598. Do plants have intelligence?  It has bee...
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3d ago
598. Do plants have intelligence?  It has been written that plants have intelligence. I think that is misguided.  Plants do have an impressive ability to adapt. Green plants grow upward to the light. Their roots grow downwards. Flowers open at daybreak and close at night. They have colours that change, and spread odours and offer honey to attract insects for pollination. They are adaptive in many ways, but this does not prove intelligence. I have proposed to use the notions of ‘assimilation’, absorption of features of the environment, into existing frames of response, and ‘accommodat ..read more
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597. Aim of life According to Nietzsche, the human...
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2M ago
597. Aim of life According to Nietzsche, the human being has an urge to manifest itself, fired by its ‘will to power’. According to Spinoza it struggles to survive, in what he called ‘conatus’. From biology we know that life struggles against decay, the increase of entropy. All this can be done egotistically, in self-interest, and it can be done benevolently, with regard to others. In the foregoing I proposed that people should go for spiritual, intellectual and social expansion. Why are spiritual, intellectual and social expansion good? They arise from communicative interaction, and contribut ..read more
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595 Rational or reasonable  The ages of reaso...
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2M ago
595 Rational or reasonable  The ages of reason and Enlightenment, in the 17th and 18th century, were obsessed by reason. Following Descartes, people saw body and mind as separate. Ideal knowledge was context-independent, with universal truths, as in geometry. The body was part of chaotic, variable nature and not a respectable subject for science. Emotions overturned reason, and were to be avoided, to maintain objectivity and ‘clear and distinct ideas’, as Descartes called them  There was a revival of 16th century humanism in the second half of the 20th century, which was more sceptic ..read more
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593. Cycle of ideas in the history of philosophy &...
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3M ago
593. Cycle of ideas in the history of philosophy  According to the account given by Stephen Toulmin, in his book ’Cosmopolis’, the Renaissance of the 16th century, with the humanists Montaigne, Erasmus and Shakespeare, was followed by the modernist ‘anti-renaissance’ in the 17th century and the Enlightenment of the 18th century engendered by Galilei, Descartes, Newton, Kant, Spinoza, and the industrial revolution and imperialism in the 19th century, until a revival of ‘neo renaissance’ and anti-Enlightenment in the 20th century. Here I follow Toulmin, but will add an idea of my own concer ..read more
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592. Dutch civil war  I have a tenacious nigh...
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3M ago
592. Dutch civil war  I have a tenacious nightmare that after the victory in the recent Dutch elections for parliament of the extreme rightist party PVV, we are in an uncertain period that might develop in a civil war. The PVV has items in its programme that go against the constitution and the legal system. It wants to discontinue help to Ukraine, exit from the EU, stop environmental spending, stop the entry of refugees, suppress Islamic citizenship and schooling, and outlaw the Koran. With this, it is difficult to engineer a cabinet, and the attempt might fail. The PVV will be acceptable ..read more
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 591. Counterenlightenment.   In earlier...
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3M ago
 591. Counterenlightenment.   In earlier items in this blog I discussed the Counter Enlightenment of Vico, Hamann, Kierkegaard, Adorno, Nietzsche and the postmodern French philosophers. Foucault, Gadamer, Lyotard, Derrida, and Rorty. They criticised the dominance of reason, universalism, absolutism, equilibrium, mono-disciplinarity, and static, rigid world views.   In his book ‘Cosmopolis’ Stephen Toulmin argued that there was an earlier attempt, with theb humanism of Erasmus, and Montaigne, who pleaded for tolerance, diversity, individualism,  The king of France Henry IV ..read more
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589 Selection environment Bruno Latour rejects not...
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4M ago
589 Selection environment Bruno Latour rejects notions from evolutionary theory such as selection environment, system, as a whole with collaborating parts, and homeostasis as equilibration of a system, where the parts collaborate to maintain the whole. His argument is that agents interact with their environment and thus shape their environment as much as they are affected by it. I think this a mistake. Shaping the environment does not exclude being selected by it. If organisms A, B and C affect each other, this can favour their survival, in symbiosis, but can also go against it, in parasitism ..read more
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 587. Guilt and broken relations   Relat...
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4M ago
 587. Guilt and broken relations   Relations are regularly broken. Which side is guilty? Both sides can be. Relations often break when trust is betrayed because agreements are not honoured, in letter or intent. But intent can be vague; a matter of interpretation and memory, and not everything can be fixed in black on white. That is inevitable, because one cannot investigate, document and control everything. That can mean that the victimised partner has been mistaken in extending trust, from naivety or a misplaced assumption of loyalty. Trust can be dumb. Trust is emotional because it ..read more
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586. Guilt and causation   One would say that...
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5M ago
586. Guilt and causation   One would say that if you are not the cause of something bad, you cannot be guilty of it. But this is more complicated than you might think. What is cause? There are several kinds. I use Aristotle’s sevenfold causality, discussed before in this blog. They are as follows: The ‘efficient’ cause (the agent, actor), the ‘final’ cause (goal, motive), the ‘ material’ cause (means used),  the ‘formal’ cause (method), the ‘conditional’ cause (circumstances), the example or model followed, the ‘exemplary’ cause. A carpenter makes a chair out of wood, according to hi ..read more
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 Blog 584 After philosophy   If late Fre...
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8M ago
 Blog 584 After philosophy   If late French Continental Philosophy indicates that traditional philosophy has pursued illusions of fixity, what should philosophers now do? They can study, more or less like scientists, processes of change, development, transformation, as I have been trying to do concerning knowledge, language, ethics, existence and society, in a book I recently published, with the title ‘Dynamic coherence of Continental Philosophy’.   As soon as one names a feature of a process, isn’t that again something that is fixed? If one names anything, does not that imply f ..read more
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