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 debate about the Strategic Foul has been rumbling on for several decades and it has predominantly been fought on moral grounds. The defenders claim that the rules of a game must be supplemented by the ‘ethos’ of the game, by its conventions or informal rules. Critics of the Strategic Foul argue that to break the rules deliberately, in order to gain an advantage, is morally wrong, spoils the game, or is a form of cheating. Rather than entering the moral (...) maze I will argue that the Strategic Foul rests on a conceptual mistake. I will contrast the Strategic Foul with the idea of Efficient Breach in the economic approach to law in order to bring out some of the salient features. While doing so I will attempt some cross-fertilisation between jurisprudential insights and philosophical reflection on game rules. Finally, I will re-cast Searle’s distinction between constitutive and regulative rules in order to bring out the conceptual mistake more clearly. (shrink)

U tekstu se polazi od problemske konstatacije prema kojoj je kapitalizam kao način života toliko postao dominantan da sustavno prožima cjelokupno vrijeme pojedinca, i radno i slobodno vrijeme. Dakle, sustav je čovjekovo vrijeme u totalu stavio u zavjetrinu ekonomije. I njime upravlja i vlada .Dalje se u tekstu postavlja pitanje koliko će još proći »vremena da se deblokiraju potencijali čovjekove prirode zapreteni u ekonomiji slobodnog vremena« . U suprotnom »svaki napredak u proizvodnji s pasivnom proizvođačkom klasom može samo pospješiti izdvajanje (...) i jačanje nove gornje klase« . Tako nastaje dublja problemska situacija u kojoj se pojedinci pretvaraju u pasivne grupe i društvene zajednice i time cijelo društvo čine pasivnim i osrednjim.Rješenje se, prema Supeku, nalazi u izoštravanju »samosvijesti građanina« kojom bi se uspješno otklanjala pasivnost i nekritičnost čovjekove svijesti. Cijeli bi se taj proces mogao razvijati iz temeljne »usamljenosti« građanina, koja pretpostavlja sigurnu distancu od tržišnog konzumerizma. Samosvijest nastala usred vlastite usamljenosti, tj. usred kritičkog odmaka od svakodnevice, bila bi osnažena i kritički otvorena prema sebi i prema sredini u kojoj živi. I tada bi mogla »djelovati kako hoće«, a ne kako je diktirano odozgor.Ta temeljna i kritički distancirana usamljenost građanina razumijevala bi se kao kvalitetno novo iskustvo vremena u neovisnom i autonomnom prostoru slobode u kojem se konačno može ostvariti vlastito slobodno vrijeme bitno drugačije od pasivne besposlice.The initial concept of this text is the problem conclusion which claims that capitalism as a way of life has become so dominant that it systematically permeates the individual’s complete time, their working hours as well as their free time. In other words, man’s free time has been overtaken by the system and completely subjected to economy. And it is run by the government .Further in the text a question arises: How long “will it take to deliver the potentials of human nature which are entwined in the economy of free time” . Otherwise “every progress that is made in production using passive production classes can only help facilitate the separation and strengthening of the new upper class” . This leads to a deeper problem situation in which individuals are being turned into passive groups and social communities, which makes the entire society passive and mediocre.According to Supek, the solution is in sharpening the “citizens’ self-consciousness”, which could bring success in removing passivity and non-critical human consciousness. The entire process could be developed from the foundational “loneliness” of the citizen, which implies a safe distance from market consumerism. Self-consciousness, caused by personal loneliness, i.e., critical detachment from everyday life, would be strengthened and critically open toward itself and the society in which the person lives. And then it would be able to “do as it pleased”, and not as it has been ordered from a higher instance.This foundational and critically detached loneliness of citizens could be understood as a good and fresh experience of time in an independent and autonomous space of freedom, where a person could finally be able to achieve their own free time in a way that is largely different than just mere passive doing nothing. (shrink)

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)

The paper deals with the concept of text, showing its transformations in semiotic studies. First the text is excluded from semiotics in favor of the system and its paradigmatic perspective, as shown in the works of L. Hjemslev. Then the meaning of the text is reconsidered as in later works of Barthes and mainly in the text theory of J. Kristeva. Both of them mark the transition to the further, poststructuralist stage of semiotics. This transformation made the text close to (...) the image of a network. The paper goes even further: Following B. Latour it tries to justify the acceptation of hybrids and impurities. Moreover, it requires not only a reconsideration of the philosophical method, but also an acceptation together with impurities the effects of balkanization. (shrink)

Významnou součástí novopozitivistické filosofie byl Carnapův projekt eliminace metafyziky logickou analýzou jazyka, ohlášený ve stejnojmenném článku. Tento projekt směřoval mj. k vytvoření tzv. logické syntaxe jazyka, která by umožňovala odhalit metafyzické věty jako nesmyslné a eliminovat je z vědeckého diskurzu. V tomto textu se nejprve věnujeme Carnapovu vymezení logické syntaxe v historickém kontextu. Následně analyzujeme Carnapovy neúspěšné pokusy logickou syntaxi jazyka zkonstruovat, přičemž ukazujeme, že jeho obtíže při hledání logické syntaxe nejsou nahodilé, ale mají systémovou povahu a souvisí se způsobem, (...) jakým Carnap problém vymezil. Na závěr formulujeme důsledky Carnapova selhání pro jeho filosofický projekt eliminace metafyziky a pro novopozitivismus jako celek. (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.

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)

Words don’t just describe the world; they change the world. We do things with words as John L. Austin (1975) has argued. But words can also change how we think about something. In this piece I wish to examine the everyday usage of words referring to strategic fouling, as it cuts across various languages. In some languages this rule-violation gave rise to figurative language after the practice became widespread. We find euphemisms but also dysphemisms, as well as evaluative language (whose (...) purpose here is to excuse the action). This is important, because ‘if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought’ (as George Orwell observed). I will argue that euphemisms and other evaluative language which refer to strategic fouling are a piece of sporting propaganda, aiming to dull our senses to such rule-violations. (shrink)

The present paper is concerned with an exposé of the basic general-semantic theses presented in the tract called “De insolubilibus” written by the 14th century British logician Roger Swyneshed. Swyneshed‘s semantics is analysed as a highly specific theory of truth, correspondence and facts . Swyneshed’s theory revises the correspondence theory of truth and rejects the principle of bivalence, while offering the solution to two different types of paradoxes . As it is usual for theories of this kind, Swyneshed’s semantics has (...) to face the specific forms of revenge-arguments, which lead to a specific conception of truthmaking. (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)

Prior research has suggested that perceptual disfluency activates analytical processing and increases the solution rate of mathematical problems with appealing but incorrect answers (i.e., the Cogn...

Anthropology of Consciousness, Volume 32, Issue 1, Page 33-54, Spring 2021.

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)

Both of Gettier's examples are not representative of situations in which we would claim knowledge – we do not use language in this way. Therefore, Gettier has not shown that justified true belief is insufficient for knowledge. I am not denying that there is a problem about the definition of knowledge. Several decades earlier, Russell dealt with this problem, using a stopped clock to illustrate it.

In life there can be good reasons to break the rules. Some sports philosophers have suggested that this also holds for games. In this essay I will compare and contrast reasons for rule-breaking in life and in sports. Some of my focus will be on recent attempts to defend strategic fouling (by Eylon & Horowitz, Russell, and Flynn). Supporters of strategic fouling try to provide a philosophical underpinning for the practice, but they ignore the genealogy of such rule-violations. I will (...) also discuss how some legal theorists view rule-breaking and contrast this with sport. Lastly, I will introduce the idea of ‘transcendental rules’ in games. They are the conditions for the possibility of playing a game. Following Aurel Kolnai, I will argue that strategic fouling violates a transcendental rule – it is not just a moral error, it is also a conceptual error. (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)

University study can be a life period of heightened psychological distress for many students. The development of new preventive and intervention programs to support well-being in university students is a fundamental challenge for mental health professionals. We designed an 8-week online mindfulness-based program combining a face-to-face approach, text, audio, video components, and support psychotherapy principles with a unique intensive reminder system using the Facebook Messenger and Slack applications in two separate runs. We assessed the program’s effect on mindful experiencing, perceived (...) stress, emotion regulation strategies, self-compassion, negative affect, and quality of life. The results of the presented pilot study confirmed that eMBP is a feasible and effective tool in university students’ mental health support. The students who completed the eMBP reported a reduction of perceived stress with a large effect size as well as a decrease of negative affect experience frequency and intensity, an increase of being mindful in their life, and a higher rate of self-compassion with a medium effect size. A small effect size was found in the frequency of using a cognitive reappraisal strategy. One new result is the observation of an eMBP effect on the decrease in attributed importance to the quality-of-life components replicated in two consecutive runs of the program. The study affirms that mindfulness-based interventions can be effectively delivered in an eHealth form to university students. (shrink)

1. This paper addresses the development of mutual relations between two sets of ideas in scholastic logic. First, consider the following statements: (1) It is impossible to encounter a chimera.(2)...

Over the last decades we have witnessed a proliferation of new human rights claims (e.g. the ‘human right’ to internet access) . But Milan Kundera (1991) reminds us that not all desires are human rights. Trans women athletes (and their supporters) often claim that there is a human right to sport and they derive a further ‘human right’ from this: the right to compete in the sex category with which they identify (i.e. the female category). The purpose of this article (...) is to critically assess these two claims: 1. every person has a human right to compete in sport; 2. trans women have a human right to compete in the female category in sport. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the early sixteenth-century epistemic logic developed by John Mair’s circle and discusses iterated epistemic modalities, epistemic closure and Bradwardinian semantics related to the logic of epistemic statements. These topics are addressed as part of setting up and solving epistemic sophisms based on traditional scenarios which can be traced back to fourteenth-century British epistemic logic. While the ultimate source for the debate appears to be the second chapter of William Heytesbury’s Regule solvendi sophismata, the immediate source is (...) the Italian editorial, commentarial and philosophical tradition, notably Paul of Venice and Cajetan of Thiene. (shrink)

Although there have been efforts to integrate Semantic Web technologies and artificial agents related AI research approaches, they remain relatively isolated from each other. Herein, we introduce a new ontology framework designed to support the knowledge representation of artificial agents’ actions within the context of the actions of other autonomous agents and inspired by standard cognitive architectures. The framework consists of four parts: 1) an event ontology for information pertaining to actions and events; 2) an epistemic ontology containing facts about (...) knowledge, beliefs, perceptions and communication; 3) an ontology concerning future intentions, desires, and aversions; and, finally, 4) a deontic ontology for modeling obligations and prohibitions which limit agents’ actions. The architecture of the ontology framework is inspired by deontic cognitive event calculus as well as epistemic and deontic logic. We also describe a case study in which the proposed DCEO ontology supports autonomous vehicle navigation. (shrink)

Under the Second Demographic Transition, alternative forms of living arrangement are on the rise. The aim of this article is to compare quality of life in children living in married and cohabiting families. We present the results of representative research conducted in Slovakia in 2018 (N = 1,010 respondents). We tested whether children brought up in traditional married families had better material resources and healthcare, fewer behavioural problems, better peer relations and spent more leisure time with their parents than children (...) brought up by cohabiting parents. We also investigated whether number of children in the family and net monthly household income affected the children’s quality of life. The results show that there were almost no differences in quality of life between children brought up by married and by cohabiting parents and that number of children in the family and level of net monthly household income affected only the child’s material resources. (shrink)

Background: -/- Having colonised the social role ‘woman’, and entering female-only spaces, there is one bastion of womanhood left which has always been closed off to men who claim to be women: the inner life, the phenomenology of inhabiting a female sexed body. This bastion has come under attack; trans women claim that they ‘feel like a woman’ or that they are ‘a woman inside’. The aim of this essay is to assess such claims. -/- The appropriation of ‘womanhood’ by (...) males leads to the sidelining of women. Trans women are lauded as exemplars of womanhood. They are crowned ‘woman of the year’, become university women’s officers, represent women in political parties, or are being nominated for a women’s prize for fiction. The message is that trans women make for better ‘women’. The philosophical underpinnings for this view can be found in the work of Talia Mae Bettcher. -/- Road Map: -/- Part I: Recently, trans women have been claiming to have the phenomenal experience of women (I am a woman inside; I feel like a woman). Relying on Thomas Nagel[1] and Frank Jackson,[2] I will argue that they are in error. The inner life of trans women is fundamentally different from that of women, because the former cannot take up the female perspective. Being a woman means, among other things, to have a female body and, consequently, to experience yourself and the world through a female body. This is the core of being a woman, and trans women can never satisfy this condition, because they are – and remain – male-bodied (regardless of any bodily modifications). Thus, such claims are simply wrong. Trans women are not physiologically equipped to share in the female phenomenal experience. -/- Without a female body there is no female experience; the latter relies on the presence of the former.[3] This means that trans women are not women because a) they lack the respective body, and b) they lack the respective phenomenal experience. Their imitations of the female (experience) don’t make them into women. -/- Part II: Trans theory offers a way out, by sidelining the body. Talia Mae Bettcher’s account of ‘first-person authority’ (henceforth, FPA) about gender as well as the ‘liberatory project’ constitutes the strongest defence available to take the avowals of trans people (about sex, gender and their phenomenal experience) seriously. Bettcher’s theory has two advantages. It doesn’t matter whether you have a female body or not, and it doesn’t matter whether you are mistaken about your avowals or not (i.e. the epistemic question). The avowals of transgender people have ‘ethical force’, rather than epistemic force. This would mean that we need to affirm trans women in their belief that ‘trans women are women’, and it would follow that the ethical force would underwrite their claims of feeling like a woman inside. I will subject Bettcher’s cogitations to philosophical scrutiny; this is something that, surprisingly, is missing in the literature. Most subsequent writers adopt Bettcher’s FPA uncritically. I will conclude that Bettcher’s project fails, and that trans claims about having the phenomenal experience of women cannot find support from Bettcher’s FPA. -/- [1] Nagel, T. 1974. What is it like to be a bat?, The Philosophical Review, Vol. 83:4, pp. 435–450. -/- [2] Jackson, F. 1986. What Mary didn’t know, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 83:5, pp. 291–295. -/- [3] A stillborn girl is female, although she will never have female experiences. Her body is the condition of the possibility for having female experiences, i.e. for ‘being’ a woman. (shrink)

Some philosophers of sport have suggested that strategic fouling is acceptable if you pay full compensation. In this paper I will argue that the idea of ‘compensation’ is conceptually inadequate to deal with strategic fouling. Compensation is a legal remedy designed to make the victim of a wrong whole again, i.e. make good the loss or harm they have suffered. But compensation as the analogon between law and games is ill-conceived when applied to strategic fouling. I will suggest another analogon (...) from the law of obligations – restitution – which is more apt to deal with strategic fouling and which shows more clearly why the ‘compensation’ prescribed by the rules often fails to restore the fouled side. (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)