The debate surrounding the way in which Heidegger and Blumenberg understand the modern age is an opportunity to discuss two different approaches to history. On one hand, from Heidegger’s perspective, history should be understood as starting from how Western thought related to Being, which, in metaphysical thinking, took the form of the forgetfulness of Being. Thus, the modern age represents the last stage in the process of forgetfulness of Being, which announces the moment of the rethinking of the relationship with (...) Being by appealing to the authentic disclosure of Being. On the other hand, Blumenberg understands history as the result of the reoccupation process, which means replacing old theories with other new ones. Thus, to the historical approach it is not important to identify epochs as periods of time between two events, but to think about the discontinuities occurring throughout history. Starting from here, the modern age will be thought of not as an expression of the radicalization of the forgetfulness of Being, but as a response to the crises of medieval conceptions. For the same reason, the interpretation of history as a history of the forgetfulness of Being is considered by Blumenberg to subordinate history to an absolute principle, without taking into account its protagonists’ needs and necessities. (shrink)

Der Artikel verzeichnet die wichtigsten Beiträge der rumänischen Forscher auf dem Gebiet der Wissenschaftsphilosophie, die in den letzten zehn Jahren in Buchform erschienen. Nicht berücksichtigt wurden Beiträge und Artikel aus Fachzeitschriften. Obwohl noch nicht für alle Wissenschaftszweige Sonderphilosophien ausgearbeitet wurden, gibt es für die wichtigsten adäquate philosophische Kommentare. So wurden unsere Betrachtungen in drei Abteilungen gegliedert: die Philosophie der formalen Wissenschaften, die Philosophie der Naturwissenschaften und die Philosophie der Gesellschafts- und Humanwissenschaften. Vor allem nimmt die Philosophie der Logik einen bedeutenden (...) Platz ein. Man kann behaupten, daß die Mehrzahl der rumänischen Arbeiten auf dem Gebiet der formalen Logik auf philosophische Erörterungen nicht verzichtet. Im Bereich der Naturwissenschaften nehmen auch in Rumänien die Diskussionen über den Determinismus einen breiten Raum ein, wie dies überall in der Gegenwartsphilosophie geschieht. Die rumänischen Untersuchungen zur Philosophie der Sozialwissenschaften sind sehr weit aufgefächert. Vor allem wird der Entstehungsmodus und die Daseinsform von Sozialwissenschaften wie Psychologie und Soziologie erforscht. (shrink)

Kuhle Wampe 1is an extraordinary cultural product by thecollective that was deeply involved in the formation of Weimar cinema.2Members of thiscollective were Slatan Dudov, who participated in Fritz Lang’s production of Metropolis, Hanns Eisler, who composed music for Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of aGreat City , while Ernst Ottwald was adistinguished novelist and a screenwriter. Bertolt Brecht did not have major experience infilm production,3although he collaborated with Karl Valentin in the preparation of film The Mysteries of a Hairdresser's Shop . (...) At that time,Brecht was developing his ‘materialist aesthetics’ in trying to conceptualise the answer tothe question: what is political art? (shrink)

The fact that production, and above all the production of material goods, is an indispensable, one may even say absolute, condition for the existence of society and human life was, of course, known long before Marx. There is no need to list the thinkers who stated this idea, to which people's ordinary consciousness, incidentally, inevitably arrives independently of science on the basis of their everyday experience. Historical materialism has nothing in common with such a commonplace assertion, which is essentially a (...) generally known fact, although insufficiently appreciated by our predecessors. (shrink)

. In this paper we propose a new definition of entailment and construct a system S of predicate calculus based on this entailment. It is also shown that all well-known set theories can be based on the system S.

It is customarily assumed that paracomplete and paraconsistent solutions to liar paradoxes require a logical system weaker than classical logic. That is, if a logic is not fragile to liar paradoxes, it must be logically weaker than classical logic. Defenders of classical logic argue that the losses of weakening it outweigh the gains. Advocates of paracomplete and paraconsistent solutions disagree. We articulate the notion of fragility with respect to the liar paradox and show that it can be disentangled from logical (...) strength. Strength and resilience to paradox do not force a trade-off with respect to liars: there can be logics which are not weaker than classical logic and are solid to the liar. (shrink)

This essay presents the Aestheticism of the 19th century as the foundational movement of modernist-formalist aesthetics of the 20th century. The main principle of this movement is what I denominate “productive opacity”. Aestheticism has not been recognized as a philosophical aesthetic theory. However, its definition of artwork as an exclusive kind of form—a deep, opaque form—is among the most precise ever given in the discipline. This essay offers an interpretation of aestheticism as a formalist theory, referred to here as “deep (...) formalism”, focusing on the thinking of leading aestheticists, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and James Whistler. These three thinkers defined artwork as a form saturated with an inextricable content, viz. opaque form. (shrink)

Seventeenth-century optics naturalizes the eye while estranging the mind from objects. A mere screen, on which rests a blurry array of light stains, the eye no longer furnishes the observer with genuine re-presentations of visible objects. The intellect is thus compelled to decipher flat images of no inherent epistemic value, accidental effects of a purely causal process, as vague, reversed reflections of wholly independent objects. Reflecting on and trespassing the boundaries between natural and artificial, orderly and disorderly, this optical paradox (...) is a Baroque phenomenon; and it is the origin of Descartes’ celebrated doubt---whether we know anything at all. (shrink)

This book offers a new definition of metaphor-as an ontological and visual construction, whose roots are external visual forms, and its motivation is our attachment to forms. This definition, which Michalle Gal names “visualist,” challenges the ruling conceptualist theory of metaphors and places a new emphasis on how we experience rather than understand metaphors. In doing so, she responds to the visual turn that is taking place in literature and the media, demanding that the visual become a site of philosophical (...) analysis. This focus on the external visual world allows Gal to employ visual theories to capture the essence of metaphor. She looks beyond conceptual or semantic mechanism, and returns to theories of Arnheim and Gombrich and the current evolution of ideas about the visual or material and embodied cognition. Proposing to see visual metaphors in their basic form, she uses a new externalist terminology of ontology, visuality, composition, affordance, construction, and emergence. Setting out a new theory that takes into account that humans are visual no less than cognitive creatures, Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics lays the foundation for a new vocabulary to talk about metaphors. (shrink)

The idea this article relies on is that we should rethink cultural distance between modernism and post-modernism. We can no longer support the thesis of a radical break between the two cultural periods since many of the changes that have marked our contemporary world were initiated or at least announced in the modern period. Besides the cultural and epistemic factors, the socioeconomic conditions have also contributed to shape a new sensitivity and a new outlook. One of the major contributions to (...) this change was the replacement of the epistemic pedestal - oriented toward the metaphysical knowledge of the world - with a kind of knowledge inspired by the model of sciences which determined the understanding of the world as a „standing-reserve" (Heidegger). Thus, we speak about a techno-world, which is not merely a consequence of our way of interacting with our fellow beings or the environment. It is also a consequence of our wayof creating reality. The post-humanist approach of the man - similarly to modern utopias - considers technology the main means of improving human condition. Furthermore, we need to see in post-humanism the hope of rethinking humanity in a world growingly devoid of spiritual values. (shrink)

This essay characterizes the perception of the visual hybrid as nonconceptual, introducing the terminology of nonconceptual content theory to aesthetics. The visual hybrid possesses a radical but nonetheless exemplary aesthetic composition and is well established in culture, art, and even design. The essay supplies a philosophical analysis of the results of cross-cultural experiments, showing that while categorization or conceptual hierarchization kicks in when the visual hybrids are juxtaposed with linguistic descriptions, no conceptual scheme takes effect when participants are presented with (...) mere visual hybrids. In isolation, the hybrids do not lend themselves to classification. I draw four conclusions from these experimental outcomes: 1. The perception of visual hybrids follows the structure of a nonconceptual mental content, because the original categories or concepts of the hybrids’ components are not combined into one, and their properties are not applied to one another, therefore none of the components reconstructs the other such that it is introduced to a new category. 2. Language freezes the hybridity of the visual hybrid into conceptuality. 3. Given that language has a freezing effect in the case of an extreme visual phenomenon such as the hybrid, it is all the more restraining in moderate artistic compositions, such as visual metaphors, in which properties of one component (the source) are applied to the other (the target). In those, nonconceptuality emerges from relatively organized compositions, forms, and relations, and from the dependence of objects and their properties on perceptual context. 4. Thus, the nonconceptualist terminology is suitable for the analysis of aesthetic perception in general and aesthetic perception’s relation to language. Keywords aesthetics, perception, nonconceptual content, hybrids, visual metaphors. (shrink)

Difficulties understanding speech form one of the most prevalent complaints among older adults. Successful speech perception depends on top-down linguistic and cognitive processes that interact with the bottom-up sensory processing of the incoming acoustic information. The relative roles of these processes in age-related difficulties in speech perception, especially when listening conditions are not ideal, are still unclear. In the current study, we asked whether older adults with a larger working memory capacity process speech more efficiently than peers with lower capacity (...) when speech is presented in noise, with another task performed in tandem. Using the Eye-tracking of Word Identification in Noise Under Memory Increased Load an adapted version of the “visual world” paradigm, 36 older listeners were asked to follow spoken instructions presented in background noise, while retaining digits for later recall under low or high memory load. In critical trials, instructions directed listeners’ gaze to pictures of objects whose names shared onset or offset sounds with the name of a competitor that was displayed on the screen at the same time. We compared listeners with different memory capacities on the time course for spoken word recognition under the two memory loads by testing eye-fixations on a named object, relative to fixations on an object whose name shared phonology with the named object. Results indicated two trends. For older adults with lower working memory capacity, increased memory load did not affect online speech processing, however, it impaired offline word recognition accuracy. The reverse pattern was observed for older adults with higher working memory capacity: increased task difficulty significantly decreases online speech processing efficiency but had no effect on offline word recognition accuracy. Results suggest that in older adults, adaptation to adverse listening conditions is at least partially supported by cognitive reserve. Therefore, additional cognitive capacity may lead to greater resilience of older listeners to adverse listening conditions. The differential effects documented by eye movements and accuracy highlight the importance of using both online and offline measures of speech processing to explore age-related changes in speech perception. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the visual aspect of metaphors, offering a new theory of metaphor that characterizes its syntactic structure, material composition and visuality as its essence. It will accordingly present the metaphorical creating or transfiguring, as well as conceiving or understanding, of one thing as a different one, as a visual ability. It is a predication by means of producing non-conventional compositions – i.e., by compositional, or even aesthetic, means. This definition is aimed to apply to the various kinds of (...) metaphors: conceptual, linguistic, visual, and material. It will thus challenge the definition of metaphor as a conceptual or linguistic phenomenon in nature that is based on its semantic mechanism, broad concepts, and cognitive value. Those definitions have been prevalent since the second half of 20th century, under the influence of the philosophy of language, and later of cognitive studies. (shrink)

In this study we present some contributions of the logician and philosopher Petre Botezatu (27.02.1911-01.12.1981), who turned the idea of complementarity,formulated by Niels Bohr for the interpretation of the wave-particle structure of the quantum world, into an ordering principle of his work. Thus, he understood general logic as a synthesis in which the style of classical logic is complementary to the style of the 20th century logic. He didn’t give up either the mathematical modelling of logical language or the conceptual (...) description through natural language. Thus, natural operational logic was created. Then Petre Botezatu assessed the achievements and failures of deduction in order to build the notion of methodological antinomy, and formulated five antinomies of axiomatization and five antinomies of formalization. The main purpose of this study is to present and interpret them. (shrink)

We consider that the epistemological recourse to semiotic dimensions could lead to peace: those in favour of an epistemology without a knowing subject are right (if they keep themselves within the syntactic and semantic frames of theoretical construction) and those who add a knowing subject are also right (if they want to express the concrete process of building up scientific convictions).

The contribution sheds a critical light on the thirty years since the break-up of socialist Yugoslavia. It presents three hypotheses for a critical reorientation of the 1989–91 sequence. Firstly, rather than seeing 1989 as the start of the longue durée of a democratic process, for Yugoslavia this trajectory was ‘realised’ as political chaos and ethnic wars in 1991. Secondly, criticising the chronological view of ‘post-socialism’, it posits post-socialism as having already emerged after 1965, marked by market reforms that ‘withered away’ (...) socialism. Thirdly, and specific to the 1990s, in order to facilitate the transition to capitalism, a ‘primitive accumulation’ of memory and a high degree of violence unfolded, which actually dis-accumulated the socialist infrastructure and socialised means of (re)production. The post-Yugoslav transition proved a genuine ‘contribution’ to ‘making our country great again’: ethnically cleansed nation-states on the horizon of European peripheral capitalism. The contribution concludes on an affirmative note, pointing to the slow resurgence of the Left. (shrink)

In the paper we give a sucient condition of the Interpolation Property in propositional calculi; then we establish the power of the class of the systems with Craig's property. Next we show that there does not exist a minimal R0-system with Craig-Godel-Lindenbaum's property. Finally, we generalize Sobocinski-Tarskis theorem concerning Sobocinski-Tarski's property.

ABSTRACT According to the Symmetry Argument against the fear of death, our attitudes towards birth and death should be identical. In this paper I defend the Deprivation Account of the badness of death, according to which death is bad because it deprives one of future goods. After rejecting previous attempts to explain and justify the asymmetry in our attitudes towards birth and death I argue that the asymmetry in our attitudes is both explained and justified by the fact that contrary (...) to birth, death is not viewed as a nomologically necessary condition for life, and therefore death is viewed as an unnecessary limitation of life. (shrink)

In this chapter I analyze the concept of self-consciousness in order to uncover its conceptual structure. The conclusions of this analysis describe some of the necessary categories of conscious experience. The concept of the self, the concept of consciousness, the concept of objectivity, the temporal distinctions between past, present, and future, and finally the idea of natural regularities, are found to be necessary categories for conscious experience, and hence describe the fundamental cognitive structure of self-conscious beings.

The majority of the studies on attentional focus have shown that participants who were instructed to focus externally performed better than those who were taught to focus internally. However, in most of these studies the participants performed complex motor tasks. Due to the scarcity of data on the effects of attentional focus specifically on simple motor tasks, our purpose in the current study was to examine these effects on two simple reaction time tasks. The study was conducted on a cloud-based (...) experimental software. Participants were allocated to three experimental groups: an external focus group, an internal focus group, and a control group. The participants performed two tasks: a choice-RT task and a Simon task. Participants in all three groups practiced eight blocks of 20 trials from each task in a counterbalanced order – a total of 180 trials for each task. The sole difference between the three groups was the administered attentional focus instructions. The findings suggest that attentional focus instructions do not affect the performance of a choice-RT task or a Simon-task in a computerized online study. It is possible that the simple RT-based tasks in the current study were not sensitive to the attentional focus manipulation, since in such simple tasks there are not many actions that internal focus can disrupt. Although we asked the participants to what extent they followed the instructions, we cannot say whether their responses represent their actual attentional focus when performing the tasks. (shrink)