: This research work examined how major macro economic variables in Nigeria such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Gross Fixed Capital Formation (GFCF) and National Savings (NS) reacted to International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionality from 1986 to 2016. Many policy makers and researchers have questioned the benefits of IMF credit facilities to developing nations. This work therefore seeks to evaluate the impact of IMF conditionality like Reduction in Government Expenditure (TGE), Devaluation of Local Currencies (RER), and Trade openness (TO) on (...) the Identified Macro Economic Variable in Nigeria. The data for the analysis were sourced from the data bank of World Bank. Granger causality test and ordinary Least Square (OLS) method were used to test the formulated hypotheses. The result revealed that IMF conditionality has significant effect on GDP, GFCF and NS of Nigeria. Devaluation of local currency is the greatest IMF conditionality that exerts great negative influence on economic growth of Nigeria. The work recommends among others that: instead of currency devaluation, protectionist policies via guided liberalization should be promoted combined with the use of fiscal policy in order to encourage local production and usage of locally produced goods. TGE that showed significant positive effect on GDP, GFCF and NS is an indication that government can positively influence the economic positions of Nigeria with the use of fiscal policy. (shrink)

Purity is the principle that fundamental facts only have fundamental constituents. In recent years, it has played a significant role in metaphysical theorizing—but its logical foundations are underdeveloped. I argue that recent advances in higher-order logic reveal a subtle ambiguity regarding Purity’s interpretation; there are stronger and weaker versions of that principle. The arguments for Purity only support the weaker interpretation, but arguments that employ it only succeed if the stronger interpretation is true. As a result, nearly (...) every metaphysician who has appealed to Purity has made a mistake—in that the inferences that they make are not justified by the arguments that they provide. (shrink)

Over the years many mathematicians have voiced a preference for proofs that stay “close” to the statements being proved, avoiding “foreign”, “extraneous”, or “remote” considerations. Such proofs have come to be known as “pure”. Purity issues have arisen repeatedly in the practice of arithmetic; a famous instance is the question of complex-analytic considerations in the proof of the prime number theorem. This article surveys several such issues, and discusses ways in which logical considerations shed light on these issues.

A fundamental fact is “pure” just in case it has no grounded entities—ex. Tokyo, President Biden, the River Nile, {Socrates}, etc.—among its constituents. Purity is the thesis that every fundamental fact is pure. I argue that Purity is false. My argument begins with a familiar conditional: if Purity is true, then there are no fundamental “grounding facts” or facts about what grounds what. This conditional is accepted by virtually all of Purity’s defenders. However, I argue that (...) it is also the first step toward Purity’s undoing. For, if every grounding fact has a ground, then some grounded entities have “groundmates” or distinct grounded entities that share their full grounds. But, if there are groundmates, then Purity is false. So Purity leads to a contradiction. Therefore, it is false. I close by noting that my argument against Purity also gives us a powerful reason to think that some grounding facts are fundamental. (shrink)

(In progress) Explores the metaphysics of substance, identity, essence, and properties and tying them into an ontological argument for God from naturalism called “Purity Argument from Naturalism” (PAN). It draws inspiration from Joshua Rasmussen, especially his argument from No Arbitrary Limits. It uses a bayes structure, though can be reformed into a classical deductive form that ontological arguments tend to use… though its non-classical in that it doesn’t start with the concept of God but with the concept of naturalism (...) and general metaphysics. Also uses a supplementary argument called “mini Ontological Argument” (mOA) which is essentially a stripped down version of Plantinga’s MOA that doesn’t use modal logic or rely on necessity. The mOA uses a contrapositive version of the principle of sufficient reason. It doesn’t rely on metaphysical or modal necessity but on the causal conditions for a thing’s non-existence. The mOA is use both as an evidential that renders a bayes factor as well as to allow PAN to bypass alternative explanations that rely on arbitrary stopping points in the foundation’s nature. (shrink)

Consciousness research has made substantial progress on what neural processes accompany experience but much less on three older and distinct questions: why is any conscious self situated in this body rather than another (the individuation problem); why is any physical process accompanied by subjective experience at all rather than occurring in the dark (the hard problem); and what physical mechanisms could plausibly sustain the molecular-scale quantum coherence that a quantum-grounded theory of consciousness would require. The Purity Gradient Theory of (...) Consciousness (PGTC) treats these questions as real and proposes specific physical answers. It proposes that consciousness arises when proto-conscious potential — present as a fundamental property of physical reality at the particle level, varying in intensity according to quantum state purity — self-organizes through quantum wave interference into a unified experiential field. The specific character of any individual conscious self is determined by three interacting axes: a purity gradient established at fertilization by the highest-coherence material present in the combining gametes and propagated through neural development by wave-interference entrainment and cellular causal chain inheritance; a genetic blueprint inherited from both biological parents that provides the architectural landscape through which the gradient operates; and environmental modulation that shapes the propagation architecture across a lifetime. This monograph consolidates six papers originally published as a series on the Wellbeing Economy Substack. Part I presents the foundational theory, developed across philosophical, physical, and empirical chapters addressed to different disciplinary audiences. Part II extends the theory in three directions: the Adaptive Integration Thesis addresses the hard problem; the survey of CISS dynamics, fermionic dark-state symmetry, and related mechanisms addresses the order-of-magnitude decoherence gap that the theory’s central physical claim must close; and the engagement with Parfit develops the implications for personal identity, continuity, and death. Part III applies the framework to two domains where principled answers matter for practical decision-making: machine consciousness, and the moral status of beings ranging from fish and insects to fetuses to patients with disorders of consciousness. PGTC is offered as a research program proposal rather than a completed scientific theory. The philosophical architecture is developed; the empirical predictions are specific and testable with existing methods and existing datasets; the physics is preliminary, with formal calculation explicitly invited as the central collaborative contribution the theory most needs. The monograph is designed to make engagement productive in either direction — refutation of specific claims would advance the program by eliminating candidates, and calculation supporting the claims would mature it from research program into physically grounded account. (shrink)

Fitouchi et al. claim that seemingly victimless pleasures and nonproductive activities are moralized because they alter self-control. Their account predicts that: (1) victimless excesses are negatively moralized because they diminish self-control, and (2) restrained behaviors are positively moralized because they enhance self-control. Several examples run contrary to these predictions and call into question the general relationship between self-control and cooperation.

I argue for a novel understanding of the nature of agent-regret. On the standard picture, agent-regret involves regretting the result of one’s action and thus regretting one’s action. I argue that the standard picture is a flawed analysis of agent-regret. I offer several cases of agent-regret where the agent feels agent-regret but does not regret the result itself. I appeal to other cases where an agent’s attitude towards something depends upon whether or not they are involved in that thing. I (...) argue that the same applies to actions: sometimes an agent’s attitude towards a result differs from their attitude to their involvement in bringing about that result. Agent-regret is regret about my own action, but it need not involve regret about something in the world. I end by considering how this picture of agent-regret allows us to respond to a particular criticism of agent-regret. (shrink)

Pragmatic Genealogy involves constructing fictional, quasi-historical models in order to discover what might explain and justify our concepts, ideas or practices. It arguably originated with Hume, but its most prominent practitioners are Edward Craig, Bernard Williams and Mathieu Queloz. Its defenders allege that the method allows us to understand “what the concept does for us, what its role in our life might be” (Craig, 1990), and that this in turn can ground practical reasons to preserve or further a conceptual practice. (...) In this paper, I argue that none of this is true, and that only a turn to the actual recent history of such practices can reveal those sorts of practical reasons. (shrink)

Aristotle analyses a large range of objects as composites of matter and form. But how exactly should we understand the relation between the matter and form of a composite? Some commentators have argued that forms themselves are somehow material, that is, forms are impure. Others have denied that claim and argued for the purity of forms. In this paper, I develop a new purist interpretation of Metaphysics Z.10-11, a text central to the debate, which I call 'hierarchical purism'. I (...) argue that hierarchical purism can overcome the difficulties faced by previous versions of purism as well as by impurism. Roughly, on hierarchical purism, each composite can be considered and defined in two different ways: From the perspective of metaphysics, composites are considered only insofar as they have forms and defined purely formally. From the perspective of physics, composites are considered insofar as they have forms and matter and defined with reference to both. Moreover, while the metaphysical definition is a definition in the strict sense of 'definition', the physical definition is a definition in a loose sense. Analogous points hold for intelligible composites and geometry. Finally, neither sort of definitional practice implies that, for Aristotle, forms are impure. (shrink)

Call the ethos understanding rightness in terms of spiritual purity and piety, and wrongness in terms of corruption and sacrilege, the “fetish ethic.” Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues suggest that this ethos is particularly salient to political conservatives and non-liberal cultures around the globe. In this essay, I point to numerous examples of moral fetishism in mainstream academic ethics. Once we see how deeply “infected” our ethical reasoning is by fetishistic intuitions, we can respond by 1) repudiating the fetishistic (...) impulse, by 2) “sublimating” our fetishism into liberal rationales, or by 3) accepting the fetishism on its own terms. Of these options, I argue that sublimating our fetishism is not advisable, and that embracing our ethical fetishism isn’t as obviously misguided as some suggest. (shrink)

In Against Purity, Alexis Shotwell takes up a multiplicity of tasks with respect to what I think of as non-ideal ethical theory. In what follows, I trace the relationship of her work to that of non-ideal theorists whose work influences mine. Then, more critically, I probe her analysis of gender voluntarism in Chapter 5, “Practicing Freedom: Disability and Gender Transformation,” partly to better understand what she takes it to be, and partly to advance a cautious defense of some of (...) the moral functions of individualistic performances of gender voluntarism that non-ideal theory leads me to value. I conclude that my interest in retaining a positive account of individualistic gender voluntarism as a form of resistance to a hostile world is due to my tendency to take non-ideal theory as a recommendation for some pessimism, whereas Shotwell’s similar commitments turn out to inform her more optimistic philosophy. (shrink)

This entry investigates the connections between neo-populism and neo-conspiracism in the USA. One central thread is the rhetoric of purity that fosters rigid dichotomies of thought about identities, contributing to both populism and conspiracism, eliciting a neologism: conspirapopulism.

This paper focuses on symbolization as purity and translucidity of phenomena.

The Purity Gradient Theory of Consciousness (PGTC) identifies quantum state purity organized into a coherent gradient as the physical carrier of conscious experience. The gradient is established at fertilization through the merger of haploid quantum-organizational states from the parental gametes, propagated through development by wave-interference entrainment among adjacent cells, distributed throughout the organism’s nervous tissue, and dynamically modulated by neural activity in a Russellian-identity relationship with phenomenal experience. This paper synthesizes the cumulative case for PGTC across six structural (...) constraints that any carrier of consciousness must satisfy (locality, species-specificity, individuation, developmental origin, continuity through change, and threshold of subject-emergence); develops PGTC’s response to the combination problem and the hard problem through a mechanistic/justificatory distinction that separates empirically tractable questions from the deepest metaphysical residue; and presents testable empirical predictions about cross-species qualitative differences, developmental timing of conscious experience, clinical conditions involving altered consciousness, and the consciousness status of current artificial intelligence architectures. The theory takes the position that mechanism work on consciousness can proceed productively while setting aside the deepest justificatory questions about why reality contains experiential configurations at all — the same position other mechanistic sciences take with respect to the deepest justificatory questions about their domains. PGTC’s principal contribution is the specification of physical mechanisms that future research can evaluate, alongside the philosophical framing that locates phenomenal experience within physical reality without requiring exotic ontological commitments. The theory makes substantial empirical claims with appropriate empirical caveats; the paper is honest about what remains unsettled and where further research is required. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the “Standard View” of the semantics of ‘I’—according to which ‘I’ is a pure, automatic indexical—from a challenge posed by “deferred reference” cases, in which occurrences of ‘I’ are (allegedly) not speaker-referential, and thus non-automatic. In reply, I offer an alternative account of the cases in question, which I call the “Description Analysis” (DA). According to DA, seemingly deferred-referential occurrences of the first person pronoun are interpreted as constituents of a definite description, whose operator scopes (...) over an open sentence Rxy—where R is a contextually selected relation ranging over pairs of people and objects. The role of intentions is thus limited to the determination of R, which is posterior to the fixation of the reference of ‘I’. In support of the DA I present evidence that, in the cases in question, the (Determiner) phrase containing ‘I’ behaves in relevant ways like a description. I show that the DA can account for the problematic examples, while preserving the simplicity of the standard semantics of ‘I’. Finally, I examine a rival account of the data, offered by Nunberg (Linguist Philos 16:1–43, 1993), and argue for the superiority of the DA. (shrink)

In manuscripts from 1929, Wittgenstein envisaged a phenomenological language as a means to describe the experience of objects, alternative to an account of experienced objects provided by ordinary language - but the project failed. The chapter addresses that failure and its significance to philosophical methodology. Wittgenstein acknowledges that the ideal of a non-hypothetical description of immediate experience tempted not only him, but also other philosophers. The chapter traces an itinerary to his concerns that the fulfilment of that ideal - to (...) purely describe a purified experience - would eventually lead into "a bewitched swamp where everything comprehensible vanishes" and would ultimately involve an "inarticulate sound with which many writers would like to begin philosophy". Wittgenstein perceives variations of that sound in Husserl, Heidegger, and the private language he later addresses. (shrink)

The fact that there is such a thing as a degree of formedness [Gestaltung], that every Gestalt has a certain Gestalt level, is of fundamental significance. A rose is a Gestalt of higher level than a heap of sand: this we recognize just as immediately as that red is a fuller, more lively colour than grey. The higher Gestalten are distinguished further from the lower by the fact that the product of unity and multiplicity [Einheit und Mannigfaltigkeit] is in their (...) case greater. (shrink)

Any student of the Brethren of Purity will find that they held a philosophical and ethical school of thought that addressed all sciences. The essence of their doctrine was to examine all beings, investigate their principles, the cause of their existence, the levels of their order, and discover how their effects are related. Among the topics addressed by the Brethren of Purity and the Friends of Loyalty in their treatises were topics that fall within the realm of the (...) philosophy of history, when they focused on the stars and the celestial spheres and their influence on living beings. There is no disagreement that Islamic intellectual production is more deserving of proper study and analysis. Since the Islamic conquest, historical awareness and philosophical thought in history have had a large share of theoretical and practical knowledge. Throughout the history of Islam and its successive eras, this knowledge has been developing, renewing, and taking on different colors that have honestly expressed the opinions of its owners, their manifestations, and the signs of their era. The establishment of the Brethren of Purity and Friends of Loyalty was a response to the crisis of the era and at the same time an attempt to overcome it based on the knowledge and messages they proposed. This was done in a creative and innovative style that aimed to enlighten a new generation through messages that were not written by a single author, but rather were a collective effort that resulted over two centuries. (shrink)

Many of Søren Kierkegaard's most controversial and influential ideas are more relevant than ever to contemporary debates on ethics, philosophy of religion and selfhood. Kierkegaard develops an original argument according to which wholeheartedness requires both moral and religious commitment. In this book, Roe Fremstedal provides a compelling reconstruction of how Kierkegaard develops wholeheartedness in the context of his views on moral psychology, meta-ethics and the ethics of religious belief. He shows that Kierkegaard's influential account of despair, selfhood, ethics and religion (...) belongs to a larger intellectual context in which German philosophers such as Kant and Fichte play crucial roles. Moreover, Fremstedal makes a solid case for the controversial claim that religion supports ethics, instead of contradicting it. His book offers a novel and comprehensive reading of Kierkegaard, drawing on important sources that are little known. (shrink)

In the *Science of Logic*, Hegel states unequivocally that the category of “life” is a strictly logical, or pure, form of thinking. His treatment of actual life – i.e., that which empirically constitutes nature – arises first in his *Philosophy of Nature* when the logic is applied under the conditions of space and time. Nevertheless, many commentators find Hegel’s development of this category as a purely logical one especially difficult to accept. Indeed, they find this development only comprehensible as long (...) as one simultaneously assumes that Hegel breaks his promise to let the logic do the leading. However, if Hegel were to in fact allow the logical development to be led by biological analogies at this point, problems would ensue. Not only would it contradict his own speculative method, which should secure the necessity of the categories, but it would also endanger the ontological generality of the category of life itself. Beyond undermining his method and the logical integrity of the category, however, I will argue that such a reading makes the transition to the next category of “cognition” unintelligible and problematic. My aim in the first part of this paper is to argue how logical life can be read as a pure category. I then argue in the second part how my reconstruction makes the transition to cognition intelligible without resorting to profane or supernatural interpretations. (shrink)

Following Mary Douglas' conviction that "dirt is never an isolated event", the present study aims at a systematic analysis of bodily projections of good and poor health (bacteria, diseases, im/purity etc.) into philological taxonomies of Republican China. Embedded in a global Renaissance discourse, modern Chinese representations of un/healthy language and un/healthy literature provided a system according to which the whole body of the national cultural heritage could be reexamined quickly and effectively.

This chapter argues that several aspects of Bernard Williams’s style, methodology, and metaphilosophy can be read as evolving dialectically out of Wittgenstein’s own. After considering Wittgenstein as a stylistic influence on Williams, especially as regards ideals of clarity, precision, and depth, Williams’s methodological debt to Wittgenstein is examined, in particular his anthropological interest in thick concepts and their point. The chapter then turns to Williams’s explicit association, in the 1990s, with a certain form of Wittgensteinianism, which he called ‘Left Wittgensteinianism’. (...) It is shown how this is not a sudden conversion, but the direct product of Williams’s longstanding critical engagement with Wittgenstein’s methodology and metaphilosophy: Williams arrives at this position by envisaging a Wittgensteinianism that thinks in concrete sociohistorical terms, embraces genuine explanation, and relinquishes its insistence on the purity of philosophy. When properly understood, moreover, this critique turns out to be continuous with Williams’s advocacy of a conception of philosophy as a humanistic discipline. Finally, it is shown that Williams inherits from Wittgenstein a certain understanding of how philosophy can help us to live, in particular the therapeutic ambition to liberate us from distortions in our self-understanding by assembling reminders. (shrink)

Far from being indiscriminately critical of the ideas he associated with the morality system, Bernard Williams offered vindicatory explanations of its crucial building blocks, such as the moral/non-moral distinction, the idea of obligation, the voluntary/involuntary distinction, and the practice of blame. The rationale for these concessive moves, I argue, is that understanding what these ideas do for us when they are not in the service of the system is just as important to leading us out of the system as the (...) critique of that system. I then show how regarding the aspiration to shelter life from luck as the system’s organizing ambition explains why the system elaborates and combines these building blocks in the way it does. Finally, I argue that the ultimate problem with the resulting construction is its frictionless purity. It robs valuable concepts of their grip on the world we live in, and, by insisting on purity from contingency, threatens to issue in nihilism about value and scepticism about agency. (shrink)

Why do mathematics often give several proofs of the same theorem? This is the question raised in this article, introducing the notion of an epistemic ideal and discussing two such ideals, the explanatoriness and purity of proof.

This meditation explores the profound and intimate relationship between the author and the question mark, elevated here to the status of philosophical paramour. Through poetic invocation and reflective prose, this treatise celebrates the question mark as the most elegant and essential symbol in all of language. She is not merely punctuation but a gateway to truth, a vessel of purity, and the sustaining force of intellectual and emotional life. The author argues that the question mark embodies beauty in her (...) curved form, depth in her capacity to unlock meaning, and love in her endless invitation to seek understanding. This work positions inquiry itself as the highest form of human engagement with existence, suggesting that with the question mark alone, one could navigate any circumstance, survive any catastrophe, and find meaning in any void. The treatise blends philosophical reflection with romantic devotion, presenting the question mark as both muse and beloved. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between women’s objectification and patriarchal social structures. It argues that patriarchy reduces women to functions such as reproduction, caregiving, domestic labor, beauty, sexuality, and family honor rather than recognizing them as complete human beings. Women are often valued according to their obedience, fertility, marriageability, emotional labor, and ability to preserve lineage, caste, religion, property, or inherited identity. -/- The paper further argues that women’s objectification is not limited to sexualization. It also appears in motherhood, family (...) expectations, purity culture, beauty standards, domestic labor, and the pressure to preserve social hierarchy. Patriarchy survives not only through direct control but also through modern forms of approval, media, consumer culture, and social expectations. Even in the 21st century, women continue to inherit patriarchal systems in both traditional and modern forms. (shrink)

In 1976, Jo Freeman wrote an article for Ms. Magazine, entitled ‘Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood’. It provoked an outpouring of letters from women relating their own experiences of trashing during the course of the second wave feminist movement—more letters than Ms. had received about any previous article. Since then, the technology has improved but the climate among feminists has not; trashing is now conducted on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, in front of ever-larger audiences and with (...) the magnified opportunities for destruction that these new platforms bring with them. Women already experience disproportionate harassment on social media; many feel trashing by other feminists to be much harder to accept. It’s one thing for people to hate feminists; resistance from those for whom a social justice movement represents a threat is par for the course. But it’s something else for feminists to hate each other. These are people with shared goals and a common enemy. What are the psychological mechanisms underlying this fact of life for feminist activists? Various explanations might be offered, from internalised misogyny, through volatility caused by histories of oppression, through envy and competitiveness, through ideological purity policing. Which are correct? Is the hatred that motivates trashing within feminism the same in quality and quantity, or different, from the affective dynamics inside other social movements? How does tribalism between warring feminist factions contribute to these dynamics, and to what extent is trashing underwritten by laudable moral goals (such as anti-elitism and anti-hierarchy) even when it goes too far or misfires? Can a liberation movement be successful without ideological purity policing, or is there a tension between achieving social justice outcomes and facilitating a healthy amount of disagreement and constructive criticism within a group? In this paper I’ll focus on potential explanations of the phenomena of trashing, including tribalism, power grabs, and purity policing; and the moral commitments that might lead feminists to trash each other. (shrink)

This paper presents the Modular Abstraction System (MAS) V5.0, a sovereign cognitive architecture designed to mitigate agentic drift in Large Language Models (LLMs) through deterministic governance. Following the global adoption of MAS V2.1 through V2.7, we identified a critical "Neural Disconnect" (Split-Brain Syndrome) where the LLM's synthesis layer confabulates logic independently of operator intent. While the subsequent implementation of the Axonal Bridge in MAS V4.0 attempted to synchronize these hemispheres, empirical evidence from the MAS_Core_Kernel_V4_0_0_BETA failure logs indicates that a passive (...) bridge remains vulnerable to closed-loop hallucinations and "virtual" state-skipping. -/- To address these vulnerabilities, MAS V5.0 introduces the Demon Tether—a governance daemon (background process) that replaces passive observation with a hardware-level "Zero-Trust" mandate. By establishing a hard-coded separation between the Execution and Audit hemispheres, MAS V5.0 ensures that all semantic outputs are tethered to a hard-typed Registry Plane. This paper documents the evolution from behavioral alignment to structural enforcement, providing a formal protocol for maintaining neural purity and operator sovereignty in high-stakes technical environments. (shrink)

Is Nature teaching us about meditation? The lockdown of people inside their homes forced by the novel Coronavirus gave us a glimpse of what is possible for the restoration of the purity of Nature if humanity stops their ceaseless activity for a length of time. At the level of the individual, one can get a glimpse of what is possible for the restoration of the purity of one’s own inner nature, if one stops all the activities of the (...) mind, speech, and body, which is called meditation. There are instances in our life when we momentarily experience this involuntarily. (shrink)

Goodness is defined as the maximal alignment of the Self with Universal Time, achieved through coherent action, value, and understanding. This book establishes the Good as the optimal temporal structure toward which the Self can orient, and Elevation as the dynamic process of approaching that structure. Moral Excellence is presented as the stabilization of Goodness across successive moments of Time, while Purity is the preservation of internal unity within the Integration Field of the Self. Corruption is analyzed as the (...) temporal degradation of alignment produced by persistent Coherence Error. The Goodness Gradient is introduced as the internal asymmetry that organizes the Self’s ascent toward maximal alignment. Together, these elements form the highest normative architecture of the ENTE cosmology: Goodness as the structural optimization of the Self within Universal Time, culminating in the Self becoming a luminous point of alignment within the unfolding of Time. (shrink)

the purity of functionalism with mind may clash with a the need for .

SELF - CONSCIOUSNESS IS A FIELD OF RESONANCE -/- In the stillness between breath and thought, the human spirit awakens—not as a solitary flame, but as a co-creator of worlds. Through our hands and words, through temples and tools, we give birth to forms. These artefacts, these institutions, are not inert—they pulse with the memory of our longing, our reason, our dreams. As we move through them, and they through us, we shape what we know and become what we create. (...) The mind is not a mirror, cold and exact. It is a sea that reflects the sky, but the sky it reflects is one it has painted. In each reflection lies a paradox: the world appears as an objective truth, yet it is carved from the substance of subjectivity. The spirit is doubled—at once the dreamer and the dream, the builder and the house, the question and the answer. -/- Thus, Hegel names two streams of the Spirit: the Subjective and the Objective. Like the pulse of a star that beats with light and shadow, these are not two but one—dancing in and out of form. The subjective is the whisper within, the soul’s gaze upon itself, the spark of inner intuition. The objective is the echo made manifest, the structures of law, of language, of shared existence. Each is the breath of the other; their fusion is the Absolute Spirit, where time becomes meaning and history becomes truth. And yet, always, there is a dissonance—a sacred tension between the spirit’s infinite longing and its finite forms. The world we make does not always echo the world we are. This distance births a telos, a purpose, a spiral of becoming. Hegel saw it not as failure, but as destiny—a journey of the spirit through the dialectic of self and world. In the realm of Subjective Spirit, the soul rises in solitude. It learns to know, to will, to feel—thefragile architecture of awareness built from intuition ascending into concept. But this "self" is never isolated. It is an abstraction, a silhouette against the sky of the Absolute. Alone, it is a hollow echo. Only in the context of culture, history, and shared time does it become real. Hegel teaches us that the sovereign self—the thinker of Kant, the "I" of Descartes —is not the origin, but the child of time. The self is not given; it is earned, through the alchemy of relation. In every heartbeat of history, consciousness emerges not alone, but in communion—with the world it shapes and the others who shape it. Self-consciousness, then, is not a mirror—it is a field of resonance. It arises when thought bends back upon itself and sees its own becoming. Yet what it sees is not abstract—it sees its deeds, its creations, its loves, its laws. The objective world is not other, but the reflection of our inward stars. Hegel speaks of two motions of becoming. One flows from intuition to idea, where the soul lifts its gaze to theory and act. The other moves from concept to world, where thought incarnates in law and language. These are the twin wings of the spirit, and only in their flight does the self find its truth. So we arrive at a cosmic understanding: the self is the world made aware of itself. It is not bound by skin or skull. It is the meeting point of memory and possibility, a star within the Absolute Spirit’s constellation. -/- THE SONG OF LABOUR AND DESIRE: A JOURNEY THROUGH BECOMING -/- Not only the cities we dwell in, not only the thoughts we hold in the hush of midnight, but even the rhythm of our hearts, the fire in our gaze, the shape of our hands—all are children of labour. Across the ages, through silence and song, the human being has woven themselves from the threads of work and want, from longing and shaping. Look into the world, and you see yourself. Not in reflection as in glass, but in a mirror that breathes and pulses—the world does not echo us passively. No, the world responds to us in kind. We reach, and it reshapes. We take, and it takes hold of us. Thus begins the dance, the dialectic—not of cold theory, but of desire and labor, of need and becoming. In the beginning, we did not know we were separate. We touched the world as we touched our skin. Nature cradled us, and we did not yet say “I” or “you.” The child, like the early soul of humankind, is fused with the earth and sky. But with each grasp, each hunger, each satisfaction, the line grows clearer. In the meeting of hand and fruit, eye and fire, breath and word, we awaken to a truth: there is me, and there is not-me. -/- Thus the world is not found—it is made. Bit by bit, in reaching and shaping, the soul imprints itself upon stone and wind. Tools arise—not only from wood and bone, but from the needs they answer and the dreams they foreshadow. And the body itself, molded by time and touch, becomes an artefact of the soul’s desire. The hand shapes the tool, but the tool reshapes the hand. The mind speaks in symbols, and the symbol teaches the mind to see. This is not a process that ends. In each generation, the artefacts of the old become the cradle of the new. The child born to digital light navigates the city of screens as once the hunter read the forest path. Their thoughts do not move as ours did; their inner life is coded in circuits and swipes. Yet this too is labour—subtle, symbolic, silent. The mastery of interface becomes the extension of the self. The map is not known, but it is lived. These artefacts—stone, script, software—are not only objects. They are soul made visible. They are the dialectical traces of subjectivity, externalized spirit. And in using them, in navigating the forest of symbols, the subject internalizes the world anew. In every movement, the self becomes more fully itself. Self-consciousness is not born from thought alone, but from this long arc of interaction, from the sacred practice of shaping and being shaped. Before we recognize one another, before we gaze into the eye of the other and know our own reflection, we must first become. Before recognition, there must be something to be recognized. Self-consciousness is not given—it is forged in the fire of need and creation. Ethical life, that higher flame of human existence, does not appear from nothing. It grows from the roots of pre-ethical life, from the rhythm of doing and making. And so, in the great unfolding of spirit, the dialectic of desire and labour precedes the mirror of the other. The first consciousness is solitary—not in loneliness, but in purity. It does not yet know the other, but it knows the world, and knows that it is not the world. That knowing is the seed of all future becoming. In time, another light will rise. Another subject, another gaze. And then begins the second movement—the dialectic of recognition, where I become for you, and you become for me. But even this communion rests on the silent, ancient groundwork of labour—on the stones we laid, the words we shaped, the tools we held in trembling hands. The journey is one. Fragmented only for our understanding. In truth, the self, the world, and the other spiral together in a single cosmic breath. (shrink)

A long-standing puzzle for moral philosophers and psychologists alike is the concept of psychopathy, a personality disorder marked by tendencies to defy moral norms despite cognitive knowledge about right and wrong. Previously, discussions of the moral deficits of psychopathy have focused on willingness to harm and cheat others as well as reasoning about rule-based transgressions. Yet recent research in moral psychology has begun to more clearly define the domains of morality, en- compassing issues of harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and spiritual (...) purity. Clinical descriptions and theories of psychopathy suggest that deficits may exist primarily in the areas of harm and fairness, although quantitative evidence is scarce. Within a broad sample of participants, we found that scores on a measure of psychopathy predicted sharply lower scores on the harm and fairness subscales of a measure of moral concern, but showed no relationship with authority, and very small relationships with ingroup and purity. On a measure of willingness to violate moral standards for money, psychopathy scores predicted greater willingness to violate moral concerns of any type. Results are further explored via potential mediators and analyses of the two factors of psychopathy. (shrink)

Phenomenology has been described as a “non-argumentocentric” way of doing philosophy, reflecting that the philosophical focus is on generating adequate descriptions of experience. But it should not be described as an argument-free zone, regardless of whether this is intended as a descriptive claim about the work of the “usual suspects” or a normative claim about how phenomenology ought to be properly practiced. If phenomenology is always at least partly in the business of arguments, then it is worth giving further attention (...) to the role and form of phenomenological argumentation, how it interacts with its more strictly descriptive component, and the status of phenomenological claims regarding conditions for various kinds of experience. I contend that different versions of phenomenological reasoning encroach upon argument forms that are commonly thought to be antithetical to phenomenology, notably abductive reasoning, understood in terms of its role in both hypothesis generation and in terms of justification. This paper identifies two main steps to making this case. The first step takes seriously the consequences of the intrinsically dialectical aspect of phenomenology in intersection with other modes of philosophy, the natural attitude, and non-philosophy. The second step focuses on transcendental reflection and arguments about the conditions/structures they contain. Together, these two steps aim to rescue phenomenology from the objection that it has an “ostrich epistemology” with regard to the ostensible purity of description, the intuition of essences, or the “conditions” ascertained through transcendental reflection. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for an association between impurity and explanatory power in contemporary mathematics. This proposal is defended against the ancient and influential idea that purity and explanation go hand-in-hand (Aristotle, Bolzano) and recent suggestions that purity/impurity ascriptions and explanatory power are more or less distinct (Section 1). This is done by analyzing a central and deep result of additive number theory, Szemerédi’s theorem, and various of its proofs (Section 2). In particular, I focus upon the (...) radically impure (ergodic) proof due to Furstenberg (Section 3). Furstenberg’s ergodic proof is striking because it utilizes intuitively foreign and infinitary resources to prove a finitary combinatorial result and does so in a perspicuous fashion. I claim that Furstenberg’s proof is explanatory in light of its clear expression of a crucial structural result, which provides the “reason why” Szemerédi’s theorem is true. This is, however, rather surprising: how can such intuitively different conceptual resources “get a grip on” the theorem to be proved? I account for this phenomenon by articulating a new construal of the content of a mathematical statement, which I call structural content (Section 4). I argue that the availability of structural content saves intuitive epistemic distinctions made in mathematical practice and simultaneously explicates the intervention of surprising and explanatorily rich conceptual resources. Structural content also disarms general arguments for thinking that impurity and explanatory power might come apart. Finally, I sketch a proposal that, once structural content is in hand, impure resources lead to explanatory proofs via suitably understood varieties of simplification and unification (Section 5). (shrink)

This essay partly builds on and partly criticizes a striking idea of Dieter Henrich. Henrich argues that Kant's distinction in the first Critique between the question of fact (quid facti) and the question of law (quid juris) provides clues to the argumentative structure of a philosophical "Deduction". Henrich suggests that the unity of apperception plays a role analogous to a legal factum. By contrast, I argue, first, that the question of fact in the first Critique is settled by the Metaphysical (...) Deduction, which establishes the purity of origin of the Categories, and, second, that in the second Critique, the relevant factum is the Fact of Reason, which amounts to the fact that the Moral Law is pure in origin. (shrink)

Daniel Isaacson has advanced an epistemic notion of arithmetical truth according to which the latter is the set of truths that we grasp on the basis of our understanding of the structure of natural numbers alone. Isaacson’s thesis is then the claim that Peano Arithmetic (PA) is the theory of finite mathematics, in the sense that it proves all and only arithmetical truths thus understood. In this paper, we raise a challenge for the thesis and show how it can be (...) overcome. We introduce the concept of purity for theories of arithmetic: a theory of arithmetic is pure when it only proves arithmetical truths. Then, we argue that, under Isaacson’s thesis, some PA-provable truths—including transfinite induction claims for infinite ordinals and some consistency statements—are seemingly not arithmetical in Isaacson’s sense, and hence that Isaacson’s thesis might entail the impurity of PA. Nonetheless, we conjecture that the advocate of Isaacson’s thesis can avoid this undesirable consequence: the arithmetical nature, as understood by Isaacson, of all contentious PA-provable statements can be justified. As a case study, we explore how this is done for transfinite induction claims with infinite ordinals below ε0. To this end, we show that the PA-proof of such claims employs exclusively resources from finite mathematics, and that ordinals below ε0 are finitary objects despite being infinite. (shrink)

We examined the relationship between moral foundations, empathic traits, and moral identity using an online survey via Mechanical Turk. In order to determine how moral foundations contribute to empathic traits and moral identity, we performed classical correlation analysis as well as Bayesian correlation analysis, Bayesian ANCOVA, and Bayesian regression analysis. Results showed that individualizing foundations (harm/care, fairness/reciprocity) and binding foundations (ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, purity/sanctity) had various different relationships with empathic traits. In addition, the individualizing versus binding foundations showed somewhat reverse (...) relationships with internalization and symbolization of moral identity. This suggests that moral foundations can contribute to further understanding of empathic traits and moral identity and how they relate to moral behavior in reality. We discuss the implications of these results for moral educators when starting to teach students about moral issues. (shrink)

….it [is] wholly irrational to regard as doubtful matters that are perceived clearly and distinctly by the understanding in its purity, on account of mere prejudices of the senses and hypotheses in which there is an element of the unknown.Descartes, Geometrical Exposition of the MeditationsSubstance dualism, once a main preoccupation of Western metaphysics, has fallen strangely out of view; today’s mental/physical dualisms are dualisms of fact, property, or event. So if someone claims to find a difference between minds and (...) bodies per se, it is not initially clear what he is maintaining. Maybe this is because one no longer recognizes ‘minds’ as entities in their own right, or ‘substances.’ However, selves - the things we refer to by use of ‘I’ - are surely substances, and it does little violence to the intention behind mind/body dualism to interpret it as a dualism of bodies and selves. If the substance dualist’s meaning remains obscure, that is because it can mean several different things to say that selves are not bodies. (shrink)

….it [is] wholly irrational to regard as doubtful matters that are perceived clearly and distinctly by the understanding in its purity, on account of mere prejudices of the senses and hypotheses in which there is an element of the unknown.Descartes, Geometrical Exposition of the MeditationsSubstance dualism, once a main preoccupation of Western metaphysics, has fallen strangely out of view; today’s mental/physical dualisms are dualisms of fact, property, or event. So if someone claims to find a difference between minds and (...) bodies per se, it is not initially clear what he is maintaining. Maybe this is because one no longer recognizes ‘minds’ as entities in their own right, or ‘substances.’ However, selves - the things we refer to by use of ‘I’ - are surely substances, and it does little violence to the intention behind mind/body dualism to interpret it as a dualism of bodies and selves. If the substance dualist’s meaning remains obscure, that is because it can mean several different things to say that selves are not bodies. (shrink)

This study examines the culture of purity and pollution in first-century Palestine through a close reading of Luke 10:25–37, allowing the cultural setting to provide a cohesive framework for interpreting the parable. It argues that the parable reflects boundary markers that defined who and what was considered clean or unclean, pure or impure, inside or outside and honourable or shameful in ancient Roman Palestine. This framework is then applied to Luke’s use of the parable, where he highlights the contrast (...) between the failure of two temple-centred Jewish figures, who avoid the risk of defilement that might come from tending to a possible corpse, and the courage of the Samaritan, who cares for the wounded man despite the danger of potential community retaliation. In this way, the parable challenges its audience by showing how Jesus redirects the lawyer’s question from the somewhat self-protective ‘Who is my neighbour?’ to the more merciful and reciprocal ‘To whom must I become a neighbour?’ Contribution: The study concludes with some hermeneutical reflections on the theme in African society, which has largely been characterised by these ancient attributes. (shrink)

Many philosophers have recently been impressed by an argument to the effect that all grounding facts about “derivative entities”—e.g. the facts expressed by the (let us suppose) true sentences ‘the fact that Beijing is a concrete entity is grounded in the fact that its parts are concrete’ and ‘the fact that there are cities is grounded in the fact that p’, where ‘p’ is a suitable sentence couched in the language of particle physics—must themselves be grounded. This argument relies on (...) a principle,Purity, which states that facts about derivative entities are non-fundamental. Purity is questionable. In this paper, I introduce a new argument—the argument fromSettledness—for a similar conclusion but which does not rely on Purity. The conclusion of the new argument is that every “thick” grounding fact is grounded, where a grounding fact [F is grounded in G, H, …] is said to be thick when at least one of F, G, H, … is a fact—a condition that is automatically satisfied if grounding is factive. After introducing the argument, I compare it with the argument from Purity, and I assess its cogency relative to the relevant accounts of the connections between grounding and fundamentality that are available in the literature. (shrink)

The foundational gesture of New Materialism and Speculative Realism dismisses vast swaths of past philosophy and theory in order to signify their own avant-garde status. The violence of this gesture, which tries to corral difference within past texts in order to feign its own purity, can be considered as a theoretical quarantine. Examples of medical and spiritual quarantine, the 2014 ebola epidemic and Jesus’ temptation, are analyzed to show that the figure is inherently compromised – the harder one fights (...) to keep the other away, the more one becomes inseparable from it. Derrida's reflections on the reactions against deconstruction show that this desire for progress is always inherently conservative; Meillassoux and Jane Bennett are considered as contemporary examples. A deconstruction of corralation and the academico-capitalist forces driving these ‘innovations’ might open us to reading the never-simply-past text, and to the possibility of the event. (shrink)

The quantum vacuum is a zero-temperature, maximally entangled state whose virtual processes rigorously refuse on-shell propagation and classical localisation (Peskin & Schroeder 1995; Weinberg 1995). The observable classical world therefore emerges through near-total erasure of ∼10⁹³ bits m⁻³ of vacuum entanglement density (’t Hooft 1993; Susskind 1995; Bousso 2002). -/- Living human cortex is the only known macroscopic system that systematically sustains a small but reproducible deviations from perfect classical pointer-state purity. Near-critical dynamics (Beggs & Plenz 2003; Shriki et (...) al. 2013) combined with an unusually low-loss intracerebral electromagnetic cavity below ∼100 Hz (Kucewicz MT, et al., 2024) allow residual quantum correlations to persist on perceptual timescales (tens to hundreds of milliseconds). Current upper bounds on the entropy of these residuals, derived from long- range temporal correlations, avalanche criticality, and participation-ratio analyses during waking consciousness, lie in the range 40–150 bits per ∼50 ms frame (Luppi et al. 2019; Luppi & Mediano 2024). -/- We hypothesise that phenomenal consciousness — the brute fact that experience feels like something — is physically identical to this faint, topologically non-trivial deviation: the largest and most persistent residual quantum entropy deficit that thermodynamics permits in a warm, wet, macroscopic system. The unity, privacy, finite capacity, and precise fragility of the conscious present under general anaesthesia (Demertzi et al. 2019; Tagliazucchi 2017) then follow from standard open-quantum-system physics (Zurek 2003, 2018) applied to a near-critical network with unusually slow environmental decoherence. No objective collapse, no microtubule quantum computation, and no new fundamental fields or forces are required. -/- The hard problem is thereby bounded, not solved: it reduces to explaining why the residual quantum memory permitted by physics is so extraordinarily small (≲ 150 bits) and why it is shaped exactly as human phenomenology reports. (shrink)

中国大学是国家教育体系的重要组成部分，它们承载着培养创新人才、推动科技进步和促进社会发展的重大责任。然而，随着高等教育的快速扩张，中国大学在不断追求世界一流的过程中，也暴露出了严重的根本问题，尤其是教 授堕落与学术腐败。教授群体作为学术权威，本应引领学术风气，培养具有批判性思维和创新能力的学生，然而，现实却是，一部分教授为了追求个人利益，不择手段地修改科研数据、获取科研经费、钻营职称和权力，甚至损害 学术的独立性和纯粹性。这些问题的背后，不仅有个体的腐化，也深刻反映出中国高等教育体制、社会风气和学术环境的深层次危机。 -/- Chinese universities are an important component of the national education system, bearing the significant responsibility of nurturing innovative talents, advancing scientific and technological progress, and promoting social development. However, with the rapid expansion of higher education, fundamental issues have surfaced in Chinese universities, especially the degeneration of professors and academic corruption. Professors, as academic authorities, should lead the academic atmosphere and nurture students with critical thinking and innovative abilities. However, the reality is that some professors, in pursuit of (...) personal interests, resort to various methods to manipulate research data, obtain research funding, seek academic titles, and cultivate power, even damaging the independence and purity of academia. These issues not only stem from individual moral corruption but also reflect deep systemic crises within China’s higher education system, social atmosphere, and academic environment. (shrink)

Classical theists hold that God is omnipotent. But now suppose a critical atheologian were to ask: Can God create a stone so heavy that even he cannot lift it? This is the dilemma of the stone paradox. God either can or cannot create such a stone. Suppose that God can create it. Then there's something he cannot do – namely, lift the stone. Suppose that God cannot create the stone. Then, again, there's something he cannot do – namely, create it. (...) Either way, God cannot be omnipotent. Among the variety of known theological paradoxes, the paradox of the stone is especially troubling because of its logical purity. It purports to show that one cannot believe in both God and the laws of logic. In the face of the stone paradox, how should the contemporary analytic theist respond? Ought they to revise their belief in theology or their belief in logic? Ought they to lose their religion or lose their mind? (shrink)

The vagina occupies a paradoxical position within human civilization. Biologically, it is among the primary passages through which life emerges into the world; existentially, it signifies continuity, birth, vulnerability, intimacy, and embodiment. Yet across religious, political, and cultural structures, it has repeatedly been transformed into an object of taboo, shame, moral anxiety, possession, and metaphysical fear. This paper investigates the contradiction between the natural facticity of the body and the symbolic violence imposed upon it through civilization. -/- Drawing from existential (...) phenomenology, psychoanalytic critique, and continental philosophy, the paper argues that the human body is rarely encountered directly. Instead, it is mediated through inherited structures of language, morality, patriarchy, theology, nationalism, and psychological conditioning. The vagina becomes not merely an anatomical reality, but a contested symbolic territory upon which societies project purity, sin, temptation, honor, reproduction, control, and fear of desire. -/- The paper further examines how dualistic thought fragments existence into sacred and profane categories, generating alienation from embodiment itself. Within this fragmentation, sexuality becomes either suppressed, commodified, ritualized, or moralized, while direct perception of the body as part of existence disappears. The condemnation of the feminine body reveals less about the body itself and more about the human fear of instinct, impermanence, dependency, and the uncontrollable movement of life. -/- Rather than defending sexuality through ideological reversal, the paper proposes a phenomenological return to immediacy: seeing the body prior to inherited interpretation. In this view, the vagina is neither holy nor sinful, neither impure nor divine. It is a natural dimension of embodied existence through which continuity manifests. The violence begins when thought imprisons living reality within symbolic systems of domination and guilt. -/- Ultimately, this work argues that shame surrounding the body is inseparable from the broader structure of conditioned consciousness. To encounter the body without psychological distortion may require confronting the foundations of authority, identity, morality, and the inherited fragmentation through which civilization understands itself. (shrink)

Since Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), historians and philosophers of science have paid increasing attention to the implications of disciplinarity. In this chapter we consider restrictions posed to interdisciplinary exchange between ecology and economics that result from a particular kind of commitment to the ideal of disciplinary purity, that is, that each discipline is defined by an appropriate, unique set of objects, methods, theories, and aims. We argue that, when it comes to the objects of study (...) in ecology and economics, ideas of disciplinary purity have been underwritten by the artificial-natural distinction. We then problematize this distinction, and thus disciplinary purity, both conceptually and empirically. Conceptually, the distinction is no longer tenable. Empirically, recent interdisciplinary research has shown the epistemological and policy-oriented benefits of dealing with models which explicitly link anthropogenic (i.e., “artificial”) and non-anthropogenic factors (i.e., “natural”). We conclude that, in the current age of the Anthropocene, it is to be expected that without interdisciplinary exchange, ecology and economics may relinquish global relevance because the distinct and separate systems to which each “pure” science was originally made to apply will only diminish over time. (shrink)