This book traces the intellectual revolution initiated by Thales in the sixth century BC to its culmination in the metaphysics of Parmenides.

Popper proposes a technical concept of 'verisimilitude' as a test of the progressiveness of scientific theories. The paper attempts to show its uselessness and inapplicability on mathematical and practical grounds, As well as raising doubts about the value of any such attempt to give a mechanical test of scientific progress.

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 42 Heft: 1 Seiten: 298-298.

In the sixties I attempted to comprehend the Zen paradox: 1,400 years of handing down a tradition through absurd statements. I had to construct a theory of the absurd. It led me to the conclusion that not only connections among words could be absurd ; connections among objects themselves could also be absurd. God hung on the cross seemed an absurdity. The Apostle Paul acutely felt this absurdity, and later Tertullian felt it even more acutely. A thousand years later, for (...) Aquinas, the sense of absurdity had subsided, and the diminution of God to the "perspective of the slave" became a postulate of scholastic reason. In all transitional periods, when the "world is out of joint," a palpably absurd situation arises, and grotesque, absurd literature is created. François Villon became popular in Russia in the twentieth century, not very long before Kafka; the poem written for the contest in Blois engraved itself in my memory. The poem is rational in its own way, i.e., it describes well the realities of life itself. (shrink)

Philosophical anthropologist Mircea Eliade once said that "the union of opposites" is a basic category of archaic ontology and comparative world religions. In this paper I develop the theory of contrariety or opposition as a prime focus for East/West comparative philosophy. The paper considers especially Nishida Kitaro's later works and the complex phrase "zettai mujuntekijikodbitsu," variously translated by Schinzinger as "absolute contradictory self-identity," "the self-identity of absolute contradictories," or more simply as "oneness" or "unity" of opposites.

The work is aimed at interpreting text and paintings in D. Rubina and B. Karafelov’s book ‘Okna‘. The authors of the article conduct an analysis of episodes with pictorial ecphrasis in the stories from the book and an iconographic analysis of paintings inside the stories. The chosen topic is actual, because it provides an alternative way to solve a problem of word and image relations in the text. The article is aimed at the search for new methods to reflect a (...) protagonist’s character. In this context, the authors of the article compare images in D. Rubina’s texts with B. Karafelov’s paintings, analyze the symbiotical connection of pictorial ecphrasis and reproductions of paintings. The most of the stories are autobiographical what makes them representative in terms of transferring the narrator’s position through the pictorial ecphrasis. In that book, paintings are not just illustrations and not visualization of ecphrasis. Pictures were introduced into the text of novels for presenting main motives and enriching stories by new images and meanings, which could not be represented by text. Colors of paintings are accentuated by color-designation words and are converged to tonality of text. Thereby a reader can interact with a writer and a painter simultaneously. After analyzing of text and pictures, the authors of the article made a conclusion about efficiency of word and picture synthesis for disclosure of the same themes in multiple artistic planes. (shrink)

During the excavations of 1924–5 at Karanis a papyrus of the second or early third century A.D. was discovered, and subsequently published by J. G. Winter , which under its single column has a subscribed title which should almost certainly be restored as ‘Alcidamas, On Homer’. The first fourteen lines of the papyrus give most of the story of Homer's death and the riddle that caused it, which is common to all the extant Lives of Homer; the remainder is a (...) general eulogy of Homer and a profession of transmitting his works to posterity. The interest of the discovery lies in the knowledge that it gives of a hitherto unrecorded work by Alcidamas, the rhetorician and contemporary of Isocrates, and the new fuel that it provides for an old controversy about the origins of the work known as the Certamen. The first part of this article aims at both re-examining the value of the papyrus and reopening some of the old questions on the Certamen. (shrink)

Markov, A. A. On constructive mathematics.--Ceĭtin, G. S. Mean value theorems in constructive analysis.--Zaslavskiĭ, I. D. and Ceĭtlin, G. S. On singular coverings and properties of constructive functions connected with them.--Maslov, S. Ju. Certain properties of E. L. Post's apparatus of canonical calculi.--Zaslavskiĭ, I. D. Graph schemes with memory.

Starting from the definition of `amorphous set' in set theory without the axiom of choice, we propose a notion of rank (which will only make sense for, at most, the class of Dedekind finite sets), which is intended to be an analogue in this situation of Morley rank in model theory.

In the course of the last few centuries the evolution of literature has been marked by the entry of Eastern countries into the system of social and spiritual relationships which came into being in the West at the beginning of the 17th century. This evolution is linked with the changes which have been grouped together as “modernization.” The content of this modernization coincides, more or less, with what Marx and Engels described, in the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto, as (...) the expansion of the bourgeoisie. However, in the 20th century, the possibility of a non-capitalist path has become apparent, and therefore the theory of modernization gives a wider sense to the character of the ruling class (which, in the 19th century, was the European bourgeoisie), and emphasizes changes of a general nature: the differentiation of the social structure, the birth of new institutions and new roles, economic differentiation, industrialization, urbanization, increased vertical and horizontal mobility, cultural differentiation, the birth of a science independent of religion, the substitution of a businesslike, rational attitude to life for a religious one, the development of civic awareness and of civil rights. The cradle of modernization (England, Holland, France) is conventionally called “the West.” Other countries, including those situated to the west of France (e.g. Spain, Portugal) are considered as “the non-West.”. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “The Banathy Conversation Methodology” by Gordon Dyer, Jed Jones, Gordon Rowland & Silvia Zweifel. Upshot: This commentary will address the implicit and explicit connections between Banathy’s Conversation Methodology, which is the heart of the process used at the IFSR Conversations held every two years in Austria, and constructivist theories in application.