Randall E. Auxier

Joel Katzav's survey of the philosophy of Grace Andrus de Laguna's philosophy covers a broad range of ideas, and I have selected three for further development and commentary: (1) the relationship between naturalism and analytic philosophy, (2) the relationship between classical and radical empiricism, and (3) the historical question of where to situate a view such as de Laguna's in the history, the present, and the future of philosophy. I suggest that the view belongs with a group I call the ‘New Naturalists’, including Theodore de Laguna, Susanne Langer, Marjorie Grene, Michael Polanyi, and others who keep philosophy closer to developments in natural and social science than is typical for pragmatists, process philosophers, and analytic philosophers. This is a position somewhere between classical and radical empiricism, but which insists that reductionism is too limiting and unwise, even when restricted to being only a method.

Preview: This is a relatively brief reflection on where we are with our “culture” in the present, a time when Politics has done a great deal of damage to our communicative purposes and hopes. Our culture has become a “post-culture,” we believe, in a sense to be defined here. It is hard enough to say what one means by “culture,” so the challenge of describing what “post-culture” means will be greater. It should be attempted because there has been a deep-seated change, in recent decades, in how human beings interpret themselves. The rate of change has accelerated even in just the last ten years. We create culture for many lesser reasons, but the over-arching reasons for our efforts all relate to knowing who and what we are and why we exist at all – what is our purpose? Culture is our attempt to address both our hopes and doubts.

Czy coś naprawdę „odchodzi” całkowicie? Niniejszy artykuł jest poszukiwaniem „rzeczywistego usunięcia” i metafizyki, która musi temu towarzyszyć. Dlaczego to jest ważne? W badaniach nad sztuczną inteligencją naukowcy zaproponowali ruchomy punkt docelowy do momentu osiągnięcia sztucznej inteligencji. Zaczęło się od testu Turinga i ewoluowało przez dużą ilość argumentacji (np. Dreyfussa, dotyczącą tego, czego nie potrafią komputery, przez „osobliwość” Kurzweila oraz wiele innych kryteriów i tysiące dyskusji na temat tego, czym jest inteligencja i co oznaczałoby ją symulować lub, jak wolę, naśladować). Cała ta dyskusja wciąż polega na rozważaniu analogii do ludzkiej inteligencji, a nie na zbliżaniu się do samej rzeczy, ale dobre analogie muszą dotyczyć czegoś znacznie więcej niż funkcji analogicznej: muszą zbliżać się do prawdziwej nieodróżnialności. Moje wywody będą zatem dotyczyły głównie dziedziny metafizyki i ontologii, tak jak rozumiem słowo „rzeczywisty” w wyrażeniu „rzeczywiste usunięcie”. Nie sądzę, aby współcześni badacze właściwie rozumieli problem czasu i jego wpływ na kryterium lub. kryteria sztucznej inteligencji. Stąd j w tych ramach oferuję „rzeczywiste usunięcie” w znaczeniu, które należy właśnie opisać. Argument AI ma implikacje dla całej metafizyki, ponieważ odnosi się do fundamentalnego charakteru czasu.

This is a performative piece of writing in the presence of and inspired by Richard Shusterman'sPhilosophy and the Art of Writing. It tries to show that the relationship between the act of writing and the formation of our human consciousness (philosophical and, more deeply, poietic) is a developing and growing process through history, and before it. The dominance of an image consciousness was slowly challenged and then replaced by a linguistic consciousness with the advent of writing, and accelerated by the invention of printing and mass literacy. Shusterman teaches us an embodied kind of philosophizing that uses the word but isn't limited by it. This paper suggests that a return to image consciousness has already occurred and that the old book consciousness is disappearing. Lessons from the book consciousness are offered.

The question of the import and role of Christian allusions in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit has received much historical attention, and this continues into the present. Often juxtaposed in this interpretive issue are two questions: Does Hegel think that “the ontological project was first a Greek event from which Christianity would have developed an outer graft”? Or is it more accurate to say that, “for Hegel at least, no ontology is possible before the Gospel or outside it”? In the latter case, Hegel might well place the Greeks precisely where Dante had - in the First Circle of Hell. Those who would make Hegel first a philosopher in the Socratic line tend to emphasize his early work. Those who would make Hegel first a Christian tend to emphasize the later work. This question is too broad to find adequate discussion in the present essay.

Aleksandr Dugin is sometimes called “Putin’s brain,” and there can be no question that Putin’s global strategy for expanding Russian power has followed quite precisely a strategic plan created, published, and advocated by Dugin beginning in 1996. This aggressive plan of political destabilization, economic hostage-taking, and ultimately militaristic invasions has been defended with a philosophical patchwork called “the Fourth Political Theory.” Dugin claims his “National Bolshevism” can stand alongside communism, fascism, and liberalism as a genuine contender in ontology, the philosophy of history, and political philosophy; and that it is the only theory that stands in genuine opposition to neo-liberalism and corporate capitalism. I show that this view, built from a distortion of Heidegger’s idea of “human-being” as Dasein, is not a coherent philosophy or worldview. I contrast it with personalism, which has always opposed the very aspects of communism, fascism, and liberalism that Dugin opposes, and does so quite effectively and without militarism, expansionism, or the need to take the nation state as some final end of human political development.

The ideas of process philosophy in general, and Alfred North Whitehead in particular, will soon come into greater use and wider familiarity. This emergence of his ideas into wider use will be a great aid to education and to the reforming of our institutions and practices around the very different educational requirements of the sort of world that sits just beyond the horizon of our present vision. There will be discontinuities in the world to come, but there will also be continuities. Whitehead’s ideas about time and possibility, and their practical applications, place us in a position to do better than guess and conjecture about what is coming.