This paper revives an important but neglected line of thought in the analytic tradition of philosophy: the search for real names. Sections 1 and 2 introduce the following key authors and ideas: Russell and his claim that the only real name is the word “this”; Frege and his conception that all words are names; Wittgenstein and his conception of naming as tagging; and Kripke and his historical acquisition theory of naming. Section 3 proposes a synthesis of these ideas in the form of the view that rigid designators are the real names. Section 4 introduces the notion of nonrigidly bounded concepts and thus shows how to integrate Wittgenstein’s remarks about concepts having a family-resemblance-type structure into the proposed view. Section 5 further elaborates on the question of the evolution of real names (i.e., rigid designators) that are not proper names. Section 6 concludes the paper with a brief summary of the argument and its wider significance.
This article reconstructs the historical status of the technological within the tradition of political philosophy and argues for its recognition as a constitutive principle of political order. Rather than dismissing the ordinary understanding of technology as a neutral instrument, the paper deliberately begins from this common-sense perspective as a methodological point of departure. By starting where political philosophy might ordinarily understand political life amid tangible physical instruments, it becomes possible to expose the limits of that view and to justify a deeper analytical shift. The study thus moves from technology as a visible object to technology as an immanent force, and ultimately to technology as a generative principle of political existence—not as a chronological progression, but as an ascent in conceptual depth. Through rereadings of figures from Plato and Aristotle to Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx, Weber, and Arendt, and engaging major thinkers in the philosophy of technology, the article situates the contemporary “political turn” as the explicit acknowledgment of a long-implicit tension. Political philosophy today must therefore confront technology as a world-configuring power shaping authority, subjectivity, and collective life.
This paper advances a twofold thesis. First, capitalism satisfies the Durkheimian criteria of a functional religion by performing integrative, normative, and symbolic roles. Second, it does so in a distorted way, producing what we call a pseudo-eschatology and a false teleology. Analytically, our argument proceeds in three steps. (1) We define functional religion as a system that integrates communities through shared norms and symbols, and we show that capitalism meets these criteria. (2) We introduce the notion of pseudoreligion: a structure that imitates religious form while redirecting transcendence into immanence. (3) We demonstrate, through a premise–conclusion argument, that capitalism cannot fulfill authentic eschatological orientation because finite goods are structurally incapable of satisfying infinite desire. The originality of this paper lies in its precise articulation of pseudo-eschatology as false teleology: a conceptual innovation that bridges sociology of religion, phenomenology, and philosophical theology. We conclude that capitalism should be interpreted not merely as an economic order but as a rival soteriological framework, whose promises must be evaluated in terms of philosophical anthropology and theological eschatology.
This paper explores, from the perspective of film philosophy, how postcolonial cinema deconstructs, challenges, and reconstructs the “Border Myth” revered in modernity’s narratives through its visual language. This myth, as a tool of political and cultural hegemony, essentializes geographical, racial, cultural, and psychological boundaries to establish and consolidate colonial power structures. Postcolonial cinema is not merely a medium reflecting social reality but an active “practice of visual philosophy.” It employs cinematic techniques—spatial composition, the gaze, bodily representation, soundscapes, and narrative structures—to reveal.
Biotechnology is steadily loosening the correlation between membership in biological categories (“human,” “nonhuman,” ”species Homo sapiens”) and the properties that moral and legal systems are plausibly trying to track (sentience, agency, vulnerability, capacity for welfare, relationships of dependency, and participation in social practices). Yet contemporary governance still treats classificatory boundaries as normatively load-bearing: statutes and guidelines often attach rights, permissions, and prohibitions to category membership rather than to the morally relevant features that those categories once served as rough proxies for. This paper offers an epistemological diagnosis and a normative proposal. The diagnosis is that category-based governance works by an inductive compression: a label functions as an evidential shortcut, licensing inferences from membership to a bundle of expected traits. Such compression is rational only when the shortcut remains reliably calibrated. When biotechnology makes “human” membership uncertain (as some legislation explicitly anticipates) and makes reproduction, chimerism, and heredity technologically plastic, the calibration fails. The normative proposal is a two-level model I call a normative firewall: (i) retain biological classifications as defeasible evidential priors for prediction, research oversight, and administrative triage; but (ii) prevent those classifications from serving as ultimate grounds for moral status or legal entitlements. Instead, rights and restrictions should attach modularly to capacities and relations, under a presumption of protection for boundary cases. I defend this decoupling against four families of objections—dignity-based human exceptionalism, administrability, moral uncertainty, and the fear that property-based criteria threaten vulnerable humans—and I sketch implementable legal design principles that preserve clarity without reifying biologically unstable boundaries.
