Japanese NGO Nihon Hindankyo wins Nobel Peace Prize
The 2024 Peace Prize was awarded to the Japanese public organization Nihon Hidankyo “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating that nuclear weapons should never be used again.” “The outstanding efforts of Nihon Hidankyo and other hibakusha have contributed greatly to the establishment of the ‘nuclear taboo.’ It is therefore alarming that today this taboo against the use of nuclear weapons is under pressure,” the official press release said.
Literature Prize awarded to South Korean writer Han Kang
The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to South Korean writer Han Kang “for her richly poetic prose that confronts historical trauma and reveals the fragility of human life.” The writer became the first South Korean to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. South Korean writer Han Kang is the 18th woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2016, she won the Booker Prize for her novel The Vegetarian.
Three US citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Economics
The laureates studied the different political and economic systems brought in by European colonizers. As the committee noted, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson “helped us understand differences in well-being across countries.” They demonstrated the importance of institutions for a country’s prosperity and developed theoretical tools that can explain why differences in institutions persist and how institutions can change.
Steven Pinker. Destruction of myths about man. Pseudo-evolutionary reverse engineering
The discussions about the relationship between the mental and the physical, discussed in the previous chapters, can be classified as a metaphysical part of the modern philosophy of consciousness. Despite the undoubted productivity of such discussions, some philosophers express doubts about the possibility of achieving positive results in this area and provide arguments in favor of their point of view. For example, K. McGinn believes that the human mind, which arose through the process of natural selection, is simply not designed to resolve questions of this kind.
John Searle. The representational aspect of the concept of intentionality. Mental states
John Searle was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1932. He studied at the University of Wisconsin from 1949 to 1952 and then went to Oxford, where he remained until 1959. That year, he defended his doctorate, returned to the United States, and settled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has worked for more than four decades. In 1967, Searle became a professor at the university and two years later published his first book, Speech Acts: Essays in the Philosophy of Language. It was followed by a number of other monographs and collections of articles, including Expression and Meaning: Studies in Speech Act Theory (1979), Intentionality: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), Mind, Brain, and Science (1984), Rediscovering Consciousness (1992), The Construction of Social Reality (1995), The Mystery of Consciousness (1997), Consciousness and Language (2002), and Mind: A Brief Introduction (2004). Of particular note is Searle’s 1998 book Consciousness, Language, and Society: Philosophy in the Real World, in which he attempted to bring together the main themes of his research.
Daniel Dennett. The functionalist part of the theory of mind. Intentional attitude
Philosophy in the 20th century was dominated by language studies. Gradually, this bias became increasingly pronounced. Being and consciousness dissolved in language, and the world turned out to be a huge text without an Author or a semantic center. Western thought was threatened by relativism and the “deconstruction” of rationality. However, in the last decades of the 20th century, radical changes took place in the philosophical climate. Philosophy was again in demand for its positive function. This was partly due to the rapid development of communication tools and the integration of the world community, which forced people to think about “human universals” against the backdrop of many cultural differences.
Richard Rorty. Language of neurophysiology. Eliminative materialism. People are the same animals
Richard Rorty was born in 1931 in New York. He studied first at the University of Chicago and then completed graduate school at Yale University. He taught at various universities and colleges in the United States: from 1961 at Princeton University, from 1982 at the University of Virginia, and from 1998 at Stanford University.
Postmodernism. Deconstructivism. Breaking down the paradigmatic way of thinking
Recently, the term “postmodernism” has been used to designate the specificity of the worldview attitudes of the newest, “postmodern” culture as a whole, associated primarily with the polyvariant perception of the world, as well as with the accentuated problem of self-identification of culture. Widely used as an interdisciplinary term, it still does not have an unambiguous definition, and functions simultaneously as an external research definition and as an internal constitutive principle, realizing itself in various spheres of human activity – art, politics, economics, philosophy, literature, psychology, science, and so on. More broadly, in the words of U. Eco, postmodern culture offers a special language capable of describing its own achievements.
Structuralism. Social structure. Language as a system of signs. Structural anthropology
The direction in the humanities, which in a later classification received the designation of structuralism, appeared at the beginning of the 20th century and was associated primarily with the concept of structural linguistics of the Swiss linguist and philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). This concept significantly influenced the anthropological research of Claude Levi- Strauss (1908-), the only one who called himself a structuralist, the psychoanalytic theory of J. Lacan (see the chapter “Psychoanalysis”), the epistemological concept of knowledge of Michel Foucault (1926-1984), the literary criticism of Roland Barthes (1915-1980) and many others.
Postpositivism. Science is the servant of power. Conventionalism
This term is commonly used to designate the works of several philosophers of the mid-20th century, thematically united around questions of scientific methodology and subjecting the concepts of classical rationality to rethinking. Among the most famous representatives of postpositivism are K. Popper, T. Kuhn, I. Lakatos, P. Feyerabend, M. Polanyi, K. Hübner. In fact, M. Foucault is not far from this movement of thought. Late postpositivism gave rise to the sociology of science.