Self-Knowledge

This article stresses the main lines of Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy on the nature of the body-soul union. Following Aristotle, Aquinas sees the soul as a ‘principle of life’ which is intimately bound to a body. Together they form a non-contingent composition. In addition, the distinctive feature of the human soul is rationality, which implies that a human needs a mind to be what it is. However, this is not to say, as Descartes proposes, that the reason that I am a human is that I am fully self-conscious. On the contrary, I will show that self-consciousness is not necessarily a key to defining a human being. To that aim, and based on Aquinas’s views, I draw a distinction between what I will call ‘egos’ and ‘selves’.

A widely accepted thesis in the philosophy of friendship is what I call "the self-knowledge thesis," which says that good friendship is essentially such as to conduce to self-knowledge.  I argue in this paper that the self-knowledge thesis is false.  Good friendship need not conduce to self-knowledge. In fact, there are certain characteristic goods of friendship that may sometimes require for their actualization that we forego seeing ourselves correctly.

"Work is changing profoundly in new digital age. The whole world of work is in evolution. The old employment system of secure, lifelong jobs with predictable advancement and stable pay is dead. For some time now we’ve observed a greater focus on flexibility, mobility, and the ability of quick adaptation of workers. The new era of Work 2.0 is coming driven by: work virtualisation, nonroutine creativity, hyperspecialisation, and reduction of communication, coordination and interactions costs. This calls for a different approach to management and work. However, technology is a double-edged sword, with the power to both liberate and enslave.

The recession is said to be over, but you’ll never get your old job back – it’s disappeared and you can’t even blame the Chinese! Your job no longer exists – it’s been automated. Book "Work 2.0” isn’t just a description of what is happening to the labor market, how we're working nowadays, it’s a complete how-to guide for successfully navigating today’s treacherous jobs environment, mitigating the risks of job loss, job insecurity, and increasing automation. Book is discussing the repercussions of automation, changes in the economic balance between East and West in terms of work, the growing importance of innovation and creativity for creating value, how companies can take advantage of the new situation and how can individuals stay competitive on the labour market.

How do you survive and thrive in the new labour market? How can workers cope in an economy which doesn’t generate stable lifelong careers? How can companies remain competitive and manage armies of dispersed hyperspecialists? You’ve become the newest victim of Work 2.0, a force you can’t possibly fight – but you can join it! If you are looking for a job – why not create one for yourself? If your company is losing its best talent – why not listen to what your workers are saying. Let them work anywhen. After all, there is nowhere to hide from the wave of creative destruction. "

Frege proposed his doctrine of unsaturatedness as a solution to the problems of the unity of the proposition and the unity of the sentence. I show that Frege’s theory is mystical, ad hoc, ineffective, paradoxical and entails that singular terms cannot be predicates. I explain the traditional solution to the problem of the unity of the sentence, as expounded by Mill, which invokes a syncategorematic sign of predication and the connotation and denotation of terms. I streamline this solution, bring it up to date and contrast the resulting conventionalist account with Frege’s unsaturatedness account. I argue that the conventionalist account provides a clear and intelligible solution to the problem of the unity of the sentence which is free of the defects of Frege’s account. I suggest that the problem of the unity of the proposition is spurious. I recommend that the notion of unsaturatedness be extruded from serious debate.

The paper tries to outline the concept of world Donald Davidson operates with in his work. What is interesting about it is that it allows for objectivity by being commonly shared and known and at the same time escapes the trap of positing meanings by consisting of ready-made, referentially scrutable and knowledge justifying entities. In the text to follow I point at some of the main pillars of making this possible.

""Know thyself," a precept as old as Socrates, is still good advice. But is introspection the best path to self-knowledge? What are we trying to discover, anyway? In an eye-opening tour of the unconscious, as contemporary psychological science has redefined it, Timothy D. Wilson introduces us to a hidden mental world of judgments, feelings, and motives that introspection may never show us.

This is not your psychoanalyst's unconscious. The adaptive unconscious that empirical psychology has revealed, and that Wilson describes, is much more than a repository of primitive drives and conflict-ridden memories. It is a set of pervasive, sophisticated mental processes that size up our worlds, set goals, and initiate action, all while we are consciously thinking about something else.

If we don't know ourselves--our potentials, feelings, or motives--it is most often, Wilson tells us, because we have developed a plausible story about ourselves that is out of touch with our adaptive unconscious. Citing evidence that too much introspection can actually do damage, Wilson makes the case for better ways of discovering our unconscious selves. If you want to know who you are or what you feel or what you're like, Wilson advises, pay attention to what you actually do and what other people think about you. Showing us an unconscious more powerful than Freud's, and even more pervasive in our daily life, Strangers to Ourselves marks a revolution in how we know ourselves."

The author of this paper discusses some major points vital for two classical Indian schools of philosophy: (1) a significant feature of linguistic analysis in the Yoga tradition; (2) the role of the religious practice (iśvara-pranidhana) in the search for true self-identity in Samkhya and Yoga darśanas with special reference to their gnoseological purposes; and (3) some possible readings of ‘ahamkara’ and ‘asmita’ displayed in the context of Samkhya-Yoga phenomenology and metaphysics. The collision of language and metaphysics refers to the risk of paralogism caused by the common linguistic procedures making the subject define its identity within the semantic order (i.e. verbal conventions and grammatical rules) which does not reflect the actual metaphysical situation of the self, though it determines one’s self-understanding in the empirical sense. Whereas, Samkhya-Yoga aims at recognizing, reorganizing and, finally, going beyond these procedures regarded as the obstacles on the path towards self-knowledge and liberation form metaphysical ignorance. Keywords: ahamkara ; asmita ; ego ; Hindu philosophy ; Indian philosophy ; language ; grammar and philosophy ; liberation ; metaphysics ; paralogism ; Patanjali ; Samkhya ; Sankhya ; self ; self-knowledge ; subjectivity ; Yoga.