Résumé Le présent travail retrace le parcours intellectuel, dans la Serbie communiste, de Jovan Deretic, grand historien de la littérature serbe. L’analyse se fonde sur ses diverses lectures de l’œuvre de Dositej Obradovic. Elle présente d’abord l’importance de ce dernier pour la culture serbe à l’époque des Lumières. Elle montre ensuite que les premières analyses de son œuvre par Deretic sont ancrées principalement dans le matérialisme dialectique. Dans une deuxième étape, Deretic se tourne vers le structuralisme néo-positiviste pour offrir une (...) approche plus immanente de l’œuvre d’Obradovic. Il aboutit finalement à une prise de conscience des contradictions et des limites de l’analyse immanente tout autant que de l’interprétation idéologique d’une œuvre. (shrink)

Explaining intuitions in terms of "facts of our natural history" is compatible with rationally trusting them. This compatibilist view is defended in the present paper, focusing upon nomic and essentialist modal intuitions. The opposite, incompatibilist view alleges the following: If basic modal intuitions are due to our cognitive make-up or "imaginative habits" then the epistemologists are left with a mere non-rational feeling of compulsion on the side of the thinker. Intuitions then cannot inform us about modal reality. In contrast, the (...) paper argues that there are several independent sources of justification which make the feeling of compulsion rational: the prima-facie and a priori ones come from the obviousness of our basic modal intuitions and our not being able to imagine things otherwise, others, a posteriori, from the epistemic success of these intuitions. Further, the general scheme of evolutionary learning is reliable, reliability is preserved in the resulting individual's cognitive make-up, and we can come to know this a posteriori. The a posteriori appeal to evolution thus plays a subsidiary role in justification, filling the remaining gap and removing the residual doubt. Explaining modal intuitions is compatible with moderate realism about modality itself. (shrink)

Plato’s Republic is a political thought experiment, claims the present paper. Thought-experimenting is announced in the story of the Ring of Gyges, and done in a thorough and systematic way through a series of political scenarios: community of goods, of women and children, educational system and the philosopher rule? The paper considers the longstanding issue of plausibility, putting it in the context of current debates about thought-experiments, and the issue of replaceability: can a given political thought experiment be replaced by (...) an argument which features only norms and empirical information? The paper also puts the Republic thought experiment into a broad historical context, presenting it as the point of origin of utopian literature on the one hand, and the thought-experimental tradition in political philosophy on the other hand, contrasting it with the social-contract thought-experiment, also adumbrated in the Republic but fully developed in modern thought. (shrink)

Bosonic and fermionic particle currents can be introduced in a more unified way, with the cost of introducing a preferred spacetime foliation. Such a unified treatment of bosons and fermions naturally emerges from an analogous superstring current, showing that the preferred spacetime foliation appears only at the level of effective field theory, not at the fundamental superstring level. The existence of the preferred spacetime foliation allows an objective definition of particles associated with quantum field theory in curved spacetime. Such an (...) objective definition of particles makes the Bohmian interpretation of particle quantum mechanics more appealing. The superstring current allows a consistent Bohmian interpretation of superstrings themselves, including a Bohmian description of string creation and destruction in terms of string splitting. The Bohmian equations of motion and the corresponding probabilistic predictions are fully relativistic covariant and do not depend on the preferred foliation. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show, contra the right-libertarian critique of social justice, that there are good reasons for defending policies of social justice within a free society. In the first part of the paper, we will present two influential right-libertarian critiques of social justice, found in Friedrich Hayek's Law, Legislation and Liberty and Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia. Based on their approach, policies of social justice are seen as an unjustified infringement on freedoms of individual members (...) of a society. In response to this critique, we will introduce the distinction between formal and factual freedom and argue that the formal principle of freedom defended by Hayek and Nozick does not suffice for the protection of factual freedom of members of a society, because it does not recognise (1) the moral obligation to help those who, without their fault, lack factual freedom to a significant degree, and (2) the legal obligation of the state to protect civic dignity of all members of a society. In the second part of the paper, we offer an interpretation of Kant's argument on taxation, according to which civic dignity presupposes factual freedom, in order to argue that Kant's justification of taxation offers good reasons for claiming that the state has the legal obligation to protect factual freedom via the policies of social justice. (shrink)

A common understanding of quantum mechanics (QM) among students and practical users is often plagued by a number of “myths”, that is, widely accepted claims on which there is not really a general consensus among experts in foundations of QM. These myths include wave-particle duality, time-energy uncertainty relation, fundamental randomness, the absence of measurement-independent reality, locality of QM, nonlocality of QM, the existence of well-defined relativistic QM, the claims that quantum field theory (QFT) solves the problems of relativistic QM or (...) that QFT is a theory of particles, as well as myths on black-hole entropy. The fact is that the existence of various theoretical and interpretational ambiguities underlying these myths does not yet allow us to accept them as proven facts. I review the main arguments and counterarguments lying behind these myths and conclude that QM is still a not-yet-completely-understood theory open to further fundamental research. (shrink)

Spontaneous intrusive recollections follow traumatic events in clinical and non-clinical populations. To determine whether any relationship exists between SIRs and enhanced memory for emotional events, participants viewed emotional or neutral films, had their memory for the films tested two days later, and estimated the number of SIRs they experienced for each film. SIR frequency related positively to memory strength, an effect more pronounced in the emotional condition. These findings represent the first demonstration of a relationship between SIRs occurring after an (...) emotional experience and subsequent memory strength for that experience. The results are consistent with the possibility that emotional arousal leads both to elevated SIR frequency and better memory, and that the covert rehearsal associated with SIRs enhances memory for emotional relative to neutral stimuli. Additional evidence of menstrual cycle influences on SIR incidence in female participants appears to merit consideration in future work. (shrink)

The paper defends causal explanationism concerning our modal intuitions and judgments, and, in particular, the following claims. If a causally explainable mirroring or “pre-established harmony” between our mind and modal reality obtains, we are justified in believing it does. We do not hold our modal beliefs compulsively and blindly but with full subjective and objective justification. Therefore, causal explanation of our modal beliefs does not undermine rational trust in them. Explanation and trust support each other. In contrast, anti-explanationists, claim that (...) causal explanation of intuitions and judgments undermines rational trust in them. They especially target causal explanation in terms of pre-established harmony between our mind, shaped by causal processes, and the underlying modal structure of reality. The paper argues against them. The argument builds upon the claim that the appeal to modal facts is indispensable for systematization and explanation of non-modal ones. Therefore, we should assume that modal facts exist and are not disjoint and isolated from actual facts. The modal structure of the universe intervenes in the non-modal reality. Causal processes indirectly carry information about deep modal structure. Any causal explanation of our intuitional modal beliefs should start from this indirect contact with and information about modal facts. Therefore, if our intuitional modal beliefs are true and causally explainable, they are true in virtue of the deep underlying modal structure. They are sensitive to modal reality and track it. We can come to know this fact, and thus strengthen our spontaneous trust in our modal intuitions. (shrink)

Spontaneous intrusive recollections are known to follow emotional events in clinical and non-clinical populations. Previous work in our lab has found that women report more SIRs than men after exposure to emotional films, and that this effect is driven entirely by women in the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle. To replicate and extend this finding, participants viewed emotional films, provided saliva samples for sex hormone concentration analysis, and estimated SIR frequency following film viewing. Women in the luteal phase reported (...) significantly more SIRs than did women in the follicular phase, and SIR frequency significantly correlated with salivary progesterone levels. The results are consistent with an emerging pattern in the literature suggesting that menstrual cycle position of female participants can potently influence findings in numerous cognitive domains. The potential implications of these results for disorders characterized by intrusions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, are also discussed. (shrink)

The main goal of this essay is to provide an in-depth analysis of the trajectory of the Colourful Revolution in North Macedonia as a social movement. From a more general perspective, the paper engages with the growing interest in the literature that explores the correlation between social movements and democratisation processes, especially in societies that fall into the category of hybrid regimes. The Colourful Revolution is a good example of a protest movement that has created effective regime change. It presented (...) a complex social movement encompassing many fragmented social and political groups gathered around the idea of a common adversary. Additionally, the Colourful Revolution has one particularity: it is a social movement that has undergone a full developmental circle - formation through utilization of political opportunity frameworks, a period of activity and success and dissolution. Drawing on literature of the political process, opportunity frameworks and cycles of social movements, the paper argues that social movements such as the Colourful Revolution are not just temporary and unstable structures but are also highly dependent on the existence of a common target of the social activism in question. The removal from power of political actors that have been the reason for mobilisation of a complex and diverse network of social and political activism resulted in an absence of an adhesive factor holding together all the parts of this complex system. The absence initiated gradual discord and dissolution of different factions within the social movement and reveals its true nature - temporary, ideologically diverse, conflictual, and even undemocratic in some respects. (shrink)

I agree completely with Devitt, first, that people do immediately understand sentences presented to them, that this understanding goes together with perceiveing the sentence in question, and that it demands an explanation. Devitt himself stresses the involvement of competence in the process, and I agree. But, if the competence is involved,, why is voice-of-competence view on the wrong track? And the view connects well with findings reported in psycholinguistic literature. Of course, there are several very broad areas that are sufficiently (...) specific to allow for hypothesis of a specialized competence and about which people have intuitions. One is human general understanding of number that is quite specialized, and can be lost, as a consequence of brain damage, without impairment in other areas. The next is our spatial competence, presumably producing our spatial-geometrical intuitions. Coming closer to the domain of philosophy, there are several normative areas, the paradigmatic one being the moral domain. The voice-of-competence view can and should be generalized to all of them. (shrink)

A popular line in philosophy championed by Jackson and his followers analyses concepts as networks of propositions. It takes even network-propositions characterizing ordinary empirically applicable concepts to be a priori, in contrast to statements of empirical science. This is meant to guarantee both the autonomy of conceptual analysis, and its substantial and informative character. It is argued here, to the contrary, that empirically applicable and entrenched concepts owe the acceptability of their own network precisely to its empirical pedigree. Promoting an (...) empirical proposition into a network proposition does not make it ultimately a priori: no matter how entrenched the network is, it owes its ultimate justification to its empirical pedigree. Autonomy from experience and informativeness clash with each other: the stipulative "knowledge" is a priori in a weak sense, but not informative and substantial, the factual knowledge is substantial but not a priori. (shrink)

Measurements of the dimensionality of chaotic attractors obtained on behavioral data represent the task complexity and also could be hypothesized to reflect the number of synchronized neural groups involved in the generation of the data. The changes in dimensionality for different experimental conditions suggest that limited processing capacity, task complexity, demand, and synchrony in neural firing might be closely related.

Brojna su istraživanja potvrdila vezu između glazbenog obrazovanja i dobrobiti za opći razvoj djeteta. Glazbene aktivnosti koje stavljaju težište na ritam u nekim su se istraživanjima istakle kao sredstvo poticaja djetetovog razvoja u ne-glazbenim domenama. Rad se bavi ulogom temporalne dimenzije glazbe u glazbenom i općem razvoju djeteta. Iznose se dosadašnje spoznaje o percepciji, obradi i izvođenju glazbenog ritma, pulsa i metra te tijeku ritamskog razvoja djeteta. Daje se pregled istraživanja utjecaja glazbenih aktivnosti koje se temelje na ritmu na ne-glazbene (...) domene razvoja te se preporuča rani rad na ritmu. Ističe se potreba provođenja eksperimentalnih istraživanja koja bi rasvijetlila ulogu ritma u razvoju djeteta i modeli rada na ritmu primjenjivi u institucijama koje se bave djecom, uključujući i terapijske te rehabilitacijske ustanove. Numerous studies have confirmed the correlation between music education and child development. In some studies, musical activities based on rhythm have been highlighted as a means of stimulating children’s development in non-music domains. The paper deals with the role of the temporal dimension of music for both the musical and general development of the child. The text presents knowledge about the perception, processing, and performance of music rhythm, pulse, and meter, as well as the course of the rhythmic development of the child. An overview is provided of the impact of rhythm-based music activities on non-music developmental domains together with recommendation for early work on rhythm. We emphasized the need to conduct experimental research to shed light on the role of rhythm in the development of the child and the rhythmic models applicable in child care institutions, including therapeutic and rehabilitation institutions. (shrink)

Although Lermontov is traditionally viewed as Russia's “second greatest poet,” the bard of Russia's beauty and the critic of Russia's “superfluous men,” the philosophical content of his poetry and prose remains relatively unexamined. The article considers Lermontov's themes of the rebellious angel, freedom, and fate, and argues that although these themes were a product of his time, they are still relevant today.

The first, critical part of the paper summarizes J. R. Brown’s Platonic view of thought experiments (TEs) and raises several questions. One of them concerns the initial, particular judgments in a TE. Since they seem to precede the general insight, Brown’s Platonic intuition, and not to derive from it, the question arises as to the nature of the initial particular judgment. The other question concerns the explanatory status of Brown’s epistemic Platonism. The second, constructive descriptive-explanatory part argues for an alternative, (...) i.e. the view of TE as reasoning in, or with help of, mental models which can accommodate all the relevant data within a non-aprioristic framework (or, at worst, within a minimally “aprioristic”, nativist one). The last part turns to issues of justification and argues that the mental model proposal can account for justification of intuitional judgments and can also support the view of properly functioning intuition as an epistemic virtue, all within a more naturalist framework than the one endorsed by Brown. (shrink)

A strong, strictly virtue- based , and at the same time truth-centered framework for virtue epistemology (VE) is proposed that bases VE upon a clearly motivating epistemic virtue, inquisitiveness or curiosity in a very wide sense, characterizes the purely executive capacities-virtues as a means for the truth-goal set by the former, and, finally, situates the remaining, partly motivating and partly executive virtues in relation to this central stock of virtues. Character-trait epistemic virtues are presented as hybrids, partly moral, partly purely (...) epistemic. In order to make the approach virtue- based , it is argued that the central virtue (inquisitiveness or curiosity) is responsible for the value of truth: truth is valuable to cognizers because they are inquisitive, and most other virtues are a means for satisfying inquisitiveness. On can usefully combine this virtue-based account of the motivation for acquiring knowledge with a Sosa-style analysis of the concept “knowledge”, which brings to the forefront virtues-capacities, in order to obtain a full-blooded, “strong” VE. (shrink)

Xenophobia is one of the key drivers of marginalisation, discrimination, and conflict, yet many prominent machine learning fairness frameworks fail to comprehensively measure or mitigate the resulting xenophobic harms. Here we aim to bridge this conceptual gap and help facilitate safe and ethical design of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. We ground our analysis of the impact of xenophobia by first identifying distinct types of xenophobic harms, and then applying this framework across a number of prominent AI application domains, reviewing the (...) potential interplay between AI and xenophobia on social media and recommendation systems, healthcare, immigration, employment, as well as biases in large pre-trained models. These help inform our recommendations towards an inclusive, xenophilic design of future AI systems. (shrink)

The paper places the work of G. Gaus into the tradition of political thought experimenting. In particular, his strategy of modeling moral decision by the heuristic device of idealized Members of the Public is presented as an iterated thought experiment, which stands in marked contrast with more traditional devices like the veil of ignorance. The consequences are drawn, and issues of utopianism and realism briefly discussed.

Nenad Miščević; IX*—Computationalism and the Kripke-Wittgenstein Paradox, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 96, Issue 1, 1 June 1996, Pages 215–23.

The contemporary global crisis can be explored in different perspectives. This text focuses on constitutionalism. It asks whether constitutionalism still matters. Responding to this question requires revisiting the basic analytical and normative concepts that shape individual autonomy, polity, law and democracy in the context of globalization. Part I of the article introduces the question of the crisis of constitutionalism. It briefly explores the dispute between proponents of state and post-state constitutionalism, and proceeds with an analysis of societal constitutionalism. The critical (...) reading of this theory prepares the ground for a positive normative argument. Part II of the article argues for the return to the moral core of constitutionalism. It defends the claim that justice at the global stage requires establishing a minimum common denominator that would be composed of universalizable substantive principles. The institutional question follows. Its focus should be on the authoritative identification, protection and advancement of the core values of constitutionalism in the social and legal-political realms of the world society. (shrink)

In Devitt’s view, linguistic intuitions are opinions about linguistic production of products, most often one’s own. They result frorn ordinary empirical investigation, so “they are immediate and fairly unreflectiveernpirical central-processor responses to linguistic phenomena”, which reactions are, moreover, theory-laden, where the ‘theory’ encompasses all sorts of speaker’s beliefs. The paper reconstructs his arguments, places his view on a map of alternative approaches to intuitions, and offers a defense of a minimalistic “voice-of-competence” view. First, intuitions are to be identified with the (...) data, the minimal “products” of tentative linguistic production of naïve speaker-listeners, and not with their opinions about the data. Second, the data involve no theory and very little prototheory. Third, although there might be admixtures of guesswork in the conscious production of data, these are routinely weaned out by linguists. Finally, mere acceptance of the “voice of competence” does not land us in any objectionable Cartesianism: it is cornpatible with naturalism and with distrust of a priori philosophy. (shrink)

This book offers a readable introduction to the main aspects of thought experimenting in philosophy and science. It presents the main options in understanding thought experiments, from empiricism to Platonism, and discusses their strengths and weaknesses. However, it also provides some original perspectives on the topic. Firstly, it provides a new definition and analysis of thought experimenting that brings it closer to laboratory experimenting. Secondly, it develops the author’s earlier theory of “mental modelling”, proposed some decades ago by him, and (...) some other researchers in the field as the crucial procedure in thought experimenting. The mental modelling approach links work with thought experimenting to cognitive science and to research on mental simulation which is a hot topic in present-day research. Thirdly, it proposes a principled way to respond to criticism of thought experimenting by “experimental philosophers” as they have been dominating the present-day debates. The response suggests a possible ameliorative, self-help project for thought experimenting. Finally, the book provides a way to systematize the history of important thought experiments in science and philosophy and thus connects, in an original way, the systematic investigation of experimenting to the historical work of famous thought experiments. It is of interest to scholars interested in history of ideas and philosophy of science. (shrink)

U ovom eseju autor ispituje jedan od mogucih puteva u postfilozofiju koja ne postoji.

In this article I ask how moral relativism applies to the analysis of responsibility for mass crime. The focus is on the critical reading of two influential relativist attempts to offer a theoretically consistent response to the challenges imposed by extreme criminal practices. First, I explore Gilbert Harman’s analytical effort to conceptualize the reach of moral discourse. According to Harman, mass crime creates a contextually specific relationship to which moral judgments do not apply any more. Second, I analyze the inability (...) thesis, which claims that the agents of mass crime are not able to distinguish between right and wrong. Richard Arneson, Michael Zimmerman and Geoffrey Scarre do not deny the moral wrongness of crime. However, having introduced the claim of authenticity as a specific feature of the inability thesis, they maintain that killers are not responsible. I argue that these positions do not hold. The relativist failure to properly conceptualize responsibility for mass crime follows from the mistaken view of moral autonomy, which then leads to the erroneous explanation of the establishment, authority and justification of moral judgments. (shrink)

Sake i ostali inkongruentni protivdelovi su dovoljni da odbacimo relacionizam, ili je bar tako mislio Kant, jos od nekih svojih prekritickih spisa. Argumenti sa inkongruentnim protivdelovima su elegantni i efektni, i privukli su prilicno veliku paznju kod odredjenog broja autora, koji su argumente kritikovali na razne nacine, ili ih branili. Rasprave su se pritom odaljile od originalnog Kantovog argumenta, i od duha tog vremena, i primila obelezja moderne filozofije i geometrije. U ovom tekstu bi trebalo da pokazem da Kant, kao (...) i oni koji su ga kasnije branili, nisu postigli svoj cilj - nije dat konkluzivan argument protiv relacionizma. (shrink)

Natural kind terms don’t have descriptive meanings, Devitt claims. The paper argues that this claim is tantamount to denying the existence of natural kind concepts, in the usual sense of “concept”, since concepts are predicate meanings. The denial is counterintuitive, and has bad epistemological consequences, since natural kind concepts are among the building blocks of our understanding of the world. The paper ends with a positive proposal, featuring a bold claim: if the standard Kripke-Putnam, line on semantics of natural kind (...) terms is correct, and if there are natural kind concepts, then propositions analyzing these concepts are not apriori knowable. Analyticity does not entail apriority. (shrink)

Snježana Prijić-Samaržija’s book discusses the epistemic grounding of democracy, stressing the epistemic role of experts in her political-epistemological favorite, the project of “reliability democracy”. Her proposal, inspired by Christiano, lets citizens play an important role in setting the aims, whereas experts deliberate about means of reaching them. I argue that it is not easy to reach consensus about goals and values. What is needed is democratic deliberation in deciding, encompassing both experts and laypersons. We should retain the duality of less (...) ideal deliberation in real world and of hypothetical contractualist deliberation, within moral-political thought-experiments, in the tradition of Habermas and Scanlon in the ideal theory. I leave it open whether our author might ultimately agree with this picture of reliability democracy. (shrink)

Building on Crane’s intentionalism, the paper proposes a variant of response-dependentist view of colors. To be of a color C is to have a disposition to cause in normal observers a response, namely, intentional phenomenal C-experience. The view is dubbed “response-intentionalism”. It follows from the following considerations, with the red of a tomato surface taken as an example of color C. Full phenomenal red is being visaged as being on the surface of the tomato. Science tells us that full phenomenal (...) red is not on the surface of the tomato. Equally, full phenomenal red is not a property of subjective state but its intentional object. Response-intentionalism follows by considerations of charity, i.e. minimizing and rationalizing the error of the cognizer, and of inference to the best explanation: being red in scientific sense is being such as to cause the response visaging phenomenal red in normal observers under normal circumstances. (shrink)

The paper explores the rift between continental and analytic style of doing philosophy, looking at the following main philosophical thesis that arguably characterize the continental turn, from Hegel to post-structuralists: first, the anthropological and historical is deeply ontological (Hegel, Heidegger). Second, the central element of human mind is a-rational, it is either will, desire or affect (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche). Third, the basic reality of the world is akin to this a-rational element of human mind (Nietzsche). Fourth, the cognitive style, the language-style (...) and the method of studying a given domain of philosopher investigates shouldfollow the language-style and the manner of domain itself. In particular, for a-rational domains, the cognitive style and the linguistic expression should minimize the use of traditional rationalist methods of enquiry and presentation in favor of more literary ones. Fifth, philosophy has reached its end, so that philosophers should abandon the traditional philosophical reflection in favor of participating in more concrete theoretical and political practices (Marx, poststructuralist “Theory”). Any future building of continentalanalytic bridges has to take into account the complexity of the rift, and the impact of the five theses on the contemporarycontinental thought. (shrink)