The ‘Harm Principle’ and Information Disorder Online

Misinformation propagation in its current form is a global problem that requires urgent solutions. Historically, instances of misinformation publicly propagated can be found as far back as the sixth century AD.Scholars and researchers have generally settled for a definition of ‘information disorder’ that reveals three variants: misinformation, disinformation and malinformation. What should be of paramount importance, in the fight against information disorders, is the potential of false information to cause harm. The ‘harm principle’ was proposed by the British philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1859 and needs an upgrade for the social media age. One such upgrade is proposed by Cass Sunstein.

Discussing the Theory and Practice of Propelling Class Reading Club from the Aspect of Knowledge Management

In the 21st century, knowledge economy has been growing rapidly. In order to strengthen knowledge competitiveness and face the international competition of the new century, Taiwan should achieve the educational goal of lifelong learning, widely build up learning organizations, tend citizens who can learn through lives, and positively give impetus to whole people reading program. To meet the coming of learning society, knowledge management has become the key to tap the treasury of library-using education. Knowledge can be fully developed only by close sharing and intellectual interchange. Thus, it can diffuse effectively. Reading and pursuing knowledge are the motive power of working out one’s potentialities and inciting creative thinking. “Knowledge is power” is a wise saying of Francis Bacon, a British philosopher. He also stated, “Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.” This statement brings out very profound meanings. It verifies that reading can not only absorb the essence of books, but broaden one’s general knowledge. The Btitish Education Secretary, David Blunkett, said, “Turning the pages of a book is to open a window on the world. Books are the foundation on which other learning can be built.” The saying well indicates that reading is the communication between mind and mind. It is also a valuable secret of being vigorous and keeping away from loneliness.

The Pastness of the Past: Some Reflections on the Politics of Historization and the Crisis of Historicist Pastness

Berber Bevernage’s thinking is centered on the concept of the pastness of the past, which is the basis of historicism. The need to rethink this concept has become evident because of the crisis in historical consciousness proclaimed by a number of theorists of history and because the boundaries between the past and the present became blurred when the presentist “broad present” (Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s term) became dominant. The author does not demand a complete break with historicism, which can be both repressive and emancipatory in nature. He does insist distinguishing the past from simple chronological precedence and on considering it strictly as a “relational concept,” i.e. as dependent on the perception of the present, which should not be reduced to simple empirical observation. The pastness of the past always depends on understanding the present as a coherent historical context; in other words, it presupposes the idea of the present’s contemporaneity to itself. However, Bevernage relies on the works of the British philosopher Peter Osborne to argue that it is possible to speak about the “fiction of the contemporary” which is not confirmed by any empirical experience. At the same time, that fiction is not a mere illusion because it fulfills a pragmatically motivated and politically significant performative function. Bevernage would apply the concept of the pastness of the past in exactly the same way. He sees the attribution of the sign of pastness to one phenomenon or another as something that can be disputed because it always attempts to justify the existing relations of power. Historians are not the only ones responsible for creating the status of pastness. The author allows that other professional communities, particularly artists and lawyers can also take part in attributing pastness. The sense of the past that prevails in a culture arises from a multitude of locally produced senses of the past.

Schinkel, Anders. Wonder and Education: On the Educational Importance of Contemplative Wonder. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

In 2011, the British philosopher and Professor of Higher Education Research, Ronald Barnett wrote: “Universities are no longer permitted to be places of mystery, of uncertainty, of the unknown. The mystery of universities has ended.”1 This was said in times where the neoliberal agenda was at its zenith and marketisation and consumerization, performativity and commodification had great impact on universities. What Barnett called for was a recovery of the sense of wonder in the encounter and presence of mystery. What indeed is language? What on earth is a human being? What is fundamentally love? Friendship? Human consciousness? Human reality? Truth? etc., etc.

Wittgenstein’s Concept of Language Games

Austrian British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the greatest philosophers in the 20th century. He mostly works in analytic philosophical thought in topics as diverse as logic and language, perception and intention, ethic and religion, aesthetic and culture. Philosophers often create their own vocabularies by giving special meanings to ordinary terms and phrases. Wittgenstein coinages the term of “language games” and the ‘private language argument”. His argument on the language is the rules of the use of ordinary language is neither right nor wrong, neither true nor false, the language is merely useful for the particular applications in which they are applied . Language is defined not as a system of representation but as a system of devices for engaging in various sorts of social activity, hence ‘the meaning of the word is its use in the language.

Abstract Society in the Time of Plague

The global lockdown following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to generate all sorts of consequences: psychological, social, economic, and political. To hypothesize about what will emerge from the present situation is at this point both premature and impossible. The impossibility comes primarily from the gravity and vastness of this emergency and from the lack of intellectual resources to deal with the challenge. At the same time, however, the need to get a grasp of the condition in which we have found ourselves is both understandable and irresistible. One way of responding, at least partially, to the demand and its possible consequences may be to refer to the concept of abstract society, an idea formulated 75 years ago by the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper.

Philosophy’s dark heir: On Nick Land’s abstract horror fiction

Nick Land is a British philosopher who developed a compelling transcendental materialist critique of anthropocentric philosophies throughout the 1990s before leaving academia at the turn of the century and moving to Shanghai. While he is now best known for his controversial pro-capitalist political writings, he has also recently developed a theory of what he calls ‘abstract horror fiction’, as well as applied it in practice by writing two abstract horror novellas. Although one might think that Land’s horror fiction, like his recent far-right politics, marks a new and independent body of work from his earlier academic writings as a philosopher, this article argues that Land turns to writing horror fiction, because he sees the genre as a better compositional form than traditional philosophy to continue his critique of anthropomorphism insofar as it is able to stage a confrontation with that which lies beyond all parochial human comprehension. I begin by outlining Land’s earlier critique of anthropocentric philosophies with recourse to the brute fact of humanity’s inexorable extinction as a way to undermine their attempts to project human values and concepts onto an inhuman cosmos for all time. I then examine Land’s theory of abstract horror to see how he envisions horror fiction as the best aesthetic means for transcendentally channeling the traumatic limits of human experience. I conclude with an analysis of Land’s two horror novellas, Phyl-Undhu and Chasm, to draw out the ways in which his earlier critical philosophy continues to inform their literary motifs. What ultimately emerges from this analysis of Land’s fiction is a conception of horror as the dark heir to critical philosophy.

John Locke at the Polish Brothers school

The goal of this article is to show the influence of Polish Brothers on the British philosopher John Locke. As an example, it will be point out the influence of Polish Brothers on the very influential text of Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration and other writings of this philosopher. Only in recent years it was accepted that Locke borrowed the concepts like tolerance and rationality of religious beliefs from Polish Brothers.

Understanding the Esoteric through Progressive Awareness

Many researchers of Western esotericism today assume a “methodological agnosticism” whereby they limit themselves to historical and textual verification. They do not adjudicate whether the specific esoteric tradition studied is genuine or spurious, reasonable or unsound, grounded in a spiritual reality or premised in fantastical impossibilities. In this article, I draw on G.I. Gurdjieff’s understanding of the “Law of Three” as extended by British philosopher and Gurdjieff associate J.G. Bennett to argue that a phenomenological approach is a valuable interpretive complement to methodological agnosticism because it offers a reliable conceptual and methodological means for probing esoteric claims as they might be understood via firsthand encounter and experience. Bennett particularized Gurdjieff’s presentation of the Law of Three by describing it in terms of six triads; i.e., systems of three forces that interact to sustain a specific action, process, or happening. In this article, I draw on my ongoing understanding of Gurdjieff’s Law of Three and Bennett’s six triads to suggest that esoteric knowledge is not necessarily “hidden” or “beyond the ordinary” but can unfold in a process of progressive awareness whereby the student engages in an empathetic, deepening understanding of phenomena. Instead of the “outsider” perspective of methodological agnosticism, one draws on an “insider” perspective of committed, first-person involvement.

The formation of the narrative and the performative in public communication

Since the British philosopher John Austin, narratives and performatives have been con­sidered as opposite concepts covered by the generic concept of speech act. At the same time, these concepts were separated according to whether a narrative, inducement, a description, or an imperative was present in the text. Similar to the narrative, the performative is created under pressure from various external factors associated with the system of public communica­tions, to which the author is exposed, and a multitude of reasons that reflect in his or her mind external processes. All these factors and influences transmute in the course of text crea­tion; the viewer/reader consumes ready-made information, which invariably bears an imprint of the author's habitus. When creating a text, the author conveys his or her desires and ex­presses his or her attitude to the chosen problem. This study aims to answers two questions. Can a narrative have at its core an explicit manipulative basis or a hidden motive? Can the picture of the world, which develops, inter alia, under the influence of narratives, serve as a pattern for decision-making by the viewer/reader? It is necessary to this end to identify the relationship between the performative and the narrative (there are several types of these rela­tionships). To answer the above question, the genesis of narratives is considered, possible nar­rative–performative combinations analysed, and the effects of performatives on the formation of the intentional component of the narrative established. The findings suggest that each nar­rative contains at least one performative and that the narrative is based on the performative and contains a manipulative component.