درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

While one version of belief in inspiration, for which the inspired human passively receives inspired deliverances, precludes human creativity, another, for which inspired compositions reflect human agency and ingenuity, presupposes it. Margaret Boden, however, suggests (in The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (2004)) that creativity is continuous with generic human powers, and also arises through infringing recognised rules. While the former suggestion (about continuity) is argued to be readily acceptable, problems are raised for the rule-breaking account of creativity. Accounts of creativity need to be supplemented with awareness that creativity commonly involves participation in traditions of skill or craftsmanship, and in a creative community, whether rules are broken or not. Further, the continuity approach is argued to be consistent with at least one particular variant of belief in inspiration, according to which God, as the universal Creator, can communicate through the imagination of receptive minds that reflect his/her creative imagination, as suggested by Austin Farrer in ‘Inspiration: Poetical and Divine’ (1963). Other faculties as well as the imagination are held to be involved, in a manner consistent with the continuity approach: perception, memory, reflectiveness, historical awareness and artistic ingenuity.

This paper shows how Hegel’s misconception of truth and knowledge misled his ideas of Absolute spirit, dialectically reinforced dogmatism and irrational historicism toward his disastrous conclusion of a “totalitarian playbook”. Analysis by Hegel scholars is presented and contrasted with Popper’s Critical Rationalism-based critiques. Hegel held a version of Correspondence for everyday truth plus a deeper “philosophical” truth, similar to essence, which could be unified with consciousness. This is compared to Popper’s anti-essentialism. Hegel’s dialectical theory is contrasted to Popper’s falsificationism. Popper showed that dialectical method produced historical relativism. Hegel’s Philosophy of Identity, yielding the dialectical Idealism of “what is reasonable must be real”, led to “might is right” with emergence of nations by fighting for domination on the stage of history. Popper credited Hegel with formulating the “playbook of totalitarianism”, used lethally by followers of Hegelian Left and Right. Inversion Theory claims the word “true”, implying completeness, certainty, and self-consistency, is applicable only to the objective world. Perception of it, acquired by an evolved biological process (Active Subjectivism), incorporates essential falsehood, yielding “best knowledge” of reality. It solves problems related to the regulatory, statistical, evidentiary, inconstant and even indexical nature of knowledge. Only the Inversion theory exposes the errors of dialecticism: since it involves subjective concepts, it is impossible for a true synthesis plus its negative antithesis to give a true synthesis. The historical process of the Zeitgeist contains falsehood, the cunning of reason to move the spirit forward is uncertain, and nobody can perform the truth for their time.

In this paper, I take for granted the view of a long tradition tracing back to Kant that the content of perception is nonconceptual, nonpropositional, and iconic. However, I challenge the idea that this content is either an existentially quantified proposition (the existential view), an object-involving proposition (the particularist view), both (the pluralist view), or still that there is no fact of the matter about the elusive content of perception (Block). Instead, I propose an alternative hybrid model as the most suitable for perception, namely a mix of the representation of properties (relativistic content) and acquaintance with whatever causes the relevant token experience. Although this format is iconic or map-like, the best semantic model for understanding this relativistic content of perception is an open sentence with predicates and free variables. Since this content is neither particular nor existential, it is incomplete (at least in the light of Fregean semantics). That is, it is neither accurate nor inaccurate per se. Perceptions do not represent particulars, let alone the causal relationship between particulars or environmental conditions and the token experience. In other words, neither particulars nor causal relations belong to the content of the experience. Instead, particulars and causal relations belong to the evaluative circumstances of the content (Lewis's context-index pairs). Perceptions represent "de re" properties as accurate or inaccurate attributions to what is causally responsible for the relevant token experience.

This study develops the Affective Ethical Model of Conceptual Engineering (AEMCE), a framework we introduce to address a critical and underexplored gap in conceptual engineering: the emotional dimension of concepts. While traditional normative conceptual engineering has focused on the application of concepts to moral and social applications, it has largely overlooked the overwhelming emotional impact a concept may have on individuals. These emotional resonances, whether harmful, isolating, or manipulative, are often ignored, creating ethical blind spots. The Affective Ethical Model of Conceptual Engineering rectifies this by introducing affective accountability and ethical adequacy as foundational criteria for conceptual success. This model is structured around four iterative and interdependent stages: Diagnosis, Design, Circulation, and Evaluation, which are operationalized through the Affective Performance Test. These rigorous mixed methods protocol empirically assesses both emotional engagement and harm reduction. The Affective Ethical Model of Conceptual Engineering demonstrates how concept revision, such as reframing the term “illegitimate child” in Algeria, can promote linguistic justice and social integration, transforming harmful labels into more neutral, inclusive language. This redesigns Conceptual Engineering not as an instrument of intellectual clarity but as a moral technology that has the capacity to transform the moral and emotional infrastructure of society. As a blend of emotional intelligence and philosophical accuracy, the Affective Ethical Model of Conceptual Engineering will provide a new concept of engineering, which improves the sense of moral quality in social life.

In this essay, I argue (i) for the thesis I call dignitarian neo-luddism with respect to digital technology, which says not all digital technology is bad and wrong, but instead all and only the digital technology that harms and oppresses ordinary people (i.e., people other than digital technocrats), by either failing to respect our human dignity sufficiently or by outright violating our human dignity, is bad and wrong, and therefore all and only this bad and wrong digital technology should be rejected but not—except in extreme cases of digital technology whose coercive use is actually violently harming and oppressing ordinary people, for example, digitally-driven weapons or weapons-systems being used for mass destruction or mass murder—destroyed, rather only either simply refused, non-violently dismantled, or radically transformed into its moral opposite, also (ii) that the members of what I call “the military-industrial-digital complex” are systematically harming and oppressing ordinary people like us by not only enabling but also effectively mandating our excessive use of and addiction to digital technology, which in turn systematically undermines our innate capacities for thinking, caring, and acting for ourselves, and therefore undermines our human real personhood, and thereby violates our human dignity—therefore, we ought to ban all giant AI experiments and LLM/chatbot technology while they are still in their infancy, just as we ought to have banned all atomic bomb experiments and nuclear weapons technology while they were still in their infancy.

Moral responsibility is a fundamental component of ethics, shaping our understanding of accountability, blame, and praise. Responsibility-internalism, which holds that moral responsibility is grounded in some internal mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions, represents a novel yet radical departure from traditional frameworks that focus on the outcome, circumstances, and interpersonal relationships to draw the moral line. While this theory presents a simple, self-contained picture of moral responsibility, it faces serious theoretical problems that challenge its coherence and practical utility. It specifically cannot adequately explain cases of negligence, culpable ignorance, and the relational aspects of moral responsibility that are central to human interactions. This paper offers a critical-analytic examination of responsibility-internalism and its theoretical and practical shortcomings. It examines positions that would incorporate both internalist assumptions, emphasizing the control agents possess over their actions, and externalist and interpersonal factors, aiming to offer a more complete and nuanced conception of moral liability. Some of the paper is devoted to discussing case studies in which the limitations of responsibility-internalism relative to its alternatives are illustrated. And it concludes that although responsibility-internalism offers a novel take and a new tool in the discussions of moral responsibility, such an internalist approach ultimately fails to provide a full and usable theory of moral responsibility.

This paper explores the structure of time and the possibility of the future within it, challenging conventional linear representations of temporality. The central thesis argues that the future does not lie on a vertical line above or to the eternally far right of a horizontal timeline; rather, the it emerges logically, not merely sequentially, following the past and present. For the future to fully manifest, the past and present must be thoroughly processed and, in some sense, exhausted. However, catastrophes, which have occurred and will presumably continue to occur, disrupt the flow of time by halting the past and indicating future occurrences in unpredictable ways. Therefore, to truly engage with the future, it is sometimes necessary to revisit the past, much like in psychoanalysis, where exploring repressed experiences helps illuminate present and future trajectories. This brings us to a crucial idea of this article: history and historiography are not solely concerned with understanding past events but also with anticipating and shaping future possibilities. In this light, many future catastrophes have their roots in the past. Recognizing this dynamic allows us to see that many future catastrophes have their origins in unresolved past events, reinforcing the necessity of engaging with history not only as retrospective analysis but as a mode of future-oriented thinking.