Systemic Dehumanization in the Age of Pandemic Terrorism

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 144-155
Author(s):  
Ross Reed ◽  

Systemic existential conditions are indelible aspects of a client's reflective and nonreflective modes of consciousness, and therefore fall within the purview of philosophical counseling. This paper focuses on the experience of the dehumanization that is a function of the monetization of all aspects of post-modern neoliberal society. Monetization demands radical self-abandonment, self-anesthesia, auto-aggressive self-exploitation and addiction for functionality within the system. The bankrupt logic of pandemic terrorism confirms that monetization has become the preeminent measure of value. Monetization distorts both reason and value, concealing a covert nihilism masquerading as the new metaphysics. The symbiotic natural world evidences a level of cooperation and coexistence that escapes monetization. Therefore, a monetized society is a society at odds with the world ecosystemand life itself. Caught in a labyrinth ofmonetized dehumanization, clients often participate in the fictional metanarrative of belief in unlimited individual possibility as a hedge against anxiety, depression, powerlessness, anomie, and the logical loop of cognitive dissonance.

Author(s):  
Alistair Fox

This chapter examines Merata Mita’s Mauri, the first fiction feature film in the world to be solely written and directed by an indigenous woman, as an example of “Fourth Cinema” – that is, a form of filmmaking that aims to create, produce, and transmit the stories of indigenous people, and in their own image – showing how Mita presents the coming-of-age story of a Māori girl who grows into an understanding of the spiritual dimension of the relationship of her people to the natural world, and to the ancestors who have preceded them. The discussion demonstrates how the film adopts storytelling procedures that reflect a distinctively Māori view of time and are designed to signify the presence of the mauri (or life force) in the Māori world.


According to a long historical tradition, understanding comes in different varieties. In particular, it is said that understanding people has a different epistemic profile than understanding the natural world—it calls on different cognitive resources, for instance, and brings to bear distinctive normative considerations. Thus in order to understand people we might need to appreciate, or in some way sympathetically reconstruct, the reasons that led a person to act in a certain way. By comparison, when it comes to understanding natural events, like earthquakes or eclipses, no appreciation of reasons or acts of sympathetic reconstruction is arguably needed—mainly because there are no reasons on the scene to even be appreciated, and no perspectives to be sympathetically pieced together. In this volume some of the world’s leading philosophers, psychologists, and theologians shed light on the various ways in which we understand the world, pushing debates on this issue to new levels of sophistication and insight.


Author(s):  
Richard Healey

The metaphor that fundamental physics is concerned to say what the natural world is like at the deepest level may be cashed out in terms of entities, properties, or laws. The role of quantum field theories in the Standard Model of high-energy physics suggests that fundamental entities, properties, and laws are to be sought in these theories. But the contextual ontology proposed in Chapter 12 would support no unified compositional structure for the world; a quantum state assignment specifies no physical property distribution sufficient even to determine all physical facts; and quantum theory posits no fundamental laws of time evolution, whether deterministic or stochastic. Quantum theory has made a revolutionary contribution to fundamental physics because its principles have permitted tremendous unification of science through the successful application of models constructed in conformity to them: but these models do not say what the world is like at the deepest level.


Author(s):  
Ruth Garrett Millikan

This book weaves together themes from natural ontology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and information, areas of inquiry that have not recently been treated together. The sprawling topic is Kant’s how is knowledge possible? but viewed from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. The assumption is that we are evolved creatures that use cognition as a guide in dealing with the natural world, and that the natural world is roughly as natural science has tried to describe it. Very unlike Kant, then, we must begin with ontology, with a rough understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, only later developing theories about the nature of cognition within that world and how it manages to reflect the rest of nature. And in trying to get from ontology to cognition we must traverse another non-Kantian domain: questions about the transmission of information both through natural signs and through purposeful signs including, especially, language. Novelties are the introduction of unitrackers and unicepts whose job is to recognize the same again as manifested through the jargon of experience, a direct reference theory for common nouns and other extensional terms, a naturalist sketch of uniceptual—roughly conceptual— development, a theory of natural information and of language function that shows how properly functioning language carries natural information, a novel description of the semantics/pragmatics distinction, a discussion of perception as translation from natural informational signs, new descriptions of indexicals and demonstratives and of intensional contexts and a new analysis of the reference of incomplete descriptions.


Author(s):  
Andrew Briggs ◽  
Hans Halvorson ◽  
Andrew Steane

The chapter appraises science as an intellectual activity that is appropriately carried out on its own terms. Consequently, it is not appropriate to introduce references to God as a component part of a mathematical proof, nor of a system of forces in the natural world, nor of a sequence of impersonal processes in the biosphere. This does not mean that it is inappropriate to be thankful to God and to celebrate all these aspects of the world as gifts. They can be employed as opportunities to express appreciation through studying and understanding them better in their own right. Nevertheless, there may be processes, such as those which shape a person’s self-identity, in which it is appropriate to recognize God’s more direct role. Good practice concerning acknowledgements sections in scientific publications such as doctoral theses and journal articles is then discussed.


Author(s):  
Kathleen Long

Monsters take on many roles in Montaigne’s Essays, almost always in novel ways. They do not take on their usual roles as markers of other races, genders, or bodies, as threats or objects of repulsion. Rather, the authorial self and his work are seen as monstrous; Europeans and their culture are seen as monstrous; the knowledge systems that create monsters are themselves monstrous; man’s vanity is monstrous. But most of all, the monster is the provocation to meditation on man’s presumption, and on the limitations of human knowledge and power in the face of the world and the divine. As the sign of the diversity and mutability of the natural world and thus of divine omnipotence, the monstrous and unusual is valued by Montaigne over the normal or usual. It is also the mark of human creativity, dependent as it is on the vagaries of the imagination, new and radically different from the rhetorical, literary, and artistic norms. This is why the Essays themselves can be considered a monstrous work.


Apeiron ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Proios

Abstract Plato’s invention of the metaphor of carving the world by the joints (Phaedrus 265d–66c) gives him a privileged place in the history of natural kind theory in philosophy and science; he is often understood to present a paradigmatic but antiquated view of natural kinds as possessing eternal, immutable, necessary essences. Yet, I highlight that, as a point of distinction from contemporary views about natural kinds, Plato subscribes to an intelligent-design, teleological framework, in which the natural world is the product of craft and, as a result, is structured such that it is good for it to be that way. In Plato’s Philebus, the character Socrates introduces a method of inquiry whose articulation of natural kinds enables it to confer expert knowledge, such as literacy. My paper contributes to an understanding of Plato’s view of natural kinds by interpreting this method in light of Plato’s teleological conception of nature. I argue that a human inquirer who uses the method identifies kinds with relational essences within a system causally related to the production of some unique craft-object, such as writing. As a result, I recast Plato’s place in the history of philosophy, including Plato’s view of the relation between the kinds according to the natural and social sciences. Whereas some are inclined to separate natural from social kinds, Plato holds the unique view that all naturalness is a social feature of kinds reflecting the role of intelligent agency.


2018 ◽  
Vol 100 (4) ◽  
pp. 745-766
Author(s):  
Lillian C. Woo

In the last fifty years, empirical evidence has shown that climate change and environmental degradation are largely the results of increased world population, economic development, and changes in cultural and social norms. Thus far we have been unable to slow or reverse the practices that continue to produce more air and water pollution, soil and ocean degradation, and ecosystem decline. This paper analyzes the negative anthropogenic impact on the ecosystem and proposes a new design solution: ecomimesis, which uses the natural ecosystem as its template to conserve, restore, and improve existing ecosystems. Through its nonintrusive strategies and designs, and its goal of preserving natural ecosystems and the earth, ecomimesis can become an integral part of stabilizing and rehabilitating our natural world at the same time that it addresses the needs of growing economies and populations around the world.


2022 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Samera Esmeir

Modern state law is an expansive force that permeates life and politics. Law's histories—colonial, revolutionary, and postcolonial—tell of its constitutive centrality to the making of colonies and modern states. Its powers intertwine with life itself; they attempt to direct it, shape its most intimate spheres, decide on the constitutive line dividing public from private, and take over the space and time in which life unfolds. These powers settle in the present, eliminate past authorities, and dictate futures. Gendering and constitutive of sexual difference, law's powers endeavor to mold subjects and alter how they orient themselves to others and to the world. But these powers are neither coherent nor finite. They are ripe with contradictions and conflicting desires. They are also incapable of eliminating other authorities, paths, and horizons of living; these do not vanish but remain not only thinkable and articulable but also a resource for the living. Such are some of the overlapping and accumulative interventions of the two books under review: Sara Pursley's Familiar Futures and Judith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria. What follows is an attempt to further develop these interventions by thinking with some of the books’ underlying arguments. Familiar Futures is a history of Iraq, beginning with the British colonial-mandate period and concluding with the 1958 Revolution and its immediate aftermath. Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is a history of “French Algeria” that covers a century of French colonization from 1830 to 1930. The books converge on key questions concerning how modern law and the modern state—colonial and postcolonial—articulated sexual difference and governed social and intimate life, including through the rise of personal-status law as a separate domain of law constitutive of the conjugal family. Both books are consequently also preoccupied with the relationship between sex, gender, and sovereignty. And both contain resources for living along paths not charted by the modern state and its juridical apparatus.


2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Saman Saleh ◽  
Abdulkhaleq Nader Qader ◽  
Mosleh Zeebaree ◽  
Goran Yousif Ismael ◽  
Musbah Aqel

Time management is the ability to plan and control how a person spends his hours in order to achieve his goals effectively. This involves organizing time between different areas of life, from work, household tasks, social life, and hobbies. Time always passes and we cannot control it, but time management is by organizing events in your life in proportion to time. You may often want to get more time in your day, but you only have 24 hours, 1440 minutes, or 86,400 seconds each day. How long can someone invest Time has acquired its importance for a person, as it represents an important dynamic and mobile dimension in his life that he cannot control, and because it is the vessel that embraces all human interactions and products, and because it is life itself, and that life is the amount of time that a person lives from birth until his death. Therefore, many specialists consider time as the most important component of life, and the most important resource available to humans in life, due to its unique and distinctive features. Because of the importance of time for humans, the ancient civilizations and the various monotheistic religions varied in their interest in it, but during research findings that there are important to record a precedent in order to take advantage of each part of the time, its parts to implement the righteous and purposeful workers that benefit them with good and benefit in the world and the hereafter, and warned them against wasting it and this is clearly manifested in many of the evidence included in the recommendation and result in part.


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