Natürliche Arten Ein großer Teil unserer Erkundung der Welt besteht darin, die Objekte und Prozesse, denen wir begegnen, zu kategorisieren oder zu klassifizieren, sowohl im wissenschaftlichen als auch im alltäglichen Kontext. Es gibt verschiedene, vielleicht unzählig, Möglichkeiten, Objekte in verschiedene Arten oder Kategorien zu sortieren, aber das wird allgemein angenommen, unter den unzähligen möglichen Klassifizierungsarten, Eine Gruppe ist privilegiert. Philosophie bezieht sich auf Kategorien wie

History of Love What is love? We all wish to have the answer to one of the most universal, mysterious, and all-permeating phenomena on this planet. And even if we perhaps have a special feeling and intuitive insight that love “is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things,” as Waldo Tobler said, we still have not found and offered

Francis Bacon (1561—1626) Sir Francis Bacon (later Lord Verulam and the Viscount St. Albans) was an English lawyer, statesman, essayist, historian, intellectual reformer, Philosoph, and champion of modern science. Early in his career he claimed “all knowledge as his province” and afterwards dedicated himself to a wholesale revaluation and re-structuring of traditional learning. To take the place of the established tradition (a miscellany of Scholasticism,

The Bakhtin Circle The Bakhtin Circle was a 20th century school of Russian thought which centered on the work of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975). The circle addressed philosophically the social and cultural issues posed by the Russian Revolution and its degeneration into the Stalin dictatorship. Their work focused on the centrality of questions of significance in social life in general and artistic creation in particular,

The Hard Problem of Consciousness The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why any physical state is conscious rather than nonconscious. It is the problem of explaining why there is “something it is like” for a subject in conscious experience, why conscious mental states “light up” and directly appear to the subject. The usual methods of science involve explanation of functional, dynamical,

Plato: Political Philosophy Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.E.) developed such distinct areas of philosophy as epistemology, Metaphysik, Ethik, und Ästhetik. His deep influence on Western philosophy is asserted in the famous remark of Alfred North Whitehead: “the safest characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” He was also the prototypical political philosopher whose ideas had a