it arises from an internal generative model for anticipating upcoming events. The experience of passage is not merely a representation by a passive recipient of sensory stimulation but is generated by predictive processes of the brain and proactive sensorimotor activity of the whole body. Although some philosophical approaches to time consider some psycho-biological evidence, the biological basis of the passage of time has not been examined in detail from a thorough scientific perspective. This paper proposes to remedy this omission.
Full article
Open AccessArticle
Clocks, Automata and the Mechanization of Nature (1300–1600)
Philosophies 2022, 7(6), 139; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7060139 - 09 Dec 2022
Abstract
This paper aims at tracking down, by looking at late medieval and early modern discussions over the ontological status of artifacts, the main steps of the process through which nature became theorized on a mechanistic model in the early 17th century. The adopted
[...] Read more.
This paper aims at tracking down, by looking at late medieval and early modern discussions over the ontological status of artifacts, the main steps of the process through which nature became theorized on a mechanistic model in the early 17th century. The adopted methodology consists in examining how inventions such as mechanical clocks and automata forced philosophers to modify traditional criteria based on an intrinsic principle of motion and rest for defining natural beings. The paper studies different strategies designed in the transitional period 1300–1600 for making these inventions compatible with classical definitions of nature and artifacts. In the first part of the paper, it is shown that, even if virtually all medieval philosophers acknowledged an ontological distinction between artifacts and natural beings, these different strategies demonstrate a growing concern about the consistency of the art/nature distinction. The next part of the paper studies how mechanical clocks, even before the Scientific Revolution, served as theoretical models for applying mechanistic views to different objects (be they cosmological, physical or biological). The epistemological function of clocks appears to stem from different factors (like the specific manufacturing of late medieval clocks as well as the evolution of 16th-century mechanics) that are listed in this second part of the paper. These factors, combined with the definitional issues raised by automata, explain that clocks became the symbol of a new approach to natural philosophy, characterized by the collapse of the art/nature distinction and the “mechanization of nature”.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Art vs Nature: The Ontology of Artifacts in the Long Middle Ages)
►▼
Show Figures

Figure 1
Open AccessArticle
Animist Phytofilm: Plants in Amazonian Indigenous Filmmaking
Philosophies 2022, 7(6), 138; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7060138 - 08 Dec 2022
Abstract
Early films about plants offer a glimpse into the behavior of vegetal life, which had hitherto remained hidden from humans. Critics have praised this animistic capacity of cinema, allowing audiences to see the movement of beings that appeared to be inert and lifeless.
[...] Read more.
Early films about plants offer a glimpse into the behavior of vegetal life, which had hitherto remained hidden from humans. Critics have praised this animistic capacity of cinema, allowing audiences to see the movement of beings that appeared to be inert and lifeless. With these reflections as a starting point, this article examines the notion of animist cinema. I argue that early movies still remained beholden to the goal of showing the multiple ways in which plants resemble humans, a tendency we often still find today in work on critical plant studies. I discuss the concept of animism in the context of Amazonian Indigenous societies as a springboard into an analysis of movies by Indigenous filmmakers from the region that highlight the plantness of human beings. I end the essay with an analysis of Ika Muru Huni Kuin’s film Shuku Shukuwe as an example of animist phytocinema.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Thinking Cinema—With Plants)
►▼
Show Figures

Figure 1

Journal Menu
► ▼ Journal Menu-
- Philosophies Home
- Aims & Scope
- Editorial Board
- Reviewer Board
- Topical Advisory Panel
- Instructions for Authors
- Special Issues
- Sections
- Article Processing Charge
- Indexing & Archiving
- Most Cited & Viewed
- Journal Statistics
- Journal History
- Journal Awards
- Society Collaborations
- Conferences
- Editorial Office
Journal Browser
► ▼ Journal BrowserHighly Accessed Articles
Latest Books
E-Mail Alert
News
Topics

Conferences
Special Issues
Special Issue in
Philosophies
Historic Ontology and Epistemology
Guest Editor: Vincent ColapietroDeadline: 10 February 2023
Special Issue in
Philosophies
Between Virtue and Epistemology
Guest Editor: Genia SchönbaumsfeldDeadline: 25 March 2023
Special Issue in
Philosophies
The Nature of Structure and the Structure of Nature
Guest Editor: Joshua MozerskyDeadline: 1 April 2023