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.
The theme „science and values“ is general enough to encompass different topical facets. Here, I am concerned with two of these, related to the answers to the following questions: „How is science, as such, construed as a value today?“ and „Are there certain types of values that in some ways determine the conceptual paths for the growth of science?”
More...
The paper presents the author’s functional model of the exo-systemic social context of science in the form of a typology, and builds a classification scheme of the model’s social functions, decomposed into target (external and internal) and instrumental functions; the latter group is divided into relational and performative functions. Through application of the principles of functional and structural analysis, indicators are proposed for determining the level of development of a social function. A summary of the types and directions of functional transformations of modern science in the context of their social impact is presented. The article concludes that both the target and instrumental social functions of science undergo significant development in the modern knowledge society.
More...
The paper discusses Hilary Putnam’s views on the role of philosophy in an age of science as they are presented in his text “Science and Philosophy” (2010). The article explains the importance of Putnam’s central idea that philosophy needs to address both moral “questions for grownups” (Cavell) and theoretical questions about “how things hang together” (Sellars).
More...
The paper juxtaposes two stripes of realism, both present in the writings of the late Hilary Putnam. As is well known, forty years ago Hilary Putnam, who was until then a staunch supporter of metaphysical realism, switched to a different doctrine, which he called “internal realism”; many adherents of realism saw this as an unjustifiable retreat from their camp. The question remains: is internal realism a true variety of realism? In order to answer it, §1 compares the postulates of metaphysical and internal realism, while §2 shows how internal realism deals with certain key distinctions observed by metaphysical realism.
More...
The text reconstructs the emergence and development of so-called “theory” in the humanities, which, since the 1970s, has aimed at redefining their scope and social role. This phenomenon first took root in France but reached other territories, including Bulgaria, for reasons that are explored in the article. The author analyzes the rhetoric of “classical” theoretic approaches, and asserts that in this particular case, method is of greater significance than the object of reflection. The overall effect of theory is identified as a particular kind of legitimization of academic discourse through practices and techniques stemming from modern art. The text deals with the history of modern views on art and analyzes the rhetorical mechanisms of secondary construction of the object of scientific research – a procedure that imparts aesthetic features to the practice of theory and enables a comparison to cultural anthropology. At the end, the author discusses the reasons for the impossibility of achieving a synthesis between science, art and life, this unity being the actual goal of “romantic” science.
More...
Around the year 1802, when he was reading his famous Lectures on the Method of Academic Study, Schelling, merely 27 years old at the time, had already parted definitely with Fichte’s philosophy and elaborated his own identity philosophy. These lectures contain no didactic guidance for teachers but address students, showing them how, in studying the sciences, not to remain at the level of empirical knowledge but to rise to the height of true philosophical thinking, such as he saw displayed in his own philosophy. That is why he proceeds (in his first lecture) from the absolute concept of science but immediately passes (in the second) to the scientific and moral significance of the higher academic institutions as centers for the education of society. Throughout the discussion on the separate sciences, the prevailing idea advanced was of their identity and of the freedom of science; this idea became a basis of the university reform undertaken in Germany by Wilhelm von Humboldt.
More...
Creationism in general, and the theory of Intelligent Design (ID) in particular, have so far mostly remained outside the mainstream discourse in Bulgaria and other Eastern European countries, in contrast with the perpetual controversy they generate in the United States. However, this situation may change in the near future as active initial forays are being made here to assert the presence of creationism in society. Albeit, based on a superficial reading of its recent socio-political history, this may seem counterintuitive, a fertile intellectual soil for creationism seems in fact to be present in this part of Europe, a circumstance that requires closer examination. The discussion carried on in this journal regarding the scientific credibility of ID has been quite informative as to the factors underlying the vulnerability of Bulgarian society to pseudo-scientific ideas. In this article, the author analyses the pro-ID argumentation presented in one of the articles in the series (Gagov 2016), first, from a scientific and philosophical point of view, and then in the larger socio-historical context from which ID is derived. This is then used as an illustration helping the reader to understand how the current situation developed. The article highlights the dangers to the intellectual health of society by making a comparison with analogous phenomena in the past and their consequences.
More...
This article is a response to another article published in this journal (Marinov 2018). Here the author presents historical, social and psychological arguments in support of the presence of spiritual influences upon social life. The role of religious beliefs as factors of “rational” and “non-rational” social processes is discussed
More...
Questions related to the emergence and development of life on Earth are basically of a philosophical kind and are more complicated than the superficial assessment that “Evolutionary Theory (ET) is science and Intelligent Design (ID) is pseudo-science”.From a Hegelian viewpoint, it may be considered that ID is a “negation of the negation” of creationism, i.e., a positive development of the latter, a “synthesis between it and ET”. The sharp criticism aimed by scientistic thinkers at ID can also be explained by their perception of it as a treacherously veiled creationism.It is necessary to show the theoretical constructs used by ID and ET. In ET, they are related to the vague, and hard to explicitate, concepts of “natural (development)” and “intervention”, concepts that go beyond the fields of particular branches of science. The basic question is, “Is it possible, using means that are internal to a system, to show that this system is self-organizing and self-structuring, and that no significant external influence has been exercised upon it?” Science claims to have a monopoly on Truth, but every monopoly is dangerous and holds the risk of misuse, especially if the verification and falsification of ID and ET are presented only by proponents of one of the two theories.In the history of science, there have been many mistaken, incomplete theories that, nevertheless, were predominant in their time. The study of the emergence and development of life on Earth is a non-classical field of science, and for some questions, science might not have a good explanation at the present stage of its development.The a priori rejection of the idea of rational participation in the emergence and development of life on Earth underestimates the possibilities of the development of science and civilization, and the potential power of reason. After 70 years of aggressive atheism, the rejection of atheism and the imposition by the government in Russia of a strict, archaic, old-ritual Orthodoxy is indirectly a blow aimed at ET as well.
More...
We will nowise deny the principles of progressive development, change, and movement, insofar as it is in them that life and the arising of the new consists. The concept of an Intelligent Design is no worse than Creationism and is better than an evolutionism based on materialistic determinism. The opposite would be peace, steadiness, degradation, miracle or death. Here we consider and pay attention to the leading principles of philosophy and to certain scientific laws that cannot be ignored and are far from a primitive and tabular Neo-Darwinian evolutionism. The same principle applies to the concept of the Big Bang and the development of the Universe. Specifically, we emphasize that the controversy of creationism vs. evolutionism is both scientifically outdated and philosophically one-sided and ill-considered. Philosophy, as a third factor, is the truth to which religion and science are subordinated. Process philosophy – for example, that of A. N. Whitehead – retains substances and provides the opportunity for development. Whether some like it or not, it does not exclude the idea of Creation.
More...съвременни философско-науковедски аспекти
The paper traces out the origins and the evolution of the concepts of technoscience, considering the main driving ideas and arguments. The key new moments are outlined, distinguishing the technoscience from the traditional science and technologies. Special attention is paid on the role of social factors in the conceptual maturing in relation to this phenomenon. Further, the basic nowadays philosophical assumptions (in regard of epistemological, ontological and axiological aspects) and some widely accepted views on technoscience in S&T studies are discussed. A generalised idea of technoscience as a convergence and hybridization of science and technologies, forming a new emerging phenomenon, is also presented.
More...Преосмисляне на Eтоса на Р. Мъртън
The foundations of the ethics of science as a separate and particular research domain were laid in the 1930s by Robert Merton. He was the first to formulate the structure of the ethos of science as well as to present the first conjectures concerning the specific mode of action in science in terms of habits, collective expectations, incentives, encouragements, and the how these are built into the individual scientist as his/her “duty”. Unfortunately, the first elements of this foundation remained incomplete; Merton’s concept was poorly understood and later neglected, considered irrelevant to contemporary ethical practice. My research investigates the roots of Merton’s ethical categories in the process of knowledge production, in which the negative effects of the violation of these categories also occur. The article further demonstrates that the ethical norms are correlative with, and complementary to, the norms of knowledge production (the latter, similar to ethical norms, are tacitly shared and transmitted by tradition). Tentative steps are taken to reveal how the building of ethical norms takes place in the individual’s mind during his/her specialized education in science. The separate layers of Merton's integral ethical categories are identified in order to show that they regulate a larger cluster of violations than those listed by him. The rethinking of the classical ethical categories and their mode of action furthers the completion of the classical foundations of the ethics of science.
More...
Dispositions play a key role in Quine’s philosophy of language as well as in his explanations of behavior. At the same time, Quine argues that the use of dispositional explanations is a mark of immaturity in the scientific disciplines that rely on such explanations. The aim of this paper is to show why Quine’s verdict on dispositional explanations is untenable. First, it is argued that Quine does not attach importance to the fact that even the most mature theories in contemporary physics and biology quite often define their objects through the dispositional properties that these objects supposedly possess. An alternative analysis of dispositional explanations is then proposed, in terms of the inferences that these explanations allow for. The author’s analysis reveals that the inferential content which a dispositional explanation adds is often larger than the inferential content of the rival explanation that replaces the explanatory disposition with underlying structures or mechanisms. This result justifies the assertion that, at least in some cases, dispositional explanations do a better job and should therefore not be treated as a mark of scientific immaturity.
More...
The problem of denoting has a long history in analytic philosophy. Its roots can be traced to its fathers, Frege and Russell. People often use names without knowing for sure whether the “objects” they name are actually denoting. Russell’s method of analysis, introduced by him in the article On Denoting (1905), largely solves the problem. One of Russell’s main reasons to apply the analysis is to enable us to meaningfully make statements about non-existent objects. Russell insists that only logically proper names denote, while descriptions and hidden descriptions must be eliminated. Quine proceeds from Russell’s theory of single descriptions and expands it. Naming is not a criterion for ontological commitment because names can be converted (paraphrased) into descriptions and Russell’s method of analysis in 1905 showed how descriptions could be eliminated. Hence, Quine’s famous slogan in On What There Is (1948) states: “to be is to be the value of a bound variable” (Quine, 1948: 594). This article aims to elucidate two questions: 1) Do “related variables” bind us? 2) Is existence a property of objects or a property of a propositional function?
More...
Quine criticizes two of the main theses of logical positivism: reductionism and the view that there is a distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. In the present inquiry, I present the main line of this critique and consider a possible defense of the view that there is a distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. I argue that this view can be defended by distinguishing between two senses of the word “meaning” – one in which it refers to a mental entity, and another in which it refers to a certain property of behavior. Here it must be assumed that, when we refer to “meaning” in relation to the concepts of analytic and synthetic, we use the word in the latter sense. We have reasons to believe that Quine himself would have accepted this way of defense.
More...
One of the central problems in the field of contemporary philosophy of medicine is the analysis of the concepts of health and disease. The article focuses on the discussions between normativists and naturalists regarding the role of values in the semantical analysis of the concepts of disease and health. The role of norm and anomaly is emphasized. The article specifically devotes attention to the different epistemological roles ascribed to norms and anomalies in contemporary medical science and theories. The article highlights the importance of nonclassical logic (fuzzy logic) for the philosophical analysis of “health” and “disease”.
More...
The article outlines a conceptual framework that would allow exploring the current revolution in biotechnologies in terms of the double role they play as a pharmakon (the concept as developed by Stiegler and Derrida): on the one hand, the development of biotechnologies intensifies the tendency of technosciences to establish full control over matter and life; on the other hand, however, technologies open new fields for the radical imagination and future protentions, as well as for the transformation of power-knowledge structures. In more specific terms, the object of this study is the movement to biotech, which includes the fields of synthetic biology, garage biology, bioart and biohacking. Some of these (synthetic biology and biohacking in its narrow transhumanist sense) could be regarded as peaks of the anthropocentric desire for full control over matter, the human body and other living beings, while others (garage biology and bioart), on the contrary, deconstruct control via dynamic involvement of the artist-researcher in the co-generating power of sympoietic commonalities between humans, nonhuman living systems and nonliving beings, the boundaries between them, as well as their identities, remaining fluid. In this text, I attempt to analyze how these apparently contradictory tendencies actually imply, and draw close to, one another, to examine the movement which generates them (algorithmization of living matter, systems and processes) and the philosophical questions posed by this movement. The article gives a schematic picture of the conceptual framework of research; while some of the presuppositions are presented in detail, the solutions require further practical and theoretical study.
More...
Man in Comparison with Other Animals was the first Bulgarian textbook on human and animal anatomy and physiology; it comprises sections on chemistry, behavioural biology, therapeutic strategies and methods, nutrition and also offers veterinary advices. The author was educated in the prestigious Medical School in Wurzburg and specialized surgery and general medicine in leading European clinics in Paris, Wien and Berlin. He aimed to significantly expand the knowledge of Bulgarian secondary school students on the above-mentioned subjects after 1870 in order to improve the education, health habits and social practices of his countrymen.
More...