Ancient Chinese philosophy already developed a philosophy of humanitarianism or humanity in the general sense. The concept of "Ren" / "Jen" was indeed a main idea already in Confucianism. It was to my mind Mencius, who was the most explicit, if not even the first, philosopher of what I call concrete humanity. The article takes up Albert Schweitzer's discussion of MengZi's philosophical humanita...

Choosing an appropriate research strategy is difficult. It requires a deep and honest reflection of one’s own beliefs. It requires commitment to the relationship between the philosophical trinity, the research paradigm, and the research methodology or methodologies. The philosophical trinity answers the questions ‘What exists?’, ‘How do I know?’, and ‘What is valuable? This paper argues that th...

Recently some results have been presented which show that certain kinds of deterministic descriptions and indeterministic descriptions are observationally equivalent (Werndl 2009a, Werndl 2011). These results prompt interesting philosophical questions, such as what exactly they show or whether the deterministic or indeterministic description is preferable. There is hardly any philosophical disc...

I propose the next steps in the neuropragmatic approach to philosophy that has been advocated by Solymosi and Shook (2013). My focus is the initial process of inquiry implicit in addressing philosophical questions of cognition and mind by utilizing the tools of neuroscientific research. I combine John Dewey’s pattern of inquiry with Charles Peirce’s three forms of inference in order to outline ...

In this article, we provide an overview of what various philosophers throughout the ages have claimed about the nature of happiness, and we discuss to what extent psychological science has been able to substantiate or refute their claims. We first address concerns raised by philosophers regarding the possibility, desirability, and justifiability of happiness and then turn to the perennial quest...

A noticeable push toward using agricultural crops for ethanol production and for undertaking research to expand the range of possible biofuels began to dominate discussions of agricultural science and policy in the United States around 2005. This paper proposes two complementary philosophical approaches to examining the philosophical questions that should be posed in connection with this turn o...

The paper criticizes epistemological conceptions of analytic or conceptual truth, on which assent to such truths is a necessary condition of understanding them. The critique involves no Quinean scepticism about meaning. Rather, even granted that a paradigmatic candidate for analyticity is synonymous with a logical truth, both the former and the latter can be intelligibly doubted by linguistical...