Die Subject- und Objektkategorie in der neuzeitlichen Philosophie.

This book is a revised translation of two works by Miroslav Hroch, which together form a pioneering comparative analysis of the various struggles for national identity in nineteenth-century Europe. It is concerned with the decisive phase of 'national renaissance', when small groups of committed patriots successfully generated mass support. When and why was their propaganda effective? The author attempts to answer this fundamental question by locating the patriots within the contemporary social structure, and uses data derived from many different (...) nationalisms. The work is divided into three sections; a theoretical examination of the origins of nationalism and nation-hood, a quantitative survey of the social and territorial structure of the patriots of eight representative national movements, and a comparative analysis of the social and professional groups that formed the milieu of patriotism. Numerous statistical tables and maps illuminate the text, which forms one of the most significant studies of the nationalist phenomenon to be published in recent years. (shrink)

The paper deals with Buridan’s approach to the problems of propositional semantics, contained in his logical works. This question can be conceived both as semantic (definition of truth) and ontological (ontological status of states of affairs). Buridan’s solution of both of these questions is based upon a terminist theory of meaning. Theory of truth is constructed as suppositional, not as significational, which enables the definition of truth in terms of the semantic values of components of a particular kind of proposition. (...) The other important problem, the semantic analysis of accusative and infinitive constructions (i.e. of sentential nominalizations), is solved within the semantics of terms by exhibiting the logical structure of a proposition. Buridan’s crucial strategy is therefore the elimination of the apparent ontological commitments of a particular discourse in terms of dismissing the denotative theory of meaning. (shrink)

In addition to structural issues and topic selection issues, the subject of professional interest is the interpretation of historical events, especially those that are to a certain extent controversial or play a negative role in terms of ethnic relations. It is not the intention to stop looking at national history "with our own eyes" and to try to look at the point of view of an independent observer (the emotional attitude to the history of one's own nation as a part (...) of the personal identity can not be dispensed with) - the sense should more often point to the positive mutual influences countries have enriched each other, as mutual contacts (including competition) have contributed to progress, such as the crossing of cultures and the lifestyle of their current form.--Publisher's website. (shrink)

Aristotelova koncepcia definície v Druhých analytikách nepredstavuje len zásadný komponent dokazovacej vedy, ale v rôznych podobách je tiež zosobnená v spisoch jednotlivých vied a významným spôsobom ovplyvňuje podobu jeho filozofických a vedeckých skúmaní. I keď je systematickému výkladu spôsobov definovania venovaná celá druhá kniha tohto spisu, plné vyjasnenie účelu definícií sa ukáže až v širšom kontexte Aristotelovho modelu vedy. Cieľom štúdie je systematická interpretácia konceptu definície a predstavenie dvoch hlavných postupov definovania na podklade metódy vedeckého skúmania v spisoch Organonu.Podobu definície (...) do značnej miery utvára povaha objektov, ktoré vstupujú do vedeckého skúmania. V prvom rade je nutné zabezpečiť definície elementárnych objektov a vlastností, ktoré konštituujú predmet vedy. V tomto význame vystupujú definície ako jeden z bezprostredných počiatkov vedeckého sylogizmu. Postavenie takzvaných bezprostredných definícií je o to význačnejšie, že ich úlohou nie je len fixovať významy elementárnych pojmov vedeckého jazyka. Aristotelova metodológia vedy je vystavaná na esencialistických základoch a definície tak majú za úlohu zachycovať všetky nutné vlastnosti popisovaného druhu objektov, pričom zároveň z výmeru vylúčia tie vlastnosti, ktoré sú pre neho náhodné. Z toho nasleduje, že jednému druhu nutne náleží len jedna úplná a adekvátna definícia, čo vedcovi umožňuje vytvoriť spoľahlivý základ pre dokazovaciu fázu skúmania zaistením pravdivých premís, ktoré vyčerpávajúcim spôsobom popisujú svoj objekt.Na opačnom konci procesu vedeckého skúmania stoja sylogistické definície. Na rozdiel od prvého typu objektu definície, ich predmety sú komplexné a esencia nie je zjavná. Nakoľko cieľom definície je práve zobrazenie esencie, Aristoteles používa dôkaz ako nástroj jej zobrazenia. V tomto kontexte uvádza príklady prírodných fenoménov zatmenia a hromu, ktorých príčina je od nich odlišná, čo vytvára potrebu tohto špecifického postupu ich uchopenia. Na podklade Aristotelovho výkladu, štúdia analyzuje tieto dva typy definovania ako integrálnu súčasť vedeckej metódy a prirodzený dôsledok potreby adekvátneho postihnutia esencie predmetu skúmania. (shrink)

World Rugby (WR) announced in 2020 that transwomen should not be competing at the elite level because of safety and fairness concerns. WR and Jon Pike, a philosopher of sport advising them, adopted a lexical approach to get a grip on the three values in play: safety, fairness, and inclusion. Previously, governing bodies tried to balance these competing values. Michael Burke recently published a paper taking aim at Pike’s lexical approach. This is a reply to Burke.

The paper aims to present Spinoza’s understanding of the ontological status of finite beings, which was heavily influenced by mathematics, i.e. geometry. Spinoza stratified finite beings into two fairly incompatible layers: the one subjectively conceived, while the other is the objective level. The first level is related to the essence of being that is caused by God through immanent causality: here, we speak of entailment on the logical and epistemological level, and not the level of reality. Unlike essence, existence represents (...) the second level of being: existence is caused by the real finite being through transeunt cause. The first level, by its ontological status, is very close to mathematical entities, therefore the qualification that Spinoza ‘geometrized reality under a species of the essences’. Namely, he geometrized the segment under the scope of ontology, i.e. the essences of finite modes. The final part of the paper is dedicated to one of the main reasons why Spinoza failed to provide a satisfactory solution to this ontological problem, which is not the only such problem of his system. This would be that Spinoza paid too much attention on ethics, to the detriment of metaphysics, i.e. ontology as general metaphysics. For Spinoza, ontology is subjected to epistemology and ethics, therefore the name ‘functional metaphysics’. (shrink)

Since the late thirteenth century, the counterfactual Filioque debate, i.e., the question whether the Son and the Holy Spirit were distinct persons in the Trinity if the Holy Spirit only proceeded from the Father and not also from the Son, was an interesting context for developing the methodology of extreme thought experiments and the logic of conditionals with impossible antecedents and paradoxes of implication. In the mid-1620s, Puente Hurtado de Mendoza introduced a strongly critical approach towards the scientific merits of (...) positing certain types of impossible scenarios while joining this traditional debate in his Tractatus de Trinitate. He argued that the counterfactual Filioque problem is a needless detour and either shifts to unreliable discussions of properties of fictional entities or is outright trivial for logical reasons. The present article offers a modern edition of the ninth disputation of Hurtado’s Tractatus de Trinitate and analyses logical and methodological aspects of Hurtado’s position in the counterfactual Filioque debate. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the role of quantity in the studies of communication. The first step in the examination of the quantity of participants involved in the process of communication was the transition from the telegraphic model to the orchestra model. This step was done by the representatives of the New communication as well as in the course of the development of the semiotics studies. The second step leads us to the city model that can be found in Lévi-Strauss’ early (...) works. The city model enables us to take into account not only the unconscious and unintentional activities of the participants, but also the effects of multiplicity. One of the most important achievements of this approach is the idea of a collective intelligence. (shrink)

This paper explains various strategies of contemporary Islamists extremism in Europe. The author identifies the most important variants of Islamist extremism and deals with their goals and with strategic approaches how to achieve these goals. Quasi-legalist strategies as well as violent forms of interest-empowerment are described. The author uses sources from various Islamist organizations and analyses these materials within the framework of modern insurgency. A comprehensive outlook and threat assessment of Islamist extremist strategies are included in this article.

Meet semidistributive varieties are in a sense the last of the most important classes in universal algebra for which it is unknown whether it can be characterized by a strong Maltsev condition. We present a new, relatively simple Maltsev condition characterizing the meet-semidistributive varieties, and provide a candidate for a strong Maltsev condition.

In 2004 in Prague, I met Slovak philosopher Miroslav Marcelli, who had attended Foucault's lectures in Paris in 80s. We talked about the legacy of Foucault and contemporary philosophy. Mr. Marcelli taught me philosophy at Comenius University in 1995.. I never visited his lectures, I only passed the exam.. The most interesting point was his answer to my 'provocations' replicating the common prejudice about impracticability of the philosophy. He answered "Do you think that e.g. Descartes didn't know about it?" (...) In fact, people tend to think that philosophers or mathematicians, are "asocial" without "social" intelligence, while their occasional isolation (e.g. Nietzsche) is a product of social exclusion, rather than their choice. In 2013 I applied Foucault's concept of Discontinuity to short 10 minutes movie: Discontinuity, projected in my exhibition "From Animation" in Holland Park, London. The film has 3 parts, ends as it starts to show the significant historical events in 4 windows, when the same idea appears to disappear to re-appear.. Foucault's philosophy doesn't seem to me so unique now, e.g. the idea that many historical changes or progress itself is often illusionary - masking the power structure, had already been explored 515 BC, in depth by Parmenides who concluded: the change is impossible. (shrink)

Recently, David Boonin has put forward several objections to Carlos S. Nino's 'Consensual Theory of Punishment'. In this paper I will defend Nino against the 'explicit denial objection'. I will discuss whether Boonin's interpretation of Nino as a tacit consent theorist is right. I will argue that the offender's consent is neither tacit nor express, but a special category of implicit consent. Further, for Nino the legal-normative consequences of an act (of crime) are 'irrevocable', i.e. one cannot (expressly and successfully) (...) deny liability to them. I will suggest an explanation for Nino's irrevocability claim. (shrink)

Scholastic and analytic definitions of semantic paradoxes, in terms of groundlessness, circularity, and semantic pathology, are introduced and compared with each other. The fundamental intuitions used in these definitions are the concepts of being true about extralinguistic reality, of making statements about one’s self, and of compatibility with an underlying semantic theory. The three approaches—the groundlessness view, the circularity view, and the semantic pathology view—are shown to differ not only conceptually, but also in their applications. As both a means for (...) showing these differences and as an adequacytest, the so-called two-line puzzles are used, which allows one to address the possibility of making non-paradoxical statements about paradoxical sentences within the same language. (shrink)

A guide to defining and then creating a flourishing life, based on the popular class at Yale What makes a good life? The question is inherent to the human condition, asked by people across generations, professions, and social classes, and addressed by all schools of philosophy and religions. This search for meaning, as Yale professors Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz argue, is at the crux of a crisis that is facing Western culture, a crisis that, they propose, (...) can be ameliorated by searching, in one's own life, for the underlying truth. In A Life Worth Living, named after its authors' highly sought-after undergraduate course, Volf, Croasmun, and McAnnally-Linz chart out this question, providing readers with jumping-off points, road maps, and habits of reflection for figuring out where their lives hold meaning and where things need to change. Drawing from the major world religions and from impressively truthful and courageous secular figures, A Life Worth Living is a guide to life's most pressing question, the one asked of all of us: How are we to live? (shrink)

This paper deals with the simple paradoxes of validity and with the possibility of solving them in terms of Bradwardinian-Buridanian semantics. The paradoxes of validity as conceived here are cases of semantic pathology, which result due to the use of terms signifying the validity of inference. Semantic paradoxes are a semantico-epistemological phenomenon which is a symptom of the need to revise several apparently acceptable semantic assumptions. The analysis of possible solutions to the paradoxes focuses on Bradwardinian-Buridanian semantics and as a (...) result on the closed, token-based semantic theories that assume the existence of an implicit meaning of propositions. The key theses, as far as the solution to the paradoxes is concerned, are the principle of truth-implication which claims that every proposition expresses or implies its own truth and the closure principle which claims that every proposition asserts or expresses everything that follows from it logically. The present paper advances on recent research in claiming that (with certain reservations) the application of these principles can effectively solve inconsistency-paradoxes but not indeterminacy-paradoxes of validity. (shrink)

The paper endeavours to identify three fundamental approaches to the depiction of the urban space. The first is that of the chronicling traveller, for whom thespace is always identified with the aid of events and operations which transmute into performative markings. This approach was replaced at the beginning of the modern period by representation in the form of the map. The third approach is Barthes' perceptions of the city as the Argo and of the urban centre as the place of (...) encounter. Here the urban space is determined through the active participant in play and by his body. (shrink)