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The Paradoxes of the Modern Geistes: Critico-Comparative Introspect of the Previous Century
No full textThis essay investigates the existential and philosophical dilemmas of modernity, drawing on the prophetic insights
of Friedrich Nietzsche and José Rizal as critical entry points. Though situated on opposite ends of the globe, both
thinkers discerned a paradox at the heart of modernity: its promise of liberation entwined with new forms of domination.
Nietzsche’s pronouncement of the “death of God” diagnosed the spiritual vacuum of Western civilisation, while Rizal’s
critique of colonial modernity exposed the violence embedded in imperial progress. Together, they illuminate the
dialectics between emancipation and barbarism that have shaped the past century. Complementary reflections by Paul
Johnson, Viktor Frankl, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn highlight modernity’s contradictions, particularly the instrumental
rationality that enabled both human flourishing and systematic destruction. Cultural transformations, marked by the
fragmentation of coherent narratives, are further exemplified in the literary visions of W. Somerset Maugham and
Gabriel García Márquez, whose works capture the dissonance of fractured modern identities. The inquiry culminates
in an exploration of hypermodernity’s crisis of selfhood, where digital “excarnation” threatens embodied human
experience. Against this backdrop, the essay advocates for situated transcendence and moral imagination as pathways
to reclaim sensibility amid disintegration. By echoing the voices of past thinkers, it calls for a conscious inhabiting of
modernity’s tensions—an effort to confront paradoxes with compassion and creativity. Ultimately, the essay envisions more grounded in ethical vigilance and imaginative renewal, as antidotes to the alienation of the contemporary age.
Echoing the voices of past thinkers, it calls for a nuanced engagement with the unresolved paradoxes of the modern
Geistes—an effort to inhabit its tensions consciously and compassionately while envisioning more humanistic futures
Moral Luck and the Imperfect Duty to Spare Blame
No full textIt is conventional wisdom that appreciating the role of luck in our moral lives should make us more sparing with blame. But views of moral responsibility that allow luck to augment a person’s blameworthiness are in tension with this wisdom. I resolve this tension: our common moral luck partially generates a duty to forgo retributively blaming the blameworthy person at least sometimes. So, although luck can amplify the blame that a person deserves, luck also partially generates a duty not to give the blameworthy person the retributive blame that he deserves at least sometimes
The Unthought Ground: Kant's Transcendental Subject and the Metalogical Lock It Cannot Think
No full textKant’s tragic brilliance lies in discovering the transcendental subject as the necessary condition for all experience. This analysis forms part of a broader systematic project concerned with the metalogical conditions of identity, reference, and intelligibility. While the present paper introduces the notion of a Primordial Identity Lock in schematic form, its aim is not to offer an independent metaphysical foundation, but to examine how Kant’s transcendental framework already presupposes structural conditions that it cannot itself thematize. We demonstrate that the “I think” accompanying all representations relies on this Lock in three dimensions: (1) as the subject’s self-identity across time, (2) as the categorical framework’s stability, and (3) as the performative ground of the Critique itself. Kant’s achievement is tragic: he approaches the threshold of this Lock yet can only conceive it as a limit rather than as radiant source
Dialetheism and the A-Theory
No full textAccording to dialetheism, there are some true contradictions. According to the A-theory, the passage of time is a mind-independent feature of reality. On some A-theories, the passage of time involves the movement of the present. I show that by appealing to dialetheism one can explain why the present moves. I then argue that A-theorists should adopt this explanation. To do this, I defend two claims. First, that the dialetheic explanation is an improvement on the only other explanation available for why the present moves and, second, that adopting the explanation is better than leaving the motion of the present unexplained. Assuming that A- theorists should adopt the best available version of their view, it follows that they should adopt a dialetheic explanation of why time passes
Quand le langage fonctionne sans trancher : Indétermination structurelle et termes normatifs en contexte pluraliste
No full textCet essai prolonge la Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH) au-delà du cadre de la langue anglaise afin d’en tester la portée structurelle. Il soutient que certaines formes d’échec communicationnel ne relèvent ni d’un manque de précision, ni d’un déficit cognitif, ni d’un problème de traduction, mais d’une contrainte inhérente au fonctionnement du langage lui-même.
En distinguant plusieurs zones d’usage linguistique — des invariants référentiels aux concepts contestables, fluides et finalement ineffables — l’essai montre que l’insuffisance apparaît de manière systématique dès lors que le langage est mobilisé pour stabiliser des abstractions normatives, ontologiques ou phénoménales (telles que la vérité, la justice ou la liberté). L’extension au français met en évidence que cette contrainte ne dépend pas des propriétés spécifiques d’une langue donnée, mais qu’elle réémerge malgré des traditions linguistiques et philosophiques distinctes.
L’objectif n’est ni de proposer une théorie alternative du sens, ni de défendre un relativisme linguistique, mais de décrire une limite structurelle à partir de laquelle l’effort communicationnel produit des rendements marginaux décroissants. Cette analyse a des implications directes pour la philosophie du langage, la théorie politique et l’épistémologie, en particulier là où des concepts linguistiquement instables sont néanmoins traités comme fondationnels
Sacrificing Strength in the Best Systems Account
No full textMany Humeans are persuaded by an argument (separately) from Roberts, Lange and Woodward that strength ought not to be sacrificed in the competition for best system because scientific practice does not exhibit such a sacrifice. I here show that Humeans should not be so persuaded. The argument from Roberts, Lange and Woodward misses the fact that scientists can only systematise their experience, whereas the best system must systematise the entire world. However, while my demonstration shows that the argument against sacrificing strength should not have been persuasive in the way it has been, it does raise new and difficult questions for the Humean
Permissivist Evidentialism
No full textMany evidentialists are impermissivists. But there’s no in-principle reason for this. In this paper, I examine and motivate permissivist evidentialism. Not only are permissivism and evidentialism compatible but there are unique benefits that arise for this combination of views. In particular, permissivist evidentialism respects the importance of evidence while capturing its limitations and provides a plausible and attractive explanation of the relationship between the epistemic and non-epistemic. Permissivist evidentialism is thus an attractive option in logical space that hasn’t received enough attention
Living as a Woman in the Consciousness Civilization
No full textThis paper explores the meaning of living as a woman within the emerging framework of the Consciousness Civilization, a post-material paradigm in which consciousness is treated as the primary ontological and value-generating condition of civilization.
Moving beyond biological reductionism and purely social-constructivist accounts of gender, the paper introduces a gender ontology grounded in lived experience, embodied consciousness, and value-creative energy (VCE), articulated through the CFE⁺ framework.
By examining how feminine embodiment functions as a site of ethical sensitivity, relational intelligence, and consciousness modulation, the paper argues that women’s lived experiences play a structurally significant role in the ethical orientation of future civilizations.
The analysis situates gender not as a derivative social category, but as a fundamental interface between consciousness, value formation, and civilizational evolution. In doing so, the paper contributes to philosophy of mind, philosophy of consciousness, feminist philosophy, and applied ethics by proposing a new integrative framework for understanding embodiment, ethics, and post-material social order
The Epistemic Status of the Wavefunction: A Materialist Critique of the Pusey–Barrett–Rudolph Theorem
No full textThis essay argues that the controversy over the status of ψ is distorted when three irreduci-ble planes are conflated: the real (material dynamics), the concrete (the coupling that pro-duces an irreversible mark), and theory (the symbolic organisation of predictions). Under this discipline, the Pusey–Barrett–Rudolph theorem is reassessed: its result does not show that ψ is a physical entity, but only constrains models that posit a hidden-state space Λ of ontic states λ and a bridge μψ(λ) between preparation and ontology. It is shown that this bridge reifies the linear structure of Hilbert space and clashes with Born’s quadratic rule, failing to carry phases and cancellations; the problem becomes visible with identical parti-cles and with measurements in entangled bases. The argument also relies on strong as-sumptions (preparation independence and “strict zeros”) that are not imposed by standard quantum theory. By fixing the mark as a criterion of factuality (not a criterion of existence), the text dissolves false dilemmas: state update is an epistemic reorganisation at the level of theory after inscription, not a superluminal physical event; non-separability encodes inher-ited correlations, not action at a distance; and uncertainty expresses limits of concretion, not a deficit of information. The conclusion is that ψ can remain a symbolic operator for predicting distributions of possible marks, without ontological inflation
From Tabula Rasa to Inductive Bias: Reframing Locke’s Problem in the Age of Generative AI
No full textLarge language models (LLMs) often appear to vindicate a radical empiricist picture: train on vast corpora of experience-like text, and capacities emerge without explicit symbolic rules. Yet contemporary machine learning research repeatedly emphasizes that what is learned, how quickly it is learned, and how well it generalizes depend crucially on prior constraints: architectural structure, training objectives, optimization dynamics, and representational bottlenecks. These constraints constitute inductive biases in a precise, technical sense. This paper develops a philosophical argument that uses LLMs as a case study to reassess the classical tabula rasa thesis associated with Locke and its descendants. I defend two claims. First, even the most ``data-driven'' generative models are saturated with structural priors that make learning possible at scale; thus, their success cannot be straightforwardly read as a triumph of unstructured empiricism. Second, once this is appreciated, the rhetorical appeal of a ``blank slate'' conception of the infant mind weakens further: if artificial systems trained on orders of magnitude more linguistic input than any child still require rich inductive biases, it is implausible that human cognition begins wholly unstructured. I then show how contemporary debates about whether LLMs ``understand'' language recapitulate the older dispute about whether experience alone can generate semantics and conceptual structure. The upshot is a more balanced, non-caricatured empiricism: experience matters, but explanation must explicitly account for the learning system's prior structure