What is time? Saint Augustine, in antiquity, said that if no one asked him about the nature of time, he knew what time was. However, when someone asked him what time was, he could no longer answer that question. Apart from being only a rhetorical paradox, Saint Augustine’s words express our deep discomfort concerning such …
What does natural science do when interpreting human consciousness? It attempts to interpret it as a consequence or effect of the complex system that the brain is. In other words, it tries to obtain the mental state from the state of the brain and of the human body in general, similarly to how Laplace’s demon …
Whitehead considers that philosophy has a close relationship with religion and science. We could add in this respect that philosophy, like religion, aims at an integration of the individual into the universal. It aims at finding a general scheme of thought that can answer not only to the rational needs of the individual but also …
Science cannot even start its investigation without presuming the existence of free will, in the same way in which the principles of mechanics cannot ignore all the meanings present in the term ‘force’ related to the human force exerted in our daily experiences. Thus what science does in the case of free will is only …
In Hegel, self-externality of space is only a logical condition for everything that exists. As logical, it concerns pure possibility and not reality. Space is everywhere opening itself into other self-external spatial contents. The difficulty of understanding Hegel in his explanations concerning nature is that we tend to understand the concepts about which he speaks …
Whitehead’s philosophical approach is based mainly on descriptive generalization. In this respect, he considers deduction as the method of mathematics, and the borrowing of this method by philosophy an error for the latter’s method of descriptive generalization (Whitehead 1978, p.10). Indeed, philosophy starts with concrete situations and experiences which it attempts to explain. It sees …
When science assumes that there are only material bodies in the universe, or put more generally, only matter, it forgets something fundamental: matter (if we take the pure concept of matter) cannot evolve. Science wants to reduce every transformation to a causal relationship, that is, to an action of a previously given material body on …
We usually share inner experience with our fellow people: when someone tells me that he has pains in his foot, I understand him because I know and have often experienced the sensation of pain myself; when someone else tells me about how he spent his holiday, I immediately know that he is recounting a memory …
Some people deny free will exists. Let’s see what it would mean to accept that there is no free will for the whole of society and for yourself. In this case, no criminal or murderer could be convicted, because he could always argue that he was not responsible for his crime, but that guilt belongs …
In Hegel, unhappy consciousness is, of course, the result of the skeptical consciousness, of that consciousness that nowhere sees any truth. This consciousness has only itself, in its pure singularity, and nothing else, without any bonds to the world or others. The lack of bonds with the world consists of the claimed incognoscibility of the …