Psychotherapy is an activity which takes many forms and which has many aims. The present paper argues that it can be viewed as a form of moral suasion. Kant's concepts of free will and ethics are described and these are then applied to the processes and outcome of psychotherapy. It is argued that his ideas, by linking rationality, free will and ethics into a single philosophical system, offer a...

The paper uses Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about the relationship between thought, language, and objects of the world to explore the assumption that OO-thinking resembles natural thinking. The paper imports from research in linguistic philosophy to computer science education research. I show how UML class diagrams (i.e., an artificial context-free language) correspond to the logically perfec...

Over the last three decades, the philosophy of Karl Raimund Popper has had a strong influence on the field of systematic biology. Unequivocally, no other philosopher's work has had such an influence during this formative period in systematics. Much, but not all, of the early discourse on Popper and systematics dealt with the philosophical basis of systematics as a science. More recently Popper'...

The papers presented here offer great contrast to the usual philosophical discussions. They are rigorous treatments of philosophical problems that are fully informed about research in artificial intelligence, and are directly concerned with the specific logical and epistemological issues that arise in attempting to automate reasoning and represent knowledge. Each one speaks directly to the conc...

The text deals with the term “critical thinking”, so popular in today’s educational theories and even amongst philosophers. If a critic should be radical, they consistent, this case, meaning that one who insist on critical thinking subject itself to criticism. hypothesis is logically inconsistent but also problematic broader philosophical, metaphysical, anthropological context. Namely, we will ...

The author presents a set of philosophical assumptions that provide a different language for thinking about and responding to the persistent questions: "How can our therapy practices have relevance for people's everyday lives in our fast changing world, what is this relevance, and who determines it?" "Why do some shapes of relationships and forms of talk engage while others alienate? Why do som...

"The Iliac Passion" traces a return from the new but busy and rapidly growing discipline of "bioethics" to its source in "fundamental philosophical inquiry." The dilemma between bioethics and medicine is examined in two ways. First, the philosophical concept of the "big question" is presented. If we ask of life or of human experience "What does it all mean?", the "it" needs to be defined, and w...

Thirty-five years ago, Gunnar Olsson was teaching at the University of Michigan while I was visiting for two years at the University of Toronto. I was then involved in "quantitative geography", quite new and popular at the time. But my curiosity went beyond matrix calculus or Volterra-Lotka distribution, into philosophy and particularly into Hegel's logic. I got in touch with Gunnar : both, we ...

The science of complexity is based on a new way of thinking that stands in sharp contrast to the philosophy underlying Newtonian science, which is based on reductionism, determinism, and objective knowledge. This paper reviews the historical development of this new world view, focusing on its philosophical foundations. Determinism was challenged by quantum mechanics and chaos theory. Systems th...