Integralność poznania ludzkiego w ujęciu Błażeja Pascala. Z dziejów filozofii zdrowego rozsądku

Author(s): Stanisław Janeczek / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

This paper discusses the conception of knowledge according to Blaise Pascal against the backdrop of epistemological discussions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It indicates the integral character of human knowledge as postulated by Pascal. This knowledge should combine reason, conceived in the sense of discourse, with intuition and instinct; on the other hand, it should combine natural knowledge and faith. Pascal goes beyond an array of truths accessible in the knowledge based on discourse (raison). He attributed a special role to intuition defined in terms of sentir or even instinct, using such categories as esprit de finesse, identified with sens droit or esprit de justesse, the categories essential in the knowledge of principes. At the same time this kind of endowment of the human mind (lumière naturelle) corresponds in some respects to the knowledge grounded on cœur, the knowledge set in opposition to raison, rationalistically understood, whereas in religion lumière naturelle is complementary to inspiration or révélation. This approach, opposite to the naturalistic manifestations of rationalism, seems to belong to a long history of common sense philosophy that takes into account the realities of human nature. It goes back to Aristotle, despite the modern contestation of his doctrine. The point of reference for Pascal is, above all, Descartes’s epistemology. The French philosopher stressed the importance of the a priori elements of knowledge, the elements treated as a natural endowment of the human mind, to which intuition or instinct refer. As a result of the integral character of knowledge one approves of a philosophy that is conceived in a maximalist manner, even though this paradigm changed in modernity from metaphysical to epistemological. Now treating the then limitations with regard to metaphysics as a manifestation of minimalism, or even a peculiar agnosticism, does not seem to be justified. This is because of the fact that the modern paradigm had changed; it was epistemology that became the main territory on which basic philosophical debates were conducted. They brought about some definite solutions in worldview, solutions essential in view of the then domination of culture by religion. Perhaps it was the religious milieu that enforced metaphysical questions which would make up the foundation of religious worldview. In this context, the era’s education implemented this requirement. At the end of the Enlightenment it preferred the Scottish school of common sense philosophy, the school that defended the integral character of human knowledge up against any manifestations of philosophical minimalism, or even peculiar skepticism, in itself dangerous for the cultural order.

Pojęcie przesądu w filozofii krytycznej Kanta i fenomenologii Husserla

Author(s): Piotr Łaciak / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

This article examines the concept of prejudice (Vorurteil) in Kant’s and Husserl’s theories. According to Kant, prejudices must be distinguished from provisional judgments that may be called anticipations or maxims for all inquiry. We form a provisional judgment (vorläufiges Urteil) of a thing before we recognize it with definitive judgment (bestimmendes Urteil). Prejudices, by contrast, are provisional judgments (or opinions) wrongly taken as definitive judgments, namely judgments which are adopted as principles without research of the conditions of their truth. Thus, Kant’s notion of prejudice has the negative connotations and the aim of the critical philosophy is to overcome all prejudices. In contrast to Kant, Husserl makes distinction between positive and negative prejudices: positive prejudice is understood as a pre-judgment (Vor-Urteil) in the form of presumptive pre-knowledge (Vorwissen) and corresponds to Kant’s concept of anticipation belonging to provisional judgment, while objectivistic (naturalistic) naïveté appears to be negative prejudice. The aim of phenomenology is to suspend all prejudices and this suspension makes it possible to research of their origins. In the article author shows that Husserl’s conception of prejudice as a pre-judgment is similar to Gadamer’s rehabilitation of prejudice as a pre-understanding. Therefore, it is possible to indicate similarities between Kant’s concept of provisional judgment, Husserl’s idea of pre-knowledge and Gadamer’s conception of pre-understanding.

Myslenie osvietenstva a ruská intelektuálna identita

Author(s): Ondrej Marchevský / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 2/2019

The Enlightenment represents a frequently reflected and, at the same time, also updated tradition. The Enlightenment ideas have become a theoretical-methodological base for thinking as such by its connection to a social or social-political praxis, what can be seen even in the contemporary confrontation with the Enlightenment legacy. The paper analyses the Enlightenment as a unique historical phenomenon – it deals with its explicit as well as its practical-political features – within the Russian milieu. In the basic outline, the paper presents a critical survey of the selected bibliographical sources. It primarily focuses on a historical-philosophical problematics and identification of three phases which can be found within a genesis of the Enlightenment thinking in Russia. The second part of the paper offers the characteristics of distinctive intellectual environments participating in a forming of the Enlightenment tradition in Russian thinking, and overlapping into actual political and social happenings. To these environments belong aristocratic associations, the Masonic lodges, and also educational institutions established and controlled by the state – spiritual academies and universities.

DUBITO ERGO SUM: MILTON’S SATAN AS THE EMBODIMENT OF CARTESIAN PHILOSOPHY

Author(s): Branko Marijanović / Language(s): English Issue: 9/2014

This work attempts to show the inseparable connection between the philosophy and literature of the seventeenth century on the basis of the interrelations between John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost and Descartes’ philosophical work. By stressing the connection between Cartesian philosophy and Milton’s epic Bogdan Suhodolski’s thesis that non-philosophical texts have very often been indispensable for understanding both the philosophy and the spirit of an age is proved to be true. It is contended that the spirit of the seventeenth century can be faithfully recreated only by an integrative approach, i.e. by combining and simultaneous analysis of works of philosophical and non-philosophical nature. Doubt, experimenting and a wide array of other Cartesian notions, dispersed throughout Paradise Lost, seem to be significant features of Satan’s character, a convincing confirmation of Suhodolski’s thesis and a rewarding way of recreating and understanding the intellectual climate of the seventeenth century.

Mihai Eminescu – 130 de ani de la intrarea în eternitate

Author(s): Ionuţ Isac / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 15/2019

The anniversary of 130 years since the departure of Mihai Eminescu requires a philosophical and metaphysical re-thinking of what the creating consciousness of a genius represents for the local and global posterity. Accordingly, it is appropriate to draw attention to a series of quasi-ignored philosophical and meta¬physical views through which Eminescu’s work acquired new cultural significations. We have in mind the standpoints of Mircea Florian, Dumitru Isac, P. P. Negulescu, Constantin Noica, and Mihai Drăgănescu. They will be analytically exposed in the following article.

Teološko-filozofsko razmatranje fenomena nove misli

Author(s): Haris Islamčević / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 1/2019

Ovaj rad sadrži teološko-filozofsko razmatranje fenomena nove misli. Naime, nova misao je fenomen koji je u Bosni i Hercegovini, ali i u zemljama naše bliže regije, poprilično nepoznat, a samim time i nedovoljno istražen. Autor je ponudio opširan prikaz nove misli, što podrazumijeva prikaz društvenopovijesnoga, religijskoga kao i kulturološkoga konteksta koji su pogodovali nastanku učenja nove misli. Posebno je naglašen zapadnoevropski i američki religijski kontekst, budući da je unutar njega nastala nova misao. Fenomen nove misli protežira ulogu čovjekovih misli u realiziranju punoga potencijala ljudskoga života te insistira na tome da stanje čovjekovih misli direktno utječe na profiliranje kvaliteta njegovog života.

Tjelovježba i igranje-igara u četirima konstrukcijama sretnog ljudskog života

Author(s): Matija Mato Škerbić / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 02/154/2019

The paper was prompted by B. H. Suitsʼ construction of Utopia and solutions for the meaningful and happy life of every single human, presented in The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (1978). The author considers, critically evaluates and confronts the role of human physical exercise and game-playing in four constructions of meaningful and happy human life, presented in three Renaissance philosophical writings: De optimo reipublicae statu deque nova insula Utopia libelous (1516) by T. More, La città felice (1553) by F. Patricius, and Civitas Solis. Idea reipublicae philosophicae (1603) by T. Campanella, with the aforementioned B. H. Suitsʼ postmodern writing. The authorʼs thesis is that Suitsʼ solution to human meaningful and full life, which consists in constant game-playing or engaging in only autotelic and intrinsically valuable activities, contains all the leisured intentions of other considered constructions. Moreover, although Suits aims at contemporary humans, it is a solution for all historical periods, conditions or circumstances.

Newton i božanske reformacije prirode

Author(s): Goran Rujević / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 02/154/2019

At the very end of his treatise Opticks, Isaac Newton mentions a “Reformationˮ of the System of Nature, a periodic divine intervention that sustains the continued existence of nature otherwise prone to decay. With the help of Holbachʼs idea of order, we offer an interpretation of Newtonʼs claims on the origin and importance of this reformation, which sometimes appear to contradict one another. By accentuating similarities and differences between human and divine cognition, we can see how Newton’s philosophy of nature can accommodate two concepts of ordered systems: a simple mechanical system, and a well-designed teleological system that displays the presence of an almighty and benevolent Creator. These concepts help differentiate Newton’s understanding of God from deistic, Cartesian and Leibnizʼs ideas.

Recenzije i prikazi

Author(s): Iris Vidmar Jovanović,Leonard Pektor / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 02/154/2019

Review of: Leonard Pektor, Iris Vidmar Jovanović - Igor Eterović, Kant i bioetika, Pergamena, Centar za integrativnu bioetiku Filozofskog fakulteta Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, Zagreb 2017.

SAMUEL HARTLIB ŞI RELAŢIILE ACESTUIA CU ROYAL SOCIETY DIN LONDRA

Author(s): Cosmin Dumitrescu / Language(s): Romanian,Moldavian Issue: 2/2020

Samuel Hartlib was a polymath of German origin who settled, married and died in England. He was an active promoter and expert writer in many fields, interested in science, medicine, agriculture, politics, and education. He was a contemporary of Robert Boyle, whom he knew well, and a neighbour of Samuel Pepys in Axe Yard, London, in the early 1660s. He studied briefly at the University of Cambridge upon arriving in England. Hartlib is often described as an „intelligencer”, and indeed has been called „the Great Intelligencer of Europe”. His main aim in life was to further knowledge and so he kept in touch with a vast array of contacts, from high philosophers to gentleman farmers. He maintained a voluminous correspondence and much of this has survived, having been lost entirely from 1667 to 1945; it is housed in a special Hartlib Collection at the University of Sheffield in England.

Osloboditi afekte ili se osloboditi afekata. Slučaj Frojda i Spinoze

Author(s): Szymon Wróbel / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 16/2018

In this paper, the author is questioning the very concept of “indifference of thinking”. The author also asks: in what sense thinking leads to “overall indifference”? What, indeed, is indifference? Carefully reading the philosophical texts on affects, mainly Spinoza, Freud, Bergson and Deleuze, the author argues, that indifference is not a kind of non-affection, beside-affection, post-affection, but rather, it is a trace of affect – just as cinders are remnants of fire. Indifference is not abnegation either, which is a kind of statement that we could not care less. On the contrary, it is in indifference where we find a profound commitment to bringing back the things of this world to their natural position.

Releasing Affects or the Release from Affects. The Case of Freud and Spinoza

Author(s): Szymon Wróbel / Language(s): English Issue: 16/2018

In this paper, the author is questioning the very concept of “indifference of thinking”. The author also asks: in what sense thinking leads to “overall indifference”? What, indeed, is indifference? Carefully reading the philosophical texts on affects, mainly Spinoza, Freud, Bergson and Deleuze, the author argues, that indifference is not a kind of non-affection, beside-affection, post-affection, but rather, it is a trace of affect – just as cinders are remnants of fire. Indifference is not abnegation either, which is a kind of statement that we could not care less. On the contrary, it is in indifference where we find a profound commitment to bringing back the things of this world to their natural position.

Конституция физики и достоверность математики в схоластической философии XVI в.

Author(s): Vitaly Ivanov / Language(s): Russian Issue: 1/2020

Traditionally, it is believed that one of the most important phenomena in the history of "new" science, i.e. the science of Early Modern times, is the emergence of mathematical natural science. However, in the 16th century the status of physics and mathematics within the framework of scientific knowledge was far from being so unambiguous. In this article, we consider and analyze the arguments of the late Peripatetic author of the late 16th century – the learned Jesuit Benedict Pereira – in favor of his thesis about "non-scientific character" of mathematical disciplines. These arguments focus not on the weaker (less perfect) status of the reality of the mathematical object, but on the nature of mathematical demonstration and mathematical knowledge as such. Pereira shows in detail that mathematics does not meet the criteria of scientific knowledge (in the sense of "Second Analytics"), because the middle terms in its demonstrations are non-proper, general and accidental, and mathematics itself is not a knowledge of the real causes. In sum, in Pereira's consideration mathematics turns out to be some sort of “operational art” rather than a necessary knowledge of the truth from real causes. A comparison of the scientific status of physical and mathematical knowledge in Pereira makes it possible to clarify the conditions for the emergence of modern mathematical physics.

THOMAS HOBBES’UN POLİTİK DÜŞÜNCESİNDE SOSYAL DÜZEN FİKRİNİN İKİ KAYNAĞI: YAŞAM VE ÖLÜM (KORKUSU)

Author(s): Mariusz Turowski,Funda Günsoy / Language(s): Turkish Issue: 19/2020

The most prominent contemporary interpretations of the political philosophy of Hobbes focus on the phenomenon of the manageability of death and life by questioning its pure legalistic and proceduralist character (social choice theory, contracting, etc.). Philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben have developed their own versions of the bio-political ontology of sovereignty, largely by reference to Hobbes' analysis in “Leviathan” and “De Cive”. The main aim of this article is to outline and compare two effective approaches to the Hobbesian conceptualization of state and society in the 20th century, one offered by Leo Strauss and another by C.B. Macpherson. Subsidiary aim of the presented reflection is to show that Leo Strauss and C.B. Macpherson provide more complex and sophisticated understanding of the relationship between power (governance) and life (and death) in Hobbes' political thought than the representatives of the “biopolitical-ontological” school.

The Scholastic Logic of Statistical Hypotheses: proprietates terminorum, consequentiae, necessitas moralis, and probabilitas

Author(s): Miroslav Hanke / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

Among the important conceptual innovations introduced in the second scholasticism era and motivated by theological debates following the Council of Trent were the theories of moral necessity and moral implication. As they were centred upon a view of moral necessity as a form of necessity weaker than physical (and, ipso facto, metaphysical and logical) necessity, and moral implication as weaker than physical (and, ipso facto, metaphysical and logical) implication, some interpretations of moral necessity encouraged the logic of statistical hypotheses and probability. Three branches of this debate are studied in this paper: the explanation of moral necessity in terms of suppositio (Vega, Molina, Hurtado, Sforza Pallavicino), the confrontation over the interpretation of moral necessity (Quirós, Herrera), and the theory of statistical quantification (Elizalde, Terill, de Benedictis).

Herbert of Cherbury, Descartes and Locke on Innate Ideas and Universal Consen

Author(s): Mattia Mantovani / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

The present paper investigates the seventeenth-century debate on whether the agreement of all human beings upon certain notions—designated as the “common” ones—prove these notions to be innate. It does so by focusing on Descartes’ and Locke’s rejections of the philosophy of Herbert of Cherbury, one of the most important early modern proponents of this view. The paper opens by considering the strategy used in Herbert’s arguments, as well as the difficulties involved in them. It shows that Descartes’ 1638 and 1639 reading of Herbert’s On Truth—both the 1633 second Latin edition and Mersenne’s 1639 translation—was instrumental in shaping Descartes’ views on the issue. The arguments of Locke’s Essay opposing Herbert’s case for innatism are thus revealed to be ineffective against the case which Descartes makes for this same doctrine, since Descartes had in fact framed his conception of innateness in opposition to the very same theses as Locke was arguing against. The paper concludes by explaining how two thinkers as antithetical as Locke and Descartes came to agree on at least one point, and a truly crucial one: namely, that universal consent counts as a criterion neither for innatism nor for truth.

Common Conceptions and the Metaphysics of Material Substance: Domingo de Soto, Kenelm Digby and Johannes de Rae

Author(s): Han Thomas Adriaenssen / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

This paper explores how, according to three early modern philosophers, philosophical theory should relate to our pre-theoretical picture of reality. Though coming from very different backgrounds, the Spanish scholastic, Domingo de Soto, and the English natural philosopher, Kenelm Digby, agreed that an ability to accommodate our pre-theoretical picture of the world and our ordinary way of speaking about reality is a virtue for a philosophical theory. Yet at the same time, they disagreed on what kind of ontology of the material world is implied by these. The Dutch Cartesian, Johannes de Raey, took a very different approach, and argued that the picture of reality we naturally develop from our early days onwards and the language associated with it have their use in domains such as law and medical practice, but are a poor guide to the ontology of the material world. Thus, if we are to arrive at a proper understanding of the nature of matter, we need to move beyond the picture of reality we naturally develop from our early days onwards in order to come to see that the nature of matter consists in bare extension.

Common Notions and Instincts as Sources of Moral Knowledge in Leibniz’s New Essays on Human Understandin

Author(s): Markku Roinila / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

In his defense of innateness in New Essays on Human Understanding (1704), Leibniz attributes innateness to concepts and principles which do not originate from the senses rather than to the ideas that we are born with. He argues that the innate concepts and principles can be known in two ways: through reason or natural light (necessary truths), and through instincts (other innate truths and principles). In this paper I will show how theoretical and moral reasoning differ from each other in Leibniz, and compare moral reasoning and instincts as sources of knowledge in his practical philosophy. As the practical instincts are closely related to pleasure and passions, which are by nature cognitive, my emphasis will be on the affective character of instinctive moral action and especially deliberation which leads to moral action. I will argue that inclinations arising from moral instinct, which lead us to pleasure while avoiding sorrow, can direct our moral action and sometimes anticipate reasoning when conclusions are not readily available. Acting by will, which is related to moral reasoning, and acting by instincts can lead us to the same moral knowledge independently, but they can also complement each other. To illustrate the two alternative ways to reach moral knowledge, I will discuss the case of happiness, which is the goal of all human moral action for Leibniz.

Christian Wolff on Common Notions and Duties of Esteem

Author(s): Andreas Blank / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

While contemporary accounts understand esteem and self-esteem as essentially competitive phenomena, early modern natural law theorists developed a conception of justified esteem and self-esteem based on naturally good character traits. This article explores how such a normative conception of esteem and self-esteem is developed in the work of Christian Wolff (1679–1754). Two features make Wolff’s approach distinctive: (1) He uses the analysis of common notions that are expressed in everyday language to provide a foundation for the aspects of natural law on which his conception of natural duties of esteem depends. (2) He develops a non-competitive conception of esteem and self-esteem into a cooperative conception, according to which enhancing the esteem in which others are held is seen as a tool for promoting self-perfection. Wolff’s ideas offer a solution to the well-known problems connected with competitive life-styles, and at the same time assign a central role in moral motivation to the desire of being esteemed and of having high self-esteem. Moreover, due to his emphasis on presenting a philosophical analysis based on common notions, he offers a solution that is meant to be persuasive from the perspective of everyday morality.

The Science of Water [Alan F. Chalmers, One Hundred Years of Pressure: Hydrostatics from Stevin to Newton, Dordrecht: Springer, 2017]

Author(s): Ovidiu Babeș / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019