Twenty extremal principles of the natural sciences are reformulated to the general ontological scheme. The hypothesis is substantiated that the unique role of the principle of least action is based on its probabilistic interpretation. It is shown how most of the variational principles can be reduced to the principle of maximal probability, which is based on a realistic interpretation of Feynman’s path integral method.

The author traces the early evolution of Rubinstein and Shpet from neo-Kantianism and phenomenology, respectively, and shows how their ideas partly converged.

This article outlines the history and development of Russian scholastic thought, whose evolution took place over the course of a century, from the mid-17th to the mid-18th centuries. By the time scholasticism began to spread in Russia, it had already reached its final stages of development in Europe. Of the three major European schools of scholasticism—nominalism, Thomism and “second scholasticism”—the last two were the most popular ones in Russia.

The author presents two complementary understandings of rationality. He criticizes those who deny the continuing relevance of rationality as a cultural value as well as those who attach exaggerated importance to it.

In this paper we treat humorous situations as a series of events underpinned by topoi, principles of reasoning recognised within a socio-cultural community. We claim that humorous effect in jokes and other discourse is often created by the juxtaposition of topoi evoked. A prerequisite for this is that there is a shift where the interpreter of the discourse updates their information state with regard to a second topos being evoked. This view of humour is consistent with an incremental analysis of (...) dialogue, and we therefore argue that interaction is central both for humour creation and interpretation. We point out some different ways in which topoi are juxtaposed in humorous dialogues as well as in jokes published in social media or in joke books, and take jokes from the coronavirus pandemic as an example because this makes lots of new topoi available and therefore offers the opportunity of creating novel jokes based on the juxtaposition of the new and existing topoi. We explore how the mechanisms of inference in dialogue can be applied to humour through the four elements from our title: old, new, borrowed and taboo. (shrink)

In this paper we present stable and unstable versions of several well-known relations from mereotopology: part-of, overlap, underlap and contact. An intuitive semantics is given for the stable and unstable relations, describing them as dynamic counterparts of the base mereotopo-logical relations. Stable relations are described as ones that always hold, while unstable relations hold sometimes. A set of first-order sentences is provided to serve as axioms for the stable and unstable relations, and representation theory is developed in similar fashion to (...) Stone’s representation theory for Boolean algebras and distributive lattices. Then we present some results about the first-order predicate logic of these relations and about its quantifier-free fragment. Completeness theorems for these logics are proved, the full first-order theory is proved to be hereditary undecidable and the satisfiability problem of the quantifier-free fragment is proved to be NP-complete. (shrink)

Der Vielfalt religiöser Emotionen liegt eine formale Einheit zu Grunde, deren semantischer Gehalt als das religiöse Grundgefühl der Selbsttranszendenz aufgefasst werden kann. Das religiöse Grundgefühl wird als Type verstanden, Ausdrücke für konkrete Emotionen entstammen den verschiedenen Religionskulturen. Diese Ausdrücke erscheinen logisch als Tokens, als Instanziierungen dieses gemeinsamen semantischen Gehalts. Der semantische Gehalt religiöser Emotionen kann interkulturell verständlich mittels Natural Semantic Metalanguage expliziert werden.

The study is focused on the relation between theology and mathematics in the situation of increasing secularization. My main concern in the second part of this paper is the early-twentieth-century foundational crisis of mathematics. The hypothesis that pure mathematics partially fulfilled the functions of theology at that time is tested on the views of the leading figures of the three main foundationalist programs: Russell, Hilbert and Brouwer.

The paper gives an outline of Antisthenes’ ethics. The first part questions the accounts of modern historians, who try to include Antisthenes in one or another philosophical schools of that time . In the second part it shows the affiliations between Antisthenes´ thinking and socratic tradition: It comes out, that the interconnection between the former and sophistics and kynicism might have come into existence as late as in the later doxographic accounts of his doctrine. The third part deals in more (...) details with the writings Kyros and Heracles, which exemplify a mimetic depiction of the way of acting of a socratic sapient. The analysis of the preserved fragments shows, that the Antisthenian ethics is practical, differing from the Platonic conception of practice in that in it moral knowledge and moral action became one. Thus it represents a non-theoretical expansion of socratic ethics and as such cannot be grasped by the classical approaches which draw a sharp line between socratics and sophistics. (shrink)

This book synthesizes the game-theoretic modeling of decision-making processes and an ancient moral requirement, called the Golden Rule of ethics (GR). This rule states, "Behave to others as you would like them to behave to you." The GR is one of the oldest, most widespread and specific moral requirements that appear in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. The book constructs and justifies mathematical models of dynamic socio-economic processes and phenomena that reveal the mechanism of the GR and are based (...) on the concept of Berge equilibrium. The GR can be naturally used for resolving or balancing conflicts, and its "altruistic character" obviously excludes wars, blood-letting, and armed clashes. The previous book of the authors, The Berge Equilibrium: A Game-Theoretic Framework for the Golden Rule of Ethics, covers the static case of the GR. In this book, the dynamic case of the GR is investigated using the altruistic concept of Berge equilibrium and three factors as follows: a) a modification of N.N. Krasovskii's mathematical formalization of differential positional games (DPGs), in view of the counterexamples given by A.I. Subbotin and A.F. Kononenko; b) the method of guiding control, proposed by N.N. Krasovskii; c) the Germeier convolution of the payoff functions of different players. Additionally, the book features exercises, problems, and solution tips collected together in Appendix 1, as well as new approaches to conflict resolution as presented in Appendices 2-4. The book will be of use to undergraduate and graduate students and experts in the field of decision-making in complex control and management systems, as well as anyone interested in game theory and applications. (shrink)

Despite the importance of the variational principles of physics, there have been relatively few attempts to consider them for a realistic framework. In addition to the old teleological question, this paper continues the recent discussion regarding the modal involvement of the principle of least action and its relations with the Humean view of the laws of nature. The reality of possible paths in the principle of least action is examined from the perspectives of the contemporary metaphysics of modality and Leibniz's (...) concept of essences or possibles striving for existence. I elaborate a modal interpretation of the principle of least action that replaces a classical representation of a system's motion along a single history in the actual modality by simultaneous motions along an infinite set of all possible histories in the possible modality. This model is based on an intuition that deep ontological connections exist between the possible paths in the principle of least action and possible quantum histories in the Feynman path integral. I interpret the action as a physical measure of the essence of every possible history. Therefore only one actual history has the highest degree of the essence and minimal action. To address the issue of necessity, I assume that the principle of least action has a general physical necessity and lies between the laws of motion with a limited physical necessity and certain laws with a metaphysical necessity. (shrink)

The paper discusses the conception of philosophy and ethics in Seneca’s Letters, as well as in his other writings, which it sets in the broader context of ancient and modern thought. The introduction outlines the Socratic and Stoic foundations of Seneca’s ethics. The next section focuses on the interpretation of passages from the Letters that remind us that the task of philosophy is to teach human to live an active life. The paper points out that, according to Seneca, philosophy resembles (...) art more than knowledge, and Seneca adapts his language and the examples he uses to this effect. In the next section, the paper returns to delineating the relationship between theoretical and practical thought. The specificity of Seneca’s position becomes visible in the background of Aristotle’s problematization of this relationship. The last section asks how we should approach Seneca’s conception of ethics and philosophy. The analyses outlined above show that Seneca’s Letters fully express an approach to philosophy as an art of living, an approach that modern authors such as Nietzsche and Foucault consider determinative for the whole of ancient philosophy. (shrink)

The focus of the article is the project of British sociologists H. Collins and R. Evans on the Study of Expertise and Experience (SEE). The author of this article attempts to explicate the contexts of talking about expertise as a sociopolitical phenomenon. On the one hand, expertise is discussed in one line of research as an important component of socio-political processes. Expertise is defined in terms of power, its ability to influence decision-making processes in a legitimising way is increasing. On (...) the other hand, the socio-ontological status of expertise is leveled due to the democratisation of access to information and the divergence of the modes of co-existence of science and politics, which is why, according to the researchers, expertise is in crisis. In these contexts, the author turns to the SEE project, which seeks to address the side effects of the proliferation of constructivist sociologies of knowledge and science. By questioning the ability of groups to access the truth and formulate expert judgements on its behalf, constructivist sociology removed the expert as a bearer of specified knowledge from the intellectual scene. Collins and Evans put expertise back on the research agenda; they propose a normative typology of expertise. The author of the article reconstructs the logic of constructing classifications of expertise and problematising two of its key types - interactional and contributory expertise. The article describes in detail the philosophical assumptions behind the concept of interactional expertise. The claims of this concept - as the author of the project sees it - to describe not only a common type of expertise, but also to become one of the conceptual resources for describing society are questionable, due to linguistic reductionism. Collins and Evans reproduce classic problems of sociological theory within the primary distinction of types of expertise. (shrink)

This article outlines the history and development of Russian scholastic thought, whose evolution took place over the course of a century, from the mid-17th to the mid-18th centuries. By the time scholasticism began to spread in Russia, it had already reached its final stages of development in Europe. Of the three major European schools of scholasticism—nominalism, Thomism and “second scholasticism”—the last two were the most popular ones in Russia.

I intend to demonstrate that the usual understanding of the ideals and norms of scientific cognition, which is often considered inseparable from the very notion of science itself, arose in concrete historical conditions; furthermore, these ideals and norms were connected with a certain type of research and a certain type of culture. As we are beginning to realize, such an understanding of ideals and norms does not work in other historical and cultural situations. I also try to show that some (...) interpretations of the ideals and goals of science, as well as some ideas about the world (which were considered pre-scientific) gain new significance in the context of contemporary knowledge. (shrink)

The author considers the social consequences of "converging technologies" and also of the internet and other new social technologies.

This paper attempts to look at the contemporary mathematical practice through the lenses of the distributed cognition approach. The ubiquitous use of personal computers and the internet as a key attribute of the digital society is interpreted here as a means to achieve a more effective distribution of the human cognitive activity. The major challenge that determines the transformation of mathematical practice is identified as ‘the problem of complexity’. The computer-assisted complete formalization of mathematical proofs as a current tendency is (...) viewed as one of the strands along which the mathematical community responds to the challenge. It is shown that this tendency gives live to the project calling to revisit and rebuild the very foundations of mathematics to secure more effective communication and thus guarantee the reliability of contemporary mathematics. (shrink)

The author analyzes the implications for the philosophy of mathematics of successive paradigm transitions in the general history of philosophy.

The paper deals with the Socratic ethics as developed by Antisthenes and conceived by the doxografical tradition as the basis of Diogenes’ Cynicism. The author tries to show that Antisthenes’ thought as a whole is connected with paideia . Thus Antisthenes’ interpretations of Homer as well as his logical paradoxes have ethical aiming. There is a close connection between Antisthenes’ logic and his ethics of the care of the self. Socratic thought in Antisthenes’ fragments is neither skeptical nor dialectical. Contrary (...) to both “intellectualistic” tendencies Antisthenes puts stress on the wise continually practicing ethics. By using of logical paradoxes Antisthenes probably hoped to demonstrate the anti-Platonic priority of ethics over metaphysics and logic. From this point of view Antisthenes can be seen as the predecessor of practical Cynical bios. (shrink)

The paper deals with Kuhn’s and Lakatos’s ideas related to the so-called “historical turn” and its application to the philosophy of mathematics. In the first part the meaning of the term “postpositivism” is specified. If we lack such a specification we can hardly discuss the philosophy of science that comes “after postpositivism”. With this end in view, the metaphor of “generations” in the philosophy of science is used. It is proposed that we restrict the use of the term “post-positivism” to (...) two and only two philosophical “generations”: the one to which Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend belong, and the previous “generation” to which Wittgenstein, Polanyi, Popper and Quine (as well as the major part of logical positivists) belong. From this point of view, Bloor, Latour, Pickering, Daston and Galison belong to the “third generation” which represents the philosophy of science “after post-positivism”. The characteristic feature of post-positivism is the combination of decisive impact of logical positivism and its severe criticism. This combination inevitably makes post-positivism a transitional form in the philosophy of science. In the second part the contribution of the “big four” of post-positivist philosophers (Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend) to the radical change in the philosophy of mathematics in the second half of the 20th century is analyzed. Primarily, they shifted philosophical interest from the logical analysis of formal systems to the historical dynamics of informal mathematics. They also reconsidered the sharp opposition between mathematics and the physical sciences. However, the transitional character of their philosophy manifests itself both in their treatment of mathematics and their way of understanding history. On the one hand, their “heritage” is ambiguous, on the other hand, it opens new perspectives. Neither Kuhn, nor Lakatos, have eliminated completely the methodological barrier positing the fundamental heterogeneity of mathematics and natural science. Neither Lakatos, nor Kuhn, adhered to the viewpoint of relentless historicism. Nevertheless, it is their work that has made these options open for today’s historians and philosophers of science, even for philosophers of mathematics. (shrink)

Традиционный философский вопрос о том, затрагивает ли знание реальность или же является лишь конструкцией сознания, получает оригинальный ответ в концепции современного эпистемологического конструктивизма. Этот «конструктивистский реализм» принимает особенно интересную форму в теории восприятия Гибсона, для которого восприятие не является ни построенным, ни просто данным. Скорее оно выступает как результат взаимодействия: познающий субъект вычленяет в реальности то, что соответствует его действиям. Важную роль при этом играет изучение социальной и культурной обусловленности когнитивной деятельности. À la question philosophique traditionnelle de savoir si la (...) connaissance porte sur le réel ou est une simple construction de l’esprit, le constructivisme épistémologique actuel essaye de donner une réponse originale. Ce « réalisme constructiviste » prend une forme particulièrement intéressante dans la théorie de la perception de Gibson, pour qui celle-ci n’est ni construite, ni donnée mais résulte d’une interaction, le sujet connaissant « découpant » dans la réalité ce qui correspond à ses activités. L’étude du conditionnement social et culturel des activités cognitives entre aussi dans ce cadre. To the traditional philosophical question as to know whether knowledge focuses on reality or is merely a mental construct, present day epistemological constructivism tries to give an original answer. This “constructivist realism” is especially interesting in Gibson’s theory of perception, according to which it is neither built nor given but results from an interaction, the knowing subject “cutting” within reality ail that corresponds to its activities. The study of social and cultural conditioning of cognitive activities can also be integrated in this framework. (shrink)