METAPHILOSOPHY最新文献

There is considerable disagreement and even confusion over what forms of border-crossing philosophizing are most appropriate to our times. Are comparative, cross-cultural, intercultural, blended, and fusion philosophy all the same thing? Some critics find what they call “comparative philosophy” to be moribund or problematically colonialist; others assert that projects like “fusion philosophy” are intellectually irresponsible and colonialist in their own way. Can we nonetheless identify a distinctive project of comparative philosophy and say why it is important? Based on a broad survey of approaches, this essay offers schematic answers to these questions, clarifies some persistent confusions, and stresses the constitutive gamble that lies at the heart of all comparative philosophy. There are several different ways to do comparative philosophy well; which method to employ depends on the values that motivate and the pragmatic situation that frames one's inquiry, and on the ways in which one or more communities receive and respond to one's contribution.

This essay aims to shed new light on the theoretical pertinence of classical Indian logic and epistemology in Benedetto Croce's criticism of Western Aristotelian and modern logic. As a matter of fact, Croce gave a positive and extraordinarily enterprising evaluation of “Indian Logic” in his review of Hermann Jacobi's Indische Logik (1905) and in his book Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept (1996 [1909]). Yet Croce's significant and considerable evaluation of “Indian Logic” has remained neglected until today. This essay tries to clear the field of some prejudices that misled scholarly research on Croce and Indian philosophy, and it glosses in detail the “neglected” judgment on “Indian Logic” in Croce's Logic. In doing so, it critically discusses some epistemological questions starting from Croce's philosophy, such as the character of “natural induction,” the relationship between language and thought, and the connection between historical languages and logical forms.

Naturalism, construed as the idea that philosophy should be continuous with science, is a highly influential view. Its consequences for epistemology, however, are rather odd. Many believe that naturalized epistemology allows eschewing traditional skeptical challenges. This is often seen as an advantage; but it also calls into question its claim of belonging to the philosophical inquiry into knowledge. This paper argues that skeptical challenges can be stated to defy epistemic optimism within naturalized epistemology, and that there are distinctively naturalistic forms of skepticism. To that end, it outlines some assumptions underlying many attempts to naturalize epistemology. It contrasts these approaches to traditional epistemology and identifies the reasons offered by naturalistic epistemologists to dismiss traditional skeptical challenges. Next, it argues that the problem of skepticism can be sensibly stated within a naturalistic setting. Finally, it contends that there are distinctively naturalistic strategies to argue for skepticism and diagnoses the prospects of naturalism vis-à-vis these kinds of skeptical challenges.

This paper describes the main features and goals of the speculative work in modern sciences that has greatly accelerated since World War II due to the exponential increase in computing power and newly available theoretical and conceptual tools. It points to the long historical strand of speculative philosophical work in symbiosis with the sciences, suggests the reasons for its unexpected neglect in contemporary professional philosophy of science, why it should be a major approach, and why such pursuit is not inevitable. Finally, the paper outlines potential topics, fields, and tools for such collaborative work and argues it is likelier to be more fruitful today than at any point in the past hundred years.

This essay unpacks several arguments about the metaphilosophic nature of African philosophy and charts a way through the problems these arguments encounter. It argues that we must be careful in our attempt to define African philosophy conceptually. Because to define it is to limit it—and to limit it is to conserve it and lead it to a cesspool. It also argues that finding a single meaning for African philosophy is not a rich endeavour, because, just like Western philosophy, African philosophy should not be a thing but be a vast array of things. The argument, one hopes, is taken as a normative rather than a merely prescriptive enterprise.

Does the biography of a philosopher have any relevance to assessing their philosophy? After considering and rejecting three distinct treatments of this question, a different answer is articulated here. Distinguishing between the content and approach of a philosophical text, this article argues that biography is relevant to assessing the approach of the text in three ways: in its socio-historical context, its philosophical context, and its personal context in the life of the philosopher. Such a strategy offers new ways of comparing very different texts and assessing them in terms of the aims of the philosopher writing them.

Some scholars claim that epistemology of science and machine learning are actually overlapping disciplines studying induction, respectively affected by Hume's problem of induction and its formal machine-learning counterpart, the “no-free-lunch” (NFL) theorems, to which even advanced AI systems such as LLMs are not immune. Extending Kevin Korb's view, this paper envisions a hierarchy of disciplines where the lowermost is a basic science, and, recursively, the metascience at each level inductively learns which methods work best at the immediately lower level. Due to Hume's dictum and NFL theorems, no exact metanorms for the good performance of each object science can be obtained after just a finite number of levels up the hierarchy, and the progressive abstractness of each metadiscipline and consequent ill-definability of its methods and objects makes science—as defined by a minimal standard of scientificity—cease to exist above a certain metalevel, allowing for a still rational style of inquiry into science that can be called “philosophical.” Philosophical levels, transitively reflecting on science, peculiarly manifest a non–empirically learned urge to self-reflection constituting the properly normative aspect of philosophy of science.

This paper begins by elucidating two common features in the application from spirit to the material world of objective idealism: first, all main representatives take the Absolute as the way to think about the inner negative foundation of spirit and, second, the Absolute has a self-negation processual structure, which exits itself and then returns to itself. The paper points out that the exit-return model can explain the objective world very well and meanwhile maintain the integrity of the spiritual ontology, in which the return to the Absolute is crucial. After the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, and two world wars, however, followed by the development of irrational thinking, positivism, and practical philosophy, the Absolute ceased to be the foundation of spiritual functioning. The return to the Absolute points to emptiness, and exit without return creates persistent schizophrenia, while subverting the ontological foundation of concepts and language, objects and humankind.

This paper uses lines of argument drawn from Amartya Sen's Idea of Justice to support the notion that NGO efforts, far from being oppressive, are helpful and progressive. It cites the work of Lairap-Fonderson and Chen, and alludes to specific projects. Contrast is made with Rawls, and the paper suggests that more formal theories of justice may not enable us to grapple with our intuitive sense that justice for the poverty stricken involves, at a minimum, both financial progress and forward movement with respect to internal growth. Examples of work done by NGOs in Bangladesh and other places help us to realize that women in these areas often have their own sense of what a more just situation would require—and NGOs and others can work from these conceptions as a point of departure. Part of the conclusion here is that Sen's concept of the just is a step in the right direction.