The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy

Values provide evidence of spirit in human life. Spirit is a creative mental force for realizing values, a force which shows signs of a superindividual growth and decline, a life of its own. This paper documents the historic rise and decline of several waves of human creativity. I also consider possible factors that would account for the rise and fall: the presence of new material, social encouragement and/or patronage, temperamental egotism on the part of creators, the attraction of pioneering talent, or a collective or superindividual spirit.

The purpose of this address is to argue for the following theses: (1) the concept of transcendentality can be associated not only with idealism but also with materialism; (2) such a connection was made possible by Karl Marx's theory; and (3) in the development of Marxism up to now, theory has been tied to a political movement, which is an error of principle, for what survives of it is a kind of social ethics which should more appropriately be called Marxism. Transcendence and immanence are notions of relationship. Values exist sensually above the senses: e.g., the aesthetic value of a painting is not identical with the material of the canvas and the oils on it, although it cannot exist without them. Persons who do not recognize values that are transcendent compared to the merely natural immanence or, to put it in another way, those for whom nothing is sacred are in fact not truly human.

I attempt to look into the issue of the ranks of values comprehensively and progressively. Anti-values can be classified into the following six categories by ascending order: (1) the act of destroying the earth-of annihilating humankind and all other living organisms; (2) the act of mass killing of people by initiating a war or committing treason; (3) the act of murdering or causing death to a human being; (4) the act of damaging the body of a human being; (5) the act of greatly harming society; (6) all other crimes not covered by the above. Higher values can be classified into the following five categories in descending rank: (1) absolute values such as absolute truth, absolute goodness, absolute beauty and absolute holiness; (2) the act of contributing to the development and happiness of humankind; (3) the act of contributing to the nation or the state; (4) the act of contributing to the regional society; (5) the act of cultivating oneself and managing one's family well. Generally, people tend to pursue happiness more eagerly than goodness, but because goodness is the higher value than happiness, we ought to pursue goodness more eagerly. In helping people to get the right sense of values and to internalize it, education and enlightenment of citizens based on the guidance of conscience rather than compulsion will be highly effective.

If Paideia means education in the classical sense, that is, education of the whole person, then authentically justifying such education in the modern world is extremely problematic. We are first drawn to practical defenses of a liberal education, that it is in itself of service and useful, both to society and to the individual. However, a practical defense of Paideia in the classical sense simply comes across as feeble and even a bit desperate (that is, if it escapes sounding pompous) and every savvy student knows it. Far better, it seems, to take courses aimed at general problem solving, or at honing critical thinking skills, or at developing socio-political sophistication, than to read Shakespeare or Plato.

While some philosophers tend to exclude any significance of emotion for the moral life, others place them in the center of both the moral life and the theory of value judgment. This paper presents a confrontation of two classic positions of the second type, namely the position of Hume and Scheler. The ultimate goal of this confrontation is metatheoretical — particularly as it concerns the analysis of the relations between the idea of emotion and the idea of value in this kind of theory of value judgment. In conclusion, I point to some important theoretical assumptions which underlie the positions of both thinkers despite all the other differences between them.

Global Peace is the summum bonum, so we must know its negative as well as positive meanings. Simultaneously peace must be understood in all its interrelated but theoretically differentiated dimensions as personal, social, national, international and global. Today, humankind is suffering from multidimensional crises such as terrorism, population-explosion, denial of human rights, economic inequality, racial discrimination, ideological extremism, religious intolerance, social injustice, ecological imbalance, consumerism, oppression of weak, etc. These peace-related issues compel us to lay down the fundamental principles of a radical global ethics that expects us to realize our roles and duties regarding global peace. It includes the role and ideals of educationalists, the duties of scientists, philosophers, and thinkers, the inculcation of human values such as nonviolence, love, etc.

The distinction between inherent and instrumental values in ethics could, in my view, be said to represent a contemporary version of both the eudaimonistic distinction between virtues as instruments and forms of happiness as the goals or ends to be achieved through these instruments, and of the deontological distinction between duties and the summum bonum to be, at least ultimately or in an afterlife, achieved through them. The paper identifies and explores what appears to be a threefold relationship between inherent and instrumental values. First, their mutual inseparability is found to be based in the very concept of instrumentality. Second, their parallelism in the relevant respects is seen also to be rooted in their instrumental relation. Third, and very significant, the inherent and instrumental values are discovered to be reversible so that what were inherent values can often become instrumental and vice-versa. Finally, and most importantly, the value and richness of human life is perceived to be nothing else than the function of the richness in values in ethics as well as in other spheres of human life.

Nozick's well-known Experience Machine argument can be considered a typically successful argument: as far as I know, it has not been discussed much and has been widely seen as conclusive, or at least convincing enough to refute the mental-state versions of utilitarianism. I believe that if his argument were conclusive, its destructive effect would be even stronger. It would not only refute mental-state utilitarianism, but all theories (whether utilitarian or not) considering a certain subjective mental state (happiness, pleasure, desire, satisfaction) as the only valuable state. I shall call these theories "mental state welfarist theories." I do not know whether utilitarianism or, in general, mental-state welfarism is plausible, but I doubt that Nozick's argument is strong enough to prove that it is not.

A well-known problem for preference-utilitarianism is to what extent it should exclude from consideration certain preferences. In this paper I focus on past preferences. I outline three general and some particular positions that a preference-utilitarian reasonably would want to take with regard to past preferences and why I think that endorsing each of these positions create new problems for the preference-utilitarian. At the end I sketch on a possible solution to the axiological problems here presented. However, although the pluralistic approach that I outline shares with preference-utilitarianism the idea that what is valuable is the satisfaction of preferences, it is not a viable option for a utilitarian. My conclusion is therefore that preference-utilitarianism faces a serious axilogical problem.

This paper discusses the nature of liberty from the point of view of value. Liberty is the highest value for liberals. The root of this liberal view is their particular conception of self. Rawls says 'the self is prior to the ends which are affirmed by it.' This is also the Kantian view of the self: the self is prior to its socially given roles and relationships. Therefore, no end is exempt from possible revision by the self. There is nothing wrong with this basic idea. In fact, all theories agree on free choice of life plan or self-determination. But they disagree about what package of rights and resources best enables people to pursue their own conceptions of the good. However, the liberal view of liberty is based on a metaphysically reasoned idealism. This results in a conception of liberty that is absolute, supreme, and has infinite value compared with other things. Communitarians have several arguments against the liberal view. I consider the following two points to be of utmost import: (1) The liberal view of the self is empty; (2) The liberal view ignores our embeddedness in communal practices. My reasoning is not exactly that of the communitarians. I view 'emptiness' as freedom associated with the substance of an action, which has a value that does not lie in itself.

Il est certain que, de plus en plus, on se rend compte du besoin de délimiter, de préciser l'idée de culture afin de rendre possible la différence entre le bon et le mauvais. En conséquence, l'humanité pourra surpasser la perplexité où elle se trouve à présent. Il est inadmissible d'accepter le nuisible et l'erreur comme manifestations de culture. S'agit-il d'un simple problème de sémantique? Ou bien, par ignorance ou confort, l'homme est-il en train d'assister passivement à l'essor des contre-valeurs en devenant complice de ce processus? Malgré la grande difficulté de la matière, nous pensons que l'idée de culture considérée comme instauration de la valeur mérite, en tant qu'un nouveau paradigme, en tant qu'idée directrice, l'attention et la réflexion de tous ceux qui souhaitent un monde meilleur.

I present the arguments of Gabriel Marcel which are intended to overcome the potentially negative impact of technology on the human. Marcel is concerned with forgetting or rejecting human nature. His perspective is metaphysical. He is concerned with the attitude of the "mere technician" who is so immersed in technology that the values which promote him as an authentic person with human dignity are discredited, omitted, denied, minimized, overshadowed, or displaced. He reviews the various losses in ontological values which curtail the full realization of the human person in his dignity. The impact of technology leads too often to a loss of the sense of the mystery of being and self, authenticity and integrity, the concrete and the existential, truth and dialogue, freedom and lover, humanity and community, fidelity and creativity, the natural and the transcendent, commitment and virtue, respect of the self and responsiveness to others, and especially of the spiritual and the sacred. Thus, the task of the philosopher is to be a watchman, un veilleur, on the alert for a hopeful resolution of the human predicament.

Today we live in a society in which hazards can no longer be regarded as mere side-effects of progress. How much more serious the problems we face today are is understood not only by seeing the magnitude of material or biological crises (such as environmental disruption), but also by discerning what we may call our 'epistemic and moral inability' — a crisis in our ability to cope with uncertainty both in science and morality. The purpose of this paper is to trace the origin of this crisis, and to problematize it as a defect of the form of human self-understanding in contemporary scientific-technological culture with the help of Hannah Arendt's reflection on human activities.

This paper is a discussion of the role played by the ideals of the Enlightenment in the invention and assessment of artifacts like the electric battery. The first electric battery was built in 1799 by Alessandro Volta, who was both a natural philosopher and an artisan-like inventor of intriguing machines. I will show that the story of Volta and the battery contains three plots, each characterized by its own pace and logic. One is the story of natural philosophy, a second is the story of artifacts like the battery, and the third is the story of the loose, long-term values used to assess achievement and reward within and outside expert communities. An analysis of the three plots reveals that late eighteenth-century natural philosophers, despite their frequent celebration of 'useful knowledge,' were not fully prepared to accept the philosophical dignity of artifacts stemming from laboratory practice. Their hesitation was the consequence of a hierarchy of ranks and ascribed competence that was well established within the expert community. In order to make artifacts stemming from laboratory practice fully acceptable within the domain of natural philosophy, some important changes had yet to occur. Still, the case overwhelmingly shows that artifacts rightly belong to the long and varied list of items that make up the legacy of the Enlightenment.

This paper deals the place of technology in contemporary culture, and the relationship between science and morality. A definition of technique as a social process has to emphasize the fact that technique means developing and enabling different fabricated material systems; it is also the action of environment transformation according to human necessities. The area of culture is not limited to classical values, conceived with traditional meanings, arts and human sciences, but also covers the values of the natural and technical sciences as well as the whole set of values implied by technique and technology. Far from being a marginal component of culture, technology interacts internally with philosophical fields such as epistemology, ontology, value theory, and ethics. It also partly overlaps partly with other fields. I suggest that science should not be considered as free of value and neutral from a moral viewpoint both because the scientist makes valuable judgments during scientific activity and because the applications of science have moral value and raise moral problems. There is thus a need for moral control that would deter the scientists from evildoing. The need for wisdom and a clear scientific attitude in our contemporary technical civilization is emphasized.

This paper is divided into four sections. The first provides a survey of some significant developments which today determine philosophical dealings with the subject of 'time.' In the second part it is shown how the question of time and the question of media are linked with one another in the views of two contemporary philosophers: Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty. In section three, the temporal implications of cultural practices which are developing in the new medium of the Internet are analyzed, and finally, related to my main theses.

This paper uses the theory of technoscience to shed light on the current criticisms against the emerging science of Artificial Life. We see that the science of Artificial Life is criticized for the synthetic nature of its research and its over reliance on computer simulations which is seen to be contrary to the traditional goals and methods of science. However, if we break down the traditional distinctions between science and technology using the theory of technoscience, then we can begin to see that all science has a synthetic nature and reliance on technology. Artificial Life researchers are not heretical practitioners of some pseudoscience; they are just more open about their reliance on technology to help realize their theories and modeling. Understanding that science and technology are not as disparate as was once thought is an essential step in helping us create a more humane technoscience in the future.

Contemporary technology in the form of electronically managed interactive telecommunications is compatible with the goals and values of the humanities. For Marx, machine-work tended toward being mechanically routine, repetitive, deskilled, and trivialized. In the case of discourse, the same criticism has been made of computerized communication. Immediacy is not authorial presence, but the experience of textuality that is maximized by participation in interactive communication. Bulletin board technology inverts the relationship between the degree of communicative interaction and the number of communicants. It is both mass communication and individualized participation. From the point of view of a theory of discourse, the bulletin board system is unique in that the ratio between the number of participants and the individualized nature of the interaction is directly proportional. One person's voice does not inhibit or repress the voice of another. It is the technological embodiment of the ideal speech situation of Habermas which allows for the maximum of democratic participation and which, by allowing everyone to have a voice, allows for the greatest amount of dissensus and dialectic.

Virtual reality is more than only high tech. We encounter this phenomenon in everyday media worlds and economy. The sign dominates the signed. Philosophy can describe this phenomenon by means of a different ontological analysis following Poppers theory of the three worlds and can prepare new ontological categories for knowledge of acting.

Can sport claim to be an educative means, and what becomes of Greek paideia in the world of sport? The author intends to answer these questions through the use of a semantic and historical clarification of the notions of sport and education. Indeed, on the one hand, sport appears like a social practice not much propitious to education; on the other hand, modern education seems to have deviated from the Greek paideia’s trajectory. Therefore, to take into account this deviation and, by doing so, to make precise the idea of education, and then demonstrate that sport carries all characteristics of modern rationality which has produced it, will allow the author to conclude that sport could be considered one of the preferential means of human beings’ formation. Nevertheless its educative function more likely belongs to the nature of "poïèsis" than to the nature of "praxis."