En el presente trabajo se propone rebajar una de las condiciones para adoptar un principio lógico. La condición a la cual se rebaja tiene que ver con la aceptación del conocimiento proposicional y, por otro lado, con contemplar las consecuencias prácticas efectivas beneficiosas que nos da un principio lógico. Para esto, primero se realiza una reconstrucción del problema de la adopción entendido como una reductio, mostrando que el problema se encuentra en el modo en que los agentes aceptan el conocimiento (...) proposicional. Luego de haber diagnosticado el problema muestro que al rebajar el peso de la adopción es necesario introducir las consecuencias prácticas efectivas beneficiosas del principio lógico para que el agente pueda adoptar el principio lógico. Por último se analizan algunas posibles objeciones a mi propuesta y doy una breve conclusión. (shrink)

Peirce’s analyses of the concept of information begin in the period from 1865 to 1869 and continue until the last years of his life. In fact, the successive phases that the scholars distinguish about Peirce’s approaches to information, roughly match Fisch’s periodization of Peirce’s philosophical development. In the first phase his approach is restricted to the proposition and the terms that knock it into shape; the forms of inference prevail. In the second phase the concept of information is enriched with (...) the development of Peirce’s semiotic theory and his typology of signs. By last, his concept of information receives a more decidedly metaphysical stamp. In this paper we will just expose Peirce’s conception of information during the first of these phases, foregrounding his papers Upon Logical Comprehension and Extension (W2 [1867]: 70-86) and Questions on Reality (W2 [1868]: 162-87). Here, individuals explore and actualize possibilities in thought, once they articulate their experience through a social system of signs. That’s why, in inferring, “we ought to say that we are in thought, and not that thoughts are in us” (EP 1 [1868]: 42). (shrink)

The annual Kronos Philosophical Journal was established in Warsaw in 2012. The papers presented in the annual might be of interest to the readers from outside Poland, allowing them to familiarize themselves with the dynamic thought of contemporary Polish authors, as well as entirely new topics, rarely discussed by English speaking authors. Volume V/2016 comprises articles problematizing Russian phlosophy and literature as well as Ancient Greek philosophy and culture.

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is a popular method for examining real-life decision-making. Research has shown gender related differences in performance, in that men consistently outperform women. It has been suggested that these performance differences are related to decreased emotional control in women compared to men. Given the likely role of emotion in these gender differences, in the present study we examine the effect of a humor induction on IGT performance and whether the effect of humor is moderated by gender. (...) IGT performance and parameters from the Expectancy Valence Model were measured in 68 university students (34 men; mean age 22.02, SD = 4.3 and 34 women; mean age 22.3, SD = 4.1) during a 100 trial-IGT task. Participants were exposed to a brief video before each of the IGT decisions available; one half of the sample (17 men and 17 women) was exposed to 100 humor videos, while the other half was exposed to 100 non-humor videos during the task. We observed a significant interaction between gender and humor, such that under humor, women’s performance during the last block (trials 80-100) improved (compared to women under non-humor), whereas men’s performance during the last block was worse (compared to men under non-humor). Consistent with previous work, under non-humor, men outperformed women in the last block. Lastly, our EVM results show that humor impacts the learning mechanisms of decision-making differently in men and women. Humor impaired men’s ability to acquire knowledge about the payoff structure of the decks, and as a consequence they were stuck in suboptimal performance. On the other hand, humor facilitated women’s ability to explore and to learn from experience, improving performance. These findings deepen our understanding of the mechanisms underlying IGT decision-making and differential effects of humor in men and women. (shrink)

Članak predstavlja prikaz obilježavanja 50. obljetnice Hrvatskog filozofskog društva, koje se održalo u Zagrebu od 6. do 8. prosinca 2007., a uključivalo je simpozij Suvremena hrvatska filozofija, predstavljanje novih knjiga u izdanju Hrvatskog filozofskog društva, godišnju skupštinu Hrvatskog filozofskog društva, svečanu akademiju u povodu 50. obljetnice Hrvatskog filozofskog društva, te okrugli stol o Vladimiru Filipoviću, prvom predsjedniku Hrvatskog filozofskog društva.The paper outlines the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Croatian Philosophical Society that took place in Zagreb 6–8 December, 2007. (...) The event incorporated the symposium entitled Contemporary Croatian Philosophy, the presentation of books published by the Society, the annual assembly of the Society, the formal academy to mark the 50th anniversary, and the round table on Vladimir Filipović, the first president of the Croatian Philosophical Society. (shrink)

I connect the idea of an existential turn in philosophical science, presented by Ilya Kasavin and Vladimir Porus in their recent article, with the problem of rationality and culture crisis, as well as the opposition of profession and vocation in Max Weber’s famous speech on politics. I offer an analysis of the structure of vocation to politics and to science as affects of a special kind. To do this, I draw on Jacques Lacan’s analysis of hysteria. My conclusions are (...) that the structure of a target affect coincides to that of hysteria. This means that scientist tries to show that the truth exists, seeks to force other people to recognize this fact and submit to science as an only acceptable form of worldview. Until this can be done, the scientist gives his relationship to the community the character of service to the highest entity. At the same time, he waits for the inversion of this service, i.e. a transition to power through acknowledgement. It should be noted that scientific research is never limited by the science itself, no matter how dangerous it may be. The existential choice in science is a choice between the pursuit of truth in natural sciences and exact sciences and maintaining the sustainability of culture in social and humanitarian knowledge. The latter, contrary to Weber, is always intertwined with politics. The first is not political, but affective. This allows me to see the definition of the vocation to the science that Kasavin gives in a new way. At the center of the “cognitive-existential mood” in the search for truth, affect dominates, the engine of which is hysteria, and in its basic attitudes truth and the scientist are opposed to the plausible and the profane. (shrink)

The main article is devoted to the historical and philosophical reconstruction of controversy between Vladimir Solovyov and the authors of the “Faith and Reason” - a magazine of the Kharkov Theological Seminary. This controversy took its place in the “theological and journalistic” or the “theocratic” period of Solovyov’s works. Particular attention is paid to the disputes of Solovyov and T. Stoyanov, A.P. Shost'in and the French Orthodox priest Fr. Vladimir Gette on the theory of dogmatic development in the (...) church. In the context of this controversy, the arguments for the “defense” of Solovyov's position, cited in the magazine “Orthodox Review” by a theologian and Konstantin Leontyev's follower Ivan Kristi are also analyzed. The reception of Solovyov's theocratic ideas and reaction to his ecclesiastical views in both the Catholic and Orthodox circles of Russian and Western society is shown. Especially it concerns the criticism of Solovyov’s ideas in the pages of the French magazines “L’Univers”, “L'Union Chrétienne”, “Revue d’Eglise greque-unie”, etc. The evolution of Solovyov's views on the problem of the union of Eastern and Western churches, the renewal of church communication between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, the main result of which was his fundamental but unfinished work “The History and Future of the Theocracy” was demonstrated. A conclusion about the “superficiality” of the judgments of the majority of Vladimir Solovyov's ideological opponents, as well as later interpreters of his legacy, following the French Jesuit Michel d'Erbigny, who tried to present him as a “Russian Newman” who converted from Orthodoxy into the Catholic faith is drawn. It is shown that Solovyov’s projects of the “religion of the Holy Spirit” and the “Universal Church”, created on its basis, should be considered primarily in the context of his own philosophical quest, and not in connection with the confessional and ideological divergences of his time. (shrink)

Recently, psychologists have explored moral concepts including obligation, blame, and ability. While little empirical work has studied the relationships among these concepts, philosophers have widely assumed such a relationship in the principle that “ought” implies “can,” which states that if someone ought to do something, then they must be able to do it. The cognitive underpinnings of these concepts are tested in the three experiments reported here. In Experiment 1, most participants judge that an agent ought to keep a promise (...) that he is unable to keep, but only when he is to blame for the inability. Experiment 2 shows that such “ought” judgments correlate with judgments of blame, rather than with judgments of the agent’s ability. Experiment 3 replicates these findings for moral “ought” judgments and finds that they do not hold for nonmoral “ought” judgments, such as what someone ought to do to fulfill their desires. These results together show that folk moral judgments do not conform to a widely assumed philosophical principle that “ought” implies “can.” Instead, judgments of blame play a modulatory role in some judgments of obligation. (shrink)

One of the key ethical debates in Russian religious thought, initiated by Leo Tolstoy, concerned the question of nonresistance to evil by force. The purpose of this article is to assess the influence of Kant’s ethics and philosophy of religion on the course of this debate and to determine the place and significance of the arguments and considerations expressed on this issue by Semyon Frank in the early and late periods (1908 and 1940s) of his work. To this end I (...) reconstruct the general course of the debate, notably the positions and arguments of Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Solovyov, Ivan Ilyin and Nikolai Berdyaev. Beginning with Tolstoy, Russ­ian thinkers introduced the original ethical content of the idea of nonresistance derived from the Gospel into the ethics of duty borrowed from Kant. The Tolstoy version of this idea was challenged mainly from two directions: from the Kantian grounding of the legitimacy of coercion and attempts to bring in styles of moral thinking other than the ethic of duty. Ilyin’s apolo­gia for the use of force in the struggle against evil prompted Russian émigré thinkers to take a closer look at Tolstoy’s ethical concept and pay attention to its positive content. On this basis Berdyaev and especially Frank create their version of the Christ-centered ethic of salvation which, in the perspective of “protecting the world against evil” includes the ethic of duty and links it with the possibility of using force, always a wrongful act, but one justified “in a situation of extreme need”. (shrink)

In their paper published in 2017 in Philosophical Psychology, Ronja Rutschmann and Alex Wiegmann introduce a novel kind of lies, the indifferent lies. According to them, these lies are not intended to deceive simply because the liars do not care whether their audience is going to believe them or not. It seems as if indifferent lies avoid the objections raised against other kinds of lies supposedly not intended to deceive. I argue that this is not correct. Indifferent lies, too, are (...) either intended to deceive or are not lies at all, since they do not involve genuine assertions. (shrink)

The aim of this book is to present the fundamental theoretical results concerning inference rules in deductive formal systems. Primary attention is focused on: admissible or permissible inference rules the derivability of the admissible inference rules the structural completeness of logics the bases for admissible and valid inference rules. There is particular emphasis on propositional non-standard logics (primary, superintuitionistic and modal logics) but general logical consequence relations and classical first-order theories are also considered. The book is basically self-contained and special (...) attention has been made to present the material in a convenient manner for the reader. Proofs of results, many of which are not readily available elsewhere, are also included. The book is written at a level appropriate for first-year graduate students in mathematics or computer science. Although some knowledge of elementary logic and universal algebra are necessary, the first chapter includes all the results from universal algebra and logic that the reader needs. For graduate students in mathematics and computer science the book is an excellent textbook. (shrink)

This is a translation from Bulgarian into English of Nikolai Lossky’s “Razlichniiat smisul na dumata intuitsiia” (“The Different Senses of the Word Intuition”), published in the Sofianite journal Filosofski pregled (Philosophical Review), 1931, year III, book 1, pp. 1–9. In this article, solicited by the journal’s editor-in-chief, the Bulgarian philosopher Dimitar Mihalchev, Lossky surveys the different ways in which the word “intuition” (intuitsiia) has been used throughout the history of philosophy: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Friedrich Jacobi, Ivan Kireevski, Alexei (...) Khomyakov, Vladimir Solovyov, Bergson, Husserl, and Hans Driesch. Lossky then situates his own use of the word within this philosophical tradition and compares his intuitivism with gnoseologies similar to his own, namely, those of Semyon Frank, Johannes Rehmke, Max Scheler, Paul Linke, Dimitar Mihalchev, the English realists (Samuel Alexander and John Laird), the American realists (Edwin Holt, Walter Marvin, William Montague, Ralph Perry, Walter Pitkin, and Edward Spaulding), and the Neo-Scholastic Josef Gredt. As such, the article makes a valuable addendum to his Obosnovanie intuitivizma (The Foundation of Intuitivism) (1906) and provides a helpful synopsis of his theory of knowledge, which, in accordance with the Russian terminological tradition, he calls “gnoseology”. (shrink)

The academic community in the West tends to be suspicious of Russian philosophy, often relegating it to another category, such as “ideology” or “social thought.” But what is philosophy? There is no simple universal definition, and many thinkers consider it impossible to formulate one. The most credible attempt is nominalistic: philosophy is the practice in which Plato and Aristotle were involved. As Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a (...) series of footnotes to Plato.”If so, then Russian thought needs to be understood as an important part of the Western philosophical heritage, given that it offers perhaps the most elaborate set of footnotes to Plato's most mature and comprehensive dialogues: the Republic and the Laws. The status of ideas in Russian philosophy mirrors Plato's vision of them as ontological and political entities, “laws,” or ideal principles—as distinct from mere epistemic units or tools of cognition. The Platonic tendency to integrate and implement religious, philosophical, and political teachings culminated in twentieth-century Russia. In the Soviet state, perhaps more than anywhere else in history, philosophy became a supreme legal and political institution, acquiring the power of a suprapersonal, universal reason. Hence thought itself, in the moment of its triumph, became a prisoner in the social structures that Soviet ideocracy erected on a philosophical foundation. In discussing Russian philosophy, we inevitably consider the practical application of Platonic conceptions by the Soviet ideocracy to a state in which philosophy was called upon to rule.According to Sergei Averintsev, the emphasis on Platonism in the Russian intellectual tradition is nothing to be proud of; it should rather be lamented and repented. Despite the obvious Platonic preferences of Russian thinkers (from Ivan Kireyevsky to Aleksei Losev), Averintsev asks whether even now we might be able to reorient the tradition toward Aristotle instead—toward a more secular, tolerant, and analytic philosophy of human nature. “If Plato is the first utopian,” Averintsev writes, “Aristotle is the first thinker to look the spirit of utopia right in the eye and overcome it.... Aristotle's technique of thought is more neutral toward religion than is Plato's ecstasy.” Characteristically, the name index to the Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought contains almost twice as many mentions of Plato as of Aristotle.Each national tradition has its own “strange attractor,” as they say now in complexity theory. English empiricism, French rationalism, German Idealism, American pragmatism... However stereotypical these generalizations are, they help to clarify the nations’ distinctive contributions to philosophy. Where does Russia stand in this row? I think that Caryl Emerson is correct to pinpoint, among the most distinctive features of the Russian intellectual tradition, the striving for “wholeness” (tselostnost’). Many Russian thinkers seem to evade definitive and particular “isms,” preferring to find ways of complementing (and thus diluting) those that are on offer. Faced with the claims for rationalism, for example, the Russian response tends to be that true rationality is or should be coupled with fullness of feeling. The characteristic Russian “ism” is at best “holism,” at worst “totalitarianism,” and is usually directed against Western thought. Kireyevsky declares: There [in the West] is a bifurcation [razdvoenie] of the spirit, a bifurcation of thoughts, a bifurcation of the sciences, a bifurcation of the state, a bifurcation of estates, a bifurcation of society, a bifurcation of family rights and duties, a bifurcation of morality and the heart.... In Russia, on the contrary, there is a predominant tendency toward the wholeness of the inner and the outer, of public and moral being.Vladimir Solovyov held that the goal of all knowledge was to comprehend “total unity” and to overcome all kinds of unilateralism, which he referred to as “abstract elements” (otvlechennye nachala). These one-sided elements included Realism, rationalism, empiricism, and positivism, all of which had been advanced by Western philosophical movements.Reading the Handbook, I was struck by how steadily, from one thinker to another, the concept of “unity” is reiterated in various synonyms and contexts: “all-unity,” “wholeness,” “totality,” “integrity,” “edinstvo,” “tsel'nost,’” “tselostnost,” “sobornost,” and so forth. Russian thinkers endeavor not to create something original and special but to unify everything that has already been done and known. Consider opponents, like the Slavophiles and Westernizers; take Petr Chaadaev and Vissarion Belinsky, Kireyevsky and Alexander Herzen, Dostoevsky and Solovyov—all are united by this “super-idea,” proclaiming its embodiment to be the all-embracing vocation of the Russian people. At the same time, they sharply reject all “private principles” and “trashy certainty” (Belinsky's driannaia opredelennost’)—anything that restricts and divides individuals or nations. All these forms of privacy and particularity must be overcome on the way to a universal whole that is even greater in scale than Western Catholicism. According to this logic of totality, we would be better off left with nothing than to be content with the particular and the limited. The first original Russian thinker, Chaadaev (1794–1856), makes the salto mortale of declaring Russia a country that has given nothing to the world, then proclaiming that Russia's destiny is to rise above the rest of the world and resolve all its contradictions. From nothing to everything: such are the philosophical foundations for the totalitarian aspiration of Russian thought, which eventually expressed itself in the revolutionary movements and communist experiments of the twentieth century.As is well known, Russian literature is considered in the West a far more powerful and original expression of philosophical ideas than Russian philosophy as such. Characteristically, then, almost half of the Handbook, its entire second part, is devoted to the dialogue of Russian philosophy with literature and art. As M. N. Forster remarks in the Handbook's concluding essay: “It is natural to wonder why this striking asymmetry between relatively modest achievements in pure philosophy and spectacularly high achievements in literature came about.” To the literary focus of Russian philosophy, we can add a political focus. At least a third of part one of the Handbook is devoted to Russian political and revolutionary philosophy, to Lenin and other Marxists, to Ivan Ilyin, and so on. In this context, both literature and politics assumed philosophical dimensions, often overshadowing philosophy itself.Bertrand Russell lamented that the system of philosophical categories in the West featured mostly nouns (being, consciousness, idea, matter, substance, and so forth), omitting adjectives, verbs, prefixes, and other parts of speech. This criticism should be applied to the category philosophy itself. Why the noun philosophy rather than the adjective philosophical, which can be applied to many areas of activity and creativity, including literature and politics?In Russian intellectual history, the philosophical, rather than philosophy, is the predominant category. The state, ideology, economics, politics and geopolitics, literature, art, warfare, space exploration—all these spheres in Russia and the USSR have been and remain abundantly philosophical, subordinated to certain philosophical tasks, though philosophy as such has never been as developed and sophisticated as in the West. As a discipline, Western philosophy “outsourced” itself to Russian disciples, leaving it to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Lenin and Trotsky, to test in literary and political practices a host of Western philosophical ideas, from those of Plato, Rousseau, and Hegel to those of Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche.Likewise, the verb to philosophize is used in ways unusual and awkward in the West. “It is characteristic of the Russian people to philosophize [filosofstvovat'],” as Nikolai Berdyaev observed: “An illiterate Russian peasant likes to pose questions of a philosophical nature—about the meaning of life, about God, about eternal life, about evil and untruth, about how to realize the Kingdom of God.” The philosophical and philosophizing, as attributes and actions of the state and society, overpowered philosophy as a noun—as an academic discipline, if you will. Russian philosophy has had a very modest impact on the West, but the impact of the philosophical has been immense. Nineteenth-century Russian literature influenced Western culture with its philosophical interrogations and existential dilemmas, just as, in the twentieth century, the USSR influenced the West with the philosophical ideas (Marxism, materialism, dialectics, collectivism, socialism, communism) that determined Soviet ideology, politics, and economics.In the USSR of the 1920 and 1930s, for instance, philosophy as an independent academic subject was in a subdued position, as a servant of party ideology. But, meanwhile, the sphere of the philosophical spread to such distant domains as theater (Stanislavsky), physiology (Pavlov), and agriculture (Michurin), with all such activities glorified and sponsored by the state as “philosophically correct”—as faithful to “materialism” and “Realism.” Paradoxically, in the quintessentially philosophical state that was the USSR, the state of philosophy, with the repression of all independent thought and thinkers, was miserable. The fateful and often disastrous originality of Russian philosophy consisted precisely in its dissemination to other areas, in an act of kenosis or self-transcendence that can be viewed both as an aggressive philosophical appropriation of politics, economics, ideology, and literature—and as philosophy's sacrificial devotion to the world beyond its professional boundaries.So there are three features that make Russian thought relevant and dangerous: its Platonic utopian aspiration; its spirit of totality; and its tendency to transcend the boundaries of academic philosophy and to philosophize society, politics, and life in general. Russian philosophy has not been as good at explaining the world as at changing it, sometimes ethically and poetically, sometimes violently and aggressively. Teachers and students of Russian culture should be deeply motivated to draw more attention to the philosophical in Russia and to raise its status in the Western academy. In my view, we would do better service to Russian philosophy if we are frank enough to qualify it as dangerous, sometimes very toxic and addictive, fraught with totalistic tendencies. This philosophy is the voice of the “underground,” both in the Dostoevskian and Leninist senses.At the same time, however, the antidotes concocted in the Russian metaphysical laboratory are of enormous value: the Russian versions of personalism, existentialism, secular and religious liberalism, neorationalism, culturology, conceptualism, and postmodernism. These movements, which counteract totalization, need to be studied precisely because they were cooked up and tested under the same extreme conditions in which the most dangerous intellectual poisons have been produced. (shrink)

Felix Klein and Abraham Fraenkel each formulated a criterion for a theory of infinitesimals to be successful, in terms of the feasibility of implementation of the Mean Value Theorem. We explore the evolution of the idea over the past century, and the role of Abraham Robinson's framework therein.

The paper outlines the historical development of question about ambiguous and mysterious human nature, in particular considering the reasons and conditions for the founding of modern philosophical anthropology. Subsequently, it brings an overview of the conceptual beginnings and directions of anthropological research in Croatia. The focus is on the following questions: When did the investigations begin in the field of philosophical anthropology, in what kind of thinking environments were they shaped and what scientific achievements were reached? The presentation brings to (...) light the cognition that philosophical anthropology in Croatia got its first contours and valuable contributions to the very beginning of the contemporary renewal of this discipline, shortly after its phenomenological and scientific revivals in the ventures of Scheler and Plessner. The development of this research branch is, according to Hans Lankʼs model, divided into four main conceptual orientations. The anthropology from above shows the creative contributions of Stjepan Zimmermann, Vilim Keilbach, Rajmund Kupareo, Miljenko Belić, Ante Kusić, Josip Ćurić, Hrvoje Lasić and Ivan Koprek. The anthropology from below is illustrated by the reference to the research by Vera Ehrlich-Stein, Rudi Supek, the Institute of Anthropology, Pavao Rudan and Darko Polšek. For the anthropology from culture, the philosophical achievements of Pavao Vuk-Pavlović, Vladimir Filipović, Vjekoslav Mikecin, Esad Ćimić, Nikola Skledar, Branka Brujić, Milan Galović and Mihaela Girardi-Karšulin were delineated. Under the anthropology from history, the works of Predrag Vranicki, Milan Kangrga, Vanja Sutlić, Gaja Petrović, Hotimir Burger, Mislava Kukoč and Raul Raunić are outlined. The conclusion summarises four insights. 1. Philosophical anthropology is an under-researched and not enough appreciated field, which represents one of the most fertile currents of thought in the 20th century. 2. Creative contributions are presented in all four major orientations. 3. In the context of anthropological research, lively dialogue and a fruitful meeting of different worldviews were realised. 4. The beginnings of the development of the discipline should be moved earlier in history than previously considered, from the 1950s and 1960s to the early 1930s. The last insight points to the need for further exploration of the perceived, and so far largely neglected, continuity of anthropological themes and related ideas in the history of recent philosophy in Croatia. (shrink)

This article highlights the participation of the Ukrainian scientist, Professor Vitaly Mikhailovich Grigorevsky, doctor of physical and mathematical sciences, and representative of the scientific school of Vladimir Platonovich Tsesevich, in the organization and development of international cooperative partnership in the field of satellite astronomy and photometric studies of artificial satellites of the Earth. The activity of the scientist in the coordination of scientific research of the countries of Eastern Europe in 1965–1973 under the SPIN program, carried out under the (...) auspices of the Astronomical Council of the USSR Academy of Sciences, is discussed. The article explores the main forms of Grigorevsky’s scientific cooperation with the world’s leading experts in the field of satellite astronomy—the British scientist Desmond King-Hele, the Czech astronomer František Link, Hungarian researchers Iván Almár and D. Toth, and others. Also, the achievements of the Latvian researchers Māris Ābele and Kasimirs Lapushka in the creation of photographic cameras of surveillance of satellites are analysed. (shrink)

At the beginning of the twentieth century, when psychoanalysis was just emerging and the tradition of writing psychoanalytic biographies did not yet exist, the genre of pathography was widespread among psychiatrists, who considered the life of a prominent figure through the prism of his or her disease. One of the heroes of the number of pathological investigations was Friedrich Nietzsche, whose figure and philosophical views instigated wide interest. This tendency was manifested among the psychiatrists working in the Russian Empire, including (...) the territory of contemporary Ukraine. The analysis of Nietzsche’s illness and creativity, proposed by a psychiatrist from Odessa Ivan Khmelevskyi, helps to clarify the historical boundaries between the pathography and psychobiography. The current article for the first time attempts to reproduce the basic data on the life and research activities of this now almost forgotten psychiatrist. The specificity of I. Khmelevskyi’s views on F. Nietzsche becomes more obvious due to the consideration of the position of Vladimir Chyzh, another Russian psychiatrist who was also interested in the figure and ideas of the German philosopher. It is shown that the pathographies of F. Nietzsche, proposed by I. Khmelevskyi and V. Chyzh, reflected both some features of the development of the genre and general trends in understanding of Nietzsche’s figure and teachings within the Russian context. It is shown that V. Chyzh and I. Khmelevskyi, like many scientists of their time, shared some ideas about evolution and degeneration, which are now considered outdated. At the same time, it has been shown that both psychiatrists confronted with the philosophy and figure of F. Nietzsche were forced to limit the explanatory ambitions of psychiatry and avoid the usual for pathographers of that time tendency to consider genius as a pathology. It is also noted that the fact of Nietzsche’s illness, if not overemphasized, can be accepted to the philosophical discourse of the present time. (shrink)

This novel's plot, if one may speak of a plot, appears to have been hatched, if one may speak of something not an egg being hatched, at Oxford. The plotters, who have unlikely names even for plotters, met in Wellington Square, a place I know well. I once drank whiskey in the afternoon there with Jane Minto, as likely a character as any in a city that breeds characters (as any follower of Inspector Morse will know). The plotters, however, drank (...) tea, from a tin teapot, while wearing wellingtons. Making something up is, in general, not that hard; making something up about Kurt Schwitters is, because his life itself was so abundant a collage. I once met a woman in front of one of his portraits: “That's me,” she said, “but I never liked it; nor did my husband; we put it under the bed.” She could have appeared in this novel but does not. Plenty of others do—relations and friends of the inventor of Merz.Merz was a fragment, a piece of Humpty Dumpty who fell off the wall in 1914 and could not be put together again. Not for want of trying by the likes of El Lissitzky, Vladimir Tatlin, Ivan Puni, and Schwitters, especially the last, collecting the Dumpty pieces into a Merzbau that was no more than an assemblage—not a Gesamtkunstwerk and not a cathedral, but what in England was once called a PreFab, a hopeful gesture in an age of helplessness. Schwitters was a collector of the discarded, of the disregarded, of the unregarded, and out of the debris he made beauty. He made poetry (if poetry it may be called) out of sounds, noises sounding in the ear like those made by the guns that had daily blown men, women, and horses to pieces.Clearly, Draesner, the author of this novel, has been totally beSchwittered. I myself became so at Oxford in 1959 and have never wavered in my beSchwitterment, albeit adding over the years beBeuysment, beFluxusment, and beKieferment to my inventory. Thus beSchwittered, I have been a pilgrim to Cylinders, though not finding it; to the grave at Ambleside, with no body in it; to Wordsworth's cottage, where I left my book of Kurt's poems; and to Hannover, to be photographed on Schwitters Square. Kurt's Hannover might have been Hanover (with a single n) had not Bismarck stolen it; Bomber Harris might, in that case, have thought twice about bombing it; and we might not have been asking of this Scheinkünstlerroman how German is it, but instead telling ourselves just how English it is. (shrink)

The paper discusses for the first time the “philosophy of life” of the famous literary critic and philosopher of the first quarter of the twentieth century Yuly Isaevich Aykhenvald (1872–1928) in connection with his interpretation of Russian history and literature. The article examines the publications of Yu.I. Aykhenvald in the newspaper “Rul’” in the first half of the 1920s, stimulated by his participation in various philosophical discussions that took place at that time in Berlin (F.A. Stepun’s lecture “Tragedy and Modernity”, (...) S.S. Olden­burg’s report “Russian Literature and Revolution”). Special attention is paid to the report of Yu.I. Aykhenvald “On the question of the meaning of history”, read in the Russian Scien­tific and Philosophical Society on April 14 (1), 1923. It is shown that for a critic-philosopher, any revolution is always opposed by the “progressive force of history”, the temple of human existence built on the basis of everyday life for centuries. It is demonstrated that for Yu.I. Aykhenvald, daily life is full of great meaning and a special “metaphysical height”. At the same time, Aykhenvald’s attitude to everyday life is the basis of his literary preferences, due to this, the “natural symbolism” of Alexander Pushkin, Apollon Grigoryev, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Bunin, Boris Zaitsev unexpectedly, but quite logically, turn out to be consonant with ideas of Vladimir Solovyov in his service to the beauty of world life, “overcoming flesh, spiri­tualizing matter, idealizing objectivity”. It is proved that the interpretation of everyday life is associated in the worldview of Yu.I. Aykhenvald with views both religious (the idea of “natu­ral Christianity” as the “imperishable myth of nature” underlying the entire natural world, the “real miracle” of dying and resurrection, which finds “refraction in the religious feeling of people”) and historiosophical (Russia’s destiny and its attitude towards Europe). (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe psychological and philosophical literature exploring the role of social influence in moral judgments suggests that conformity in moral judgments is common and, in many cases, seems to b...

Several attempts have recently been made to point to ‘the proper place’ for hydrogen in the Periodic Table of the elements. There are altogether five different types of arguments that lead to the following conclusions: hydrogen should be placed in group 1, above lithium; hydrogen should be placed in group 17, above fluorine; hydrogen is to be placed in group 14, above carbon; hydrogen should be positioned above both lithium and fluorine and hydrogen should be treated as a stand-alone element, (...) in the center of the Periodic Table. Although all proposals are based on arguments, not all of them sound equally convincing. An attempt is made, after critical reexamination of the arguments offered, to hopefully point to the best possible choice for the position of hydrogen. A few words are also mentioned on the structure of the Periodic Table and the attempts to reorganize it. (shrink)

The short exposition of the triplet model of concepts and some definitions connected with it are given. In this model any concept may be depicted as having three characteristics: a base, a representing part and the linkage between them. The paper introduces the fuzzification of concepts in terms of the triplet model.

Our investigation is concerned with the finite model property with respect to admissible rules. We establish general sufficient conditions for absence of fmp w. r. t. admissibility which are applicable to modal logics containing K4: Theorem 3.1 says that no logic λ containing K4 with the co-cover property and of width > 2 has fmp w. r. t. admissibility. Surprisingly many, if not to say all, important modal logics of width > 2 are within the scope of this theorem–K4 itself, (...) S4, GL, K4.1, K4.2, S4.1, S4.2, GL.2, etc. Thus the situation is completely opposite to the case of the ordinary fmp–the absolute majority of important logics have fmp, but not with respect to admissibility. As regards logics of width ≤ 2, there exists a zone for fmp w. r. t. admissibility. It is shown that all modal logics A of width ≤ 2 extending S4 which are not sub-logics of three special tabular logics have fmp w.r.t. admissibility. (shrink)

The main result of this paper is the following theorem: each modal logic extendingK4 having the branching property belowm and the effective m-drop point property is decidable with respect to admissibility. A similar result is obtained for intermediate intuitionistic logics with the branching property belowm and the strong effective m-drop point property. Thus, general algorithmic criteria which allow to recognize the admissibility of inference rules for modal and intermediate logics of the above kind are found. These criteria are applicable to (...) most modal logics for which decidability with respect to admissibility is known and to many others, for instance, to the modal logicsK4,K4.1,K4.2,K4.3,S4.1,S4.2,GL.2; to all smallest and greatest counterparts of intermediate Gabbay-De-Jong logicsD n; to all intermediate Gabbay-De-Jong logicsD n; to all finitely axiomatizable modal and intermediate logics of finite depth etc. Semantic criteria for recognizing admissibility for these logics are offered as well. (shrink)

This paper offers a brief analysis of the unification problem in modal transitive logics related to the logic S4 : S4 itself, K4, Grz and Gödel-Löb provability logic GL . As a result, new, but not the first, algorithms for the construction of ‘best’ unifiers in these logics are being proposed. The proposed algorithms are based on our earlier approach to solve in an algorithmic way the admissibility problem of inference rules for S4 and Grz . The first algorithms for (...) the construction of ‘best’ unifiers in the above mentioned logics have been given by S. Ghilardi in [ 16 ]. Both the algorithms in [ 16 ] and ours are not much computationally efficient. They have, however, an obvious significant theoretical value a portion of which seems to be the fact that they stem from two different methodological approaches. (shrink)

Categorical-theoretic semantics for the relevance logic is proposed which is based on the construction of the topos of functors from a relevant algebra (considered as a preorder category endowed with the special endofunctors) in the category of sets Set. The completeness of the relevant system R of entailment is proved in respect to the semantic considered.

The aim of this paper is to look from the point of view of admissibility of inference rules at intermediate logics having the finite model property which extend Heyting's intuitionistic propositional logic H. A semantic description for logics with the finite model property preserving all admissible inference rules for H is given. It is shown that there are continuously many logics of this kind. Three special tabular intermediate logics λ, 1 ≥ i ≥ 3, are given which describe all tabular (...) logics preserving admissibility: a tabular logic λ preserves all admissible rules for H iff 7λ has width not more than 2 and is not included in each λ. MSC: 03B55, 03B20. (shrink)

There are no universally adopted answers to the natural questions about scientific concepts: What are they? What is their structure? What are their functions? How many kinds of them are there? Do they change? Ironically, most if not all scientific monographs or articles mention concepts, but the scientific studies of scientific concepts are rare in occurrence. It is well known that the necessary stage of any scientific study is constructing the model of objects in question. Many years logical modeling was (...) dominant in the concept studies. Last decades, concepts came to be regarded as the subject of mathematical modeling. However, different authors take different features of concepts as independent variables of their models. Our objective is to characterize informally the spectra of relevant variables for the modeling of scientific concepts. (shrink)

. How, why and what for we should combine logics is perfectly well explained in a number of works concerning this issue. But the interesting question seems to be the nature and the structure of the general universe of possible combinations of logical systems. Adopting the point of view of universal logic in the paper the categorical constructions are introduced which along with the coproducts underlying the fibring of logics describe the inner structure of the category of logical systems. It (...) is shown that categorically the universe of universal logic turns out to be a topos and a paraconsistent complement topos. (shrink)

Understanding has usually been seen as a method of hermeneutics. Until recently, philosophers of science paid little attention to the topic of scientific understanding because they came to the conclusion that understanding can be nothing more than a psychological by-product of scientific activity. However, many scientists believed that understanding was an important aim of science. The article states that understanding is a universal cognitive phenomenon applicable to the knowledge of not only cultural and historical phenomena, but also natural objects and (...) processes. Understanding does not oppose explanation; some types of the latter produce scientific understanding. In the course of criticism of the standard model of scientific explanation, the first concepts of “scientific understanding” arose – unifying and causal-mechanistic. A pragmatic approach to scientific understanding is also considered, linking it to the cognitive skills of a scientist or a group of scientists. (shrink)

We study the problem of finding a basis for all rules admissible in the intuitionistic propositional logic IPC. The main result is Theorem 3.1 which gives a basis consisting of all rules in semi-reduced form satisfying certain specific additional requirements. Using developed technique we also find a basis for rules admissible in the logic of excluded middle law KC.

The present article deals with different Marxist theories on the Soviet experience, which emerged in post-Soviet Russophone Marxist or neo-Marxist scholarship (concurrently with some reference to Marxist traditions in other former Eastern Bloc countries). The article demonstrates that these theories – if we leave the remaining ‘Marxist-Leninists’ of the classical Soviet type aside and focus on critical, post-Soviet Marxism – may be classified as either ‘fundamentally rejectionist’ or ‘Thermidorian’. The former, in line with the seminal criticisms of K. Kautsky and (...) other early opponents of Lenin, reject the socialist nature of the October 1917 Revolution outright. The latter mostly define the Revolution as at least socialist-oriented, but further bifurcate into different varieties of the ‘state capitalism’ thesis with a number of theorists defining Stalinist societies as special varieties of post-revolutionary industrialism essentially different from orthodox capitalism. Most critical post-Soviet Marxists agree, however, that the main vector of Soviet-type regimes’ evolution indeed pointed towards increased class stratification. However, it should be remembered that Soviet-type bureaucracy was a class-in-the-making rather than a class-in-itself or a class-for-itself, and this point is further elaborated in the works of those theorists who prioritise the differences rather than similarities between Soviet-type industrialism and orthodox capitalism. (shrink)

Reproductive biotechnologies, also known as assisted reproductive technologies (ART), have undergone significant development over time, reaching a remarkable level of evolution in the 20th century. Currently, several biotechnologies stand out, among which Artificial Insemination (AI), widely spread globally, Embryo Production (EP) both in vivo and in vitro for embryo transfer, Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI), sexing, among other innovations. In Vitro Production (IVP) of embryos has emerged as the biotechnology that has experienced the greatest development and evolution in recent decades, covering (...) various fields such as research in assisted human reproduction, obtaining transgenic animals for biomedicine, preservation of endangered species and conservation of animals of high genetic value. This research aims to analyze the relevance of IVP, as well as the fundamental elements that make up this complex process. IVP of embryos involves several stages, from oocyte procurement, oocyte selection and in vitro maturation, sperm preparation, in vitro fertilization, to the culture of the resulting zygotes to blastocysts. These blastocysts, once transferable to recipients, culminate in the birth of a new being. However, this process has both advantages and disadvantages, which motivates continuous innovation in the field. (shrink)

Embora seja comum reconhecer no belo natural o caso mais paradigmático para a argumentação que Kant desenvolve na Crítica da faculdade do juízo estética, encontramos reiteradas considerações sobre a arte na “Dedução transcendental” exposta nos §§30-38. Neste trabalho, argumento que há duas centralidades distintas em operação nessa obra. O belo natural é paradigmático porque sua predicação é a que melhor representa o ideal de pureza que corresponderia ao ajuizamento integralmente fundado em faculdades transcendentais; mas o belo artístico também pode ser (...) considerado paradigmático, pois é por meio dos juízos sobre ele que melhor nos aproximamos de tal ideal. (shrink)