With the widespread omnipresence of digital social media, the truth has lost some of its reliability and objectivity, several authors warn nowadays. In fact, when an age brings to the foreground the tensions of truthfulness and falsehood, correct information and fake news, reality and fiction, genuineness and delusion, this testifies to the unpredictability and inscrutable nature of the confusion into which public communication has been entrained. The rapid development of new media and digital technologies is causing a far-reaching process of change, especially in the field of politics. In his book on "the post-truth era", Ralph J. Keyes announced the advent of a "fib-friendly times", in which "more lies than ever are being told" (Keyes 2004, 4). However, the considerations in this paper rest on a more cautious and critical approach. They support a viewpoint of pluriperspectivism. The new media have surely raised a challenge to contemporary communications. Political affairs are always about certain perspectives and contributions in the constant agon or contest of truth. There is no completely neutral and non-partisan claim to truth, as some philosophers and scientists aspired to represent. Because of its particular nature, the truth can be revealed only with controversy and effort, never without participation and beyond any perspectives. Nevertheless, neither does the truth decline nor do we enter an age of post-truth. Moreover, we can argue about the question which age tends more towards the lie and fake news. Politics is not in a more difficult state today than it has ever been, nor is it in a much simpler position in terms of truth. The truth remains for politics a supporting ground and a permanent benchmark for assessment. It can be discovered only in its pluri-perspective appearance.
It is very complicated to give correct answer to the question “How to define human life?” Nowadays dilemmas consider the respect of human life from the birth to death involve not just biology but also other sciences like philosophy, theology, sociology, psychology, law and politics. These sciences evaluate the topic from different points of view. Integration of all of these perspectives could result with a proper definition. The principal purpose of this paper is to try to determine when a human individual begins. If this proves to be too difficult, we might have to settle for a specific stage in the reproductive process before which it would be impossible to say with any plausibility that a human individual exists. It is necessary to return the moral dimension of observation to the science of life. The point is to reconcile the universal ethical principles concerning the absolute value of life with the everyday challenges and dilemmas. It is our deepest conviction that life has an absolute value and that there always remains something indestructible and substantial in life, which may neither be evaluated by anything final, nor completely reduced to the material biological equivalent and the genetic substratum.
Introductory remarks of this article are reflections on monolingualism in science. In the following step, the article presents Hegel’s arguments in favor of multilingualism in science, illustrated on the example of Christian Wolff, and proceeds to discuss the position of German at the World Congress of Philosophy. The analysis shows that the use of German at the 23rd Convention in Athens in 2013 was in radical recline. When it comes to the predicament mentioned in the title, which is in close connection to the question whether science would be better suited by a universal language or language variety, more arguments seem to be in favor of multilingualism.
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