We live in an age that promotes life and life values. In this respect, we interpret ourselves according to the now dominant Darwinian paradigm exclusively as organic beings whose society, culture, and thoughts are rooted in organic impulses, having their inceptions in animals. We think of ourselves as animals: as highly evolved animals, certainly, but …
People have always sought the highest Good in life. Epicureanism was one of the philosophical streams that had an important influence on the Western tradition of thought. This conception stresses that the highest Good in life is pleasure and the highest evil is pain. While maintaining this, it avails of some arguments that it takes …
Certainly, the concept of a system had a long history before Kant’s philosophical system, going back even to ancient philosophy and Greek language. Usually, it meant a whole in which the composing elements are integrated organically. Therefore, they depended on each other, as organs depend on each other in an organism. The representation of such …
Despite the contradictions discovered in the theory of the Critique of Pure Reason, a few Kantian ideas became soon after its publishing philosophical commodities concerning a priori knowledge. First, the need to transform philosophy into a deductive science based on principles, a science that could ground all the other less abstract sciences, like Newtonian physics …
We think of Hegel not only as one of the most important philosophers but also as one of the most important representatives of the philosophy of identity. I understand here by ‘philosophy of identity’ that type of philosophy that states the fundamental identity or correspondence between the human mind and external reality. Because of its …
It is the easiest thing in the world to believe in God. We are facing an infinite universe that works like a clock. You can then deduce that the clock must have had a clock-maker. And there you are: now you have a God, i.e., an infinite active intelligence. This is the short form of …
What is matter, and how can we think of matter? ‘Matter’ is not something real in the sense that it can be given in our experience. It is not something that we can feel, touch or see as we see this apple tree or this cat. Matter is an ‘abstraction,’ as they say, or an …
In Hegel, self-externality of space is only a logical condition for everything that exists. As logical, it concerns pure possibility and not reality. Space is everywhere opening itself into other self-external spatial contents. The difficulty of understanding Hegel in his explanations concerning nature is that we tend to understand the concepts about which he speaks …
In Hegel, unhappy consciousness is, of course, the result of the skeptical consciousness, of that consciousness that nowhere sees any truth. This consciousness has only itself, in its pure singularity, and nothing else, without any bonds to the world or others. The lack of bonds with the world consists of the claimed incognoscibility of the …
Whitehead says that in every philosophical theory, there is an ultimate that is endowed with accidents (Whitehead, 1978, p. 7). In Whitehead, this ultimate is creativity. Accidents are necessary in order to characterize things. The logical meaning of accidents is predicates that are enounced about a logical subject. You do not know anything about something …