Several philosophers have developed theological perspectives out of Heidegger's ontology. Yet the question of God in Heidegger's thought itself has never received full elucidation. In this revealing new study, George Kovacs poses the problem of analyzing the idea of God as a process of questioning and thus subjects Heidegger's phenomenological existentialism to a process of exposition Heidegger himself employed.

We describe a KB Gödelian ontological system, and some other weak systems, in a fully formal way using theory of types and natural deduction, and present a completeness proof in its main and specific parts. We technically and philosophically analyze and comment on the systems (mainly with respect to the relativism of values) and include a sketch of some connected aspects of Gödel's relation to Kant.

Humeans identify the laws of nature with universal generalizations that systematize rather than govern the particular matters of fact. Humeanism is frequently accused of circularity: laws explain their instances, but Humean laws are, in turn, grounded by those instances. Unfortunately, this argument trades on controversial assumptions about grounding and explanation that Humeans routinely reject. However, recently an ostensibly semantic circularity objection has been offered, which seeks to avoid reading such assumptions into the Humean view. This paper argues that the new (...) semantic version tacitly relies on the familiar metaphysical one and, therefore, it ultimately brings nothing new to the table. (shrink)

Humans seem to readily track their conspecifics’ mental states, such as their goals and beliefs from early infancy. However, the underlying cognitive architecture that enables such powerful abilities remains unclear. Here I will propose that a basic representational structure, the belief file, could provide the foundation for efficiently encoding, and updating information about, others’ beliefs in online social interactions. I will discuss the representational possibilities offered by the belief file and the ways in which the repertoire of mental state reasoning (...) is shaped by the characteristics of its constituents. A series of questions will be outlined concerning the representational skeleton of the belief file, sketching a possible structure that supports the rapid encoding and re-identification of belief related information. After analyzing the possible limitations of the belief attribution system, I will examine some of its characteristics that might enable a flexibility that is often neglected. I will suggest that operations involving belief files are not impeded by the absence of precise first-person information regarding their contents. In fact, the system permits manipulations with “empty” belief files, allowing humans to ascribe beliefs to conspecifics based on little or no direct information regarding the content of the mental state. Such an analysis aims to advance our understanding of how spontaneous belief attribution may be performed, and to provide an insight into the possible mechanisms that allow humans to successfully navigate the social world. (shrink)

The current use of citation-based metrics to evaluate the research output of individual researchers is highly discriminatory because they are uniformly applied to authors of single-author articles as well as contributors of multi-author papers. In the latter case, these quantitative measures are counted, as if each contributor were the single author of the full article. In this way, each and every contributor is assigned the full impact-factor score and all the citations that the article has received. This has a multiplication (...) effect on each contributor's citation-based evaluative metrics of multi-author articles, because the more contributors an article has, the more undeserved credit is assigned to each of them. In this paper, I argue that this unfair system could be made fairer by requesting the contributors of multi-author articles to describe the nature of their contribution, and to assign a numerical value to their degree of relative contribution. In this way, we could create a contribution-specific index of each contributor for each citation metric. This would be a strong disincentive against honorary authorship and publication cartels, because it would transform the current win-win strategy of accepting honorary authors in the byline into a zero-sum game for each contributor. (shrink)

Feminist science criticism has mostly focused on the theories of the life sciences, while the few studies about gender and the physical sciences locate gender in the practice, and not in the theories, of these fields. Arguably, the reason for this asymmetry is that the conceptual and methodological tools developed by (feminist) science studies are not suited to analyze the hard sciences for gender-related values in their content. My central claim is that a conceptual, rather than an empirical, analysis is (...) needed; one should be looking for general metaphysical principles which serve as the conceptual foundation for the scientific theory, and which, in other contexts, constitute the philosophical foundations of a worldview that legitimates social inequalities. This position is not being advocated anywhere in the philosophy of science, but its elements are to be found in Helen Longino's theory of science, and in the social epistemology and ontology of Georg Lukács. (shrink)

According to the theory Russell defends in The Analysis of Mind, ‘true memories’ (roughly, memories that are not remembering-hows) are recollections of past events accompanied by a feeling of familiarity. While memory images play a vital role in this account, Russell does not pay much attention to the fact that imagery plays different roles in different sorts of memory. In most cases that Russell considers, memory is based on an image that serves as a datum (imagebased memories), but there are (...) other cases in which memory judgment requires an image without being based on it (answer-memories). A good example for the former is when a person, asked what the colour of the sea was last afternoon, recalls an image and forms a judgment on this basis. In the second case she may recognize the sea and entertain a memory image of it without ‘reading off’ the memory judgment from this picture. That is, the image does not prompt but itself is part of the propositional content of answer memories. Since in this latter case the feeling of familiarity is constitutive of the recollection but cannot serve as its explanans, answer memories do not conform to Russell’s account. According to Lindsay Judson this is not a vice of the theory, since Russell never meant to extend it to answer memories. Despite having a certain appeal of benevolence, Judson’s interpretation is not supported by textual evidence. Taking side with David Pears, I will argue that Russell did not properly differentiate between image-based memory and answer memory, and illegitimately extended his theory to the latter. (shrink)

Phenomenological theories have a long history in undermining the traditional opposition between mind and body. According to them, the material, viz. the corporal can serve as a place for the processes of meaning-formation, i.e., as a condition of possibility for any set of relationships forming a body of meaning. In this paper, this manifests itself through the fact that the basic concepts related to corporeality, e.g., perception, movement etc., are the conditions of possibility for any construction of meaning and consciousness (...) process, as also shown by contemporary neuroscience and communication theory in the case of intelligence and communication. However, this was already known to Aristotle, long before the advent of modern neuroscience, but the stakes were even higher for him: the issue of corporeality is itself problematic in terms of determining its boundaries, as the limits of the Self (viz. my body) merge with those of the world. The situation is similar to the passive and active synthesis of Husserl and also to Heidegger’s twofold openness of the Dasein, conflating the boundaries of the Self and the limits of the world for our human being-there, or consciousness. (shrink)

The present study examines how two famous professors in Central Europe decided to network together in order to promote traditional Christian faith through New Orthodoxy of Debrecen and Reformed Pietist of Vienna which became the source of renewal in the Reformed Church of Hungary. Their correspondence bears a witness to the endeavour to train, teach and guide young students enabling them to become persons of influence in the church. This research paper examines contents of the exchange of letters between Ferenc (...) Balogh of Debrecen and Eduard Böhl from Vienna with a particular view on how they educated the future generation along the evangelical-pietist faith that both professors adhered to. (shrink)

Chapter 20 David Kovacs’ “Essence, Grounding, and Explanation” sets out four different ways in which essence might be taken to relate to the notion of grounding or metaphysical explanation, i.e., the type of connection that is often expressed by means of non-causal “in virtue of” or “because”-claims: (i) Unity: essence and grounding belong to a unified set of explanatory concepts; (ii) Supplementation: essence and grounding both contribute in their own way to a distinctive type of explanation; (iii) Independence: essence is (...) a sui generis notion with no straightforward conceptual links to grounding; and (iv) Irrelevance: essence is not an explanatory notion at all and therefore should not be viewed as connected to explanatory notions like grounding. As Kovacs brings out in the chapter, a wide variety of attitudes are represented in the literature even among philosophers who are sympathetic to the recent “hyperintensional” turn in metaphysics when it comes to the question of how the notions of essence and grounding interact with one another. (shrink)

This brief poem (Hor. Carm. 1.30) is by turns enigmatic (what is the purpose of Horace's prayer to Venus?) and slightly incoherent (why should both Horace and Glycera be praying to Venus? Are they praying for the same thing or for different things? Either has its problems). A further problem is that, if Horace intended uocantis in line 2 for a genitive, the text as it stands misleads the first-time reader, contrary to Horace's normal practice of authorial kindness toward such (...) readers. The way to deal with this is to take uocantis as accusative (‘those calling on you with much incense’) and to insert an ‘and’ in the text to connect sperne and transfer: sperne dilectam Cypron et uocantīs | ture te multo Glycerae decoram | transfer in aedem (‘reject your beloved Cyprus and your incense-offering devotees and move to Glycera's beautiful shrine’). If this is right, it addresses the incoherencies under which the usual interpretation labours. (shrink)

Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann's contributions to chemistry are well known. Less well known, however, is that over a career that spans nearly fifty years, Hoffmann has thought and written extensively about a wide variety of other topics, such as chemistry's relationship to philosophy, literature, and the arts, including the nature of chemical reasoning, the role of symbolism and writing in science, and the relationship between art and craft and science. In Roald Hoffmann on the Philosophy, Art, and Science of Chemistry, (...) Jeffrey Kovac and Michael Weisberg bring together twenty-eight of Hoffmann's most important essays. Gathered here are Hoffmann's most philosophically significant and interesting essays and lectures, many of which are not widely accessible. In essays such as "Why Buy That Theory," "Nearly Circular Reasoning," "How Should Chemists Think," "The Metaphor, Unchained," "Art in Science," and "Molecular Beauty," we find the mature reflections of one of America's leading scientists. Organized under the general headings of Chemical Reasoning and Explanation, Writing and Communicating, Art and Science, Education, and Ethics, these stimulating essays provide invaluable insight into the teaching and practice of science. (shrink)

The Response of Debrecen New Orthodoxy to Liberal Theology in Hungary. The Reformed Church of Hungary was not exempt from the impact of various theological schools of Western Europe during the nineteenth century. The historical theological school of Tübingen, the Swiss liberal and moderate theology and the Dutch ‘moderne theologie’ held a great sway on Hungarian Protestantism in particularly Reformed Theology. Parallel to this development another and distinct trend appeared as a response to the challenges posed by liberal theology, which (...) preferred traditional theological stances. In consequence not only liberal theology but also orthodox, evangelical, and pietist theologies were transferred from England, Scotland, Switzerland, Germany and France to Hungary. While Germany experienced already in the 1840s and 1850 serious theological debates, Hungarian Protestantism was late to encounter a similar debate due to the political-historical situation. It is only after the Ausgleich, the Agreement between Austrian and Hungarian aristocracy that in the era of political and national freedom theological debates surfaced and became really intense. The fiercest theological debate unfolded between the liberal theologians led by Mór Ballagi, a professor in Budapest, and the neo-orthodoxy of Debrecen Reformed University where Imre Révész sen., a local minister and Ferenc Balogh, professor of Dogma and Church History became the leading voices. This pioneering study seeks to demonstrate how the response of Debrecen neo-orthodoxy came into being in response to extremely liberal form of theology, which was organised and promoted by Mór Ballagi, a convert from Judaism to Christianity. (shrink)

Aristotle continues to be a highly cited author in cultural sciences (human and social sciences) and humanities. In the last two decades, his work attracted up to a hundred times more attention than the work of Konrad Lorenz or Edward O. Wilson, who have attempted to synthesize new knowledge on behavior and society and proposed alternatives to traditional, intuitively appealing, explanations. Aristotle's interpretations of the world, which appear to be intuitive to the human mind, were abandoned in natural sciences upon (...) introduction of the experimental method. Human intuition may have been appropriate in conditions under which it was originally selected: for life of small non-anonymous groups of hunters and gatherers in the savannah. Intuition confines human understanding to a simple reality circumscribed by a boundary that can be called Aristotle's barrier. The barrier may only be crossed by experimentation, which is largely missing in cultural sciences. Snow's concept of two cultures may be revisited to characterize a splitting of natural sciences versus cultural sciences. It may also be applied to a widening gulf between science and technoscience. Diverging of the two cultures may have far-reaching consequences for prospects of humankind's survival. (shrink)

Popular culture continues fuelling public imagination with things, human and non-human, that we might beco-me or confront. Besides robots, other significant tropes in popular fiction that generated images include non-human humans and cyborgs, wired into his-torically varying sociocultural realities. Robots and artificial intelligence are re-defining the natural order and its hierar-chical structure. This is not surprising, as natural order is always in flux, shaped by new scientific discoveries, especially the reading of the genetic code, that reveal and redefine relationships between (...) life forms. However, for the first time, a new, artificial, species is being introduced into the existing diagrams, and, for the first time, it appears to hybridise the anthro-pocentric natural world order. (shrink)

This paper invokes the conceptual framework of Bourdieu to analyse the mechanisms, which help to maintain inappropriate authorship practices and the functions these practices may serve. Bourdieu’s social theory with its emphasis on mechanisms of domination can be applied to the academic field, too, where competition is omnipresent, control mechanisms of authorship are loose, and the result of performance assessment can be a matter of symbolic life and death for the researchers. This results in a problem of game-theoretic nature, where (...) researchers’ behaviour will be determined more by the logic of competition, than by individual character or motives. From this follows that changing this practice requires institutionalized mechanisms, and change cannot be expected from simply appealing to researchers’ individual conscience. The article aims at showing that academic capital is translated into honorary authorship. With little control, undetected honorary authorship gives the appearance of possessing intellectual capital. In this way a dominant position is made to be seen as natural result of intellectual ability or scientific merit, which makes it more acceptable to those in dominated positions. The final conclusion of this paper is that undemocratic authorship decisions and authorship based performance assessment together are a form of symbolic violence. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is, first, to demonstrate to future editors of the Metamorphoses , whether conservative or sceptical, just how improbable is the reading of the majority of MSS, illas , and how strong are the claims of the variant ilia , first recommended by P.Lejay in 1894 and vigorously championed by E.J.Kenney in 1976; and, second, to suggest an interpretation of this reading that is open to fewer objections than the one proposed by Kenney.I have given above (...) the beginning of Ovid's longest poem as it ought to stand in all modern editions and as it stands in fact in only one, the French school edition of selections edited by Lejay in 1894: ‘Gods, on my undertakings breathe your favour.’ To be sure, all of Ovid's MSS read illas in line 2, and ilia is attested only as a variant in two of them.But majorities, in textual as in other matters, are frequently wrong.Even before the minority report of the Urbinas had been heard, Lejay adopted ilia , av.1.in the Erfordensis.1. (shrink)

In the realm of medical ethics, the foundational principle of respecting patient autonomy holds significant importance, often emerging as a central concern in numerous ethically complex cases, as authorizing medical assistance in dying or healthy limb amputation on patient request. Even though advocates for either alternative regularly utilize prima facie principles to resolve ethical dilemmas, the interplay between these principles is often the core of the theoretical frameworks. As the ramifications of the sustainability crisis become increasingly evident, there is a (...) growing need to integrate awareness for sustainability into medical decision-making, thus reintroducing potential conflict with patient autonomy. The contention of this study is that the ethical standards established in the 20th century may not adequately address the challenges that have arisen in the 21st century. The author suggests an advanced perception of patient autonomy that prioritizes fostering patients’ knowledge, self-awareness, and sense of responsibility, going beyond a sole focus on their intrinsic values. Empowering patients could serve as a tool to align patient autonomy, beneficence, and the aim to reduce resource consumption. (shrink)

Quantitative information is one of the means used to interface science with policy. As a consequence, much effort is invested in producing quantitative information for policy and much criticism is directed toward the use of numbers in policy. In this paper, I analyze five approaches drawn from such criticisms and propose alternative uses of quantitative information for governance: valuation of ecosystem services, social multicriteria evaluation, quantification of uncertainty through the Numeral, Unit, Spread, Assessment, Pedigree approach, Quantitative Story-Telling, and the heuristic (...) use of statistics. The analysis shows the varied ways that numbers are conceptualized and how different conceptualizations matter for the science–policy interface. Alternative conceptualizations of numbers are used to challenge the model of science-speaking truth to power. Uncertainty, complexity, pluralism, malpractice, and values are mobilized to redefine the relations between science and policy. Alternative quantification may produce alternative facts, but reflexive approaches that use numbers to discuss the relevance of equity, positionality, and quality in science for policy may offer a remedy. (shrink)

Communication presumes trust, but trust presumes risk. The main characteristic of trust is that it offers social stability, gives strength for mutual expectations and makes possible the construction of a common world. These traits make possible to present the temporal, spatial and identical aspects of trust. The confrontation of ‘traditional’ and online trust shows that there is not an essential difference between them but a relational one, the essence of trust appears on his relational mode. The relational approach makes evident (...) that only the risky choice gives content for trust, in the sense that it is capable to open new, creative possibilities for communication. (shrink)

This essay reviews a number of issues regarding self-regulation and professional ethics which journalists across Europe might face in the scaling down of national borders. The dilemma of whether a pan-European ideal standards code of ethics can help journalists when working across borders and encountering other traditions is explored by referring to Slovenia, one of the new European Union (EU) members. Presenting a critique of the traditional professionalization concept, cogent arguments are found for rejecting a universal code of ethics. By (...) acknowledging the limitations and even deficiencies of such codified morality, a journalist's responsibility is emphasized and a different concept of ethics is indicated. Ethical journalists in this international context must focus on responsibility, positive tolerance, and empathy that transcends mere obedience to a code. The EU citizen's ethics rather than EU professional ethics should be advanced, based on universal principles and grounded in personal responsibility. (shrink)

In 246 we should, as Dodds suggests, get rid of the feeble δεινς and adopt Mau's δειν κγχνης. Verdenius, Mnemos. 41, 254, defends the reading of the MSS., saying that δεινς serves to distinguish the noose of punishment from that of suicide, but this is untenable: why is one noose more ‘terrible’ than the other, and who on hearing ‘worthy of the terrible noose’ would draw conclusions about it that could not be drawn from ‘worthy of the noose’? The question (...) raised about the kind of noose is important but cannot be answered by these means. (shrink)

Anderson and Dyck claim that the current trend of almost exclusively using citation-based evaluative metrics to assess the research output of scholars is unsound. I agree with them in this, but I feel that, for practical reasons, this system will not disappear in the near future, so we must concentrate on making it fairer. Both commentators doubt whether numerically expressing each contributor's relative contribution is feasible. I admit that an important precondition for this task is the possibility of an informed, (...) democratic debate among equals about the relative contribution of each contributor to the article. Mechanisms should be established to protect vulnerable researchers in the academic field in the same way as safeguards exist today to protect vulnerable research participants. Theoretically, however, I think that the fair allocation of authorship credit is possible, and much of this task is already being performed routinely when contributors determine the order of their names in the byline, being well aware of the widespread assumption that this order mostly mirrors the order of their relative contributions. All they would have to do as an additional task is to express this order in numbers. If they cannot reach a consensus, they could always choose not to express their relative contribution in numbers, in which case the presumption would be that they contributed equally. My proposal could, at best, make the system fairer and, at worst, not reduce the options that evaluators already have. (shrink)

Résumé Le problème complexe de la réception tardive de tout l’œuvre du marquis de Sade doit être considéré dans le contexte de l’histoire de la censure en Hongrie au cours de plusieurs siècles. Mon article se nourrit de mon expérience de traductrice, en particulier de ma traduction de La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1989). L’aperçu historique sur l’absence de réception de ses textes avant 1989 puis sur la période suivante qui a commencé avec le changement de régime et une grande (...) liberté dans le domaine éditorial, illustre bien les limites et les avatars de la censure en Europe Centrale et Orientale. (shrink)

Abstract:Skepticism about grounding is the view that ground-theoretic concepts shouldn’t be used in meta­physical theorizing. Possible reasons for adopting this attitude are numerous: perhaps grounding is unintelligible; or perhaps it’s never instantiated; or perhaps it’s just too heterogeneous to be theor­­­­­etically useful. Unfortunately, as currently pursued the debate between grounding enthusiasts and skeptics is insufficiently structured. This paper’s purpose is to impose a measure of conceptual rigor on the debate by offering an opinionated taxonomy of views with a reasonable claim (...) to being “skeptical.” I argue that carving up logical space into pro- and anti-grounding views isn’t especially helpful; rather, we should recognize various degrees of ground-theoretic involvement depending on how inflationary our understanding of the theoretical term ‘ground’ is. (shrink)