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The essay reviews briefly relation of contemporary theoretical physics to the truth and describes various philosophical approaches to physical knowledge.
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The essay reviews briefly relation of contemporary theoretical physics to the truth and describes various philosophical approaches to physical knowledge.
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This article examines the epistemological views of key quantum physicists of the Copenhagen circle (Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Léon Rosenfeld). The discussion begins with a presentation of their conception of measurement, indeterminacy and complementarity, and goes on to focus on their views regarding the nature of being and knowledge. The author identifies the basic areas of consensus in the Copenhagen circle as well as the disagreements and disputes that arose between its members. Three main points are argued: (1) The fundamental epistemological consensus in the group was that subject and object are inseparable; that the subject participates in the formation of images of reality, which are multiple and depend on how the subject is concretely constituted historically; the disagreements within the group did not arise with logical inevitability from the principles of quantum mechanics but largely stemmed from ideological clash in the Cold War context. (2) Being linked to specific configurations of the subjects, knowledge is always relative; but it does not follow that knowledge is illusory or inadequate; on the contrary, it is the pretension of attaining the ultimate nature of things “in themselves” that leads to devaluation of any concrete knowledge. (3) The world is something external, generally independent of our desires and will, but at the same time is constructed as concrete objects through the specific configuration of each concrete subject.
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The word “rhetoric”, which has crossed the centuries, can be found at the confluence of various disciplines (philosophy, linguistics, law, communication). It is much less spontaneously associated with the sciences. However, Perelman suggests a kinship between his concerns and the work of certain epistemologists (e.g. Polanyi, Kuhn, Gonseth). Above all, we would like to show how, through a rather formal mechanism and a wise limitation of its programme, the New Rhetoric manages, in our opinion, to escape the pitfall of absolute relativism.
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Heterotopia is the space of otherness, a counter-space. A very specific type of heterotopia is a human’s body, especially in its illness and sickness. Hysteria, the disease which can imitate many other diseases, is here a crucial example. From its ancient beginnings until today hysteria makes us reflect on the essence of illness and disease, on the definition of the human condition, on the social role of a healthy and ill human body, etc. The archeology of hysteria explains how disorders shape medical standards.
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The subject of the article is the paradox of fiction. I present the most important attempts to explain and solve it. I argue that this paradox results from the assumption that an emotional response requires the belief that something is really there. This belief is not necessary at all — someone can be afraid that p, and at the same time not have a strong belief that p. It is enough to have a specific thought. I defend the thesis that our emotional reactions are mediated by the mind and its representational and content-related equipment. Due to the modest literature on this topic in Polish, the article was written in the author’s native language. The article is therefore educational and, above all, popularizing.
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In the research on emotions in dance, scientists focus mainly on their motor expression. This article deals with the mental conceptualization of emotions in a specific movement practice, the Gaga language of movement, created by an Israeli choreographer — Ohad Naharin. The language is based on movement interpretation of verbal instructions during dance improvisation. The verbal communication system plays an important role in Gaga’s practice. Emotions in movement function implicitly and are an important element of working with the movement and the bodies of dancers. The phenomenological considerations of Edmund Husserl and Marice Merleau-Ponty on the subject of the body, which also influenced the contemporary concept of embodied cognition, is an important factor in considering the functioning of emotions in the Gaga language. The key issue in analyzing the functioning of emotions in the language of the Gaga movement is the concept of dynamics from a phenomenological and linguistic perspective. The purpose of this article is to show that: 1) emotions, although they do not appear directly in Gaga’s instructions, are an important part of a dancer’s creative work; 2) their functioning, understanding and motor interpretation is based on the metaphorical understanding of various aspects of dynamics; 3) the phenomenological analysis of the body are essential to understand the functioning of emotions during dance.
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Herman Cappelen in his book Fixing language (2018) proposed a project within conceptual engineering according to which what we revise in concepts is their intension and extension. He undertook a polemic with the ideas in concept engineering according to which we appeal to functions and purposes when revising. In the first part of this paper I describe the aforementioned discussion. In doing so, I refer to Amie Thomasson’s article “A Pragmatic Method for Normative Conceptual Work” (2020). Next, I attempt to defend positions that refer to functions and purposes in conceptual revision. For this purpose, I refer to Michael Prinzing’s article „The Revisionist’s Rubic: Conceptual Engineering and Discontinuity Objection” (2018). In the second part of the article, I intend to describe the method of explication as one of the methods by which we perform conceptual revision. I turn my attention to the explication used by Quine. He proposes to focus when explicating on what function a concept serves.
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This short communication attempts to define what the kairos time is in terms of cultural spacetime and how it interacts with linear time the chronos. The paper consists of three parts: the first part offers the explanation of the cultural spacetime and the flow of time within it, the second part presents the proposed concepts of bidirectional time flow patterns, the third part explains the kairos - chronos schematics and attempts to demonstrate the complete picture of cultural spacetime of cultural mankind. The paper concludes a derived speculation of the point of total singularity of cultural spacetime. The complete awareness of the kairos presence within cultural time is called evolutional turn of humanity that could create configurations of chronos time by observing kairos hit et nunc. 'Finally, the paradox of retrocausality is partially proved.
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Svaki pokušaj razumijevanja verbalne komunikacije mora je posmatrati u prirodnom okruženju kao dio većeg poduhvata. U početku se čini da to ne može biti teško jer jezik komunikacije ne uključuju ništa više nego samo jezičke transakcije među govornicima i interpretatorima te sklonosti za takve transakcije. Ipak, taj zadatak nam izmiče. Jer činjenica da su jezički fenomeni samo bihevioralni, biološki ili fizički fenomeni opisani u egzotičnom vokabularu značenja, referencije, istine, tvrđenja [assertion] i tako dalje - sama dominacija činjenica ove vrste nad drugom vrstom činjenica ili opisa jedne vrste fenomena nad drugom vrstom fenomena – ne jamči, niti čak ne obećava, mogućnost konceptualne redukcije.
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Racionalno stvorenje nije ni dijete staro jednu sedmicu ni puž. Ako dijete preživi dovoljno dugo, on ili ona vjerovatno će postati racionalni, dok tako šta nije tačno i u slučaju puža. Ukoliko želimo, za dijete bismo od početka mogli reći da je racionalno stvorenje, jer će vjerovatno postati racionalno ukoliko preživi, ili zato što pripada vrsti s tom sposobnošću. Na bilo koji način da govorimo, ostaje razlika, u pogledu racionalnosti, između djeteta i puža,sjedne strane, i tipične odrasle osobe,s druge strane.
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This allegorical postcard is organized around two groups of photographs. The first group was the result of a joint collaboration with the Vancouver artist Scott Saunders and produced photographs which have peppered several of my previous texts published by American, British and Canadian Studies. The second is a series of photographs taken by Scott Saunders from the window of his apartment in Vancouver in which he documents the street life constantly ebbing and flowing on the sidewalk below. The catalyst for bringing these two groups together was a photograph I took several years ago in Sambro, Nova Scotia (a small fishing village located just outside of the city of Halifax) depicting a forlorn sunken fishing vessel. The term “flotsam” is applied, according to the Oxford Reference Dictionary, to “the wreckage of a ship or its cargo floating on or washed up by the sea,” while “jetsam” describes the things or objects deliberately “thrown away, especially from a ship at sea and that float toward land.” Combined, these images of words and devastated human beings are caught in an apparently endless circulation of violence and contingency located at the heart of the urban fabric of a modernity bereft of any horizon of hope, redemption, or rescue.
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In this paper, the author analyzes certain specifics of spiritual atmosphere in American films noir during 1940s and 1950s. There were certain existential strivings and contextual factors that generated the atmosphere of decadence and claustrophobia in this genre’s worldview. Noir philosophy thus follows European existentialist thought. In order to demonstrate this fact, the author analyzed several distinguished noir films, such as Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950), Jacques Toruneur’s Out of the Past (1947), Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955), etc. In these movies, the dehumanizing alienation, the downfall of spirit and a very small possibility of happy ending are a dominant reality. Noir world does not recognize any other reality, which leads to its main spiritual question: is this the world that is worth living in? There dominates the philosophy of absurd: protagonists, whose faith is either shaken or even nonexistent, accept absurdity as the only way of life. Of course, there is no answer in such choice, but it is nevertheless better than emptiness. The passion of absurdity, i.e. some kind of life automatism or inertia, is a reason why protagonists act in the first place: nihilism does not necessarily lead to passivism. This noir philosophy is akin to that of Camus, which is also colored by alienation and disorientation. The positions of good and evil, or love and hatred, are very much obscured. Therefore, the noir genre depicts a specific psycho-physical state of an entire epoch, captured and lost in the darkness of existence.
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There has been a growing interest in thinking critically and constructively about the contours of spiritual perception (SP). One aim involves making philosophical sense of SP. How, for example, are statements about perceiving things divine to be construed philosophically (e.g., “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”)? What are the conditions under which perceiving the divine is possible? What are the objects and features of SP? Is it comparable to other types of perception (e.g., physical, moral, aesthetic, and value perception)? What is the relationship between the perceptual and the conceptual? In what ways can conceptually-loaded forms of SP become epistemically beneficial or distorted?
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In this review, the authors self-review the text about Foucault's hall of mirrors, in which they try to develop the project of a Foucauldian geo-epistemology. First, they question the process of self-review – through the problematization of the text as an object of analysis and the meaning of the process itself, recognizing in it the apparatus of confession which Foucault established as typical for Western civilization. After accepting the challenge of self-criticism, the authors return to the problem area of geo-epistemology and the concept of the trihedral as an analytical tool, first at the level of criticism of the theoretical-methodological framework. In doing so, they observe insufficiently clear delineation of their own approach from Foucault's, insufficient precision of their own geo-epistemological analysis, and insufficient attention that they paid within this framework to the genealogy of concrete practices of power and knowledge. The authors then focus on specific deficiencies that marked the beginning of their research project and were manifested in an insufficiently clear conceptualization of the concept of life, as well as the underdevelopment of the trihedral of spatialization regarding the issues of governmentality and biopower, language, and madness itself. Acknowledging the possibility that, by agreeing to play Foucault's game, they got caught in the "Trihedral Foucault" as a circular framework of interpretation, in the concluding part of the review the authors offer a systematization of their evaluations and present proposals for the further development of the project of Foucauldian geo-epistemological analytics.
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In the environment of rapidly changing technological background that facilitates the effects of globalization and the ever-decreasing distance between cultural heritage of different ethnic and national origins, it is an essential task to find and implement innovative strategies that would ensure inclusive dialogic spaces of fast reaction, spaces sensitive to local cultural developments as well as environments free from the domineering tendencies of identification in its traditional and practically dated definition. The present article attempts to form a foundation for an alternative approach to cultural communication. By means of shifting the focus from textual and semantic interpretations of cultural interactions as well as cultural environments, this article sets the direction for communication based on information instead of meaning. The suggested approach, therefore, stems from Claude Shannon’s information theory and its development associated with Fred I. Dretske (theoretical-informational approach). The spaces of cultural interaction are understood as dialogic spaces that in accordance with the mentioned approach will be dislocated in order to gain advantage in the sphere of cultural communication in such a way that would allow synergetic functioning alongside the ideas of posthumanist, (post)digital era, as well as conscious utilisation of the specificities of technogenesis.
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A general criterion for distinguishing between epistemic and non-epistemic values is that the former promotes the attainment of truth whereas the latter does not. Daniel Steel (2010, 2016) is a proponent of this criterion, although it was initially proposed by McMullin (1983). There are at least two consequences of this criterion; (i) it always prioritizes epistemic values over non-epistemic values in scientific research, and (ii) it overlooks the diverse aims of science, especially the aims of regulatory or policy-oriented science. This criterion assumes the lexical priority of truth or lexical priority of evidence. This paper attempts to show a few inadequacies of this assumption. The paper also demonstrates why epistemic priority over non-epistemic values is a problematic stance and how constraining the role of non-epistemic values as ‘tiebreakers’ may undermine the diverse aims of science.
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Inferentialism has brought important insights into the nature of meanings. It breaks with the representationalist tradition that sees meanings as constituted primarily by representing some extra-linguistic reality. Yet the break with tradition should be pursued further. Inferentialists still regard meanings as static, and they still do not entirely abandon the idea of fully determined meaning. Following Davidon’s ideas about meanings as constituted only in the course of a specific conversation, I propose a dynamic account of what meanings are. They are described as entities belonging to the dynamic realm of Henri Bergson’s duration. The inhabitants of this realm live in constant movement and development which is more essential to them than the stages that this development goes through. My account brings about a rejection of the notion of strict literal meaning and therewith also of the contrasting notions such as ambiguity. Meaning is understood as a dynamic entity that is characterized rather by its history than by its nature.
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According to higher order (HO) theories of consciousness, a mental state is conscious when there is a HO state about it. However, some HO states do not seem to be about other existing mental states. It is possible to resolve this problem since targetless HO states resemble HO states that misrepresent but the assumption that HO states always target other existing mental states is at odds with the theory since HO states are not only necessary but also sufficient for phenomenal consciousness according to the theory. Given the sufficiency of the HO states for consciousness, there is a need to understand the emergence of HO states as a non-random phenomenon to avoid the difficulties caused by targetless HO states. I suggest it is possible to develop such an understanding by thinking of HO states as predictive states in accordance with the predictive processing theory of the mind.
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