Academic literature on the topic 'Natural Ontological Attitude'

I present the arguments of Gabriel Marcel which are intended to overcome the potentially negative impact of technology on the human. Marcel is concerned with forgetting or rejecting human nature. His perspective is metaphysical. He is concerned with the attitude of the "mere technician" who is so immersed in technology that the values which promote him as an authentic person with human dignity are discredited, omitted, denied, minimized, overshadowed, or displaced. He reviews the various losses in ontological values which curtail the full realization of the human person in his dignity. The impact of technology leads too often to a loss of the sense of the mystery of being and self, authenticity and integrity, the concrete and the existential, truth and dialogue, freedom and lover, humanity and community, fidelity and creativity, the natural and the transcendent, commitment and virtue, respect of the self and responsiveness to others, and especially of the spiritual and the sacred. Thus, the task of the philosopher is to be a watchman, un veilleur, on the alert for a hopeful resolution of the human predicament.

This chapter argues that Aristotle’s enquiry on the nature and meaning of monstrosity is rooted in his positive attitude toward the knowledge of lower nature, which enjoy the same status of the science of higher beings. Heavens and earth are thus connected through the divine principle that is active throughout the whole nature. Gods thus become author of, but also responsible for, what happens in nature, and Aristotle’s argument provides the ground for every future theodicy. Monstrosity plays a major role in this philosophical approach. Aristotle develops the opposition between the normal and the abnormal development, through the concept of accidental necessity, namely the necessity that is at stake in natural processes that not always happen in the same way. Monsters are of pivotal importance in this ontological picture, because of their paradoxical ambiguity. On the one hand, they are the sign and symptom or a resistant nature, which opposes itself to Aristotle’s major ontological invention, namely the form and the final cause. On the other hand, without this hyatus between formal perfection and actual reality, nature would not exist in the way we experience it: there would be no diversity, no better and worse, no normal and monstrous. Monstrosity is necessary for Aristotle to explain nature and its ontological structure based on the substitition of dynamic forms and ends to both the static ideas of Plato and the exclusively material reality of atomists.

Is the synthesis a complete and satisfactory evolutionary theory? It would be a trivial and derogatory exercise indeed to depict the synthesis in utterly simplistic terms and then turn around and conclude that it is incomplete and unsatisfactory. Though I have subjected the synthesis to a series of purifying distillations through the course of this book so far, I have in mind by no means solely Mayr’s (1980, p. 1) two-sentence summary of the synthesis as I pose the question of just how complete, workable, and satisfactory a theory of the evolutionary process it is. No serious student of evolutionary theory could ever claim that the modem synthesis is “just population genetics.” Many more phenomena are included than the statics and dynamics of genetic change in populations. What does seem to be true of the synthesis in general is that it focuses its concerns on a certain range of biological entities and attendant processes, and espouses attitudes and ontological positions on others that appear (to me) to exclude the latter from effective integration into the theory per se. Specifically, the synthesis focuses on genes; their replication, recombination, and mutation; and the fate of allelic variation within populations. But species—certainly not the sole province of population genetics—are very much a part of the synthesis, if equivocally so. If it is true that most evolutionary phenomena considered by the synthesis are construed, at least in principle, to be explicable in terms of the dynamics of selection and drift of allelic variation in populations, it is not because other sorts of phenomena, such as macroevolutionary trends, are alleged not to exist. The synthesis takes the (on the whole commendable) attitude of the Missourian who must be shown. We have a highly corroborated theory of the origin, maintenance, and modification of adaptations—through pure, narrowly defined natural selection. The burden of demonstration lies on anyone who would maintain either that some other process builds such (organismic) adaptation or that an additional process (or more than one) is also at work in evolution. Certainly the entire discussion on levels of selection, a discussion to which I return in this chapter, is structured in this general sort of way.

The analysis of theories and models of radicalization existing in psychology and sociology is given. The complexity and transitivity of the world, the emerging methodological trends in psychology, the change of postmodern discourse to metamodernism require new psychological approaches to a research of this phenomenon, which can take into account the role of cultural factors and anthropological turn, as well as space and time as ontological constants of reality. Theoretical: theoretical and methodological analysis of scientific literature, comparison, generalization, interpretation. The paper s