Cet article aborde la réception des éditions de Pierre Poiret dans les milieux piétistes séparatistes de Berleburg. Grâce aux manuscrits conservés aux archives du château de Berleburg, il est possible de reconstruire l’expérience spirituelle du comte Casimir von Sayn-Wittgenstein, auteur d’une traduction des vingt volumes de la Sainte Bible de Mme Guyon éditée par Poiret en 1713-1715.

The first classification of general types of transition between phases of matter, introduced by Paul Ehrenfest in 1933, lies at a crossroads in the thermodynamical study of critical phenomena. It arose following the discovery in 1932 of a suprising new phase transition in liquid helium, the “lambda transition,” when W. H. Keesom and coworkers in Leiden, Holland observed a λhaped “jump” discontinuity in the curve giving the temperature dependence of the specific heat of helium at a critical value. This apparent (...) jump led Ehrenfest to introduce a classification of phase transitions on the basis of jumps in derivatives of the free energy function. This classification was immediately applied by A.J. Rutgers to the study of the transition from the normal to superconducting state in metals. Eduard Justi and Max von Laue soon questioned the possibility of its class of “second-order phase transitions” -- of which the “lambda transition was believed to be the arche type -- but C.J. Gorter and H.B.G. Casimir used an “order parameter to demonstrate their existence in superconductors. As a crossroads of study, the Ehrenfest classification was forced to undergo a slow, adaptive evolution during subsequent decades. During the 1940s the classification was increasingly used in discussions of liquid-gas, order-disorder, paramagnetic-ferromagnetic and normal-super-conducting phase transitions. Already in 1944 however, Lars Onsagers solution of the Ising model for two-dimensional magnets was seen to possess a derivative with a logarithmic divergence rather than a jump as the critical point was approached. In the 1950s, experiments further revealed the lambda transition in helium to exhibit similar behavior. Rather than being a prime example of an Ehrenfest phase transition, the lambda transition was seen to lie outside the Ehrenfest classification. The Ehrenfest scheme was then extended to include such singularities, most notably by A. Brain Pippard in 1957, with widespread acceptance. During the 1960s these logarithmic infinities were the focus of the investigation of “scaling” by Leo Kadanoff, B. Widom and others. By the 1970s, a radically simplified binary classification of phase transitions into “first-order” and “continuous” transitions was increasingly adopted. (shrink)

A study of various central and connected topics in philosophical logic and the theory of meaning. There are important sections on the relation between linguistic and abstract entities, on necessity and convention, on meaning, sense and reference, and on entailment. Dr Lewy proposes a number of original solutions to problems which have been widely discussed in literature, and there is in particular a sharp and sustained criticism of conventionalism and reductionism. These are among the most difficult and intricate issues in (...) contemporary philosophy, but Dr Lewy writes with great clarity and a minimum of technicality. Where his views are controversial they are explained and supported in a detail which makes it both possible and necessary for potential critics to state their disagreement precisely. The book should therefore be of value as an advanced textbook as well as an original contribution to philosophical logic. (shrink)

It is argued, in this paper, that the core operation underlying any measurement—the inverse modelling under uncertainty—is equivalent to quantitative abductive reasoning which consists in the selection of the best estimate of a measurand in a set of admissible solutions, using a priori information: on the measurand, on the measuring system coupled with an object under measurement, and on the influence of the environment including the user of the measurement results. There are two key premises of this claim: a systematic (...) interpretation of measurement in terms of inverse problems, proposed earlier by the author, and a logical link between inverse problems and abduction, identified by the Finnish philosopher of science Ilkka Niiniluoto. The title claim of this paper is illustrated with an expanded example of measuring optical spectrum by means of a low-resolution spectrometer. (shrink)

H.B.G. Casimir's life, interests and works are intertwined with the important developments that have taken place in physics during this century. This book was compiled by his friends and admirers in honour of his 80th birthday and concentrates mainly on Casimir's achievements in the field of physics, though without ignoring the peripheral areas of the history and philosophy of physics in which he was greatly interested. The book is divided into four parts. Part I describes Casimir's teachers, (...) Ehrenfest, Bohr and Pauli, and will be of general interest due to the key role which these physicists played in modern developments. The articles do give new facts and provide new insights into the history of modern physics. Part II consists of essays on recent developments in various areas of physics in which Casimir has taken an active interest, such as the modern concept of time, statistical foundations of electrodynamic theory and field theory. The subjects covered in Part III have been selected because of Casimir's efforts in the industrial research area of physics. They cover past, present and future expectations in research. (shrink)

Since the demise of introspective techniques in the early twentieth century, experimental psychology has largely assumed an administrative arrangement between experimenters and subjects wherein subjects respond to experimenters’ instructions and experimenters meticulously constrain that relationship through experimental controls. During the postwar era this standard arrangement came to be questioned, initiating reflections that resonated with Cold War anxieties about the nature of the subjects and the experimenters alike. Albeit relatively short lived, these interrogations of laboratory relationships gave rise to unconventional testimonies (...) and critiques of experimental method and epistemology. Researchers voiced serious concerns about the honesty and normality of subjects, the politics of the laboratory, and their own experimental conduct. Their reflective commentaries record the intimacy of subject and experimenter relations and the plentiful cultural materials that constituted the experimental situation, revealing the permeable boundaries between laboratory and everyday life. (shrink)

It has been suggested by some that the acquisition of symbolic capital in terms of honor, prestige, and power translates into an accumulation of material capital in terms of tangible belongings, and that on the basis of these goods high reproductive success may be achieved. However, data on completed fertility rates over more than one generation in so-called traditional societies have been rare. Ethnographic and demographic data presented here on the pastoral Bakkarwal of northern India largely corroborate the hypothesis concerning (...) the interdependence between the attainment of various cultural goals and differential reproduction rates and indicate that the numbers of (especially male) surviving offspring and siblings are crucial to a man’s position in society. (shrink)

The ArgumentPsychology has been frequently subjected to the criticism that it is an unreflexive science — that it fails to acknowledge the reflexive properties of human action which influence psychologists themselves as well as their subjects. However, even avowedly unreflexive actions may involve reflexivity, and in this paper I suggest that the practices of psychology include reflexive ones. Psychology has an established tradition of silence about the self-awareness and sell-consciousness of its actors, whether those actors are experimenters, theorists, or participants (...) (subjects) in research, yet this silence has been established and maintained through sophisticated exercises in self-regard — through sustained reflexive work. Historical analysis reveals some of the ways in which psychologists recognized and then neglected, covered over, or denied reflexivity. Study of those instances where psychologists have engaged in self-conscious reflection or have attended to the sell-consciousness of research subjects indicates both the dangers of reflexivity to governing investigative practices and the resilience which psychology has built against reflexive work. Canonized procedures for scientific work reproduce selves of experimenters and subjects alike, selves who acknowledge only part of their reflexive engagements. Historians of psychology have a special opportunity (and obligation) to explore the reflexive dynamics of investigative practices, and, hence, to theorize aboutscientists, along with their actions and interactions, just as we theorize about science, its products, and its evolution. (shrink)

The generalizing methods of philosophies achieve a popularity for a period of time, which may be extended or brief, during which their proponents and even their opponents may regard them as the cognitive presuppositions for the epoch. The same effect is achieved by the more exact scientific methodologies as they find fame outside the scientific circle and are treated by some as omnipotent discoveries with powers to heal all other disciplines which may be ailing. The limping disciplines, generally classified among (...) the humanities and discerned to be in trouble since the nineteenth century, are understandably envious of the seemingly invincible, favored scientific children of our time. For our era tends to worship quantifiable data and the principles and instruments for measuring and conceptualizing it. Thus semiotics and information theory, in hopes of acquiring the status of the sciences, have led aesthetic inquiry toward the currently popular scientism; but the limited cognitive scope of this methodology has not been recognized. Sociology of knowledge, however, forewarns us of the winds of fashion on cognitive paradigms. Where the inherent explanatory scope of a doctrine, system, or method is less than is believed according to the prevailing sociological patterns, a correction will eventually set in. And an important factor in overcoming the para-religious claims will be, precisely, the fundamental antinomical tendency of the human mind. Stefan Morawski, Research Professor at the Institute of Arts of the Polish Academy of Sciences, has lectured throughout the United States and is currently teaching at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. His works have appeared in a variety of languages: Marxism and Aesthetics: History of Ideas has been published in Spanish and Italian; Absolute and Form, in Polish, Italian, and French; and, in English, Inquiries into the Fundamentals of Aesthetics. (shrink)

Recalling his Warsaw Uprising days after years and from a considerable distance, Morawski reflects on human behavior during the fighting and the degree to which it was justified, simultaneously wondering whether humans had the right to take the lives of other humans. He also dwells on the erroneousness of memories recalled after years. The text is full of critical reflection on the Uprising and human attitudes during the battles.

In this original and eye-opening study, Stefan Morawski sheds light on the notoriously inconclusive--and all too often confused--debate about the cultural significance of postmodernism and postmodernity. He shows how large the volume of historical and artistic knowledge needs to be to seriously grapple with the issues. Morawski unravels the complex strands which link our perception of postmodernism and postmodernity with aesthetic and human values whose roots lie deep in history. He discusses daily life in a consumer society, science (...) and religion, visual arts, literature, film, television and the most arcane works of contemporary music and offers an impassioned interrogation of the ways in which we understand, evaluate and use contemporary culture. (shrink)

Psychologists tend to examine their activities in experimentation with the same objective scientific attitude as they routinely assume in the experimental situation. A few psychologists have stepped outside this closed expistemic practice to undertake reflexive analysis of the psychologist in the laboratory. Three cases of such critical reflexive analysis are considered to better understand the strategies and consequences of confronting what Steve Woolgar has called ‘the horrors of reflexivity’. Reflexive work of William James, Horace Mann Bond, and Saul Rosenzweig are (...) examined: working in the early years of modern experimental psychology these scientists identified limitations in the dominant natural science model of experimentation. Attending to the scientist's own cognitions, social status, and unconscious processes respectively, James, Bond, and Rosenzweig criticized this natural science model and presented methodological and epistemic alternatives. The relative neglect of their constructive observations underscores the resistance to addressing psychology's reflexive dimensions. (shrink)

Casimir Lewy; On the “Justification” of Induction1, Analysis, Volume 6, Issue 5-6, 1 September 1939, Pages 87–90, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/6.5-6.87.

Drawing on Richard Kilminster and Ian Varcoe's article concerning the main themes of Bauman's sociology, this article emphasizes what was left aside (for example, the discontinuities of the thought under consideration, the shift from a systematic science-minded approach to hermeneutics, or the aporetic, somehow dramatic seizure of the culture-power relations which indeed are the chief pillars of Bauman's interest and scrutiny). Another characteristic quality is focusing on the Polish issues, that is, the native tradition in humanities, the specific vicissitudes of (...) sociology after 1945, Bauman's personal background, his gradual change of philosophic views through the phase of his dissident activity till the 1970s, when he transgressed the Marxist worldview. The way in which way Bauman combines many talents (scholarly and literary, of the researcher and the teacher) is also pointed out and analysed and his latest creative period, opened by the publication of Legislators and Interpreters, is brought to light. Bauman's diagnosis and weighted appreciation of the present-day cultural breakthrough, named postmodernity, were enriched and deepened with each subsequent book. There is a touch of genius in the scope and mode of dealing with this problematic. Bauman's international fame seems to be well deserved and firmly grounded. (shrink)

There are only three distinct temporal relationships between art and theory: either the development of new events precedes theory, or both develop side by side, or theory anticipates the appearance of the new artistic current. This temporal relationship is, to some degree, fundamental in the relationship between both phenomena. If one is dealing with the first case, theories of art serve only to redress a balance. The art-theory introduces nothing in any way new; it serves only to explain an artistic (...) process which has already flowered. At most, largely thanks to critical studies, it helps the public understand the new works unexpectedly arising in the field of art, and plays the role of popularizing these new works, in the best sense of the word. (shrink)

Celem niniejszego artykułu jest nie tylko przybliżenie określonych obrazów raju i utopii, które ukazują się w różnych odsłonach w domenach imaginariów europejskich na przestrzeni dziejów, lecz także ukazanie powiązań owych obrazów z domeną dyskursów politycznych dążących do zmiany status quo oraz ukonstytuowania doskonałej, harmonijnej i nieantagonistycznej wspólnoty. Stworzenie takiej wspólnoty – pomimo uniwersalistycznych wizji, które imaginaria raju i utopii implikują – niejednokrotnie opiera się na mechanizmach inkluzji i ekskluzji. Mechanizmy tego typu są charakterystyczne przede wszystkim dla maksymalistycznych wizji i idei (...) politycznych, które dążą do rozwiązania wszelkich ludzkich problemów w sposób ostateczny i całkowity. Z takimi dążeniami należy wiązać nade wszystko rewolucyjne próby realizacji utopii, czy też budowy królestwa Bożego na ziemi. (shrink)

The article is devoted to certain fundamental and discussed threads defined as dilemmas of political anthropology. Starting from specific rudimentary descriptions of human nature, the natural state or natural man, initiated by thinkers described by Barnard as “precursors of anthropology,” as well as referring to the problems of contemporary political philosophy, the papers aims to bring closer the issues concerning the fall of human and his “regeneration,” the “mask regime,” tensions between a human being and society, conflict and cooperation; dialogue (...) and antagonism. The proposed interpretations of the thoughts of Hobbes, Machiavelli, or Rousseau have the character of “retroactive reading.” It means that the references made to historical-philosophical examples activate the contexts of contemporary thought, or even give them new meanings, and at the same time trigger a thought that leans towards the future. (shrink)

Wprowadzenie -- Platon mitotwórca -- Mit Księcia -- Imaginarium rewolucyjne -- Mit w postkomunistycznej Europie -- Mit i słowo -- Zakonczenie.