We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
Računarska i informacijsko-teorijska istraživanja u filozofiji danas su vrlo plodna i sveprisutna. Obnavljaju se stara filozofska pitanja, postavljaju novi problemi, doprino si rekonceptualizaci ji naših svjetonazora, pa već imamo mnoge vrlo zanimljive i značajne rezultate. Za novo područje predloženi su razni nazivi.
More...
Does a medical practitioner have a moral obligation to mislead a patient about hiscondition, if he has subjective certainty, that revealing the truth to the patient mayharm him even more? Or, perhaps the practioner is always bound to fully inform thepatient about true state of his health? Idea that pertains to those questions is, in itsnature, achronic. It has accompanied medicine since its birth and has also becomean issue pondered by philosophers. Over the course of centuries, various ethicalfundaments have been created by social and historical contexts. Their purpose wasto evaluate the so called ‘white lie’. The intention of this article is to classify and describemain ethical concepts, within which a solution to this issue has been sought for.
More...
Among philosophers of science there are a lot of views about nature of theology in relate to others disciplines. In the article author defends an account according to which theology is a formal science. Firstly he introduces two necessary features of science: semantic exclusivity and practical egalitarianism. Next he examines theological definitions of theology and using Bocheński’s meaning partition he indicates that matter of theology has operative meaning, but not eidetic. In the face of this difficulty, author shows examples of theological researches and exposes its schemes. Furthermore, he presents a final conclusion that theological researches are nothing more than establishing mutual relations between a finite number of terms, in other words the creation of some new conceptual schemes that would be syntactically coherent and logically consistent with other, previously approved, conceptual schemes. Finally he indicates how theology bases on four kinds of rules of sentences’ transformation: rule of syntactic, sources, conclusion-formulating and assigning the truthfulness.
More...
In my paper I set the existential interpretation of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground proposed by Lev Shestov against the religious and psychological interpretations of this novel in order to excavate a vital problem in Dostoevsky, which is the inversion of hierarchy in pairs of oppositional categories such as normality-pathology, happiness-unhappiness, harmony- dissonance, omnitude-lack, certainty-uncertainty, joy-despair, faith-doubt. Following Shestov I argue that Dostoevsky embraces those categories that are traditionally mistrusted and negatively valorized and by so doing he rehabilitates the “underground”, accursed and unhappy existence at the expense of regular, “normal” life, easily founding spiritual certainty and every day satisfaction. Such an un-problematic life Dostoevsky’s man from the underground regards as a false, smug and eventually – “dead”. In further part of my study I focus on the religious aspect of Shestov’s later philosophy and try to prove that the perspective of faith gradually introduced to his reading of Dostoevsky in no way cancels Shestov’s early philosophy of the underground, despair and tragedy. On the contrary: if faith “obtained” is likely to become yet another mask of “evidence” and “certainty” and in this way might put stop to existential doubts and spiritual dissatisfaction, then neither Dostoevsky, nor Shestov himself, can easily trust it. In this situation despair and tragedy cannot but hold in Dostoevsky’s and Shestov’s thought and the circle of searching and suffering must remain vicious. I demonstrate the consistency in Shestov’s philosophical thought on Dostoevsky and its constant adequacy for understanding one of the crucial existential dilemmas in the works of the Russian writer.
More...
This paper is a part of a project devoted to Brentano’s Aristotelian writings. I concentrate on his habilitation about Aristotle’s psychology, and especially on how he understood Aristotle’s division of mental life into three levels as well as the functions typical for these levels. I analyze two notions that Brentano introduces in his account: Zwischenglieder, meaning intermediary “levels” within the soul enabling smooth passages between the vegetative soul and sensory soul and between the latter and intellectual soul; and Gottverwandtschaft, i.e. human kinship with God, which is possible thanks to the noblest part of the soul. I also introduce two metaphors of the soul: cake-metaphor and fabric-metaphor.
More...
The subject of the consideration contained in the article is topological logic interpreted as place logic and its possible applications in a logical analysis of legal reasoning. The first part of the article is about significance of widely understood spatial element in a law and about a role of formal logic in legal sciences (especially in dogmatic of law) and in legal discourse. There are also given conditions imposed on logical systems which can be applied to analyse legal reasoning. In the second part there is characterization of topological logic interpreted as place logic. In the third part there are examples of formalization of sentences of legal language and of legal inferences using symbols occurring in place logic. In the article there is shown that such kind of logic can be applied to logical analysis some reasoning conducted in legal language, specifically such reasoning in which there appear sentences including, in an explicit or a hidden way, phrase “in place”, that is, information about that, where certain events are realized.
More...
The metaphysical view of Bertrand Russell, called neutral monism, is not widely known today, although its impact on the contemporary debate over mind-body problem is clearly visible. The aim of this paper is to answer the question: what was Russell’s neutral monism? Firstly, I present the views of Russell’s predecessors – Ernst Mach and William James. Then, I discuss Russell’s own thought which can be divided into three phases. The initial phase is the rejection of neutral monism (mainly because of Russell’s commitments to epistemology). The second phase – I call it the first neutral monism – appears in The Analysis of Mind, where he proposes a deflationary theory of the object and the subject. The last, third phase – called the second neutral monism, initiated in 1927 in The Analysis of Matter and An Outline of Philosophy – introduces the notions of intrinsic and extrinsic properties. Finally, I suggest that the agnostic metaphysics of Russell is too reductive for a dualist and too mysterious for a materialist. However, it might be also true that Russell’s view is more epistemological than metaphysical, and the frames of (misleading) Cartesian dictionary of mind/matter may be too narrow for neutral monism to be pertinently interpreted.
More...
In this article I discuss the roots of libertarian thought. First I draw a little-known late-scholastic philosophy of the Renaissance period. Then, the theoretical basis for the libertarian direction created: Anglo-Saxon philosophers the Age of Enlightenment and French anti-statists nineteenth century. A fundamental contribution to the popularization this philosophy played in turn: Austrian economics, which created such outstanding figures as Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises and Chicago school of economics under the direction of Milton Friedman.
More...
In the debate on personal identity many different criteria of identity are proposed and defended. Criteria of identity are usually taken to state necessary and sufficient conditions of identity and are viewed, in their metaphysical interpretation, as providing truth conditions of relevant identity statements. In my paper I argue that this view is misconceived and I present some arguments for the simple view of personal identity, according to which there are no noncircular and informative criteria of identity for persons. In particular, I argue that there are no other facts of the matter than identity itself which would serve as truth conditions of statements concerning numerical identity. I also try to justify the view that in most cases criteria of identity should be interpreted either epistemically as a means for finding out whether identity holds or not or metaphysically as criteria of genidentity, which provide appropriate persistence conditions for objects of a given kind.
More...
The paper discusses notions of intuition and insight. The most typical features attributed to intuition in the history of philosophy – receptiveness, passivity, immediateness, directness, self-evidence, infallibility, and indubitability – are analyzed. A variability of the notion of intuition is shown, taking as its example the category of insight, central for the epistemology of Bernard J.F. Lonergan (1904–1984), the twentieth-century philosopher locating between phenomenology, Thomism and hermeneutics. Insight is still in some respects a kind of intuition although it is creative, active, mediated, indirect, fallible and open to revision.
More...
In this paper I focus on the concept of neutrality taken in the meaning typical for political discussions concerning e.g. the religious neutrality of the state. I take it for granted that the huge majority of educated people belonging to the so called “western culture” would agree that the most important institutions of our social life – such as schools, courts, and parliaments – should be neutral in this sense. But on the other hand it is extremely difficult to formulate a set of precise and reliable criteria allowing us to exclude particular statements, arguments or kinds of discourse as violating this principle of neutrality. The sad truth is that the term “neutrality”, even if restricted to the meaning that is relevant to this paper, is rather vague. Nevertheless I want to propose three types of criteria that can be helpful in attaining this goal. They will be termed: (i) content criterion, (ii) epistemic criterion, and (iii) pragmatic criterion. It seems that if we apply all these criteria together, we will be able to secure a reasonable degree of neutrality in our public debates.
More...
The paper aims to pinpoint one of the main interpretational problems of Józef Tischner’s philosophy – the dispute around the notion of scene, which is the basic concept in Tischner’s ‘philosophy of drama’. It is as well strongly connected with theatre studies. That is why it is common to regard Tischner’s philosophy in a theatrical context. On the other hand, Tischner’s scene is also referred to world of entities, which in traditional philosophy was a field of ontological investigates. Both abovementioned tendencies are a result of misunderstanding Tischner’s thought and they lead to the wrong interpretation of his philosophy of man. Yet according to Tischner man does not play in a drama as an actor on the scene, but rather he is a dramatical being. Proper understanding of Tischner’s notion of scene is essential to understand his philosophical project and to recognize its value and novelty.
More...
The linguistic turn has emphasized the linguistic aspect of history as a kind of a tale, unveiling its ideological foundations and rhetorical structure. This article’s aim is, however, to prove how seeing history as a collection of texts enables us to regain its subjective sense. The authoress considers the fears of historians’ manipulations as well as the validity of »the sense of history«’s question and shows that hermeneutics restores that validity in the epoch after metanarratives’ defeat. Referring to Ricoeur, Gadamer, Marquard, Vattimo and also a sociologist Jan Szczepański, this paper displays that we could be perceived as a product of history, but the interpretation of historical texts, sources and traditions, deepens our “being-in-the-world”. History appears to be the dialectics of being a product and creating, it relies on decision and obligation. Having understood, how the past mediated by texts – historical interpretations – influences our conduct, we could give it new senses.
More...
In The Eudemian Ethics 1237b6–7 Aristotle seems to suggest that if the ethical friend has an unpleasant odour, he is left by his friend. The article is devoted to demonstrating that the ethical friendship is not the apparent friendship. For this purpose author presents the characteristics of the true friend and distinguishes two types of the ethical friendship, the first between good men, i.e. men with a typical mixture of good and bad traits of character, the second between noble men, i.e. the best men who are heroes of intellect and character – intellect because prudent, character because noble. On this basis author shows three interpretations which neutralize controversial statement. According to the first interpretation – called “superhuman stink” – unpleasant odour is impossible to endure for the men, even good or noble. Therefore ethical friend must leave his friend in such circumstances. According to the second interpretation – called “one-dimensional courage” – ethical friend, who has an unpleasant odour is left by ethical friend, since one, who leaves can not endure stinking friend. The reason is that he has one-dimensional courage and apart from direct hostilities he does not cope with own weakness. According to the third interpretation – called “heroic solitude” – ethical friend, who has an unpleasant odour does not want to grieve his friend. Therefore decides to heroic solitude – heroic, since a human being is a civic being and one whose nature is to live with others – and leaves his friend.
More...
The aim of this article is to investigate the reception of Husserl’s theory of meaning by Ajdukiewicz and Blaustein, two members of the analytically-oriented Lvov-Warsaw School, who, in different ways, were attracted to and confronted with Husserl’s phenomenology. The discussed hypothesis is that Ajdukiewicz’s interpretation of Logical Investigations, and his original theory of meaning influenced both Blaustein’s critical reading of Husserl’s theory of intentionality and his account of meaning-intention. After outlining the central elements of “First Logical Investigation” the paper shows how itis interpreted by Ajdukiewicz in his Lvov lectures on logic and in his directival theory of meaning. What emerges is a psychological-descriptive interpretation of Husserl’s concept of meaning, and are consideration of his theory of intentionality within the inferential structure of beliefs in premises that motivates a person who speaks a language to believe in conclusions of a certain form. This leads Ajdukiewicz to his own original conventionalist account of meaning which is based on the identification of three main directives of meaning that represent the matrix of a given language, i.e., the grid in which each meaning finds its place. These elements allow one to demonstrate how Ajdukiewicz’s interpretation resonates in Blaustein’s critique of Husserl in his early writings, where, in addition to a psychological-descriptive reading of phenomenology we also find a conventionalist conception of meaning acts and signitive presentations. According to Blaustein, a sign can represent an object only through the conventions arising from the directives of meaning that belong to a given natural language.
More...
This paper focuses on Arthur Danto’s approach to literature. One of the leading philosophers of art in the analytical philosophical tradition, Danto published on art ontology, defining art and art historicity as well as serving as an art critic for the magazine The Nation in the late phase of his career. The essence of Danto’s philosophy thus lies in the visual arts, and it seems he was not interested in literature from a philosophical point of view. However, following Garry L. Hagberg, I show that Danto was not only a keen reader but also reflected on literature, its specificity, and its role. In the first part of the paper, I scrutinize what — in Danto’s view — is a literary work of art, and I compare his position to the view of New Criticism. In the second part, I explore the often neglected dimension of Danto’s philosophy of art, i.e., the spectator’s emotional response to an artwork. I argue that Danto draws on works of literature to illustrate the nature of this response for the reason that they provide the basis for a deeper understanding in this context.
More...
Analytic philosophy is a movement which emerged as a reaction to traditional philosophy around the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Analytic Philosophy of Education emerged partly as a reaction to traditional philosophy of education and partly with the desire to apply the general principles of analytic tradition in education. American Israel Scheffler and English Paul H. Hirst have produced many works since 1960s and so they are considered among the eminent philosophers of this field. In this study, the concepts of “critica/rational thinking” and “autonomy” have been studied and analyzed in the works of these two important figures. By adopting an analytic approach, firstly their arguments and propositions as regards the different educational topics have been classified and analyzed. Then their opinions as regards how they interpret these concepts, how importance they attribute to them and how these concepts can be used in education have been analyzed extensively. It has been found that critical/rational thinking can be seen as both the ultimate aim of education and the best means to reach this target for both philosophers, particularly for Scheffler. When it comes to the concept of autonomy, both philosophers think that every individual has an innate value and human dignity and so every person must have the right of free choice through rational thinking.
More...
This is a summary of the recent research related to the issue of future contingents. It focuses on the aspects that were largely neglected in the traditional debate, such as relativism, pragmatics of assertion, probability, epistemology, and metaphysics
More...
The elements of water, fire, earth, air, light and darkness have always played an essential role in human thought, philosophy and mythology. These elements, each with their distinctive characteristics and symbols, have been fundamental in defining the universe and life in numerous cultural and religious traditions. Water, associated with life and purification, is considered a source of existence and regeneration. Fire, symbolizing power and transformation, has fascinated human minds throughout time, representing destruction as well as light and heat. Earth, a stable and fertile element, was seen as the foundation upon which life and fertility rest. Air, invisible and imperceptible but essential to breathing and life, has often been associated with freedom and movement. Light, as a manifestation of energy and knowledge, has been revered as a source of wisdom and enlightenment in many cultures and spiritual traditions. In contrast, darkness often evoked fear and mystery, but also contemplation and introspection. Together, these elements make up a complex web of meanings and symbols that have influenced human thought and creativity throughout history. Their interpretations differ according to cultural and philosophical context, but they remain a fundamental aspect of human experience and our understanding of the world around us.
More...
,,The Dialectic Portal: The Sacred and the Profane in the Mystical Elements of the Faustian Wandering” presents the complex interplay between sacred and profane dimensions in the context of the protagonist's spiritual and mystical quest in 'Faust'. The dialectic portal functions as a symbolic space of transition, where the sacred and the profane confront, coexist, and influence each other, generating a perpetual tension between the desire for divine knowledge and the tempting allure of the material world. This wandering, both physical and spiritual, reflects Faust's effort to transcend the limits of the human condition through his pact with Mephisto and the exploration of occult dimensions. The mystical elements that mark his path symbolize an endless search for absolute truth, and the intersection of the sacred and the profane is the focus of this Faustian dialectic. Thus, Faust's journey becomes a profound exploration of conflict and reconciliation between opposing forces, in a transformative process of spiritual becoming.
More...
