The paper «Situation as concrete entity» dedicated to ontological opposition of abstract being and concrete being. Main idea of this paper – situation as concrete being was rejected, ignored by philosophic and religious systems for thousands of years, because situation was associated with false being, being of things (Plato), life distress, illusion (Hinduism, Buddhism). But culture of XX century includes «reanimation» of situation as concrete being by existentialphilosophy and modern art, and now we can speak about new approach to problem (...) of human being, practice and cognition – situative method. This approach has high humanitarian potential and wide perspectives of development. (shrink)

This article is concerned with an analysis of semantics and the normativity of evaluative judgments, in which “aesthetic concepts” and “predicates of personal taste” are used in the context of the evaluation of selected cultural forms. Qualitative data obtained through semi-structured interviews with representatives in four categories of actors in the cultural field are analyzed. In the light of the findings, theories of aesthetic judgment are critically assessed, which on the one hand, postulate the categorical semantic and normative difference between (...) aesthetic concepts and predicates of personal taste and, on the other hand, conceive aesthetic disputes from an epistemological point of view and do not sufficiently take into account their pragmatic context. In conclusion, a functional analysis of the semantics and normativity of evaluative judgments is presented, in which the speakers use terms from the field of aesthetics. (shrink)

A review of Jozef Kovalčik´s and Max Ryynänen´s Aesthetics of Popular Culture.

This article provides an ethical analysis of the moral conflict over access to premium audio-visual online content, which is currently regulated by geo-blocking in the domain of digital film distri...

Speaker’s reference is an intentional act directed, via an expression, at an object – an intentional object. The author of the paper tries to find an answer to the following question: What does a speaker refer to when he does not know what a description or a proper name used refers to? He argues that, if the speaker uses such a description, his reference is not directed at the referent of the description but at its meaning. If the speaker uses (...) a proper name whose meaning is not known to him, he can refer neither to the referent nor to the meaning of that name. (shrink)

To mitigate the potentially devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is vital to identify psychosocial and moral resources. The care, preservation, protection, and well-being of social communities are attributes of prosocial behavior that can be such a resource. The purpose of the study is to identify the features of prosocial orientation of Russian youth during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as to identify strategies for prosocial behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. The sample consisted of 447 people. The study was (...) conducted in May 2020 in the form of an online survey of subjects using Google Forms (“Moral Foundations Questionnaire method” and “Portrait Values Questionnaire”). The research made it possible to establish that Russians were dominated by norms of care, fairness, purity; values of benevolence-universalism, security, and self-direction. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the prosocial orientation of Russians may manifest itself in the following behavioral strategies: proactive prosocial strategy of “caring for others” (true altruism, expressed in forms of volunteering, helping a stranger, and charity despite the risk of contracting a coronavirus infection); egoistic strategy of prosocial behavior “self-care through caring for others” (volunteering based on self-development; helping a stranger to improve your own psychological well-being); conventional prosocial strategy “self-care” (self-isolation and preventive behavior). In the long run, it is necessary to identify personal and environmental resources that allowed people to effectively implement a prosocial self-isolation strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as various forms of volunteerism. (shrink)

Risk and crisis communication (RCC) is a complex constellation of multiple actors, platforms, and voices. It involves institutional actors but also laypeople. Participation by social media users can both facilitate and obstruct effective RCC. The present study draws on in-depth interviews with Swedish Facebook users, and explores motivational factors for lay participation in RCC in the context of vaccination utilizing Peter Dahlgren’s (2011) model. The contributions of this study are threefold. First, it identifies three dominant clusters of participation motivations: personal (...) interest, information brokerage, and persuasion. Second, the results show that Facebook sociality is characterized by asynchronous communication, loops, and widespread hostility. Third, degrees of content visibility set up “zones of peace” (backstage, safe communication spaces) and “zones of fight” (frontstage, open sub-arenas where various views on vaccination are debated). Moreover, the study finds that these forms of sociality and levels of visibility can both strengthen and undermine user motivations. (shrink)

Chapter One: Constructions. Entities, constructions, and functions When one travels from Los Angeles to New York, going, say, by way of St. Louis, Chicago, ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Thomas G. Pavel INCOMPLETE WORLDS, RITUAL EMOTIONS' IN recent years, the notion of "fictional world" has enjoyed a considerable rise in fortune. The expression, however, is not entirely new. To refer to the world of a literary work, of a novel or of a play, has always been a favorite way of speaking for literary critics and aestheticians. In most cases, these were informal worlds. A discussion of (...) the world of Balzac, Dostoyevsky, HenryJames, or Proust often amounts to a description of each author's preferences in die selection and rearrangement of his material. Such discussion primarily fits authors who purposefully attempt to build comprehensive representational artifacts. One speaks quite naturally about l'univers balzacien, or about the universe of Musil. But is one entitled to refer with equal ease to the world ofBenjamin Constant, meagerly perceptible in his Adolphe, a short novel built in the spirit of economy, displaying just a few characters and a minimum of worldly information? Perhaps density and comprehensiveness are not indispensable characteristics of literary worlds. Aestheticians and narratologists using the "fictional worlds" terminology seem to believe mat any kind of artistic text projects a world, be it rich or poor. Such worlds are imagined in the fashion of modern philosophy of logic as states of affairs, more or less comprehensive. Some writers believe that the states of affairs comprised in fictional worlds must be fairly sizable, since diey should include "not only what the author indicates, but also whatever is required (entailed) by that which he indicates." 1 The laws of nature which are not specifically contradicted by the text would belong to its world. Thus, a few notorious cases aside, there is no reason to doubt that every child born in fiction has been engendered by a human fadier as long as the text does not report an exception. And if it does? Then, assuming that the laws of logic still govern if not fiction itself at least our understanding of it, we may appeal to what "possible world" philosophers have called "small miracles." * Editor's note: This article, as well as the contributions by Gerald Prince, Peter van Inwagen, and Kendall Walton which follow it, grew out ofa symposium on "Styles ofFictionality," organized by Professor Pavel and held at Harvard University in 1981. The Fall, 1983 issue of PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE will contain additional papers presented at the symposium. 48 Thomas G. Pavel49 Imagine, for instance, the world in which Notre Dame de Paris would be covered with blue paint. While everything else would preserve the properties it possesses in the actual world, with the laws of nature and the caused chains maintained, a small local change, somewhat miraculous, would modify only the color of the venerable building. Similarly, the world of Balzac may be understood as the world of early and mid-nineteenth-century France, slightly modified by the addition of a few hundred imagined characters. That diese conform surprisingly well to the general laws of French society of the time is so much the goal of Balzac's successful project, that for the sociologically-minded reader die' actual nonexistence of Rastignac, Rubempré, Vautrin, or Birotteau may appear a mere accident. These characters, one may surmise, display every trait that actual counterparts of theirs would possess, except existence. Hence, why would Rastignac's or Vautrin's emergence in a world omerwise identical to nineteenth-century France amount to anydiing more than a "small miracle"? On the other hand, Balzac's world being blessed wim hundreds of such miracles, the very magnitude of the project vindicates the attribute of "visionary," ascribed to Balzac by Béguin, or, if metaphorically undercut, mat of"God the Father" given him by Thibaudet. For, would not such magnitude entail more than just local changes in an otherwise faithful representation of the "actual" nineteenthcentury France? Similarly, would we interpret a fictional world in which a child has been engendered not by a human father, but by a divinity, as identical in all respects to the actual world, except for the limited modification attributed to a small miracle? 2 If we grant for a moment the improbable assumption that nineteenth-century France was a given and that Balzac... (shrink)

In [Laurence, Margolis 2003] the authors try - within their polemics against F.Jackson’s views in [Jackson 1998] - to decide the question whether concepts are a priori (in their formulation “to be defined a priori”). Their discussion suffers - as a number of similar articles - from a typical drawback: some problem whose solution requires an exact notion of concept is handled as if the latter were quite clear. The consequence of this ‘conceptual laxity’ is that a) the topic of (...) the discussion is not very clear (what does the phrase ‘concepts must be defined a priori’ mean?); b) the relevance of the Quinean criticism of the “second dogma of empiricism”, i.e., of Quine’s claim that “science sometimes overturns our most cherished beliefs” and therefore there is no sharp boundary between analytic and synthetic is uncritically accepted; c) no distinction is made between the question whether the relation between an expression and its meaning is a priori and the question whether the relation between a concept and the object identified by the concept is a priori. The present article intends to elucidate and then to answer the questions that can be asked when we say something like “concepts are a priori ”. (shrink)

[A Note on Peregrin‘s Critique of Cmorej‘s Conception. of Linguistic Expression].

Ultimately everything returns to its own place. And our life, like a river that had overflowed its banks, is again returning to its former bed. We are now assimilating long-hidden treasures, understanding forgotten truths, and regaining our sight and seeing what we were unable to see when we were blinded.

The central focus of this monograph is the concept of higher education reform in the light of an international and global comparative perspective. This volume takes a close look at these changes, the drivers of change, their effects and possible future scenarios.

2 Popper's Logical Definition of Verisimilitude. 3 Popper's Probabilistic Definition of Verisimilitude. 4 Conclusion.

Logical pluralism from historical perspective -The plurality of logics is understood as a challenge to seek a deeper understanding of the na- ture and import of logic. Two basic approaches to demarcation of logic are considered, the model-theoretic and the proof-theoretic one. Investigation of the history which led to these two appraoches identifies the postion of logic in Kant's epistemology as crucial for the devel- opment. An analogical development from Kant's conception of geometry to the plurality of geometric theories leads (...) to a holistic view both of geometry and of logic. It furthermore proves essential to understand the pragmatic import of logic. Given the problems tied to the attempts to demarcate logic, inferentialism and logical expressivism are arrived at as jointly provid- ing the most appropriate account. These approaches are developed into a conception which stresses, in line with the historical perspective of the work, the ability of logic to develop. (shrink)

We define propositional quantum Frege proof systems and compare them with classical Frege proof systems.

Starting bioethics in Russia we were motivated with the idea of the democratization of our society on a basic micro-social level. The country was swift enough to take several important steps in this direction on the macro-social level, i.e., to adopt a new constitution with guarantees of human rights and rights of ownership of private property, to elect the parliament and the president. But these modernizations in the Russian political facade did not sufficiently change the internal structure of the society–the (...) net of everyday relationships in the home, at work, at school, in hospitals and other places. One of the most brilliant philosophers of the Russian “silver age,” L.S. Frank, wrote in the beginning of the century that a tyrannical state grows out of tyrannical interpersonal relationships. Political revolution not grounded in a social evolution on the basic level of satisfying “simple” human economic, physical, and psychological needs could reproduce only the same totalitarian pattern under a new ideological label. Events resulting from the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 proved the wisdom of his statement. Russia could suffer the same fate today. (shrink)

We give an exponential lower bound on the number of proof-lines in intuitionistic propositional logic, IL, axiomatised in the usual Frege-style fashion; i.e., we give an example of IL-tautologies A1,A2,… s.t. every IL-proof of Ai must have a number of proof-lines exponential in terms of the size of Ai. We show that the results do not apply to the system of classical logic and we obtain an exponential speed-up between classical and intuitionistic logic.

We give proofs of the effective monotone interpolation property for the system of modal logic K, and others, and the system IL of intuitionistic propositional logic. Hence we obtain exponential lower bounds on the number of proof-lines in those systems. The main results have been given in [P. Hrubeš, Lower bounds for modal logics, Journal of Symbolic Logic 72 941–958; P. Hrubeš, A lower bound for intuitionistic logic, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 146 72–90]; here, we give considerably simplified (...) proofs, as well as some generalisations. (shrink)

The article offers a rigorous explication of the intuitive notion of verisimilitude, I.E., Of the distance of a theory from the truth. The proposal is defended against charges of material inadequacy made by popper, Niniluoto, And miller.

Out of the broad variety of Cusanus' work, this book discusses six of his writings, careful not to isolate them from the whole of his work. It instead presents them against the maturation of Cusanus' thinking as it developed from his first sermons up to his shortest philosophical text De apice theoriae. The texts in question are De docta ignorantia, De coniecturis, Idiota de mente, De beryllo, Trialogus de possest and De apice theoriae. In the search for God, or rather (...) in Cusanus' lifetime eff orts to have his spirit touch the fi rst principle and the basis of all things, new perspectives on the world and man within would open up for Cusanus. Respecting this basic intention of Cusanus' thinking, the author primarily deals with Cusanus' ontotheological (metaphysical) claims and, in their context, turns his attention to the cosmological, or anthropologico-gnoseological opinions. (shrink)