Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050178

Authors: John Otieno Ouko

Amartya Sen’s capability approach has been very influential in reframing development as the expansion of people’s substantive freedoms rather than mere growth, and in tying evaluation to what individuals are actually able to be and do. Building on this insight, I argue that a relational capabilities approach grounded in Kwame Gyekye’s moderate communitarianism should guide African development ethics because it retains Sen’s focus on expanding substantive freedoms while grounding those freedoms in the just, caring, and participatory relationships through which people in African societies actually come to flourish. Drawing on Gyekye’s moderate communitarianism, I distinguish a relational capabilities approach from Sen’s predominantly individual-focused framework by grounding capabilities in persons’ partial social constitution through community and showing how this insight can inform development practice in Africa. This article contributes to the existing knowledge by extending scholarship on relational capabilities through a critical application of Gyekye’s moderate communitarianism, arguing that development ethics should attend to both social embeddedness and individual agency. I use critical philosophical analysis to examine Sen’s capability approach, Gyekye’s moderate communitarianism, and an ubuntu-based approach, arguing that Gyekye’s account offers a plausible foundation for relational capabilities in African development.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050177

Authors: Strahinja Đorđević Berkay Ozar

This article explains how material practices and naming shape collective agency in organizations that depend on artificial intelligence. It addresses an apparent tension. An AI system can be a constitutive condition of what an organization can do at a given time. The same system can remain replaceable across the organization’s history. This distinction separates present agency from persistence through change. This article develops affordance facts as an analytically distinct category within explanations of social facts. These facts concern the possibilities for action that a material or computational arrangement makes available to situated users. They differ from anchoring facts because they do not establish the rules that ground a social fact. Naming has a related but narrower role; it supports recognition and coordinates claims of continuity, yet it is neither necessary nor sufficient for organizational identity. A revised thought experiment on structural relocation shows that continuity cannot be determined by an AI system alone. Brief illustrations involving IBM Watson Health and Google DeepMind support this claim. The resulting view avoids technological determinism because it treats agency as relational. AI systems can shape organizational capacities without becoming autonomous identity bearers. They are often constitutive conditions of present activity and contingent operational infrastructures across time. This framework clarifies how responsibility can remain with an organization even when an AI system has become indispensable to its current operations.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050176

Authors: Yuval Dolev

This paper explores the openness of the future by prioritizing lived experience over traditional ontological frameworks like eternalism or presentism. Rejecting the “branching roads” model as a misguided spatialization of time, the author argues that objective temporality is best understood through the phenomenal character of hope and the sentiment of randomness. Central to this investigation is the concept of abstract hope, an unstructured faith that manifests the future’s genuine openness in reality. The author further redefines randomness as “unfixable unaccountable unpredictability” (UUU). Rather than viewing randomness as the source of openness, this paper posits that our understanding of random events—including quantum phenomena—is grounded in the experiential origin of acting without bias, where an agent makes a choice despite having no determining factors. Ultimately, this paper contends that hope and unbiased action are not merely psychological states but register objective features of the world. By treating the future as truly open, the author defends a form of realism where human decisions and random occurrences actively shape reality rather than serving as mere epiphenomena of a predetermined causal chain.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050175

Authors: Sydney Kale

Growing academic research and popular interest in critical plant studies have brought vegetality out of the shadows of plant blindness. Yet, plants labeled as invasive continue to receive disproportionately negative attention in non-native contexts due to their detrimental effects on desirable native ecological processes. They have often been antagonized as unfair players in ecological harmony as well as a symptom of human negligence and an uncontrollably changing climate. They are charismatic in the sense that they incite a ‘collective turning towards’ ecological voice, although they are often misunderstood, as evidenced by misplaced antagonistic responses. The language surrounding many of today’s pressing environmental issues tends to estrange us from whom we should be fighting for and with, while ignoring the metastatic drivers of ecological dis-ease. The intention of this paper is to illuminate the characteristics and implications of what I call the ‘invasive register’. Invasive species demonstrate a vocal, charismatic, and passive activism, pointing to and flooding ecological wounds through adaptive physiological mechanisms. Their refusal to stand down in the face of conventional management methods demonstrates an insistence on collective responsiveness to that which they attend to and speak for, and with. The invasive register, as argued in this paper, is romantically intertwined with landscape, selflessly ego-centric through the proliferation of biomass, provocative as a facilitator of collective agency, a metabolic invigorator, and an expression of the legibility of landscape.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050173

Authors: Mala Dengkeng

In this paper, I will investigate “sickness in situation” using a critical phenomenological approach together with two concepts from disability studies—normate and misfit. I will scrutinize the famous distinction that has been made in the phenomenology of illness tradition between “disease” as a “biological property” and “illness” as the “what it is like” of disease and argue that the phenomenology of illness should turn its attention to the purposively neglected half of the illness–disease dyad, namely, disease. I illustrate that third-person descriptions of the body, norms, and assumptions built around normate normality are part of the situation in which sickness unfolds; they steer what we think the body is and determine what its “normal” abilities are. Some ways of being sick are anticipated and accommodated, whereas others are foreclosed. Respectively, these two cases of sickness can be described as normal and abnormal sickness. I will argue that normal sickness, even though it may deviate from normate normality, tends to constitute a fit, whereas abnormal sickness constitutes a misfit. Lastly, I will turn my attention to “disease” as a third-person description of the body. Rather than insisting on the difference between first-person experience and third-person description, I will show how third-person descriptions of the body that are well established in a subject’s lifeworld form their conceptual understanding of their own body. This understanding is part of the body image, thereby shaping embodied experience.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050174

Authors: Weian Ding

In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger names preservation (Bewahrung) as essential to the artwork, yet says comparatively little about what it requires of those who undertake it. This essay offers a textual reconstruction of preservation as a task of articulation, reading the artwork essay alongside GA 80.2, GA 82, GA 100, and GA 104. Heidegger’s formulation of truth setting itself into work indicates that neither artist nor preserver produces or completes the truth that happens in the work. The preserver participates in a disclosure that remains underway through finite and historically situated forms of saying. I develop this interpretation through Er-stellung and Er-sagen and consider its measure and temporal structure through Grundton, Er-schweigen, and Gespräch. On this reading, preservation places an onto-hermeneutical demand upon the preserver: to articulate and hand on what the work opens without claiming mastery over it. The essay closes by turning to Cao Jun’s painting to ask whether such articulation may continue across historical worlds, a possibility that must be weighed against the communal and linguistic boundedness of Heidegger’s own account.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050172

Authors: Lingkai Kong

Modern political thought typically understands politics as an order of rule centered on supreme authority, usually sovereignty. However, this sovereign model compresses the rich mediating relationships and plural actions within politics. Taking “where is politics generated” as its core question, this article conducts a comparative study of the political theories of Johannes Althusius and Hannah Arendt from the perspective of mediating structures. The article first elaborates the basic structure of the sovereign model and identifies its underlying social imaginary: political order is understood as a ruling structure established by a unified adjudication center, while mediating communities and plural relationships are regarded as objects to be incorporated into it. On this basis, the article analyzes how Althusius and Arendt, respectively, proposed two non-sovereign forms of politics against different historical conditions of mediating structures. Althusius, writing in a still-corporate world where mediating structures remained abundant, understood politics as a symbiotic order produced through hierarchically constructed communities. Arendt, confronting the modern disintegration of those structures and the decline of the public sphere, redefined politics as the action of plural actors in public space and the generation of power. The former answers how political community is constructed outside the sovereign center; the latter answers how politics can be reactivated within an already institutionalized community.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050171

Authors: Ben Gershon Oron Shagrir

Turing develops the idea of machine intelligence in a series of lectures and papers between 1947 and 1952. In some of them he addresses the mathematical objection (his term), whose gist is the claim that humans can assert some mathematical truths that exceed the abilities of computing machines. We first ask why Turing was concerned with the mathematical objection. After all, even if some humans surpass machines in their mathematical abilities, this by itself does not undermine the project of machine intelligence. Our answer is that the mathematical objection raises a dilemma with respect to Turing’s core claims about machine intelligence and forces him to relinquish at least one of them. We then clarify Turing’s reply to the mathematical objection. Based on the textual evidence, we argue that, according to Turing, the machine that plays against the human in the Turing test is not a static machine but an enhanced machine.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050170

Authors: Saeid Sharifi Peyman Vahabzadeh

The quotidian is no longer a site of tranquil reiteration but a field of ontological fissure wherein sedimented collective structures undergo dissolution. This paper reconceives “sociocultural renaissance” not as a teleological ideal but as a phenomenological-existential process emergent from lifeworldly rupture. Engaging Husserl’s Lebenswelt, Heidegger’s Dasein-analytic, Merleau-Ponty’s carnal embodiment, and a radical phenomenology of collective praxis, it demonstrates fracture as structurally constitutive of sociohistorical being. Through a critique of “ultimate referentiality” and “articulated experiences,” the paper argues that fracture constitutes the transcendental condition for signification and collective transformation. Renaissance is thus redefined not as nostalgic restitution but as a mode of dwelling within fissure itself—a reorientation toward meaning-constitution when its ground reveals itself as abyssal and precarious. This demands acceptance of vulnerability and provisionality, ensuring that emergent forms remain perpetually open to reconfiguration. Ultimately, sociocultural renaissance consists of the arduous art of indwelling within ever-generative fractures. Freedom is actualized neither through escape from nor sublimation of the everyday, but through the immanent praxis of its transformation, a fragile intersubjective praxis that inaugurates the horizon of a genuinely common world.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050169

Authors: Gabriel Matías Vidal

Since the antiessentialist critique in the social sciences questioned the boundary between nature and culture, the view of nature as an independent reality has often given way to the idea that nature itself is a socially constructed category. This reading called into question the very enterprise of environmental ethics, understood as caring for nature as an objective reality: the imperative to protect wild nature from anthropogenic damage presupposes the nature–culture divide, even as some environmentalists insist that humans are part of nature, producing an apparent contradiction within environmental discourse. In this paper, I take the opposite route. I question the boundary between culture and nature not to arrive at socially constructed natures, but to show that humanity is as natural as any other living being. Drawing on ecological evidence at large temporal and spatial scales, I challenge the assumptions that underpin the nature–culture divide and human exceptionalism: equilibrium and harmony in nature, unchanging ecosystems, pristine or reference ecosystems, and the geographical essentialism that distinguishes native from exotic species. On this basis, I argue that the contemporary ecological paradigm supports a natural monism—a processual, realist and non-essentialist view of nature as a single immanent totality that includes humans as one of its many expressions—rather than dissolving nature into social construction. Human novelty then represents continuity rather than discontinuity with natural processes, and the exceptional character of humanity, whether construed negatively or positively, proves unfounded. Environmental ethics, in turn, may be understood not as the enterprise of caring for nature as something other, but as caring for humanity and other-than-human nature alike, as coinhabitants within shared ecological assemblages.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050168

Authors: Susan Bredlau

When we think of our way of being-in-the-world as an individual rather than as an intercorporeal accomplishment, we unfairly expect other people to sustain for themselves forms of experience that we only sustain through others. Drawing on Lisa Guenther’s work on solitary confinement, Iris Marion Young’s work on extended-care facilities for older adults, and my own account of the experience of people who hear voices, I will explore how we can deny others inclusion in forms of intercorporeality that we take for granted, and thereby exacerbate, if not create, forms of distress often referred to as “mental illness.” Indeed, we often deny forms of intercorporeality to the very people who are often most in need of them, people like prisoners, older adults, and those diagnosed with psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia, whose sense of self and autonomy is already more at issue than that of most others. While restoring existing forms of intercorporeality, or even creating new forms, for those who have been denied them may not eliminate the suffering associated with “mental illness,” it may certainly help to lessen this suffering.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050167

Authors: Takeshi Sakon

Time is often treated by analogy with space and considered to be another dimension alongside the three spatial dimensions. I refer to this conception as the “spatialization of time.” This paper aims to offer a version of presentism that avoids such spatialization. Presentism is typically characterized as the thesis that everything is present, and it has given rise to numerous objections. I primarily address the challenges concerning change and persistence raised by Leininger and Tallant, respectively. These critics seem to presuppose that change involves a thing’s having different states at various times, and persistence requires its continuous existence across those times. To counter these presuppositions, I first reconsider what the presentist thesis amounts to and then integrate it with the Aristotelian claim that time is the number of motion or change. By scrutinizing this claim, I develop a dynamic model that quantifies the duration of change and persistence but does not regard times as temporal locations. Ultimately, I argue that things can exist and possess properties without being located at a specific time, thereby providing a robust defense of presentism against its spatializing alternatives.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050166

Authors: Lee Braver

I discuss a view derived from philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, which sees language as presenting reality itself rather than representing things distinct from it. I give a reading of the Apology according to this Presentational Model of Language, organized around the three prophecies that it gives and that itself is the fulfillment of. All three prophecies bring about that which they predict in their very predicting of it. This reading finds the dialogue to be self-referentially about the nature of interpretation and about Plato’s writing of it. Its climax comes in the only recorded dialogue between Socrates and Plato, which I accord far more significance than most. Presentational language avoids Plato’s criticisms of language in general and writing in particular, allowing them to speak philosophy by his own lights.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050165

Authors: Kelly Becker

One major strand of post-Gettier epistemology concentrates on shoring up the connection between belief and truth by postulating a condition that includes a modal requirement. This approach abandons the traditional emphasis on reasons. A second major strand maintains the focus on reasons, aiming to distinguish those that are sufficient for knowledge from those that are not. The first strand has generated an endless parade of counterexamples. Some version of the second strand may be true but insufficiently informative. For example, perhaps knowledge really is undefeated justified true belief, but what is a genuine defeater, and what is justification? An early entrant in the post-Gettier competition, Fred Dretske, proposed a modal requirement that ties reasons, not belief, to the truth, thus incorporating key components of both strands. Drawing solely on resources in Dretske’s presentation, I develop his notion of conclusive reasons in an account of knowledge that I call reasons-based Dretskean sensitivity (RDS), which resolves most, if not all, of the major problems afflicting its wayward cousin, Nozickean sensitivity, and indeed many other epistemological difficulties. This paper lays out the RDS resolution of Hawthorne’s lottery puzzle.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050164

Authors: Susana Viegas

This paper proposes the concept of the “death-image” as a point of convergence between the film-philosophies of Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze. While Cavell and Deleuze are rarely brought together—given Cavell’s emphasis on ordinary language, skepticism, and ethics, and Deleuze’s focus on ontology, becoming, and impersonal temporality—death reveals a productive intersection between their respective approaches to cinema. Indeed, death simultaneously raises ethical questions concerning relation and acknowledgment, central to Cavell, and ontological questions concerning time, disappearance, and the limits of representation, central to Deleuze. Building on Cavell’s distinction between genre-as-cycle and genre-as-medium, the paper argues that film genres do not merely represent death differently but organize distinct forms of death-images: cinematic limit-images in which continuity falters, action is suspended, and the image confronts finitude. Through an analysis of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s melodrama Three Colors: Blue (1993) as a post-classical reconfiguration of this genre-medium, the paper examines how death-images transform from structures of sacrifice and deferred acknowledgment into images of traumatic grief, suspension, and survival after loss. In doing so, it proposes the death-image as a conceptual bridge between Cavellian acknowledgment and Deleuzian theories of cinematic time.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050163

Authors: Thomas Ede Zimmermann

This paper compares two approaches to intensionality within possible-worlds semantics between which Montague seems to have wavered: Frege’s distinction between extensional and intensional environments and Russell’s one-layered proposition-based account. It is shown that the Fregean framework can be embedded within the more restrictive Russelllian ontology by a variation of David Kaplan’s Russelling construction that is fully definable in Montague’s intensional type logic and lends itself to compositional semantic analysis.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050162

Authors: Alexander Cárdenas-Acero Carlos J. Mosquera Edwin A. Baquero

When interpreting the evolution of science, it is essential not only to know its history in terms of the foundational facts or the advances in the global theories that define it but also to understand how the subordinate theories, methodologies, and particular values within a field of knowledge configure themselves over the years. Insofar as this is achieved, it is possible to think of history and philosophy as optimal didactic tools for teaching science. Much more so in subjects such as Organometallic Chemistry, where solid foundations can ensure improvements in the teaching-learning process in college education. In this sense, the present article aims to perform a Micro-Theoretical analysis of the history of this discipline in terms of the research lines that have shaped it (i.e., Metal-CO, Metal-Olefin, Metal-Alkyl, Metal-Carbene, Sandwich Type). For this purpose, relevant aspects from each line are analyzed using an adaptation of Laudan’s Research Traditions (RT) model. This analysis is complemented by a brief discussion of the epistemological relevance of historical reconstruction regarding contemporary challenges in chemical progress. Finally, some comments are presented as conclusions and perspectives.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050161

Authors: Michael Levin

I argue that the emerging sciences of synthetic morphology and diverse intelligence suggest non-physicalist models of mind and show how they can be empirically investigated. Whence the anatomical, physiological, molecular-biological, and behavioral properties of engineered new beings that have never before existed, and do not have a history of selection? Understanding, predicting, and guiding new forms of life and mind requires characterizing a structured latent space of patterns. Developmental, synthetic, and behavioral biology should take seriously, and exploit, the kinds of non-physicalist ideas that are already a staple of Platonist mathematics. I propose the following hypotheses. (1) Patterns in this space span a highly variable degree of agency, comprising a spectrum ranging from static truths studied by mathematicians to active ones studied by behavioral scientists (i.e., some patterns on the same spectrum as mathematical truths are kinds of minds). (2) The relationship between mind and body is the same as the relationship between causally instructive mathematical facts and physics. (3) Living beings have no monopoly on the “free lunches” provided by the ingression of these patterns into the physical world. While traditional computationalist views of living and cognitive systems are insufficient, my framework erases artificial distinctions between organisms and machines, framing all physical constructs (natural or engineered) as being, to various degrees, in-formed by patterns from the latent space. I sketch a research program, already begun, inspired by these ideas. Such frameworks, while contradicting long-held assumptions of both mechanists and organicists, could have many implications for evolutionary biology, regenerative medicine, AI, and the ethics of synthbiosis with the forthcoming immense diversity of morally important beings.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050160

Authors: Leo Peruzzo Junior

This article advances the thesis that the development of Artificial Intelligence, far from representing an absolute rupture with nature, progressively incorporates characteristics inherent to environmental design. Rather than emerging as a purely abstract creation or something detached from the natural world, many AI systems are conceived through the observation of structures, behaviors, and adaptive strategies already present in living organisms and ecosystems. In other words, this means that AI can be understood as a kind of technical continuation of environmental solutions refined by evolution itself. The article further argues that AI design increasingly follows an ecological logic in which intelligent systems respond to environmental conditions, adjust to change, and expand human capacities through biological references. Finally, it is argued that Artificial Intelligence cannot be adequately understood through the traditional opposition between nature and artifact. Because it emerges from the convergence of biological inspiration, technical infrastructures, and informational processes, AI occupies a hybrid ontological position that differs both from living organisms and from classical artifacts, thereby requiring new conceptual categories within the philosophy of technology.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050159

Authors: Maren Wehrle

On the one hand, disruptive or alienating experiences are quite common, experienced at one time or another by everyone. While they might seem to be exceptional or specifically confined to the elderly, the ill, or the disabled, everyone experiences illness at some point, and many experience old age and disability. In this sense, these disruptive experiences are ‘normal’ phases of human life, which can thus be described as ‘normal abnormalities’, a term inspired by the reflections of Simone de Beauvoir and Gail Weiss on aging and disability.). On the other hand, neoliberal Capitalism, Consumerism, and Technological Enhancement ideologies view aging, illness, and disability as personal failures and threats to normality. This leads to a politics that structurally discriminates against, excludes, or stigmatizes those affected by these conditions. However, the represented ‘normality’ of these ideologies—expressed by the image of a strong, independent, active, fully functioning, young subject—is itself an ‘abnormal’ (i.e., pathological) ideal, since it does not account for the temporal, vulnerable, and relational nature of all embodiment. It puts marginalized or non-conforming bodies in precarious situations, and, in turn, numbs those who are (still) able to conform to the plight of those who are not. Instead of being responsive to, and in solidarity with, the vulnerable, they are tired and worn out by false ideals and capitalist promises, and find themselves begging for a quiet life with ‘no alarms, and no surprises, please’. How can we embrace the ambiguity of our existence and the normal abnormalities that come with it, instead of denying them? Is there such a thing as a shared normality that cannot be reduced either to dominant social health norms, or to a supposedly objective nature, or to mere individual experience? In this paper, I investigate how an abnormal normality (represented normality) impacts the lived experience (lived normality) of those living and suffering from normal abnormalities (i.e., their lived normality) in different ways in aging, sickness, and disability. In this context, I want to argue for the relevance of the making and unmaking of an intersubjectively shared normality. Normality, in this sense, is the aim of a collective praxis that is based upon a common bodily vulnerability but also respects the specific differences and alterity of every situated bodily experience (of illness, disability, or aging).

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050158

Authors: Giovanni Galli

Two debates in the analytic philosophy of literature have run in parallel: one asks how literary criticism can be rational when critical reasons neither entail nor inductively support the readings they back (Isenberg, Sibley); the other asks whether literature has cognitive value, and is stalled on a dilemma, since extractable truths are banal and non-trivial ones unevidenced (Stolnitz, Lamarque and Olsen, Currie). This paper argues that Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspect-seeing dissolve both problems jointly, and that each dissolution is incomplete without the other. Criticism, I argue, is not proto-theory but the production of perspicuous representations: arrangements of what already lies open to view, assembled reminders whose characteristic success is the dawning of an aspect rather than assent to a conclusion. Correspondingly, the literature’s cognitive yield is aspectual rather than propositional: a transformation of perception and an enriched responsiveness to situations, motives, and words, in which meaning is not extracted from the text but lived in the reader’s altered practice. Criticism is the institutionalized practice by which such dawning is occasioned, disciplined, and transmitted (the care of a shared sensibility), and the aspectual character of literary understanding explains why critical reasoning must take the reminder-assembling form it does. The two debates are two descriptions of one practice, sustained by public criteria within forms of life. The account is developed through the critical history of Dickinson’s “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun” and defended against the objections of quietism, interpretive relativism, and empirical skepticism.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050157

Authors: Anan Zhou Yue Liu

This paper develops a nativist approach to mathematical knowledge as an alternative account within the philosophy of mathematics. Rather than beginning with the ontological status of mathematical objects, it argues that any satisfactory account of mathematical knowledge should address three closely related questions: how to understand and justify truth-talk in mathematical practice, how mathematical knowledge is acquired, and why some mathematical knowledge has indispensable applications in the sciences. The paper first examines representative nominalist and Platonist responses to these questions. Nominalist accounts, while avoiding the specific epistemic difficulty associated with abstract objects, face challenges in explaining the non-arbitrariness of mathematical practice and the indispensability of mathematics in certain scientific theories. Platonist accounts, while offering a straightforward semantics of mathematical truth, still face the familiar epistemic problem of explaining how we acquire knowledge of abstract mathematical entities and require a fuller account of the applicability of mathematics to the empirical sciences. Against this background, the paper proposes two nativist theses: that some mathematical knowledge is innate, and that mathematics may function more fundamentally as a cognitive pattern than as a cognitive capacity. On this basis, mathematical knowledge is construed as cognitively dependent, while mathematics itself is understood as underlying our representations of the world. The paper concludes that the nativist account provides a framework for reconsidering the legitimacy of truth-talk in mathematical practice, the acquisition of mathematical knowledge, and the applicability and indispensability of some mathematics to sciences.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050156

Authors: Iñigo Navarro-Rubio Coello de Portugal Miguel Rumayor Gonzalo Génova

The vocabulary of artificial intelligence has colonized human self-description. Terms historically reserved for conscious agents—intelligence, learning, understanding, creativity—now routinely designate computational processes that bear no phenomenological resemblance to the experiences that they originally named. This conceptual erosion is not merely semantic; it undermines our capacity to articulate what distinguishes human cognition from machine operation at a moment when that distinction matters most. This article develops a dual-path argument for the identification of irreducibly human capacities. A via negativa assembles four independent lines of formal and philosophical reasoning—Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, Turing’s halting problem, Searle’s Chinese Room, and the frame problem—that establish principled limits to what computation can achieve. A via positiva draws on phenomenology to positively characterize the structures of human existence that lie beyond those limits: embodiment, intersubjectivity, temporality, being-in-the-world, and subjective experience. The convergence of these independent paths—each pointing from its own starting point toward the same boundary—grounds a taxonomy of five Unique Human Faculties (creativity, moral judgment, self-determination, empathy, and sentience) that resist mechanization in principle. The article concludes that the burden of proof now lies with those who claim that formal computation can exhaust human understanding, and argues that the simulation–possession distinction provides a principled basis for restoring conceptual clarity to discourse about artificial intelligence.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050155

Authors: Katherine Davies

Three new conversational texts appeared with the 2025 publication of volume 104 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe. This article introduces these conversations to an anglophone Heidegger studies readership and situates their profound dramatic and thematic interrelations with Heidegger’s previously published conversational texts. A significant concern of his work, Heidegger’s thinking of Gespräch stretches from at least the 1930s through the 1950s. Additionally, recent research has demonstrated its profound importance in the “Four Notebooks” material—drafts and notes for a book project Heidegger ultimately abandoned. Building upon this scholarship, this article offers an interpretation of the new conversations of GA 104 through exploring the significance of the figure of the Stranger in each text.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050154

Authors: Anne G. J. Newstead

This paper evaluates a certain kind of response to philosophical scepticism that is broadly inspired by Wittgenstein’s discussion in On Certainty (OC). Special attention is paid to the idea that we show our certainty and belief in particular assumptions through our actions, practices, and language-games, and that due to their global, impractical, and largely context-free nature, sceptical doubts are not genuinely meaningful doubts. How successful is such a response? Wittgenstein’s own philosophy helps us to evaluate this type of response to scepticism. It is shown that Wittgenstein was well aware that a mere appeal to actions or practices, unaccompanied by a contextualist approach to meaning, would be insufficient as a satisfying response to scepticism. Moreover, the main thrust of Wittgenstein’s response in OC largely departs from foundationalism in that it is not an attempt to provide a ‘justification’ of our beliefs as with traditional forms of foundationalism. For this reason, this rationally reconstructed Wittgensteinian response to scepticism does not fall prey to the ‘myth of the given’ with which foundationalists are sometimes accused. Thus, this Wittgensteinian response to scepticism is a robust and successful one.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050153

Authors: Dung Xuan Bui

The rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) confronts education with a question that is philosophical rather than technical: not how schools should use AI, but what education is ultimately for once knowledge is no longer scarce. This article addresses that question through a single, extended argument rather than an empirical report. It proceeds from a historical observation, that the modern transmission model of schooling rested on the scarcity of knowledge, and shows, drawing on the pragmatist philosophy of Charles S. Peirce, William James, and above all John Dewey, that AI dissolves this scarcity and thereby reopens the deepest question about the aims of education. The article’s central claim is that the most consequential change AI brings to education is not technological but teleological: as knowledge shifts from a scarce resource to a pervasive condition, it can no longer function as the destination of education and must be repositioned as a condition for the fuller aim of human formation. To clarify what “the full development of the human person” means, an idea too often asserted rather than defined, the article brings Dewey’s concept of growth into dialogue with the German tradition of Bildung, with Gert Biesta’s account of subjectification, and with Nick Bostrom’s Deep Utopia, whose “purpose problem” sharpens, by pushing to the limit, what remains distinctively human when instrumental tasks are automated. The argument closes by weighing and answering four objections. In doing so, the article extends pragmatist philosophy of education into the age of AI and proposes that the value of education be judged by its capacity to form persons who can use knowledge and AI to judge wisely, act responsibly, and keep developing in a changing world. The Vietnamese context provides a particularly relevant setting for this discussion, as the country’s strong commitment to educational development and digital transformation offers an important opportunity to place emerging AI capabilities in the service of human growth and the broader purposes of education.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050152

Authors: Raphaël Pierrès

This article offers a philosophical investigation into the phenomenon of seeing-as within the experience of cinema, through a dialogue between phenomenology and Wittgenstein’s grammatical method. It seeks to question the myth of direct access to an experience independent of language and technical apparatuses, and instead proposes an analysis of the complex relations between language, perception, and human practices. The study first examines the relationship between seeing-as and intentionality, questioning the possibility of a phenomenological account of aspect perception. Although seeing-as appears close to certain analyses of form (Gestalt), particularly because of its interpretative character, cinema reveals the limits of an approach grounded solely in natural perception. The cinematic image introduces a technical, symbolic, and temporal dimension that transforms our way of seeing. Through an analysis of Rear Window, the article argues that film does not merely reproduce a perceptual experience: the apparatuses of recording and editing produce meanings of their own. Cinema thus becomes a privileged field for examining how our ways of perceiving are shaped by techniques, signs, and forms of life.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050151

Authors: Ori Belkind

This paper develops a process ontology of spacetime grounded in the primacy of motion. Standard interpretations of relativity are commonly understood in terms of a four-dimensional manifold of events, with motion represented by world-lines connecting temporally ordered event-points. Although mathematically and empirically successful, this framework encourages an event-based metaphysics in which motion is derivative and temporal becoming plays no fundamental ontological role.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11050150

Authors: Talia Welsh

Phenomenologies of health remain relatively infrequent compared to phenomenologies of illness. This paper addresses this lack by first summarizing some key elements of phenomenologies of health. First, health typically resides in the background of our experience. Second, health requires a creative, adaptive capacity to life’s variations. The paper then explores prescriptive critical phenomenology of health. It highlights key elements of treatment to produce health that avoid a reductive medicalized approach. The paper examines the social and political determinants of health as key elements of a critical approach to health. Finally, it argues for support of public health as essential to questions of health to counteract the contemporary view of health as solely a personal, rather than contextual, matter.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040149

Authors: Emma Williams

The failures of securing justice for survivors of sexual violence remain a central concern in contemporary feminist thought. Much recent work has addressed these failures through the frameworks of epistemic and hermeneutical injustice, foregrounding the role of voice in shaping recognition and response. This paper shares that focus on voice but seeks to identify a difficulty that such debates do not fully capture. Drawing on J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace alongside the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, it explores how literature and philosophy together can illuminate this problem. Focusing on the university tribunal scene in Disgrace, which appears to function effectively and deliver justice, the paper argues that something nonetheless remains inadequate. Through a Wittgensteinian account of pain and its expression, the paper comes to show how the tribunal exemplifies a deeper failure—not one of discrediting or disbelieving, but an inability to respond to the human voice of pain as such. Literature and philosophy hereby open a different way of understanding the limits of approaches that prioritise legibility, evidence, and procedural resolution as a way of responding to sexual violence. Rather than securing justice, such approaches risk leaving something essential untouched: what it would mean to answer to another’s suffering.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040148

Authors: William Day

The contribution of this essay to two rather distinct academic literatures is two-fold. First, it reconceives the significance of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspect–seeing, which are generally taken to be revelatory of language narrowly conceived, and instead explores the connection between aspect–seeing—what Wittgenstein identifies as one “among the concepts of experience”—and the nature of experience itself. It does so by noting the importance to Wittgenstein of inventing “fictitious natural history” to reveal the connection between what we say and the kind of creature we are. It then examines other fictitious natural histories involving aspect–seeing (or its absence) that illustrate some “very general facts of nature”—facts that, the essay contends, help form the fundamental conditions for our finding one another intelligible. Second, the essay reconceives what constitutes the significance of jazz improvisation (and possibly other forms of spontaneous activity, though those are not explored here) by grounding this significance in these same very general facts of nature. It develops this thought by considering the implications of a different fictitious natural history involving musical performance, and through a remarkable if complex instance of an exemplary improvised jazz solo by Charlie Parker.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040147

Authors: Erik Axelkrans

Contemporary science has achieved extraordinary explanatory and predictive success, yet its ontological interpretation remains unsettled. This paper argues that one source of this instability lies in the inherited assumption that reality is fundamentally composed of independently existing substances. While this picture was historically fruitful, it has become increasingly difficult to sustain as a general ontology in light of three converging pressures: the relational and structural character of modern physics, the problem of emergence across levels of organization and the unresolved status of consciousness within physicalist metaphysics. The paper first examines why substance ontology has become unstable as an implicit background framework for scientific interpretation. It then argues that existing post-substance approaches, including ontic structural realism, relational interpretations of physics and process ontology, each capture important aspects of the required shift and contain important resources for moving beyond substance ontology. The present paper does not attempt to adjudicate these traditions as a whole. It instead identifies a specific generative requirement: an adequate post-substance ontology must explain how stable physical, organizational and experiential domains can be jointly situated within a common ontological framework. This requirement is identified as a generative gap in the argument developed here. In response, the paper argues that a post-substance ontology must be not only structural, relational or processual but generative. It must explain how effective objects stabilize, how levels of organization arise, how spacetime coordination becomes available, and how physical structure and conscious experience can belong to the same reality without reduction or fragmentation. The paper develops a generative-projection hypothesis that takes the derivative status of spacetime as its point of entry and introduces a generative domain, projection, invariance and compatibility as conceptual tools for articulating this ontological direction. The hypothesis is presented as preliminary rather than as a completed metaphysical system.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040146

Authors: Gilad Nir

My essay draws attention to several little-known texts by Wittgenstein in which he addresses the processes which may precede a genocide. I seek to demonstrate that Wittgenstein’s thought contains resources that may be drawn on in confronting such ethical and political problems, and more specifically, in addressing issues that arise in relation to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The resources I locate in Wittgenstein’s work include techniques for shifting attitudes and for redirecting attention, for unsettling interlocutors from their complacency and for leading them to transform their ways of seeing the problems they confront. In this connection, I reflect on the ethical and political efficacy of experiences of the uncanny. I also find in Wittgenstein the suggestion that moral philosophy calls for a mode of engagement which is essentially first-personal, and refuses to separate the biographical from the philosophical. In order to put this suggestion to the test, the essay is written in the idiom of autotheory.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040145

Authors: Andreas Goncalves Lind

Taking into account that Marion studied Sein und Zeit simultaneously with Henry’s opus magnum, L’essence de la manifestation, one may read his phenomenology of givenness as an overcoming of the aporias that Henry identifies in Heidegger; aporias that, as Marion argues, persist in Henry’s own solutions. In this way, following Heidegger’s principle that possibility stands higher than actuality, Marion overcomes Henry’s non-ecstatic phenomenology of life, which closes the phenomenological field in a pure immanence. Contrary to Henry, Marion argues that the structure of call and response fulfils, more radically than any phenomenology of immanence, Heidegger’s own definition of phenomenology as letting the phenomenon show itself in and from itself. Moreover, the study of Heidegger’s Beiträge, a text that only became publicly available in 1989, and which Marion never cites, reveals a remarkable convergence between Marion’s notion of revelation and Heidegger’s Ereignis, insofar as both think it is what gives itself unconditionally, exceeding every horizon of subjectivity, whether transcendental, intentional, or purely affective.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040144

Authors: Kim Q. Hall

This paper builds on insights in disability studies, queer theory, feminist philosophy, and critical phenomenology to reframe the meaning and value of ordinary, physical objects that are part of the worlds that people with dementia share with their close family and friends. I offer a queer crip critical phenomenological reframing of dementia’s objects to better understand and critique normalized structures of ableism that shape dementia experience, especially when first-person experience of dementia cannot be transparently communicated. I argue that such a reframing of dementia’s objects furthers understanding of how dementia is a disability justice issue and opens possibilities for more just care for people with dementia and members of their care communities.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040143

Authors: Liliana Albertazzi

Recent studies in plant and animal cognition are currently leading to a re-evaluation of subjective experience in scientific endeavor while also questioning the widespread application of the physicalist paradigm. These new developments reactivate the old Aristotelian idea of natural philosophy as a unitary vision of science, life, and the universe that surpasses the way it is fragmented into different and even separated disciplines by modern scientific thought. This new scenario, and its reappraisal of subjectivity, anchored in Gestalt theory, addresses scientific classifications, methodologies and assumptions, while highlighting the limitations of the reductionist paradigm. Moreover, it shows that perception becomes a shared principle of organization for both psychology and biology. All this indicates that a more comprehensive understanding of the many nuances of life is possible and this paper includes various suggestions on how to achieve it.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040142

Authors: Tran Quoc Hung

This article explores the topic of digital sovereignty from the vantage point of the theory of politics, maintaining that AI disrupts the traditional Westphalian principle of state sovereignty. Drawing on the normative frame of Roberts and the comparative analyses of Larsen and Kurbalija, it illustrates the three competing philosophical models of digital self-determination: the liberal market model (United States), the techno-legal rights model (European Union), and the cyber-sovereignty model (China), and evaluates the normative presumption. It furthermore assesses these models in light of emerging legislative patterns in Vietnam, arguing that true digital sovereignty requires more than technical infrastructure but a philosophically cohesive conception of collective self-determination in an increasingly interconnected world. The article concludes with an outline for a relational account of digital sovereignty incorporating autonomy/interdependence.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040141

Authors: Pragya Mishra

Contemporary critiques of digital capitalism have examined behavioural data extraction, algorithmic governance, attention capture, and platform regulation, while debates about responsibility have generally focused further downstream on consent, moderation, and individual conduct. The relation between these two moments nevertheless remains under-conceptualised. Digital infrastructures increasingly help organise the pre-reflective conditions under which significance, urgency, and practical orientation emerge; yet conduct formed within these environments is subsequently attributed to users as though those formative conditions were neutral background. To conceptualise this relation, the article introduces affective heteronomy: the systematic organisation of affectively charged orientations from which conduct arises, whereby solicited responses are experienced, and later attributed, as the subject’s own. Anchored in Adorno’s account of freedom, unfreedom, and the bodily addendum, the argument proceeds through conceptual reconstruction and immanent critique, bringing that account into conversation with surveillance and data colonialism, societies of control, algorithmic governmentality, affect theory, platform governance, and neoliberal responsibilisation. The central problem is neither influence nor responsibility considered alone, but an asymmetry between formation and judgment: the same order that helps organise the conditions of conduct later disregards those conditions when demanding an account. The article concludes that critique cannot abolish the entanglement of freedom and unfreedom, but it can require practices of answerability to account for the infrastructures that help form the conduct they attribute.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040140

Authors: Paul J. E. Dekker

In this note, it is shown, following up on a conjecture of Joyce Friedman and David Warren in 1980, and in contrast with what is commonly assumed, that the reduction of applied λ-terms in Richard Montague’s intensional logic does not need to conflict with other possible reductions. For a confluent reduction, one only needs to access more rules than just the λ-reduction alone. In addition, we need to draw from principles, such as λ-Application Distribution and λ-Argument Exploitation, and suitably adjust the concept of a normal form.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040139

Authors: Daniel Boyd

Recent years have seen explosive growth of both personal and professional use of large language models (LLMs). This article considers the impact of these developments on formal and informal cyber–social systems: the meta-systems created through integrative interactions between (groups of) humans and technological components. The analysis is based on Emergent Information Theory, a theoretical framework encompassing both biological and technological information systems. A qualitative distinction is demonstrated between LLM-based cyber–social systems and those involving other types of information technology such as expert systems and traditional fixed-function software. The article concludes with a discussion of the potential impact of this relatively new type of artificial intelligence on the future of cyber–social systems.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040138

Authors: Nam Van Lai Thuy Thu Thi Nguyen Quyet Thi Nguyen

This article reinterprets Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile as a philosophical resource for clarifying the normative meaning and institutional limits of educational happiness in contemporary Vietnamese school reform. It responds to a central tension: Émile constructs an individualized and partly anti-institutional pedagogical experiment, whereas UNESCO-inspired Happy School initiatives operate through mass schooling, policy, professional roles, assessment, and public accountability. Methodologically, the study combines conceptual reconstruction, close textual interpretation, contextual comparison, and critical institutional translation. It reconstructs amour de soi, amour-propre, perfectibility, pity, negative education, and moral freedom, and distinguishes Rousseau’s broader philosophy from the specific pedagogical construction of Émile. The article argues that Rousseau should not be treated as a policy architect or directly scalable school theorist. Rather, his work supplies diagnostic criteria for examining how schools organize comparison, authority, developmental timing, experience, and dependence on external recognition. Institutional mediation is therefore introduced as the authors’ reconstructive category for translating selected Rousseauian concerns into contemporary practices while preserving the limits of that translation. Applied to Vietnam, this approach connects UNESCO’s people–process–place framework with assessment, teacher authority, family–school relations, curriculum experience, and psychological safety. Educational happiness is thus presented not as compulsory positivity or affective comfort, but as a qualified normative ideal supported by institutions that protect dignity and enlarge learners’ capacities for judgment, responsibility, and relational freedom.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040137

Authors: Samal Adylkhanova Assem Sagatova Nursultan Sarsenbekov Aiman Gappassova Ali Rafet Ozkan Halil Gunay

This study examines the role of the ethics of responsibility at individual, societal, and institutional levels and explores its potential to address the ethical challenges of the contemporary world. This ethical framework requires individuals and institutions to consider not only their own interests but also the long-term societal and environmental consequences of their decisions. The study explores how this approach provides guidance in the contexts of technological innovations, environmental crises, and globalization. Technological developments are presented as a domain that both expands the scope of ethics of responsibility and introduces new ethical challenges. It is emphasized that artificial intelligence (AI) systems may give rise to issues such as bias, data privacy violations, and the spread of misinformation through digital platforms. In this context, the necessity of designing “fair AI” and ensuring that digital platforms operate in alignment with ethical principles is emphasized. From the perspective of environmental sustainability, it is stated that while individual efforts, such as recycling and energy conservation, are important, institutions must focus on large-scale initiatives, such as carbon-neutral targets and circular economy models. The article also addresses the criticisms and challenges associated with implementing this framework. The subjective nature of ethical principles and the conflict between diverse cultural values make the universal adoption of this approach difficult. Additionally, the prioritization of individual interests within the capitalist system and the inadequacy of global cooperation are seen as major obstacles to the practical application of ethics of responsibility. This situation underscores the importance of both individual awareness and institutional policies. In conclusion, this framework is presented as an important guide capable of addressing the complex issues of the contemporary world. It is argued that the broader application of this approach is essential in areas such as technological advancements, environmental crises, and global inequalities. Fulfilling the ethical responsibilities of individuals, institutions, and the international community is critical for creating a more equitable and sustainable world.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040136

Authors: Xinyu Zou Jianhui Li

The relationship between science and values is a classic and important issue in the philosophy of science. Ernan McMullin, a philosopher of science, believes that as science matures, the pursuit of epistemic values leads to the gradual exclusion of non-epistemic values. Michael Ruse, a philosopher of biology, emphasizes the uniqueness of this issue in evolutionary biology: the expulsion of progressivist cultural values actually stems from the influence of another cultural value, rather than purely from the pursuit of epistemic values. Therefore, the concept of evolutionary progress cannot completely escape the entanglement of cultural values. Even today, biologists still use other concepts to discuss a metaphor sympathetic to progressivist cultural values. By sorting out the discussions on evolutionary progress among evolutionists in different periods, this paper aims to show that Ruse’s view that “the concept of evolutionary progress is necessarily bound to cultural values” is wrong. Although Ruse correctly points out the uniqueness of this topic in evolutionary biology, his argument hinges on Thomas Huxley’s distinction between professional science and popular science. Huxley confined evolutionary progress to the latter—an area with looser academic norms—which complicates the process of expelling cultural values. More importantly, this paper argues that Ruse’s central mistake is his failure to distinguish between two fundamentally different kinds of value: the cultural values imported by human beings into the concept of evolutionary progress, and the survival values that arise from the functional performance of organisms themselves. The former can, in principle, be excluded from mature scientific discourse; the latter cannot, because they are constitutive of what evolutionary progress describes. By conflating these two categories, Ruse wrongly concludes that even today, the concept of evolutionary progress still cannot be separated from the influence of cultural values.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040135

Authors: Boumediene Hamzi

This article undertakes a systematic comparative study of the critiques of modernity advanced by René Guénon (1886–1951) and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ṭāhā (b. 1944). Both thinkers arrive at convergent diagnoses of modernity’s spiritual and ethical failures from fundamentally distinct intellectual starting points—Guénon from the universal perennialist metaphysics of primordial Tradition, Ṭāhā from Islamic philosophy of language, logic, and ethics. Drawing on Guénon’s The Crisis of the Modern World and The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times alongside Ṭāhā’s Rūḥ al-Ḥadātha (The Spirit of Modernity), Al-ʿAmal al-Dīnī wa-Tajdīd al-ʿAql (Religious Practice and the Renewal of Reason), and Rūḥ al-Dīn (The Spirit of Religion), and supported by secondary scholarship including Wael Hallaq’s Reforming Modernity (2019) and the edited volume Islamic Ethics and the Trusteeship Paradigm (2020), the article argues that the philosophical significance of their encounter lies not merely in their convergences—both condemn the reduction of human life to quantitative and instrumental horizons—but in the productive tension between Guénon’s initiatory-metaphysical model of restoration and Ṭāhā’s trusteeship-based ethic of engagement. Where Guénon describes Western civilization as a civilization of “moralism”—a shifting, interest-driven ethical veneer concealing the absence of genuine transcendent principles—Ṭāhā constructs an affirmative alternative through his concept of i’timāniyya (trusteeship), which grounds reason, speech, and knowledge in an ethics of responsibility toward God, others, and creation. The article further argues that these two thinkers together illuminate a double rupture at the heart of modernity: the loss of metaphysical orientation (the vertical rupture) and the collapse of ethical trusteeship (the horizontal rupture).

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040134

Authors: JT Paasch

A common idea is that logical truth values are fixed independently of the objects to which logic is applied. Topos theory reveals a different possibility. In a topos, the available truth values and logical operations depend upon the structure of its objects’ subobjects (generalized parts). In fact, the familiar first-order semantics of sets appears as one instance of this more general phenomenon: it is a logic arising from a particular algebra of parts (namely, the algebra of subsets). This paper provides a detailed exposition of this idea for philosophers without prior training in category theory. Using sets and directed multigraphs as running examples, it explains how a topos’s internal logic—including its truth values—depends upon the structure of its subobjects.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040133

Authors: Rafael Alejandro Betancourt Durango Diego Alejandro Correa Correa Eduar Antonio Rodríguez Flores Conrado Giraldo Zuluaga

Can Hans Jonas’s heuristics of fear still ground a philosophy of artificial intelligence (AI), or does the digital artefact require its reformulation? Building on the empirical turn in the philosophy of technology and on a postphenomenological reading of human–technology relations, this article combines conceptual reconstruction with a PRISMA 2020-compliant bibliometric review (Scopus + Web of Science, 2010–2026; n = 2372 articles and reviews). The bibliometric map reveals an extreme productivity concentration, a stable journal core, and six thematic clusters that organise the field. Rather than treating these patterns as proof of a normative thesis, the article uses them to locate a lexical re-weighting of the field after 2021, in which applied AI-ethics and governance vocabularies expand faster than explicitly philosophical vocabularies. A targeted Jonasian sub-corpus (n = 124) indicates that Jonas remains conceptually relevant but circulates mainly in a smaller, database-visible niche of continental and environmental ethics. We argue that the heuristics of fear remains philosophically fertile provided that it is reconstructed as a threshold question of moral admissibility and expanded through phenomenological resources—lifeworld, embodiment, technological mediation—and through the cosmotechnical plurality emphasised by Yuk Hui. The convergence of bibliometric mapping and philosophical analysis suggests that robust AI governance requires not only procedural principles but also renewed attention to digital mediation, distributed agency, and the protection of the lifeworld under algorithmic uncertainty.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040132

Authors: Glyn Morrill

Text Correction [...]

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040131

Authors: Florian Vermeiren

Philosophers come in many different shapes [...]

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040130

Authors: Jan Kerkmann

Background: Arthur Schopenhauer’s On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (in its revised 1847 edition) has been variously interpreted as an epistemological prelude to his metaphysics of will, as a continuation of Kantian transcendental philosophy, or as an early expression of Schopenhauer’s broader soteriological concerns. These readings often differ in emphasis but converge in treating the text primarily as subordinate to Schopenhauer’s later system or early intellectual development. Methods: This article offers a systematic textual reconstruction of the 1847 edition within the Kantian tradition of transcendental critique. It proceeds through close reading and conceptual analysis of Schopenhauer’s articulation of the principle of sufficient reason, situating individual argumentative steps within both Kantian and post-Kantian debates. The aim is not to deny the relevance of systematic or developmental readings, but to clarify the internal philosophical function of the text’s argumentative structure. Results: The analysis shows that Schopenhauer’s account of the principle of sufficient reason consistently operates as a critical and immanent framework for structuring possible explanation rather than as a metaphysical grounding principle. Across its four domains, the principle is differentiated into irreducible forms governing distinct types of object-relation, thereby constraining illegitimate transitions between epistemic justification and ontological explanation. This reading highlights (i) the internal differentiation of explanatory forms, (ii) the restriction of causal claims to intra-phenomenal relations, and (iii) the systematic limitation of metaphysical grounding strategies. Conclusions: On this reading, the Fourfold Root does not function primarily as a foundational doctrine for Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of will, but as a critical investigation into the limits of metaphysical explanation within experience. It thereby reconfigures metaphysical inquiry as a reflective clarification of the conditions under which explanation is possible, rather than as a doctrine of ultimate ontological grounds.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040129

Authors: Yunlei Ban

The traditional Chinese ecological aesthetics takes ‘the Unity of Heaven and Humanity’ [天人合一] as its philosophical core and constructs a cosmological landscape of coexistence and prosperity between humans and nature. Given the challenges of the global ecological crisis, this research draws on the ecological aesthetic wisdom of ‘the Unity of Heaven and Humanity’ to systematically explore its theoretical support and practical value for building a Beautiful China. By employing a mixed-method approach that integrates textual analysis, policy review, and multi-case comparative study, this research finds that in the process of building a Beautiful China, the traditional ecological aesthetic wisdom of ‘the Unity of Heaven and Humanity’ has achieved creative transformation and innovative development through the spatial creation of ‘Poetic Dwelling’, the green economy characterized by ‘Suitable for Employment’ and the ecological empowerment for the principle of ‘Suitable for Nurturing Life and Tourism’. This has paved a distinctive path for green development that integrates cultural subjectivity, ecological principles, and modern governance technologies. The discussion further emphasizes that intelligent ecological governance, leveraging technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data, provides a key technological pathway for the contemporary transformation of ‘the Unity of Heaven and Humanity’ philosophy. This study provides a unique ecological and cultural foundation for building a Beautiful China and for global ecological protection.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040128

Authors: Maria Laura Giacobello

This article explores the ecological crisis as a multidimensional phenomenon that engages humanity at an existential and therefore philosophical level. Starting from the recognition of the authentic human condition, as that of a being deeply rooted in an ecosystem whose balance sustains its well-being, it argues for moving beyond the anthropocentric fallacy that has driven humankind to pursue its dream of Promethean domination. Rather, the complex nature of the human being, at once biological and cultural, carries a message of universal solidarity. In ignoring this message, humanity has betrayed its true identity: that of a steward of life understood in its universal dimension. As a conscious part of nature, humanity is entrusted with caring for it, adopting a more-than-human ethics grounded in respect and love for the relationships that connect all things within the web of life. This calls for revisiting the anthropological question through a systemic lens, opening onto an alternative epistemological and ontological perspective, one that allows us to rethink humanity’s relationship with the entire ecosphere and imagine a different way of co-dwelling on Earth.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040127

Authors: Christophe Jurczak

Certain physics-based technologies (quantum computing, fusion energy, advanced materials, brain–computer interfaces) have remained “five years away” for decades. This paper argues that this perpetual horizon is not a forecasting failure but the temporal signature of Perpetual Five-Year Technologies (PFYTs): technologies of atoms, not bits, whose technical object and enabling ecosystem must co-develop. Drawing on philosophy of technology and sociology of scientific practice, and grounded in quantitative analysis of cross-platform performance data and high-impact research across hardware architectures, the paper shows that PFYT temporality is endogenous, produced by concretization dynamics and recursive constraint discovery rather than by market failures or insufficient funding. Quantum computing provides the paradigmatic case. Treating the quantum processor as a technical individual in active individuation explains why multiple computing paradigms persist and why each breakthrough resets rather than collapses the horizon. The convergence of machine learning and quantum hardware into pipelines for drug and materials discovery shows how Physical AI reshapes PFYT dynamics, compressing some cycles while introducing new forms of co-individuation between intelligence and matter. The framework generates diagnostics for physics-based frontiers where technical objects and milieus co-produce developmental time.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040126

Authors: Sifiso Vilakati

Methodological statistics has developed under the pervasive belief that the value of a simulation study lies in its ability to demonstrate the superiority of a proposed method. This belief has distorted the epistemic role of simulation research by encouraging selective reporting, narrow design spaces and the suppression of results that fail to show improvement. Drawing on philosophical accounts and on meta scientific critiques by several studies, this paper argues that non-superiority is not a failure but an essential source of methodological knowledge. It marks the boundaries at which a method performs adequately, where it begins to degrade and where it breaks. Using empirical patterns evident in contemporary methodological literature and drawing on the widely cited case in which machine learning methods often failed to outperform logistic regression in clinical prediction, this paper demonstrates how non-superiority clarifies expectations and guides methodological refinement. The paper proposes a structural remedy that pairs the Registered Reports model with principled simulation design following the ADEMP framework. This alignment protects the visibility of non-superiority and restores the integrity of simulation research. Boundary mapping is therefore not a modest contribution but a scientific and ethical imperative for methodological transparency and applied reliability.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040125

Authors: Daniel H. Lange

The philosophy of artificial intelligence often begins one question too late. Discussions move directly to whether a system could be conscious, whether there is something it is like to be the system, or whether it possesses genuine subjectivity, without first asking a more basic structural question: what would have to be true of a system’s internal organization before those questions gain a determinate basis in its architecture? This paper addresses that prior question. It defends a threshold account built on three jointly necessary conditions: persistent internal context, differentiated internal possibility, and closed-loop operativity. Together, these conditions mark the point at which a system’s processing can plausibly be said to unfold from an internal standpoint, rather than merely as a chain of locally linked transitions. Such organization may also have functional significance independent of consciousness by supporting temporal coherence, cross-role coordination, and reduced dependence on episodic reconstruction or external scaffolding. The account explains why simple feedback controllers are clear non-cases, why standard transformer inference remains at most a bounded near-case, and why world-model architectures are more serious candidates for assessment, while making no claim that such systems are conscious. The aim is not to provide a test for artificial consciousness, but to clarify when consciousness-oriented inquiry into intelligent systems has a determinate architectural target.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040124

Authors: Sandra Baquedano

This article addresses environmental esthetics in dialog with other non-anthropocentric representations of nature, starting with the Ancient Western philosophy of art as a human expression of nature (φύσις, physis). In the context of this more primary understanding, the consolidation of an anthropocentric representation of nature based on homo mensura is examined, in which the human being emerges as the measure of all things. This interpretation of nature fosters its progressive reification, which coincides with the emergence of esthetics as a modern philosophical discipline, often articulated around the partial and isolated appreciation of the object. It is argued that environmental esthetics emphasizes an immersive and relational experience with the environment, facilitating a certain release from anthropocentric mental habits, and that the notion of hyperobjects also helps to confront them by laying bare phenomena that exceed the human scale. In line with this expansion of space–time coordinates, which challenge perceptive categories in themselves, an ecosuicidological esthetic is presented, one capable of cultivating a renewed, non-anthropocentric sensitivity. The article resorts to Amerindian knowledges for the concept’s potential deployment and discusses artistic expressions that reconfigure the experience of representing nature, transforming perception and inspiring new forms of reciprocity.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040123

Authors: Ricardo Rozzi

The reunification of scientific, artistic, and philosophical knowledge empowers us to rethink our relationship with nature in light of a biocultural ethic grounded in co-inhabitation among humans and other-than-human beings in shared habitats. To this end, the biocultural ethic is built upon the 3H model, which values the vital links among co-inhabitants and their life habits in shared habitats. The model integrates the biophysical, cultural, and sociopolitical dimensions characteristic of environmental complexity. In this essay, the 3H model is applied to rivers, examined from biological, philosophical, poetic, and legal perspectives. The result is not only to highlight that rivers are more than merely exploitable resources, but also to show that their “voice” raises a normative (ethical and legal) appeal that, among other aspects, has inspired the new Latin American constitutionalism. This ontological, epistemological, and ethical turn seeks to foster a transition from destruction and homogenization toward a bioculture that values biological and cultural diversity through renewed forms of co-inhabitation with rivers and the biosphere.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040122

Authors: Duncan Pritchard

It is widely accepted that there is a modal condition on knowledge. There are two main candidates in the literature: safety and sensitivity. My goal in this paper is to revisit this debate in the context of anti-risk epistemology. This approach is meant to offer an independent way of determining the modal condition on knowledge (i.e., as opposed to simply pitching modal conditions against one another and seeing which one accommodates the wider range of cases). Interestingly, while anti-risk epistemology favors safety over traditional formulations of sensitivity, it also leads to a very specific way of formulating the safety condition on knowledge. Given that sensitivity might also be reformulated along anti-risk lines, a natural question to ask is where this leaves the debate between safety and sensitivity. I will be suggesting that the most plausible anti-risk formulation of sensitivity is equivalent to the corresponding formulation of safety. If that is right, then ultimately the moral to draw from anti-risk epistemology is not that it favors safety over sensitivity but that it leads to a formulation of the anti-risk condition on knowledge whereby this distinction collapses.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040121

Authors: Edu William

This article develops a conceptual account of semantic displacement in conversational AI. The central question concerns how agency is affected when systems do more than automate information retrieval and begin to supply the descriptions, classifications and normative cues through which users understand what they are doing. Drawing on philosophy of action, philosophy of language, hermeneutics, philosophy of technology and critical accounts of algorithmic mediation, this article reconstructs the relation between meaning and action as a condition of agency. Its methodological approach is conceptual and diagnostic, oriented toward clarifying a problem that becomes visible when established theories are brought together in relation to contemporary conversational systems. The article interprets these systems as operational semantic infrastructures that organize context-sensitive linguistic uptake within practical environments such as health, work, education, administration and everyday self-management. It then introduces semantic displacement as the condition in which action-relevant meanings become increasingly organized, prioritized and consolidated outside the agent’s own participatory interpretation. The argument contributes a vocabulary for distinguishing agency-enhancing semantic support from forms of semantic substitution that weaken interpretive participation. It concludes by proposing semantic sovereignty and interpretive contestability as normative ideals for human agency in AI-mediated environments. The argument specifies action as intentional conduct understood under socially available descriptions and cognition as situated interpretive sense-making rather than purely internal computation. It also clarifies three conditions under which semantic support becomes displacement: opaque semantic generation, practical stabilization and reduced interpretive contestability.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040120

Authors: Diego Gonzalez-Rodriguez

Contemporary cognitive science is predominantly grounded in physicalist assumptions that locate cognition and consciousness in neural and computational processes. While these approaches have yielded significant empirical advances, they often struggle to account for the qualitative and first-person structure of experience. This paper proposes an ethno-phenomenological perspective by engaging non-Western epistemic practices through the lens of embodied cognition and ontological pluralism. Rather than treating non-Western phenomenology as external to scientific inquiry, we analyze how it can inform cognitive dynamism and ontological enactment through sophisticated epistemic practices. Particularly, we analyze how by actively manipulating cognitive and informational structures, Śaiva-Śākta phenomenology may dynamically affect embodied subjectivity. From this perspective, certain methods like visualization and ritual enactment can be understood as systematic interventions that modulate attentional, mnemonic, and perceptual processes, thereby reconfiguring the experiential architecture of the self and world. We further examine how processes such as constructive imagination function as mechanisms of cognitive reorganization, enabling practitioners to inhabit multiple ontological configurations of subject–object relations. Drawing on predictive processing and enactive cognitive science, the paper argues that Śaiva-Śākta sādhanā may operationalize a form of embodied epistemology in which ontology is not merely represented but enacted. This supports a model of ontological pluralism in which divergent experiential worlds correspond to stabilized modes of cognition rather than competing metaphysical hypotheses. Within this framework, sādhanā is considered a methodological method for investigating consciousness beyond reductionist neurophysiological accounts, offering structured access to non-ordinary modes of experience. Conclusively, the paper proposes that certain non-Western traditions may provide not only philosophical insights but also alternative phenomenological pathways for exploring the informational dynamics of embodied cognition, thereby expanding the methodological and ontological horizons of cognitive science and philosophy of mind.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040119

Authors: Alison L. Kahn

The development of artificial intelligence has proceeded within a disciplinary culture whose positivist epistemological foundations generate a constitutive blind spot: the systematic exclusion of tacit, embodied, relational and contextually situated knowledge from what counts as knowledge at all. This article argues that this exclusion is not a technical limitation, but a structural condition of AI systems as currently built, with serious consequences for individuals, institutions and the social order. The method is interdisciplinary and critically synthetic, integrating the anthropology of science and technology, the philosophy of language and the literary-philosophical tradition of techno-critique. Three original contributions are advanced. First, the Faustian framework is reformulated as a collective rather than individual pact: the AI contract implicates a civilisation. Second, the prevalent reductionist critique is refined: the error is not quantification of incommensurable goods but the enforcement of total orderings upon value landscapes that admit only partial orderings. Third, the stochastic parrot objection is reconciled with the Faustian analysis through the concept of institutional amplification: AI’s danger resides not in its intelligence but in the authority conferred upon its incomprehension. The article concludes that Mephistopheles, not Faustus, is the more precise figure for AI itself, and asks whether the defunding of humanities disciplines, those best placed to navigate the moral challenges AI presents, constitutes the most consequential characteristic deletion of all.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040118

Authors: Marcel Dubovec

The focus of this paper is Heidegger’s lecture “On the Basic Disposition of Knowledge” (summer semester 1939), first published in 2020 in GA 80.2 and still largely unexplored in Heidegger scholarship. In this text, Heidegger problematizes the scientific disposition as a lack of mindfulness (Besinnungslosigkeit). This lack of mindfulness is, in turn, characterized as a disturbance and forgetting of the original disposition that, in Plato and Aristotle, is named in Greek thaumazein. In the advanced form of occidental knowledge, shaped by techne, the remembrance of wonder at beings (Erstaunen) is no longer possible. Instead, the abandonment of Being (Seinsverlassenheit) becomes accessible only through another disposition: terror (Entsetzen). The paper argues that these distinctions between basic dispositions (curiositas, thaumazein, and terror) can be understood only by focusing on Heidegger’s concept of withdrawal (Entzug). In Heidegger’s words, one must take it seriously that Being withdraws from beings. On this basis, curiosity blocks the experience of withdrawal, thaumazein names the beginning of philosophy but cannot be repeated today, and it is terror that discloses the abandonment of Being. To place this claim in context, the paper offers a short sketch of Heidegger’s critique of curiositas, based on his Augustinian reception in the Natorp report (“Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation”) and in Being and Time (§ 36). It then draws on his account of thaumazein in Basic Questions of Philosophy (GA 45) and finally briefly turns to Contributions to Philosophy, where Heidegger develops the disposition of the other beginning in three stages: shock (Erschrecken), restraint (Verhaltenheit), and diffidence (Scheu).

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040117

Authors: Alejandro Pérez-y-Soto-Domínguez Héctor Fernando Rueda-Rodríguez Héctor Alberto Cortez-Valencia

This article advances a philosophical interpretation of contemporary cyberspace through the categories of recognition, negativity and invidious distinction. Existing accounts attribute digital self-exploitation to surveillance, economic coercion or behavioural design; these readings describe mechanisms without identifying the ontological operation they presuppose. The paper argues that the like is not a reduced form of recognition but its structural contrary, and that the same cancellation operates across the broader architecture of commerce in cyberspace. Drawing on Hegel’s analysis of Anerkennung as a negative operation requiring risk and determinate negation, and on Veblen’s theory of invidious distinction as the preservation of that negativity within commercial society, the article shows that algorithmic cyberspace cancels the three conditions under which recognition is ontologically possible—the risk of non-recognition, determination through scarcity, and the reciprocity of the encounter. What the like offers is pure positivity, and that positivity produces the very exhaustion it claims to soothe. Platform fatigue is therefore structural: the consequence of an institution that monetises recognition demands it cannot satisfy. The paper concludes by situating the diagnosis within the Kantian question of autonomy and the Luddite prehistory of technical resistance to the reorganisation of recognition.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040116

Authors: Rafal Maciag

The subject of this paper is the problem of knowledge revealed by the emergence of advanced natural language processing technology, called large language models (LLMs). It proposes an interpretation of the appearance of this phenomenon as an emergent effect of a complex system, such as LLMs. The meaning of this interpretation is based on the observation of the computational trajectory of computational units (vectors) which, on the other hand, represent discrete semantic units, tokens. To justify the autonomy and relevance of this interpretation of knowledge, the paper invokes the concept of discursive space, which allows, in particular, for the reliance on language as a container of knowledge and for the generalization of the idea of knowledge to other semantic environments. To describe more general units of knowledge, the strong version of the theory proposes the introduction of the institution of gnosemes, of which discourse is a special case. Gnosemes find application in the case of LLMs. Due to the different ontical contexts of the entities described, the paper proposes a transdisciplinary approach, the axis of which is the field of social sciences.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040115

Authors: Olexii Varypaiev

Everyday work with large language models (LLMs) normalizes a practice in which a generated formulation supports judgment before the user has checked its grounds. This crisis of rationality arises not from a single technical defect in the system, but from a shift in justificatory practice in which fluent textual coherence is read as evidence of semantic understanding and rational judgment. The method brings conceptual analysis into contact with 4E cognition and a postphenomenological account of technological mediation. Within this framework, LLMs are described neither as autonomous rational subjects nor as neutral instruments, but as multistable moral-epistemic mediators of human rationality. The analysis distinguishes textual competence from world-involved understanding and relates interface mediation to trust and responsibility. On this basis, the article proposes a four-cluster protocol for the attribution of rationality, which introduces an epistemic pause as a route of verification between a generated formulation and its authorial acceptance as a claim. The central risk lies not in whether machine consciousness has been proven, but in the normalization of practices in which ready-made text acquires the status of a ground before the user has reconstructed its sources and accepted responsibility for what is asserted.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040114

Authors: Grégori de Souza Jelson Roberto de Oliveira

The central argument of this article is that the genetic manipulation of plants raises profound ethical questions that cannot be adequately addressed within a purely anthropocentric framework. Drawing on Hans Jonas’s philosophy of responsibility, the article argues that modern biotechnology transforms living organisms into objects of technological intervention, thereby challenging traditional distinctions between subject and object in the domain of technology. Because plants are living beings that possess their own intrinsic good and play a fundamental role in the biosphere, their genetic manipulation must be evaluated not only in terms of human utility but also in relation to ecological integrity, intergenerational responsibility, and the preservation of life’s evolutionary continuity. The article proposes an approach that remains largely unexplored in the international literature: interpreting plant genetic engineering through the lens of Jonasian ontology of life and the ethics of responsibility, thereby moving the debate beyond the limits of traditional anthropocentrism.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040113

Authors: David Gamez

Recent progress in artificial intelligence has intensified claims about AI reaching or surpassing human intelligence. However, much of this discussion is not grounded in scientific measurements of intelligence in humans, animals or AIs. The existing methods for measuring intelligence are a patchwork of heterogeneous approaches that employ different measurement scales and are often limited to a single type of agent. This paper addresses this problem by developing a taxonomy that organizes intelligence measures according to the type of measurement scale (nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio) and methodology (judgment, test batteries, indirect and direct measurement of properties linked to intelligence). Methods that are included in this survey include human intuition, standard tests like IQ and g, test batteries for animals and AIs, and direct measurement of prediction and goal-achievement. This paper argues that direct ratio measures are the most plausible route to a single universal measure that would enable the intelligence of humans, animals and AIs to be compared on a single scale. This could provide a real measure of progress in artificial intelligence, inform debates about AI safety, and help us to develop a scientific understanding of the relationship between intelligence and consciousness.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040112

Authors: Delin Ma Yufei Chen Qingqi Pei

This study conducts a technical analysis of frontier generative AI algorithms—including Meta’s Self-Rewarding Language Models, DeepMind’s EVA (Evolving Alignment via Asymmetric Self-Play) framework, and DeepSeek’s pure reinforcement-learning models—in order to examine an intrinsic paradigm shift in the ethical governance of generative artificial intelligence and to advance a physicalist analysis of algorithmic endogenous ethics. Combining a close reading of alignment techniques (RLHF, DPO, iterative DPO, GRPO) with a conceptual analysis grounded in Peter-Paul Verbeek’s theory of technological mediation and moral materialization, the paper traces how value-alignment goals are being “materialized” into internal, dynamic, and evolvable “moral scripts” within the algorithms themselves. The analysis shows that contemporary alignment practices are moving from external ethical discipline toward endogenous norms generated through iterative self-evaluation, asymmetric self-play, and rule-based self-exploration. The paper argues that this trend warrants a re-examination of Verbeek’s framework for its capacity to explain the co-evolution of technology and morality in the digital age, and it envisions a future of human–machine value co-evolution organized around new research directions such as “Setting as Governance” and “value homeostasis mechanisms”.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040111

Authors: Remigius Nwanosike Orjiukwu

This paper develops an original philosophical anthropological account of hope, arguing that hope is the essence of freedom—the inner propulsive principle without which freedom cannot move or sustain itself. Three levels of hope are distinguished. Ontological hope is the invariable, pre-reflective orientation of the human being toward the possibility of adequate response to the demand of ontological emptiness—the raison d’être of freedom itself, and the central contribution of this paper. Fundamental hope is its variable existential actualisation—the dispositional, non-object-directed orientation that emerges from the human being’s encounter with the totality of reality and is carried by the spiritual unconscious. Fragmental hope is the most variable and most familiar mode—the hope directed at particular, temporary needs and solutions. It is ontological hope—invariable, constitutive, and prior to every conscious act of hoping—that is the essence of freedom: the phenomenon that opens the space of ontological emptiness and gives freedom access to the demand of the latter, making its exercise possible at all. The paper further introduces and analyses three original concepts: certainty-mania—the obsessive quest for certainty that severs consciousness from the unconscious and from the fundamental hope it carries—showing that the loss of hope is always rooted in fear and the compulsive need for predictability; the distinction between anticipating joy (Freude-auf) and existential joy (erlebte Freude), arguing that pre-emptive certainty eliminates the tension that genuine hoping requires and thereby empties the present of its capacity to fulfil; and an original etymological and phenomenological analysis of disappointment as Enttäuschung—disillusionment, the medicinal return from illusion to reality. The paper situates its account in relation to Marcel’s ontological hope and Moltmann’s eschatological hope, and engages Frankl, Marcel, Moltmann, Fromm, Heidegger, Camus, Kierkegaard, Tillich, and Blondel as principal interlocutors.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040110

Authors: Gianfranco Basti Alfonso D’Amodio

This article develops a systematic reinterpretation of Amartya Sen’s capability approach as a human-centered renewal of the theory of justice grounded in Adam Smith’s moral philosophy. The central claim is that the epistemological foundation of Sen’s theory does not primarily depends on Kantian normativism mediated by Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness, but rather on The Theory of Moral Sentiments, particularly it depends on the concepts of “sympathy”, “impartial spectator”, and justice interpreted as “a social practice”. Through a genealogical reconstruction that brings Aristotle, Adam Smith, and Amartya Sen into dialog, the paper argues that the capability approach can be interpreted as an alternative tradition to Enlightenment theories of justice, because oriented toward human person flourishing and the public evaluation of real freedoms. By overcoming the limits of classical liberal egalitarianism and transcendental institutionalism, the article shows that Sen’s formalization of extended sympathy within social choice theory enables a comparative, pluralistic, and non-dogmatic conception of justice, capable of assessing real social states without recourse to transcendental foundations. In line with the thematic focus of the Special Issue Adam Smith’s Philosophy and Modern Moral Economics, the paper highlights the implications of this interpretation for contemporary moral economics, economic justice, human development, and the role of markets in pluralistic democratic societies.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040109

Authors: John Robert Bagby

Two related problems, problems of (in-)compatibility, are addressed to understand Deleuze’s philosophical project and to deepen our understanding of his use of Spinoza and Bergson: that of the compatible and incompatible features of Spinozism and Bergsonism, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the status of metaphysical compatibilism with respect to freedom in all three of their philosophies. I trace the incompatibilities and insist on the value of reopening the problem partially covered up by Deleuze’s creative engagement. Spinoza and Bergson remain incompatible despite Deleuze’s mixture, and metaphysically, Bergson and Deleuze explicitly affirm the coexistence of incompatible ingredients as constitutive of our very existence and freedom. Some version of metaphysical incompatibilism is affirmed by all three. Life, consciousness, and freedom force us to think of an irreducible incompatibility as constitutive, the coexistence of necessity and freedom, on the one hand, and a movement beyond teleology and mechanism, on the other. Deleuze’s radical pluralism rejects the value of reconciliation and instead deploys an expanding multiplicity of incompatibilities. I flag certain parallels and resonances between Spinoza and Bergson that are not common Deleuzian themes and suggest that Jean-Marie Guyau provides an alternative link to Bergsonism through his spiritualist Spinozism. Despite Bergson’s criticisms of Spinoza, they shared a moral notion of freedom expressed in intellectual generosity, which I characterize as undissociated joy.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040108

Authors: Albano Likaj

Modernity emerges as an era in which the correlation between intelligence and technical mastery becomes the central axis of social and cultural development. These two concepts function as the leitmotif of the modern age, shaping the way human beings understand themselves and the world. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s analysis in The Human Condition, this article examines how technical rationality has transformed the philosophical tradition and the foundations of scientific thought. The relationship between observation and thought undergoes a profound reconfiguration, contributing to the re-formation of a “new human being.” Paradoxically, introspection becomes a central source of meaning, mediating the tension between thought and action, intelligence and mastery. The principle of utility, a pillar of utilitarian philosophy, plays a dual role: it drives technical progress while simultaneously exposing the limitations of modern thought. This article clarifies the internal tensions of modernity and demonstrates how the modern age ultimately contradicts its own foundational claims.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040107

Authors: Marcin J. Schroeder

This is a companion paper for the short paper published in the proceedings of the 1st International Online Conference of the Journal Philosophies, presenting the view that the multiple, diverse manifestations of human, artificial, and natural intelligence do not preclude a uniform characteristic of intelligence, which could be called meta-intelligence, and that this uniform characteristic can be found in the triadic relationship of intelligence, information, and complexity, in which intelligence is considered the capacity to overcome complexity of information. While the conference paper was focused on overcoming the view of a diversity of unrelated forms of intelligence through the lifting of the level of abstraction of the study, and with the use in its background of auxiliary concepts of information and its complexity, the present paper defends, but only indirectly, the same vision of meta-intelligence, but with a shift of the focus to the metaphysical study of a triadic conceptual framework with its relationship to free will, agency, causality, and interaction, and the necessary high level of generality for the concept of information. The arguments used in the conference paper for the conceptualization of intelligence are not repeated here. Instead, this paper provides comprehensive metaphysical and epistemological foundations for the study of the triad of intelligence, information, and complexity, which in the earlier paper were only fragmentary.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040106

Authors: Inge van de Ven Jenny Slatman

This article examines how contemporary domestic noir fiction and its online reception relate to the pathologization of women’s testimony. Combining feminist narratology, critical phenomenology, and Ian Hacking’s concept of “making up people,” we analyze Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train and A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window alongside Goodreads reviews of both novels. We argue that these texts mobilize women’s psychological distress—addiction, agoraphobia, depression, trauma, and gaslighting—as sources of narrative suspense while simultaneously casting doubt on women’s credibility as witnesses to their own experiences. Drawing on a thematically coded corpus of Goodreads reviews, we identify a spectrum of reader responses, ranging from diagnostic and moralizing readings that reproduce testimonial injustice to empathic and feminist readings that challenge pathologizing assumptions. By bringing textual analysis and reader-response research into dialogue, the article demonstrates that the credibility of female narrators is not determined by narrative form alone but is negotiated through broader cultural assumptions about women’s reliability and authority. Domestic noir thus emerges as a key site where women’s suffering becomes a contested object of interpretation in contemporary reading culture.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040105

Authors: Åke Elden

This article introduces explanatory entitlement as an epistemic category: the inferential right to deploy a construct as a basis for causal inference in a given domain. Drawing on Woodward’s interventionist account and Cartwright’s analysis of causal portability the article argues that this entitlement is conferred by demonstrated invariance and does not transfer automatically across levels or domains. When constructs are projected beyond their invariance conditions without bridging support, they undergo conceptual inflation: retention of explanatory authority without the evidential conditions that license it. The article formalizes this failure, distinguishes it from seven neighboring frameworks, and proposes a diagnostic structure.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040104

Authors: Renate Künne Stephan Baumgartner Peter Heusser Sandra Würtenberger

The German physician Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843) established the basic principles of homeopathy as a medical specialty 200 years ago. Nowadays homeopathy is generally categorized as a method of complementary medicine, because its principles seem difficult to relate to modern western biomedicine and due to a different philosophical background. One important aspect is that Hahnemann ascribed the mode of action of homeopathic remedies—highly diluted potentized preparations (HDPPs)—to a non-physical force, called geistartig (literally translated as spirit-like). However, the term geistartig is nowadays difficult to understand and to translate, and it is open to misunderstanding. To build a bridge to today’s science, we aimed to clarify the meaning of geistartig. We therefore analyzed the complete body of Hahnemann’s publications and found that Hahnemann provided a consistent conceptualization of geistartig. The term geistartig encompasses the dynamic (force-like) effects of HDPPs and includes substance-specific gestalt-organizing effects, which differ from the known physical forces. A detailed analysis reveals that the hypothesis of such non-physical gestalt-organizing forces agrees with the concepts of modern biology and can also be tested empirically. We thus conclude that Hahnemann’s concept of the active principle of HDPPs can be related to contemporary research.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040103

Authors: Vincent Grandjean

When an individual A is accused of having committed a morally impermissible action X, it is generally accepted that they may invoke three types of defenses to mitigate, or even eliminate, their moral responsibility (or at least the fittingness of blame): justifications, excuses, and exemptions. However, another consideration—one that does not prima facie fall under any of these three types of defenses—also appears capable of influencing moral responsibility: the passage of time. A might argue that, although they did indeed commit the morally impermissible action X, the fact that it occurred twenty years ago partially absolves them from responsibility. This idea, which underlies several legal principles—such as statutes of limitations, rehabilitation, and sentence reduction—raises underexplored philosophical issues. In this paper, we argue that the passage of time does not constitute an autonomous moral defense. Rather, it is morally relevant only insofar as it makes possible certain transformations—including psychological reform, repentance, and processes of moral repair—capable of modifying the normative conditions under which it is appropriate to hold an agent to account. Accordingly, the attenuation of diachronic responsibility is best understood not as a direct consequence of temporal distance itself, but as a consequence of changes in those normative conditions.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11040102

Authors: Vladislav L. Zhdanov Ksenia Antrushina

This study presents an interdisciplinary examination of the intersections between human capital theory, philosophical interpretations of property, and contemporary housing and aspirational patterns in Germany and the United Kingdom. Drawing upon classical economic thought, Hegel’s philosophy of right, and Marx’s theory of alienation, the analysis demonstrates that falling homeownership rates and the reorientation of youth aspirations toward non-material domains reflect the structural impossibility of realizing Eigentum—property understood as an extension of personhood. These developments exemplify what Marx termed Eigenschaftslosigkeit, the condition of being divested of essential human attributes. The findings reveal a social configuration in which the Hegelian conception of Eigentum as a universal medium for freedom has been systematically denied to younger generations while the Marxian prospect of collective emancipation remains unfulfilled. The paper does not claim that virtual environments directly substitute for material property; rather, it proposes the metaverse as a conceptual horizon that illuminates the compensatory logic of a generation structurally excluded from Eigentum.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030101

Authors: Silvia Dadà

New information and communication technologies (ICTs) and applications of artificial intelligence (AI) have profoundly shaped our relationship with the world and with ourselves. As they are no longer merely tools or media, many scholars now describe these technologies in terms of environments. Although the concept of the digital environment has been extensively examined from a theoretical perspective, an ethics of digital environments qua environments has not yet been developed. In this paper, we advance a framework for an ethics of artificial environments, beginning with the fundamental questions that define this field of inquiry. The article develops this proposal in three steps: first, it examines the form of intrinsic value that may be attributed to digital environments; second, it considers the ways in which humans inhabit and dwell within these environments; and finally, it elaborates the metaphor of the digital garden as an ethically significant space in which responsibility is articulated through cultivation, co-dependence, and sustained care.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030100

Authors: Iago Ramos

This paper examines whether genuine dwelling—understood as embodied engagement with a world that resists, endures, and exceeds human control—can occur in the metaverse. Drawing on Heidegger’s account of dwelling and Ingold’s concept of the ‘taskscape’, it argues that the metaverse is structurally unable to sustain dwelling in the full ontological sense. The argument unfolds in three steps. First, dwelling is shown to depend on friction: bodily cost, temporal irreversibility, material resistance, and exposure to mortal finitude. Second, the metaverse is interpreted as a technological and commercial project oriented toward reducing these frictions through attenuated bodily burden, reversible action, programmable environments, and artificial scarcity. Third, the paper extends the concept of the metaverse beyond immersive hardware to describe a broader condition of digitalized life in which experience becomes increasingly modifiable, personalized, and optimized. In this wider sense, the difficulty of dwelling in the metaverse is not limited to a niche technology but reveals a tendency within late-digital culture itself. The paper concludes by proposing a politics of friction: a public deliberation over which resistances are unjust and should be transformed, and which are constitutive conditions of ethical, ecological, and responsible life.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030099

Authors: Zijian Ding

Contemporary interpretations of Jungian typological functions are often shaped by trait-based and cognitive or rationalist models. This paper argues that philosophical evaluation and reconstruction of typological theory are required. Drawing on distinctions from metaphysics—particularly between nominalism and realism and between bundle and substrate theories—this paper analyses how different interpretations of typological function are constructed and where their limitations arise. It shows that certain approaches collapse into nominalism by attributing shared features that do not obtain across their intended scope, while others fall into realist reification by treating functions as underlying entities. Even accounts that capture real patterns often remain bundle-like, describing co-occurring features without explaining reasons for their unity, or substrate-like, positing metaphysical identity where only structural similarity recurs. This account is further articulated through a structural analysis of signifying processes inspired by Lacanian theory, showing how functions can be understood as different modes of signifier chains. Applying the conceptual discussion to artificial intelligence, the paper argues that a clearer typological conception can inform how typology can better benefit artificial intelligence.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030098

Authors: Pavel Straňák

Discussion of consciousness and artificial intelligence has hitherto focused on the question of whether a large language model (LLM) exhibits signs of consciousness or understanding. This paper proposes to redirect attention elsewhere: not to the model itself, but to the orchestrating layer that governs the model—the backend, understood here as the collection of mechanisms (context management, retrieval, evaluation, planning, and tool-use control) that structure the model’s operation. We argue that the backend performs a function functionally analogous to the role of consciousness in the human brain: it stabilizes generative processes, directs attention, maintains context, and mitigates the entropic disintegration of thought. Consciousness fulfills this function through the phenomenal layer—qualia—which creates a persistent subjective “inner canvas”, used here as a metaphor for a more general multimodal phenomenal space. The backend fulfills it only algorithmically, without phenomenal quality. We further show that computation is an informationally conservative process in the sense of Shannon’s Data Processing Inequality (DPI), and therefore cannot increase Shannon information, even though it may yield novel or pragmatically useful recombinations of existing information. We conclude by proposing the hypothesis that consciousness constitutes a phenomenon orthogonal to computation—not an emergent property of complexity, but a qualitative leap into a different dimension. This hypothesis, which builds on the author’s prior work in this Special Issue and in Symmetry, is presented as a conceptual contribution rather than a formal theory, and may have implications for how future artificial intelligence research conceptualizes the limits of computational architectures.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030097

Authors: Lyazzat Tulbayevna Kurmanbayeva Anar Saduakasovna Tanabayeva Akmaral Ivanovna Doszhanova Aidyn Aidaruly Olzhashov Denis Bakarassov Adilbek Knarovich Bisenbaev

This study examines the phenomenon of pseudoconfident knowledge in the context of the everyday use of generative artificial intelligence. By pseudoconfident knowledge, we mean a response that is substantively plausible, rhetorically coherent, and outwardly persuasive but is treated and understood as knowledge before its actual reliability has been established. Of course, we do not use the term “pseudoconfident knowledge” to denote knowledge in the strict epistemological sense. Rather, it denotes a special form of AI-generated content that acquires the status of knowledge in the user’s perception before its reliability, source-based justification, or factual correctness have been established. The problem here is not that such an answer is already knowledge but that it is prematurely accepted as knowledge because of its coherence, completeness, and rhetorical confidence. The aim of the study is to identify the epistemic gap between the everyday operational integration of artificial intelligence and the user’s critical ability to distinguish between persuasiveness and justification. The theoretical framework combines approaches to AI literacy, epistemic vigilance, and contemporary forms of digital mediation in the circulation of knowledge. The empirical basis of the study is an online survey of AI users. The analysis was conducted using descriptive statistics, contingency tables, and methods for testing associations between categorical variables. The results show that the key differentiating factor is not the frequency of AI use, but the strategy used in handling its responses. More epistemically robust positions are associated with practices of comparison, editing, and verification, whereas uncritical acceptance of the answer is associated with greater vulnerability to pseudoconfident knowledge. We conclude that the spread of generative artificial intelligence is producing a new socioepistemic problem that calls for a shift in emphasis from simple instrumental literacy toward a culture of verification, doubt, and epistemic responsibility.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030096

Authors: Luca Valera

This paper focuses on the increasing relevance of rewilding in the context of the global ecological crisis. This crisis is conceived not only as a loss of biodiversity, but also as a breakdown in our capacity to dwell meaningfully on Earth. Although rewilding has been developed primarily as an ecological restoration strategy, this paper argues that it is first and foremost an ethical concept. In this sense, starting from Næss’s ecosophy, contemporary theories of self-rewilding, and environmental virtue ethics, this paper develops a philosophical framework that interprets rewilding as a form of dwelling based on the concept of oikos (home). It shows that rewilding entails a transformation of human agency through identification and self-realization, which makes the “ecological self” emerge. As for its methodology, the paper adopts a conceptual and interdisciplinary approach, combining ecology, environmental philosophy, and virtue ethics. The paper concludes that the concept of rewilding should be linked both to ecological restoration and ethical flourishing, requiring the development of certain virtues—e.g., humility and the recognition of ecological dependence. In this regard, rewilding should offer a relevant context to rethink our relationship with nature, starting from the idea of dwelling in the common home.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030095

Authors: Chenju Xian Xinggui Mao

Richard J. Arneson’s theory of welfare underwent a significant transformation from subjectivism to objectivism. Three difficulties—adaptive preferences, false beliefs, and non-prudential desires—demonstrate that a welfare theory grounded in subjective attitudes is untenable in principle, driving Arneson toward an objective list theory. Through his rejection of the endorsement constraint, he established a purely objectivist position: subjective attitudes are “neither necessary nor sufficient” for well-being. This position generates significant justificatory pressure toward hard paternalism. Arneson confronted this consequence by arguing that hard paternalism is defensible in principle, while contending that paternalistic intervention must remain restrained in practice on grounds of the intrinsic value of autonomy, the limitations of state capacity, and the costs of stigmatization. However, the reasons Arneson offers for restraint cannot be adequately supported by the objective list alone; they face explanatory pressure at the level of political application. Conditional objectivism can better fill this explanatory gap: for an item on the objective list to count as contributing to a particular individual’s well-being, a negative condition must be satisfied—namely, that the individual would not rationally reject the item under conditions of reflective deliberation.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030094

Authors: Catalin Teoharie

At first glance, the treatment of LLMs from the perspective of the Free Energy Principle (FEP) seems straightforward: LLMs do not fully operate under the FEP due to their lack of direct connection with the external environment and the incompleteness of their active inference. LLMs do not fully capture the consequences of their actions; hence, they will never acquire a human-like world model. While I agree that LLMs do not operate under FEP and have major limitations resulting from their lack of connection to the external environment, I argue that they capture an important part of our world model by grounding their responses in it. Although this grounding is mediated—and therefore imperfect—I attribute to LLMs a deeper relation with the external world than many have thus far acknowledged. I explore two main directions when evaluating the possibility of LLMs encapsulating a human-like world model. First, I evaluate the similarity of their behavior, with the underlying hypothesis that, under the FEP, similar behaviors exhibited in similar environments imply similar internal models. Second, I use research on mechanistic interpretability to explore whether human and LLM neural networks are similar. The conclusion is that LLMs might acquire part of our world model, even though this was not intended during their training.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030093

Authors: Fei Sun Damir Isovic Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic

AI systems generate ethical tensions that cannot be addressed through principle-based guidance alone. This paper brings forward an Integrated Axiology–MCDA Framework for AI ethics that distinguishes intrinsic, instrumental, and relational values and uses multi-criteria analysis to operationalize value pluralism in practice. The framework structures ethical evaluation by making value commitments explicit, enabling transparent examination of trade-offs, and supporting context-sensitive judgment. A healthcare hyper-scenario with sensitivity analysis shows how different weight configurations influence the relative acceptability of diagnostic systems and clarifies the thresholds at which accuracy considerations outweigh privacy or fairness. Cross-domain applications in education, criminal justice, and finance further illustrate how domain-specific value tensions require distinct criteria sets and weighting structures. The analysis shows that ethical challenges in AI arise from genuine value pluralism. Explicit value classification enables more accountable decision making across the AI lifecycle.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030092

Authors: Andrea Gentili

What do we mean when we talk about the “environment” inside the ecological discourse? Do we really have a clear and distinct notion of it? This paper argues that the “environment” is not a single object approached from different disciplinary angles, but a stratified epistemic field in which distinct models produce distinct results. Against the assumption of a unified environmental referent, the article reconstructs four major models of understanding: (1) the scientific model of the ecosystem, (2) the moral model of nature as value, (3) the aesthetic model of landscape, and (4) the juridical model of territory or land. Each of these models is shown to function as a specific device of objectivation, unifying heterogeneous elements according to its own rationality: systemic regulation, axiological orientation, experiential appearance, or the normative ordering of living space. Through historical and conceptual analyses, the paper demonstrates that these models are neither mutually reducible nor merely complementary perspectives on the same object. Rather, they generate different environmental objects, each governed by its own epistemic logic. What the paper suggests is that the environment remains (as it should) a polyvocal concept, and that a critical epistemology of the environment, precisely because of this polyvocality, must concern itself with mapping these models and explicating their architecture and techniques of functioning.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030091

Authors: Aleksandre Maskharashvili Symon Jory Stevens-Guille Elena Vaikšnoraitė

A bstract Categorial Grammars (ACGs) are a type-theoretic grammatical framework inspired by Montague Grammar. They provide a fully compositional architecture in which syntactic derivations are mapped to semantic representations by means of a typed homomorphism. ACGs have proven useful for modeling a range of grammatical formalisms, including Tree-Adjoining Grammar (TAG), which has been extensively investigated as a model of natural language syntax because of its mildly context-sensitive expressive power and polynomial-time parsing algorithms. In this work, we adopt ACGs to model the syntax–semantics interface, with the syntactic component based on TAG. The semantic component of this work builds on negative-event semantics—a recent development in Neo-Davidsonian event semantics centered on the notion of negative events—to provide adequate analyses of core semantic phenomena that have eluded satisfactory treatment in prior work. By exploring this semantic account, our approach captures intricate interactions among various phenomena at the syntax–semantics interface, including event quantifiers, negation, quantified noun phrases, and verbs with clausal complements, while preserving the following desirable theoretical and computational properties: (i) syntactic representations are standard phrase-structure trees derived by a grammatical formalism; (ii) the mapping from syntax to semantics is fully compositional; and (iii) efficient parsing and generation algorithms remain applicable.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030090

Authors: Abduljaleel Kadhim Alwali

Contemporary bioethical debate over biotechnological enhancement, genetic engineering, prosthetics, and neuroenhancement largely takes place within a metaphysical framework inherited from post-Cartesian European philosophy. In this framework, humanity is essentially something received or given, and biotechnological intervention is a transgression against that givenness. This paper argues that medieval Islamic philosophy, particularly Ibn Tufail’s account of human environmental agency in Hayy Ibn Yaqzan and Maimonides’ integration of body and soul into a single moral–physical economy, offers conceptual resources that reframe this debate. According to the viewpoint developed here, the human is constitutively a self-shaping being whose formation is mediated through bodily and environmental conditions that the human reciprocally shapes. Biotechnology is therefore not a rupture in the human story but the latest expression of a perennial human practice. This reframing does not dissolve bioethical concern but relocates it: the question is not whether to engage in self-shaping (as we always have), but what forms of self-shaping conduce to the integrated flourishing of an embodied person.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030089

Authors: Weiqiang Qi

This paper examines the essence and dilemmas of Hobbes’s mechanical materialism, which posits that all things—God, the soul, and the mind—are bodies subject to mechanical laws. Rejecting metaphysical assumptions, Hobbes emphasizes the absoluteness of bodies over appearances, insisting that all knowledge originates from sensory experience. A central issue in his philosophy is the nature of motion: if every movement requires an external cause, what initiates the first? While Hobbes dismisses the concept of a self-moved mover as incoherent, his appeal to agnostic theology introduces contradictions. To resolve this, he proposes the concept of endeavor (conatus) as the fundamental principle of motion, but it remains insufficient to explain motion’s origin fully. Nevertheless, Hobbes’s philosophical framework offers a materialist perspective for understanding the world, revealing how mechanical processes serve as the foundation for comprehending reality.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030088

Authors: Edu William

Digital systems are ordinarily evaluated in terms of speed, throughput, efficiency, and optimization. Such evaluations are indispensable, but they remain philosophically incomplete because they treat latency as a merely technical property of systems rather than as a condition of mediated action. This article argues that latency should be understood as a phenomenological condition of technological mediation because the interval between human initiative and technical response influences how action is experienced, how continuity is sustained, and how agency is lived and distributed across human and technical components. The article argues that latency is a constitutive condition of mediated agency and that changes in temporal coupling reorganize how technology appears in experience. On this basis, it distinguishes delayed mediation, immediate mediation, and anticipatory mediation as three regimes through which the temporal structure of response alters the phenomenological status of action. When delay is perceptible, technology tends to appear as obstacle, procedure, or object of attention; when delay withdraws, mediation can recede into the continuity of action and be incorporated into embodied practice; when responsiveness gives way to prediction, mediation begins to pre-structure the field of action before initiative is fully articulated. The argument reinterprets Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, postphenomenology, Stiegler, and Rosa through the lens of latency, while selected findings from human–computer interaction and agency research are used as a limited scientific dialogue concerning continuity, disruption, direct manipulation, presence, and the sense of agency. The article argues that existing literature has illuminated mediation, embodiment, interface responsiveness, acceleration, and anticipation, but has not systematically theorized latency itself as a temporal condition of agency. Anticipation is therefore treated not as a competing topic but as the limiting case at which latency analysis opens toward the use of the future in present action, as discussed by Rosen and Poli. The conclusion argues that the philosophical problem raised by digital speed is not simply acceleration as such, but the preservation of the human interval of hesitation, interpretation, judgment, and responsibility within increasingly responsive technical worlds.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030087

Authors: Bin Li

The relation between entropy and time is central to debates on thermodynamic irreversibility and the arrow of time. This paper clarifies that relation by distinguishing several roles often associated with entropy in such debates: temporal ordering, temporal orientation, temporal flow and measurement, and thermodynamic asymmetry. The paper does not deny that entropy increase, together with a low-entropy past and suitable coarse-graining, may explain the thermodynamic arrow or help orient an already ordered sequence of states. It also does not deny that thermodynamic or statistical structure may contribute to the selection or measurement of physically meaningful temporal flow in special frameworks. It addresses a narrower question: whether standard entropy notions can themselves supply temporal ordering or serve as general temporal parameters. Using thermodynamic, Boltzmann, Gibbs, and coarse-grained entropy within a minimal dynamical-systems framework, we show that they do not satisfy this role in general. Entropy functionals may be non-injective along trajectories; fine-grained Gibbs entropy is invariant under Hamiltonian flow; coarse-grained entropy depends on descriptive partitions; and entropy monotonicity depends on boundary conditions rather than an intrinsic temporal orientation. An open-system example is included only to illustrate that subsystem entropy may decrease while the dynamical time parameter continues to order the evolution. The novelty is therefore not in the bare claim that entropy and time are non-identical, nor in the attribution of a crude entropy-equals-time thesis to the literature, but in the explicit role-separation argument showing why entropy can characterize asymmetry, help orient an already ordered history, or contribute to temporal-flow selection only after suitable dynamical, statistical, or ordering structure is already given. Entropy remains central to statistical-mechanical accounts of irreversibility, but under standard definitions, it cannot itself supply temporal ordering.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030086

Authors: Ehsan Jozaghi

This paper develops a systems theoretical account of democracy as an emergent equilibrium ecosystem within complex evolutionary adaptive systems rather than a purely institutional or normative construct. Drawing on general systems and complexity theories, it argues that democratic stability depends on maintaining balance across economic, security, and informational domains. The Industrial Revolution illustrates how technological and economic transformations simultaneously enabled democratic expansion and generated instability. This paper’s central contribution is to conceptualize the technological revolutions (e.g., Industrial and AI) as an entropic force that accelerates systemic instability through inequality, amplifications (e.g., mass and algorithmic media), and informational fragmentation (e.g., polarization and radicalization). In response, democratic resilience is reframed as integration (economic, governance/security, and informational/social) and harm reduction, both of which serve as adaptive mechanisms within complex evolutionary systems. Democracy is thus understood not as a fixed institutional form but as a dynamic, fragile, evolutionary equilibrium continuously shaped by technological and entropic systemic pressures.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030085

Authors: Maiko Sakai Yui Yuda

This paper examines how asking “why” may function as a form of censorship that regulates the actions and desires of disabled people. We describe how one author’s life was transformed by 24 h personal assistance, which let her pursue activities “unnecessary for sustaining life” and “be picky about her daily routines.” Building on phenomenological research, we argue that the lack of discretion in homemaking alienates disabled people. While Independent Living with a personal assistant enables homemaking that reflects personal preferences, pursuing “unnecessary activities” or “pickiness” can be difficult because of the pressure to explain reasons to caregivers. The author developed a habit of explaining her reasons—often initially or excessively—from a lifetime of interactions with non-disabled people who constantly demanded justification. This demand for explanation places a burden of justification on disabled people, censoring their “pickiness” or comfort by dismissing it as an “unnecessary luxury.” This “censorship of reasons” maintains the fluid flow of actions conducted by non-disabled people within an ableist society. The recognition of this creates a space for reexamining able-bodied normalcy and the excessive fluidity expected within ableist social structures.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030084

Authors: Angelo Compierchio Phillip Tretten Prasanna Illankoon Giada Di Pietro

Today, it is common practice to distinguish something as intelligent or unintelligent based on its origin or behavior. One of the biggest discoveries of evolutionary biology is rapid evolution, which permeates every layer of the natural world. This is where natural glimpses of microevolutionary forms can be observed, revealing living organisms’ adaptive capacities converging towards intelligent behavior. In comparison, according to a Kantian postulate, encompassing ethical and anthropological conditions, nature acts for man until he is capable of acting with free intelligence; that is, until reason is fully realized to guide men towards performing morally good actions. This deliberation concerns humans acting with commendable conduct in a unified concept of will through reason to grasp not simply intelligence but a logical faculty that shapes our sense of duty. In Kant’s view of nature, this study posits in non-human animals’ signs of free intelligence in accidental relations with external agents, reaching an admirable display of ingenious abilities, as displayed in Kanzi and the South African beetle. Although it is difficult at times to distinguish purely reflex actions, humans’ reasoning strategies are not capable of reaching Kant’s practical maxims as a tool for achieving the greatest well-being necessary for all mankind.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030083

Authors: Anné Hendrik Verhoef Edmund Terem Ugar

In this paper, we examine the evolving conception of the “other” in relation to human happiness, drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical account and empirical findings from the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Ricoeur situates happiness in three interrelated threads: individual fulfilment, friendship with those near to us, and just relations with distant others. The Harvard Study corroborates the significance of relationality for well-being, showing that strong social ties enhance longevity and life satisfaction. However, contemporary digitalisation and the proliferation of AI humanoid social robots challenge traditional notions of the “other.” Individuals increasingly form “meaningful” attachments, emotional bonds, and even romantic relationships with technological artefacts, raising the question of whether these non-human entities can contribute to happiness in a Ricoeurian sense. While the above dynamics are now proliferating, we argue that AI and social robots cannot be considered as the “other” in the Ricoeurian sense. Although these technologies can be considered as a virtual other, we do not defend that position in the current paper. In this paper, we explore the tensions regarding the authenticity, moral status, and ethical implications of AI and social robots in relation to human happiness. We conclude by proposing a re-evaluation of relationality, moral consideration, and the ethical frameworks underpinning human–technology interactions in the pursuit of human flourishing and happiness in the Ricoeurian sense.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030082

Authors: Anna-Lisa Nußbaum

Ongoing processes appear to be both open-ended and, in an important sense, complete. In the context of the Growing Block Theory of time, this combination generates a tension: if a process is genuinely ongoing, it seems incomplete; yet if it is complete, it appears closed and no longer directed at a non-existent future. This paper argues that this tension is only apparent. Building on Stout’s conception of occurrent continuants and on the distinction between temporal existence and temporal location central to Growing Block accounts, I examine two hybrid views according to which a process, considered as ongoing, and processes, considered as having gone on, fall under different categories of persistence. I argue that both versions of the hybrid view ultimately fail to account for the relation between dynamic existence and temporal location in a growing universe. As an alternative, I propose understanding ongoing processes as temporally expanding wholes with open boundaries. In this view, an ongoing process is always complete, though not completed, because its boundary at the edge of becoming is dynamically open rather than a genuine temporal part. This account preserves the motivations behind hybrid views while avoiding their ontological costs.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030081

Authors: Jovan M. Tadić

This paper re-examines the problem of free will in light of both deterministic and indeterministic assumptions about the structure of the world. On the philosophical side, it analyzes van Inwagen’s arguments that free will is incompatible with determinism—because our actions would then be fixed by a remote past and the laws of nature—and with indeterminism, on the grounds that indeterministic outcomes reduce to mere chance. On the neuroscientific side, it revisits Libet-style experiments, often interpreted as showing that unconscious brain activity initiates voluntary actions before conscious intention, and critically reviews recent reinterpretations of the readiness potential and the limitations of such paradigms for assessing free will. The paper then diagnoses a shared structure in these challenges: they presuppose a strict dichotomy between Laplacean determinism and a thin, law-governed conception of chance that leaves no conceptual space for non-chance indeterminism or for agent-level causal contributions. A simple quantum thought experiment is used to show how microscopic indeterminism can have direct macroscopic effects, undermining the assumption that the macroworld is effectively deterministic. Finally, the implications of computational and dynamical models of cognition are considered, arguing that their built-in constraints should be read as limits of the models rather than as metaphysical results. The conclusion advocates a naturalistic agnosticism: current physics, neuroscience, and cognitive science neither establish nor refute free will, but underdetermine its status while still placing substantive constraints on any viable theory of it.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030080

Authors: Michael Papademas

This paper examines the transhumanist prospect of abolishing death and argues that technological immortality would undermine the conditions that make meaning and philosophy possible. Mortality is a biological limit but also the existential horizon against which identity, value, and narrative coherence are constituted. If death were eliminated, the structures that orient personhood, ethics, and motivation would be destabilized, along with the urgency and depth that characterize human life. The argument directly relates to current debates in AI ethics, bioethics, and technoethics, as the pursuit of digital or biotechnological immortality raises questions about personhood, embodiment, responsibility, and the moral limits of technological intervention. The central claim is that the very practice of philosophy presupposes mortality as its constitutive horizon, such that removing it would deprive philosophy of its central subject matter. The argument unfolds in three steps. First, it shows that life’s narrative coherence depends on finitude, for without an end, a life cannot take shape. Second, it claims that moral and communal values such as legacy, sacrifice, and generational concern rest on mortality. Third, it considers how the scarcity of time gives urgency to reasoning and commitment. Without temporal limits, projects can always be deferred, eroding their significance. Philosophy has long drawn its seriousness from the confrontation with death, from Platonic Socrates’ practice to modern existentialism. I conclude that transhumanist immortality would not extend philosophy but radically transform or undermine it, since the existential tension supplied by mortality has been indispensable to philosophy.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030079

Authors: Michael Lewin Polina Lewin

Metaphilosophy is often understood as an inquiry into the nature, goals, and methods of philosophy and is sometimes construed as an epistemology of philosophy. Moral questions concerning philosophical practice, however, are no less important and constitute a distinctive field that may be called ‘moral philosophy of philosophy’ or ‘moral metaphilosophy’. This article maps the field by identifying, addressing, and classifying various forms of moral transgressions in, against, and through philosophy. Hermeneutical rational injustices include the devaluation, discrediting, misrepresentation, and non-objective critique within philosophical discourse. Violations within academic philosophical practice encompass such phenomena as intellectual theft; gatekeeping; academic cliques; scholarly neglect; discrimination and favoritism; prestige bias, excellence bias, and other forms of bias oriented toward perceived institutional, professional, evaluative, or symbolic “topness”; unfair peer review; problematic evaluation criteria and rankings; abuses of power; unjust distributions of resources; and the inversion of virtues into vices. External injustices and transgressions concern the public discrediting of philosophy, violence against philosophers, the problematic relation between philosophy and politics, and the impact of extra-academic vices on philosophy. Bringing these issues to light, thereby underscoring the importance of moral metaphilosophy, can help protect philosophers from various forms of harm inflicted by themselves, colleagues, institutions, and other actors across academic and non-academic contexts, thereby rendering philosophical practice fairer and more worthwhile.