Academic literature on the topic 'Identity (Philosophical concept)'

The essay deals with the issue of freedom in labor law through dialogue with two currents of philosophical-political thought: neo-republicanism and the neo-Hegelian theory of social freedom. After the critique of neoliberal economic thought, labor law can draw on these two currents of political philosophy to consolidate, from an evolutionary point of view, its own value paradigm and to identify a new regulatory project that lives up to the challenge of neo-modernity. The ideas of freedom as non-domination and as social freedom, unlike the classical liberal concept of negative freedom, converge in the construction of social rights, such as codetermination, around which to found a new course of labor law.

AbstractThe conceptual history of the term “organization” begins in Medieval times with the reception and transformation of Aristotle’s philosophy of life. It designates the corporeal structure and conditions of identity of natural “organic bodies,” a term that had been used to refer to living beings since antiquity. The term played an important role in specifying the ontological status of living beings. At the same time, it offered a basis for their mechanistic understanding. Starting with mechanistic models of life in the second half of the seventeenth century, “organization” and “life” were increasingly used interchangeably. This conjunction of meaning transformed “living beings” into “organisms.” Within physiological accounts of the eighteenth century, the living organization was compared to a causal cycle of interdependency. Philosophically, this conjunction was adapted at the end of the century in Kant’s philosophy of “organized beings of nature” in which he located the idea of causal cyclicity within a teleological framework and specified an “organized being” in causal terms as a system of interacting and interdependent parts characterized by functional closure. Thus, “organization” refers to the constitution of living beings as a particular kind of causal system. In the nineteenth century, the term achieves the status of a signal word for the life sciences and starts being applied in a wide variety of contexts, from comparative anatomy to physiology and ecology. It was supplemented by two other fundamental notions, namely, “regulation” and “evolution,” the first referring to the stabilization and the second to the long-term transformation of natural organizations. The twentieth century saw a further intensification of the complementarity of the perspectives associated with these three terms. Finally, in recent years, a substantial improvement in understanding the causal structure of “organization” was achieved by analyzing it in terms of the “closure of constraints.”

AbstractMost of Eriksen’s research over the years has somehow or other dealt with the local implications of globalization. He has looked at ethnic dynamics, the challenges of forging national identities, creolization and cosmopolitanism, the legacies of plantation societies and, more recently, climate change in the era of ‘accelerated acceleration’. Here we want to talk not just about cultural diversity and not just look at biological diversity, but both, because he believes that there are some important pattern resemblances between biological and cultural diversity. And many of the same forces militate against that and threaten to create a flattened world with less diversity, less difference. And, obviously, there is a concern for the future. We need to have an open ended future with different options, maximum flexibility and the current situation with more homogenization. We live in a time when there are important events taking place, too, from climate change to environmental destruction, and we need to do something about that. In order to show options and possibilities for the future, we have to focus on diversity because complex problems need diverse answers.Martina: I would like to start with a passion of mine to get into one of your main research themes: diversity. I’m a Marvel fan and, what is emerging, is a reduction of what Marvel has always been about: diversity in comics. There seems to be a standardization that reduces the specificity of each superhero and so it seems that everyone is the same in a kind of indifference of difference. So in this hyper-diversity, I think there is also a reduction of diversity. Do you see something similar in your studies as well?Thomas: It’s a great example, and it could be useful to look briefly at the history of thought about diversity and the way in which it’s suddenly come onto the agenda in a huge way. If you take a look at the number of journal articles about diversity and related concepts, the result is stunning. Before 1990, the concept was not much used. In the last 30 years or so, it’s positively exploded. You now find massive research on biodiversity, cultural diversity, agro-biodiversity, biocultural diversity, indigenous diversity and so on. You’ll also notice that the growth curve has this ‘overheating shape’ indicating exponential growth in the use of the terms. And why is this? Well, I think this has something to do with what Hegel described when he said that ‘the owl of Minerva flies at dusk,’ which is to say that it is only when a phenomenon is being threatened or even gone that it catches widespread attention. Regarding diversity, we may be witnessing this mechanism. The extreme interest in diversity talk since around 1990 is largely a result of its loss which became increasingly noticeable since the beginning of the overheating years in the early 1990s. So many things happened at the same time, more or less. I was just reminded yesterday of the fact that Nelson Mandela was released almost exactly a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. There were many major events taking place, seemingly independently of each other, in different parts of the world. This has something to do with what you’re talking about, because yes, I think you’re right, there has been a reduction of many kinds of diversity.So when we speak of superdiversity, which we do sometimes in migration studies (Vertovec, 2023), we’re really mainly talking about people who are diverse in the same ways, or rather people who are diverse in compatible ways. They all fit into the template of modernity. So the big paradox here of identity politics is that it expresses similarity more than difference. It’s not really about cultural difference because they rely on a shared language for talking about cultural difference. So in other words, in order to show how different you are from everybody else, you first have to become quite similar. Otherwise, there is a real risk that we’d end up like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s lion. In Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1983), he remarks that if a lion could talk, we wouldn’t understand what it was saying. Lévi-Strauss actually says something similar in Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss, 1976) where he describes meeting an Amazonian people, I think it was the Nambikwara, who are so close that he could touch them, and yet it is as though there were a glass wall between them. That’s real diversity. It’s different in a way that makes translation difficult. And it’s another world. It’s a different ontology.These days, I’m reading a book by Leslie Bank and Nellie Sharpley about the Coronavirus pandemic in South Africa (Bank & Sharpley, 2022), and there are rural communities in the Eastern Cape which don’t trust biomedicine, so many refuse vaccinations. They resist it. They don’t trust it. Perhaps they trust traditional remedies slightly more. This was and is the situation with HIV-AIDS as well. This is a kind of diversity which is understandable and translateable, yet fundamental. You know, there are really different ways in which we see the Cosmos and the universe. So if you take the Marvel films, they’ve really sort of renovated and renewed the superhero phenomenon, which was almost dead when they began to revive it. As a kid around 1970, I was an avid reader of Superman and Batman. I also read a lot of Donald Duck and incidentally, a passion for i paperi and the Donald/Paperino universe is one curious commonality between Italy and Norway. Anyway, with the superheroes, everybody was very white. They represented a the white, conservative version of America. In the renewed Marvel universe, there are lots of literally very strong women, who are independent agents and not just pretty appendages to the men as they had often been in the past. You also had people with different cultural and racial identities. The Black Panther of Wakanda and all the mythology which went with it are very popular in many African countries. It’s huge in Nigeria, for example, and seems to add to the existing diversity. But then again, as we were saying and as you observed, these characters are diverse in comparable within a uniform framework, a pretty rigid cultural grammar which presupposes individualism: there are no very deep cultural differences in the way they see the world. So that’s the new kind of diversity, which really consists more of talking about diversity than being diverse. I should add that the superdiversity perspective is very useful, and I have often drawn on it myself in research on cultural complexity. But it remains framed within the language of modernity.Martina: What you just said makes me think of contradictory dimensions that are, however, held together by the same gaze. How is it that your approach helps hold together processes that nevertheless tell us the same thing about the concept of diversity?Thomas: When we talk about diversity, it may be fruitful to look at it from a different angle. We could look at traditional knowledge and bodily skills among indigenous peoples, for example, and ideas about nature and the afterlife. Typically, some would immediately object that this is wrong and we are right and they should learn science and should go to school, period. But that’s not the point when we approach them as scholars, because then we try to understand their worlds from within and you realize that this world is experienced and perceived in ways which are quite different from ours. One of the big debates in anthropology for a number of years now has concerned the relationship between culture and nature after Lévi-Strauss, the greatest anthropological theorist of the last century. His view was that all cultures have a clear distinction between culture and nature, which is allegedly a universal way of creating order. This view has been challenged by people who have done serious ethnographic work on the issue, from my Oslo colleague Signe Howell’s work in Malaysia to studies in Melanesia, but perhaps mainly in the Amazon, where anthropologists argue that there are many ways of conceptualising the relationship between humans and everything else. Many of these world-views are quite ecological in character. They see us as participants in the same universe as other animals, plants and even rocks and rivers, and might point out that ‘the land does not belong to us – we belong to the land’. That makes for a very different relationship to nature than the predatory, exploitative form typical of capitalist modernity. In other words, in these cultural worlds, there is no clear boundary between us humans and non-humans. If you go in that direction, you will discover that in fact, cultural diversity is about much more than giving rights to minorities and celebrating National Day in different ethnic costumes, or even establishing religious tolerance. That way of talking about diversity is useful, but it should not detract attention from deeper and older forms of diversity.

Abstract This is the third chapter of The Paradoxes of Time Travel. In The Paradoxes of Time Travel Lewis argues that time travel as it is imagined in certain science fiction narratives is a genuine possibility. In his own words, Lewis aimed, ‘(1) to solve a philosophical problem hitherto largely ignored or casually mis-solved by philosophers […]; (2) to introduce the layman to various topics in metaphysics, since our problem turns out to connect with many more familiar ones; and (3) to show several of my favorite doctrines and methods in metaphysics’. In the course of his 6 lectures, Lewis lays out his Quinean four-dimensionalist metaphysics and explains how our ordinary concept of person allows for causal loops. This requires a notion of ‘reverse causation’ which Lewis explains by analysing causation in counterfactual terms. Finally, Lewis elaborates on the sense in which we can and cannot be intelligibly said to be free to change the past.

This chapter argues that the initial step toward imposing some theoretical order on the notoriously haphazard concept of identity in politics is to distinguish at the outset between its subjective and objective aspects. When a person is said to have a certain identity owing to some characteristic she has, and with which she identifies, then we are thinking of subjective identity. If a person is said to have a certain identity owing to some characteristic she has, but with which she does not necessarily identify, then we are speaking of her objective identity. The chapter distinguishes fundamentally between the subjective and objective aspects of the concept. To a considerable extent, which of these two aspects we emphasize in our study of the concept will be a matter of theoretical decision that depends on nonarbitrary philosophical considerations having to do with themes at some distance from identity, such as autonomy and moral reasons but also questions of politics and social oppression.

Abstract One Kind of question that may motivate a philosophical examination of the concept of physical persistence is whether this concept is indispensable to our thought about the world, or whether we could, on the contrary, conceive of the world in some radically different way. Let me first consider this question with regard to the observable persistence of standard objects, like cars, and tables, and trees; in later sections I will extend the discussion to include the persistence of matter. (But it should be understood that special problems revolving around the persistence of persons are not to be treated until a later chapter, except perhaps in an occasional parenthetical aside.)

This chapter explores Hegel’s speculative identity thesis, defending the importance of Schelling for Hegel’s appropriation of Kant’s purposiveness theme. It provides an interpretation of Hegel’s first published text, the Differenzschrift, and analyzes the relation between “subjective subject-objects” and “objective subject-objects” as an early presentation of Hegel’s philosophical method. In addition to defending the contribution of Schelling, this chapter provides an interpretation of Fichte’s contribution via his notion of the self-positing activity of the I. It then turns to a reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, demonstrating that the notion of “negativity” can be understood along the lines of speculative identity. The chapter argues that Hegel presents life as constitutive for self-consciousness by way of a three-dimensional argument: the employment of an analogy; a transcendental argument; and a refutation of idealism argument. It concludes by briefly outlining how the speculative identity thesis is carried forward in the Science of Logic.

Abstract The papers in this volume constellate about fundamental philosophical issues concerning modality and identity: How are we to understand the concepts of metaphysical necessity and possibility? Is chance a basic ingredient of reality? How are we to make sense of claims about personal identity? Do numbers require distinctive identity criteria? Does the capacity to identify an object presuppose an ability to bring it under a sortal concept? In order to provide a guide to the reader I will provide a brief overview of the content of the papers collected here and some of the interrelations that obtain between them.

First we begin with a brief description of the process of information modeling followed by a very brief discussion of earlier attempts to address the philosophical foundations. Then we introduce four concepts from metaphysics that are highly relevant to information modeling. These four concepts are as old as philosophy itself and yet when applied to information modeling, they are as relevant to database design as they were to philosophers over the past few millennia. These four concepts are (a) the concept of identity, (b) the problem of universals, (c) teleology, and (d) the correspondence vs. coherence views of truth. Each concept will be explained in turn, as will its implications for information modeling. Each of these concepts also provides a foundation from which a theory of information modeling and, eventually, a theory of information systems can be built. So, following the introduction of the concepts, we will explain how they were identified.

This introductory chapter discusses philosophical issues in mind. For some time now consciousness has been at the center of discussions of the mind–body problem. One might say that the mind–body problem is the consciousness–brain problem. However, much the same problems that afflict consciousness also afflict unconsciousness: unconscious mental states are as problematic as conscious mental states, and for essentially the same reasons. The chapter also analyzes the concept of the paraconscious, which exists alongside consciousness and replicates it in crucial respects. It delves further into cognition and emotion, the second brain, awareness of time, mind–brain identity theories, actions and reasons, the relationship between consciousness and light, and the thought of language.

Relevance of the problem: the need to develop a new field of knowledge-security psychology, which could rely on the basic philosophical and psychological concept of security, methodologically, theoretically and practically able to provide a new field of knowledge integrative character. The purpose of the research: development of security psychology as a direction of fundamental socio-philosophical and psychological research. Hypothesis: it is possible to substantiate the psychological status of the concepts of "danger" and "security", which will give grounds to talk about their interdependence

The article defines the meaning of the phenomenological approach to the analysis of the concept of intersubjectivity in the context of social and philosophical problems of the balance of the Self and the Other. The discourse is based on the correlation of phenomenological orientation and communicative action in determining the mechanisms of identity of the Self in relation to the Other in the inseparability of social reality. A sequential analysis of prerequisites and research approaches aimed at testing the problem of intersubjectivity is carried out. The focus is placed on social phenomenolo

The article defines the meaning of the phenomenological approach to the analysis of the concept of intersubjectivity in the context of social and philosophical problems of the balance of the Self and the Other. The discourse is based on the correlation of phenomenological orientation and communicative action in determining the mechanisms of identity of the Self in relation to the Other in the inseparability of social reality. A sequential analysis of prerequisites and research approaches aimed at testing the problem of intersubjectivity is carried out. The focus is placed on social phenomenolo

It has become extremely important to revisit our teaching methodology along with pedagogical contents and objectives, in consideration of the impressive and sometimes overwhelming progress that the technology available to document, analyze and represent the complexity of our built and natural environments has reached, and also the role that it has been proactively playing in affecting our way of thinking, designing and building. A renewed “theory of formativity” (Pareyson)1 styles a knowledge that is generated by a constantly transforming process of “making,” in which methodologies, theoriesan

The authors define the concepts of consciousness, mind, reason, intellect. The most important properties of consciousness: understanding of the self, reflection, freedom, creativity. Mind is the ability to understand the absolute. Reason is the ability to understand the relative. Intellect is the ability of a subject to solve by rational and logical methods a wide class of tasks related to the life of the subject. Types of artificial intelligence (AI): weak, strong, super-strong AI. Problems that arise on the way of turning a weak AI into a strong one: freedom, trust, alienation. The main prob

The problem of the balance between society and personality, awareness of ‘individuality’, ‘personality’, as well as ‘publicity’ (publicness) are ranked among the central philosophical issues. There are many interpretations of them. And these matters remain critical in today’s ‘individualised’ society. Based on a philosophic-anthropological approach, and using comparative-historical methods, the authors trace the cultural-historical transformation of the subsistence of an individual in society from Antiquity to the present. An individual is characterised via such conceptions as ‘social type’, ‘

From the beginning, through to Antiquity and the Middle Ages, mankind has started from a belief in the existence of a substantial soul. Belief in a spirit substance gradually receded, giving way to a spirit wholly dependent on matter and strictly material causes. The human psyche does not easily adapt to the times, and, despite humanity's breakthroughs and changing conceptions regarding life and the world, the nucleus of magical thinking has continued to exist and manifest itself incongruously relative to modern circumstances. Antiquity offers a variety of examples in representing mental illne

среди представителей русской философии XIX–XX вв. было немало тех, кто пытался выявить характер взаимосвязи в процессе познания мира философии и математики. М.С. Аксенов создал метагеометрическую концепцию пространственно-временной модели мироздания, где утверждал, что воспринимаемые человеком объекты как трехмерные на самом деле четырехмерны и существуют в четырехмерном пространстве в абсолютном покое. Идея иллюзорности движения, изменения, развития объективного мира была фундаментом в рассуждениях М.С. Аксенова. Человек, в его понимании, живет в неизменяющейся Вселенной, находясь в непрерывн

With the advent of the 4th industrial revolution and disruption with traditional methods of construction, the pre-fabrication of constructive systems has never been so prominent. The competitiveness of the sector and the complexity of the projects have increased substantially, so that the survival of companies in this sector is associated with their ability to optimize resources and decrease the waste of their production. Thus, the application of Lean Manufacturing concepts, which focus on waste reduction, presents itself as an alternative not only viable, to provide mapping and waste reductio

Dynamic changes in Russian social life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the elimination of its rigid ideological framework influenced the development of our society. The turning points were not limited to economic and political changes. There was a radical change in the worldview paradigm, which, accordingly, influenced the content of ideals, values, life-sense attitudes, and rules of social interaction. The rearrangement of the components of the spiritual and semantic core of culture at the end of the 1990s testified to a crisis in this area. It was the crisis processes in culture t

The article updates the activities of regional broadcasters in the information space of the Luhansk region, where numerous enemy information attacks preceded the invasion of the Russian occupation forces. Main objective of the study - mass media activities of the Luhansk region’s television companies in the pre-war and post-war periods and the specifics of the integration of the (pro) Russian agenda into the region’s information space. The study was done out using a descriptive, classification, comparative-historical method, which made it possible to consider the regional telespace in the cont