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What is a conversion testimony? How do we know that persons who report conversion experiences are telling the truth? What are converts trying to achieve with their testimonies? These are the leading questions of this article. The first section discusses the hermeneutics of testimony and deals with the philosophical and theological understanding of the term. It summarizes Paul Ricoeur’s contributions to the philosophy of testimony. Building on my earlier research exploring the testimonial analysis of recovering drug addicts’ conversions, this article examines the validity, reliability, objectivity and other methodological challenges in the empirical study of religious conversion.
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In the paper it is argued that cosmopolitanism based on human needs would be the most legitimate way to organize the emerging global community. Such cosmopolitanism should be rooted in the notion of basic human needs, for instance: security, autonomy, identity and well-being. Although the notion of human need is universalistic (thereby providing space for meta-consensus), the “human nature” derived from this notion is not necessarily fixed. Deliberation on the needs and political practice of their satisfaction will enable the real progress of cosmopolitanism, more quickly and without numerous problems that the human right-based approach is facing nowadays. Global democracy requests certain universalism in ethics, but it has to be different from those previously attempted, while also the everyday position of individuals in different parts of the world has to be improved considerably.
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Two philosophical arguments, e.g. that the meaning of an expression transcends its use and that the human arithmetical thinking is not entirely algorithmic (the argument Lucas/Penrose) base their theses on Gödel's first incompleteness theorem. But both in these arguments and in some of their criticisms the word "true" is often used ambiguous: it swings between a licit metamathematical use and an illicit transfer of it in a formal system. The aim of this paper is to show the way these arguments are connected, via G-type sentences (sect 2), and how do we argue that the sentence G, albeit unprovable in PA, is true, by using non-conservative extensions of PA with reflections (sect 3). And this without any illicit use of “true”.
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Unlike truth values that, accordingly to the principles of logic, are only two, there can be distinguished three values of opinion for a proposition: acceptance, rejection and indifference. Still, the attempt to build a three-valued logic of opinion comes to the paradox that there are tautologies that are not accepted. We can avoid the paradox if we use a complex representation of the opinion values, through analogy with complex numbers. The logic of opinion is a kind of complex logic.
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This philosophical-algebraic presentation aimed at a simple and concise exposition of notions and demonstrations, especially in class algebra. The demonstrations were constructed so that they configure the epistemological objectives on a logical linguistic level, of interest for this analysis: conceptual clarifications and the loading of logical symbols with mathematical signification. My hypothesis is that the propositions of logic have no mathematical content, but become propositions of mathematics, just as, by a different level analogy, propositions of mathematics become propositions of physics. Thus, within the scope of this analysis, a meaningless logical proposition becomes a “mathematical proposition”, a proposition with “mathematical signification” by the loading of logical symbols with mathematical significations. As a result, mathematics is regarded here as more than the Wittgensteinian meaning of mathematics as a method of logic
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