The beneficial effects of prosocial spending on happiness: work hard,make money,and spend it on others?

Previous research has shown that the way people spend their money is as important to happiness as how much money people earn. Specifically, it has been shown that spending money on others contributes more to an individual’s happiness than spending money on oneself. In the present study, we investigated this effect and examined the role of the money’s origin. Students were randomly assigned either to spend a small amount of money on themselves or to spend the money on others. Moreover, half of the participants received the money as a wage, whereas the other half received the money as a windfall. The results replicated previous research indicating that prosocial spenders report greater happiness than do selfish spenders. However, the happiness effect was unaffected by the source of the money (i.e. wage vs. windfall). Implications for well-being and happiness are discussed.     

The Theological Foundation of Hobbesian Physics: A Defence of Corporeal God

In 1668, the octogenarian Hobbes finally affirmed openly a doctrine that was unavoidable given his longstanding embrace of both theism and materialism: God is corporeal. However, this doctrine has generally been downplayed or dismissed by scholars, who have alleged that Hobbes's corporeal theism is irreconcilable with his more orthodox theological pronouncements or with his fundamental metaphysical principles. This paper defends the coherence of Hobbes's corporeal God against particularly vigorous criticisms of Douglas Jesseph and others. The aim of the paper is not, however, to situate Hobbes's deity safely within the boundaries of seventeenth century protestant theology, as defenders of Hobbesian theism have often wanted to do. Rather, the paper places the corporeal God at the metaphysical foundations of Hobbes's natural philosophy. Despite his early reticence about theological speculation, Hobbes eventually relied on God to provide a continuous, resistance-free source of motion or conatus to a material plenum whose parts would otherwise quickly slow to an infinitesimal crawl. Hobbes's late theology, while certainly heterodox in content, is not so different in function from that of contemporaries like René Descartes and Henry More, whose religious sincerity is rarely questioned. Hobbes' corporeal deity deserves a place in the seventeenth century pantheon.     

Postmetaphysical Thinking or Refusal of Thought? Max Horkheimer’s Materialism as Philosophical Stance

Abstract

Frankfurt School critical theory has long opposed metaphysical philosophy because it ignores suffering and injustice. In the face of such criticism, proponents of metaphysics (for example Dieter Henrich) have accused critical theory of not fully investigating the questions is raises for itself, and falling into partial metaphysical positions, despite itself. If one focuses on Max Horkheimer’s early essays, such an accusation seems quite fitting. There he vociferously attacks metaphysics, but he also develops a theory that pushes toward metaphysical questions. His work can thus seem laden with unpacked metaphysical baggage, and fraught with contradiction. The aim of this paper is to show that Horkheimer’s critique of metaphysics makes sense and is not contradicted by a surreptitious metaphysics. To show this, Horkheimer’s views will be compared with Bas van Fraassen’s in The Empirical Stance. Ultimately, the paper should show that Horkheimer’s early philosophy can be reconstructed in such a way that it employs a ‘materialist stance’.     

‘Serving Two Masters’: Protestant Churches in Korea and Money

Materialism or religio-economic entrepreneurship has been a primary impetus for the explosive growth of Protestant churches in Korea, especially since the 1960s, when rapid industrialisation began to propel Korean society into tremendous economic prosperity. However, since the early 1990s, there has been stagnation, even decline. The primary aim of this article is to identify the most pressing problems facing the Korean Protestant churches and show how these problems have begun to render them less vibrant and possibly to bring about decline in their membership. More specifically, the article identifies how materialism, having deeply penetrated Korean Christianity, led it first to grow and then decline; thus robbing it of its requisite or intrinsic organisational characteristics – being the light and salt of the world.     

Necessity of origins and multi-origin art

The Necessity of Origins is the thesis that, necessarily, if a material object wholly originates from some particular material, then it could not have wholly originated from any significantly non-overlapping material. Several philosophers have argued for this thesis using as a premise a principle that we call ‘Single Origin Necessity’. However, we argue that Single Origin Necessity is false. So any arguments for The Necessity of Origins that rely on Single Origin Necessity are unsound. We also argue that the Necessity of Origins itself is false. Our arguments rely on a thesis in the ontology of art that we find plausible: Multi-Work Materialism. It is the thesis that works of art that have multiple concrete manifestations are co-located with those manifestations.     

A Richer or a Poorer Naturalism?

Willem Drees endorses not only minimal naturalism, understood as the rejection of supernatural interruptions of the world's normal causal processes, but also maximal naturalism, with its reductionistic materialism. Besides arguing that this reductionistic naturalism provides the best framework for interpreting science, he believes that it is compatible with religion (albeit of a minimalist sort). The "richer" naturalism advocated by Whiteheadians is, accordingly, unnecessary. Drees's position, however, cannot do justice to a number of "hard-core commonsense notions," which we inevitably presuppose in practice and thereby in science as well as religion. His naturalism is too poor, in particular, to account for subjectivity, freedom, and mathematical, religious, and moral experience.     

Materialism in late Enlightenment Germany: a neglected tradition reconsidered

ABSTRACT

Late Enlightenment German materialism has hardly attracted any scholarly attention in the past, in spite of the fact that there were quite a few exponents of it. In this paper, I identify the philosophically most important ones and examine to what extent they were connected with each other. In fact, there are local concentrations of materialists at universities and academic circles in Göttingen, Halle, and Gießen. I then discuss the spectrum of materialist positions held by them, from empiricist naturalism in the case of Michael Hißmann to emergentism and Spinozism in the case of Karl von Knoblauch. Finally, I examine how German materialists conceived of the nature of soul and its immortality. It turns out that most of them were mortalists, with the exception of August Wilhelm Hupel, and some of them also endorsed Socinianism.     

Descartes,Malebranche and Leibniz: conceptions of substance in arguments for the immateriality of the soul

ABSTRACT

The most prominent early modern argument against materialism is to be found in Descartes. Previously I had argued that this argument relies crucially on a robust conception of substance, according to which it has a single principal attribute of which all its other intrinsic qualities are modes. In the present paper I return to this claim. In Section 2, I address a question that is often raised about that conception of substance: its commitment to the idea that a substance has a single such principal attribute. Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra and Daniel Garber have argued that this claim relies on Descartes's identification of substance with attribute. But I argue that it relies on his view that a substance has a single, unitary nature. In Section 3, I examine the role of this conception of substance in arguments found in Malebranche and Leibniz and compare these arguments with Descartes's.