Intercultural Philosophy

@article{Hannes2024,

title = {Being Taken for a Ride: Social and Technological Externalist Complements to the Internalist Reading of Buddhist Chariot Similes},

author = {Tom Hannes and Gunter Bombaerts},

doi = {10.1353/pew.2024.a939596},

issn = {1529-1898},

year  = {2024},

date = {2024-07-00},

urldate = {2024-07-00},

journal = {Philosophy East & West},

volume = {74},

number = {3},

pages = {379--398},

publisher = {Project MUSE},

abstract = {Slavoj Zizek’s criticism of Western Buddhism (2014) for being a late capitalist opiate of the people is partly unwarranted and partly of undeniable relevance. His implicit assumption is that Buddhism is an internalist path that only looks into the individual inner world, leaving harmful societal systems in peace. This article offers a response to Zizek’s analysis, by interpreting the chariot simile in the Buddhist Pali Canon. Even though Pali chariot similes indeed support an internalist perspective, some of them also allow for a reading that opens up to two “externalist” complements: the social outer world and the technological environment. In this way, while acknowledging Zizek’s criticism, we point at Buddhist philosophy’s inherent potential for developing a social-technological critical stance, for instance by linking it to mediation theory.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{nokey,

title = {Living Well Together Online: Digital Wellbeing from a Confucian Perspective},

author = {Matthew Dennis and Elena Ziliotti},

url = {https://www.esdit.nl/j-applied-philosophy-2022-dennis-living-well-together-online-digital-wellbeing-from-a-confucian-perspective/},

doi = {https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12627},

year  = {2023},

date = {2023-05-01},

urldate = {2023-05-01},

journal = {Journal of Applied Philosophy},

volume = {40},

number = {2},

abstract = {The impact of social media technologies (SMTs) on digital wellbeing has become an increasingly important puzzle for ethicists of technology. In this article, we explain why individualised theories of digital wellbeing (DWB) can only solve part of this puzzle. While an individualised conception of DWB is useful for understanding online self-regulation, we contend that we must seek greater understanding of how SMTs connect us. To build an account of this, we locate the conceptual resources for our account in Confucian ethics. In contrast to individualised conceptions of human flourishing that are found in the Western tradition, Confucian thinkers strongly emphasise that individuals cannot flourish alone, but need wider social structures (partner, family, society, nation). Not only do strands of Confucian ethics explain how individuals are defined by the roles they take up in relationships, but this perspective also makes practical suggestions for how these roles can be cultivated. We conclude our article by identifying the Confucian notions that seem to have most promise for the future design of SMTs.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{Bombaerts2023b,

title = {Attention as Practice},

author = {Gunter Bombaerts and Joel Anderson and Matthew Dennis and Alessio Gerola and Lily Frank and Tom Hannes and Jeroen Hopster and Lavinia Marin and Andreas Spahn},

doi = {10.1007/s10516-023-09680-4},

issn = {2948-1538},

year  = {2023},

date = {2023-04-00},

urldate = {2023-04-00},

journal = {glob. Philosophy},

volume = {33},

number = {2},

publisher = {Springer Science and Business Media LLC},

abstract = {The “attention economy” refers to the tech industry’s business model that treats human attention as a commodifiable resource. The libertarian critique of this model, dominant within tech and philosophical communities, claims that the persuasive technologies of the attention economy infringe on the individual user’s autonomy and therefore the proposed solutions focus on safeguarding personal freedom through expanding individual control. While this push back is important, current societal debates on the ethics of persuasive technologies are informed by a particular understanding of attention, rarely posited explicitly yet assumed as the default. They share the same concept of attention, namely an individualistic and descriptive concept of attention that is a cognitive process, an expendable resource, something that one should control individually. We step away from a negative analysis in terms of external distractions and aim for positive answers, turning to Buddhist ethics to formulate a critique of persuasive technology from a genuinely ethical perspective. Buddhist ethics points at our attention’s inescapable ethical and ontological embeddedness. Attention as practice requires “the right effort” to distinguish desirable and undesirable states, the “right concentration” to stop the flow we are caught in, and the “right mindfulness” to fortify the ability to attend to the present situation and keep in mind a general sense of life’s direction. We offer input for further philosophical inquiry on attention as practice and attention ecology. We put forward comfort/effort and individualism/collectivism as two remaining central tensions in need of further research.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}