Environmental Ethics The field of environmental ethics concerns human beings’ ethical relationship with the natural environment. While numerous philosophers have written on this topic throughout history, environmental ethics only developed into a specific philosophical discipline in the 1970s. This emergence was no doubt due to the increasing awareness in the 1960s of the effects that technology, industry, economic expansion and population growth were having on

Johann Georg Hamann (1730—1788) Johann Georg Hamann was the philosophically most sophisticated thinker of the German Counter-enlightenment. Born in 1730 in Königsberg in eastern Prussia, Hamann was a contemporary and friendly acquaintance of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and in many ways Hamann’s career can be seen in parallel to that of his great friend. Like Kant, Hamann attended the University of Königsberg, and in his

Omniscience and Divine Foreknowledge Omniscience is an attribute having to do with knowledge; it is the attribute of “having knowledge of everything.” Many philosophers consider omniscience to be an attribute possessed only by a divine being, such as the God of Western monotheism. Tuttavia, the Eastern followers of Jainism allow omniscience to be an attribute of some human beings. But what exactly is it to

Stoic Ethics The tremendous influence Stoicism has exerted on ethical thought from early Christianity through Immanuel Kant and into the twentieth century is rarely understood and even more rarely appreciated. Throughout history, Stoic ethical doctrines have both provoked harsh criticisms and inspired enthusiastic defenders. The Stoics defined the goal in life as living in agreement with nature. Humans, unlike all other animals, are constituted by

Teoria dell'informazione integrata della coscienza Teoria dell'informazione integrata (IIT) offre una spiegazione per la natura e la fonte della coscienza. Proposto inizialmente da Giulio Tononi nel 2004, afferma che la coscienza è identica a un certo tipo di informazione, la cui realizzazione richiede attività fisica, non semplicemente funzionale, integrazione, e che può essere misurato matematicamente secondo la metrica phi. La teoria tenta un equilibrio tra

Understanding in Epistemology Epistemology is often defined as the theory of knowledge, and talk of propositional knowledge (questo è, “S knows that p”) has dominated the bulk of modern literature in epistemology. Tuttavia, epistemologists have recently started to turn more attention to the epistemic state or states of understanding, asking questions about its nature, relationship to knowledge, connection with explanation, and potential status as a