Quantification is particularly seductive in times of global uncertainty. Not surprisingly, numbers, indicators, categorizations, and comparisons are central to governmental and popular response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This essay draws insights from critical data studies, sociology of quantification and decolonial thinking, with occasional excursion into the biomedical domain, to investigate the role and social consequences of counting broadly defined as a way of knowing about the virus. It takes a critical look at two domains of human activity that play a (...) central role in the fight against the virus outbreak, namely medical sciences and technological innovation. It analyzes their efforts to craft solutions for their user base and explores the unwanted social costs of these operations. The essay argues that the over-reliance of biomedical research on “whiteness” for lab testing and the techno-solutionism of the consumer infrastructure devised to curb the social costs of the pandemic are rooted in a distorted idea of a “standard human” based on a partial and exclusive vision of society and its components, which tends to overlook alterity and inequality. It contends that to design our way out of the pandemic, we ought to make space for distinct ways of being and knowing, acknowledging plurality and thinking in terms of social relations, alterity, and interdependence. (shrink)

This article approaches the paradigm shift of datafication from the perspective of civil society. Looking at how individuals and groups engage with datafication, it complements the notion of “data politics” by exploring what we call the “contentious politics of data”. By contentious politics of data we indicate the bottom-up, transformative initiatives interfering with and/or hijacking dominant processes of datafication, contesting existing power relations or re-appropriating data practices and infrastructure for purposes distinct from the intended. Said contentious politics of data is (...) articulated in an array of practices of data activism taking a critical stance towards datafication. In data activism, data as mediators take a central role, both as part of an action repertoire or as objects of struggle in their own right. Leveraging social movement studies and science and technology studies, this theoretical essay argues that data activism can be mapped along two analytical dimensions: “data as stakes” vs. “data as repertoires”, and “individual practice vs. collective action”. Mapping action repertoires and tactics along these axes allows us to chart the potential emergence of a political data subject at the intersection of these two dimensions. This furthers our understanding of people’s engagement with data in relation to other forms of activism and existing work in social movement studies. It also helps us interpreting potential trajectories of contemporary social movements, as they increasingly interface with data, devices and platforms. (shrink)

Many tasks in statistical and causal inference can be construed as problems of entailment in a suitable formal language. We ask whether those problems are more difficult, from a computational perspective, for causal probabilistic languages than for pure probabilistic (or “associational”) languages. Despite several senses in which causal reasoning is indeed more complex—both expressively and inferentially—we show that causal entailment (or satisfiability) problems can be systematically and robustly reduced to purely probabilistic problems. Thus there is no jump in computational complexity. (...) Along the way we answer several open problems concerning the complexity of well-known probability logics, in particular demonstrating the ${\exists \mathbb {R}}$ -completeness of a polynomial probability calculus, as well as a seemingly much simpler system, the logic of comparative conditional probability. (shrink)

Kripke-style models with two accessibility relations, one intuitionistic and the other modal, are given for analogues of the modal systemK based on Heyting's prepositional logic. It is shown that these two relations can combine with each other in various ways. Soundness and completeness are proved for systems with only the necessity operator, or only the possibility operator, or both. Embeddings in modal systems with several modal operators, based on classical propositional logic, are also considered. This paper lays the ground for (...) an investigation of intuitionistic analogues of systems stronger thanK. A brief survey is given of the existing literature on intuitionistic modal logic. (shrink)

Ob množici del grških in rimskih piscev, ki so bila prevedena v slovenski jezik, je Livijeva Zgodovina doslej ostala nekako ob strani. Razen posameznih odlomkov ni bilo prevedenega nič. Količina ohranjenega besedila, avtorjev slog z dolgimi stavčnimi periodami, izbranim besediščem in različnimi retoričnimi prijemi, vse to pred­stavlja za prevajalca gotovo precejšnjo oviro. Z novo knjigo, ki je pred kratkim izšla pri Slovenski matici in prinaša prvih pet Livijevih knjig v prevodu Primoža Simonitija, se sedaj to spreminja. Knjigo je uredil David (...) Movrin, ki je napisal tudi spremno besedo in pripravil obsežen spremni aparat. Prevod zajema nekje sedmino ohranjenega Livijevega dela, ob predvidenem nadaljevanju s skupino prevajalcev si lahko obetamo izid nadaljnjih zvezkov in v doglednem času tudi prevod vsega, kar se je od Livija ohranilo v rokopisnem izročilu. (shrink)

InhaltStichworte zur Dialektik der Freiheit oder Durchaus untaugliche Ausfuhrungen zur Philosophie Milan PruchasJ. Kosta, Das interdisziplinare Forschungsprojekt des Prager Fruhlings von 1968J. Kotik, Der LandvermesserKonzepte der DialektikM. Theunissen, Dialektik der Endlichkeit - Hegel von Heraklit bis DerridaC. Iber, Begriff und Kategorien negativer Dialektik bei AdornoA. Arndt, Figuren der Endlichkeit - Zur Dialektik nach KantB. Scholze, Die dialektische Aufwertung der Rhetorik: Zu Adornos Theorie der DarstellungMotive der Philosophie Hegels und ihre WirkungM. Sobotka, Hegels Spruch: Gott ist totM. Rolli, Zum Vergangenheitscharakter (...) der Hegelschen AsthetikA. Jubara, Vom Reich des Antichristen zum Homogenen Weltstaat. Das "Ende der Geschichte" bei Vladimir Solov'ev und Alexandre KojeveDie Differenz denkenC. Friedrich, Differenz und Wiederholung in der Sprache. Fur eine Konzeption der Sprache ohne TelosR. Krause, Verkehrte Welt - Dialektisch denken mit DeleuzeD. Benseler, Den Krieg finden. Bemerkungen zu Lyotards skeptischer Konzeption der PraxisMilan Prucha - Auswahlbibliographie. (shrink)

The thesis analyzes the position of Albanian women in the first decade of socialist rule in Montenegro, during which women became full members of society. The efforts of the communist authorities t...

As a philosopher, legal ethicist, and expert in international criminal law, David Luban was uniquely positioned to challenge the morality and legality of the Bush administration's coercive interrog...

In a state of existential anguish, Blaise Pascal asked himself a fundamental question: “What is man in infinity?” He tried to answer this question in his unfinished reflections, collected in Thoughts. The conspicuous existential features of Pascal’s anthropology, as well as the deeply personal and passionately religious character of his thought, call for a comparison with the two centuries younger, polemical Danish religious thinker and “founding father” of existential philosophy, Søren Kierkegaard. In my article, I will try to explain the (...) affinity of these thinkers to each other and point out several parallels in their ideas, focusing especially on those fundamental moments in which this affinity is particularly reflected and which, at the same time, underline the existential dimension of their anthropology: the paradox of existence, the concept of distraction as a phenomenon of existential escapism, and the existential situation of choice/wager. Although this article is primarily aimed at revealing the common intersections between the two thinkers, I will conclude it by also highlighting the point where their thinking diverges most markedly: their different understanding of the relationship between faith and reason, where, in the direction of fideism, Kierkegaard shows himself to be a far more radical thinker than Pascal. (shrink)

Kao i sva živa bića, čovjek je djelomično genetski predodređen, tj. određen i prije nego što se u potpunosti razvije kao ljudsko biće. Ali ono što čovjeka bitno razlikuje od svih nam poznatih živih bića, jest upravo to što je, u odnosu na njih, njegova predodređenost bitno manje u-rođena, a znatno više pri-rođena. A to znači da su ljudi u odnosu na druge žive vrste manje predodređeni na genskoj, a više na memskoj, upravo kulturnoj razini. Kulturni, a to znači povijesno (...) oduhovljeni okoliš u koji se djeca rađaju i koji zatiču pri-rođenju bitan je čimbenik njihova daljnjeg razvitka. Stoga se čovjek i ne rađa kao čovjek, nego kao dijete koje čovjekom tek mora postati. Za razliku, naime, od bićâ koja već pri rođenju imaju sve bitne odlike svoje vrste i koja se stoga mogu razvijati i uzgojem, tj. poticanjem na rast i pridizanjem onoga što im je biološki već dano, djeci je za ljudski razvitak potreban odgoj koji će ih tek uvesti u određenu kulturu kao njihov duhovni – i samo takav istinski ljudski – zavičaj. Čitavo čovjekovo biće, dakle i ono tjelesno, raste u duhu određene kulture i izrasta iz njega. Kako i koliko kultura određuje čovjeka – predmet je ove rasprave.As all other living beings, man is partially genetically predisposed, that is, determined even before it completely develops as a human being. However, the thing that differentiates man from all other known living beings is the fact that, compared to them, his predisposition is significantly less natured, and significantly more nurtured. This means that humans compared to other living species are less determined on a genetic, and more on a memetic, cultural level. Cultural, meaning a historically spiritualized environment, children are born into and find with birth, is an important factor of their further development. Thus, humans are not born as humans, but as children that have yet to become human. Namely, unlike the beings that have all the important characteristics of their species at birth, which are thus able to develop through breeding, that is, through encouragement of growth and nurturing of what is biologically given, for human development children need raising that will only introduce them into a specific culture as their spiritual – and truly human – environment. The entire human being, including the physical, grows up in a spirit of a specific culture and springs from it. How and how much culture determines man is the topic of this discussion. (shrink)

The main goals of this work are: Ethical and social aspects of policy, contemporary liberal democratic structures, morality in political decision-making, human rights and their individual conceptions, political-philosophical ideas, function of a social-scientific education, selected aspects of security policy, environmental policy, eco-social market economy and religion and law.

Application of the reliability of repairable systems on solving problems from constructing production systems takes an important place in the process of finding the optimal solution among the suggested system choices. The basic hypothesis when using the reliability of the repairable systems is that every machine is representing a component, a fact that is debatable when talking about technical sciences. However, considering the second assumption of the stationary process, the function of the availability is introduced. It represents the measure between (...) the reliability and the benefit of maintaining the components and the system as a whole one. An additional and the last reason for analyzing constructing machine as a whole one has an economic reason. From the aspect of the total cost and the capacity of the system, the function of the availability is catching more and more impact in the process of determinating the total cost in bill of quantities as the most important part of tender documents. Until former works, techno-economic optimisation usually ran over when choosing the system of the construction machines. In the work, there are shown the methodologies for gathering and analyzing the indicators of availabilities per unit of a company's machine park. The time of demission and reparation have been investigated among 34 components in the period of 6 years. Based on the obtained result for different conditions of machine exploitation and facilities, it is suggested the methodology of the future behaviour of the corresponding within the model optimization availability of constructing production system with the aim of eliminating extra criterion. The suggested model takes in consideration the total cost of the components when they are functional, and when they are not. This kind of approach enables the one who take choices decision of the height of profits, in the lenght of work in function of the projection of cash flow and managing with real indicators of functioning the system at the project level. Given the fact that the maintanance policy of machines is based on availability, and not on reliability of components, with the aim of maximizing the availability of different budget scenarios, a logical approach to the selection of the objective function in the terms of management of construction production systems is to minimize costs for a given availability of system constructing machinery is based on the use of historical data base with the values of the operational availability of components, conditions in which they function, in the process of forecasting the project availability for projects that follow. Ranking variant solutions is the result of the adopted function of the aim as a consequence due to enlargement methods of availability for serial parallel systems with the associated restrictions. For optimal system availability is taken a value that belongs to minimal total cost. However, it is predicted that after the end of the financial year, the real and projected indicators of system functions get compared to each other. Informational support to the proposed model is informational company system, which was built in the PHP programming language on the Linux software platform, and with data based in My SQL. The suggested model is tested on the system for the production and embedding bitumen bound materials on the specific project. Obtained results confirm the assumptions used in work. (shrink)

In the late seventeenth century, when Spain gradually emerged from the general crisis that had afflicted the country, several members of the cultural elite became acquainted with the new sophisticated theories and methods of modern science. This newly acquired knowledge inspired these novatores (innovators) to examine Spain’s history and historiography. They intended in the first place to integrate and align Spain with European culture at large, since the religious and ideological obstacles of the past were supposedly no longer in force. (...) Their second purpose was to establish a scientifically based historical discourse focused on the genuine achievements of Spain over the centuries and its contribution to European civilization. They were thus willing to confront the long-standing distortions arising from propaganda, either from the outside—such as the “black legend” forged by the enemies of Spain—or from inside—such as the “fake glories” forged by earlier historians. Diverse circumstances, however, limited their enlightened endeavour, and whoever was eager to resume it in the eighteenth century came up against the restrictions imposed on modern culture by Enlightened despotism. (shrink)

Vstupní kapitola objasňuje neotickou filosofii 17.-18. století a pojetí člověka. Další výklady sledují na Kantově filosofii zápas noetického konceptu filosofie s metafyzickým konceptem jsoucna, učení prvního filosofa činné.

Recent discussion of the alleged adverse consequences of space colonization by Phil Torres in this journal is critically assessed. While the concern for suffering risks should be part of any strategic discussion of the cosmic future of humanity, the Hobbesian picture painted by Torres is largely flawed and unpersuasive. Instead, there is a very real risk that the skeptical arguments will be taken too seriously and future human flourishing in space delayed or prevented.