Tags / 67 quotes from 27 sources
#philosophy
3 More C's Of Ontology Engineering In The Enterprise
Decouple your internal ontology from what you publish
The fact that your internal architecture has been built upon a rich cohesive ontology that fits your requirements, and provides for robust and easy to maintain enterprise software need not determine (or compromise!) what you want to publish to any given consumer. Marking up…
Adesso basta (Simone Perotti)
L'effetto formica e la nuova povertà
Al giorno d’oggi, centrifugati dal lavoro, dai viaggi in metropolitana e dagli happy hour, gli abbienti lavoratori si ritrovano ogni giorno attorno a un tavolo pieno di gente senza nemmeno un argomento di conversazione. E ogni sera, finito di lavorare, la birra al pub sembra…
Cosmicism - Wikipedia
Cosmicism
Cosmicism and human centric views of the universe are incompatible. Cosmicism shares many characteristics with nihilism, though one important difference is that cosmicism tends to emphasize the insignificance of humanity and its doings, rather than summarily rejecting the…
Degenerate Epistemology
Scientific truth
Science, especially physics, has taught us to be very cautious about our naïve certainties (“that’s the way it is!”), everyday intuitions (“it must be that way!”), and commonsensical rejections (“that’s impossible!”). While reading this issue of Philosophy & Technology…
Exploring The Significance Of Digital Humanities For Philosophy | Digital Scholarship In The Humanities
Three possible reasons why DH hasn't thrived in philosophy yet
I think three more interesting possible explanations are that (1) philosophers are more methodologically skeptical than other humanities, (2) philosophers have long integrated computational methods in their work and so don’t need a revolution, and (3) the practice of philosophy…
From Encyclopedia To Ontology: Toward Dynamic Representation Of The Discipline Of Philosophy
Challenges in traditional metaphilosophical investigations; individual biases and limitations
Traditional methods for obtaining a description of the intellectual space of the discipline take the form of a less than a handful of philosophers testing each other's intuitions about ways to organize the content of the discipline. There are many reasons to be skeptical about…
Problem: “philosophy of x” vs. “x”
In numerous places in the expert-supplied taxonomies, we also noticed that cat- egory names sometimes included a “philosophy of” prefix and sometimes did not; examples include “artificial intelligence” vs. “philosophy of artificial intelligence,” “connectionism” vs. “philosophy…
Role of inpho in metaphilosophy: a 'descriptive', not a 'normative' adequacy
Let us call a metaphilosophical position descriptively adequate if it portrays the discipline as it is currently practiced in such a way as to support practical applications. Let us call a metaphilosophical position normatively adequate if it outlines the best way to arrive at…
Problem: how to differentiate categories from individuals? a sep-driven approximation..
Another important aspect of ontology design concerns the drawing of a line between categories and individuals. For instance, should connectionism be considered an instance of the category philosophy of articial intelligence, or should it be treated as a subcategory with…
Criticism: is the sep ontology a representation of meta-philosophy?
Some readers may be skeptical of our statistical approach, supposing that we are engaged in a very dubious metaphilosophical methodology: to be arguing that because two terms frequently co-occur in the SEP , they ought to be seen as mutually relevant. We want to make clear that…
Ideas for a visualization system; open challenges for digital philosophy
Such a system would facilitate interaction with the encyclopedia for expert and novice users alike. Experts could see the “big picture” of an idea or philosopher in a glance, capturing a large amount of information in an efficient manner, and novices could surf through the…
Humans and computers work better together
A key challenge facing philosophers in the digital age is to discover how best to use computers to support our understanding of the discipline. As should be clear by now , we do not expect our text processing tools to write a compelling philosophy paper any time soon. Rather…
Stating something clearly won't stifle criticism, but rather encourage it
After all, it isn't like philosophers to allow standards or accepted truths to stifle such progress; in fact, the history of philosophy shows that stating something precisely and making it widely available is instead an invitation to more intelligent critique. Given the…
Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits
Science should give us a chemistry of the moral, religious, aesthetic conceptions and feeling
Chemistry of the Notions and the Feelings.—Philosophical problems, in almost all their aspects, present themselves in the same interrogative formula now that they did two thousand years ago: how can a thing develop out of its antithesis? for example, the reasonable from the…
Science and philosophy
This constitutes the antagonism between the specialties of science and philosophy. The latter aims, as art aims, at imparting to life and conduct the utmost depth and significance: in the former mere knowledge is sought and nothing else—whatever else be incidentally obtained.
If there is no longer any ought morality, wouldn't death be preferable?
For Tranquility.—But will not our philosophy become thus a tragedy? Will not truth prove the enemy of life, of betterment? A question seems to weigh upon our tongue and yet will not put itself into words: whether one can knowingly remain in the domain of the untruthful? or, if…
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
Thinking as calculation, from Hobbes onwards
The idea that knowledge can be formalized is not new. For centuries the act of thinking has been seen as calculation based on logical reasoning. Newell and Simon’s physical symbol systems hypothesis has its roots in the work of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679).
Leibniz's Characteristica Universalis
Hobbes’s “parcels” were the basic units of thought, just as symbols are basic to Newell and Simon’s Physical Symbol Systems Hypothesis. Hobbes’s ideas were furthered by the mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) who tried to identify an appropriate…
The philosophical roots of AI
Many of the concepts central to Al have their roots in the work of philosophers such as Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, as we have seen, and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951):
Wittgenstein and Heidegger against formal meaning
Wittgenstein, in his later philosophy, and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) strongly reject the formalist assumption of meaning.
Lo Spirito del Giappone (Leonardo Vittorio Arena)
Esiste una filosofia giapponese?
Vanno superati alcuni stereotipi, i pregiudizi. Come affrontare la questione: esiste una filosofia in Giappone? Conosciamo la risposta che fino a poco fa ci sarebbe stata propinata: la filosofia nasce in Grecia, in Giappone non esiste. È la replica dell’imperialismo, così ben…
L'uno è uguale ai molti
L’uno è uguale ai molti, ed è diverso dai molti. Leibnitz non esprime altro nella Monadologia: ogni sostanza rappresenta tutte le altre e ne è rappresentata (§56).
Il pennello e la spada
Il samurai si presenta, al senso comune, come un guerriero. Così, però, se ne coglie soltanto una parte della rigorosa formazione. La cultura letteraria era il complemento dell’arte della guerra, benché non tutti i samurai potessero fregiarsene.1 L’espressione «il pennello e la…
Nishi Amane, pioniere dell'incontro con l'Occidente
Nishi Amane (1829-1897) è unanimamente riconosciuto come il pioniere dell’incontro tra la filosofia giapponese e la filosofia occidentale. Gli è dovuta la traduzione del termine «filosofia» (philosophia) con tetsugaku, impostosi nella cultura giapponese. Nishi, figlio di un…
Tetsugaku: tradurre la parola filosofia
Nishi si interessa soprattutto alla filosofia. La considera regina delle scienze, un’asserzione che parrebbe fichtiana, se non fosse per lo sfondo positivistico in cui si inscrive. Fu Nishi a imporre la sua traduzione giapponese del termine «filosofia» (philosophia). Non fu una…
Onishi Hajime, mediatore tra Oriente e Occidente
Hajime (1864-1900) è un altro pensatore dell’epoca Meiji. Nato nella prefettura di Okayama, frequentò una scuola cristiana e si laureò in filosofia a Tokyo. Dopo aver insegnato all’università Waseda di Tokyo, studiò filosofia in Germania per poi tornare in patria in risposta…
Medieval Semiotics (meier-oeser, Stephan)
A mistaken assumption
In view of this it should be clear that the widespread opinion according to which in medieval philosophy the sign was characterized by the “classical definition” or the “famous formula of aliquid stat pro aliquo” (something stands for something)[53] is mistaken. It is…
Augustine and the Stoics
In his incomplete early work, De Dialectica, Augustine massively draws on the terminology of the Stoic philosophy of language, though in many points fundamentally modifying its sense.[4] It is especially in the concept of sign where his difference from Stoic doctrines becomes…
Metodo Baconiano - Wikipedia
Bacon's idols of the mind
La pars destruens, ovvero la "parte che distrugge", consiste nell'eliminare le antiche conoscenze errate, le quali non sono altro che illusioni. Bacone definisce questi errori īdōla (i:.'do:.la), cioè idoli, e ne distingue quattro tipi: Gli Idola Tribus, sono i pregiudizi della…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Constructive philosophy starts with the human mind
The ideal place to begin that constructive philosophy is to start by examining the nature of the human mind.
In philosophy there is no escaping history
In philosophy there is no escaping history. Ideally, I sometimes think, I would just like to tell my students the truth about a question and send them home. But such a totally unhistorical approach tends to produce philosophical superficiality. We have to know how it came about…
The greatest single disaster in the history of philosophy
Descartes presents very little by way of an argument to show that we cannot directly perceive tables, chairs, mountains, etc. but can only perceive our ideas of these things. He makes the transition from perceiving real objects to perceiving only the contents of our own minds…
Philosophy is full of apparent contradictions
We ended the last chapter with an apparent contradiction of the sort that is typical in philosophy. On the one hand we accept a view that seems overwhelmingly convincing—the universe is material—but that seems inconsistent with another view that we cannot give up—minds exist…
Forget the history and state the facts
My method in philosophy is to try to forget about the history of a problem and the traditional ways of thinking about it and just try to state the facts as far as we know them.
Thinking about things that do not exist
To make matters even worse, it seems that I can sometimes think about objects that do not even exist. When I was a small child I believed that Santa Claus comes on Christmas Eve. Was my belief about Santa Claus? It certainly seems so, but how is that possible, since Santa Claus…
Nishida Kitarō (stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy)
Philosophy
...he defined philosophy as science [gakumon], i.e. unified conceptual knowledge, more specifically the first and universal science that “reflects on the basic concepts of the particular sciences in general and constructs of them one system of knowledge.” Yet “its object of…
Philosophical influence of nishida kitaro
Nishida Kitarō was the most significant and influential Japanese philosopher of the twentieth-century. His work is pathbreaking in several respects: it established in Japan the creative discipline of philosophy as practiced in Europe and the Americas; it enriched that…
Eastern and western philosophies
Nishida once suggested that we can distinguish traditional Eastern and Western philosophies by the East's prioritizing of nothingness and the West's reliance on being (NKZ VII, 429–30; Nishida 1970b, 237).
Nobel Prize Genius Crick Was High On Lsd When He Discovered The Secret Of Life
Philosophy of self sufficiency
They gave away thousands to pet causes such as the Glastonbury pop festival and Release. "They have a philosophy," Harker told me at the time. "They believe industrial society will collapse when the oil runs out and that the answer is to change people's mindsets using acid…
Of money and morals
Banks hiring moral philosophers
So what would the Scholastics make of modern finance? Would they admire how efficiently a family’s savings can find productive uses? Or would they decry how developing countries pay more to borrow than rich ones? Would they marvel at our banks’ international reach? Or would…
Ontology
Ontology between realism and nominalism
Ontology, in analytic philosophy, concerns the determining of whether some categories of being are fundamental and asks in what sense the items in those categories can be said to "be". It is the inquiry into being in so much as it is being, or into beings insofar as they…
Philosophy Engines: Technology And Reading/writing/thinking Philosophy
Epistemic practices in philosophy
In this paper, I wish to consider how some of these technologies are affecting the teaching and learning of philosophy, as integral aspects of what it is to do philosophy, that is, its epistemic practices. By this I mean the means for the achievement of key epistemic goals of…
Philosophy engines
The material processes for doing philosophy-speaking, gesturing, writing in alphabetic or ideogrammatic form, or in any symbol system-have a deep effect on more abstract philosophical practices involved in thinking, reasoning, and understanding, and explaining, and it is in…
Philosophy engines and epistemic practice
The examples of computational technologies which could be viewed as potential 'philosophy engines' that I have given are meant to show how the mundane processes for accessing, organising, arranging and analysing electronic processes, even if not directly taken up for doing…
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
Leadership as a right-brain art
Management, remember, is clearly different from leadership. Leadership is primarily a high-powered, right brain activity. It’s more of an art; it’s based on a philosophy. You have to ask the ultimate questions of life when you’re dealing with personal leadership issues.
The Book Of Dead Philosophers (critchley, Simon)
To philosophize is to learn how to die
It is in stark contrast to our drunken desire for evasion and escape that the ideal of the philosophical death has such sobering power. As Cicero writes, and this sentiment was axiomatic for most ancient philosophy and echoes down the ages, ‘To philosophize is to learn how to…
Philosophy is erotic, not just epistemic
Socrates only seems to embody a weak paradox. On the one hand, Socrates is declared the wisest man in Greece by the Oracle at Delphi. On the other hand, Socrates always insists that he knows nothing. How therefore can the wisest man in the world know nothing? This seeming…
Philosophy against the new sophistries
There has never been a more important time to emphasize this distinction between philosophy and sophistry. We are surrounded by countless new sophistries. Televangelists offer authoritative knowledge of the true word of God and perform miraculous cures in exchange for…
Tiedemann's history of philosophy starts with the Greeks
The idea that philosophy has a uniquely Greek source and that everything prior to the Greeks is simply not philosophy finds its most powerful modern expression in Dietrich Tiedemann’s six-volume Geist der spekulativen Philosophie (The Spirit of Speculative Philosophy, 1791–7)…
Against Hegel's westering as bestering
My approach is therefore deeply at odds with that of Hegel. I do not see the history of philosophy as the progressive logical unfolding of ‘Spirit’, which culminates in showing that it has its destiny in the Western philosophy of the present. This is ‘westering’ as ‘bestering’…
Dewey: philosophy as the general theory of education
Dewey sees education as the dynamic and continuous development of democratic life, what he called ‘reconstruction’, and rightly believed that society cannot transform itself without paying scrupulous attention to pedagogy. Dewey saw learning as more important than knowing and…
Husserl: the philosopher as civil servant of humanity
In 1935 and 1936, as the lights were going out all over Europe, the elderly Husserl travelled to Vienna and Prague to give the lectures that were developed into his final, unfinished book, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. For Husserl…
Gramsci's philosophy of praxis
Although in very poor health and initially forced to share a cell with five other prisoners, Gramsci’s brain kept working and he produced the posthumously published Prison Notebooks which offer a powerfully consequent critique and reconstruction of the basic concepts of…
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
In the vedanta philosophy, nothing exists except god
But this is because we think of God as the King of the Universe, the Absolute Technocrat who personally and consciously controls every detail of his cosmos—and that is not the kind of God in my story. In fact, it isn’t my story at all, for any student of the history of…
One's human nature
If, then, I am not saying that you ought to awaken from the ego-illusion and help save the world from disaster, why The Book? Why not sit back and let things take their course? Simply that it is part of “things taking their course” that I write. As a human being it is just my…
Prickles versus goo
I have sometimes thought that all philosophical disputes could be reduced to an argument between the partisans of “prickles” and the partisans of “goo.” The prickly people are tough-minded, rigorous, and precise, and like to stress differences and divisions between things. They…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Selves are like paintings
The Irish philosopher Bishop Berkeley once wrote, ‘Philosophers have raised a dust and then complain that they cannot see.’ The cloud that obscures our view of the self has been thickened by the trampling of psychologists, scientists, theologians and sociologists too. In…
The limits of neuroscience for philosophy
The limits of what neuroscience can contribute to our understanding of self was made evident to me as I read more and more about how the brain constructs a sense of self. The findings I have reported here do seem to illuminate the issue, or at least shine a light different from…
Postmodernism rejects essentialism
This is not fragmentation for fragmentation’s sake, however. Underlying it is an intellectual rejection of various kinds of essentialism or realism. Before postmodernism, so we are told, most dominant modes of thought took reality to have a single, real essence.
Armchair necessities contradicted by facts
These arguments seem compelling, but attempts to work out from the armchair what is necessary for experience to be possible, as Cassam and Kant do, are always vulnerable to facts emerging on the ground which plain contradict them. People with Cotard Syndrome or transient…
Ratiocentrism and the neglected body
It is important to stress the physical basis of personhood in order to answer critics who argue that the contemporary philosophy of personal identity suffers from the same disability that has plagued western philosophy since its inception: it is so centred on rational thought…
The Experimental Philosophy Page
Experimental philosophy (x-phi)
Welcome to the experimental philosophy page. Experimental philosophy, called x-phi for short, is a new philosophical movement that supplements the traditional tools of analytic philosophy with the scientific methods of cognitive science. So experimental philosophers actually go…
The Philosophical Computer: Exploratory Essays In Philosophical Computer Modeling
Computers as a new environment for philosophical modeling
Philosophical modeling is as old as philosophy itself; examples range from Plato's Cave and the Divided Line to Rawls's original position. What is new are the astounding computational resources now available for philosophical modeling. Although the computer cannot offer a…
Theories of Childhood, Second Edition (Carol Garhart Mooney)
Becoming John Dewey (reference)
Dalton, Thomas C. 2002. Becoming John Dewey: Dilemmas of a Philosopher and Naturalist. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
This Free Online Encyclopedia Has Achieved What Wikipedia Can Only Dream Of
A benefit of the sep’s not being crowdsourced is that minority views get more exposure
Another benefit of the SEP’s not being crowdsourced is that minority views get more exposure. Wikipedia’s overview of feminist philosophy is hopelessly short. The SEP has dozens of meticulously researched entries. A 2012 survey by Wikimedia, Wikipedia’s parent organization…
Three ways to be more rational this year
Pinker on rationality
When events occur at random times, they will inevitably group in clusters in our minds - unless there is some non-random process that spaces them apart. And so when we experience haphazardly timed events in life, we're liable to think that bad things happen in threes, that some…
Towards An Ontology Of Software: A Requirements Engineering Perspective
Irmak on the artifactual nature of software
A different approach to account for the artifactual nature of software is taken by Irmak [8], also acknowledged by Ray Turner in his recent, comprehensive entry on the philosophy of Computer Science published in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [19]. According to Irmak…