Introduction -- Plato -- Aristotle -- The rise of modernity -- Immanuel Kant -- Romanticism and historicism -- Phenomenology and hermeneutics -- Philosophes and philosophers -- Analytic philosophy -- Conclusion.

In recent decades, a number of authors have relied on the multiple realizability argument to reject methodological individualism. In this article, I argue that this strategy results in serious difficulties and makes it impossible to identify social entities and phenomena.

The work of the Paduan Aristotelian philosopher Iacopo Zabarella (1533–1589) has attracted the attention of historians of philosophy mainly for his contributions to logic, scientific methodology and because of his possible influence on Galileo. At the same time, Zabarella's views on Aristotelian psychology have been little studied so far; even those historians of Renaissance philosophy who have discussed them, have based their analysis mainly on the psychological essays included in Zabarella's De rebus naturalibus , but have avoided Zabarella's commentary on (...) Aristotle's De anima . This has led to an inaccurate, but widespread, understanding of Zabarella's views. The intention of this article is to provide a systematic analysis of Zabarella's arguments about the (im)mortality of the soul in the context of Aristotelian psychology. Zabarella's view that the soul is mortal according to Aristotle is remarkable for his time, while his elaboration of this position is far more comprehensive than that of Pietro Pomponazzi, the other significant Renaissance thinker who shared the same view. (shrink)

In the philosophy and psychology of perception there exists a long-standing debate about the detachability of the visual from the conceptual contents of perception. The article analyses the implications of this dilemma for the attribution of aesthetic properties independent of the classification of aesthetic objects and the possibility of aesthetic formalism.

Art and ObjectsHARMANGRAHAM polity. 2020. pp. 204. £16.54.

Authors who advocate historical anti-realism have often insisted that they do not claim that no past events happened or that the past did not happen. In this paper, I show that in spite of such protestations, the core arguments presented by Leon Goldstein, Paul Roth, Frank Ankersmit, and Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen preclude the possibility that the past or past events happened.

In this text I analyze Frank Ankersmit’s, Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen’s, and Paul Roth’s responses to my claim that anti-realism in the philosophy of history entails that the past did not happen. I conclude that Ankersmit has failed to understand the argument I presented, Kuukkanen de facto agrees with my view, while Roth has addressed my earlier criticism of the view that the past can be changed and not the argument that is currently under discussion.

Although Levinas’ “il y a” does not directly correspond to Heidegger’s conception of being, his criticism of Heidegger’s temporal ontology is nevertheless justified. With the reduction of every meaning (and being) to its temporal constitution, Heidegger excludes any possibility of transcendence beyond time. The problem of overcoming the radical finitude and historicity of meaning, which is ethically motivated, brings Levinas to the age-old question of metaphysics. However, taking Heidegger’s thought seriously, Levinas is forced to look for an entirely new understanding (...) of the metaphysical quest. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss Foucault’s formulation of the notions of biopolitics and biopower against the background of the COVID-19 pandemic and the public reaction to it. For this purpose, we first identify his body of work relevant to the issue of biopolitics, since this issue – unlike the subject areas represented in Foucault’s earlier work – has not been the subject of a separate study. We narrow the focus to the period between 1974 and 1976, when he wrote five (...) crucial texts for understanding biopolitics. The final one – “Right of Death and Power over Life”, the only one with biopolitics as the sole subject – provides what could be understood as Foucault’s definitive interpretation of the genesis and position of biopolitics in modern technologies of power. In the second part of the paper, we analyze the conceptual structure of biopower and the position of discipline and biopolitics within this structure. We then turn to Foucault’s final determination of biopolitics as thanatopolitics to raise the question of whether this whole perspective is dystopian. We find that it is not, because this perspective depends on Foucault’s understanding of power relations, according to which resistance is primary and power is derived. Finally, we argue that his conceptualization of biopolitics cannot be used to justify any of today’s antibiopolitical tendencies. (shrink)

The paper presents a realist perspective on the recent exchange in the Journal of the Philosophy of History between Adrian Currie and Daniel Swaim on the one side and Paul Roth and Fons Dewulf on the other. The first part presents a critique of Currie and Swaim’s view that the past is not determinate and can be changed. The second part states a series of arguments against Roth’s view that events exist only under description. The third part discusses the ontological (...) problems that Roth’s irrealism about the past fails to address. (shrink)

The paper analyses possible contributions of philosophy and philosophers to architecture and architects’ work. During the twentieth century, a number of dominant positions in philosophy, such as the view that all thinking is verbal or that conceptual thinking determines the contents of perception, significantly limited the ground for productive intellectual interaction between architects and philosophers. With the demise of such positions in recent decades, one can hope that philosophy and philosophers could make genuine contributions to architectural theory.

Die Arbeit, die das ethische Denken von Levinas im Lichte seiner Auseinandersetzung mit Heidegger zu rekonstruieren und kritisch zu bewerten sucht, ist als Gegenüberstellung der beiden Denkansätze angelegt. Sie gliedert sich in drei Teile, die jeweils eine Grundfrage zum Thema haben (Sein, Zeit, das Gute) und zugleich die Entwicklung von Levinas' Denken nachzeichnen. Ausgehend von einem Heidegger entgegengesetzten Seinsverständnis gelangt Levinas zu seiner spezifischen Auffassung der Transzendenz, die schließlich zur Ethik jenseits des Seins führt. Levinas' Denken zeichnet sich somit durch (...) eine strukturelle Nähe zu Heidegger aus, wenngleich die Distanz zwischen beiden Ansätzen unüberbrückbar bleibt. (shrink)

In contrast to idealistic denial and Heidegger’s absolutization of death Levinas tries to interpret death on the background of the ethical relation towards fellow men. The boundary which death presents to life he interprets as the experience of passivity of subject in front of the absolute otherness of death. The subject also experiences such passivity in ethical relation towards other people whose otherness and difference nevertheless invert into ethical non-indifference and responsibility of the subject. In this ethical relating Levinas finds (...) the source of meaning, which is alienated from Being, and starting from which he tries to derive new meaning for his own death as well as for the death of my fellow man. (shrink)

Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology can be seen as a specific reduction of meaning to its temporal constitution . Temporality as the universal horizon of Being makes any transcendence and meaning beyond time impossible. Levinas opposes such reduction of sense to finitude and historicity for ethical reasons. However, in his attempt to overcome Heidegger's primacy of time and transcend its totality, he must look for a completely different conception of significance which goes hand in hand with a new, "diachronic" understanding of time.

Recent experimental data from proteomics and genomics are interpreted here in ways that challenge the predominant viewpoint in biology according to which the four evolutionary processes, including mutation, recombination, natural selection and genetic drift, are sufficient to explain the origination of species. The predominant viewpoint appears incompatible with the finding that the sequenced genome of each species contains hundreds, or even thousands, of unique genes - the genes that are not shared with any other species. These unique genes and proteins, (...) singletons, define the very character of every species. Moreover, the distribution of protein families from the sequenced genomes indicates that the complexity of genomes grows in a manner different from that of self-organizing networks: the dominance of singletons leads to the conclusion that in living organisms a most unlikely phenomenon can be the most common one. In order to provide proper rationale for these conclusions related to the singletons, the paper first treats the frequency of functional proteins among random sequences, followed by a discussion on the protein structure space, and it ends by questioning the idea that protein domains represent conserved units of evolution. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMany long‐standing debates about anachronistic concept‐attributions derive from an essentialist understanding of concepts that is often difficult to sustain for metaphysical or epistemological reasons. The intentionalist alternative to essentialism elaborated in this article successfully clarifies and avoids many standard problems with anachronism.