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.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030078

Authors: Sonja Lavaert

In his lectures from November 1980 to March 1981, Deleuze describes the immanent and compositional nature of Spinoza’s philosophy expressed in the content, the method, and the form of his writings. Spinoza himself uses in the Ethics and the TP the images of the climatologist studying the weather and the geometric drawing of lines and surfaces for his technical, artisanal, and neutral approach to the affects and political life. His ontology is characterized by the absence of hierarchical order and by nature as the principle and source of diversity. This approach is reminiscent of art, which also orders the chaos of human existence and makes it productive in a free and immeasurable way. Deleuze conceives of Spinoza’s ontology as a practical philosophy, leading him to the examples and the analysis of paintings (and, vice versa, from the art of painting to Spinoza’s philosophy), to which he dedicates his subsequent lectures from March to June 1981. In this article I reflect on the link between Deleuze’s lectures on Spinoza and on painting, and therefore also between Spinoza’s compositional thought itself and painting.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030077

Authors: Abraham Meidan

This paper does not attempt to resolve the metaphysical question of whether consciousness and free will really exist, nor whether machines could literally possess them. Instead, it pursues a more modest and, I suggest, more fruitful aim: to show that it is possible, in principle, to construct machines that think they are conscious and think they choose freely, in essentially the same way that human beings do. To address this question, I identify functional requirements for systems that think they are conscious and think they choose freely. These include subjective self-report, opacity of underlying mechanisms, semantic competence, memory-based self-models, deliberation among alternatives, counterfactual reasoning, and practical unpredictability. I then sketched preliminary computational architectures showing how these capacities could, in principle, be realized using existing or foreseeable technologies. No single component is novel; what matters is their integration into a unified, self-referential system.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030076

Authors: Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic

Cognition and intelligence are central concepts in cognitive science, biology, philosophy of mind, and artificial intelligence, yet these disciplines offer conflicting accounts of what each of them means and how the two notions are related. In many accounts the two notions are used interchangeably, while in others intelligence is defined independently of cognitive processes. Dominant human-centered traditions identify cognition with mental processes associated with brains, whereas life-centered perspectives attribute cognitive capacities to all living systems. This article proposes a relational, life-centered, info-computational framework in which cognition is the ongoing autopoietic and sense-making organization of living systems, while intelligence is the degree of competence with which such organization achieves goal-directed problem solving under novelty, perturbation, and uncertainty. Cognition exists in degrees across living systems, from basal cellular sensing and regulation to increasingly complex cognitive organizations, while intelligence correspondingly appears in degrees in the ability to solve cognitive problems. Current artificial systems can exhibit engineered or derivative intelligence and may implement cognition-like functions, but they are not cognitive in the biological sense. The resulting framework clarifies how human-centered, life-centered, computational, and artificial intelligence can be related.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030075

Authors: Marco Tuono

In this article, we analyze the bioethical issue of brain-dead pregnancy, both from the perspective of its implications for the brain death criterion and with reference to the ethical question of maintaining life support measures for brain-dead pregnant women with the aim of delivering a fetus. In doing so, we will demonstrate that, after having addressed the main critical positions, brain death cannot be considered the death of a human being because its justification (the brain as the body’s “critical organ”) has ceased to exist. “Brain-death survivors” (Shewmon) demonstrate levels of bodily integration even in the absence of the brain’s contribution. We will also evaluate the ethical consequences of carrying a brain-dead patient to term, a procedure to which we give our ethical assent. In doing so, we will be guided by the principle of dignity.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030074

Authors: Dimitrios Dimitriou Aristi Karagkouni Maria Sartzetaki Evangelia Schoinaraki Antonia Moutzouri Vasileios Benteniotis

Intergenerational equity has become central to contemporary sustainability discourse and climate litigation, as courts increasingly confront whether present generations may legitimately deplete ecological resources in ways that impose irreversible burdens on those yet to come. This article argues that the normative structure underlying contemporary intergenerational climate claims reflects a recurring institutional logic identifiable much earlier in legal history. Focusing on the Gortyn Code (5th century BCE), one of the earliest and most extensive surviving Greek law codes, the analysis reveals how rules governing property, inheritance, guardianship, and family relations constructed an architecture of intergenerational continuity through enforceable constraints on present authority over inherited assets. The Code restricted alienation of inherited assets, structured succession through fixed distributive formulas, and imposed mechanisms designed to preserve the material foundations of future social existence. These provisions are then interpreted in relation to contemporary sustainability frameworks, emphasizing trusteeship, burden inheritance, and ecological thresholds. The article considers recent climate litigation to illustrate how modern courts increasingly translate intergenerational commitments into enforceable duties through functionally equivalent reasoning. The findings suggest that climate adjudication represents a modern manifestation of a deeper logic already visible in the Gortyn Code, one that emerges regardless of whether the resource at stake is owned or unowned, and that this parallel carries implications for the design and institutional anchoring of intergenerational obligations in contemporary climate governance.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030073

Authors: Badriah Alanazi Abdullah Alsaleh

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly mediate how individuals learn, work and make decisions, raising foundational philosophical questions about the nature of knowledge, agency and autonomy. This article integrates philosophical analysis with illustrative empirical cases from Romania to examine how AI restructures human epistemic and practical activity. A central empirical observation, the engagement–performance paradox, reveals that AI-driven learning environments can produce dramatic increases in learner interaction while generating only marginal improvements in understanding. Interpreted through post-phenomenology, virtue epistemology and theories of autonomy, this paradox highlights the emergence of epistemic superficiality: a condition in which algorithmically mediated engagement replaces reflective, conceptually grounded learning. Complementary findings from AI-supported workplace contexts further illustrate how intelligent systems automate aspects of decision-making, thereby reshaping autonomy, responsibility and the phenomenology of action. Synthesizing these insights, the article argues that AI functions as a structuring force that co-authors human agency by reorganizing the conditions under which cognition and action occur. The study contributes to contemporary debates in the philosophy of technology, epistemology and AI ethics by proposing the concept of structured agency as a lens for understanding how AI-mediated environments transform the foundations of knowledge, autonomy and human flourishing.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030072

Authors: Adil Guler

This article develops a comparative metaphysical inquiry into real time through a dialogue structured by formal analogy between al-Ghazālī’s theology of continuous creation (tajdīd al-khalq) and Lee Smolin’s relational, law-evolving physics. Against both timeless determinism and accounts of becoming that deny any further ontological grounding, it argues that real time may be understood as a structured horizon of actualization in which openness is progressively articulated into determinate actuality under constraint. Employing a non-reductive method of formal analogy, the analysis maps shared problem-structures—discreteness, contingency, openness, and directionality—while foregrounding controlled disanalogies, especially the contrast between volitional grounding in al-Ghazālī and system-level, naturalistic actualization in Smolin. The article proposes three interpretive claims: (i) both frameworks may be read as relocating order within time rather than above it; (ii) the comparison brings into focus the philosophical problem of actualization, rather than mere succession, in accounts of real temporality; and (iii) stability and regularity are more plausibly understood as articulated within time than as timeless givens. The result is a layered account of temporal order in which volitional maintenance, ontological stabilization, and mathematical framing intersect, suggesting a way of viewing real time as ontologically significant and epistemically consequential within the present comparison.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030071

Authors: Abbas Jong

This article examines the 1910 philosophical dispute between Vladimir Ern and Semyon Frank in post-1905 Russia as a dispute over the criterion of philosophy itself. The controversy arose in a field where the meaning of “Russian philosophy,” the authority of neo-Kantian nauchnost’ [scientificity], the religious-ontological program of Put’, and the problem of culture had become closely interconnected. The article argues that the central issue concerned what makes a claim philosophical: participation in an antecedent order of being, or conceptual articulation, proof, and universally valid justification. Ern’s intervention is presented as an attempt to reconstitute philosophy through Logos. For Ern, modern rationalism separates the discursive-logical from the “fullness of reason,” producing ratio as an autonomous and ultimately meonic form of thought; Logos, by contrast, names the ontological principle through which thought remains inwardly bound to being. Frank’s response locates the issue in the concept of philosophy itself. While acknowledging intuition, ontologism, and the insufficiency of one-sided rationalism, he insists that every appeal to being becomes philosophical only when it enters the medium of concepts, reasons, and proof. The article argues that the controversy turns on two irreducible conditions internal to philosophy itself: thought must remain faithful to being, yet it must do so in a form through which its claims become philosophically valid. Read in this way, the Ern–Frank exchange discloses a constitutive tension between ontology and conceptual justification, and between historical embodiment and universal validity.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030070

Authors: Thomas Detcheverry

This article addresses an apparent tension in Deleuze’s philosophy: while his own work consistently valorizes the encounter and the role of signs in the genesis of thought, his interpretation of Spinoza seems to offer a radical critique of signs as sources of imagination, superstition, and servitude. The article argues that this tension is only apparent provided that Deleuze’s reconstruction of a Spinozist empiricist semiology is carefully examined. By analyzing Spinoza’s definition of the sign, its classification into scalar and vectorial types, and its grounding in an ethology of the body and affects, the article shows that Deleuze sharply distinguishes between signs that constitute vague experience and certain privileged signs—joyful passions and the “good encounter”—that make the formation of reason possible. The critique of the sign thus targets a specific regime of imaginative thought, while the valorization of the encounter concerns the empirical conditions for engendering thinking. This reconstruction ultimately reveals an isomorphism between Spinoza’s rationalism and Deleuze’s project of transcendental empiricism.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030069

Authors: Michael Fowler

Structural semiotics, as developed by A. J. Greimas and the Paris School, provides a powerful framework for analyzing narrative meaning through actantial roles, modalities, and hierarchical narrative structures. Despite its longstanding engagement with formal reasoning and diagrammatic tools, it has seen relatively few explicit mathematical formalizations. This article proposes a diagrammatic reconstruction of key Greimassian concepts using the language of symmetric monoidal and hypergraph categories. We treat the actantial model as a typing schema and introduce wiring diagrams as a formal semantics for representing narrative configurations, modal transformations, and actantial redistribution. Modal operations such as knowing-how-to-do, wanting-to-do, and causing-to-do are modeled as typed morphisms, while Frobenius structures account for duplication, erasure, and persistence of actants across narrative time. We show how operadic nesting captures hypotaxis, and how diagrammatic factorization yields higher-level abstractions corresponding to the hypotactical clusters of the canonical narrative schema. The approach is illustrated through a detailed analysis of Aesop’s The Fox & the Crow, culminating in a formal account of discoursivization via actorialization, spatialization, and temporalization. Rather than replacing structural semiotics, this work provides it with a compositional and mathematically explicit toolkit that clarifies existing concepts and opens new possibilities for comparative, computational, and interdisciplinary analysis.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030068

Authors: Davide Settembre-Blundo Fernando Soler-Toscano Maria Giovina Pasca Andrea Scozzari Gabriella Arcese

Industrial development is commonly described as a sequence of technological stages, from automation to artificial intelligence. This study examines whether successive industrial paradigms—from Industry 3.0 to the emerging Industry 6.0—can be more adequately understood as transformations in technological rationality rather than merely technological upgrades. The analysis adopts a conceptual–philosophical methodology informed by targeted review of peer-reviewed literature indexed in Scopus and Web of Science, integrating Kuhn’s notion of paradigms with Peircean inferential logic. Through systematic comparison of technological configurations, problem-framing practices, and epistemic assumptions, the study maps each paradigm onto a dominant mode of inference. The findings indicate that Industry 3.0 privileges deductive rule-based control, Industry 4.0 relies on inductive data-driven optimization, Industry 5.0 foregrounds hermeneutic interpretation and normative judgment, and prospective Industry 6.0 can be coherently interpreted as oriented toward abductive hypothesis generation within human–AI systems. Industrial change thus emerges as a reconfiguration of epistemic limits rather than a linear trajectory of technical improvement. The analysis concludes that expanding machine intelligence does not eliminate human authority but intensifies epistemic responsibility, understood as the obligation to determine relevance, value, and legitimacy in socio-technical systems.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030067

Authors: Daniel Deasy

What is time? In this paper, I defend the view that time is change. In Section 1, I introduce the view that time is change and contrast it with an alternative view. In Section 2, I draw on recent developments in higher-order metaphysics to defend a particular theory of change, and therefore, of time. Finally, in Section 3, I respond to several objections to the view that time is change.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11030066

Authors: Kristie Miller

It has been argued that one or other asymmetry in temporal ontology grounds there being reasons to have certain temporal attitudes which we not only have, but also judge to be reasonable, and that this gives us reason to posit that asymmetry. Call this general form of argument, the Argument from Reasonable Attitudes (ARA). There are several versions of this argument depending on (a) the posited asymmetry and (b) the attitude(s) mentioned and (c) whether the reasons adduced are subjective or objective. I argue that none of the resulting versions of the ARA are sound, and so reflecting on the nature of these temporal attitudes does not furnish us a reason to posit an asymmetry in temporal ontology.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020065

Authors: Lorenzo Magnani

I recently introduced the concept of eco-cognitive openness and situatedness to explain how cognitive systems—human or artificial—dynamically interact with their environments to generate information and creative outputs through abductive cognition. Humans display high eco-cognitive openness, integrating tools and cultural contexts through “unlocked strategies” that also enable exceptional creativity. By contrast, generative AI like LLMs operates via “locked strategies” based on pre-existing datasets with limited real-time interaction, which constrains higher creativity. Although LLMs surpass humans in many cognitive tasks, they lack the openness required for truly advanced abductive performance. Notably, most human cognition is repetitive and imitative—humans themselves often resemble “stochastic parrots.” In this sense, LLMs reveal human intellectual poverty more than they expose flaws in artificial intelligence. I will illustrate how LLMs can act as powerful enhancers of human performance while simultaneously threatening our most distinctive prerogative: creativity. Future human–AI collaboration could expand our eco-cognitive openness, but demands vigilant oversight to counter bias and so-called overcomputationalization. GenAI can serve as an epistemic mediator toward unlocked creativity only if humans maintain agency and embed its outputs in broader socio-cultural frameworks. My greatest concern is that ethical and legal safeguards will remain ineffective in practice, resulting in mere “ethics washing” and “law washing” without genuine enforcement.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020064

Authors: Steven G. Affeldt

The number and variety of images of reading in the Investigations suggest that, for Wittgenstein, reading is an essential part of our natural history and of the human form of life. Further, his treatments of reading show that different forms of reading express and sustain different forms of life. This essay explores what the Investigations reveals as the existential stakes of different modes of reading. Beginning with Wittgenstein’s opening engagement with Augustine, it argues that in the Investigations, as in the Confessions, different modes of reading both bespeak, and open us to, blessed or cursed forms of life. It then develops extended interpretations of individual passages in order to detail some specific shapes of, and conditions governing, modes of reading tied to these blessed or cursed forms of life. Finally, given these existential stakes of reading, it examines how the Investigations itself asks to be read and outlines specific ways in which its notorious difficulty and obscurity are essential to achieving its philosophical aims and, in particular, to promoting an ongoing practice of reading through which we are able to awaken to the wonder of our lives in language.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020063

Authors: Eduardo Duque-Dussán

The problem of meaning in an apparently indifferent universe has long been a central concern of existential philosophy. Classical existentialism addressed this question by emphasizing human freedom, responsibility, and the creation of meaning in the absence of transcendental guarantees, yet it largely remained framed within an anthropocentric horizon. This article introduces the concept of cosmic existentialism as a philosophical framework that situates human existence within the broader context of a scientifically understood cosmos. Through conceptual philosophical analysis, the paper reinterprets key existential categories such as angst, authenticity, and freedom in light of contemporary cosmological perspectives. Within this framework, the indifference of the universe is interpreted as a fundamental existential condition within the cosmological framework adopted in this study that reveals the fragility and contingency of human life. The analysis suggests that recognizing humanity’s lack of cosmic privilege does not lead to nihilism but instead allows meaning to be interpreted as a local, finite, and relational phenomenon. Cosmic existentialism therefore offers a philosophical perspective that integrates existential reflection with modern cosmological understanding and provides a framework for thinking about human existence within an indifferent universe. This standpoint is articulated through several principles, including cosmic indifference, the existential locality of meaning, and the contingency of human existence within the cosmos. Rather than emphasizing the scale of the universe itself, the present analysis suggests that the philosophical significance of cosmology lies in the removal of any privileged standpoint from which human existence can be interpreted.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020062

Authors: Donald A. Landes Kathleen Hulley

From hours spent in waiting rooms amidst uncertainty to the experience of recovering from medical treatments, the lived time of illness is marked by intervals of suspended sense. By disorienting our relation to the future, illness disrupts and reconfigures lived time from within, shaping how we navigate our intersubjective milieu and make sense of our unfolding lives. In this paper, we introduce the phenomenological concept of “protentional friction” as a way of understanding these experiences. Drawing upon Simone de Beauvoir’s work on subjectivity and becoming, alongside Henri Bergson’s and Eugène Minkowski’s emphasis on durée and élan, we demonstrate how protentional friction allows us to negotiate the tensions of our situation, orient ourselves toward the future through projects, and gear into the ongoing work of sense-making. As a counterbalance to normalizing cultural discourses surrounding illness, we reinterpret the idea of the “quotidian” as the everyday practice of sense-making to find and sustain an equilibrium.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020061

Authors: Mackenzie Hawkins

This paper argues that, within established mechanics, a change-first structure of mechanics—one that does not treat background time as fundamental—is as empirically licensed as the familiar time-first structure. Carlo Rovelli’s generally covariant framework and Wonchull Park’s initial conditions framework each provide an independent demonstration of this possibility across classical, relativistic, and quantum mechanics. Park’s Reality View Equivalence is employed as an epistemological constraint on claims of compatibility at the physics–metaphysics interface. The resulting picture of change before time yields structural resources that offer, without mandating, ways of supporting metaphysical projects that emphasize the dynamic nature of reality. Two worked examples are used to illustrate this application: first, by placing local becoming within the change-first state package, and, second, by treating entities that participate in change-first states as necessarily dynamic and thus, arguably, processual.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020060

Authors: Evan Thomas Knott

This paper explores the ethical dimensions of violence in sporting contexts, proposing that violence can be a virtue when characterized by controlled physicality. While society often views violence negatively, the paper argues that within rule-governed sports, certain forms of violence are morally permissible, strategically valuable, and essential to upholding the integrity of the game. Drawing on Suitsian terms and Kantian ethics, the paper develops a theory of lusory violence, distinguishing it from uncontrolled physicality or unmitigated violence. By examining the roles of enforcers in hockey, the development of MMA, and the ethics of sport jiu-jitsu, the paper suggests that violence is acceptable within a lusory framework only when it is purposive, strategically relevant, and constrained by rules that prioritize technical skill over raw damage. Ultimately, the paper argues that the ability to modulate violent behaviour represents a form of moral development, framing virtuous violence as a necessary tool for maintaining natural justice and personal excellence within specific sporting environments. Yet, virtuous violence is subordinate to technique, justice, and other defining elements of sports.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020059

Authors: Jeffrey A. Bell

This essay attempts to bring together the philosophies of Spinoza, Wittgenstein, and Deleuze by developing an ethics of learning that is implicit, and at times explicit, in each of their works. How this comes to be manifest in their works is that for Spinoza, Wittgenstein, and Deleuze, what is most important about this ethics of learning is that it is irreducible to rigid moral laws and to an understanding of reality that is reducible to forms of representational thinking. Most importantly, this essay shows that Spinoza’s understanding of absolutely infinite substance allows Spinoza to develop the ethical project of his Ethics—namely, his ethics of learning—and it is also what helps us to understand what Wittgenstein believed must be passed over in silence. Although the influence of Spinoza on Deleuze is well known, the focus placed here on learning will highlight, and in large part explain, why Spinoza remains a constant thread throughout Deleuze’s work while the importance of other philosophers, such as Nietzsche, slip to the background.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020058

Authors: Paul Redding

The paper starts by questioning the highly influential but extremely misleading characterizations of Plato and Hegel by Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper. It is argued that mathematical assumptions concerning the ancient problem of the incommensurability of continuous and discrete quantities underlie the ways in which Russell and Popper portray the metaphysics of Plato and Hegel—Popper explicitly, and Russell implicitly, presupposing a particular response to this problem by broadening the concept of number to include irrational numbers. Recent work on Plato, however, suggests a different strategy for responding to this ancient conundrum, one that involves a mediated “duality” of the continuous and discrete that Hegel would later generalize to a duality of determinate and indeterminate aspects of cognition more generally. This Platonic alternative had originated with the Pythagorean natural philosopher Philolaus of Croton and would later be expressed in modern mathematics in a non-Cartesian way of applying numerical metrics to geometric figures in disciplines such as projective geometry. Such an alternative approach to both quantitative and conceptual incommensurability, I claim, had influenced Plato’s later conception of philosophical method that would be adopted by Hegel via the intermediary of Leibniz, the first modern “idealist”. Understanding the actual mathematics modeling philosophical concepts for Plato and Hegel becomes crucial for understanding the philosophical claims of modern idealism.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020057

Authors: Jordi Vallverdú

Epistemology remains tacitly anthropocentric: it treats knowledge as something produced and validated through human cognitive capacities such as understanding, intuition, and transparent justification. Yet contemporary science and artificial intelligence increasingly depend on non-human systems that generate mathematically valid results, empirically successful models, and operationally reliable inferences that no human can fully survey or interpret. This article develops xenoepistemics, a structural theory of non-anthropocentric knowledge. The central claim is that epistemic evaluation must be reformulated in terms of system-level properties—reliability, robustness, counterfactual sensitivity, and domain transfer—rather than mentalistic notions such as belief or understanding. I offer (i) a definition of xenoepistemic systems as systems that track structure in a target domain without requiring human-style semantic access; (ii) a minimal account of epistemic agency without minds that avoids trivialization; and (iii) a non-circular trust framework that distinguishes empirical success from epistemic legitimacy using independent validation regimes. This paper addresses a reflexive worry—that a human-authored theory cannot dethrone human epistemology—by separating standpoint from object: xenoepistemics is articulated by humans but is not about human cognition. I discuss the pragmatic value of xenoepistemic knowledge production, the limits of independent verification for opaque systems, domain-relative thresholds for xenoepistemic authority, and the problem of constitutionally human-inaccessible knowledge. Finally, I diagnose and formalize the Marcusian regress paradox: recurrent goalpost-shifting, whereby every machine competence is reclassified as irrelevant once achieved. Xenoepistemics reframes this debate by treating non-human knowledge as a present reality requiring new norms, not as a future curiosity.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020056

Authors: Ernest Billings Brewster

Mereological anti-realism denies the intrinsic reality of both composite wholes and their constituent parts. This paper analyzes the mereological anti-realist argumentation developed by the Sino-Parthian scholar-monk Jizang 吉藏 (549–623 CE) targeting the mereological realist doctrine of the Brāhmaṇical Vaiśeṣika tradition in his understudied Exegesis on the Middle Treatise (Zhongguan lun shu中觀論疏) and Exegesis on the Hundred Verse Treatise (Bailun shu百論疏). By counterbalancing Jizang’s critiques with the Vaiśeṣika mereological realist doctrine on its own terms, this paper critically assesses the viability and coherence of Jizang’s arguments that there are no entities that instantiate mereological relations or properties. An examination of Jizang’s critique of Vaiśeṣika mereological realism brings to light how the Madhyamaka Buddhist doctrine avoids metaphysical nihilism in accounting for how both wholes and parts can possess causal efficacy without being attributed intrinsic reality in and of themselves.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020055

Authors: Baptiste Mélès

Can human languages help us write programs in a different way than we usually do? To examine this question, we first define exactly what it means for a programming language to be “derived from” a human language. Next, we analyse cases in which translating a program from one human language to another does not significantly change the program’s structure. Finally, we examine two game-changing cases: a programming language derived from Latin, in which syntax plays a limited role compared to morphology, and another derived from Classical Chinese, in which little linguistic recursion is available. These examples show that human languages, even ancient ones, are a reservoir for innovation in program writing. One can encourage programming language designers to dare learn foreign languages and not be ashamed of their own native language.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020054

Authors: Mariam Margaryan Aghavni Harutyunyan Silva Petrosyan Ashot Gevorgyan Hayarpi Sahakyan

This article examines contemporary forms of algorithmic governance through a biopolitical framework grounded in Michel Foucault’s analysis of security, risk, and governmentality. Rather than treating algorithmic systems as a rupture with earlier modes of power, the article argues that they intensify a security-based rationality already oriented toward probabilistic reasoning, anticipatory intervention, and the indirect regulation of conduct. Governance increasingly operates by organizing environments in advance, shaping the conditions under which action becomes possible rather than correcting behavior after the fact. Situating transhumanism within this framework, the article approaches enhancement-oriented projects not as speculative or external developments, but as an extension of biopolitical governance from the regulation of life toward its optimization and redesign. Human capacities become objects of assessment and intervention, shifting the biopolitical subject from a bearer of risk to an upgrade-eligible profile oriented toward projected futures. To conceptualize the form of subjectivity produced at the intersection of algorithmic prediction and transhumanist optimization, the article introduces the heuristic figure of Homo virtualis. This figure describes a form of subjectivity in which individuals are approached through predictive profiles rather than stable identities, and responsibility shifts toward managing expected outcomes rather than accounting for past actions. By examining these shifts, the article contributes to debates on algorithmic governance by clarifying how biopolitics, prediction, and subjectivity are reconfigured as futures become increasingly organized in advance. This article adopts a descriptive and analytical approach rather than a normative one.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020053

Authors: Patrick Seniuk

Depression is notable for high rates of disability. The medical model typically characterizes depression as a physiological dysfunction or psychological disorder. However, both views fail to appreciate the phenomenology of depressed experience. Drawing on the existential phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, this article contends that the lived experience of chronic depression is marked by a disturbance between the body-subject and the world. More specifically, the experience of depression is characterized by alienation from the world, self and others. While anti-depressants have long been the first line of treatment of depression, many governments subsidize cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) as an adjunct treatment. CBT is said to be the gold standard psychotherapeutic treatment given that it is evidence-based, cost-effective, and short in duration. However, not only are these justifications questionable, but the theoretical underpinnings of CBT have ideological significance. Rather than approaching depressed persons as body-subjects, CBT casts service users as neo-liberal subjects, insofar as depression is characterized as disordered thinking that is independent of a person’s situated life. The emphasis on quickly returning people to work to reduce strain on welfare systems, while a valid economic concern, is not a valid therapeutic concern. The limited choice of subsidized psychotherapeutic options fails to recognize that depression is a heterogenous phenomenon, meaning that the CBT model of disordered thinking is not necessarily representative of the way in which depression manifests.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020052

Authors: Tarik Mokadi Osama Tawfiq Jarrar Ayman Yousef

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a significant paradigm of methodology and epistemology in the social sciences. Machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and generative models enable researchers to work with big, multimodal datasets, identify complex patterns, and recreate events in the social world in ways that previously were not feasible. At the same time, these innovations also lead to ethical challenges related to algorithmic bias, black boxes, data extractivism, and reinforced structural inequalities in welfare, government services, education, and criminal justice. The article critically questions the social sciences in the light of AI on three dimensions that are inextricably linked, namely: (1) the opportunities that AI provides to social-scientific inquiry; (2) the biases and constraints generated through data, models, and institutional application; and (3) ethical pathways that are necessary for the responsible governance of AI-facilitated research and decision support. The article is based on a scoping, critical thematic review of the recent literature, and its conceptualization of AI as a socio-technical infrastructure is that it produces knowledge and, at the same time, offers power. It explains the impact AI practices have on restructuring disciplines like sociology, psychology, political science, and policy analysis, and how it blindly predicts how data practices, design choices, and governance arrangements can either preserve or destroy existing hierarchies. The paper suggests an analytical framework synthesizing AI practices, social research practices, and governance structures in ethical frameworks. It argues that the emancipatory promise of AI in the social sciences is dependent on the attainment of something beyond principle-based claims of so-called ethical AI by operational governance mechanisms that make systems visible, debatable, and responsible in their respective situations.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020051

Authors: Se Hoon Son

Fairness and minority exclusion have emerged as the central concerns of contemporary Artificial Intelligence (AI) ethics. However, standard auditing and documentation practices often fail to capture harms affecting edge cases and marginalized groups. This article argues that this failure is structural: the act of “discretization”—converting continuous reality into discrete governance categories—inevitably produces a “residual.” Drawing on German Idealism (Kant, Fichte, Schelling) and continental philosophy (Dilthey, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty), we reconceptualize residuals not as mere noise but as “surprising facts” that should trigger abductive hypothesis revision. We critique checklist-centered governance as a form of proceduralized auditing that can obscure these residuals. This article makes three key contributions: (i) a structural diagnosis of residual production using systems theory and topology; (ii) a philosophical reconstruction of abductive revision as a hermeneutic necessity; and (iii) an institutional design proposal—specifically, the Residual Ledger and Category Revision Protocols—to operationalize “Open Schema” governance.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020050

Authors: Florian Vermeiren

In his seminars, Deleuze claims that Spinoza is ‘an absolute geometrist’. This article contextualizes, explains and substantiates this aspect of Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza. I position Deleuze’s reading within both the long-running scholarly debate on Spinoza’s relationship to mathematics and within the evolution of Deleuze’s own relation to Spinoza. Deleuze’s idea that Spinoza is a geometrist is shown to consist of three elements. First, according to Spinoza, geometry is more fundamental than arithmetic. Second, Spinoza frees geometry from the realm of fiction and abstract and develops, as Deleuze says, a ‘mathematics of the real’. Third, Spinoza finds in geometry a language of univocity, by which he can avoid the equivocity and hierarchy of the Aristotelian worldview.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020049

Authors: Jonah Y. C. Hsu

This paper develops Tone as Ontology, a structural account of being grounded in the invariants of generative systems. We articulate the ontological significance of tone, distinguishing this foundational work from a companion paper that explores its methodological application and formalization. We redefine “tone” as the structural profile of constraints that allows entities to maintain coherence under transformation. The tonal ontology formalizes three invariants—Resonance, Responsibility, and Closure—as conditions of persistence that bridge operational and metaphysical ontology. Concretely, we specify Resonance (relational continuity via recursive feedback), Responsibility (traceable accountability that conserves integrity across transformations), and Closure (recursive self-consistency enabling bounded openness). In contrast to informational or substance-based views, tonal being is understood as the conservation of structure through change. The resulting framework unites physical coherence, informational integrity, and ontological continuity into a generative ontology of integrity, suggesting that to exist is to maintain one’s tone. This paper addresses fundamental questions in meta-ontology, demonstrates how tone generates classical ontological frameworks, and advances a conceptual reorientation for understanding existence as resonant persistence. It outlines testable implications across philosophy of mind, AI ethics, and social/environmental theory. Overall, tonal ontology is presented as a post-informational, structurally grounded account of being.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020048

Authors: Yan Li Xinyue Yao

This article focuses on the origin of “Wenqi Theory”—a core domain of ancient Chinese literary theory—specifically Cao Pi’s proposition that “literature is governed by qi”. It situates this concept within the 21st-century context of cultural globalization to engage in dialogue with Western aesthetics, aiming to revitalize the theory through mutual learning between Chinese and Western civilizations and integrate it into the system of modern transformation for classical literary theory. From the perspective of contemporary theoretical reconstruction, the paper analyzes the modern discourse paradigm of “Wenqi Theory”, traces its philosophical roots, and points out that the “clearness” or “murkiness” of “Wenqi” directly influences the aesthetic value of writing and the evaluation of objects. The study reveals that “Wenqi Theory” possesses rich connotations and unifies multiple dialectical relationships such as author and text, macrocosm and microcosm, personal temperament and acquired cultivation, content and form, fully embodying the distinctive integration of Chinese cultural tradition. Furthermore, the paper studies the lineage of life aesthetics from “Qi-Theory” in philosophy and science to “Wenqi Theory” in literary criticism, and its importance in constructing modern discourse paradigms. Meanwhile, by utilizing the categories of “the sublime” and “the beautiful” in Western aesthetics, it reactivates the contemporary aesthetic implications of “Wenqi Theory” within the context of globalization and cross-cultural exchange. The article endeavours to place this seemingly esoteric concept of classical Chinese literary theory within a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary philosophical horizon for systematic and theoretical interpretation, revealing its universal aesthetic value that transcends specific cultural backgrounds, thereby providing a possible paradigm for the modernization of traditional Chinese literary theory and its participation in international academic dialogue.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020047

Authors: Giorgio Dieci

Recently, a shift from substance-based to process-based ontologies of living beings and biological entities has been widely advocated, largely on the grounds that traditional substance thinking, by encouraging biological reductionism, fails to adequately capture the nature of biological wholes. Process-based approaches are instead taken to provide a more appropriate metaphysical framework for the constitutive dynamicity of living systems. These arguments, however, have been criticized for relying on overly reductive characterizations of substances, which both classical and contemporary accounts describe as inherently involving change and activity. In this essay, I address the substance-versus-process debate from the perspective of contemporary cell biology. I argue that conceiving the cell as a substance is not only compatible with the centrality of processes, but that the cell continues to function as the fundamental reference point in biology precisely because it entails processuality as intrinsic to its dynamic mode of being. Within this framework, subcellular entities are identified by their functional subservience to the cellular whole. On this basis, I propose an empirically grounded criterion for distinguishing between purely processual and substance-like subcellular entities. Processual entities, such as the Golgi complex and the nucleolus, lack dedicated repair systems and tend to disassemble upon inhibition of specific metabolic activities. By contrast, substance-like entities, including cell-derived organelles such as the mitochondrion and the nucleus, depend for their persistence on specific repair systems, and their eventual dismantling under non-permissive conditions cannot be straightforwardly understood as the mere interruption of a process, but instead appears as the outcome of an active, regulated response.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020046

Authors: S. Montgomery Ewegen

This article explores the role that death plays in Heidegger’s ontology after Being and Time, focusing especially on volumes 97–104 of the Gesamtausgabe. Within these volumes, death occupies a pride of place within Heidegger’s being-historical (and post-being-historical) attempts to articulate beyng, coming to play a role as significant as, and not unrelated to, the Nothing. In order to give a full accounting of the role that death plays within these texts, a number of other structurally significant terms within Heidegger’s Seinsdenken—such as Gebirg, Enteignis, Brauch, and Sage—will be examined. It is ultimately argued that these volumes, by exposing the human to the heretofore un-thought truth of beyng (as radical concealment), carry out the transition from “human” to “mortal” so essential to Heidegger’s later thinking.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020045

Authors: Hong Joo Ryoo

Recent arguments in favor of Presentism leverage Markovianity, the principle of the future’s events being able to be determined/influenced only by current events (and sufficiently near events). These approaches, however, leave the room open for objections centered around recent speculative non-Markovian foundations of our physical theories. Using insights from Builes and Impagnatiello’s argument and drawing on recent quantum foundations, I explore how non-Markovian quantum dynamics may constrain metaphysical accounts of time. I compare rough versions of Eternalism and Presentism in their ability to accommodate temporally extended correlations and motivate further development with explicit treatment of non-Markovian physics in the metaphysics of time.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020044

Authors: João Miguel Alves Ferreira

The intricate relationships between humans and animals have long shaped philosophical, cultural and scientific inquiry. This narrative review examines evolving conceptions of animal consciousness, agency and sentience within broader historical, ethical and epistemological contexts. Drawing on philosophy, ethology, neuroscience, psychology and animal studies, it critically engages debates on anthropocentrism, cognitive ethology, moral considerability and relational ontology. By tracing the shift from mechanistic models of animality to embodied and affective accounts of consciousness, the analysis highlights how contemporary scholarship destabilises traditional forms of human exceptionalism. Building on this interdisciplinary synthesis, the article advances a symbiotic humanist orientation that integrates evolutionary continuity with multidimensional models of consciousness and differentiated normative responsibility. The argument culminates in the articulation of a Stratified Relational Responsibility Model (SRRM), which reconciles ontological continuity with asymmetrical accountability. Within this framework, shared evolutionary conditions ground moral considerability, while the emergence of reflexive and institutional normativity intensifies human ethical obligation. The model offers a non-anthropocentric yet normatively robust account of human–animal relations, situating human distinctiveness not in metaphysical superiority but in heightened responsibility within multispecies ecological systems.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020043

Authors: Maria Gallego-Ortiz

Iris Murdoch situates imagination at the core of moral life, challenging moral philosophy’s preference for abstract universal principles over the particularity of lived experience. This paper reconstructs Murdoch’s concept of imagination by tracing her engagement with Plato’s distinction between eikasia and the Demiurge’s ‘high’ imagination, as well as Kant’s notions of empirical and esthetic imagination. I argue that Murdoch’s imagination is best understood as a hermeneutical capacity essential to moral vision. She distinguishes between egoistic fantasy, which distorts reality, and free and creative imagination, which enables a just and loving gaze upon the world. Through imagination, we can replace obscuring images with truer ones, making moral progress an exercise in vision and attention. Murdoch’s account thus offers an alternative to moral theories that overlook the inner life as a site of ethical transformation.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020042

Authors: Jakub Mácha

This paper defends the thesis that LLM hallucinations are best explained as a truth representation problem: Current models lack an internal representation of propositions as truth-bearers, so truth and falsity cannot constrain generation in the way factual discourse requires. It begins by surveying leading explanations—computational limits on self-verification, deficiencies in training data as truth sources, and architectural factors—and argues that they converge on the same underlying representational deficit. Next, it reconstructs the philosophical background of current LLM design, showing how optimization for fluent continuation aligns with coherence-style evaluation and with broadly structuralist, relational semantics, before turning to David Chalmers’s recent attempt to secure propositional interpretability by drawing on Davidson/Lewis-style radical interpretation and by locating propositional content in “middle-layer” structures; it argues that this approach downplays the ubiquity of hallucination and inherits instability from post-training edits. Finally, the paper offers a positive proposal: Atomic propositions should be represented in the basic vector layer, reviving a logical atomist program as a principled route to reducing hallucination.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020041

Authors: Jeffrey Arle

Understanding how high-level meanings emerge from low-level microstate dynamics is a central challenge in both artificial intelligence and consciousness studies. Complex networks can exhibit rich behaviors, yet reliably mapping every microstate onto a semantic label to date seems intractable. To explore these limits, a minimal 4-bit model consisting of only a ring of binary cells updated by a parity-flip rule, coupled with a finite lookup table that assigns conceptual tags to selected microstates, is presented. Two core failure modes are noted. First, noise is found to push the system into out-of-training-set states that a semantic decoder cannot label (“missing-label” errors). Second, distinct microstates collapse into the same semantic tag (“many-to-one” grouping), obscuring their unique identities. These findings demonstrate inherent opacity in semantic mapping and suggest fundamental barriers to reverse-engineering high-level content in artificial or biological networks. Future work includes scaling N and examining partial-observability effects.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020040

Authors: Yugo Matsumoto

This paper proposes the Unified Observation Layer Theory (UOLT), a structural framework for understanding observation not as an act of cognition, measurement, or subjectivity, but as a layered condition through which the world becomes visible. Contemporary theories across physics, philosophy, and cognitive science often treat observation as a primary explanatory principle, implicitly assuming that what is observed constitutes the world itself. Such approaches repeatedly encounter paradoxes concerning objectivity, incompleteness, and the limits of visibility. UOLT argues that these paradoxes do not arise from epistemic failure or insufficient data, but from a structural confusion between distinct layers of observation. UOLT introduces a three-layer model consisting of an Invisible Layer, a Projection Layer, and a Visible Layer. The Invisible Layer refers to structural conditions that do not appear directly within a given observational configuration, yet are presupposed by the coherence of what becomes established within it. The Projection Layer specifies the conditions under which certain structural relations become stably manifest, including selection, emphasis, and exclusion. The Visible Layer corresponds to the domain in which objects, quantities, causality, language, and time are articulated as established. By separating these layers, UOLT explains why observation can never access the totality of the world, why visibility does not imply completeness, and why similar structural paradoxes emerge across otherwise distinct domains. Importantly, UOLT does not compete with or replace existing physical or philosophical theories. Instead, it repositions them as descriptions operating within the Visible Layer, without reducing the Invisible Layer to hidden variables or metaphysical entities. Unified Observation Layer Theory offers a non-temporal, non-reductive account of observation that clarifies the structural conditions under which reality appears coherent despite being only partially visible. In doing so, it provides a framework for reconsidering objectivity, visibility, and world formation without privileging observation as an ultimate ground. This paper does not aim to propose a unified theory, but to clarify the structural conditions under which observation becomes possible.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020039

Authors: Mesfer Alhayyani

This paper argues that al-Ghazali’s (1058–1111) distinction between taqlid (uncritical acceptance of authority) and ijtihad (independent reasoning) can offer a normative response to the contemporary challenge of fake news, thereby connecting a medieval epistemic framework to a pressing twenty-first-century problem. This study treats fake news as both an epistemic and an ethical challenge. Epistemically, fake news undermines the aim of belief, which is the aspiration toward truth, by introducing and sustaining falsehoods within the testimonial networks on which individuals depend for knowledge. Ethically, it constitutes a form of deception that manipulates audiences, corrodes intellectual virtues such as honesty, and disintegrates the trust between individuals and public institutions that is essential for collective life. Methodologically, this paper adopts an analytical–critical approach. It examines recent philosophical literature on the epistemology of misinformation, reconstructs al-Ghazali’s taqlid–ijtihad framework from his original texts, and then adapts it to the conditions of digital information environments. The resulting model distinguishes between digital ijtihad, the responsible and competent verification of online information, and justified digital taqlid, the legitimate reliance on credible digital authorities when independent verification is impractical. The findings suggest that this adapted framework not only enriches contemporary epistemic theory but also offers practical normative guidance for cultivating responsible belief formation, including in educational contexts where teaching itself functions as a structured form of testimonial exchange.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020038

Authors: Tina Röck

In this contribution, I explore the idea that reality is best understood as fundamentally dynamic and interdependent, i.e., processual, bringing together resources from process thought, phenomenology and the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism. I furthermore explore how this view shapes the ways we speak about, investigate, and understand the natural world. What is novel in my approach is that I bring a phenomenological reading of process in dialogue with Buddhist thought. My paper unfolds in two stages: first, I map key points of convergence between phenomenologically clarified process philosophy and Madhyamaka; second, I consider the broader epistemological and practical consequences of viewing reality as impermanent and dependently arising by looking at Whitehead’s and Nāgārjuna’s views in dialogue. Engaging with Buddhist philosophy alongside phenomenological process thought enables a deeper investigation into the ethical, and lived dimensions of metaphysical inquiry, which are dimensions often sidelined both in Western metaphysics and in some versions of phenomenology, because metaphysical and phenomenological analysis can remain stuck on the conceptual level, detached from both lived experience and practice. By contrast, Buddhist traditions explicitly link philosophical reflection with lived experience and embodied practice throughout. For this reason, sustained dialogue with Buddhist views and practices can expand Western methodology as such and can enrich process-based phenomenological approaches in particular by showing ways to reconnect speculative metaphysics, observation, and the concrete in practical ways.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020037

Authors: Elias Rubenstein

Intelligence metrics based on benchmark performance or population norms are useful for measuring comparative ability within defined test environments, but they do not directly evaluate the structural coherence of an agent’s trajectory across time, domains, and perturbations. This article introduces Reflexive Signature Intelligence (RSI) as a bounded theoretical framework for addressing that different problem. RSI is developed within a causal-symmetric informational perspective in which intelligence is understood as the capacity of a system to maintain and restore alignment with a structurally constrained invariant without collapsing the open gradient of development. On this basis, the paper formulates the Principle of Bounded Subjectivity and the Prohibition of Finality as framework-level principles, arguing that intelligence should be assessed not as arrival at a completed end state but as the quality of an asymptotic trajectory. The framework is then operationalized on two coupled levels: a micro-level proposed as a future measurement program linked heuristically to resilience and prediction-error dynamics, and a macro-level expressed through five dimensions of structural integrity, including reflexive regulation, cross-domain integration, internal consistency, stabilization, and signature-setting. The article concludes by outlining implications for AI evaluation and alignment, with particular relevance for distinguishing full agents, partial systems, and human–AI composite configurations.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020036

Authors: Max Lowdin

Spinoza’s theory of language seems to risk the paradox that no expression of true ideas is possible in linguistic terms. One particular term in the Ethics has stood out as addressing its potential contradictions: quatenus, ‘insofar as’ or ‘to the extent that,’ occurring hundreds of times in the text but still an element of mystery. This article offers an interpretation of this notion inspired by Deleuze’s reading and especially the theme in his seminars, that Spinoza’s project is a ‘general semiology.’ This suggests another way to affirm the coherence of the Ethics, by making a virtuous circle of its ontological and practical registers. Key to this is the notion of ‘sense’ in its genetic role and the overlooked distinction between infinite attributes and the two powers. The senses of words, propositions or demonstrations in the Ethics are not independent of a ‘noncausal correspondence’ between powers of thinking and acting from which they arise, and which quatenus consistently marks.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020035

Authors: Aqib Javaid Parry Mudasir Ahmad Mir Shamsudheen Mannekuzhiyan

This paper examines the Andalusian philosophical tale Hayy Ibn Yaqzān, written by the 12th-century philosopher Ibn Tufail, through the lens of Erik Erikson’s theory of the eight stages of human psychosocial development. In his book The Childhood and Society (1950), Erik Erikson offers eight key insights into how humans progress through different stages of development across their lifespan. The paper argues that Ibn Tufail’s allegory of the titular character, Hayy, is fundamentally a philosophical romance that examines various phases of Hayy’s philosophical development while also reflecting his complex psychosocial evolution. The paper highlights that Hayy’s early nurturance by a doe and his life among animals and plants correspond to Erikson’s stages of trust, autonomy, and initiative. His later intellectual and ethical development aligns with the psychosocial stages of generativity and integrity—though there are notable differences from Erikson’s model at some crucial stages. The Eriksonian model is applied heuristically, not exhaustively, as the overarching aim is to shed light on the classical Islamic philosophical tale by applying a modern theoretical framework to demonstrate how it prefigures contemporary discussions of the human condition, identity, and spiritual integrity. It contributes to ongoing interdisciplinary discussions on Islamic philosophy and developmental psychology by showing how Hayy Ibn Yaqzān can be read as a narrative of psychosocial growth.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020034

Authors: Mosa Motea Pius Oba

Blockchain is frequently presented as a decentralised infrastructure capable of enhancing efficiency and trust by replacing or bypassing legacy institutions. Such accounts, however, often treat blockchain as a neutral technical system and overlook the ethical and political consequences of institutional transformation through code. This perspective article applies Andrew Feenberg’s Critical Theory of Technology to examine blockchain as a normative socio-technical system shaping institutional transformation, governance practices, and moral expectations. Using a conceptual, critical-theoretical methodology supported by illustrative cases from decentralised finance, blockchain-based land registries, and decentralised autonomous organisations, the paper illustrates how blockchain design and governance embed values that may reinforce exclusion, obscure accountability, and constrain democratic contestation. In response, the article proposes a set of normative principles intended to guide ethical reflection on blockchain-based institutional change: participatory co-design; reflexivity and reversibility; moral pluralism through modular governance; and embedded ethical impact assessment. These principles are advanced as evaluative criteria for ethically responsible blockchain-based institutional transformation. By extending Feenberg’s framework into the domain of blockchain ethics, the paper shifts ethical debate beyond privacy and compliance toward questions of institutional legitimacy, democratic rationalisation, and context-sensitive innovation.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020033

Authors: Sybrand Veeger

The distinction between signs and expressions is essential to unlock Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza. However, during a lecture delivered on 13 January 1981, Deleuze makes a passing remark that complicates this distinction. For Spinoza, Christ’s religion, like political society, is a systems of signs pertaining to the collective imagination that nevertheless is meant to facilitate the transition towards the domain of expressions, that is, to the domain of reason and philosophy. The aim of this paper is to shed light on this ambiguity between signs and expressions in Deleuze’s work on Spinoza. First, I discuss the scattered passages in Spinoza’s oeuvre dealing with the figure of Christ. I then go on to reconstruct Deleuze’s Spinozistic taxonomy of signs. Third, I reconstruct Deleuze’s comparison between Spinoza and Hobbes regarding the emergence of political society from the state of nature. I then propose a close reading of chapter 7 of the Theological-Political Treatise to argue that Christ’s religion, according to Spinoza, should be seen as fulfilling the function of political society in times of crisis. I end with an extensive analysis of Spinoza’s formula “the Spirit of Christ, that is, the idea of God” in light of Deleuze’s reading of the first half of Ethics V. To conclude, I suggest we look at Christ as the conceptual persona of Spinozism.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020032

Authors: Maximilian Zachrau

Process metaphysics seeks to provide a novel foundation for metaphysical explanations of entities in both scientific inquiry and everyday experience. It aims to better explain ongoing phenomena—moving, raining, and the like—by analysing them as fundamental processes (FP), that is, dynamic entities not further reducible. Crucially, I argue, this analysis and the ultimate value of process metaphysical explanation hinge on an understanding of what dynamicity is; without one, the central thesis concerning fundamental processes remains vacuous. The paper examines metametaphysically what an account of dynamicity should provide, defending three desiderata: (1) difference-making: it must draw an informative, not merely stipulative, distinction between dynamic and static entities; (2) explanatory power: it must provide the conceptual resources to yield explanatory claims about dynamic entities and apply broadly. On the basis of these desiderata, I argue that prominent accounts of dynamicity, that is the mereological and modal account, prove unsatisfactory or miss their mark. The paper concludes by developing and defending an account of dynamicity as temporal forward-directedness, thereby linking process metaphysics to realist theories of time.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020031

Authors: Aldo Stella Piergiorgio Sensi

This theoretical–speculative text is structured to emphasize both the novel interpretation of the concept of relation and the value of unity, understood not as unification (i.e., as synthesis), but as a compact unity: the unity that belongs solely to the absolute. The extrinsic relation (äusserliche Beziehung) is a mono-dyadic construct, indicating the conjunction of two extreme terms and a middle term that connects them. The immanent synthesis (immanente Synthesis), according to Hegelian intentions, serves as the sublation of the extrinsic relation, since it indissolubly binds the determinations. Only the immediate relation (unmittelbare Verhältniss) indicates that intrinsic bond, which structurally constitutes determinate identity and which must necessarily result in its sublation.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020030

Authors: Qing Sun Shangcheng Tang

With conditional probability as a primitive notion rather than a ratio of classical probability, we extend the language of epistemic logic by introducing conditional probability operators. We propose a conditional probabilistic epistemic logic (CPEL) based on the general frame, which enables the assignment of conditional probabilities to any formula in the language defined in this paper. Furthermore, we discuss the relationship between knowledge and conditional probability in CPEL, as well as the connection between indicative conditionals and conditional probability. Finally, we present a sound and weakly complete axiomatization for our framework and demonstrate its application in analyzing the lottery paradox.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020029

Authors: Waleed Mouhali

We argue that turbulent irreversibility is best explained as an asymptotic feature of a singular inviscid limit—a reclassification of admissible entities and balances at ν→0—rather than as a mere residual effect of molecular viscosity. Tracing a conceptual line from Euler and Kármán–Howarth to Onsager, Duchon–Robert, Kato/Prandtl, and modern convex integration results, we show that the limit theory reclassifies the admissible entities: from smooth Euler fields (energy conserving) to rough weak solutions equipped with a positive defect measure in the energy balance. The constant inter-scale process (energy flux) observed at high-Reynolds number therefore persists at ν=0 as a structural feature of the limit ontology. We articulate three selection principles—the local energy inequality, the exact third-order law, and scale-locality—as ontological constraints that reconcile mathematical non-uniqueness with physical uniqueness. A brief conceptual history clarifies how the arrow of time in turbulence emerged through successive shifts of entities and invariants, and a comparison with other singular limit explanations (Boltzmannian irreversibility, shocks, renormalization) situates the account within general foundations of physics. Methodologically, we recast LES/closures as asymptotic mediators validated by flux plateaus and viscosity-free diagnostics, not microscopic subgrid fidelity.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020028

Authors: Efraín Villamor Herrero

Previous scholarship has explored the Buddhist perspective on war and peace in Early Buddhism, offering valuable insights into Buddhist attitudes toward war. However, the specific ways in which warriors were persuaded through arguments to convert to Buddhism, and the prevalence of warfare-related allusions in Buddhist teachings, are still a topic underexplored that has not received sufficient attention in previous scholarship. This study examines the significance of references to the war context in the Pāli Canon. Comparing it with Brahmanical prose and Jain scriptures and contrasting the transmission of Buddhist thought into the Chinese language, this study demonstrates the narratives on the spiritual contest and the Buddhist warriors’ proclamation of Brahminical terms and ideals for royal patronage. This article discusses the significance of the relationship between the war context in the Nikāyas and the historical implications of incorporating the ideals and archetypes of Aryan warriors into Buddhist teachings.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020027

Authors: Francisco Jose Gonzalez

For Martin Heidegger’s quest to understand the meaning of being, Aristotle’s repeated claim that being “is spoken of in many ways” was both an inspiration and a provocation. Yet the places where Heidegger directly confronts and seeks to understand Aristotle’s claim are surprisingly few, with the most extensive and open-ended reflection now to be found in the recently published volume 91 of the Gesamtausgabe. Heidegger here, unlike too many others and himself elsewhere, does full justice to the radicality of Aristotle’s claim that refers not only to the different senses of being according to the categories (‘substance’, ‘quality’, ‘quantity’, etc.), but also to non-categorial senses (‘truth’, ‘accidental being’, ‘dunamis and energeia’) and sub-senses and refuses to reduce this plurality within plurality of senses to a unity. The Aristotle highlighted here is not the systematic but rather the ‘broken’ one. In the notes, Heidegger furthermore considers the possibility that this indeterminacy and darkness at the heart of Aristotle’s ontology, rather than a limitation due to an understanding of being as presence from the perspective of logos, reflects the indeterminacy and darkness at the heart of being itself. Heidegger’s ‘broken’ and even contradictory reading of Aristotle in these notes thus becomes his own attempt to think through the meaning of being in its withdrawal.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020026

Authors: Edward L. Keenan

We characterize semantically quantified subjects, type (et,t), in English and show that the Boolean closure of the generalized existential and universal quantifiers is exactly the conservative ones. We prove that all subjects are expressible as Boolean functions of Montagovian individuals and that all mathematically extend to objects, type (eet,et). But quantified objects also include many functions that are not subject extensions, contrary to usual textbook assumptions. This is because two-place predicates (P2s) have more structure than one-place ones (P1s), so quantified objects have more to vary with/depend on. For example, we illustrate how lexical P2s in English can force their models to be infinite; P1s provably cannot.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020025

Authors: Ivano Caponigro

Richard Montague (1930–1971) is known as a founding figure of natural language semantics, i.e., the formal study of the semantics of natural languages by means of tools from mathematical logic. Less well known is that Montague maintained a strongly skeptical view on the possibility of a systematic logico-philosophical analysis of natural language for most of his short life, adhering to the then-common belief that natural languages are fundamentally different from the languages of logic. Completely unknown, until now, has been how Montague underwent a 180-degree turn in the last few years of his life, in the late 1960s, and pioneered a precise formal analysis of the syntax and semantics of fragments of English in three seminal papers that established the research framework, the methodology, and the formal tools for the new field of study. I provide a precise and documented answer to when, where, and how Montague’s intellectual turn occurred and how it relates to Montague’s previous research interests and work.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020024

Authors: Johnny Sakr

Missing Acknowledgements [...]

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11020023

Authors: Qirou Xiao Qiaoyun Zhang

A spatial awareness is a fundamental aspect of dance, reflecting deep philosophical ideas and aesthetic values across different cultures. While existing studies often focus on theatrical or biomechanical analyses, few explore how material cultural artifacts, such as pottery and porcelain figurines, reveal spatial differences in dance. This study addresses this gap by comparing Chinese pottery figurines from the Neolithic to Tang dynasties with Western Meissen porcelain dancers from the 18th century onward, applying a three-dimensional framework of “Movement Scheduling Space—kinetic space—expressive space.” Drawing on Confucian principles of “Harmony between Heaven and Humanity” and Christian notions of transcendence, the research examines how cultural traditions shape the spatial expression in dance. The findings show that Chinese dance emphasizes inward, upper-body movements extending from two-dimensional to one-dimensional space, reflecting a centripetal, earthly orientation. In contrast, Western dance expands from two-dimensional to three-dimensional space, emphasizing outward, lower-body movements symbolizing transcendental aspirations. Additionally, Chinese dance focuses on subtle hand gestures, while Western dance highlights expressive foot movements. By integrating artifact-based analysis with cultural and philosophical interpretation, this study offers a fresh approach to comparative dance philosophy, providing valuable insights for the reinterpretation of traditional aesthetics in modern choreography.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010022

Authors: Ilgin Aksoy Corry Shores

At the end of Deleuze’s lectures on Spinoza of 1980–1981, he asks his students to “imagine a Spinozist gambler.” Yet he ends the course offering few clues about how to picture this figure. Here we provide an interpretation of the Spinozist gambler based on both its Spinozist conceptual context and its place in Deleuze’s broader philosophy of gambling play. Accordingly, we examine Spinozist gambling in terms of Deleuze’s account of Spinoza’s three types of knowledge, and we compare the Spinozist gambler to Deleuze’s more prominent figure of the Nietzschean dice-thrower. We thereby offer a tripartite characterization of the Spinozist gambler following its place in Spinoza’s epistemology, which we further refine by examining Deleuze’s comments on indeterminism in Spinoza and Nietzsche. We argue that, according to Deleuze, the Spinozist gambler controls chance through rational organization, whereas the Nietzschean gambler affirms and embraces chance itself. And by means of this analysis, we advance our knowledge of both Deleuze’s Spinozism and his philosophy of play.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010021

Authors: Roland Breeur

In 1948 Sartre wrote an essay about the absolute space in Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures. This notion of absolute space is also used by Gilles Deleuze, inspired by the art critic and philosopher Henri Maldiney, in his approach of the notion of essence in Spinoza. In the first part of this article, I explain what this absolute space is about, and how it helps us to better understand Spinoza’s theory of the relation between essences and existence of modi in their relationship with—and dependency of—the substance. In a second part, I explain Sartre’s notion of absolute space in order to illustrate his inversion of the relation of essence and existence, and what this inversion means on a metaphysical level. I conclude with the suggestion that Sartre’s early philosophy and his notion of absolute consciousness and freedom can be interpreted as a kind of Spinozism, stripped of its essences.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010020

Authors: Pavel Straňák

Contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) achieves remarkable results in data processing, text generation, and the simulation of human cognition. However, it appears to lack key characteristics typically associated with living systems—consciousness, autonomous motivation, and genuine understanding of the world. This article critically examines the possible ontological divide between simulated intelligence and lived experience, using the metaphor of the motorcycle and the horse to illustrate how technological progress may obscure deeper principles of life and mind. Drawing on philosophical concepts such as abduction, tacit knowledge, phenomenal consciousness, and autopoiesis, the paper argues that current approaches to developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) may overlook organizational principles whose role in biological systems remains only partially understood. Methodologically, it employs a comparative ontological analysis grounded in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, systems theory, and theoretical biology, supported by contemporary literature on consciousness and biological autonomy. The article calls for a new paradigm that integrates these perspectives—one that asks not only “how to build smarter machines,” but also “what intelligence, life, and consciousness may fundamentally be,” acknowledging that their relation to computability remains an open question.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010019

Authors: Simona Trifu

This article explores Mihail Aslan’s volume of poetry Late Geometries, Rejected through the prism of an in-depth psychoanalytic reading. The text highlights how the poetic work constitutes an expression of deep psychic processes, centered around the concepts of early trauma, narcissistic deficit, and failure of the primordial environment. Through theories by authors such as Winnicott, Anzieu, Green, and Kristeva, the article reveals how Aslan’s creation functions as a transitional space, in which a complex dialectic takes place between Eros and Thanatos, between the constitution of the self and its waste. Writing thus becomes an act of psychic survival, a way to metabolize the traumatic experience and to reconstruct an inner geometry, albeit “late” and “rejected”.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010018

Authors: Boumediene Hamzi

This essay explores the metaphysical and philosophical implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) through the intersecting insights of René Guénon (ʿAbd al-Wāḥid Yaḥiā), Martin Heidegger, and Ibn al-ʿArabī. It argues that modern AI systems, particularly in their statistical and data-centric forms, are not merely instrumental tools but expressions of a deeper metaphysical worldview-one rooted in quantification, abstraction, and utility. Guénon’s critique of the “reign of quantity” and Heidegger’s notion of Enframing (Gestell) converge in diagnosing the loss of qualitative and sacred dimensions in modern life. While Heidegger’s phenomenology provides a powerful immanent critique of technological reductionism from within the Western philosophical tradition, Guénon’s metaphysical traditionalism articulates a diagnosis of modernity that resonates with Islamic metaphysics, especially as articulated by Ibn al-ʿArabī. The essay includes Heidegger in the argument as a representative of a critique of modern technology issuing from the Western tradition itself, and by emphasizing his shared concerns with Guénon, whose metaphysics resonates with Ibn al-ʿArabī’s metaphysics. Through a comparative metaphysical framework, this paper proposes an Islamic response to AI that avoids both technophilia and technophobia, insisting instead on a spiritually grounded ethic of technology that preserves human’s dignity and mission. Methodologically, the essay restores a prior order often inverted in contemporary AI ethics: ontology (what AI is) grounds epistemology (what it can know), and only then can ethical evaluation be coherent.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010017

Authors: Paul Keen

If modern readers sometimes find Adam Smith’s laissez-faire market vision in Wealth of Nations difficult to reconcile with his emphasis on sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which Smith published in 1759 while serving as Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, the fault may be ours. For many of Smith’s eighteenth-century contemporaries, the connections between the two books would have been obvious: they were distinct but converging aspects of an Enlightenment project to lay the ethical foundations of an urban middle-class discourse of polite sociability that reflected Britain’s status as a modern transactional society. This focus on the moral dimensions of eighteenth-century Britain’s experience of commercial modernity becomes especially clear when we read Smith in the philosophical context out of which his ideas emerged, including writers such as Joseph Addison, Francis Hutcheson, and David Hume. Closer attention to these earlier writers, especially Steele and Addison’s Spectator, offers a powerful reminder of the philosophical complexity of this project and a timely rejoinder to current efforts to sever economic policies from ethical imperatives in the name of an often brutal protectionism today.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010016

Authors: Francisco Javier Lopez Frias

In this article, I critique the dominance of internalism in sport philosophy and outline an alternative theoretical framework that integrates internal and external elements while striving to transcend the dichotomous language used to conceptualize sport. The analysis begins by claiming that internalism conflates three fundamental teleological aspects of sport: goals, point, and purposes. I argue that this conflation limits internalism’s ability to explain the complexity of sporting practices. By carefully distinguishing these elements, I illustrate their distinct roles in shaping sport and explore how they interact. I conclude by proposing that the alternative pluralist framework briefly sketched here enables a more comprehensive understanding of sport.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010015

Authors: Adil Guler

This article develops a structural–analogical framework to investigate conceptual resonances between Qur’an 24:35—the Verse of Light—and contemporary relational models in physics, while maintaining firm epistemic boundaries between theology, philosophy, and empirical science. The Qur’anic metaphors of niche, glass, tree, oil, and layered light depict a graded ontology of manifestation in which being unfolds through ordered relations grounded in a transcendent divine command (amr). By contrast, modern physics—as represented by quantum field theory, loop quantum gravity, and cosmological models—operates entirely within immanent causality, conceiving spacetime and matter as relational, dynamic, and structurally emergent. Despite their distinct registers, both discourses converge structurally around a shared grammar of potentiality, relation, and manifestation. Drawing on classical Islamic metaphysics—especially al-Ghazālī’s Mishkāt al-Anwār—alongside contemporary relational ontologies in physics (Smolin, Rovelli, Markopoulou), the article argues that “real time” functions as an ontological choice that conditions intelligibility, agency, and novelty. The Qur’anic notion of nūr is interpreted not as physical luminosity but as the metaphysical ground of determinability, while the quantum vacuum is treated as a field of latent potential—without suggesting empirical equivalence. Rather than concordism, the comparison highlights a structural resonance (used here as a heuristic notion indicating pattern-level affinity rather than equivalence, correspondence, or empirical verification): both traditions affirm that reality is neither static nor substance-based, but arises through dynamic relational processes grounded—whether transcendently or immanently—in principled order.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010014

Authors: Alexander George Kurtz

The persistence of ordered experience in a quantum-branching universe raises fundamental questions about how continuity is maintained across multiple possible outcomes. The Frame Survival Model (FSM) is a theoretical framework grounded in quantum decoherence, and is applicable to any system—biological or artificial—capable of sustaining integrated, survival-compatible states. FSM models reality as a sequence of discrete “Hyperframes”—complete matter–energy configurations defined by quantum decoherence events. At each transition, a system either proceeds along a survival-compatible path or terminates its trajectory within that branch. When applied to consciousness, FSM formalizes subjective continuity as “threading” through a network of compatible Hyperframes, yielding an observer-relative path through the multiverse. The same formalism extends to other coherent, path-dependent processes, making FSM relevant to physics, information science, and the life sciences. By providing operational definitions for survival filtering, informational coherence, and frame-to-frame stability, FSM unifies continuity across domains and re-contextualizes longstanding paradoxes—including subjective death, quantum immortality, and identity persistence—without invoking new physics. It further suggests experimentally approachable implications, such as modulation of perceived time by changes in decoherence rates, positioning FSM as both a general continuity principle and a testable framework for applied fields such as cognitive neuroscience.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010013

Authors: Charles Altieri

Poetry is not philosophy, nor was it meant to be, except on rare, glorious occasions. And only Wittgenstein seems willing to claim that philosophy should be written as poetry. Yet it is difficult to imagine poetry not wanting to impinge on the cultural roles played by at least some philosophy. And some philosophers, like Hegel and Heidegger, want to influence the course of poetic practice. So it seems useful to inquire into the various ways these two disciplines can overlap or complicate one another’s modes of inquiry, even if one has no hope of securing abstract definitions for either practice. Those with the appropriate philosophical background, for example, could articulate tensions within a culture’s intellectual life as a means of specifying how an author develops emotionally resonant concrete experiences grappling with this environment. One example might be examining how the need to address Humean skepticism helped shape the development of Romantic ways of making constructive imagination inseparable from attentive states of perceptive involvement in the world. Another example might focus on efforts by contemporary poetry to correlate the work performed by ordinary language philosophy with Heideggerean ideals of building and dwelling potentially applicable to the frameworks provided by philosophical grammar.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010012

Authors: Adilbek K. Bisenbaev

This article proposes a redefinition of scientific authorship under conditions of algorithmic mediation. We shift the discussion from the ontological dichotomy of “tool versus author” to an operationalizable epistemology of contribution. Building on the philosophical triad of instrumentality—intervention, representation, and hermeneutics—we argue that contemporary AI systems (notably large language models, LLMs) exceed the role of a merely “mute” accelerator of procedures. They now participate in the generation of explanatory structures, the reframing of research problems, and the semantic reconfiguration of the knowledge corpus. In response, we formulate the AI-AUTHorship framework, which remains compatible with an anthropocentric legal order while recognizing and measuring AI’s cognitive participation. We introduce TraceAuth, a protocol for tracing cognitive chains of reasoning, and AIEIS (AI epistemic impact score), a metric that stratifies contributions along the axes of procedural (P), semantic (S), and generative (G) participation. The threshold between “support” and “creation” is refined through a battery of operational tests (alteration of the problem space; causal/counterfactual load; independent reproducibility without AI; interpretability and traceability). We describe authorship as distributed epistemic authorship (DEA): a network of people, artifacts, algorithms, and institutions in which AI functions as a nonsubjective node whose contribution is nonetheless auditable. The framework closes the gap between the de facto involvement of AI and de jure norms by institutionalizing a regime of “recognized participation,” wherein transparency, interpretability, and reproducibility of cognitive trajectories become conditions for acknowledging contribution, whereas human responsibility remains nonnegotiable.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010011

Authors: Joseph Rivera

Love’s Movement, Love’s Gift [...]

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010010

Authors: Rossella Lupacchini

One of Wittgenstein’s most quoted passages from his Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology concerns Turing’s “machines” and says verbatim: “These machines are humans who calculate. And one might express what he [Turing] says also in the form of games.” This passage not only captures the kernel of Turing’s conceptual argument for the adequacy of his definition of “computability”, as presented in his article On Computable Numbers (1936), but also helps clarify Turing’s idea of “mechanical intelligence.” Indeed, the notion of game provides an ideal means to focus on similarities and differences between Turing and Wittgenstein’s views of mechanical procedures, mathematical understanding, and thinking activity. The live encounter between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alan Turing took place in Cambridge in 1939, when Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics were regularly attended by Turing. Interestingly, during the conversations between the two, Turing seems to play the role of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, to allow the present Wittgenstein to reassess what he deplores as mistaken or misleading in his early work. As for Turing himself, his reflection on thinking machines from the late 1940s demonstrates the significance of his dialogue with Wittgenstein.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010009

Authors: Mark Rathbone

Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776) offer a distinctive perspective on moral development that avoids succumbing to the limitations of capitalism and utilitarianism by supporting both moral agency and the importance of enabling structures and systems in commerce. Corruption of moral sentiments cannot be averted by enforcing only mechanical structures and systems of compliance with governance rules, regulations, and disciplinary processes to control employees. Compliance then follows a means-to-an-end logic for maximising profit, which becomes a barrier for autonomous moral development or is even incapable of moral decision-making, as suggested by Hannah Arendt. Smith’s originality lies in grounding this analysis with an affirmative view of human nature and liberty, which enables him to move beyond purely legalistic or moralistic approaches to understand and counter moral failure. Smith offers a distinctive perspective on moral development in commerce, integrating human cognition, moral philosophy, and enabling structural and systemic design that avoids the displacement of responsibility noted by Albert Bandura. For Smith, the corruption of moral sentiments is distorted by the natural need for praise from others at all costs, as opposed to praiseworthy conduct. His remedy is a two-fold process of moral education in which the impartial spectator extends the natural desire for praise to prioritise honour and integrity in behaviour that is praiseworthy. However, moral education also requires a structural social space that is not prescriptive or legalistic to enhance the freedom to develop morally by exercising the choice to strive towards ethical behaviour. In this manner, self-interest enables moral development through natural means that prioritise honourable conduct and perpetuates sympathetic sentiment in which the well-being of others is considered.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010008

Authors: Adil Guler

This article reconceptualizes entropy not as a metaphysical substance but as a structural constraint that shapes the formation, energetic cost, and durability of records. It links the coarse-grained—and typically irreversible—flow of time to questions of moral responsibility and divine justice. Drawing on the second law of thermodynamics, information theory, and contemporary cosmology, it advances an analogical and operational framework in which actions are accountable in an analogical sense insofar as they leave energetically costly traces that resist erasure. Within a Qur’ānic metaphysical horizon, concepts such as kitāb (Book), ṣaḥīfa (Record), and tawba (Repentance) function as structural counterparts to informational inscription and revision, without reducing theological meaning to physical process. In contrast to Kantian ethics, which grounds moral law in rational autonomy, the Qurʾān situates responsibility within the irreversible structure of time. Understood in this way, entropy is not a threat to coherence but a condition for accountability. By placing the Qurʾānic vision in dialog with modern science and theology, the article contributes to broader discussions on justice, agency, and the metaphysics of time within the science–religion discourse.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010007

Authors: Federico Divino

This paper aims to provide an in-depth and detailed overview of the relationship between language and cognition in Pāli Buddhist texts. These reflections will touch on several fundamental themes, such as the role of signs in structuring cognitive processes and semiosis as a force linked to the proliferation of concepts and percepts, whose organization underlies the constitution of a shared and partly subjective “world”. The paper will engage with linguistics, semiotics, and biosemiotics in order to acquire a vocabulary capable of better understanding the Buddhist reflections on these issues, and, where possible, it will also offer a genealogical inquiry that explains why the theme of language takes on the pivotal role it holds in Pāli Buddhism.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010006

Authors: Graziosa Luppi

This review provides a systematic critique of the debate between two paradigms in the philosophy of mind—the Naturalist–Externalist Research Program (NERP) and the Phenomenal Intentionality Research Program (PIRP)—with particular focus on Uriah Kriegel’s reconciliation project. Following Kriegel’s view, attention is given to rational agents’ awareness of their mental states—a key issue since most current artificial intelligence systems aim to model rational thinking and action. Naturalist accounts derive mental content from brain activity and environmental interaction, emphasizing a constitutive dependence of the former on the latter. In contrast, phenomenological theories assert that the object of mental states is an internal semblance presented to the subject. Within this framework, I maintain that Kriegel attempts to naturalize mental content within the framework of a Same Order theory, but this limits his ability to demonstrate that intentionality is grounded in consciousness in the sense of the Phenomenal Intentionality Research Program. Compounding this issue, the idea that the mind arises from manipulating representations has been challenged by dynamical approaches to cognitive science, yet advanced representational models persist, often simulating phenomenological qualities through forms of internal data organization. Methodologically, the approach is primarily comparative and reconstructive, focusing on the structural tensions and theoretical commitments that distinguish NERP and PIRP.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010005

Authors: Marcel Dubovec

This paper reinterprets Plato’s anecdote of Thales’ fall into the well in the Theaetetus. In contrast to readings that view this episode as a merely comic critique of the impractical intellectual, this study situates it within the broader context of Plato’s philosophical reorientation of wonder from cosmology to ontology. Drawing on Hans Blumenberg’s intellectual–historical approach and contrasting it with Aristotle’s epistemological conception of thaumazein in the Metaphysics, this paper combines conceptual analysis with close textual readings of the Theaetetus, Symposium, and Phaedrus under a unitarian assumption of continuity. This comparative inquiry reveals that Plato transforms wonder from a state of aporia or perplexity into an ecstatic participation in the realm of Forms, thereby redefining the philosophical act itself. This study argues that Plato “lets Thales fall” precisely to withdraw wonder from cosmological observation, embodied in the figure of Thales, and to reclaim it as the ontological foundation of philosophical contemplation.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010004

Authors: Ziya Kıvanç Kıraç Fırat Kargıoğlu Oğuzhan Göktolga

In this article, the philosophical (critical) continuity between ancient Greek skepticism (Pyrrhonism) and postmodern political theory is pointed out. This continuity (philosophical reincarnation) is demonstrated by referring to Sextus Empiricus’ writings on Pyrrhonism, as well as two different approaches that are considered to reflect postmodern political theory in its most salient features, such as anti-fundamentalism: Chantal Mouffe’s “project of radical democracy” and the “art of doubt” in Ulrich Beck’s “reflexive” modernity. The content of the identified continuity is basically the following: Just as the Pyrrhonian philosopher aspires to achieve serenity of spirit by suspending judgment through doubt (“epoche” and “ataraksia”) [epəkē –αταραξία], the postmodern theorist aims to end organized political violence by doubting all modern truth allegations. In other words, the individual hope of the Pyrrhonian philosopher is reproduced in the postmodern mind as a socio-political ideal. In Michel Foucault’s terms, the “regime of truth” or the “politics of truth” is an option that often leads to the “terror of truth”. The politics of doubt, on the other hand, is a peaceful, tolerant alternative. According to the postmodern theorist, skepticism is a highly strategic element of a pluralist (libertarian) democratic order. The intellectual way to make modern democracy even more democratic is, first and foremost, through a skepticism that makes absolutely no concessions to truth allegations. In this respect, the most uncompromising skeptic in the history of philosophy is the Pyrrhonian philosopher. Pyrrhonism is the summit of anti-dogmatism. This means that the postmodern theorist is not so much a postmodern agent. In other words, postmodern political theory is the theory of an innovation that is already obsolete.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010003

Authors: Lilian Suzanne Alweiss

This paper examines what Hannah Arendt means when she urges us to “love the world as it is” considering that we live in a world that is marred by injustice and violence. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part, demonstrates how Arendt’s concept of amor mundi is deeply influenced by her reading of St. Augustine. The second part, in turn addresses the challenge of loving the world as it is, given Arendt’s agreement with Augustine that we live in a desert. It argues that Arendt departs from Augustine on two fronts, first she rejects notions of original sin and forgiveness in favour of reconciliation, and second, she rejects the idea of divine grace claiming that our only hope for a new humanity lies in loving the world as it is.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010002

Authors: Suhail Ahmad

This article re-interprets V. S. Naipaul’s “Tell Me Who to Kill” from In a Free State (1971) through a Heideggerian lens, focusing on the ‘groundlessness’ of existence and the dialectics of ‘danger’ that structure the unnamed narrator’s life within colonial ‘modernity’. Using Hiedegger’s phenomenology as a rhetorical hermeneutic, it traces how ordinary existential structures—fear, anxiety, boredom, curiosity, idle talk, and ambiguity—surface in the narrator’s and other characters’ comportments and speech. In Heidegger’s sense, these moods do not simply describe psychological states but reveal the conditions of Dasein’s being-in-the-world and the ontological disclosures of a being unhomed by empire. By situating Heidegger’s concepts of Dasein, thrownness, and fallenness within Naipaul’s world of migration, labour, and racial precarity, the paper reveals how metaphysical homelessness becomes historically tangible. The narrator’s obsessive drive for success, his failed fraternal duty, and his descent into estrangement dramatize a colonial subjectivity torn between aspiration and abjection. In reframing Heidegger through the postcolonial experience, the article both deprovincializes European existentialism and reclaims phenomenology as a site for interrogating the psychic economies of empire. Ultimately, the novella becomes a poetics of nihilism—where the search for authenticity collapses under the weight of displacement.

Philosophies doi: 10.3390/philosophies11010001

Authors: Glyn Morrilll

In the context of formal grammar we sketch a review of the smooth integration of the logical semantics of Montague with the logical syntax of Lambek: Lambek-Montague grammar. This highlights a pristine compositional architecture of categorial grammar founded on methodology of computational logic. The main finding is that this approach lends itself to a further technical refinement of represention of grammar as Girard proof nets; we conclude by mentioning this prospect.