The development of civilization is impossible without rational inter- action with nature, which develops and operates millions of years. The person receives from it all necessary for life: energy, food, materials, and, no less importantly, emotional and aesthetic enthusiasm. The focus of action on human nature determines not only positive impact but also leads to negative consequences. The man is so out of balance when nat- ural the entire global ecosystem that it started to deteriorate, losing the ability to heal itself. This effect will increase with the increasing global- ization of the world economy.
The environmental factor was actually limiting people's well-being: to know and this affects the health, increases the risk of genetic faults reduces life expectancy. According to the world health organization public health is 50% dependent on lifestyle and 25% of the state of the environment. The main components of natural environment: atmos- phere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, biosphere. Each of them has its constit- uent elements, structure and features. Three of them – the atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere – educated lifeless substances and is aralon functioning of living matter-biota – the main component of the fourth component of the environment – biosphere. Let us consider each of them.
A special place in the structure of the natural environment is the bio- sphere. Biosphere — the outer shell of the Earth within which life ex- ists. The basic element of the biosphere is. Man is the highest develop-
ment of living organisms on Earth, the subject of socio-historical activi- ty and culture.
The trend of evolution of the biosphere is: a gradual increase in total biomass and productivity; accumulation of the accumulated solar energy in the surface shells of the planet; increase the capacity of the biosphere, which manifests itself in increasing life-forms; strengthening of some of the biogeochemical functions of the living and of waste products and the emergence of new functions; the increasing role of living matter in geo- logical, geochemical and physical geographical processes; the complexi- ty of the structure of the biotic turnover. You must add also the trans- forming influence of human activities, causing evolutionary replacement of certain Bioelements. Sometimes this substitution at the regional level is accompanied by a complete decline. Rapid withdrawal types of eco- system composition and affect the trend, reverse to the above, – reduced biomass, productivity and information in the biosphere, changing the nature of the fixation of solar energy. Therefore, evolution can be seen not only by progressive but also regressive.
The problem of "man – biosphere" has two main aspects:
1. The feasibilityassociated with growing depletion of natural re- sources of the planet that poses a lot of problems scientists search for new energy sources and the like.
2. Socio-ecologicalpollution of the environment and violation of the biological balance in the system "man – biosphere".
But if the socio-ecological process is directed, as all evolution, then in what direction? This question is answered by the law formulated by
V. Vernadsky: the biosphere will inevitably turn into a noosphere, i.e. the sphere where the human mind will play a dominant role in the de- velopment of the system "man – nature". In other words, chaotic self- development based on the natural processes of self-regulation, will be replaced by a sound strategy based on forecasting and planning princi- ples and regulation of the processes of natural development.
The founders of this doctrine was invested in the concept of "human mind" and the divine (ascension to the divine mind) that followed from their worldview. In the above formulation of the law of the noosphere seems logical, since humanity as part of nature, becoming a devastating global "geological force" that can either completely destroy the bio- sphere, and thereby destroy themselves, or to preserve her own exist- ence. But, in the figurative expression of Russian geologist M. Wassouf, "the biosphere is both the people and the house, and we in him."
A distinctive feature of the modern world is a constant increase of technological and anthropogenic loads on the biosphere. This is the rea- son for increasing the size tehnosfera regions, which are home to most of the world's population. These regions are characterized by a high lev- el of concentration of industrial objects and population density.
On the planet formed regions where the level of pollution of the bio- sphere has reached alarming proportions.
Scientific evidence suggests that catastrophic changes in the bio- sphere has happened quite regularly before the advent of man. But they took place over a long enough periods. It is known that significant changes in environmental conditions caused the disappearance of a number of types of organisms, but it saw the acceleration of evolution- ary Adaptations. This happened on the principle of catastrophic jolt, ac- cording to which disaster always causes significant evolutionary change can be interpreted as a progressive phenomenon. The acceleration phase is altered by the stage of evolution, that is, the principle of continuity and discontinuity of development of the biosphere.
In our time, anthropogenic impact on the biosphere occur intensively and regularly, and expect a new acceleration of evolutionary mutations, the consequences of which we cannot even imagine. First of all there is a problem of awareness of mankind not only on the state of the bio- sphere, as well as its information-management network. Awareness of the humanity of the crisis in the biosphere and response to the global environmental crisis, which has already begun, is characterized by ex- cessive slowness. And it threatens humanity's physical destruction. Ac- cording to some estimates, we're 40-100 years old.
Philosophical antropology
Philosophical anthropology as a kind of thought, before it was founded as a distinct philosophical discipline in the 1920s, emerged as post-medieval thought striving for emancipation from Christian religion and Aristotelic tradition. The origin of this liberation, characteristic of modernity, has been the Cartesian skepticism formulated by Descartes in the first two of his Meditations on First Philosophy.
Immanuel Kant taught the first lectures on anthropology in the Euro- pean academic world. He specifically developed a conception of pragmatic anthropology, according to which the human being is stud- ied as a free agent. At the same time, he conceived of his anthropology as an empirical, not a strictly philosophical discipline. Both his philo-
sophical and his anthropological work has been one of the influences in the field during the 19th and 20th century. After Kant, Ludwig Feuer- bach is sometimes considered the next most important influence and founder of anthropological philosophy.
During the 19th century, an important contribution came from post- kantian German idealists like Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, as well from Søren Kierkegaard. From the late 19th century till the early 20th centu- ry, influential contributors have been Friedrich Nietzsche, John Dewey and Rudolf Steiner.
Since its development in the 1920s, in the milieu of Germa- ny Weimar culture, philosophical anthropology has been turned into a philosophical discipline, competing with the other traditional sub- disciplines of epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, aesthetics. It is the at- tempt to unify disparate ways of understanding behaviour of humans as both creatures of their social environments and creators of their own values. Although the majority of philosophers throughout the history of philosophy can be said to have a distinctive "anthropology" that under- girds their thought, philosophical anthropology itself, as a specific dis- cipline in philosophy, arose within the later modern period as an out- growth from developing methods in philosophy, such as phenomenolo- gy and existentialism. The former, which draws its energy from method- ical reflection on human experience as from the philosopher's own per- sonal experience, naturally aided the emergence of philosophical explo- rations of human nature and the human condition.
Max Scheler, from 1900 till 1920 had been a follower of Husserl's phenomenology, the hegemonic form of philosophy in Germany at the time. Scheler sought to apply Husserl's phenomenological approach to different topics. From 1920 Scheler laid the foundation for philosophical anthropology as a philosophical discipline, competing with phenome- nology and other philosophic disciplines. Husserl and Martin Heidegger, were the two most authoritative philosophers in Germany at the time, and their criticism to philosophical anthropology and Scheler have had a major impact on the discipline.
Scheler defined the human being not so much as a "rational animal" but essentially as a loving being. He breaks down the traditional hylo- morphic conception of the human person, and describes the personal being with a tripartite structure of lived body, soul, and spirit. Love and hatred are not psychological emotions, but spiritual, intentional acts of the person, which he categorises as "intentional feelings." Scheler based
his philosophical anthropology in a Christian metaphysics of the spirit. Helmuth Plessner would later emancipate philosophical anthropology from Christianity.
Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen have been influenced by Scheler, and they are the three major representatives of philosophical anthropology as a movement. Ernst Cassirer, a neo-Kantian philosopher, has been the most influential source for the definition and development of the field from the 1940s till the 1960s. Particularly influential has been Cassirer's description of man as a symbolic animal, which has been reprised in the 1960s by Gilbert Durand, scholar of symbolic anthropol- ogy and the imaginary.
In 1953, future pope Karol Wojtyla based his dissertation thesis on Max Scheler, limiting himself to the works Scheler wrote before reject- ing Catholicism and the Judeo-Christian tradition in 1920. Wojtyla used Scheler as an example that phenomenology could be reconciled with Catholicism. Some authors have argued that Wojtyla influenced philo- sophical anthropology. In the 20th century, other important contributors and influences to philosophical anthropology have been Paul Häberlin, Martin Buber, E.R. Dodds, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Eric Voegelin, Hans Jonas, Josef Pieper, Hans-Eduard Hengstenberg, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jo- seph Maréchal, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, René Girard, Alasdair MacIntyre, Pierre Bourdieu, Hans Blumenberg, Jacques Derri- da, Emerich Coreth, Leonardo Polo.
Marx's concept of man is rooted in Hegel's thinking. Hegel begins with the insight that appearance and essence do not coincide. Or, to put it differently, it is the problem of the relationship between essence and existence. In the process of existence, the essence is realized, and at the same time, existing means a return to the essence. For Hegel, knowledge is not obtained in the position of the subject object split, in which the object is grasped as something separated from and opposed to the think- er. In order to know the world, man has to make the world his own. This essence, the unity of being, the identity throughout change is, according to Hegel. The culmination of all of Hegel's thinking is the concept of the potentialities inherent in a thing, of the dialectical process in which they manifest themselves, and the idea that this process is one of active movement of these potentialities. This emphasis on the active process within man is already to be found in the ethical system of Spinoza. For Spinoza, all affects were to be divided into passive affects, through
which man suffers and does not have an adequate idea of reality, and into active affects in which man is free and productive.
Goethe, who like Hegel was influenced by Spinoza in many ways, developed the idea of man's productivity into a central point of his phil- osophical thinking. For him all decaying cultures are characterized by the tendency for pure subjectivity, while all progressive periods try to grasp the world as it is, by one's own subjectivity, but not separate from it. Goethe gave the most poetic and powerful expression to the idea of human productivity in his Faust. Neither possession, nor power, nor sensuous satisfaction, Faust teaches, can fulfill man's desire for meaning in his life; he remains in all this separate from the whole, hence unhap- py. Only in being productively active can man make sense of his life, and while he thus enjoys life, he is not greedily holding on to it. He has given up the greed for having, and is fulfilled by being; he is filled be- cause he is empty; he is much, because he has little.
Hegel gave the most systematic and profound expression to the idea of the productive man, of the individual who is he, inasmuch as he is not passive-receptive, but actively related to the world; who is an individual only in this process of grasping the world productively, and thus making it his own. For Hegel the development of all individual powers, capaci- ties and potentialities is possible only by continuous action, never by sheer contemplation or receptivity. For Spinoza, Goethe, Hegel, as well as for Marx, man is alive only inasmuch as he is productive, inasmuch as he grasps the world outside of himself in the act of expressing his own specific human powers, and of grasping the world with these pow- ers. Inasmuch as man is not productive, inasmuch as he is receptive and passive, he is nothing, he is dead. In this productive process, man realiz- es his own essence, he returns to his own essence, which in theological language is nothing other than his return to God.
The concept of productivity as against that of receptivity can be un- derstood more easily when we read how Marx applied it to the phenom- enon of love. Marx expressed also very specifically the central signifi- cance of love between man and woman as the immediate relationship of human being to human being. It is of the utmost importance for the un- derstanding of Marx's concept of activity to understand his idea about the relationship between subject and object. Man's senses, as far as they are crude animal senses, have only a restricted meaning. The senses which man has, so to speak, naturally, need to be formed by the objects outside of them. Any object can only be confirmation of one of my own
faculties. Subject and object cannot be separated. What Marx means by "species-character" is the essence of man; it is that which is universally human, and which is realized in the process of history by man through his productive activity.
From this concept of human self-realization, Marx arrives at a new concept of wealth and poverty, which is different from wealth and pov- erty in political economy.
Society has several mechanisms for building us and our personality. The first mechanism is socialization. A second mechanism society has for building us is social control, which is used to re-build deviants or at least keep them from interfering with the normal operation of society. Social control ranges from gossip and ridicule to imprisonment and exe- cution. Society also has mechanisms for distributing valued resources. Through stratification society categorizes people and distributes valued resources to them based on the categories. Among the most important categories are class, race and gender. Our social class, race and gender affect how we are socialized, what type of social control we face, what opportunities we receive and what obstacles weface.
Primary socialization theory as formulated by Oetting and his associ- ates emphasizes the transmission of societal norms during childhood and adolescence within society‘s three major socializing agencies: fami- ly, school, and small, intimate peer groups. The norms thus transmitted may be pro-social or deviant, with pro-social norms more likely to be transmitted through strong bonds to healthy families or schools. Person- ality traits and other personal characteristics influence negative out- comes only to the extent that they interfere with socialization. Our re- search does not address primary socialization theory directly. We have studied social factors, personality factors, and various psychopatholo- gies as etiological for deviance and substance abuse. Our research has supported the hypotheses of primary socialization theory.
Philosophy of Mind is the branch of philosophy that studies the na- ture of the mind (mental events, mental functions, mental properties and consciousness) and its relationship to the physical body. It intersects to some extent with the fields of neurobiology, computer science and psy- chology. Within philosophy, the Philosophy of Mind is usually consid- ered a part of Metaphysics, and has been particularly studied by schools of thought such as Analytic Philosophy, Phenomenology and Existen- tialism, although it has been discussed by philosophers from the earliest times. It has a potential influence on philosophical questions such as the
nature of death, the nature of free will, the nature of what a person is, and the nature of emotion, perceptionand memory.
The central issue in Philosophy of Mind is the mind-body problem, and the challenge is to explain how a supposedly non-material mind can influence a material body and vice-versa. The two major schools of thought that attempt to resolve this problem are Dualism and Monism , with Pluralism as a small minority viewpoint.
However, there are those (notably Ludwig Wittgenstein and his fol- lowers) who reject the problem as an illusory one which has arisen pure- ly because mental and biological vocabulary are incompatible, and such illusory problems arise if one tries to describe the one in terms of the other's vocabulary, or if the mental vocabulary is used in the wrong con- texts. Dualism is the position that mind and body are in some categori- cal way separate from each other, and that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical in nature. It can be traced back to Plato, Aristotle, and the Sankhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy, but it was most precisely formulated by René Descartes in the 17th Century. Descartes was the first to clearly identify the mind with consciousness and self-awareness, and to distinguish this from the brain, which was the physical seat of intelligence.
Dualism appeals to the common-sense intuition of the vast majority of non-philosophically-trained people, and the mental and the physical do seem to most people to have quite different, and perhaps irreconcila- ble, properties. Mental events have a certain subjective quality to them, whereas physical events do not. There are three main Dualist schools of thought:
o Substance Dualism argues that the mind is an independently exist- ing substance - the mental does not have extension in space, and the ma- terial cannot think. This is the type of Dualism most famously defended by Descartes, and it is compatible with most theologies which claim that immortal souls occupy an independent "realm" of existence distinct from that of the physical world. There are three main types of Substance Dualism:
o Interactionism, which allows that mental causes can produce mate- rial effects, and vice-versa. Descartes believed that this interaction phys- ically occurred in the pineal gland.
o Occasionalism, asserts that a material basis of interaction between the material and immaterial is impossible, and that the interactions were
really caused by the intervention of God on each individual occasion. Nicholas Malebranche was the major proponent of this view.
o Parallelism, holds that mental causes only have mental effects, and physical causes only have physical effects, but that God has created a pre-established harmony so that it seems as if physical and mental events cause, and are caused by, one another. This unusual view was most prominently advocated by Gottfried Leibniz.
o Property Dualism maintains that the mind is a group of independ- ent properties that emerge from the brain, but that it is not a distinct sub- stance. Thus, when matter is organized in the appropriate way, mental properties emerge.
o Epiphenomenalism, which asserts that mental events are causally inert. Physical events can cause other physical events, and physical events can cause mental events, but mental events cannot cause any- thing, since they are just causally inert by-products of physical events which occur in the brain of the physical world. This doctrine was first formulated by Thomas Henry Huxley in the 19th Century, although based on Thomas Hobbes' much earlier Materialism theories.
o Predicate Dualism argues that more than one predicate is required to make sense of the world, and that the psychological experiences we go through cannot be redescribed in terms of physical predicates of nat- ural languages.
Monism is the position that mind and body are not ontologically dis- tinct kinds of entities. This view was first advocated in Western Philos- ophy by Parmenides in the 5th Century B.C., and variations on it were andwas later espoused by Baruch Spinozain the 17th Century and\ George Berkeley in the 18th Century.
There are three main Monist schools of thought:
· Physicalism argues that the mind is a purely physical construct, and will eventually be explained entirely by physical theory, as it con- tinues to evolve. With the huge strides in science in the 20th Century, Physicalism of various types has become the dominant doctrine.
There are two main types:
o Reductive Physicalism, which asserts that all mental states and properties will eventually be explained by scientific accounts of physio- logical processes and states, has been the most popular form during the 20th Century. There are four main types:
o Behaviourism, which holds that mental states are just descriptions of observable behaviour.
o Type Identity Theory, which holds that various kinds of mental states are identical to certain kinds, or types, of physical states of the brain.
o Token Identity Theory, which holds that particular instances of mental states are identical to particular instances of physical states of the brain.
o Functionalism, which holds that mental states are constituted sole- ly by their functional role and can be characterized in terms of non- mental functional properties.
o Non-Reductive Physicalism, which argues that, although the brain is all there is to the mind, the predicates and vocabulary used in mental descriptions and explanations cannot be reduced to the language and lower-level explanations of physical science. Thus, mental states supervene (depend) on physical states, and there can be no change in the mental without some change in the physical, but they are not reducible to them.
There are three main types:
o Anomalous Monism, which states that mental events are identical with physical events, but that the mental is anomalous i.e. these mental events are not regulated by strict physical laws.
o Emergentism, which involves a layered view of nature, with the layers arranged in terms of increasing complexity, each corresponding to its own special science.
o Eliminativism , which holds that people's common-sense under- standing of the mind is hopelessley flawed, and will eventually be re- place by an alternative, usually taken to be neuroscience.
o Idealism maintains that the mind is all that exists, and that the ex- ternal world is either mental itself, or an illusion created by the mind. According to Idealism, then, the problem of the interaction between mind and body is not a problem at all. A pure form of Idealism was es- poused by Bishop George Berkeley, and variations were formulated by various members of the German Idealism school, including Kant, Fich- te, Schelling and Hegel.
o Neutral Monism maintains that existence consists of one kind of primal substance, which in itself is neither mental nor physical, but is capable of mental and physical aspects or attributes. Thus, there is some other, neutral substance, and that both matter and mind are properties of this other unknown substance. Such a position was adopted by Baruch Spinoza and also by Bertrand Russell for a time.
7.1.9. Specificaty of a social reality.
Marx summarized the materialistic aspect of his theory of history, otherwise known as historical materialism, in the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of produc- tion constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which corre- spond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of produc- tion of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their con- sciousness.
In this brief popularization of his ideas, Marx emphasized that social development sprang from the inherent contradictions within material life and the social superstructure. This notion is often understood as a simple historical narrative: primitive communism had developed into slave states. Slave states had developed into feudal societies. Those societies in turn became capitalist states, and those states would be overthrown by the self-conscious portion of their working-class, or proletariat, creating the conditions for socialism and, ultimately, a higher form of com- munism than that with which the whole process began. Marx illustrated his ideas most prominently by the development of capitalism from feu- dalism, and by the prediction of the development of socialism from capitalism.
The base-superstructure and stadialist formulations in the 1859 pref- ace took on canonical status in the subsequent development of orthodox Marxism, in particular in dialectical materialism . They also gave way to a vulgar Marxism as plain economic determinism, which has been criti- cized by various Marxist theorists. Vulgar Marxism was seen as little other than a variety of economic determinism, with the alleged determi- nation of the ideological superstructure by the economical infrastruc- ture. However, this positivist reading, which mostly based itself on En- gels' latter writings in an attempt to theorize "scientific socialism" has been challenged by Marxist theorists, such as Antonio Gramsci or Al- thusser.
Some believe that Marx regarded them merely as a shorthand sum- mary of his huge ongoing work-in-progress. These sprawling, volumi- nous notebooks that Marx put together for his research on political economy, particularly those materials associated with the study of "primitive communism" and pre-capitalist communal production, in fact, show a more radical turning "Hegel on his head" than heretofore acknowledged by most mainstream Marxists and Marxiologists.
In lieu of the Enlightenment belief in historical progress and stages espoused by Hegel, Marx pursues in these research notes a decidedly empirical approach to analyzing historical changes and different modes of production, emphasizing without forcing them into a teleological par- adigm the rich varieties of communal productions throughout the world and the critical importance of collective working-class antagonism in the development of capitalism.
Moreover, Marx's rejection of the necessity of bourgeois revolution and appreciation of the obschina, the communal land system, in Russia in his letter to Vera Zasulich; respect for the egalitarian culture of North African Muslim commoners found in his letters from Algeria; and sym- pathetic and searching investigation of the global commons and indige- nous cultures and practices in his notebooks, including the Ethnological Notebooks that he kept during his last years, all point to a historical Marx who was continuously developing his ideas until his deathbed and does not fit into any pre-existing ideological straitjacket.
Some varieties of Marxist philosophy are strongly influenced by He- gel, emphasizing totality and even teleology: for example, the work of Georg Lukács, whose influence extends to contemporary thinkers like Fredric Jameson. Others consider "totality" merely another version of Hegel's "spirit," and thus condemn it as a crippling, secret idealism.
Theodor Adorno, a leading philosopher of the Frankfurt School, who was strongly influenced by Hegel, tried to take a middle path between these extremes: Adorno contradicted Hegel's motto "the true is the whole" with his new version, "the whole is the false," but he wished to preserve critical theory as a negative, oppositional version of the utopia described by Hegel's "spirit." Adorno believed in totality and human potential as ends to be striven for, but not as certainties.
The status of humanism in Marxist thought has been quite conten- tious. Many Marxists, especially Hegelian Marxists and also those committed to political programs, have been strongly humanist. These humanist Marxists believe that Marxism describes the true potential of
human beings, and that this potential can be fulfilled in collective free- dom after the Communist revolution has removed capitalism's con- straints and subjugations of humanity. A particular version of the hu- manism within the marxism is represented by the school of Lev Vygot- sky and his school in theoretical psychology. The Praxis school based its theory on the writings of the young Marx, emphasizing the humanist and dialectical aspects thereof.
However, other Marxists, especially those influenced by Louis Al- thusser, are just as strongly anti-humanist. Anti-humanist Marxists be- lieve that ideas like "humanity," "freedom," and "human potential" are pure ideology, or theoretical versions of the bourgeois economic order. They feel that such concepts can only condemn Marxism to theoretical self-contradictions which may also hurt it politically.
The collective consciousness informs our sense of belonging and identity, and our behavior. Founding sociologist Émile Durkheim devel- oped this concept to explain how unique individuals are bound together into collective units like social groups and societies.
What is it that holds society together? This was the central question that preoccupied Durkheim as he wrote about the new industrial socie- ties of the 19th century. By considering the documented habits, customs, and beliefs of traditional and primitive societies, and comparing those to what he saw around him in his own life, Durkheim crafted some of the most important theories in sociology. He concluded that society exists because unique individuals feel a sense of solidarity with each other. This is why we can form collectives and work together to achieve com- munity and functional societies. The collective consciousness, or con- science collective as he wrote it in French, is the source of this solidari- ty. Durkheim first introduced his theory of the collective consciousness in The Division of Labor in Society. Later, he would also rely on the concept in other books, including Rules of the Sociological Method, Suicide, and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
In this text, he explains that the phenomenon is "the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society." Durk- heim observed that in traditional or primitive societies, religious sym- bols, discourse, beliefs, and rituals fostered the collective consciousness. In such cases, where social groups were quite homogenous (not distinct by race or class, for example), the collective consciousness resulted in what Durkheim termed a "mechanical solidarity"-in effect an automatic
binding together of people into a collective through their shared values, beliefs, and practices.
Durkheim observed that in the modern, industrialized societies that characterized Western Europe and the young United States when he wrote, which functioned via a division of labor, an "organic solidarity" emerged based on the mutual reliance individuals and groups had on others in order to allow for a society to function. In cases such as these, religion still played an important role in producing collective conscious- ness among groups of people affiliated with various religions, but other social institutions and structures would also work to produce the collec- tive consciousness necessary for this more complex form of solidarity, and rituals outside of religion would play important roles in reaffirming it. These other institutions include the state, news and popular media, education, and the police and judiciary, among others.
Rituals that serve to reaffirm the collective conscious range from pa- rades and holiday celebrations to sporting events, weddings, grooming ourselves according to gender norms, and even shopping. In either case
– primitive or modern societies – collective consciousness is something "common to the whole of society," as Durkheim put it. It is not an indi- vidual condition or phenomenon, but a social one. As a social phenome- non, it is "diffused across society as a whole," and "has a life of its own." It is through collective consciousness that values, beliefs, and tra- ditions can be passed down through generations. Though individual people live and die, this collection of intangible things, including the social norms connected to them, are cemented in our social institutions and thus exist independent of individual people.
Most important to understand is that collective consciousness is the result of social forces that are external to the individual, that course through society, and that work together to create the social phenomenon of the shared set of beliefs, values, and ideas that compose it. We, as individuals, internalize these and make the collective consciousness a reality by doing so, and we reaffirm and reproduce it by living in ways that reflect it. Firstly, civilization in theory is bigger than culture in which an entire civilization can encompass one single unit of culture. Civilization is a bigger unit than culture because it is a complex aggre- gate of the society that dwells within a certain area, along with its forms of government, norms, and even culture. Thus, culture is just a spec or a portion of an entire civilization. For example, the Egyptian civilization
has an Egyptian culture in the same way as the Greek civilization has their Greek culture.
A culture ordinarily exists within a civilization. In this regard, each civilization can contain not only one but several cultures. Comparing culture and civilization is like showing the difference between language and the country to which it is being used.
Culture can exist in itself whereas civilization cannot be called a civilization if it does not possess a certain culture. It‘s just like asking how a nation can exist on its own without the use of a medium of com- munication. Hence, a civilization will become empty if it does not have its culture, no matter how little it is.
· Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experi- ence, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.
· Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people.
· Culture is communication, communication is culture.
· Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior; that is the totality of a person's learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning.
· A culture is a way of life of a group of people – the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next.
· Culture is symbolic communication. Some of its symbols in- clude a group's skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives. The meanings of the symbols are learned and deliberately perpetuated in a society through its institutions.
· Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for be- havior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be consid- ered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further action.
· Culture is the sum of total of the learned behavior of a group of people that are generally considered to be the tradition of that people and are transmitted from generation to generation.
· Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distin- guishes the members of one group or category of people from another.
· The position that the ideas, meanings, beliefs and values people learn as members of society determines human nature. People are what they learn. Optimistic version of cultural determinism place no limits on the abilities of human beings to do or to be whatever they want. Some anthropologists suggest that there is no universal "right way" of being human. "Right way" is almost always "our way"; that "our way" in one society almost never corresponds to "our way" in any other society. Proper attitude of an informed human being could only be that of toler- ance.
· The optimistic version of this theory postulates that human na- ture being infinitely malleable, human being can choose the ways of life they prefer.
· The pessimistic version maintains that people are what they are conditioned to be; this is something over which they have no control. Human beings are passive creatures and do whatever their culture tells them to do. This explanation leads to behaviorism that locates the causes of human behavior in a realm that is totally beyond human control.
· Different cultural groups think, feel, and act differently. There is no scientific standards for considering one group as intrinsically superi- or or inferior to another. Studying differences in culture among groups and societies presupposes a position of cultural relativism. It does not imply normalcy for oneself, nor for one's society. It, however, calls for judgment when dealing with groups or societies different from one's own. Information about the nature of cultural differences between socie- ties, their roots, and their consequences should precede judgment and action. Negotiation is more likely to succeed when the parties concerned understand the reasons for the differences in viewpoints.
The term ―value theory‖ is used in at least three different ways in philosophy. In its broadest sense, ―value theory‖ is a catch-all label used to encompass all branches of moral philosophy, social and political phi- losophy, aesthetics, and sometimes feminist philosophy and the philoso- phy of religion – whatever areas of philosophy are deemed to encom- pass some ―evaluative‖ aspect. In its narrowest sense, ―value theory‖ is used for a relatively narrow area of normative ethical theory particular-
ly, but not exclusively, of concern to consequentialists. In this narrow sense; ―value theory‖ is roughly synonymous with ―axiology‖. Axiology can be thought of as primarily concerned with classifying what things are good, and how good they are. For instance, a traditional question of axiology concerns whether the objects of value are subjective psycho- logical states, or objective states of the world.
But in a more useful sense, ―value theory‖ designates the area of moral philosophy that is concerned with theoretical questions about val- ue and goodness of all varieties – the theory of value. The theory of val- ue, so construed, encompasses axiology, but also includes many other questions about the nature of value and its relation to other moral cate- gories. The division of moral theory into the theory of value, as con- trasting with other areas of investigation, cross-cuts the traditional clas- sification of moral theory into normative and metaethical inquiry, but is a worthy distinction in its own right; theoretical questions about value constitute a core domain of interest in moral theory, often cross the boundaries between the normative and the metaethical, and have a dis- tinguished history of investigation. This article surveys a range of the questions which come up in the theory of value, and attempts to impose some structure on the terrain by including some observations about how they are related to one another.
The theory of value begins with a subject matter. It is hard to specify in some general way exactly what counts, but it certainly includes what we are talking about when we say any of the following sorts of things
Value theory (or axiology) is the major branch of philosophy that addresses topics such as goodness, beauty and justice. Value theory in- cludes ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, feminist philosophy, phi- losophy of law and more.
Ethics, or "moral philosophy", studies and considers what is good and bad conduct, right and wrong values, and good and evil. Its primary investigations include how to live a good life and identifying standards of morality. It also includes meta-investigations about whether a best way to live or related standards exists. The main branches of ethics are normative ethics, meta-ethics and applied ethics.
A major point of debate revolves around consequentialism, where ac- tions are judged by the potential results of the act, such as to maximize happiness, called utilitarianism, and deontology, where actions are judged by how they adhere to principles, irrespective of negative ends.
Aesthetics is the "critical reflection on art, culture and nature." It ad- dresses the nature of art, beauty and taste, enjoyment, emotional values, perception and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more precisely defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste. It divides into art theory, literary theory, film theory and music theory. An example from art theory is to discern the set of principles underlying the work of a par- ticular artist or artistic movement such as the Cubist aesthetic. The phi- losophy of film analyzes films and filmmakers for their philosophical content and explores film as a medium for philosophical reflection and expressionPolitical philosophy is the study of government and the rela- tionship of individuals to communities including the state. It includes questions about justice, law, property and the rights and obligations of the citizen. Politics and ethics are traditionally linked subjects, as both discuss the question of how people should live together.
Other branches of value theory:
There are a variety of branches of value theory.
· Philosophy of law explores the varying theories explaining the nature and interpretation of laws.
· Philosophy of education analyzes the definition and content of education, as well as the goals and challenges of educators.
· Feminist philosophy explores questions surrounding gender, sexuality and the body including the nature of feminism itself as a social and philosophical movement.
· Philosophy of sport analyzes sports, games and other forms of play as sociological and uniquely human activities.
Phenomen of globalization
The concept of history plays a fundamental role in human thought. It invokes notions of human agency, change, the role of material circum- stances in human affairs, and the putative meaning of historical events. It raises the possibility of ―learning from history.‖ And it suggests the possibility of better understanding ourselves in the present, by under- standing the forces, choices, and circumstances that brought us to our current situation. It is therefore unsurprising that philosophers have sometimes turned their attention to efforts to examine history itself and the nature of historical knowledge. These reflections can be grouped together into a body of work called ―philosophy of history.‖ This work is heterogeneous, comprising analyses and arguments of idealists, posi-
tivists, logicians, theologians, and others, and moving back and forth over the divides between European and Anglo-American philosophy, and between hermeneutics and positivism.
Given the plurality of voices within the ―philosophy of history,‖ it is impossible to give one definition of the field that suits all these ap- proaches. In fact, it is misleading to imagine that we refer to a single philosophical tradition when we invoke the phrase, ―philosophy of his- tory,‖ because the strands of research characterized here rarely engage in dialogue with each other. Still, we can usefully think of philosophers' writings about history as clustering around several large questions, in- volving metaphysics, hermeneutics, epistemology, and historicism: (1) What does history consist of – individual actions, social structures, peri- ods and regions, civilizations, large causal processes, divine interven- tion? (2) Does history as a whole have meaning, structure, or direction, beyond the individual events and actions that make it up? (3) What is involved in our knowing, representing, and explaining history? (4) To what extent is human history constitutive of the human present?
What are the intellectual tasks that define the historian's work? In a sense, this question is best answered on the basis of a careful reading of some good historians. But it will be useful to offer several simple an- swers to this foundational question as a sort of conceptual map of the nature of historical knowing.
First, historians are interested in providing conceptualizations and factual descriptions of events and circumstances in the past. This effort is an answer to questions like these: What happened? What was it like? What were some of the circumstances and happenings that took place during this period in the past? Sometimes this means simply reconstruct- ing a complicated story from scattered historical sources – for example, in constructing a narrative of the Spanish Civil War or attempting to sort out the series of events that culminated in the Detroit race riot / uprising of 1967. But sometimes it means engaging in substantial conceptual work in order to arrive at a vocabulary in terms of which to characterize what happened. Concerning the disorders of 1967 in Detroit: was this a riot or an uprising? How did participants and contemporaries think about it?
Second, historians often want to answer ―why‖ questions: ―Why did this event occur? What were the conditions and forces that brought it about?‖ This body of questions invites the historian to provide an expla- nation of the event or pattern he or she describes: the rise of fascism in
Spain, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the great global financial crisis of 2008. And providing an explanation requires, most basically, an account of the causal mechanisms, background circumstances, and hu- man choices that brought the outcome about. We explain an historical outcome when we identify the social causes, forces, and actions that brought it about, or made it more likely.
Third, and related to the previous point, historians are sometimes in- terested in answering a ―how‖ question: ―How did this outcome come to pass? What were the processes through which the outcome occurred?‖ How did the Prussian Army succeed in defeating the superior French Army in 1870? How did Truman manage to defeat Dewey in the 1948 US election? Here the pragmatic interest of the historian's account de- rives from the antecedent unlikelihood of the event in question: how was this outcome possible? This too is an explanation; but it is an an- swer to a ―how possible‖ question rather than a ―why necessary‖ ques- tion. Fourth, often historians are interested in piecing together the hu- man meanings and intentions that underlie a given complex series of historical actions. They want to help the reader make sense of the histor- ical events and actions, in terms of the thoughts, motives, and states of mind of the participants. For example: Why did Napoleon III carelessly provoke Prussia into war in 1870? Why has the Burmese junta dictator- ship been so intransigent in its treatment of democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi? Why did northern cities in the United States develop such profound patterns of racial segregation after World War II? Answers to questions like these require interpretation of actions, meanings, and in- tentions – of individual actors and of cultures that characterize whole populations. This aspect of historical thinking is ―hermeneutic,‖ inter- pretive, and ethnographic.
And, of course, the historian faces an even more basic intellectual task: that of discovering and making sense of the archival information that exists about a given event or time in the past. Historical data do not speak for themselves; archives are incomplete, ambiguous, contradicto- ry, and confusing. The historian needs to interpret individual pieces of evidence; and he or she needs to be able to somehow fit the mass of evi- dence into a coherent and truthful story. So complex events like the Spanish Civil War present the historian with an ocean of historical trac- es in repositories and archives all over the world; these collections sometimes reflect specific efforts at concealment by the powerful; and
the historian's task is to find ways of using this body of evidence to dis- cern some of the truth about the past.
In short, historians conceptualize, describe, contextualize, explain, and interpret events and circumstances of the past. They sketch out ways of representing the complex activities and events of the past; they ex- plain and interpret significant outcomes; and they base their findings on evidence in the present that bears upon facts about the past. Their ac- counts need to be grounded on the evidence of the available historical record; and their explanations and interpretations require that the histo- rian arrive at hypotheses about social causes and cultural meanings. His- torians can turn to the best available theories in the social and behavioral sciences to arrive at theories about causal mechanisms and human be- havior; so historical statements depend ultimately upon factual inquiry and theoretical reasoning. Ultimately, the historian's task is to shed light on the what, why, and how of the past, based on inferences from the evidence of the present.
Two preliminary issues are relevant to almost all discussions of his- tory and the philosophy of history. These are issues having to do with the constitution of history and the levels at which we choose to charac- terize historical events and processes. The first issue concerns the rela- tionship between actors and causes in history: is history a sequence of causal relations, or is it the outcome of an interlocking series of human actions? The second issue concerns the question of scale of historical processes in space and time: how should historians seek to reconcile micro-, meso-, and macro-perspectives on history? Both issues can be illustrated in the history of France. Should we imagine that twentieth- century France is the end result of a number of major causes in its past – the collapse of the Roman order in the territory, the military successes of Charlemagne, the occurrence of the French Revolution, and defeat in the Franco-Prussian War? Or should we acknowledge that France at any point in time was the object of action and contest among individuals, groups, and organizations, and that the interplay of strategic actors is a more fertile way of thinking about French history than the idea of a se- ries of causal events? Scale is equally controversial. Should we think of France as a single comprehensive region, or as the agglomeration of separate regions and cultures with their own historical dynamics? Fur- ther, is it useful to consider the long expanse of human activity in the territory of what is now France, or are historians better advised to focus
their attention on shorter periods of time? The following two sections will briefly consider these issues.
Globalization refers to the free movement of goods, capital, services, people, technology and information. It is the action or procedure of in- ternational integration of countries arising from the conversion of world views, products, ideas, and other aspects of culture. Advances in transportation and in telecommunications infrastructure have been major factors in globalization, generating further interdependence of economic and cultural activities. Though many scholars place the ori- gins of globalization in modern times, others trace its history long be- fore the European Age of Discovery and voyages to the New World, some even to the third millennium BC Large-scale globalization began in the 1820s. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, the connec- tivity of the world's economies and cultures grew very quickly. The term globalization is recent, only establishing its current meaning in the 1970s. In 2000, the International Monetary Fund identified four basic aspects of globalization: trade and transactions, capital and investment movements, migration and movement of people, and the dissemination of knowledge.Further, environmental challenges such as global warm- ing, cross-boundary water and air pollution, and overfishing of the ocean are linked with globalization. Globalizing processes affect and are affected by business and work organization, economics, socio-cultural resources, and the natural environment. Academic literature commonly subdivides globalization into three major areas: economic globalization, cultural globalization, and political globalization. This caused shifts in population for third world countries, it took away their healthy men and unmarried women leaving wives, children, and the elderly to struggle which in return, lowered their health dramatically. The people that had left these countries also soon found out that the factory owners they started working for cut corners and worked the people extra hard, and did not care about health or safety.
Philosophy is about the study of existence, beliefs and ideas. The word ‗philosophy‘ actually means the ‗love of wisdom‘ and has been ascribed to the work of Pythagoras. The word ‗wisdom‘ is not a word one hears very much in the safety industry that is far more consumed by absolutes, indoctrination and authoritarianism. The educator Sternberg wrote a great work on Wisdom, something that should be foundational for any safety person. So, if one is to develop a philosophy of safety one would develop a ‗love‘ for wisdom in safety. The intent of the develop-
ment of wisdom is the humanization and education of people, the oppo- site is the preoccupation of self, the foundation of narcissim. For the philosopher, the first step to wisdom is knowing the reality of paradox. In this regard, the work of Raynor is an important read.
For the safety person the challenge of paradox arises from the com- mitment to safety in the face of uncertainty, fallibility, change, random- ness and risk. Despite the nonsense rhetoric of ‗all accidents are pre- ventable‘ and perfectionism in zero, a philosophy of safety must acknowledge the reality of randomness in human living. So, the safety person must ‗commit‘ to a collision with uncertainty. A commitment to something lessens the possibilities for adaptability, because if a com- mitment can be changed easily it wasn‘t much of a commitment. Com- mitments rarely adapt until predictions prove incorrect and predictions are rarely verifiably correct. So here is the conundrum or paradox, commitment tends to anchor people to securities in the face of what is unknown. In the light of this paradox, a safety person would do well to understand the nature of cognitive dissonance. In many organisations a philosophy of safety is declared in values statements or a ‗safety philos- ophy‘ statement. These are often little more than a wish list of populist statements that have no real connection to a foundational ethic or an- thropomorphic understanding of personhood. There is generally no un- derstanding that the illogical language ‗all accidents are preventable‘ must lead to blaming and perfectionism. The anthropology of such lan- guage denies fallibility and the natural logic of learning. So, if such or- ganisations really believe all accidents are preventable, will they bet on their predictions? What do they do when an accident occurs?
The safety industry needs to talk much more about wisdom. The ne- glect of wisdom is also the neglect of adaptability. This is why the rigid- ity of binary opposition is so dangerous. There is no wisdom in zero, no wisdom in intolerance, no wisdom in no compromise and no learning in absolutes yet, this is the language of so many companies about their safety philosophy. I read this week of one company bragging about be- ing ‗beyond zero‘ and yet sprouting words about no compromise and caring for people. The well know story of ‗splitting the baby‘ has be- come an archetype of wisdom.
The story shows that judgment is neither simple or easy, something the organisations immersed in ‗cardinal rules‘ could think about. It shows that leadership and wisdom are flip sides of the same coin and that binary thinking is indeed a mark of immaturity and a lack of leader-
ship. The story also shows the importance of adaptability to the exercise of wise leadership and that leaders need to understand paradox.
So, if one wants to develop a philosophy of safety first, it must be person-centred. Second, it must have a culture focused on the develop- ment of maturity rather than the semiotics of zero. Third, a philosophy of safety must be committed to the wisdom of adaptability and finally, understand that the paradox of safety is the beginning of wisdom.
Philosophy of identity.
The identity theory of mind holds that states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain. Strictly speaking, it need not hold that the mind is identical to the brain. Idiomatically we do use ‗She has a good mind‘ and ‗She has a good brain‘ interchangea- bly but we would hardly say ‗Her mind weighs fifty ounces‘. Here I take identifying mind and brain as being a matter of identifying processes and perhaps states of the mind and brain. Consider an experience of pain, or of seeing something, or of having a mental image. The identity theory of mind is to the effect that these experiences just are brain pro- cesses, not merely correlated with brain processes.
Some philosophers hold that though experiences are brain processes they nevertheless have fundamentally non-physical, psychical, proper- ties, sometimes called ‗qualia‘. Here I shall take the identity theory as denying the existence of such irreducible non-physical properties. Some identity theorists give a behaviouristic analysis of mental states, such as beliefs and desires, but others, sometimes called ‗central state material- ists‘, say that mental states are actual brain states. Identity theorists of- ten describe themselves as ‗materialists‘ but ‗physicalists‘ may be a bet- ter word. That is, one might be a materialist about mind but nevertheless hold that there are entities referred to in physics that are not happily de- scribed as ‗material‘.
In taking the identity theory as a species of physicalism, I should say that this is an ontological, not a translational physicalism. It would be absurd to try to translate sentences containing the word ‗brain‘ or the word ‗sensation‘ into sentences about electrons, protons and so on. Nor can we so translate sentences containing the word ‗tree‘. After all ‗tree‘ is largely learned ostensively, and is not even part of botanical classifi- cation. If we were small enough a dandelion might count as a tree. Nev- ertheless a physicalist could say that trees are complicated physical mechanisms. The physicalist will deny strong emergence in the sense of
some philosophers, such as Samuel Alexander and possibly C.D. Broad
. The latter remarked that as far as was known at that time the properties of common salt cannot be deduced from the properties of sodium in iso- lation and of chlorine in isolation. Of course the physicalist will not de- ny the harmless sense of "emergence" in which an apparatus is not just a jumble of its parts.
The identity theory as I understand it here goes back to U.T. Place and Herbert Feigl in the 1950s. Historically philosophers and scientists, for example Leucippus, Hobbes, La Mettrie, and d'Holbach, as well as Karl Vogt who, following Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, made the pre- posterous remark (perhaps not meant to be taken too seriously) that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile, have embraced material- ism. However, here I shall date interest in the identity theory from the pioneering papers ‗Is Consciousness a Brain Process?‘ by U.T. Place and H. Feigl ‗The "Mental" and the "Physical". Nevertheless mention should be made of suggestions by Rudolf Carnap, H. Reichenbach and
M. Schlick. Reichenbach said that mental events can be identified by the corresponding stimuli and responses much as the (possibly unknown) internal state of a photo-electric cell can be identified by the stimulus (light falling on it) and response from it. In both cases the internal states can be physical states. However Carnap did regard the identity as a lin- guistic recommendation rather than as asserting a question of fact. See his ‗Herbert Feigl on Physicalism‘ in Schilpp, especially p. 886. The psychologist E.G. Boring may well have been the first to use the term
‗identity theory‘. See Place.
Place's very original and pioneering paper was written after discus- sions at the University of Adelaide with J.J.C. Smart and C.B. Martin. For recollections of Martin's contributions to the discussion see Place
‗Low Claim Assertions‘ in Heil. Smart at the time argued for a behav- iourist position in which mental events were elucidated purely in terms of hypothetical propositions about behaviour, as well as first person re- ports of experiences which Gilbert Ryle regarded as ‗avowals‘. Avowals were thought of as mere pieces of behaviour, as if saying that one had a pain was just doing a sophisticated sort of wince. Smart saw Ryle's theo- ry as friendly to physicalism though that was not part of Ryle's motiva- tion. Smart hoped that the hypotheticals would ultimately be explained by neuroscience and cybernetics. Being unable to refute Place, and rec- ognizing the unsatisfactoriness of Ryle's treatment of inner experience, to some extent recognized by Ryle himself, Smart soon became con-
verted to Place's view. In this he was also encouraged and influenced by Feigl's ‗"The Mental" and the "Physical". Feigl's wide ranging contribu- tion covered many problems, including those connected with intention- ality, and he introduced the useful term ‗nomological danglers‘ for the dualists' supposed mental-physical correlations. They would dangle from the nomological net of physical science and should strike one as implausible excrescences on the fair face of science.
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