This is the précis of Artūrs Logins book Normative Reasons: Between Reasoning and Explanation (Logins 2022).

The aim of this paper is to show that it is the explicativecharacter of Tarski's semantic definition of truth given in his study of 1933 that allows forconsideration of a philosophical background of this definition in the proper sense. Given the explicativecharacter of this definition it is argued that the philosophical tradition that should be taken intoaccount with regard to this philosophical background is the tradition of the Lvov-Warsaw Schoolin its connections with the School of Brentano. As an example of (...) the explanatory power ofconsidering this tradition as far as Tarski's philosophical choices are concerned I use here thenotion of sentence-inscription, i.e., the notion of that entity of which truth is predicated inthe definition in question. One of the consequences of these statements is that philosophicaldiscussions concerning the semantic definition of truth can be regarded from two points ofview. On the one hand, they may take the perspective of its explicational function, i.e., theperspective of its philosophical background. On the other hand, they might consider the philosophicalconsequences of the definition with respect to the goal of the explication, i.e., they may considerits philosophical content independently of its historical background. (shrink)

According to a widely held view epistemic justification is a normative notion. According to another widely held assumption, epistemic justification comes in degrees. Given that gradability requires a context-sensitivity that normativity seems to lack, these two assumptions stand in tension. Giving up the assumption of gradability of justification represents a lesser theoretical cost.

Author: Dobosz Artur Title: METAMORPHOSIS – METAPHOR – ANTROPOMORPHISATION – Deantropomorphisation (Metamorfoza – metafora – antropomorfizacja – deantropomorfizacja) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2010, vol:.10, number: 2010/1, pages: 25-36 Keywords: ANTROPOMORPHISATION, DEANTROPOMORPHISATION Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:The author proposes a theory of a metaphor according to which the metaphor is a manifestation sign of a magical thinking in contemporaneous culture. The proposed theory enables the classification of metaphors.

Politics is on the one hand an attempt to implement certain good, a desire for achieving agreed objectives, on the other hand – as Max Weber says – a simultaneous a#empt to avoid a particular evil. If in defining the notion of politics there are references to good and evil, purpose and desire, it has to include the non-political spheres – culture, axiology, religion. Mark Lilla argues that for decades we have been aware of the great and final separation that (...) has taken place in Western Europe between political and religious life. This awareness implies a conviction, which is obligatory today in most countries and societies, that to separate politics from religion is a great achievement. For many thinkers and politicians this is an undisputed success from which the West learns to benefit while preparing other regions of the world for such separation. Therefore it seems that modern politics should be free from religious inspiration and temptation. On the other hand, many sociologists and political scientists show the vitality of religious attitudes, proving that in its deepest essence religion is an expression of human behaviour. Each person and each community always has an element of irreducibility which is an internal defence against reducing man to “here and now”, restricting his world to what is useful and usable. We experience that in man there is a natural opening to what is transcendent. Thus, if man is ever to achieve individual and social reconciliation with himself, he will always look for rational and moral meanings. This situation creates a platform for the emergence of a completely new a#itude in society and politics – to seek and pursue spirituality in a world without religion. Increasingly, the understanding of religion reveals itself in a wide etymological sense, sociological and ethnological: religare – “to connect”, “to bind”, “to build community ties”. Religion so understood would be a great solution to the dilemma of separation – the adoption of religion (bonds) without the doctrine, while ensuring social cohesion, strengthening the feeling of being together, maintaining a spiritual connection. Many thinkers are convinced that we cannot base social life only on fear, discipline and economy; we need a deeper and stronger foundations for Community Cohesion. But is such a project possible at all? Is politics becoming a place for the formation of relationships, education and conservation of values, a narrative space which tells citizens what is good and right and what is wrong and alien? Can it replace religion in its deepest essence – in its intimate sense of an exploration and discovery of transcendence? Will it not become a caricature of religion, and a caricature of politics, and ultimately a trap for freedom? (shrink)

SPIS TREŚCI Ryszard Moń Wstęp -/- Rozdział 1: Lękam się świata bez filozofii. O nieodzowności humanistyki w dobie techniki i globalizacji -/- 1.1 Konieczność filozofii 1.2 Narodziny sztuk wyzwolonych 1.3 Uniwersytet domem humanistyki 1.4 Upadek humanistyki 1.5 Uniwersytet – biznes i korporacyjna logika 1.6 Kognitywny kapitalizm 1.7 Złowroga moc etatyzmu 1.8 Pragmatyzm a ideały kształcenia 1.9 Demokracja – dialog, kultura, światopogląd 1.10 Humanistyka na straży demokracji 1.11 Edukacja filozoficzna w szkole 1.12 Podsumowanie – filozofia jako fundament -/- Rozdział 2: Czy (...) starożytna paideia może być alternatywą dla współczesnej pedagogiki? Antyczne metody wychowawcze i ich obecna rola -/- 2.1 Filozofia jako sposób życia 2.2 Rola ćwiczeń duchowych w paidei starożytnej Grecji oraz starożytnego Rzymu 2.3 Antyczna paideia a aktualne wzorce kształcenia -/- Rozdział 3: Problem ujawniania przez nauczyciela własnej tożsamości moralnej w nauczaniu etyki i filozofii -/- 3.1 Nauczyciel na lekcjach filozofii i etyki 3.2 Etyka, moralność i tożsamość 3.3 Matthew Lipmana filozofowanie z dziećmi i młodzieżą 3.4 Filozofia! Ale jaka? 3.5 Nauczyciel-filozof 3.6 Tożsamość moralna nauczyciela -/- Rozdział 4: Język i filozofia. O Naturalnym Metajęzyku Semantycznym i jego związkach z filozofią -/- 4.1 Naturalny Metajęzyk Semantyczny – rozważania wstępne 4.2 Inspiracje filozoficzne koncepcji NMS 4.3 Naturalny Metajęzyk Semantyczny – cel i założenia koncepcji 4.4 Kierunki rozwoju NMS 4.5 Jak wykorzystać NMS w dydaktyce filozofii? -/- Rozdział 5: Metody problemowe na lekcji etyki i filozofii jako możliwe działanie prewencyjne -/- 5.1 Metody rozwiązywania problemów – informacje ogólne 5.2 Rozwiązywanie problemów poznawczych 5.3 Rozwiązywanie problemów decyzyjnych 5.4 Rozwiązywanie problemów praktycznych 5.5 Nauczanie i uczenie się metodą „układanki” 5.6 Metoda wychowania bez porażek 5.7 Rola nauczyciela 5.8 Kształcenie umiejętności rozwiązywania problemów 5.9 Oceny i wartościowania 5.10 Podsumowanie Rozdział 6: Trudności w uczeniu się – profilaktyka i terapia -/- 6.1 Trudności w uczeniu się 6.2 Specyficzne trudności w uczeniu się 6.3 Niepowodzenia szkolne 6.4 Profilaktyka i terapia -/- Aneks – konspekty lekcji o tematyce filozoficznej i etycznej. (shrink)

This paper refers to the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri in commemoration of which Pope Francis released a special apostolic letter highlighting the genius and significance of the Italian poet. We should praise his genius, the Pope writes, because it is he who was able to express, much better than most of the others, the depth of the mystery of God and His love. The Commedia is the fruit of deep religious inspiration. This is why Francis repeats (...) after Benedict XV – „Dante is our own!” Why is it so? Because there breathes in Alighieri the devotion that we too feel and his faith resonates with ours. Dante’s work continues to be a meaningful and valid exemplar for Christ’s followers. However, in today’s pop culture Dante is mainly seen through his depiction of hell – the artistically described eternal punishment. The truth about hell which Dante made the subject of his narrative does not find acceptance even between Christians. Many people are really outraged and scandalized because hell is for them the symbol of sadism and distorted image of God – a vengeful tyrant who condemns human souls to eternal perdition. But hell is present in the biblical message. The early Church Fathers spoke of hell in their sermons, wrote about it in treatises, disputed the dwelling place of the condemned souls, the position of Satan and other demons, and the imminence of God’s judgement. In this way in the Catholic dogmatic theology consolidated the truth of the reality of hell and eternal punishment. This was also in accord with the views of the prominent medieval theologians. Therefore, why the ancient and well-known truth about hell is rejected today as outrageous and Dante’s vision does not gain recognition? The heart of the matter is the understanding of the idea of justice and atonement. In their denial expressed through the notion of the empty hell and rejection of eternal punishment for angels’ and people’s sins, we have to do with misunderstanding of the significance of human intellect and will. The refusal to accept responsibility for our free choices entails the uninhibited rejection of seriousness of our earthly life. If we believe that our fate, and what is more, out eternal fate – the salvation or damnation – depends on what we were able to do in our lifetime, Dante’s poetic vision strongly illustrates this standpoint. The power of free will is deeply and inalienably present in The Comedy’s stanzas. In the Dante’s poem the essence of hell lies in the ultimate rejection of the goal that man longs to achieve from his very nature – the happiness which is the union with the infinite Good – God, the Creator and the Redeemer of the world. How is it possible? It happens due to the existence of free will which is innate to all people and no one can deprive them of it or minimise it. This rejection of the sublime happiness is the result of human free decision – the condemned did not say to God: “Thy will be done!” but “my will be done!”. The existence of hell becomes the guarantee of human dignity, the evidence that a perfectly Good and Omnipotent God treats the man whom He had created seriously and preserves him for the eternity in the same state in which he wanted to remain in his earthly life. (shrink)

Ernest Nagel’s two-part article entitled “Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe” undoubtedly played a crucial role in the development of analytic philosophy in both Europe and the United States. Nagel articulates the shared metaphilosophical assumptions embraced by philosophers from various centres, including Prague, Vienna, Lviv, Warsaw, and Cambridge. Nevertheless, it is important to note that philosophers began to describe themselves using the term “analytical philosopher,” or a similar term, particularly within the intellectual centre of Cambridge, in the early (...) 1930s in Britain. In this article, I shall compare how these philosophers conceptualized “analytic philosophy” with the metaphilosophical assumptions outlined by Nagel. Then, I shall draw a comparison between the understanding of analytic philosophy in the early 1930s in Britain, and contemporary conceptions such as “conceptual creativity” and “conceptual engineering.” As it turns out, a part of contemporary analytic philosophy is more open to social-practical issues than it was in the early 1930s in Britain, especially in the intellectual centre that was Cambridge. (shrink)

Studies presenting memory-facilitating effect of emotions typically focused on affective dimensions of arousal and valence. Little is known, however, about the extent to which stimulus-driven basic emotions could have distinct effects on memory. In the present paper we sought to examine the modulatory effect of disgust, fear and sadness on intentional remembering and forgetting using widely used item-method directed forgetting paradigm. Eighteen women underwent fMRI scanning during encoding phase in which they were asked either to remember (R) or to forget (...) (F) pictures. In the test phase all previously used stimuli were re-presented together with the same number of new pictures and participants had to categorize them as old or new, irrespective of the F/R instruction. On the behavioral level we found a typical directed forgetting effect, i.e. higher recognition rates for to-be-remembered (TBR) items than to-be-forgotten (TBF) ones for both neutral and emotional categories. Emotional stimuli had higher recognition rate than neutral ones, while among emotional those eliciting disgust produced highest recognition, but at the same time induced more false alarms. Therefore when false alarm corrected recognition was examined the directed forgetting effect was equally strong irrespective of emotion. Additionally, even though subjects rated disgusting pictures as more arousing and negative than other picture categories, logistic regression on the item level showed that the effect of disgust on recognition memory was stronger than the effect of arousal or valence. On the neural level, ROI analyses (with valence and arousal covariates) revealed that correctly recognized disgusting stimuli evoked the highest activity in the left amygdala compared to all other categories. This structure was also more activated for remembered vs. forgotten stimuli, but only in case of disgust or fear eliciting pictures. Our findings, despite several limitations, suggest that disgust have a special salience in memory relative to other negative emotions, which cannot be put down to differences in arousal or valence. The current results thereby support the suggestion that a purely dimensional model of emotional influences on cognition might not be adequate to account for observed effects. (shrink)

Human organizations’ adoption of the paradigm of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is associated with the growth of techno-empowerment, which is the process of transferring autonomy in decision-making to intelligent machines. Particular persuasive strategies have been identified that may coax people to use intelligent devices. However, there is a substantial research gap regarding what antecedents influence human intention to assign decision-making autonomy to artificial agents. In this study, ethological and evolutionary concepts are applied to explain the drivers for autonomous assistants’ techno-empowerment. (...) The method used in the study was a 4 × 2 between-subject experiment made with 278 persons. The research tool used to collect the data was an online survey. The results show that more positive attitudes and higher trust, perceived usefulness, and perceived ease of use are correlated with higher intention to allow the autonomous assistant independence in decision-making. Second, the results suggest that the more human-like a non-human agent is, the higher the intention to empower it—but only if this agent simultaneously provides functional and visual anthropomorphic cues explainable by the mimicry effect. (shrink)

Neste texto perseguimos a polêmica presença do pensador francês Jean-Baptiste Roustaing no cenário espírita brasileiro, compondo-se com a obra de codificação de Allan Kardec. Tomamos, como ponto de referência, o papel de coordenador e representativo da Federação Espírita Brasileira (FEB) no processo, tanto de afirmação da presença de Roustaing ao lado de Kardec, quanto de posterior retirada da obra roustainguista, como leitura reconhecida e recomendada por aquela instituição. Concluímos pelo reconhecimento da importância da permanência da obra de Roustaing como bibliografia (...) avalizada pela FEB, o que, sem dúvida, indica para jogos de poder e de identidade no interior do movimento espírita brasileiro. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to illustrate the ethical foundations of psychoanalysis and to outline the ethical origins of Freudian theory. To this end, Jürgen Habermas' conception of knowledge-constitutive interests is discussed, which draws on psychoanalysis as an example of science justified in its form through an underlying emancipatory interest. The analysis of the position of the German philosopher is complemented by Charles Taylor's reflections on the sources of the contemporary conceptions of subjectivity and related ethical conceptions considered in (...) their relation to the history of the discourse on madness - including psychoanalysis. The research results in showing the continuing validity of the conception proposed by Freud in the context of the development of the philosophical theories of subjectivity, as well as more detailed, conceptual problems concerning mental disorders. (shrink)

Dziewiętnaste stulecie to jeden z najbogatszych w wydarzenia i treści okresów historii myśli ludzkiej. Jeśli popatrzymy na ten czas pod kątem wydarzeń o znaczeniu ideowym, to uzmysłowimy sobie, że symbolicznie otwiera je wielka rewolucja francuska, a kończy wybuch I wojny światowej. Naukowe teorie i filozoficzne przesłania, jakie zrodziły się w tym okresie – kantyzm, heglizm, materializm, marksizm, społeczny i biologiczny ewolucjonizm, pozytywizm, radykalny ateizm – wypełniły uniwersyteckie sale wykładowe, gabinety polityczne i izby parlamentów. Nie wszyscy żyjący wówczas intelektualiści zdawali sobie (...) sprawę z przemożnej siły filozoficznych nowinek czy przełomowego znaczenia ideowych propozycji. Tylko uważny namysł nad tym, co wtedy dokonywało się w europejskiej myśli, co działo się w kulturze, nauce, historii, filozofii i religii, pozwalał zauważyć, że nadchodzą bardzo poważne zmiany. Jedną z kluczowych postaci, która dostrzegła moc filozoficznych idei, rozbrzmiewających w dyskusjach tego stulecia, był włoski duchowny Gioacchino Vincenzo Raphaelo Luigi Pecci, późniejszy papież Leon XIII. Właśnie świadomy wagi i mocy ideowych skutków nowych prądów pod koniec XIX wieku, w bardzo trudnych dla Kościoła katolickiego czasach, we wrogiej chrześcijaństwu światopoglądowej atmosferze, spowodowanej wpływem idealistycznych filozofii i fascynacją rodzącym się marksizmem, ogłosił w 1879 roku encyklikę Aeterni Patris. Papież wskazywał sposoby intelektualnego wspomagania i odbudowywania znaczenia teologii i religii w życiu społecznym, zachwianego przez nurty postoświeceniowe i modernistyczne. Leon XIII przekonywał, że jeśli misją Kościoła jest nauczanie, to jest on odpowiedzialny także za ocenę treści, jakie pojawiają się w życiu społecznym i politycznym. Narody, państwa i wspólnoty nie żyją jedynie sprawami ekonomicznymi czy bytowymi, ale przede wszystkim tym, co dokonuje się w kulturze, sztuce, filozofii. Papież proroczo dostrzegł, jak wiele zależy od filozofii. W świetle wciąż powracającego pytania o zasadność i potrzebę filozofii chrześcijańskiej warto spojrzeć retrospektywnie na znaczenie wspomnianej encykliki i zawartej w niej wizji roli filozofii w ludzkim poszukiwaniu odpowiedzi na pytania, wynikające z aktualnego postępu cywilizacyjnego, naukowego i kulturowego. -------------- Zgłoszono: 26/07/2020. Zrecenzowano: 18/09/2020. Zaakceptowano do publikacji: 27/10/2020. (shrink)

It is stated both by Tischner and his scholars that he follows the footsteps of Hegel. Yet thus far no one – including Tischner himself – was talking about exactly this aspect of Tischner’s thought that is antiHegelian. The best way to do that is to address the issue of truth. Tischner’s theory of truth is antiHegelian because Tischner puts emphasize on the word “feeling”, while at the same time describing his distrust for ontology, which leads him to two things: (...) he thinks about truth first and foremost as a kind of value which is not privileged among other values, and he thinks too little about society. So it is anti-Hegelian because it denies the requirement of Hegel’s science as being the true knowledge of spirit about spirit. In order to understand more from Tischner’s philosophy independently of the issue of Hegel’s philosophy, one should take into consideration Tischner’s theory of evil. (shrink)

Teoricamente, busca-se expor os pressupostos, quanto às concepções voltadas para o âmbito educacional, de Jacques Derrida. Investiga-se, em seus escritos, se há um liame que permite separar e definir o que faz parte do mundo natural em contrapartida ao mundo cultural e vice-versa, quando nos reportamos ao estudo do homem e de suas ações, porque esta dualidade natureza/cultura é fundamental para saber da possibilidade de modificação do ser humano, pressuposto este, absoluto para a educação. Conclui-se que Derrida, ao defender a (...) não existência da ontologia antropológica, com seus resultados, invalida os seus próprios pressupostos, os quais estão assentados em um sujeito enunciador. (shrink)

By all accounts, virtue epistemology is making a value turn in contemporary analytic epistemology. In this article, this twist is explicated through the transformation of the understanding of epistemic values and the value of the epistemic. In the first sense, we are talking about how the view has changed on what determines the epistemic value of such categories as truth, knowledge, understanding, etc. In the second sense, we are talking about the value of our epistemic concepts (the value of the (...) epistemic): what is true belief, knowledge, etc. for? It is shown how the causal link between our beliefs and intellectual virtues allows us to explain the nature and value of knowledge as a central category of epistemology. The author reveals the difference between the main types of virtue epistemology through the prism of two different approaches to the justification of values: value internalism and value externalism. Value externalism assumes that a state/motive/action gains value from something outside of a person's consciousness. In contrast, value internalism holds that the conditions that determine value are internal to consciousness. For reliabilism, the value of cognitive success lies in its causal connection with the reliable competences of the subject, for responsibilism – with virtuous motives of cognitive activity. Common to reliabilism and responsibilism is that they shift the focus from the value of an effect (truth) to its relationship with the value of a cause – an ability or excellent trait of intellectual character. The main approaches to substantiating the fundamental value of knowledge in virtue epistemology are analyzed. If for reliabilism the highest epistemic value is truth as cognitive achievement, then for responsibilism the value of epistemic categories is primarily in their moral significance – the achievement of a good life and happiness (eudaimonia). In conclusion, the problematic aspects of virtue epistemology are formulated and promising directions for its further development are shown. (shrink)

It is well known that environmental burdens are more pronounced in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities, a phenomenon known as environmental injustice. Yet, there have been few studies that have addressed whether the degree of environmental injustice has changed over time. We analyze toxic releases in the United States over the first 26 years of the toxics release inventory and examine whether the decreases in toxic releases differ according to characteristics of the communities in which the emitters reside. We find that decreases (...) over these years are universal but far more substantial in high-income areas. Our results speak to both the nascent literature on information disclosure and that on environmental justice. (shrink)

Початок повномасштабного російського вторгнення в 2022 році викликав значні зміни в українській національній ідентичності. Соціологічні опитування демонструють трансформацію цінностей та повсякденних практик українців. Вони почали частіше вживати українську мову, змінили історичні та конфесійні вподобання. Необхідним є отримання об’єктивного соціологічного знання стосовно причин та наслідків цих змін. Передумовою цього є дослідження існуючих робіт по даній тематиці. Метою статті є систематизація та критичне узагальнення наукових праць по тематиці української національної ідентичності у вітчизняній науці. Автор розглядає роботи по цій темі, написані дослідниками в (...) галузі різних наук: історії, філософії, політології, філології, соціології. Особливу увага приділяється огляду дисертацій. Узагальнюються основні ідеї праць, даються авторські висновки по можливості їх використання в майбутньому. Показується, що автори зачіпають широке коло питань, що стосуються національної ідентичності: її історична ґенеза, трансформації, фактори мови та історичної пам’яті, відображення ідентичності в мистецтві та медіа, вплив на неї глобалізації та російської агресії. Автор констатує, що дана проблематика поки що слабо розвинута в рамках соціологічної науки. У відкритому доступі відсутні значні теоретичні роботи, здебільшого соціологи займаються виключно емпіричними дослідженнями. Також відсутні теоретичні роботи, присвячені аналізу трансформацій національної ідентичності, що стались з початку повномасштабної російської агресії в лютому 2022 році. Це пояснюється недостатнім проміжком часу, що пройшов на даний момент. Також складності додає швидка зміна політичних та військових реалій. Враховуючи значну суспільну значимість, автор робить висновок про необхідність посилення соціологічного осмислення цієї тематики. (shrink)

According to the good reasoning view of normative reasons, p is a reason to F, just in case p is a premise of a good pattern of reasoning. This article presents two counterexamples to the most promising version of the good reasoning view.

The literature on listening and daily discourse often describes an overly romanticized conception of listening, meaning what it should be in its ideal form. However, at most, this ideal is realized through the ‘masks’ that listeners ‘carry’ during their performance of listening. The ideal version that is being projected through the performance of listening is not cognruent with what actually happens behind the mask and performance. Individuals do not have the cognitive capacities to realize this unrealistic and unattainable ideal, but (...) they have the capacity to act as if they do. Using Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical account this paper reveals the psychological and social world that hides behind the mask and performance of listening in order to ground the theorizing of listening in a more realistic perspective. This account gives rise to novel and indispensable listening concepts: the definition of the situation, the sincere and cynical listener, undercurrent listening, and misrepresentations of listening. These concepts demonstrate that the study of interpersonal listening cannot be isolated from the dramaturgy of listening as (expressed) manners of listening are intricately and inherently embedded in social structure. This account also strongly contests the psychocentric and simplistic definition of listening as proposed by Kluger, A. N., & Mizrahi, M. (2023). Defining Listening: Can We Get Rid of the Adjectives? Current Opinion in Psychology, 101639.). (shrink)

We start by introducing the idea of echo chambers. Echo chambers are social and epistemic structures in which opinions, leanings, or beliefs about certain topics are amplified and reinforced due to repeated interactions within a closed system; that is, within a system that has a rather homogeneous sample of sources or people, which all share the same attitudes towards the topics in question. Echo chambers are a particularly dangerous phenomena because they prevent the critical assessment of sources and contents, thus (...) leading the people living within them to deliberately ignore or exclude opposing views. In the second part of this paper, we argue that the reason for the appearance of echo chambers lies in the adoption of what we call ‘epistemic vices’. We examine which vices might be responsible for their emergence, and in doing so, we focus on a specific one; ‘epistemic violence’. In assessing and evaluating the role of this epistemic vice, we note that it can be triggered by epistemic contexts characterized by high stakes that may turn ordinary intellectual virtues (such as skepticism) into vices (such as denialism). In the third part of this contribution, we suggest a way to deal with echo chambers. The solution focuses on advocating a responsibilist pedagogy of virtues and vices that -we claim- might be capable of preventing their emergence. (shrink)

In a recent publication Travis Timmerman has claimed that sometimes it is morally permissible to not prevent something bad from happening, even if it is in one’s power to do so without sacrificing anything nearly as important.1 To defend his point, he has proposed a thought experiment and based his claims on putative common-sense morality intuitions. To aid in the subsequent discussion, Timmerman’s case is reproduced as follows.

This paper elaborates a new solution to the lottery paradox, according to which the paradox arises only when we lump together two distinct states of being confident that p under one general label of ‘belief that p’. The two-state conjecture is defended on the basis of some recent work on gradable adjectives. The conjecture is supported by independent considerations from the impossibility of constructing the lottery paradox both for risk-tolerating states such as being afraid, hoping or hypothesizing, and for risk-averse, (...) certainty-like states. The new proposal is compared to views within the increasingly popular debate opposing dualists to reductionists with respect to the relation between belief and degrees of belief. (shrink)

In recent years some archaeological commentators have suggested moving away from an exclusively anthropocentric view of social reality. These ideas endorse elevating objects to the same ontological level as humans – thus creating a symmetrical view of reality. However, this symmetry threatens to force us to abandon the human subject and theories of meaning. This article defends a different idea. It is argued here that an archaeology of the social, based on human intentionality, is possible, while maintaining an ontology that (...) does not involve dualistic conceptions of reality. Building upon the philosophical work of Vincent Descombes, it is contended that humans are intentional actors and society is predicated on triadic relations that involve humans, objects and meanings. These relations can only be understood holistically, given that these relations are merely parts of a meta-narrative. These meta-narratives contain specific historical and social settings, and it is only within these settings that social relations are intelligible. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the theme of childhood – one of the main creative lines in the artistic heritage of Vladimir Alexandrovich Igoshev. The artistic development of the distant and previously little-known periphery began with the first graphic works and individual sketches in March 1954, dedicated to the little inhabitants of the harsh earth, and ended with heartfelt masterpieces created in the last years of the master's life, when all the strength was taken away by illness. Based on the (...) art criticism analysis of V.A. Igoshev's works of art from the funds of the state museums of Ugra, the figurative and stylistic originality of the children's theme in the context of the "northern cycle" is revealed, the general evolution of portrait creativity is indicated. It is proved that as artistic tasks changed, as a result of deep creative immersion in the original and organic world of the North, the figurative interpretation of the children's theme, which acquires an aesthetically autonomous meaning, also changed. (shrink)

This book explores why, regarding practical reasoning, humans are sometimes still faster than artificial intelligence systems. It is the first to offer a self-contained presentation of neural network models for many computer science logics.

After a brief outline of the history of the catholic doctrines of natural law the author concludes that although the doctrine itself has not changed, changes in its official interpretation and in the conclusions drawn from it are traceable. A rigid, invariable catholic natural law, universally binding for all times, all societies, and all men, has transformed into a natural law of variable content. It has become variable depending on both the socio-historical circumstances and on the different situations and different (...) mutual relations of various groups in the society. In this way the function of law has changed. Whereas to Pius XI natural law was still an expression of a static attitude towards society contributing to the restitution of a statical medieval system and securing the control of morality by the church, nowadays it should fulfil the two following functions: owing to its variability it should facilitate the dynamics of development, and owing to the fundamental invariability of its basic principles it should secure only a single consistent direction of development. (shrink)

Europe is the community of nations which, in the favorable conditions of a small yet extremely diversified continent, took over and developed the legacy of Greco-Roman civilization transformed and enriched by Christianity. Philosophy, theology, liturgy, religion, national culture and tradition are still manifestations of this heritage. Europe is not merely a region or geographical location. It is an idea that expresses cultural and social ideals. The nature of Europeanness is not defined by race or place but by freedom and culture (...) in the broad sense. Latin Europe created a sphere of civilization. Though ridden by contrasts and differences, not merely an organic unity was established but also a unity of a spiritual kind by accentuating and merging of values all Europeans have in common. This was also made possible by Christianity whose ethos came to pervade a multiplicity of socio-cultural phenomena. (shrink)