The principles of economic calculation set out by Mises (1990, 1976, 1953, 1998), namely that an agent is inspired by past prices in economic calculation, face the problem of circular argument, infinite regress, and the empirical question of which past prices the agent is inspired by, and are inconsistent with Mises’s correct assertion that action is aimed at changing the future. Principles of calculation must be based on attributions of valuation, and calculation must be based on value determinations, which Mises explicitly rejects. I provide an alternative interpretation of the problem that is future-oriented and presents principles of calculation based on the agent’s value determinations. This is made possible by a paradigm shift in interpretation based on defining individual utility and individual equilibrium. The paper presents philosophical-economic speculations on the unit of utility (util) and how it can be ontologically-informationally defined. The propositions are supported by in-depth philosophical argumentation alongside Platonic-Aristotelian-Kantian-Hegelian-Brentanian-Hayekian lines, inspired by the works of Ján Pavlik. A logical consequence of the principles presented is a description of the dynamics of price-setting (as a consequence of individual intentions) based on the individual utility of the agent. Demand-supply that are usually used as preconditions for price formation are described in the interpretation as consequences of individual intentionality and dynamic of individual utility.

ChatGPT has gained a practical importance in aiding students with academic tasks, i.e., writing essays, synthesizing difficult theories, and generating ideas for class related projects. Recent observations and analysis of academics suggests that students rely significantly on artificial intelligence platforms like ChatGPT to ease the academic pressures of having to read long articles and original works, formulate and write essays for subjects that require submissions of reflective and argumentative papers. The goal of this paper, however, is not to critique the impact of ChatGPT in the classroom, but to argue that AI interfaces and platforms like this confirms Louis Althusser’s thesis that education as an ideological state apparatus (ISA) turns to a mechanism that reproduces the mode of production. Althusser contends that education legitimizes and reproduces the consumerist social formation. As can be known, this thrust could be discerned from the direction of the Outcomes-Based Education (OBE) which most educational systems adapted around the world for practical purpose of ensuring quality graduates. For Althusser, besides the need to “manufacture consent” among the people, the means of production has to be secured which is accomplished by “educating” and training the learner to eventually become inducted to the labor force. Thus, the students themselves are victimized by the relentless pursuit of reproducing workers to maintain capitalist interests. This work will, therefore, argue that given the thrust of education as objective or outcomes-based, the learner begins to perceive learning through the lenses of outcomes and achievements which overlooks the process of knowledge generation.

Hegel is renowned for his view that in family members are fully recognised and the master and slave relationship does not exist in it. Among the problems of the modern society, Hegel devoted more attention to poverty, crime and alienation in the economic sense. Hegel rarely discussed problems which are commonly found in modern society despite his anthropologically nuanced philosophy, which treats the family, civil society and the state as the three highest moments in ethical life (Sittlichkeit). For Hegel, the family performs the functions of realisation of individual subjective freedom, performing deeds for the death, and the establishment and maintenance of morality on a collective level. This paper aims to move beyond Hegel’s discussions by exploring problems related to the family as a social institution, and proposes that family problems in modern society are caused by the conflicts between family as based on feelings and rationalisation based on ethical objectivity, tensions between the family and civil society, master and slave dialectic in marriage, and realisation of individual freedom through private property. Measures on alleviating family problems are suggested, and they include positive enhancement of bonds among family members through morality, re-discovery of unreflective feelings, deployment of family property, and extension of scope of Corporation to directly intervene in family problems.

In recent years, the issue of the compatibility of free will and determinism has been studied by philosophers by methods of experimental philosophy among ordinary people.  The results of these experiments led to new disputes about the definition of determinism and fatalism. I propose that to get valid results from experiments, one should first study the perception of ordinary people about what determinism and fatalism are. The research aims to study (non-expert) human perception of determinism as well as people’s views regarding fatalism.  The goal of this background research was to change the playing field of further debates on free will and determinism. The results have been summarized and compared with previous literature along with consequent inference on common grounds between determinism and fatalism.

Technology, in its broadest sense, is the greatest resource of the human species. If philosophers contemplate the cosmos in its entirety, they do so by using a wide range of technical tools, developed over the course of human history. Moreover, as part of the cosmos, philosophers contemplate technology itself: not only the development of technology, but also the reason for its use and how it is passed on to future generations. Education therefore assumes a central role in the existence of humankind. While in the first instance the task of education is the transmission of technical skills, in the second instance it is perhaps more important to educate to judge technology and technological progress. Judging technology is crucial whenever progress leads to new gaps in the normative system and value system of a human society.

The field of modern work bears striking similarities to the inner workings of leisure pursuits such as the fantasy video games of the Elder Scrolls series in at least one small part – the quests pursued by players are often menial, and serve no explicit purpose save their very existence. Petty renumeration, meaningless aesthetic gifts; these are not fulfilment nor are they worthy reward for the work done to earn them. This work seeks to evaluate the nature of work of this type and do so through a similar analysis of the Radiant AI and the imperatives it doles out to players. Moreover, we shall delve into the issue of depth and nuance in the design of adventure games and the lack thereof when the task of game design is delegated to an AI and will summarily provide insight into enjoyment and fulfilment in the spheres of work and leisure.

The phenomenon of consciousness has proved to be a notoriously convoluted concept, inviting various fields of philosophical inquiry to comprehend. In discourse on philosophy of mind, there are contentious perceptions on the elusiveness of consciousness; whether it is a reductive concept, a non-reductive concept or the easier way out, eliminating any mental language and substituting it with scientific language. This paper, by studying David Chalmers’ invaluable submissions on consciousness, provides a non-reductionist framework that will set the direction of the attempts by psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers to comprehend consciousness. To begin with, Chalmers’ arguments for the fundamental nature of consciousness will be discussed. Furthermore, it juxtaposes Chalmers’ assertions with the reductionist approach by the sciences. Having articulated these two perspectives regarding consciousness, a framework for theorizing consciousness is put forward.

This article deals with a critical summary of the main ideas and reflections expressed in the book The Burnedout Society. The author of the five essays that make up this book is Byung-Chul Han, a German-writing philosopher from Seoul, Korea. The ideas of this author are elaborated in detail in the essay Society of Fatigue, which was logically included in the first place in the book. The central idea of this treatise, and indeed of the author's entire set of reflections, is the current decrease in negativity that surrounds contemporary man and that leads to an excess of positivity and the emergence of a society of performance. According to Han, it results in the fact that contemporary man becomes his own exploiter. This central theme is further elaborated in the following four essays. The author of this article has a critical attitude to some of Han's propositions and at the same time finds parallels to Han's main ideas introduced in the work To have or to be? by Erich Fromm. Above all, the author questions Han's construct of paradoxical freedom and also contradicts Han's heralded end of the viral epoch.

The relationship between image and text has been a topic of debate since the Ancient Greek era. Plato considered image as more natural than text, therefore the image is readily understood. Simónides de Ceos has begun the sister arts tradition between image and text, by his phrase ut pictura poesis (as is painting, so is poetry). In contrast to the Ancient Greek, Modern thinkers tend to sharply distinguish between image and text. We can trace modern philosophical discourse on image and text from Leonardo da Vinci’s superiority of painting over poetry, Lessing’s distinction of painting and poetry, Burke’s words as the sublime medium, Clement Greenberg’s and Michael Fried’s medium specificity, to Rosalind Krauss’s grid of modern art. This study examines discourse on image and text relationship in the historical analysis view. Eventually, the researcher attempts to answer the problem of image and text relationship, in the light of contemporary and multimodality theories.

In 1966, M. Friedman published an essay on the methodology of positive economics, in which he emphasized the role of predictions as a decisive criterion for accepting macroeconomic models. This paper analyzes to what extent modern macroeconomics in 2023 is guided by these ideas. The first part of this paper deals with the role of predictions in macroeconomic models and shows that a large part of the models currently used do not contain any predictions at all. The next part of the paper explains the problem of Lucas' critique and the resulting complications in making predictions. The following section shows how modern dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models are attempting to deal with Lucas' criticism. The last part of the text analyzes further fundamental complications in making macroeconomic predictions, such as the issue of free human decision-making, the butterfly effect and the normative form of the questions being studied. The paper shows that a portion of modern macroeconomic models that do not contain predictions would undoubtedly fail Friedman's test, and models created for the purpose of prediction still have not completely dealt with serious methodological complications. Due to the nature of the subject matter, macroeconomic models will likely never be able to provide completely reliable predictions.

The present paper focuses on main points of Thomas H. Huxley's lecture 'Evolution and Ethics', which addressed current social and political debate about application of evolutionary principle of competition on society. Huxley, a well-known proponent of Darwin, was strictly opposed to such application as he threatened that ethics, the base of civilized society, would disappear. He claimed that ethical process kept natural processes under control and made men truly human. He stressed that while evolution governed the biological realm of nature, ethics was domain of human conscience and society.
Even though Huxley was well established scholar, ideas of his contemporary colleague Herbert Spencer often gained much more popularity amongst general public. This was certainly true in China, where Spencer's evolutionary ethics gained tremendous popularity. The Theory of Evolution in China was immediately dragged into debate about national survival. Spencer's thought was paradoxically introduced to China by translation of Huxley's critical lecture 'Evolution and Ethics'. Chinese intellectuals were, however, far more interested in the concept of struggle and competition than in philosophical questions about meaning of ethics in human society, which troubled Thomas Henry Huxley in his public lecture presented in 18th May 1893.

In a recent article, Matej Cíbik claims that some tattoos are immoral because they are imprudent. (Cíbik 2020) In response, I argue that a tattoo can only be immoral if it causes harm to a third party, so that no tattoo is immoral simply because it is reckless. Conflating prudential and moral requirements in the way that Cíbik does would strike at the heart of liberalism, and has deeply counter-intuitive consequences, as we can see when we consider Cíbik's own discussions of suicidal individuals and smokers. After discussing the role of the self/other distinction in liberal moral philosophy, I affirm both the moral neutrality of tattoos and the importance of adopting non-judgemental attitudes towards the choices which a person makes concerning her own body.

The aim of this study is to clarify Spinoza’s concept of freedom and outline the meaning of this concept in Spinoza's philosophical system as a whole. First, I outline the position of the topic of freedom within the framework of Spinoza's philosophical teachings and its reception. Then I gradually turn to how Spinoza’s topic of freedom appears in the context of ontology, ethics and political philosophy. Spinoza's philosophy is ontological - ethics and political philosophy are the application of his ontology. That is why I will start with the interpretation of its basic metaphysical notions - substance, attributes, and modes. In an ethical context, it is possible to speak of Spinozism of freedom with regard to the concept of so-called power of mind over affects, which will be the next center of interpretation. I will conclude with a summary of Spinoza's political-philosophical views on freedom.

The aim of this study is to outline the psychoanalytic method of interpretation in its application to a philosophical text. The nature of philosophical creativity is illustrated by comparison with the laws of dream activity and the concept of primary process thinking. The concept of a “pride system” (Karen Horney) is used to interpret the specifically philosophical diction. The study shows the possibility of reading a philosophical text as a kind of declaration confirming the importance of its author, fulfilling their unconscious desire to prove the impossibility of "falling out of this world” (Sigmund Freud). The concept of the three archetypal ontological primordial images, inspired by Erikson's reflections and elaborated in other texts of the present author, is reformulated as a distinction of three philosophical styles: disciplined and paternalistic, focused on strict rule and order; sympathetic and maternalistic, focused on acceptance, equality and positive home atmosphere; and "nonsubstantially" (Egon Bondy) open, guided by the image of the "preparental center" (Erik Erikson) and primarily focusing on the value of freedom.

Contractual moralists, such as Bowie and Donaldson, have argued that contractual agreement explains why corporations have a moral obligation towards the society in which they operate. They argue that a corporation’s moral obligation emerges from a hypothetical social contract that establishes its legitimacy to operate in society. Their assumption appears to indicate a logically necessary relationship between a corporation’s moral obligation and contractual agreement that establishes the corporation. We argue that there is no such relationship: a corporation’s moral obligation does not necessarily emerge from a social contract. We suggest that instead of assuming that a corporation’s moral obligation emerges from a social contract, it should be said that a corporation’s moral obligation is sustained by a social contract. This helps answer the question of why corporations have a moral obligation towards the society where they operate in a better light.

This study discusses the first chapter of Filip Tvrdý's book, Nesnáze introspekce
("The Trouble with Introspection", 2015). In his book, Filip Tvrdý presents critical arguments against introspection, that serve him in his implicit defence of methodological naturalism. The aim of this study is to show that the problems of introspection are deeper-rooted than Tvrdý assumes in his book and that his implicit defence of methodological naturalism contains many weak points.

Jaegwon Kim's views on mental causation and the exclusion argument are evaluated systematically. Particular attention is paid to different theories of causation. It is argued that the exclusion argument and its premises do not cohere well with any systematic view of causation.

In the fifth Logical Investigation, Husserl argues against the possibility of the pure I as a function that synthetizes the intentional contents. His argumentation is explicitly directed against Neo-Kantian conception of the pure ego elaborated by Paul Natorp in his Einleitung in die Psychologie nach kritischer Methode from 1888. The present text analyzes the polemic over the status of the I by exploring the metaphysical and logical assumptions involved in it. Finally, it is trying to sketch out some motivations that led Husserl to reevaluate the status of the pure I in his Ideen zu einer reine Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie.

This paper aspires to meet a philosophical challenge posed to the author to give treatment to what was seen as a particularly nice Meinongian case; namely the case of Galician Meigas. However, through the playful footpaths of enchanted Galician Meigas, I rehabilitate some relevant discussion on the justification of belief formation and come to some poignant philosophical insights regarding the understanding of possibilities. I hope both the leading promoter of the challenge and, of course, other philosophical readers are satisfied with the outcome.

In the first half of 20th century the problem of demarcation between science and metaphysics was considered as the central issue of normative philosophy of science. W. W. Bartley convincingly demonstrates in his text from 1962 that dichotomy between science and metaphysics (non-science) is not so important because it does not provide relevant data about certain assertion (theory). Bartley shifted the question to the level of evaluation and acceptability of theories and presented his own criterion of "demarcation" between a good and a bad theory depending on the number of problems it solves. This study presents Bartley's arguments in context of popperian discussion, his critical response to the reopening of the problem of demarcation between science and pseudoscience in contemporary debates and points out at least three (Bartley, Kuhn, Laudan) denial of the problem of demarcation claimed already in the past. The conclusion of the study offers a solution in accordance with the concept of Bartley's conception of acceptability of theory.

The paper deals with main principles of ethics and focuses especially on evolutionary ethics. First part encloses what is ethics and what are main features of evolutionary ethics. The author then points out onto fact and value dichotomy as one of the main problems of evolutionary (meta)ethics.

This paper attempts to be a contribution to the epistemological project of explaining complex conceptual structures departing from more basic ones. The central thesis of the paper is that there are what I call "functionally structured concepts", these are non-harmonic concepts in Dummett's sense that might be legitimized if there is a function that justifies the tie between the inferential connection the concept allows us to trace. Proving this requires enhancing the russellian existential analysis of definite descriptions to apply to functions and using this in proving the legitimacy of such concepts. The utility of the proposal is shown for the case of thick ethical terms and an attempt is made to use it in explaining the development of natural numbers. This last move could allow us to go one step lower in explaining the genesis of natural numbers while maintaining the notion of abstract numbers as higher order entities.

Primarily focusing on Steiner's Real Presences (1989) and Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (1987), the present article wishes to come to an understanding of the relationship between Steiner's hermeneutics of transcendence and John Caputo's radical hermeneutics. Faced with the XXth century inhumanity, Steiner seems to be embracing the most radical move in hermeneutics, and he does so by wagering on transcendence, in which the meaning of meaning peacefully rests on the arms of God, thus rejecting the negative semiotics of Derrida. However, when looked upon by the demanding eye of radical hermeneutics put forth by Caputo, Steinerian hermeneutics soon reveals itself in alliance with a metaphysics of presence and a philosophical thought which holds back the free play of difference. Whereas Steiner seeks 'the meaning of Meaning', John Caputo, one of America's most respected and controversial continental thinkers, has been both braced and terrified by Friedrich Nietzsche's demand to take the truth straight up, forgoing the need to have it 'attenuated, veiled, sweetened, blunted and falsified,' readily confessing that we have not been handpicked to be Being's or God's mouthpiece, that it is always necessary to get a reading, even if (and precisely because) the reading is there is no Reading, no final game-ending Meaning, no decisive and sweeping Story that wraps things up. Even if the secret is, there is no Secret. 'We do not know who we are - that is who we are.'.

This article is about knowledge with power or else actionable knowledge. This kind of ability knowledge is often neglected in mainstream epistemology but its importance in today's information society should not be underestimated. The central element here is the Infoworld, a ubiquitous world projected via the Internet. It is argued that information acquired via this world can be transformed into knowledge by means of logical inference. Knowledge acquisition is seen here as a continuous-time feedback process with its stability depending upon reliable information.

The article aims to introduce an interpretation of Gaston Bachelard's phenomenology of imagination as a phenomenological reduction sui generis. The autor of the article presents daydreaming (rêverie) as a process of regression to the naïve primordial consciousness reaching a state of childness. Childness provides a harmonisation of subject-object relationship. World is valorisated in that conception and reveals itself as a home. This valorisation is done via memories and a reciprociality of imagination. The article presents Bachelard's phenomenological reduction as a complementary opposite to scientific reason and it emphasises its therapeutical nature.

The paper aims to put the civil society in the context of political philosophy and to explain it from a pluralistic perspective. The first part discusses the classical concept of the civil society. The second part examines the civil society during and after the era of Communism. The third part analyses the dispute between corporativism and pluralism. The fourth part distinguishes between political power and influence. The fifth part highlights the roles of political parties. The sixth part points out the suspicious nature of universal moral claims.

In the world of contemporary American politics, the "conservative movement" continues to figure prominently as a force that is, for all practical purposes, inseparable from the Republican Party. As the 2016 presidential election cycle gets under way, well over a dozen Republican contenders are laboring tirelessly to establish their "conservative" bona fides. In truth, however, neither the "conservative" movement nor most "conservative" politicians are conservative at all. Rather, they are neoconservative, and between neoconservatism and traditional or classical conservatism there is all of the difference, a difference in kind. In this paper, I cite both scholarly and popular representatives of both traditions of thought to show that each depends upon epistemological, ontological, and ethical-political suppositions that are not only fundamentally distinct from, but radically at odds with, those of the other.

This paper analyzes the field of sexual desire within the frame of phenomenological philosophy. That approach enables an understanding of sexuality as a peculiar modality of relation with alterity. This is due to the fact that, in sexual desire, there are three dimensions of otherness: first, the other's body/corporeality that provokes desire; second, the imaginative level that constitutes a space for transcendence with/towards/by means of the other; and last, the sociocultural level, where the rules are established for controlling sexual desire and fixing its admitted and forbidden versions.

This paper evaluates an argument according to which many anthropologists commit themselves to Cartesian dualism, when they talk about meanings. This kind of dualism, it is argued, makes it impossible for anthropologists to adequately attend to material artefacts. The argument is very original, but it is also vulnerable to a range of objections.

In Nietzsche's thought the criticism of the concept of ego occupies a dominant position. In Nietzsche's philosophy, the ego-both as a moral and as an epistemological subject--has received a serious criticism. Nietzsche views that the concept of ego, reason and consciousness have resulted from the breakup of human existence from a more natural state - a state in which instinctual activity dominated the human life. Nietzsche's concept of ego is closely related to his understanding of human instincts. The following article is an attempt to see the connection between the concept of ego and human instincts in Nietzsche's philosophy.