Philosophies, Volume 2, Issue 2 (June 2017) – 7 articles

The concept of political correctness highlights a set of principles and structures that should (or, in other cases, must) be followed to pursue a specific social behavior that characterizes a society and endorses an ideal identity. Nevertheless, even when this behavior implies a sense of social recognition and acceptance by a specific group, it also encompasses a risk of imposing a particular model of life, halting the emergence of criticisms and differences as far as it could be misguided to promote discrimination and exclusion. All of these raise the question of whether it is possible to conceive political correctness from a perspective of inclusion that transcends this layer of exclusion. If this is the case, following Eugenio Trías’ philosophy about the limit, the concept needs to be reconsidered through a “border reason” that enables one to conceive the benefits it brings as well as the criticisms that come from the analysis of the “shadowy” practice of the concept. This approach will lead to accepting that political correctness fulfills a function for society but that it requires a reflexive attitude along with its practices as part of a border relation between its benefits and the risks that it also has to tackle. Finally, a concept that could serve as a hinge to reinforce the perspective of a border limit is dignity, which could lead to an ethical reflection that underpins politically correct actions. Full article

This paper offers an unorthodox appraisal of empirical research bearing on the question of the low representation of women in philosophy. It contends that fashionable views in the profession concerning implicit bias and stereotype threat are weakly supported, that philosophers often fail to report the empirical work responsibly, and that the standards for evidence are set very low—so long as you take a certain viewpoint. Full article

In An Introduction to Probability Theory and its Applications, W. Feller established a way of ending the St. Petersburg paradox by the introduction of an entrance fee, and provided it for the case in which the game is played with a fair coin. A natural generalization of his method is to establish the entrance fee for the case in which the probability of heads is $\theta$ $(0<\theta <1/2)$ . The deduction of those fees is the main result of Section 2. We then propose a Bayesian approach to the problem. When the probability of heads is $\theta$ $(1/2<\theta <1)$ the expected gain of the St. Petersburg game is finite, therefore there is no paradox. However, if one takes $\theta$ as a random variable assuming values in $(1/2,1)$ the paradox may hold, which is counter-intuitive. In Section 3 we determine necessary conditions for the absence of paradox in the Bayesian approach and in Section 4 we establish the entrance fee for the case in which $\theta$ is uniformly distributed in $(1/2,1)$ , for in this case there is a paradox. Full article

I argue for an idealist ontology consistent with empirical observations, which seeks to explain the facts of nature more parsimoniously than physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism. This ontology also attempts to offer more explanatory power than both physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism, in that it does not fall prey to either the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ or the ‘subject combination problem’, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: spatially unbound consciousness is posited to be nature’s sole ontological primitive. We, as well as all other living organisms, are dissociated alters of this unbound consciousness. The universe we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of phenomenality surrounding—but dissociated from—our alter. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters. As such, the challenge to artificially create individualized consciousness becomes synonymous with the challenge to artificially induce abiogenesis. Full article

We examine the spiral structure of the thinking and the work of Marshall McLuhan, which we believe will provide a new way of viewing McLuhan’s work. In particular, we believe that the way he reversed figure and ground, reversed content and medium, reversed cause and effect, and the relationship he established between the content of a new medium and the older media it obsolesced all contain a spiral structure going back and forth in time. Finally, the time structure of his Laws of Media in which a new medium obsolesced an older medium, while retrieving an even older medium and then when pushed far enough flipped into a still newer medium has the feeling of a spiral. We will also examine the spiral structure of the thinking and work of those thinkers and artists that most influenced McLuhan such as Vico, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Joyce, TS Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticism movement. Full article

In this paper, it is examined how, if at all, the logical laws can be normative for human reasoning, wherein the notion of normativity is analyzed primarily with respect to Wittgenstein’s philosophy. During the ancient and the medieval periods, logic was being considered in terms of discourse and dialogical practice, but since Descartes and especially Kant, it has been treated as a system of laws with which the process of individual human reasoning has been compared. Therefore, normativity can be investigated in the private sphere (for thinking and reasoning) and in the public sphere (for dialogic practices in a community). Wittgenstein discussed both aspects of normativity: in his early philosophy, the focus is on the laws of logic that are primarily normative for the state of affairs in the world, while in his later works the emphasis is on a social aspect of normativity (which is closer to Aristotle’s view), which is derived from the adopted rules that have been applied in a certain community. Taken that way, logic is certainly normative in the public sphere, but the more difficult issue is whether logic is normative for thinking, regarding the difference between the logical laws and those of thought. Full article

The purpose of this synthesis is to deconstruct the medium of Marshall McLuhan’s prose as an anti-environment for the medium of traditional academic writing. By placing McLuhan’s own theory in dialogue with the founding principles of linguistic anthropology, I will argue that McLuhan’s authorial tactics—a subject of his long-term repudiation by the academic community on the whole—adhered to the tenets of the Electric Age, and were thus inherently incomprehensible to those who negotiated academic prose as a medium locked within the media environment of the Print Age. Full article