The aim of this paper is to present the idea of violence in Nietzsche’s work, seen as a basic principle that organizes and unites different elements of his philosophy. Violence is one of its crucial categories, which he exploits in his descriptions and analyses of metaphysical, historical and social-cultural reality. In what follows, I shall examine different meanings and renditions of violence in Nietzsche, both in their negative as well as positive aspects. I shall start from an attempt to locate (...) Nietzsche’s understanding of violence within the Western philosophical tradition. Then, I will discuss it in the light of the evolution of Nietzsche’s work. By analyzing the positive and constructive meaning of violence, I shall be able to conclude the essay by emphasizing that in Nietzsche’s political project violence acquires a spiritual and sublime nature. (shrink)

Celem artykułu jest ukazanie wpływu Kantowskiej koncepcji wolności i zła na myśl Schellinga z tzw. pisma o wolności. W pierwszej części przedstawiam trudności wyjaśnienia zła jako kategorii moralnej na gruncie koncepcji wolności ujętej jako racjonalna autonomia i przedstawionej w Uzasadnieniu metafizyki moralności i Krytyce praktycznego rozumu: Kant utożsamia wolność z posłuszeństwem prawu moralnemu i tym samym nie jest w stanie ugruntować możliwości samego wyboru dobra i zła, jak również osobowego i jednostkowego charakteru wolności człowieka jako zmysłowo-rozumnej całości. Następnie pokazuję niesatysfakcjonującą (...) próbę rozwiązania tych trudności w Religii w obrębie rozumu, w której, na gruncie teorii maksym, podejmuje on problem możliwości zła jako aktu wolności: Kant nie jest w stanie określić statusu skłonności do zła jako pozaempirycznej podstawy zła, jak i tegoż powszechności. W drugiej części omawiam Schellinga oryginalną koncepcję wolności, która ukazuje jej osobowy i jednostkowy charakter na gruncie nowej ontologii ja jako bytu swobodnie się samookreślającego. Koncepcja ta pozwoliła mu podjąć próbę rozwiązania przejętego od Kanta problemu zła. (shrink)

L'article analyse l'interprétation deconstructive de la pensée de F. Nietzsche, qui a été presentée par Sarah Kofman sous l'influence de Jacques Derrida et à la base de sa critique de la tradition logocentrique. Kofman discerne deux périodes dans l'evolution de la philosophie de Nietzsche. Dans la premier Nietzsche part de la notion de la métaphore, qui detruit la possibilité du langage rationelle et objectif, mais qui se rapport symboliquement à l'essence dionysiaque du monde. Dans la seconde Nietzsche développe la notion (...) de l'interprétation: la volonté de puissance n'est que l'interprétation, "la hypothèse interprétative" qui fonde la possibilité de l'interprétation en général. À la fin de l'article j'analyse les difficultés concernant l'interprétation presentée par Kofman. (shrink)

Moim celem jest przedstawienie nazistowskich interpretacji myśli Nietzschego oraz interpretacji Lukacsa – oskarżającej ją o protofaszyzm. Następnie omawiam znane interpretacje z lat czterdziestych i pięćdziesiątych ubiegłego wieku, które broiły Nietzschego, choć wskazywały na pewne dwuznaczności jego myśli. Na końcu przedstawiam własne stanowisko, wskazując na bezpodstawność oskarżeń wobec Nietzschego, którego utopijny projekt był oparty na elitystycznej idei aktywności kulturotwórczej.

Die ewige Wiederkehr gehört zu den meist unklaren Fragen in der Philosophie von Friedrich Nietzsche. Die Idee der ewigen Wiederkunft wird von mir als ein integraler Teil seiner Philosophie angesehen, da meines Erachtens ist das die grundsätzliche Kategorie, die das Ganze jener Philosophie begreifen laßt. Am Beispiel konkreter Interpretationen werden dann genannt und kritisch betrachtet drei Interpretationsweisen der Idee der ewigen Wiederkehr, die sich in der Geschichte der Rezeption der Philosophie Nietzsches finden lassen: die ewige Wiederkehr im stoischen Sinne als (...) Wiederkehr der "identischen Fälle, die ewige Wiederkunft im ethischen Sinne als Postulat der Wirkung und die ewige Wiederkunft im dionysischen Sinne - als Prinzip und Charakteristik des Werdens. Ich spreche für die "dionysische" Interpretation aus, da sie mit den Voraussetzungen und mit der ursprünglichen Fassung der Philosophie von F. Nietzsche am meisten übereinstimmt. (shrink)

Paweł Gładziejewski, Is empathy is mental simulation? Remarks on the representative approach based on the concept of mirror neurons., Diametros 27 This paper draws on the theoretical achievements of analytic philosophy of mind and the empirical results of psychology and cognitive neuroscience in order to understand the nature of empathy and the sub-personal mechanisms upon which it is based. The paper distinguishes two types of empathy, which are often not sufficiently clearly distinguished in the literature, empathy as a kind of (...) social perception and empathy as compassion. The argument attempts show to that neither of these can be identified with a mental simulation process understood as a sub-personal process. Nevertheless mental simulation may play a limited explanatory role with respect to these two types of empathy. (shrink)

In September 1999 "Nature" magazine announced that atomic orbitals were di-rectly observed. Opposing it, Eric Scerri, editor-in-chief of "Foundations of Chemistry", claimed that what could be observed in the experiment was electron density, not orbitals. The main purpose of this paper is to consider philosophical and methodological aspects of the above controversy. Especially, the problems of direct observability and reality of theoretical entities are taken under detailed discussion. From the point of view of quantum mechanics there are not any reasons (...) to believe that orbitals exist. However, realistically treated orbitals are very effective tools in the laboratory practice of chemistry. (shrink)

In this paper we are focused on the relation between an Ontology (with the capital "O") qua philosophical discipline and an ontology (with the lowercase "o") qua branch of Computer Science. In our view "Ontology" refers to all philosophical groups or schools which take some position on the reality. The meaning of 'ontology' in the second case is not that easy to grasp because of the variety of artefacts which are called 'ontologies' and many activities - aiming at creating the (...) ontologies - called ontological engineering . In general we could state that an ontology is something what is called "ontology" beyond Philosophy, mostly in the Knowledge Management, Artificial Intelligence, Conceptual Modelling or Ontological Engineering and what refers to an engineering artefact describing certain aspect of reality. So understood ontology is always tied to certain language (preferably a logical one) or more precisely to the set of the sentences of this language. It is said that these sentences constitute an ontology and specify the intended meaning of the terms used in these sentences. The ontologists usually focus on describing their conceptualization of the relevant for them aspects of reality. In their ontologies only these properties of reality are taken into account, which are considered as important for the sake of the application. In this sense ontological engineering may ignore Ontologically essential properties, i.e. the ones important from the purely philosophical perspective. The simplest ontologies are catalogues - the list of terms or numbers denoting certain object, glossaries - containing additionally the definitions of the terms, thesauri - the glossaries in which the hierarchy of the terms appear and taxonomies - in which the primitives are hierarchically structured in order to enabling the properties' inheritance. The most sophisticated ontologies are called formal ontologies and they are logical theories fully axiomatized. Ontologies are also divided on the top-level ontologies concerning very general and mostly abstract entities (e.g. property, agent, time) and the domain ontologies dealing with some small domains (e.g. car's parts). For a better understanding of the wide variety of ontologies we give an example of three ontologies: WordNet (thesaurus-like ontology), Cyc (top-level, formal ontology) and Enterprise Ontology (domain ontology). The Ontology plays an important role in ontological engineering. We notice that the ontological engineers more and more often rely on the philosophical literature looking for the solutions of the ontological problems. It is especially visible in the top-ontologies where many Ontological distinctions have been directly adopted. On the other hand we must sadly stress that philosophers seem to be not interested in the ontological engineering at all. We'd like to introduce ontology to t. (shrink)

Formal Ontology in Information Systems is the flagship conference of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications. Its interdisciplinary research focus lies at the intersection of philosophical ontology, linguistics, logic, cognitive science, and computer science, as well as in the applications of ontological analysis to conceptual modeling, knowledge engineering, knowledge management, information-systems development, library and information science, scientific research, and semantic technologies in general.As in previous years, FOIS 2014 was a nexus of interdisciplinary research and communication. The current proceedings (...) is divided into four main sections, dealing with: foundations; processes, agency and dispositions; methods and tools; and applications. The last of these covers a broad spectrum of areas, including in particular biology and medicine, engineering, and economy. For the first time in its history, the conference hosted a special track: an ontology competition, the aim of which was to encourage authors to make their ontologies publicly available and to allow them to be evaluated according to a set of predetermined criteria. Papers discussing these ontologies can also be found in this volume.The book will be of interest to all those whose work involves the application of ontologies, and who are looking for a current overview of developments in formal ontology. (shrink)

According to the predictive coding theory of cognition , brains are predictive machines that use perception and action to minimize prediction error, i.e. the discrepancy between bottom–up, externally-generated sensory signals and top–down, internally-generated sensory predictions. Many consider PCT to have an explanatory scope that is unparalleled in contemporary cognitive science and see in it a framework that could potentially provide us with a unified account of cognition. It is also commonly assumed that PCT is a representational theory of sorts, in (...) the sense that it postulates that our cognitive contact with the world is mediated by internal representations. However, the exact sense in which PCT is representational remains unclear; neither is it clear that it deserves such status—that is, whether it really invokes structures that are truly and nontrivially representational in nature. In the present article, I argue that the representational pretensions of PCT are completely justified. This is because the theory postulates cognitive structures—namely action-guiding, detachable, structural models that afford representational error detection—that play genuinely representational functions within the cognitive system. (shrink)

Modernity and What Has Been Lost comes out of a conference held at the Jagiellonian University in Krakw̤, Poland, on June 4-5, 2009 that sought to identify Leo Strauss's intellectual background in re: the repudiation of a modern idea of homogenous, universal state (considered as an illegitimate synthesis of Jerusalem and Athens, i.e., the claims of Reason and Revelation). The world we live in, molded by science and historical relativism, may be described as hostile to human dignity or perfection, or (...) abhorrent to those who love the search for wisdom. Straussian teaching consisted in the steady effort to reopen "the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns," and refers to the esoteric way of writing practiced by the most profound thinkers of the past which has been apparently forgotten in the last three centuries. Strauss binds the concept of natural right with the question of maintenance of conditions for philosophizing, and it probably seems to him that such defense of philosophy is the highest task in our times. However, one must be well aware that philosophizing always means a perilous way of life. Indeed, it may be destructive of the city (polis) itself as far as the city exists due to some crucial beliefs the philosopher might put in doubt. Reflecting on those issues, Strauss engaged in several highly important debates with his contemporaries, in an open way with, e.g., Carl Schmitt, Karl Lw̲ith and Alexandre Kojv̈e, and more tacitly with Martin Heidegger"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

The title of this article refers to one of the best-known essays written by David Hume, That Politics may be reduced to a Science. Hume assumed that politics was a science because it admitted of some general truths, which could not be varied by human beings. He adopted a similar stance, albeit indirectly, in the case of economics, discovering several general truths concerning the origins of wealth, money and international trade. At times, however, he was far from being consistent and (...) this undermined these truths. Consequently, it can be argued that, from his perspective, economics was a science on a theoretical level, but it lost this character at a more practical level. Similar doubts can be raised when it comes to Hume’s role in the history of economic thought. In some respects he was an original thinker, but several of his key concepts resembled to some extent ideas that had been put forward by ‘mercantilists’, especially those ‘mercantilists’ who were active in his native Scotland in the first decade of the 18 th century. (shrink)

Psychedelic substances elicit powerful, uncanny conscious experiences that are thought to possess therapeutic value. In those who undergo them, these altered states of consciousness often induce shifts in metaphysical beliefs about the fundamental structure of reality. The contents of those beliefs range from contentious to bizarre, especially when considered from the point of view of naturalism. Can chemically induced, radically altered states of consciousness provide reasons for or play some positive epistemic role with respect to metaphysical beliefs? In this paper, (...) I discuss a view that has been underexplored in recent literature. I argue that psychedelic states can be rationally integrated into one’s epistemic life. Consequently, updating one’s metaphysical beliefs based on altered states of consciousness does not have to constitute an instance of epistemic irrationality. (shrink)

Brain activity determines which relations between objects in the environment are perceived as differences and similarities in colour, smell, sound, etc. According to selectionism, brain activity does not create those relations; it only selects which of them are perceptually available to the subject on a given occasion. In effect, selectionism entails that perceptual experience is diaphanous, i.e. that sameness and difference in the phenomenal character of experience is exhausted by sameness and difference in the perceived items. It has been argued (...) that diaphaneity is undermined by phenomenological considerations and empirical evidence. This paper considers five prominent arguments of this sort and shows that none of them succeeds. (shrink)

In den philosophischen Diskussionen, die bereits im Vorfeld der Postmoderne unter dem Titel Jenseits des Subjekts stattfinden, geht es um eine radikale Infragestellung des Subjektbegriffs, eines der wesentlichen Konzepte der Philosophie der Neuzeit und der Moderne. Die Grundlage der Problematisierung des Subjekts ist eine kritische Diagnose, die der modernen Welt gestellt wird. Postmoderne Theorien vermitteln den Eindruck, in einer Welt zu leben, in der sich der Mensch aus dem Zentrum ins Ungewisse bewegt. Die «nachkopernikanische Welt» befindet sich in der Krise: (...) Individuen sehen sich unkontrollierbaren anonoymen Prozessen ausgeliefert und als Subjekte entmachtet. Zivilisations-, Kultur- und Technikkritik prägen das Weltbild, in dessen Zentrum die Kritik der Subjektivität steht. Die Kritik richtet sich gegen die als illusionär behauptete Selbstherrschaft des Subjekts. In den Beiträgen zu diesem Band geht es um die Frage, inwiefern eine derart radikale Infragestellung des Subjekts philosophisch gerechtfertigt werden kann. (shrink)

A survey of the modern theories of explanation leads us to conclude that it is J. Woodward\'s conterfactual approach that seems to set out a promising agenda for setting up a satisfactory model of explanation. Such a model would need to come to terms with two stipulations, i.e. to reflect causal asymmetry and be empirically adequate. To meet the latter I modify the counterfactual model of explanation to require a class of observationally equivalent (Bayesian) causal models instead of the true (...) causal model. For in most cases empirical adequacy of causal models, i.e. their identifiability and consistency with observed distributions, would neither grant the stronger conclusion Woodward embeds in his conterfactual account of explanation nor license metaphysical naturalism. (shrink)

The article deals with the issue of turning in the thought of Martin Heidegger. I show that, in Being and time the question of being posed from the perspective of a distinguished being as Dasein has led to the objectification of being, thus rather reproducing instead of overcoming, the so far way of thinking that Heidegger named “metaphysical”. The turning in Heidegger’s thought consists in his effort to make being independent from human being, i.e. he tries to go beyond the (...) transcendental and subjectivist point of view of Dasein by placing historicality of Dasein against the background of the very existence of being. It is not Dasein who designs being, but on the contrary, being designs understanding for Dasein. In this context, I show that the thinking of being postulated by Heidegger takes the form of thinking the very process of historical presencing of the historic types of interpretation of being. (shrink)