In this article, we explore whether cross-linguistic differences in grammatical aspect encoding may give rise to differences in memory and cognition. We compared native speakers of two languages that encode aspect differently (English and Swedish) in four tasks that examined verbal descriptions of stimuli, online triads matching, and memory-based triads matching with and without verbal interference. Results showed between-group differences in verbal descriptions and in memory-based triads matching. However, no differences were found in online triads matching and in memory-based triads (...) matching with verbal interference. These findings need to be interpreted in the context of the overall pattern of performance, which indicated that both groups based their similarity judgments on common perceptual characteristics of motion events. These results show for the first time a cross-linguistic difference in memory as a function of differences in grammatical aspect encoding, but they also contribute to the emerging view that language fine tunes rather than shapes perceptual processes that are likely to be universal and unchanging. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAlthough formative of modern value theory, the moral beauty view—which states that moral virtue is beautiful and moral vice is ugly—is now mostly neglected by philosophers. The two contemporary defences of the view mostly capitalize on its intuitive attractiveness, but to little avail: such considerations hardly convince sceptics of what is nowadays a rather unpopular view. Historically, the view was supported by thought experiments; and although these greatly increase its plausibility, they also raise empirical questions, which they leave unanswered. Here, (...) I offer a novel defence of the moral beauty view, capitalizing on empirical evidence and arguing via an inference to the best explanation. (shrink)

There is a tendency in contemporary (analytic) aesthetics to consider- ably restrict the scope of things that can be beautiful or ugly. This peculiarly modern tendency is holding back progress in aesthetics and robbing it of its potential contribution to other domains of inquiry. One view that has suffered neglect as a result of this tendency is the moral beauty view, whereby the moral virtues are beautiful and the moral vices are ugly. This neglect stems from an assumption to the (...) effect that virtues and vices simply cannot be beautiful or ugly. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it develops an account of form, under which, it argues, possession of form suffices for an object’s candidature for beauty and ugliness. Second, it argues that, under the foregoing proposal, the moral beauty view turns out to be a coherent position, and so should be taken seriously in both aesthetics and ethics. (shrink)

Archival art has been discussed so far in spatial terms, as archival installation, emphasizing stability of content and narrativity. Performative archiving is introduced here as intervention practice producing empowered public spheres in the context of a generalized network archival culture. These archiving practices do not produce content, but dispositives that enable the recension of archival data in distributed processes, not unlike oral forms and rituals of transmission of knowledge. Synchronicity of performance, in distant or person-to-person encounters, creates the possibility of (...) contesting co-utterances. Such works experiment on new forms of participation and collective writing, determining the roles and responsibility of subjects during the development of archival time, regulating different levels of interaction among persons, social groups, institutions, practices, thematic areas, media, physical and virtual spaces. They are centrifugal processes that resist the thematization of the archive and its confinement within the discourse of art. Their intervention aims at a different mode of instituting in the world of art, which problematizes the local conditions of social spaces and cultural institutions. They shift our interest away from archival accumulation and preservation, away from the ‘ideology of the trace’, and towards the moment of speech and act that bears the ‘capacity to aspire’. While they are triggered by an intention to actively institute, to organize tactics of action, they insist on the political performance of ‘act and speech’ at the moment when they occur. (shrink)

Proposes that postmodernist inquiries regarding power and authority have contributed to the adoption by some psychologists of discursive stances that are fundamentally ethical. Two of the most important schools defined by their employment of an ethical logic are feminist psychology and multicultural therapy, both of which offer "ethico-therapeutic" treatment modalities to clients perceived to be suffering from psychological wounds caused by some kind of power inequity. Essential to the success of such therapy for clients is the demand by psychologists for (...) changes not only from clients, but from the general society. The authors conclude that the continued development of ethical discourses within psychology may help to meet many of the challenges to psychological well-being in the postmodern era. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Progressively Husserl started referring to the whole sphere of the life of intentional acts in terms of praxis. Perception, imagination, judgement, scientific consciousness, etc., are all seen as practices. What is the meaning of this move? A seemingly self-evident possibility is that intentionality is praxial, because even perception is not completely free from empty intending moments that demand fulfilment; and all fulfilment is attained by means of bodily activities that enable our senses to acquire the relevant contents. I reject this (...) approach as insufficient and misguided. I argue that perception and intentionality in general is praxial because consciousness, in all of its constituting syntheses, is or becomes organized as a practice-structure. Intentional consciousness organizes its contents according to rules so as to accomplish the evident or true givenness of its intended correlates. (shrink)

Heidegger connected his name with the endeavor of renewing the question regarding Being (Seinsfrage). In BT (1927), he attempted to bring the issue of Being and everything concerning it back to the fore, by investigating the question of what the things themselves (die Sache selbst) are in its case. In this way, he managed to maintain his distance from the inherited and uninterpellated theories and speculations around "Being" (είναι). At the time, he continued to think that the precondition for arriving (...) at the very things themselves was—more or less—the phenomenological method that Husserl introduced in his breakthrough phenomenological opus, the Logical Investigations (1900-01). On this basis, in his "What is Metaphysics?” (1929) (WM). Heidegger explicitly maintained that the truth with regard to the issue of Being could and should be mediated—no matter how paradoxical this may sound—through the question regarding Nothing (Nichts). Parmenides, to be sure, had warned that nothing (μηδέν) is not, for that which is the έόν, and that only with what is can understanding (νοείν) and speaking (λέγειν) be correlated. The possibility of arriving at truths depends on propositions that say “is” with regard to what is, and “is not" with regard to what is not. Heidegger, however, thought that the most important issue for philosophy as ontology (but even for humans as beings engaged in praxis) was Nothing (Nichts)—and, moreover. Nothing as Being! But how could someone conceive of and bring to language these obviously limit subject matters? Haven’t we seen that Logic, following Parmenides' instruction, has progressively burked all talk of Being, and barred all talk about Nothing? (shrink)

Ugliness is a neglected topic in contemporary analytic aesthetics. This is regrettable given that this topic is not just genuinely fascinating, but could also illuminate other areas in the field, seeing as ugliness, albeit unexplored, does feature rather prominently in several debates in aesthetics. This paper articulates a ‘deformity-related’ conception of ugliness. Ultimately, I argue that deformity, understood in a certain way, and displeasure, jointly suffice for ugliness. First, I motivate my proposal, by locating a ‘deformity-related’ conception of ugliness in (...) aesthetic tradition, offering examples in support, and rejecting related alternative suggestions. Second, I argue that the proposal boasts considerable merits. Not only does it capture much of what we ordinarily think of as ugly, but it also comprises an objective criterion for ugliness, offers unity and comprehensiveness, and is informative and explanatorily potent. Third, I discuss a number of objections, thereby demonstrating that the proposal withstands reflective scrutiny. (shrink)

Linda Zagzebski recently put forward a new theory, moral exemplarism, that is meant to provide an alternative to theories like consequentialism and deontology, and which proposes to define key moral terms by direct reference to exemplars. The theory’s basic structure is straightforward. A virtuous person is defined as a person like that, where that points to individuals like Leopold Socha, Confucius, Jesus Christ, and so on. A key component of this theory is the function played by the emotions, specifically the (...) emotion of admiration, which helps us identify moral exemplars, inspires our emulation of them, and grounds moral motivation. In other words, admiration tracks persons like that. The aim of this article is to show that unless moral exemplarism recognises and incorporates an aesthetic dimension to morality, as did, for instance, eighteenth-century sentimentalists by recognising the categories of moral beauty and ugliness, the theory suffers important theoretical difficulties, whilst failing to yield some of the theoretical merits that it boasts. To this end, I will cast doubt on the prominent role accorded to the emotion of admiration for morality, arguing that it has to either be qualified as a specific kind of admiration––namely that which takes the beautiful as its object––or be replaced altogether with the affective response to the beautiful, a mark of which is pleasure or delight in the contemplation of an object. In short, an aesthetics of character is necessary in order to properly theorise the affective and motivational components of morality under an exemplarist framework. (shrink)

I offer a set of sufficient conditions for beauty, drawing on Parsons and Carlson’s account of ‘functional beauty’. First, I argue that their account is flawed, whilst falling short of...

Philosophical aesthetics has recently been expanding its purview—with exciting work on everyday aesthetics, somaesthetics, gustatory aesthetics, and the aesthetics of imperceptibilia like mathematics and human character—reclaiming territory that was lost during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the discipline begun concentrating almost exclusively on the philosophy of art and restricted the aesthetic realm to the distally perceptible. Yet there remains considerable reluctance towards acknowledging the aesthetic character of many of these objects. This raises an important question—partly made salient again by (...) the ongoing expansion of the aesthetic domain, and partly by the fact that many still seem resistant to this aesthetic diversification—which aestheticians seem to avoid: what, if anything, constrains the scope of beauty or the aesthetic? I argue that form, construed as comprising a degree, however minimal, of experienceable complexity, is necessary and sufficient for an object's candidature for the possession of aesthetic properties. Such a condition serves to discriminate between attempts to expand the scope of the aesthetic that are legitimate and those that are not. If correct, my view suggests that the aesthetic realm, though not limitless, is very broad indeed—but this, I think, is as it should be. (shrink)

This paper discusses awareness systems for supporting informal social relationships, focusing on some of they key concerns for designers and researchers. The discussion is general, but examples highlight the design issues discussed and summarize related empirical results. The paper argues in favor of automated capture of awareness information and suggests that social intelligence is relevant (a) as a design and evaluation criterion for such systems and (b) as a mechanism for supporting users in managing the information sharing by means of (...) awareness systems. (shrink)

We’ve all heard people say ‘Beauty is only skin-deep’, or ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’: our culture promulgates a conception of beauty as subjective, superficial, and independent of other values like moral goodness or knowledge and understanding. Yet our taste in beauty affects many aspects of our lives, sometimes playing a decisive––and often detrimental––role in areas as wide-ranging as our identity and self-esteem, our morally salient decisions, and our relationship to the environment. This presents us with a (...) choice: we can either ignore the facts––leaving our conception of beauty unchanged and allowing our taste to influence much in our lives while either not acknowledging such influence, or perhaps seeking to reprimand it; or we can take the power of beauty seriously and seek to harmonise our taste with our values. I argue for the latter option, and propose a way of bringing beauty and taste in line with what matters to us using the notion of functional beauty. Adopting this strategy, I suggest, can have a powerful––and positive––impact on our self-esteem and wellbeing, our relationship to others, as well as our attitudes towards the environment. (shrink)

According to immoralists, some artworks are better aesthetically in virtue of their immorality. A. W. Eaton recently offered a novel defence of this view, seeking to overcome shortcomings in previous accounts, thereby occasioning a reconsideration of immoralism. Yet, as I argue in this paper, Eaton’s attempt is unsuccessful, insofar as it consists partly of inadequately supported claims, and partly—and more interestingly, albeit paradoxically––of covert moralist assumptions that are, eo ipso, incompatible with immoralism. I then turn to a parallel debate in (...) ethics concerning the possibility of admirable immorality, suggesting that a consideration of the state of that debate further supports my argument against immoralism. I close by suggesting some strategies by which immoralists may offer a rejoinder, although I note that their prospects are rather dim, not least because available defences of immoralism and similar positions all seem to share the same flawed pattern. (shrink)

Considerable progress in personality and social psychology has been largely ignored by philosophers, many of whom still remain sceptical concerning whether the conception of character presupposed by virtue theory is descriptively adequate. Here, I employ the five-factor model of personality, currently the consensus view in personality psychology, to respond to a strong reading of the situationist challenge, whereby most people lack dispositions that are both cross-situationally consistent and temporally stable. I show that situationists rely on a false dichotomy between character (...) traits and situations, and that evidence supports the empirical adequacy of the sorts of character traits presupposed by virtue ethics. Additionally, I suggest that the personality traits of the five-factor model are relevant to virtue theory, in so far as they are malleable, morally salient, and seem to structurally parallel Aristotelian virtues and vices. Thus, contra situationism, the five-factor model supports the descriptive adequacy of a virtue-theoretical framework. (shrink)

La publication de trois amphores panathénaïques de la fin du Ve siècle et du début du ive siècle, découvertes à Praisos, fournit l'occasion de remarques concernant les scènes de proclamation des vainqueurs et de remise des prix dans la céramique attique. L'auteur souligne aussi le rôle des joueurs de trompette, met en lumière des exemples de représentation narrative sur des amphores panathénaïques et propose des remarques iconographiques et techniques concernant les vases panathénaïques de cette époque.

Two seemingly opposing philosophies, Plato’s and Heidegger’s, are brought together by reading the philosophy of politics in the Republic through the existential-analytic lenses of Being and Time and also by using the former in order to explore the philosophico-political potential of the latter. Plato’s thematic of errancy (αμαρτία) is shown to interlock harmoniously with Ηeidegger’s thematic of the fall (Verfall). This provides a single, penetrating interpretation of how philosophy thinks humans are supposed to respond to the predicament of their original (...) condition (painfulness connected with injustice, meaninglessness, etc.). It turns out that in these otherwise antipodean versions of philosophizing, the view emerges, according to which the original difficulty can be fully overcome. The question whether the aforementioned predicament can be actually fully overcome (or rather not) however, would form the basis for a novel phenomenology of the political. (shrink)

Politics presupposes an understanding of meaning in history, according to which it manages the actions that accord with or serve this meaning (as an ultimate good). The aim of this paper is to examine the process by which meaning in history is formed, as well as its character. To do this, I employ suitably modified phenomenological analyses of intentional consciousness to bring them as close as possible to the thematic of the psychoanalytic unconscious. I first try to sketch the basis (...) on which the modern problem of meaning in history arises and the fundamental responses produced by modern philosophy. Then, I delineate two basic understandings of meaning in history as developed by the founders of Phenomenology, Husserl and Heidegger, which are surprisingly close to those of modern metaphysics. Next, I draft the process by which the topic of the unconscious surfaces in the context of difficulties faced by critical epistemology in its effort to penetrate the unperceivable folds of reality, which should be acknowledged as a precondition of experience but also of action and ethics. After this, a brief phenomenological account regarding action and praxis in response to evil is presented as a specific concretization of this philosophy after its vaccination with the thematic of the unconscious. Next, I examine MerleauPonty’s final, although ultimately failed, attempt to construct a phenomenological proof of the possibility of objective knowledge regarding historical meaning. In addition, I consider how persistent maintenance of the ideologically optimistic reading of history simply concocts political action that crucially exposes humanity to the danger of perpetrating what Arendt called “banal evil.” The question, then, is whether Phenomenology can offer a non-nihilistic understanding of existence, action, and events in history. I argue that a cautious non-Marxist and de-Messianized reinterpretation of Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), in tandem with an Aristotelian analysis of praxis and Kantian-Arendtian “common sense,” offers a sober, perspectivist, realistic understanding of the place of humans in the cosmos and of the historical course we happen to take in it. (shrink)

This book deals with foundational issues in Phenomenology as they arise in the smoldering but tense dispute between Husserl and Heidegger, which culminates in the late 1920s. The work focuses on three key issues around which a constellation of other important problems revolves. More specifically, it elucidates the phenomenological method of the reductions, the identity and content of primordial givenness, and the meaning and character of categorial intuition. The text interrogates how Husserl and Heidegger understand these points, and clarifies the (...) precise nature of their disagreements. The book thus sheds light on the meaning of intentionality and of its foundation on pre-objective time, on the sense of the phenomenological a priori, on intentional constitution, on the relatedness between intentionality and world, and on Heidegger’s debt to Husserl’s categorial intuition in formulating the question regarding Being/Nothing. The author revisits these fundamental issues in order to suggest a general intra-phenomenological settlement, and to do justice to the corresponding contributions of these two central figures in phenomenological philosophy. He also indicates a way of reconciling and interweaving some of their views in order to free Phenomenology from its inner divisions and limitations, enabling it to move forward. Phenomenology can re-examine itself, its obligations, and its possibilities, and this can be of benefit to contemporary philosophy, especially with regard to problems concerning consciousness, intentionality, experience, and human existence and praxis within a historical world in crisis. This book is ideally suited to students and scholars of Husserl and Heidegger, to philosophers of mind, consciousness and cognition, and to anyone with a serious interest in Phenomenology. (shrink)

Generation and Corruption II is concerned with Aristotle's theory of the elements, their reciprocal transformations and the cause of their perpetual generation and corruption. These matters are essential to Aristotle's picture of the world, making themselves felt throughout his natural science, including those portions of it that concern living things. What is more, the very inquiry Aristotle pursues in this text, with its focus on definition, generality, and causation, throws important light on his philosophy of science more generally. This volume (...) contains eleven new essays, one for each of the chapters of this Aristotelian text, plus a general introduction and an English translation of the Greek text. It gives substantial attention to an important and neglected text, and highlights its relevance to other topics of current and enduring interest. (shrink)

This is the inaugural volume of the Plato Dialogue Project: it offers the first collective study of the Philebus - a high point of philosophical ethics, containing some of Plato's most sophisticated discussions of human happiness. The contributors work through the text, discussing pleasure, knowledge, philosophical method, and the human good.

Departing on a demonstration which aims to show to young Cleinias how one ought to care about wisdom and virtue, Socrates asks at 278e2 whether people want to do well (εὐ πράττειν). Εὐ πράττειν is ambiguous. It can mean being happy and prospering, or doing what is right and doing it well. Socrates will later exploit this ambiguity, but at this point he uses this expression merely to announce his conviction that every human being (pathological cases aside, perhaps) desires to (...) be happy (278e2-7). He does not examine how this desire figures in the psychology of action. Instead, and more fundamentally, he seeks to identify the things that would make us happy, or the good things as he calls them (279a2-4). In this passage, only those things are said to be good that make their possessor happy. Socrates does not present his view on what it is to be happy. But he goes on to advance confidently controversial claims about which things are good for us to possess and which are not. In and of itself, this implies that he has a view on happiness which enables him to identify these things, even though he does not offer an explicit statement of it. Here, I attempt to articulate the conception of happiness that is presupposed by Socrates in this passage. Since he does not reveal it explicitly, I will have to use the information he offers in which it is revealed implicitly. More precisely, I am going to ask what sort of a conception of happiness and unhappiness we need to attribute to Socrates in order to explain adequately his claims about what makes us happy and unhappy. To test the adequacy of the articulation I develop, I examine whether it can help us make sense of these claims and his defence for them. The same test of adequacy I apply also to some influential interpretations already on offer. (shrink)

The Methodological seminar was conducted by the scientific journal “Philosophy of Education”. The participants of the seminar were Prof. Panos Eliopoulos, Lyudmyla Gorbunova, Mykhailo Boychenko, Olga Gomilko, Mariia Kultaieva, Volodymyr Kovtunets, Sergiy Kurbatov, Anna Laktionova, Tetiana Matusevych, Natalia Radionova, Iryna Stepanenko, Maya Trynyak and Viktor Zinchenko. On March 30, 2016, a methodological seminar was conducted at the Institute of Higher Education NAES of Ukraine. This seminar was devoted to the discussion of educational problems in the area of mass culture, (...) and relative opportunities for the development of individuality. The report «Mass culture, education and the perspective of individuality» was made by Panos Eliopulos, professor of Peloponnese University, a member of journal’s «Філософія освіти. Philosophy of Education” editorial board. The scientists from the Institute of Higher Education, Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Skovoroda National Pedagogical University of Kharkiv participated in this event. Designated issues were observed primarily from the point of view of the Frankfurt School representatives, as well as representatives of modern critical philosophy of education and critical pedagogy. It was emphasized that T.Adorno’s ideas and ideas of other Frankfurt School members, which were developed in the middle of the last century, continue to be relevant in current socio-cultural contexts. The technical rationalism which became the rationalism of dominance in the context of technological civilization, could not provide the way toward the liberation of man and the development of his or her individuality. Market society with its instrumental rationality leads to homogenization and standardization of mass culture and as a result, we have a semi-education, leading to destruction of personality and social pathologies. The panelists agreed that semi-education reflects the crisis of ideals of education and training as far as a suspension of human emancipation process. Due to suspension of the creative process of a person formation, replacing it by the processes of stereotyping based on mimetic rationality, culture itself loses creative potential. The process of degradation of education and culture in the semi-education eventually leads to its destruction at theoretical level and the elaboration of the practice of anti-education. Only through returning of the individual and maintaining his or her social importance due to the tools of holistic education it is possible to overcome such stereotyping. For Frankfurt School members, and those who share their ideals, true education in its meta-theoretical sense becomes the important factor, contributing to the emancipation of society and individual. This idea is particularly important in the context of contemporary challenges and threats from instrumentalization of approaches to the process of transformation of the Ukrainian culture and education. (shrink)

The article starts with a brief overview of the kinds of approaches that have been attempted for the presentation of Phenomenology’s view on the emotions. I then pass to Husserl’s unsatisfactory efforts to disclose the intentionality of emotions and their intentional correlation with values. Next, I outline the idea of a new, “normalized phenomenological” approach of emotions and values. Pleasure and pain, then, are first explored as affective feelings . In the cases examined, it is shown that, primordially, pleasure and (...) pain are recordings for our bodily and spiritual states resulting from our confrontation with beings and situations in the world. Delight and distress are, subsequently, approached as the first full-fledged emotive acts that animate or intentionally interpret pleasure and pain in specific ways. The elementary values of agreeableness and disagreeableness appear correspondingly to the latter in relation to the very pleasure or pain and to what has caused them. In other words, agreeable and disagreeable show how what we confront in the world weighs for us, what value it has for the embodied intentional consciousness, for its state and functioning as well as for its existentio-praxial possibilities in the lifeworld. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I evaluate the coherence of Nietzsche's thought given a logical elaboration of the implications entailed by his embryonic insights into perspectivism, genealogy, and differential analysis. I argue that, given these, Nietzsche's critique of western culture is flawed in that it is based on two assumptions which the above show to be illegitimate: that life has certain perspective-independent features that can function as transcultural standards by which to measure the biological worth of any given form and of their (...) respective values; and that he has privileged access to these features. I go on to argue that this conflict between the critical/epistemic dimension of his thinking--i.e., those elements that elaborate his anti-dogmatism--and that forming his cultural criticism--in fact, a distinctly apocalyptic, salvational and thus dogmatic dimension--is not only irreducible, but severely compromises the integrity of his thought. Furthermore, I argue that, under the assumption that dogmatic positions are internally compromised if one is interested in generating a philosophically defensible point of view out of Nietzsche's thought, rather than examine it as a piece of intellectual history, one must move to excise from it those elements which are inconsistent with its anti-dogmatic, anti-metaphysical, and anti-foundational elements. This, I argue, generates a philosophical position which, though limited in scope, provides one with a justifiable account of the human world, one which in many respects reflects the self-understanding of postmodern microcommunitarian. (shrink)

International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume 26, Issue 3, Page 335-343, September 2012.

The optimistic perspective opened up by the preceding possibilities and promises does not grant that everything in this research project is rosy. Phenomenology may be a philosophy of infinite tasks, but it cannot pass for a philosophy of infinite means. By its very methodological principle, this philosophy is restricted to the elucidation of the phenomena in their horizontal and vertical (as it were) structure or, otherwise put, in their synchronic/diachronic or static/genetic structuring. To this extent, the specifically phenomenologically justified significance (...) of Phenomenology’s discoveries and teachings is restricted to the phenomena themselves, to what is phenomeno-logizable. To be sure, this restriction does not necessarily signal a diminishing of Phenomenology’s dignity as a kind of philosophizing. As we will see, what it signals is a more deeply entrenched self-awareness. Both Husserl and Heidegger nonetheless flirted with (and were sometimes fully enchanted by) the charm of the non-phenomenologizable. It is in the nature of our truth-seeking process in philosophy to frequently find ourselves moving along the boundary that separates the soundly intuitional from the merely speculative. According to Phenomenology’s strict rule, the possible drift into the merely speculative is the philosophical original sin against truth and knowledge, yet Phenomenology does not appear fully innocent of this drift. In this final chapter, we will have the opportunity to see what I believe to be the most crucial trespasses of these self-posed phenomenological limits. Generally speaking, this might be an expected result, given philosophy’s own high expectations in the field of truth and knowledge. The fact remains, however, that without any specific notice both Husserl and Heidegger do on occasion pass from the domain of phenomenological description of the things themselves into a speculative conjecturing of the phenomenologically unchartable. In their efforts to further extend the elucidatory capability of Phenomenology, fully absorbed in following the traces of the phenomena under investigation, they allow themselves to fall down the rabbit hole. (shrink)

It has already been remarked that Heidegger’s early Kriegsnotsemester of 1919 plays an important role in the development of his project toward a phenomenological Fundamental Ontology, which would elucidate the meaning of “Being as such.” However, both the reason why this happens and why it eventually fails appear to have been poorly understood. In this paper, I initially present the meaning of Heideggers effort, in that ‘semester,’ to build philosophy as a genuinely “primordial science.” Then, I explain the sense in (...) which the neo-Kantian philosophy of values became a crucial constituent of his inspiration. In this direction, Heidegger’s thought experiment with the “African aboriginal” is examined and placed at the right position within his overall search for the “primal something” qua critical “formal indication” in the search and pheno-menologization of “Being as such.” Finally, I present three serious difficulties that make this early attempt by Heidegger phenomenologically flawed and probably lead him to the new orientations of Being and Time. (shrink)

In the vast majority of the literature on Kant, the prevailing view is that his conception of analyticity and analytic truths suffers from obscurities and inconsistencies that render it, in the end, unintelligible. In the present paper, I try (i) to underline the meaning of these conceptions of Kant’s, (ii) to bring to the fore a crucial hidden presupposition in his account of analytic truths, and (iii) to present an interpretation that restores an intelligible account of Kantian analyticity and analytic (...) truth. Contrary to the ‘received’ view, I claim that definition is the royal way to Kant’s analyticity and analytic truth, and that the latter cannot be understood apart from a very specific kind of appeal to the intuition of the object falling under the concept being defined. I call this elusive and fragile act “simple intuition,” pointing thus to the medieval notion of apprehensio simplex (and the long history behind it). Then I try to show how this is done with reference to the most suitable species of concepts, the mathematical, and by analogy (and with expectable limitations) to the empirical ones. Of course, the present attempt to reconstruct an intelligible Kantian account of analyticity and analytic truths does not also mean that I endorse it as successful and final in the context of philosophy’s effort to clarify the possibility and kinds of a priori truths. (shrink)

Taking my cue from the longest-standing theory of beauty to date, which identified beauty with formal properties such as order, harmony, and proportion, I argue that wellformedness—understood under a tripartite account comprising abstract, categorial, and functional species—is a necessary condition for beauty, which itself comprises three corresponding species. To this end, I offer a new conception of wellformedness along with a clear taxonomy of both beauty and wellformedness. My account reverses the common tendency to treat species of beauty that are (...) independent of considerations of objects’ functions or kinds as paradigmatic and others as derivative, construing instead all three species as interrelated. In doing so, my proposal sheds considerable light on the concept of beauty, provides a measure of objectivity in our understanding thereof, clarifies the conceptual terrain in the philosophy of beauty, and elucidates some central links between beauty, form, and our interests and values. (shrink)

Thalēs -- Anaximandros -- Anaximenēs -- Hērakleitos -- Anaxagoras -- Archelaos -- Diogenēs Apollōniatēs -- Leukippos -- Dēmokritos.