An important task for every major philosopher is to offer us an understanding of the nature of mind. The essays in this volume discuss different aspects of the philosophical theories of mind put forward in the century and a half that followed Descartes' Meditations of 1641. These years, often referred to as the 'early-modern' period, are probably unparalleled for originality and diversity in conceiving the mind. The volume not only includes two essays on Descartes' own thinking, but there are also (...) examinations of what Spinoza, Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, Reid, the Cambridge Platonists, and others, have to say about the nature of mind. The aim of the volume is to represent some of the best contemporary research and reflection on mind in early-modern philosophy. The contributors, who teach at a range of universities in mainland Europe, Great Britain and North America, are Margaret Atherton, Miran BozoviÄ, Petr GlombìÄek, Boris Hennig, James Hill, Nicholas Jolley, Jan Palkoska, G. A. J. Rogers, and Anthony Savile. All the essays appear here for the first time. (shrink)

It is argued that George Berkeley’s term ‘common sense’ does not indicate shared conviction, but the shared capacity of reasonable judgement, and is therefore to be classed as a mental ability, not a belief-system. Common sense is to be distinguished from theoretical understanding which, in Berkeley’s view, is frequently corrupted either by learned prejudice, or by language that lacks meaning or camouflages contradiction. It is also to be distinguished from the deliverances of divine revelation, which—however enlightening Berkeley supposed them to (...) be—are not necessarily available to all people. This interpretation of common sense is supported both by attention to Berkeley’s own texts, including his sermons, letters and philosophical writings, and by attention to the views of John Locke and René Descartes, who also understand ‘common sense’ as susceptibility to the ‘natural light’. In addition, this interpretation renders Berkeley’s appeal to common sense in support of his immaterialism a straightforward appeal to the reader’s native reason. No longer, then, are we forced to see Berkeley as improbably maintaining that the denial of matter is really the view of ‘the common people’, but rather that those who have least attachment to theory and doctrine will be best able to grasp the case for immaterialism. (shrink)

[Anthony Kenny: Thomas on the Human Spirit].

The article treats the issue of a private language as presented by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his whole work and it interprets the problem of private language as a critique of a concept of language as a calculus contrasting it with a conception of language as universal medium. According to this understanding the private language is not only a language of sense data, not even necessarily a language based purely in a subjectivity of its speaker. The article aims to show the (...) continuity of Wittgenstein’s thought on the matter. In the end it briefly touches the question of so called solitary language as a once so popular version of the problem in the framework presented above. (shrink)

The article concerns Descartes‘ comment on an anonymous project of universal language. Author argues that Descartes‘ refusal of the project is based on implicit argument against very posssibility of the project. Descartes‘ comment can then be read as a dismissal of quite popular version of entlightenment reform, usually attributed even to Descartes himself, but according to the interpretation proposed here the argument is directed against a recipient of Descartes‘ comment, namely Marin Mersenne.

[On Hintikka’s Alternative Interpretation of “Cogito, ergo sum”.].

Článek se věnuje nejnovější knize Charlese Taylora Secular Age (2007). Poukazuje na její kořeny v hegeliánství a v novějších kritikách modernity a probírá některé námitky vůči Taylorově koncepci včetně Taylorových odpovědí. Taylor představuje dva typy současných etických projektů. Na jedné straně tzv. výlučný humanismus, na druhé straně imanentní antihumanismus. A smyslem jeho genealogie moderního sekularismu je ukázat vzájemnou podmíněnost mezi antihumanismem, humanismem a religiozitou s tím, že bez nějaké formy transcendence se každý západní hodnotový systém vystavuje nepřekonatelným tenzím, aby následně (...) navrhl koncept originality volající k následování jako spojnici hlavního nároku křesťanství ztělesněného v pojmu lásky k bližnímu s moderním uměním jako náhražkovým náboženstvím. Taylorova práce je nejen v tomto ohledu postavena na jeho celoživotním zájmu o Hegelovu filosofii, v níž se hledá takový způsob, jak spojit etiku autenticity se smyslem pro společenství, který by překonal omezení reflektující racionality. Taylorovo obohacení Hegela můžeme chápat jako snahu nahradit tradiční nárok lásky k bližnímu srozumitelnějším pojmem podpory rozmanitosti v jednotě (resp. pojmem kultury). The essay examines Charles Taylor’s latest book The Secular Age (2007) by unveiling its Hegelian roots together with its debt to other critics of modernity and by considering some objections as well as Taylor’s answers. Taylor sketches two types of contemporary ethical projects. On the one hand he considers exclusive humanism, on the other the immanent antihumanism. The moral of Taylor’s story of modern secularism comes to his claim that the anti-humanism is enabled by humanism and humanism again by religiosity. According to him this comes to indispensability of religion: namely, some notion of transcendence is necessary for coherence of any set of values available to western man. Actually the originality inspiring its following is what he understands as the key element that is shared by the central claim of Christianity embodied in the notion of love (agape) overcoming the rigorism of explicit rules on the one hand and modern art as Ersatzreligion.(Not only) this aspect of Taylor’s recent work is rooted in his lifelong interest in Hegel, who looked for such pairing of the ethics of authenticity with a sense for community that could overcome the limits of reflective rationality. We can interpret Taylor’s amendement to Hegel as a substitution of „support for differentiation in unity“ (or simply „culture“) for „love for neighbour“. (shrink)

[On the role of the first principle in Descartes' philosophy].

[Locke’s modest proposal of a doctrine of signs].

[General sense in Arendt and Kant’s common sense].

[A note on Jan Kuneš's and Jiří Pechar's discussion. on translation ].

The aim of this paper is to find roots of the private language argument in older Wittgenstein‘s texts. Scrutiny of them reveals that the more general form of the argument, so called solitary language argument, precedes the traditional sense-data argument from the first Wittgenstein‘s consideration of the problem in The Brown Book with a continuation in lectures on sense data and private experience. In consequence, this undermines exegetical objections to the solitary language argument.

The paper addresses a mainstream contemporary view of the notion of common sense in Thomas Reid’s philosophy, as proposed by Nicholas Wolterstorff who claims that Reid was not clear about the concept of common sense, or about the principles of common sense. In contrast, this paper presents Reid’s conception as a clear and traditional Aristotelian notion of common sense and its principles as presuppositions of particular sense judgments, usually taken for granted. The alleged confusion about principles is resolved by a (...) distinction between principles of common sense and first principles as such. (shrink)

Studies man in view of what he may become. Describes how a man must work simultaneously on his knowledge and his being to find inner unity.

Drawing on an exploratory study of urban food self-provisioning (FSP) in China, this article argues that progress in sustainability scholarship can be accelerated by embracing a greater diversity of framings of sustainability. It brings four important empirical findings concerning the prevalence of Chinese urban FSP, the social diversity of its practitioners, their primarily non-economic motivations, and production methods meeting the criteria for organic food that are deployed by more than a third of urban food growers. On this basis, the article (...) highlights the importance of greater attention to identifying and valuing ‘already existing sustainability’ in non-Western contexts, rather than privileging Western conceptualizations of sustainability that promise sustainability innovation in the future. (shrink)

Can one extend crisp Peano arithmetic PA by a possibly many-valued predicate Tr(x) saying “xis true” and satisfying the “dequotation schema”for all sentences φ? This problem is investigated in the frame of Łukasiewicz infinitely valued logic.

Analyzing different philosophical and theological components of Aquinas’s view regarding the relation between human agency and divine providence, the monograph shows this view to be compatibilist, based on a determinist conception of causation and an aristocratic understanding of goodness.

This paper addresses the ontological status of the body in the context of bodily practices in body-oriented disciplines, such as sport training, dance, and physiotherapy. Following Descartes’, Huss...

Between the zone of certainty beyond all doubt and the zone of incomprehensible uncertainty, the sources of which are nothing but chance, we need to use solid results from a vast interdisciplinarity. We wish to give here a sense of the factors in play and the state of the debate and advance in the territory of how interdisciplinarity may help to solve problems which are common in many areas of knowledge. Chaos and complexity certainly put limits on what we can (...) know. High complexity, asymmetry and/or non-linearity are universal types of imprecision. Can hazard have purpose and direction?The idea is that the more effort we put into project design to cover as many details and possible consequences as possible we can grasp in our in-depth analysis aiming to create the project (in art or science or society), the greater the chances that the random occurrence of the unpredictable event will settle on the project's purpose and direction and not on contrary to them. There is no vicious circle here. This kind of method can explain many good results already obtained in such circumstances. Simplicity, beauty, rationalistic optimism, are features of unshakeable scientific results We may call this feature of scientific theory or art _uniqueness. _Uniqueness is strongly correlated with _essentialization. _Science is working in that sense: to simplify a phenomenon to its essence in order to study it easily without losing anything important in the analysis. That is _essentialization. _Why and how complex systems move to the edge of chaos? And what do they do to stay there? They are in constant struggle to create or keep order in complexity. That is the pattern of self-organization, the specific feature of human nature. That is why our action is meant to build resilience to deal better with unpredictable events and prevent the emergence of a critical threshold. Uncertainty, indeterminacy, randomness, and contradictions appear, not as non-essential substances of debate to be eliminated by explanation, but as everlasting ingredients of our conception of reality. There are compelling reasons to believe that it is impossible to make accurate, nontrivial predictions concerning human behavior. Logic and reason are and remain priority, but unpredictability forces us to imagination and creative thinking. Indeed we are confronted with a new human landscape. The anomalies become the new normal. (shrink)

We prove that Standardization fails in every nontrivial universe definable in the nonstandard set theory BST, and that a natural characterization of the standard universe is both consistent with and independent of BST. As a consequence we obtain a formulation of nonstandard class theory in the ∈-language.

This paper addresses the ontological status of the body in the context of bodily practices in body-oriented disciplines, such as sport training, dance, and physiotherapy. Following Descartes’, Huss...

This monograph presents a general theory of weakly implicative logics, a family covering a vast number of non-classical logics studied in the literature, concentrating mainly on the abstract study of the relationship between logics and their algebraic semantics. It can also serve as an introduction to algebraic logic, both propositional and first-order, with special attention paid to the role of implication, lattice and residuated connectives, and generalized disjunctions. Based on their recent work, the authors develop a powerful uniform framework for (...) the study of non-classical logics. In a self-contained and didactic style, starting from very elementary notions, they build a general theory with a substantial number of abstract results. The theory is then applied to obtain numerous results for prominent families of logics and their algebraic counterparts, in particular for superintuitionistic, modal, substructural, fuzzy, and relevant logics. The book may be of interest to a wide audience, especially students and scholars in the fields of mathematics, philosophy, computer science, or related areas, looking for an introduction to a general theory of non-classical logics and their algebraic semantics. (shrink)

Drawing on current debates at the frontiers of economics, psychology, and political philosophy, this book explores the challenges that arise for liberal democracies from a confrontation between modern technologies and the bounds of human rationality. With the ongoing transition of democracy's underlying information economy into the digital space, threats of disinformation and runaway political polarization have been gaining prominence. Employing the economic approach informed by behavioral sciences' findings, the book's chief concern is how these challenges can be addressed while preserving (...) a commitment to democratic values and maximizing the epistemic benefits of democratic decision-making. The book has two key strands: it provides a systematic argument for building a behaviorally informed theory of democracy; and explores how scientific knowledge on quirks and bounds of human rationality can inform the design of resilient democratic institutions. Drawing these together, the book explores the centrality of the rationality assumption in the methodological debates surrounding behavioral sciences as exemplified by the dispute between neoclassical and behavioral economics; the role of rationality in democratic social choice; behaviorally informed paternalism as a response to the challenge of irrationality; and non-paternalistic avenues to increase the resilience of the democratic institutions towards political irrationality This book is invaluable reading for anyone interested in behavioral economics and sciences, political philosophy and the future of democracy. (shrink)

Social networks can influence people’s behaviour and therefore it is assumed that central individuals in social networks, also called “opinion leaders”, play a key role in driving change in agricultural and food systems. I analyse the outcomes of an intervention (that encouraged Sulawesi smallholder farmers to take a specific action toward improving the health of their cocoa trees) to assess the impact of engaging opinion leaders in agricultural programs that aim to change farmers’ practices. The intervention has been implemented through (...) (a) 18 opinion leaders identified by interviews and a social network survey of 1885 cocoa farmers; and (b) 18 randomly selected farmers who were not central in local social networks. The obtained social networks and statistical data were quantitatively analysed and the results were interpreted with input from the field staff. Contrary to expectations, the highly socially central opinion leaders were not more effective in promoting the initiative in their communities. On average, randomly selected low-centrality farmers convinced almost twice as many of their peers to take the recommended action as compared to the identified opinion leaders (17.1 versus 8.6) but the variation within the random group was also significantly higher. Importantly, while the identified opinion leaders were mostly senior men, women performed better in influencing others into taking action even when their centrality in local social networks of agricultural advice was lower. I discuss the implications of the conventional selection of perceived opinion leaders as model farmers for achieving sustainable and equitable change at scale in agriculture and propose practical alternatives. (shrink)