Much attention is given to education in philosophy in the USSR, in which the study of dialectical and historical materialism occupies a special place. The practical achievements involved in the transformation of society, together with the advance of the natural and social sciences, have demonstrated most clearly the great strength of dialectical materialism as the scientific world view of the working people and as the philosophical foundation of their practical activity. It is therefore no accident that philosophy has an immense (...) attraction for people in our country. (shrink)

John Law notes that — by the early 1990s — Latour’s approach contained the entirety of the principles of actor-network theory: attention to heterogeneous relations, use of semiotic tools, adherence to symmetry in describing the truth or false statements, performativity of practices, focus on circulations, predisposition to case studies. Expanding the list of approaches and tools used in the ANT, Law turns to material semiotics. He aspires to show it as a set of themes that stimulate the researcher’s sensitivity to (...) the problem of polysemanticity in a particular field. At the same time, his version of material semiotics implicitly contains a critique of the of Greimas’ semiotics developed by Latour. Law’s vision describes practices of producing multiple realities, maintaining uncertainties and the polysemantic. In contrast, Latour’s semiotics are more instrumental, showing how particular actors eliminate multiplicity by creating common rules. The article shows that the contradiction between Latour’s semiotics and Law’s material semiotics is related to the question of tracing the networks’ length created by heterogenous actors. However, this question is empirical. The article explores a particular case of interaction from the practices of a center for the development and socialization of children and adults with mental disabilities. It is shown that the problem of polysemanticity and uncertainties has two solutions: limiting the network through a “shifting in” of the “enunciator” and maintaining polysemanticity through “partial connections”. (shrink)

We analyze the section from Hesiod’s Works and Days (724–760) that equips the farmer with the expertise necessary to facilitate the household’s harmonious relationship with the gods. We propose that this section with its tabular ordinances represents the earliest collection of Greek religious norms, and we contextualize it both within the structure of the W&D and within the wider framework of Greek religion. The section is carefully developed and purposefully placed towards the end of the poem, with an eye to (...) symmetry and rhythm: Hesiod distributes divinely sanctioned social norms alongside religious norms in three distinct sections of the poem, providing ever more specific cautionary advice in the form of ordinances and injunctions. The passage 724–760 is also artfully structured and divided into ἀπό and ἐπί sections. By drawing attention to overlaps of the Hesiodic material and later inscriptional ritual norms, we demonstrate that they share common linguistic and thematic features. We also demonstrate that well-informed readers such as Plato, Plutarch, and Proclus repeatedly interpreted Hesiod’s norms in the light of their own religious experience. (shrink)

The article aims to provide a new perspective on the role played by Maksim Gorky in the creation of Soviet culture. From multiple documentary sources, it reconstructs the private Naturphilosophie that Gorky began developing in the early years of the twentieth century and which continued to inform his views after he took the helm of the Stalinist cultural establishment. At its center was the monistic concept of energy, which Gorky, under the influence of Aleksandr Bogdanov, came to regard as the (...) principle uniting objective processes and subjective phenomena, nature and human history. Insofar as Gorky’s energetics comprises both a doctrine of culture-building and a theory of subjectivity, it allows us to see in a new light the writer’s return to the Soviet Union in the late 1920s. His project for a new socialist culture was, at the same time, a project of subjectivity, as he sought to fashion himself into what he thought a socialist individual should be. (shrink)

Nudge is a social innovation developed based on the achievements of behavioral science. According to this approach, when citizens make decisions about their behavior, they often react irrationally, based on heuristic factors related to their lives. Thus, collective goals are difficult to achieve, especially in conditions of unpredictability in social development and the prevailing influence of individualistic ideas. The nudge is a possible tool of modern politics that enables the liberal state to achieve collective goals and protect individual freedom simultaneously. (...) This makes it a valid policy tool, despite the criticisms of individualist theories as well as defenders of traditional democracy. (shrink)

The article develops a critique of John Deely’s ontological realism, specifically in its relevance for the project of global semiotics. Deely, whose theorizations rely heavily on the pre-modern philosophical systems of Thomas Aquinas and the Latin scholastics, has made the most sustained attempt to give philosophical grounding to Charles Peirce’s famous intuition that “all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs”. The critique developsalong two main lines. Firstly, I contend that Deely’s account of (...) onto logical relations is unsatisfactory, for it assumes the very fact it promises to demonstrate: the identity between patterns of physical events, on one hand, and patt erns of thought, on the other. As it is never adequately explained what it means for the former to be identical with the latter, the mediating term – “ontological relation” – remains highly problematic. Secondly, I argue that even if this ontological paradigm is allowed to stand as proposed, it still fails to bridge the gap between the so-called “natural” signs and human-specific, language-based signification; for, as it posits a unity between the stipulable and the non-stipulable sign, the argument falls into a performative contradiction. (shrink)

Alfred North Whitehead's (1861-1947) 'Philosophy of Organism' offers an important, indeed fundamental, metaphysical doctrine. It is the product of a long adventure of ideas and has many complementary aspects. The present book does not claim to achieve a complete description of all the aspects of the late Whitehead's worldview. Its aim is rather to stress some specific features of his teachings, such as his views concerning rationality, dynamic holism, things and objects, events, anticipation, creativity, nature, organism, and life. This book (...) should be useful not only for process philosophers, but also for all scholars who are interested in the development of process philosophical ideas"--Introduction, page 7. (shrink)

The article discusses the necessity for the diversification of stories of Yugoslavia, arguing for the importance of incorporating the affects and experiences of Yugoslavia?s citizens into the historical narratives. Acknowledging the difficulties emerging form the fact that what is articulated as historical narrative is still part of the experience for millions of citizens of post-Yugoslav societies, the article reflects upon the potential for and obstacles to an affective history of socialist Yugoslavia through the lens borrowed from German sociologist Georg Simmel. (...) It particularly refers to - and makes use of - two sets of Simmel?s ideas. The first concerns the nature of material and the way we are making a story out of it - more precisely, the relationship between history and experience, life and representation. The second is about the perspective from which we look at, approach, and synthesize this material. Simmel?s reflections on history and form offer a very useful tool to look at the Yugoslav case and also help de-essentialize and normalize Yugoslav history, making the anxieties that characterize it part of a much broader discussion about history, its nature, and its internal contradictions. nema. (shrink)

This article critically explores John Rawls’s contention that the personal assets of individuals, i.e. their mental and bodily powers, should not determine the size of their holdings. Since such an argument may have several forms, the first task is to establish which of them Rawls himself advocates. He relies, it is argued, on a version that attempts to convince us that personal assets should not play a decisive distributive role because they are undeserved. This account is then formally reconstructed, making (...) all the relevant premises visible and preparing the ground for a critique that concentrates on the argument’s separate steps. Coming under attack first is the claim that everything should be deserved. The discussion examines next the premise urging us to find an ultimate, indisputable ground for desert-claims. Debate about this issue reveals some fundamental weaknesses in Rawls’s position: that he demands too much and is inconsistent; that some strong counter-intuitive consequences follow from his demands; and that his entire project, were such a criterion taken seriously, is undermined. Final comments are directed against the assertion that the community should own everything an individual does not deserve, showing that this does not remove moral arbitrariness, allows for the use of some persons as resources for others, and cannot plausibly limit its range of application. Most of these criticisms are not original, but are in accord with this paper’s main intention of combining as many good points against Rawls as possible. (shrink)

The present article is a critical engagement with Aleksei Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. It contends that, as rich as Yurchak’s insights on the language culture of Brezhnev’s Stagnation have proven to be, his account ends up seriously misrepresenting the Stalinist episode in the life of Soviet ideology. This misrepresentation is due, in large part, to the problematic use of post-structuralist models, and particularly of Claude Lefort’s theorization of ideology in the modern (...) era. Through a re-examination of Lefort’s “Outline of the Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies,” the present article advances an alternative understanding of the discursive “shift” in Soviet ideology. Yurchak has argued that, before being set afloat in the 1950s, Soviet official discourse was held together through the figure of the “external master,” Stalin himself. The master is able to mask what Yurchak terms the “Lefort paradox” of Soviet ideology and which he glosses as the divergence between ideological enunciation and ideological “rule.” Yet Yurchak misreads Lefort’s theory, and specifically the latter’s references to “master” and “rule.” When these terms are restored to their proper theoretical significance, it becomes possible to formulate in a new way the contradictory duality at the heart of Soviet ideology. The article contends, contra Yurchak, that this is not the duality of enunciation and actual exercise of power; but rather the split internal to ideological discourse, between the “rule of reality” and the “reality of the rule.” The “shift” of Soviet ideological discourse begins as a slippage between these two ideological representations, and not as the removal of some anchor external to representation. (shrink)

The article presents the results of an interview in a student’s group on the problem of the fall into sin based on the discussion at the seminar of Dante's «divine Comedy». The authors consider human as an image and likeness of God, who creates himself, choosing between good and harm. There were changes in the perception of the structure of Inferno: the number of circles of hell in the minds of young people interviewed decreased: all respondents do not see sin (...) in unbelief, three-quarters of respondents − in gluttony, half − in lust. The inter-pretation of heresy and fraud as ways to promote their projects is relevant. The effect of absolute rejection of violence, contemptuous attitude to treachery is revealed. The authors believe that secularization has touched only the first five circles of Hell, but at the bottom everything is still the same. (shrink)

This book's critical approach addresses the anachronism, essentialism and ethnocentrism that underlie contemporary theoretical and methodological uses of the term «cosmopolitanism». It explores the concept of cosmopolitan reason from the viewpoints of comparative literature, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, postcolonialism and moral philosophy.

We are demonstrating that the Luttinger model with short range interaction can be treated as a type of Fermi liquid. In line with the main dogma of Landau’s theory one can define a fermion excitation renormalized by interaction and show that in terms of these fermions any excited state of the system is described by free particles. The fermions are a mixture of renormalized right and left electrons. The electric charge and chirality of the Landau quasi-particle is discussed.

Several legal scholars have recently argued that U.S. tort law’s physical-emotional distinction commits tort to the objectionable position of mind-body dualism, but they have not considered the distinction’s role as an aid to judicial cognition and decision-making. Drawing primarily on the law of negligent infliction of emotional distress, this essay argues that tort’s physical-emotional distinction is not a relic of mind-body dualism but a heuristic that judges have used to structure and simplify the difficult but unavoidable task of drawing lines (...) between legally cognizable and non-cognizable harm. The analysis has at least three normative implications: (1) users of tort’s physical-emotional distinction should clarify that they neither endorse dualism nor depreciate emotional harm; (2) because judicial expertise may not extend to the task of drawing lines between legally cognizable and non-cognizable harm, judicial performance in this area may be more adequate than critics suggest; and (3) although it may not be possible to determine the optimal way of drawing lines between legally cognizable and non-cognizable emotional harm, moral-philosophical tools such as Rawlsian and Scanlonian contractualism may be able to identify partial or pro tanto considerations for choosing among different ways of doing so. (shrink)

The article deals with contemporary war history, the aesthetics of resistance, and the politics of affect in the context of the post-Yugoslav space. Looking back at the armed wars of the 1990s, as well as the numerous wars still being waged by other means, it becomes clear that there is still no peace in this exhausted zone of geopolitical discomfort. The politics of (non)belonging to this space has oscillated for decades between conflicting affects, liminal zones, and the (im)possibilities of overcoming (...) the permanent production of war through lasting peace. This ambivalent feeling of (non)belonging has led to various twists and shifts in post-Yugoslav art that have solidarized within the old and new geopolitical zones of discomfort and war(s). Using the post-Yugoslav art-based research of Adela Jušić and Blerta Heziraj, who are now involved with the Antifašistički front žena—AFŽ (Women’s Antifascist Front), as well as a long-durée activist performance by Žene u crnom (Women in Black), the text accordingly points to a common ground of politics and art that uncompromisingly resist the governing (post-)Yugoslav discourses of never-ending wars. (shrink)

Članek se ukvarja s sodobno vojno zgodovino, estetiko upora in politiko afekta v kontekstu postjugoslovanskega prostora. Če pogledamo nazaj na oborožene vojne v devetdesetih letih prejšnjega stoletja, pa tudi na številne vojne, ki se še vedno vodijo z drugimi sredstvi, postane jasno, da v tem izčrpanem območju geopolitičnega nelagodja še vedno ni miru. Politika (ne)pripadnosti temu prostoru je desetletja nihala med konfliktnimi afekti, liminalnimi conami in ne/možnostmi preseganja permanentne produkcije vojne s trajnim mirom. Ta ambivalenten občutek (ne)pripadnosti je povzročil različne (...) zasuke in premike v postjugoslovanski umetnosti, ki so se solidarizirale znotraj starih in novih geopolitičnih območij nelagodja in vojn(e). Na podlagi postjugoslovanskega umetniškega raziskovanja Adele Jušić in Blerte Heziraj, ki se ukvarjata z Antifašistično fronto žensk – AFŽ, ter dolgoletnega aktivističnega performansa skupine Žene u crnom (Ženske v črnem), besedilo torej kaže na stičišče politike in umetnosti, ki se brezkompromisno upirata vladajočim (post)jugoslovanskim diskurzom neskončnih vojn. (shrink)

Priority-setting policy-makers often face moral and political pressure to balance the conflicting motivations of efficiency and rescue/non-abandonment. Using the conflict between these motivations as a case study can enrich the understanding of institutional design in developed democracies. This essay presents a cognitive-psychological account of the conflict between efficiency and rescue/non-abandonment in health care priority-setting. It then describes three sets of institutional arrangements—in Australia, England/Wales, and Germany, respectively—that contend with this conflict in interestingly different ways. The analysis yields at least three (...) implications for institutional design in developed democracies: (1) indeterminacy at the level of moral psychology can increase the probability of indeterminacy at the level of institutional design; (2) situational constraints in effect require priority-setting policy-makers to adopt normative-moral pluralism; and (3) the U.S. health care system may be in an anti-priority-setting equilibrium. (shrink)

The fall of the Soviet Union is analysed in conceptual terms, drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte. The author seeks to interpret the instrumental role of the concepts perestrojka, glasnost´, reform, revolution, socialist pluralism, and acceleration in the Soviet collapse. The semantics and pragmatics are related to a wider intellectual and political context, and the conceptual perspective is used to help explain the progress of events. The author argues that the common notion of the reform policy concepts as clichés is not (...) valid. (shrink)

International crises are dangerous episodes that can be destabilizing not only to the actors directly involved but also to the entire international system. Crises can present overwhelming challenges to established institutions and change forever the distribution of power. It is suggested that the stability of a political regime is demonstrated by its ability to avoid transformation as well as breakdown at times of crisis when the continuity of the regime’s identifying characteristics is threatened. The concept of «crisis» is rather vague (...) and diffuse. This is not only the case in the public debate, but also in the political science literature. Despite its frequent use, no collectively accepted definition of a crisis exists. How to define the word crisis has been a problem for decades. The basic aims of this study are to present different views on international crises, to gain an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the literature on crisis definitions, and to develop an agenda for future research on international crisis management. In addition, we examined and compared several prominent 20th century international crisis waves in historical context by means of a wide range of general and special scientific methods. International crisis management has undergone a significant transformation in recent years. Its expansion in terms of tasks and timelines and the increasing number of actors involved have made effective coordination of activities and instruments an urgent priority. (shrink)

The conception of man as an economic animal is implied by the view that economic production is the determining “factor” or “sphere” of man or society. Against this conception can be put another, that of man as praxis. This takes account of man as a creative being, capable of realizing his freedom through his own activity. In this article the theory of the determining role of the “economic factor”, and the theory of factors in general have been examined. The economic (...) interpretation of history, a variant of the theory of factors, has been acknowledged as partly true for the self-alienated man and society, but the theory of factors in any variant has been found inadequate as a general theory of man, or society. The possibility of freedom cannot be reduced to the fact that the determining roles played by “factors”, vary, or to the hope that the economic “factor” can be subordinated to a “better” one. Man's freedom consists in his resolving the conflict of “factors”, and in realizing himself as an integral creative being, no longer split into independent and mutually opposed spheres. (shrink)

Rather than being just abstract notions scholars write about, patriotism and cosmopolitanism are used by social actors in ongoing social life. Whether employed to name?us? and exalt the values of one?s own group, or to name?them? and stigmatize what the opponents stand for, the two terms have long served as potent discursive weapons in the struggle for various kinds of power in Serbia. While they retain some significance to this day, the peak of their intensive and consequential employment in public (...) discourse occurred between 2005 and 2010. In this paper we aim to reconstruct the symbolic battles over the foundations of Serbian political community, based on critical discourse analysis of the discursive material produced by intellectuals and made public via Pescanik and Nova srpska politicka misao media outlets. (shrink)

Applied ontology is among those new topics that have recently entered the philosophical and scientific territories and have quickly received broad attention despite the numerous difficulties0it involves. For a number of historico-speculative reasons, the philosophical community remains indeed quite conservative (in the negative sense of the word) and only accepts with great difficulties new and vanguard ideas.0?0We seek to peruse here the stakes of applied ontology and to demonstrate the successful elaboration of new ideas in that field. The book is (...) provocative because it seeks to foster new and nonstandard ideas that match the requirements of the development of today's science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Callimachus in Context: From Plato to the Augustan Poets by Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, Susan A. StephensIvana PetrovicBenjamin Acosta-Hughes and Susan A. Stephens. Callimachus in Context: From Plato to the Augustan Poets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012. xvi + 328 pp. 4 maps. Cloth, $99.Callimachus is a scholar’s poet, not just because his poetry is difficult and challenging, but also because we tend to see a reflection of ourselves in (...) him: self-assured to the point of arrogance, delighting in recondite words and fun facts, a target of unfair criticism from malevolent and envious colleagues. Callimachus was for decades perceived as antiquarian, bookish, a scholar whose poetry was divorced from the performative setting, not championing civic values, but rather l’art pour l’art avant la lettre. The main focus of scholarship used to be Callimachus’ relationship with the Greek poetic tradition, and virtuoso studies in intertextuality demonstrated just how rich and wide-ranging the tapestry of his allusions is, from poetry to technical writings in prose. However, in the last couple of decades, this image of Callimachus as the ivory-tower scholar-poet began to change. In his ground-breaking monograph Callimachus and His Critics (Princeton 1995), Alan Cameron argued that Callimachus was a prominent and active figure at the Alexandrian court, and far from an armchair intellectual.In recent years, numerous scholars have looked into the way Callimachus was indeed a child of his own time. Brill’s 2011 Companion to Callimachus (edited by the authors of the present book and Luigi Lehnus) is a good illustration of the current state of affairs in Callimachus scholarship: six out of twenty-seven papers discuss Callimachus’ relationship with the royal family and explore his status as a court-poet, his attitude to contemporary religion, and the geopoetics of his poetry and its political implications.This book is a successful union of the two aforementioned approaches to the poet. First, the authors set out to “contextualize Callimachus within his intellectual traditions and within his physical and social environments”; second, they pose five questions: “Why do there appear to be so many Platonic tangents in Callimachus? Why, in a poet considered the model of the ‘bookish’ author, are there so many indications of poetic performance? What is the rapport between the Ptolemies and their political interests and a remarkably diffuse body of work of one court poet? Why is Callimachus an ongoing feature of Roman poetic culture, and in such a particular way?” (viii). They provide an answer to each of these questions in separate chapters, carefully and meticulously negotiating between the study of intertexts and Callimachus’ social contexts.The introduction is fast-paced and fact-based. It provides an overview of Callimachus’ career and the political and cultural history of his native city, Cyrene, and his adopted home, Alexandria. It is the choice of facts and the sharp eye for detail that sets this section apart from a mere collection of data: by discussing the poetic production of the lesser-known Cyrenaean epic poet Eugamon, the authors provide “a glimpse into regional poetics and how it operated within the broader Panhellenic context” (6); careful reading of inscriptions and an assessment of the archaeological remains allows them to offer an interesting suggestion regarding [End Page 365] the dramatic performances of dithyrambic choruses in connection with the festival of the Carneia, which Callimachus memorably described in his Hymn to Apollo.A succinct discussion of Cyrenaean cults brings together results of decades of archaeological study and allows material culture to inform and enrich our view of Callimachus’ poetry: there was a bronze Delian palm in the Cyrenaean sanctuary of Leto (cf. H. Ap. 1–2); the local temple of Zeus Olympius had a cult statue that replicated Phidias’ (cf. Iambus 6); Thesmophoria were probably celebrated in the Cyrenaen sanctuary of Demeter and Kore (cf. H. Dem.); a number of local statue-groups and reliefs coincide with figures in Callimachus’ poetry. By juxtaposing the old and venerable city Cyrene with the newly founded cosmopolitan Alexandria in Egypt, the authors emphasize the cultural contrast between Callimachus’ native city and his chosen home. Since Callimachus was a poet active in a city... (shrink)

The posterior cortex, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex in the Leabra architecture are specialized in terms of various neural parameters, and thus are predilections for learning and processing, but domain-general in terms of cognitive functions such as face recognition. Also, these areas are not encapsulated and violate Fodorian criteria for modularity. Anderson's terminology obscures these important points, but we applaud his overall message.