Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft Jahrgang: 25 Heft: 2 Seiten: 287-324.

According to contextualist accounts, the truth value of a given knowledge ascription may vary with features of the ascriber's context. As a result, the following may be true: "X doesn't know that P but Y says something true in asserting 'X knows that P'". The contextualist must defend his theory in the light of this unpleasant but inevitable consequence. The best way of doing this is to construe the context sensitivity of knowledge ascriptions not as deriving from an alleged indexicality (...) of the word "know" nor from its vagueness or ambiguity, but rather from a distinct semantic feature of the word "know", namely its unspecificity. (shrink)

In this chapter, we examine the naturalist approach in the philosophy of memory through the lens of the simulation theory of memory. On the theory, episodic memory is a kind of constructive simulation performed by a functionally specialized neurocognitive system. Taking naturalism to be a kind of methodological stance characterized by a cluster of epistemic guidelines, we illustrate the roles these guidelines have played in the development of the theory. We show how scientific evidence has guided both the selection of (...) the research question and the initial elaboration of the theory. We demonstrate how such evidence has led the simulationist to reject a familiar, commonsense picture of memory. We also trace the recent radicalization of the theory, highlighting the simulationist's continual reflection on their concepts and assumptions. In the spirit of such reflection, we end by outlining some outstanding challenges for the theory. (shrink)

Engrams—physical memory traces resulting from specific experiences—are the central posits of modern memory science. In this paper, I examine engrams through the lens of the theory of mental files. Integrating evidence from a variety of research programs, I argue that engrams exhibit the core functional properties of mental files. I characterize them as discrete informational structures, formed upon individual experiences of events and causally involved in their subsequent recall. Engrams are plausibly structurally complex in a file-like way, consisting of a (...) stable hippocampal index, which may function as an atomic pointer-like component, and a distributed cortical representation of an event’s properties. As such, they afford transmission of content and referential stability during potential content change. Their deployment is constitutive of the capacity for singular reference in episodically remembering particular previously experienced events. This emerging picture of engrams should engender reasonable optimism about the prospects of causal-representational theories of memory. (shrink)

Th is microhistorical case-study of the role of the Antifascist Front of Women of Yugoslavia in popularising New Year celebrations in the Serbian municipality of Čačak aims to examine the internalisation of the communist discourse through ritual practices serving to infiltrate the private life of the local community and to expand the Party’s support basis. In the first post-war years, the new authorities not only tolerated, but tacitly approved and aided celebrations of Christian holidays. Yet this policy changed radically in (...) 1948, when local mass organisations were instructed to replace winter holidays with New Year festivities, based on the Soviet model. These events bore an observably ideologised character, since New Year’s Day was not only supposed to mark the calendar year’s end, but also to symbolise the new beginning as a ubiquitous simulacrum for a new socialist society. The primary agents of this novel collective identity practice were women, champions of the socialist emancipation project, whereas the main channel for dissemination were children, which embedded this measure within the farsighted project of tempering a “new man.”. (shrink)

The basic idea of conversational contextualism is that knowledge attributions are context sensitive in that a given knowledge attribution may be true if made in one context but false if made in another, owing to differences in the attributors’ conversational contexts. Moreover, the context sensitivity involved is traced back to the context sensitivity of the word “know,” which, in turn, is commonly modelled on the case either of genuine indexicals such as “I” or “here” or of comparative adjectives such as (...) “tall” or “rich.” But contextualism faces various problems. I argue that in order to solve these problems we need to look for another account of the context sensitivity involved in knowledge attributions and I sketch an alternative proposal. (shrink)

Taking the ‘Fridays for Future’ movement as its starting point, this article conceptualizes and defends youth disobedience, understood as principled disobedience by legal minors. The article first argues that the school strike for climate can be viewed as civil disobedience. Then, the article distinguishes between various forms of youth disobedience (according to whether they involve child-specific issues or actions). Building on the democratic rationale for civil disobedience, the remainder of the article argues that there is a special justification for youth (...) disobedience. To show this, it argues that children are wrongfully excluded from political participation and that principled law-breaking can be an important remedy to this exclusion. The upshot is that adults should engage seriously and leniently with youth disobedience. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is the critique of poststructuralist theory of art, and particularly thesis about the avant-garde peace of art as a kind of transgression. As a starting point of this critique, the ordinary language philosophy developed by American philosopher Stanley Cavell is used, particularly his film theory. While poststructuralist philosophy was developed around the notion of ideology, Cavell interprets film and arts in general around the notion of skepticism. While poststructuralism, because of thesis about avant-garde as (...) a kind of transgression within the field of ideology, is a kind of philosophy of negation, we point out that Cavell?s philosophy is a utopian theory of transcending of skepticism where avant-garde film has significant but not crucial place. Cavell?s thesis is used as a basis for re-thinking of modernism, which is in opposition to postmodernist turn realized by poststructuralism. nema. (shrink)

Filozofska i, u manjem opsegu, lingvisticka debata oko problema imena traje vec duze vreme. Procesi iza imenovanja su predstavljani i objasnjavani na razlicite nacine. Rad ce pokusati da pruzi novi uvid u motivaciju za stvaranje novih imena vidjenu iz jezicke perspektive. Metafora, kao jedan od najvaznijih izvora motivacije u jeziku kako je vidi kognitivna lingvistika je jedna od osnovnih formi ljudske konceptualizacije. Prvi deo rada predstavlja pregled najvaznije teorije o imenu. Drugi deo rada opisuje osnovne principe kognitivne lingvistike i odnosa (...) prema metafori. Treci deo predstavlja prikaz ucesca metafore u originalnom nastajanju licnih imena, dok poslednji deo rada daje primere metafore u imenima u srpskom jeziku. (shrink)

We conducted focus groups with participants of a laboratory experiment on cheating with the aim to describe and structure participants’ lived experience with the experiment and to compare their per...

Epidemiological data suggest that previous infections can alter an individual's susceptibility to unrelated diseases. Nevertheless, the underlying mechanisms are not completely understood. Substantial research efforts have expanded the classical concept of immune memory to also include long‐lasting changes in innate immunity and antigen‐independent reactivation of adaptive immunity. Collectively, these processes provide possible explanations on how acute infections might induce long‐term changes that also affect immunity to unrelated diseases. Here, we review lasting changes the immune compartment undergoes upon infection and how (...) infection experience alters the responsiveness of immune cells towards universal signals. This heightened state of alert enhances the ability of the immune system to combat even unrelated infections but may also increase susceptibility to autoimmunity. At the same time, infection‐induced changes in the regulatory compartment may dampen subsequent immune responses and promote pathogen persistence. The concepts presented here outline how infection‐induced changes in the immune system may affect human health. (shrink)

The article examines the formation of Nietzsche's view of Napoleon as a Renaissance man, and its importance for Nietzsche's thought. Stendhal, with his image of Napoleon, exercised a crucial influence on Nietzsche, who was, thanks to Burckhardt, already full of admiration for the Renaissance. Special attention is given to Stendhal's Vie de Napoleon, which provided Nietzsche with a key to Napoleon as the continuator of the Renaissance and the man who again revived antiquity, a hero of Plutarchian proportions. Taine's influence (...) is also analysed, for he provided the final stimulus for Nietzsche's concluding conception of Napoleon as a Renaissance man, as well as helping Nietzsche to realize the closeness between the Ubermensch and Napoleon. The significance of Napoleon for Nietzsche's conceptualization of historical greatness is emphasized, as well as the features of the Corsican hero that make him the embodiment of Nietzsche's emulative understanding of history: the mirror image of a model active man from the second Untimely Meditation. (shrink)

The volume ‘Questioning the Foundations of Public Law’ is co-edited by Michael. A Wilkinson and Michael W. Dowdle and its core aim is to engage critically with the magnum opus of Martin Loughlin, ‘...

This article explores contemporary biopolitics in the light of Michel Foucault's oft quoted suggestion that contemporary politics calls `life itself' into question. It suggests that recent developments in the life sciences, biomedicine and biotechnology can usefully be analysed along three dimensions. The first concerns logics of control - for contemporary biopolitics is risk politics. The second concerns the regime of truth in the life sciences - for contemporary biopolitics is molecular politics. The third concerns technologies of the self - for (...) contemporary biopolitics is ethopolitics. The article suggests that, in these events, human beings have become `somatic individuals': personhood is increasingly being defined in terms of corporeality, and new and direct relations are established between our biology and our conduct. At the same time, this somatic and corporeal individuality has become opened up to choice, prudence and responsibility, to experimentation, to contestation and so to a politics of `life itself'. (shrink)

In the philosophy of memory, singularism is the view that episodic memories are singular mental states about unique personally experienced past events. In this paper, I present an empirical challenge to singularism. I examine three distinct lines of evidence from the psychology of memory, concerning general event memories, the transformation of memory traces and the minimized role temporal information plays in major psychological theories of episodic memory. I argue that singularist views will have a hard time accommodating this evidence, facing (...) a problem of transitional gradation. I then look at some potential consequences for the larger debate, highlighting the way in which singularism has featured in three important recent arguments in the philosophy of memory. (shrink)

The Galilean explanatory style is characterized by the search for the underlying structure of phenomena, the positing of "deep" explanatory principles, and a view of the relation between theory and data, on which the search for "crucial data" is of primary importance. In this paper, I trace the dynamics of adopting the Galilean style, focusing on the science of episodic memory. I argue that memory systems, such as episodic and semantic memory, were posited as underlying competences producing the observable phenomena (...) of memory. Considered in idealized isolation from other systems, episodic memory was taken to underlay the ability of individuals to remember events from their personal past. Yet, in reality, memory systems regularly interact, standing in many-to-many relations to actual memory tasks and experiences. Upon this backdrop, I explore a puzzle about the increasing prominence of the notion of autonoetic consciousness in Tulving's theory of episodic memory. I argue that, contrary to widespread belief, the prominence is not best explained by the purported essential link between autonoetic consciousness and episodic memory. Rather, it is explained by the fact that autonoetic consciousness, hypothesized to uniquely accompany episodic retrieval, was considered a source of crucial data, predictable only from theories positing a functionally distinct episodic memory system. However, with the emergence of a new generation of theories, positing wider memory systems for remembering and imagination, the question of the relation between episodic memory and autonoetic consciousness has been reopened. This creates a pressing need for de-idealization, triggering a new search for crucial data. (shrink)

The purpose of this report is to systematize the role of artificial intelligence for the teaching of anatomy in medicine. Experience of teachers in using new technologies (Google Classroom, 3D atlases, WordPress, Facebook, Virtual Reality, etc.) in teaching human anatomy to students of various health specialties for the last 4 years is described. Currently available tools such as ChatGPT 4, Google Gemini, Microsoft Bing Copilot, are not designed for this purpose and fail to generate anatomically correct training images. This situation (...) attends professional attention as well as needs some philosophical remarks on the problem. Popular directions for the development of AI technologies are video generators and editors, image and art generators, painting and drawing tools, writing tools and text generators, music and audio generators, face generators, avatar generators. The benefits and drawbacks of the introduction of artificial intelligence in the teaching of anatomy are discussed and the conclusion that there is a benefit and necessity of its practical inclusion in the pedagogical tools is substantiated. (shrink)

In Tulving’s initial characterization, episodic memory was one of multiple memory systems. It was postulated, in pursuit of explanatory depth, as displaying proprietary operations, representations, and substrates such as to explain a range of cognitive, behavioural, and experiential phenomena. Yet the subsequent development of this research program has, paradoxically, introduced surprising doubts about the nature, and indeed existence, of episodic memory. On dominant versions of the ‘common system’ view, on which a single simulation system underlies both remembering and imagining, there (...) are no processes unique to memory to support robust generalizations with inductive potential. Eliminativism about episodic memory seems to follow from the claim that it has no dedicated neurocognitive system of its own. After identifying this under-noticed threat, we push back against modern eliminativists by surveying recent evidence that still indicates specialized mechanisms, computations, and representations that are distinctly mnemic in character. We argue that contemporary realists about episodic memory can retain lessons of the common system approach while resisting the further move to eliminativism. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that causal theories of memory are typically committed to two independent, non-mutually entailing theses. The first thesis pertains to the necessity of appropriate causation in memory, specifying a condition token memories need to satisfy. The second pertains to the explanation of memory reliability in causal terms and it concerns memory as a type of mental state. Post-causal theories of memory can reject only the first (weak post-causalism) or both (strong post-causalism) theses. Upon this backdrop, I (...) examine Werning’s (2020) causalist argument from probabilistic correlation. I argue that it doesn’t establish the necessity of appropriate causation and thus it can only target strong post-causalist theories. I end up by presenting some general considerations, suggesting that memories may not always be causally linked to past experiences. (shrink)

In this paper, I take issue with Axel Honneth's proposal for renewing critical theory in terms of the normative ideal of 'self-realisation'. Honneth's proposal involves a break with critical theory's traditional preoccupation with the meaning and potential of modern reason, and the way he makes that break depletes the critical resources of his alternative to Habermasian critical theory, leaving open the question of what form the renewal of critical theory should take.

Ob Kunstwerke, im emphatischen Sinne des Wortes, in der Moderne überhaupt produziert werden können, hat Heidegger philosophisch in Zweifel gezogen. Sofern ästhetische Praxis an einem historischen Wahrheitsanspruch gemessen werden soll, muss ihre Bewertung letztlich prekär bleiben. Trotz dieser skeptischen Haltung Heideggers haben nicht nur Kunsttheoretiker, sondern auch zahlreiche Künstler und Schriftsteller seine Überlegungen nachhaltig rezipiert und in die Reflexion der eigenen Praxis eingebunden. Nikola Mirkovic folgt den Spuren von vier Lesern von Heideggers Kunstphilosophie, - Günther Anders, Heinrich Besseler, Paul Celan (...) und Peter Zumthor - die verschiedene Motive von Heideggers Denkens aufgreifen, kritisieren und weiterentwickeln. Erst durch die Transformation von Heideggers Grundbegriffen im Zuge der jeweiligen Architektur-, Literatur- und Musiktheorie zeigt sich ihr phänomenologisches Potential. (shrink)

In this paper I indicate the reasons why critical theory needs an alternative conception of critique, and then I sketch out what such an alternative should be. The conception of critique I develop involves a time-responsive redisclosure of the world capable of disclosing new or previously unnoticed possibilities, possibilities in light of which agents can change their self-understanding and their practices, and change their orientation to the future and the past.

The general idea of this text is to reflect biopolitical constitution of the society and its implications related to the issues of animal welfare. Since animal in biopolitical formation is technically reduced to an object - commodity for contentment of the industry and of the people needs - critical public advisories are calling from moral, ethical and legal standpoint for attention to the fact that is necessary to protect animals from the unnecessary exploitation. It is obvious that animal protection is (...) evoking animal rights question. But in the last instance protection of animal rights is related to the nutritional dilemma of animal food use. Question is arising: does animal rights in particular also envisage change in food politics, what is for instance the extreme vegan option taking for granted? This challenge sent to the culture of all-food eaters is opening up new questions and dilemmas. First of all, there is a question linked to the right of men to choose his own nutritional option, and of course dilemma which is related to scruples about meat-eaters and their ability to love animals. Opsta ideja ovog teksta je promisliti biopoliticnu konstituciju savremenog drustva i njene implikacije vezane za status zivotinja. Posto je zivotinja u biopolitickoj konstituciji tehnoloski gledano svedena na objekt - na predmet za zadovoljavanje potreba industrije i populacije - kriticna masa upozorava sa moralnog, etickog i pravnog gledista, da je potrebno zastiti zivotinje pred neopravdanom eksploatacjom. Zastita zivota evocira pitanje prava zivotinja, koja nas dovode u poslednjoj instanci do dileme vezane za upotrebu zivotinja u prehrani. Postavlja se pitanje: da li zastita prava zivotinja podrazumeva i promenu politike ishrane - napustanje ishrane mesom - kako zahteva ekstremna veganska opcija? Taj izazov upucen kulturi svastojeda povlaci za sobom pre svega onu vrstu pitanja koja se ticu prava coveka da sam iazbere nacin na koji ce se prehranjivati, odnosno dilemu da li je covek sposoban za ljubav prema zivotinjama uprkos cinjenici da se njima prehranjuje. (shrink)

Namera ovog teksta je da prikaze tri medjusobno povezane projekcije savremene globalne krize postmodernog kapitalizma: diskurzivnu, sociolosku i kulturolosko-politicku. Diskurzivna projekcija promislja krizu postmodernog kapitalizma kroz perspektivu prestrukturacije paradigme diskursa, socioloska projekcija podaje interpretaciju paradigme postmodernih drustvenih ekonomija, dok kulturolosko-politicka promislja postmodernu formu?ideologije? svakodnevnog zivota, postavljajuci pitanje: da li imamo adekvatnu alternativu?