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0:06
For many tutorials now, we’ve studied the history of philosophy and logic throughout more than two thousand years of authors, concepts, schools of thought, and overall research. Hopefully it has become clear that philosophy, though serving as the bedrock of most sciences and the scientific method itself, is an ever-evolving discipline, always adapting and honing itself toward better inquiry. So even though people associate philosophy with classical names such as Plato,
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Kant, Aquinas, or Wittgenstein, there are many active philosophers working on a variety of novel and important ideas right now, throughout the entire world. Of course, many also still study the ones we have already discussed, providing many new insights and even discovering new sources, authors, and theories. But in these tutorials, we’ll take a look at some truly current ideas. And as with the rest of this series, this list is far from complete,
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but hopefully it will illustrate how philosophy is being done today. We’ll present some authors focused on ethics, epistemology, logic, and philosophy of language, with a few outliers in between, just as we did with the Frankfurt School alumni, naturalism, and experimental philosophy. First off, ethics. As we’ve seen, ethics had a wide array of developments during the 20th century. J. L. Mackie wrote against the objectivity of ethics from a naturalistic
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standpoint given the anthropological fact that different values occur in different peoples. His “argument for queerness” states that moral judgements are merely a reflection of cultural guides for behavior, which is useful but not logically “true”, since its connection to the natural world is “queer”, or “strangely unique”. Peter Singer is also a naturalist, but he focuses on utilitarianism in applied ethics, specifically bioethics. He understands
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morality within an interspecies perspective where all sentient living beings deserve the same amount of respect and recognition, regardless of one’s proximity to them – your child, a gorilla, or another person in a poor country far away. All should receive the same amount of sympathy from us. Richard Boyd, another naturalist, comes from the Cornell Realist school of metaethics, which treats moral judgment as objectively and cognitively present in the world – though it does
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not inherently motivate us to act accordingly. He defends a scientific approach to morality which reveals that “goodness” is not an object in the world but a function of sets of worldly states of affairs which are empirically analyzable. Akin to Mackie, Simon Blackburn developed a midway between realism such as Boyd’s and anti-realism such as Mackie’s, with his “quasi-realism”, a neo-Humean approach to morality where even though moral judgements do not express objective
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beliefs – thus being a non-cognitivist position – we treat them as being factually real when we utter them and use them in our everyday life. Against these largely naturalistic perspectives we have authors such as Charles Taylor, an analytic-turned-continental philosopher with the wide array of topics and ideas such a transition would incur. From a strong Wittgensteinian and Hegelian approach, he deals in hermeneutics, with topics such as the idea of
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the “self” as a Western liberal construction, absent from correlates in Eastern culture, a position which leads to his society-oriented political standpoint of communitarianism. Christine Korsgaard, on the other hand, focuses on the self in a neo-Kantian fashion, arguing for the existence of a moral practical identity which we all have, and which orients us. Morality is thus a practical endeavor, and through autonomy we are able to recognize the importance
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of ethical obligations and therefore follow them. Let’s now go to the Frankfurt School. As we know, the Frankfurt School was one of the most influential seedbeds of the 20th century, especially within continental philosophers, spawning several influential alumni which still participate in current debates. Jürgen Habermas was Adorno’s assistant, and thus one of the first to continue the school’s legacy. He treaded through several different areas such as sociology,
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linguistics, and pedagogy, among many others, developing an overall political and ethical theory interconnected with these findings. Akin to Rawls, he attempted to develop the moral grounds for a democratic theory, but instead of focusing on economic rationality, he developed the concept of “communicative reason”, integrating Wittgenstein’s perspective of language with Austin’s speech act theory, to form what he identified as a natural universal “end”
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to language: that of mutual understanding. Instead of Rawls’ “reasonability”, Habermas believes that actual consensus can be achieved within different groups in a democracy given proper dialogue, and proper analysis of these discourses would help clarify and understand each other using a tool he developed with Karl-Otto Apel called “discourse ethics”. Such a tool intends to deconstruct discourse in order to analyze background values and presupposed normativity
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not directly clear in them, which may be used by unaware speakers or to succinctly instill such values indirectly by an intentional agent. Axel Honneth also veered into similar fields by connecting the Frankfurt School perspective to later continentals such as Foucault and Habermas himself, besides Hegel, Taylor and Dewey. He also tries to understand and develop how a justice system can be improved under the fact of multiculturalism and the necessity
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of mutual respect and recognition. Rights, as mutual respect and social responsibility, solidarity to each one’s own individuality and traits, and love, both physical and emotional toward self-confidence, are the three modes of recognition people must develop toward a positive relationship with themselves and society. Their denial beckons social struggles, since they constitute an unjust treatment of citizens, and are a characteristic of oppressive systems.
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Progress thus can only arise from governmental and legal systems that respect and recognize idiosyncrasies toward personal integrity. Finally, though not properly a member of any area of school of thought, Hannah Arendt was an influential philosopher that studied the phenomenology of ethics, politics, and law regarding atrocities committed through human rights violations in fascism and totalitarianism. As a Jewish woman fleeing from Germany in the
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second World War, she directly witnessed some of these abhorrent crimes, and she wrote about the human condition, freedom, and even epistemology. One of her most famous concepts is the “banality of evil”, encompassing these areas by analyzing how one of the key figures in designing the Holocaust treated it and its inhumane intricacies as if it were mere bureaucracy from an everyday job instead of the machinations of an evil psychopath, as well as how totalitarian regimes
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nurture such banalization toward their goals. As we mentioned, these few authors surely are not fully representative of philosophical developments in these areas, but hopefully it paints an image of how debate has been progressing since the last century and throughout the history of philosophy. In the next tutorial, we’ll take a look at some authors in logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology, to further our understanding of the current status of this field.
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