Best Compressions Garmentsfor Outer Thighs

Philosophy: From the thinkers of the ivory tower

philosophers seek new answers to old questions of basic human / Scientific American twelve-part series starts

From: Scientific American, March 2011

What is man? Does he have free will? What is consciousness? What can we know? Can we understand others? What about the rights of man? What is justice? How language acts to think?

Many of the big questions of humanity have been raised by philosophers of antiquity. But in a world that is changing faster than ever before, is it to find new answers to these fundamental questions - and there are new ones arising from a present that is more complex, in the almost seven billion people the planet settle to be and have also competed in the science and technology with an unexpected triumph.

It should not really surprise that even philosophers respond to such signs of the times and look for new answers to fundamental questions of time and humanity. Why is the scientific spectrum is these issues in a twelve-part series - starting with the current March issue. Even in the first episode is about "Canned": "Who am I?" asks the philosopher of science, Albert Newen Bochum, who took over the scientific coordination of the whole series. And treated in the same issue of the Berlin philosopher Michael Pauen the issue of free will and speaks of a "question of self-determination." It seems that traditional philosophers leave their ivory tower and intensify its efforts to provide empirical evidence for their theories. Unless the signs deceive, it goes through this oldest academic discipline of the West now literally a change of thinking.

This is evident when you look at the situation out a few years ago before our eyes. Philosophy - that was considered by many as a discipline that is buried in historic questions of their own subjects, and among scientists, it was often the comment: "The philosophy that we need, we make ourselves" But evidently, times have changed. This was also the fact to do that now a younger generation has grown philosophers who take themselves and the world re-examined. And it is due to two changes: the triumph of analytical philosophy and the resulting internationalization of the tray and on a close alliance with the natural sciences. Apparently, now operated a philosophy that strives to "always at the height of the natural sciences" to act.

what is so new, the philosophy at length from a study of the history in the modern era of the 21 Century, catapulted? Albert Newen positioned not the philosophy (as before), but rather next to the other disciplines - with which we must cooperate. Moreover, the analytical philosophy of "the argumentative standard" of the subject raised significantly and established a unified form. It could certainly be different assumptions, "but only a form of reasoning".

Finally, aim, according to Newell, "other subjects as significant control and source of philosophical theory" be included, especially as the empirical sciences. Newell calls to step out on that point from the shadow of his father on Kant, with its outmoded self-image, "that philosophy is not one bit need to take care of empiricism and take care not to".

Fortunately, seems among philosophers such an attitude no longer a majority: In the entrance interview, the series from the March issue of spectrum speaks Julian Nida-Rümelin, currently president of the German Philosophical Society, by the new spirit that has engulfed his guild: 'Philosophy as a discipline is now less in the ivory tower than ever before. "