The long Nineteenth Century spans a host of important philosophical movements: romanticism, idealism, socialism, Nietzscheanism, and phenomenology, to mention a few. Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Marx are well-known names from this period. This, however, was also a transformative period for women philosophers in German-speaking countries and contexts. Their works are less well-known, yet offer stimulating and path-breaking contributions to nineteenth-century thought. In this period, women philosophers explored a wide range of philosophical topics and styles. Throughout the movements of romanticism, (...) idealism, socialism, and phenomenology, women philosophers helped shape philosophy's agenda and provided unique approaches to existential, political, aesthetic, and epistemological questions. While during the Nineteenth Century women continued to be (largely) excluded from formal education and positions, they developed ways of philosophizing that was accessible, intuitive, and activist in spirit. The present volume makes available to English-language readers--often for the first time--the works of nine significant women philosophers, with the hope of stimulating further interest in and scholarship on their works. The Editors' introductions offer a comprehensive introduction to the contributions of women philosophers in the period, but also to individual figures and movements. The translations are furnished with explanatory footnotes and are designed to be accessible to students as well as scholars. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is that of discussing some recent antipositivist theses, with specific reference to the arguments that focus on the alleged incapability of legal positivism to understand and explain the complex normative structure of constitutional states. One of the central tenets of legal positivism (in its guise of “methodological” or “conceptual” positivism) is the theory of the separation between law and morality. On the assumption that in contemporary legal systems, constitutional law represents a point of intersection between (...) law and basic moral values, antipositivists contrast legal positivism with two main arguments. First, on a more general level, the positivist theory of the separation between law and morality is questioned; then, and consequently, the “neutrality thesis” in the juristic study of law is rejected. The author discusses both these antipositivist arguments, and offers a brief defence of methodological positivism. (shrink)

In the paper I exploit Frege's notions of sense and synonymity in order to amend the slingshot argument. The main emendation is to replace the assumption about logical equivalence by an assumption about synonymity. While the replaced assumption begs the question about the reference of sentences, the replacing assumption has much more theoretical support from Frege's general conception of sense and reference and the relation between them. In the paper I use a specific notion of synonymity which I believe is (...) faithful to Frege's discussion of the subject. I notice that if a stronger (and to my mind implausible) notion of synonymity is used, my version of the argument fails. The failure is explained by showing that this stronger notion of synonymity enables the assignment of facts, and not truth values, as the references of sentences. (shrink)

First published in 1999, this volume focuses on the relation of supervenience which plays a crucial role in contemporary philosophical discussions in diverse fields including the philosophy of mind, ethics and aesthetics. Contrasting the material and conceptual worlds, Dalia Drai questions what we are committed to when we adopt a position affirming determination but denying reduction. The answer Drai develops is that in both cases this position commits us to an anti-realist approach with regard to the supervenient domains.

The article analyzes the social representations of ICTs’ appropriation for community empowerment by social movements. The study includes two recent Latin American student social movements: the Mexican #YoSoy132 and the Chilean student movement. Discourse analysis was used to examine interviews with participants in these social movements as well as other texts associated with their episodes of collective action. The discourse analysis was focused on four main dimensions of the social representations of ICTs’ appropriation: (1) the interrelationships between the technological and (...) the socio-political and cultural dimensions; (2) the tension between a visibility-centered and an articulating-focused use of ICTs; (3) the tension between the individual and the collective dimensions; and (4) the articulation between ICTs-based collective action and offline one. The findings indicate that the online/offline and the visibility/articulation tensions are relevant dimensions, in an articulated way, of the social representation of ICTs’ appropriation for collective empowerment. The results also indicate that the sociopolitical goals of the social movements are a central mediation for the process of configuration of the social representation, as it is proved by the importance of the individual/collective tension for the process. (shrink)

Why must critical congenital heart disease (CCHD) screening be legislated? This was my first reaction to Hom and colleagues' (2016) analysis. As the authors explain, pulse oximetry is painless and...

There are two problems discussed in the article. The first one is the phenomenon of mass literature and semiotic approach to it. According to Lotman, mass literature of the 20th (and 21st) centuries is not so much an object of semiotics as of sociology. However, it is possible to consider mass literature of earlier times as an object of semiotics of culture. Lotman discusses Russian mass literature of the 18th and 19th centuries as such an object in the article “Massovaya (...) literatura kak istoriko-kulturnaya problema”. Considering mass literature a dynamic factor of the semiotic system, Lotman distinguishes its main features: a high degree of automatization and syndrome of retardedness. In the second part of the article the author discusses the phenomenon of mass poetry in contemporary Lithuania. This kind of mass literature is much more similar to the phenomenon discussed by Lotman than to the mass literature of the postmodernist epoch. Lithuanian mass poetry employs the codes of national romanticism (the end of 19th century) and considers itself an ignored part of high culture. This sort of poetry unknown to Western societies exhibits archaising tendencies in the modern postsoviet culture. (shrink)

Nassar distinguishes an understudied philosophical tradition that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, traces its development, and argues for its continued significance. She shows how four key thinkers, whom she calls the 'romantic empiricists', developed a distinctive approach to the study of nature, which culminated in an ecological understanding of nature and the human place within it. Nassar contends that the romantic empiricist insights and approaches remain crucial for us today, as we seek to address (...) the environmental crisis.--. (shrink)

Este análisis teórico busca analizar, por una parte, en la inmersión de la obra del pensador galés Raymond Williams y, por otro lado, el acercamiento a lo que podemos denominar como Estudios Culturales Británicos, una propuesta metodológica y política plausible en virtud de pensar nuestro presente con una mirada y una sensibilidad diferente a lo que ampliamente se ha caracterizado como «presentismo» o futuros cancelados. Para ello, retomar la obra de un pensador parcialmente olvidado en las últimas décadas, no solo (...) nos permitirá atisbar posibilidades de pensar futuros diversos, sino que nos obligará a tomar en consideración una caja de herramientas, sugerente, que terminó defendiendo con matices, contradicciones e incorporaciones hasta el final de su vida en 1988. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es criticar la representación tradicional del trabajo periodístico de Karl Marx, habitualmente olvidado por un canon engañoso que sólo asume sus artículos al precio de convertirlos en una obra menor. Uno de los problemas de esta concepción tradicional es que disocia sus contribuciones teóricas y económicas del desarrollo histórico del pensamiento del autor . Intentaremos señalar la importancia del periodismo maduro de Karl Marx en dos áreas: en la construcción de los conceptos centrales de su (...) crítica contra el capitalismo y en la producción de cartografías políticas para intervenir en el conflicto de clases. Este artículo plantea varias hipótesis y afirmaciones tentativas sobre el periodismo de Karl Marx que pueden servir como punto de partida de una investigación crítica. (shrink)

In contrast to the previously widespread view that Kant's work was largely in dialogue with the physical sciences, recent scholarship has highlighted Kant's interest in and contributions to the life sciences. Scholars are now investigating the extent to which Kant appealed to and incorporated insights from the life sciences and considering the ways he may have contributed to a new conception of living beings. The scholarship remains, however, divided in its interest: historians of science are concerned with the content of (...) Kant's claims, and the ways in which they may or may not have contributed to the emerging science of life, while historians of philosophy focus on the systematic justifications for Kant's claims, e.g., the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of Kant's statement that living beings are mechanically inexplicable. My aim in this paper is to bring together these two strands of scholarship into dialogue by showing how Kant's methodological concerns (specifically, his notion of reflective judgment) contributed to the ontological concern with life as a distinctive object of study. I argue that although Kant's explicit statement was that biology could not be a science, his implicit and more fundamental claim was that the study of living beings necessitates a distinctive mode of thought, a mode that is essentially analogical. I consider the implications of this view, and argue that it is by developing a new methodology for grasping organized beings that Kant makes his most important contribution to the new science of life. (shrink)

The current section of issues 12/2021-13/2022 of History of Communism in Europe deals with East-East and East-South relations among socialist countries and countries of the Global South. Exploring local specificities and global ambitions, the papers bring to light the beginnings of the socialist developmental projects, and bilateral relations that overcome the strict framework of the monolithic socialist bloc.

This paper deals with the Romanian experience as a developer of projects and investor of resources in the countries of the Global South during the 1970s. It follows the country’s grand narrative in its Communist Party’s documents, as compared to that of the statements of the international meetings of the commu­nist parties in the 1960s and 1970s and to that present in the party’s newspaper Scinteia, and in contrast to documents of the political executive committee of the Romanian Communist Party (...) collected from the Romanian National Archives and the Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives. The purpose of this research is to analyse the Romanian solidarity messages in the party discourse, their degree of compliance with the solidarity messages of the rest of the countries in the socialist camp, actual actions of humanitarian assistance in the countries of the Global South, and how those actions and messages were filtered and transmitted to the Romanian readers of print press. The results indicate a discrepancy between public discourse and archival discourse on the one hand, and the nature of information disclosed to the public, on the other. (shrink)

One of the most significant moments in the development of German idealism is Schelling's break from his mentor Fichte. On account of its significance, there have been numerous studies examining the origin and meaning of this transition in Schelling's thought. Not one study, however, considers Goethe's influence on Schelling's development. This is surprising given the fact that in the fall of 1799 Goethe and Schelling meet every day for a week, to go through and edit what came to be Schelling's (...) most path-breaking work. This paper considers Goethe's influence on the development of Schelling's thought, and argues that it was by appropriating Goethe's idea of metamorphosis that Schelling was able to put forth a conception of nature as independent from the mind. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to understand what is involved in the claim that a mental state in general and love in particular, is based on reasons. Love, like many other mental states, can be evaluated in various ways: it can be considered appropriate, deserved, enriching, perverse, destructive etc. but this does not mean that love is based on reasons. In this paper I present and defend a test that a mental state has to satisfy if it is to (...) count as based on reasons. This test will be used to construct a new argument in favour of Frankfurt's position that love is not based on reasons. (shrink)

Contra widespread readings of Karoline von Günderrode’s 1805 “Idea of the Earth ” as a creative adaptation of Schelling’s philosophy of nature, this article proposes that “Idea of the Earth” furnishes a moral account of the human relation to the natural world, one which does not map onto any of the more well-known romantic or idealist accounts of the human-nature relation. Specifically, I argue that “Idea of the Earth” responds to the great Enlightenment question concerning the human vocation, but from (...) a distinctive romantic-idealist angle. I begin by demonstrating the influence of Fichte’s 1800 Vocation of Humanity on Günderrode’s thinking, which involves an investigation of both Fichte’s text and Günderrode’s critical response to it. I then turn to “Idea of the Earth” where I analyse Günderrode’s understanding of nature and the self in light of her critique of Fichte, and thereby distinguish her position from Fichte’s and from the position espoused by her fellow romantics and idealists. By reading “Idea of the Earth” alongside Fichte’s text and Günderrode’s remarks on it, this article sheds new light on both Günderrode’s understanding and defence of Naturphilosophie – against Fichte’s critique of it – and her distinctive contribution to romantic philosophies of nature. (shrink)

Practical reasoning is often described as weighing reasons. When one deliberates about what to do one puts all the reasons for the action on one side and all the reasons against the action on the other side. The balance between both sides determines the outcome of the deliberation. Assuming that this description is correct, the next question is how the different reasons for and against the action determine the outcome of the deliberation. This is the place where the notion of (...) weight enters. The natural answer is that every reason for or against an action has a weight, and the weights of all the reasons involved determine what one should do. The aim of this paper is to argue that this answer is wrong; weights of reasons have no role in a theory of reasoning. (shrink)

Belief merging aims at combining several pieces of information coming from different sources. In this paper we review the works on belief merging of propositional bases. We discuss the relationship between merging, revision, update and confluence, and some links between belief merging and social choice theory. Finally we mention the main generalizations of these works in other logical frameworks.

The article is devoted to reflections on the future of the humanistic paradigm that underlies modern culture, and an analysis of the views of modern philosophers and historians on this scientific problem. Modern science and technology are evolving very rapidly. Society is trying to keep up with their development and modernize culture to meet new requirements. The foundation of modern culture is humanism as a system of views and values associated with the recognition of the central role of man, as (...) well as with the belief in the need to coordinate strategies for solving any socio-cultural issues with the essence of human. At the same time, a person in the context of a humanistic worldview is certainly perceived as a bearer of the individual “I”, acts as the basis of personality. Science and technology are still developing within the framework of a humanistic system of values, and they also set ambitious goals based on such value. However, there are already very significant contradictions between the values of humanism and scientific achievements. Consequently, there is a need for a fundamental analysis of this situation. It seems that technology poses a significant threat to humanism, and this threat can be realized in several scenarios. On the one hand, modern science undermines “faith” in humanism when it claims that despite advances in the analysis of the functioning of the brain, it has failed to find the very center of personality, the individual “I” of a person, on the basis of which the humanistic paradigm is built. That is, science has failed to figure out how electrical impulses turn into consciousness. And if we assume that no “I” actually exists, that this is only a certain function of the brain to create a holistic picture of the world, then a person can be considered simply as one of the algorithms. Then it does not matter on what basis this algorithm works, that is, “live” and artificial algorithms in fact are not fundamentally different. Such considerations, of course, leave humanism no chance. Such reasoning, of course, leaves no chance for humanism. On the other hand, the “humanistic” goals of humanity can lead to its complete or partial transformation into a certain “super-humanity”. And attempts to define the “spiritual” values of such a future “new formation” look like a fundamentally insoluble task. So, from the point of view of determining the future states of humanism, modern philosophers have something to think about. (shrink)

In the paper I exploit Frege's notions of sense and synonymity in order to amend the slingshot argument. The main emendation is to replace the assumption about logical equivalence by an assumption about synonymity. While the replaced assumption begs the question about the reference of sentences, the replacing assumption has much more theoretical support from Frege's general conception of sense and reference and the relation between them. In the paper I use a specific notion of synonymity which I believe is (...) faithful to Frege's discussion of the subject. I notice that if a stronger notion of synonymity is used, my version of the argument fails. The failure is explained by showing that this stronger notion of synonymity enables the assignment of facts, and not truth values, as the references of sentences. (shrink)

ABSTRACT We consider in this work the problem of iterated belief revision. We propose a family of belief revision operators called revision with memory operators and we give a logical (both syntactical and semantical) characterization of these operators. They obey what we call the principle of strong primacy of update: when one revises his beliefs by a new evidence, then all possible worlds that satisfy this new evidence become more reliable than those that do not. We show that those operators (...) have a satisfying behaviour concerning the iteration of the revision process. Then we provide four particular operators of this family. (shrink)

La interpretación es un proceso cognitivo peculiar: distinto, por una parte, de la explicación cientificopositiva; por otra, de la comprensión empática y también del entender en sus distintas formas. EI proceso interpretative tiene lugar por el sujeto, que en ese momento hace de intérprete, a partir de un objeto en un contexto determinado, pero sobre la imagen del objeto, que es en realidad el referencial; la dación de significados connotativos constituye el interpretado, el cual es devuelto al contexto como referido. (...) En la neointerpretación o en la reinterpretación, ese objeto referido es entonces neoreferencial. EI proceso interpretativo es estocástico y, por eso, con la finalidad de reducir la entropía del sistema, podría ser interminable. EI sistema compuesto por objeto, imagen del objeto, intérprete e interpretado es,siempre, en consecuencia, dishomeostático. (shrink)

En este artículo se traza una distinción clara y precisa entre geometría pura y geometría aplicada dentro del marco de las reflexiones sobre los fundamentos de la geometría promovidas por la aparición de geometrías no-euclidianas y en el contexto de las discusiones mantenidas por los empiristas lógicos sobre la estructura general de las teorías empíricas. De manera más particular, se defiende, tal y como proponen los empiristas lógicos, que una geometría pura es un sistema formal que no nos dice nada (...) sobre la realidad física, mientras que una geometría aplicada es una teoría empírica, una teoría física (una teoría del espacio) que resulta de dotar de significado a una geometría matemática. Para sostener esta tesis se recurre, en parte, a ciertas ideas expresadas por Einstein sobre la teoría general de la relatividad. Por último, si bien parece que esta imagen de la estructura de una geometría física es relativamente adecuada, se insiste en la tesis de que el error principal de los empiristas lógicos estaría entonces en pretender hacer de ella el carácter predominante de la estructura de las teorías científicas en general. (shrink)

Blackburn argues that moral supervenience in conjunction with the lack of entailments from naturalistic to moral judgments poses a challenge to moral realism. Klagge and McFetridge try to avert the challenge by appealing to synthetically necessary connections between natural and moral properties. Blackburn rejoins that, even if there are such connections, the challenge still remains. We remain agnostic on the question whether there are such connections, but argue against Blackburn that, if there are indeed such connections, then the challenge to (...) moral realism, properly phrased, does not hold up. (shrink)

Our study seeks a better understanding of how Spanish-speaking cancer patients communicate about their personal experiences with cancer. We examine the use of metaphor in narratives contributed to an online forum for Spanish speakers afflicted with various types of cancer. Specifically, we identify, quantify and discuss three categories of metaphors: violence, journey and other. Our study expands prior work on cancer communication by examining a language other than English, by focusing on how cancer victims communicate among themselves, and by examining (...) how cancer narratives discuss concerns about personal experiences with this disease. Research thus far has focused on English. The work also expands on what is known about how people use the metaphor ‘in the wild’. (shrink)

Among the most used expressions in scholarly articles concerning collective memory, is “dealing with the past”, or its more specific alternative, “dealing with the traumatic past”. This is a rather inexact formulation, because what scholars, artist, curators deal with is not the past in itself but the manner in which it is narrated and represented, or remembered, reconstructed. A series of questions are triggered by this statement: who “remembers”, for what purpose, with what consequences? The scope of this yearbook is (...) to present two different ways of approaching the construction of collective remembrance: the authoritarian one and the post-authoritarian one. Th e articles discuss case studies of collective memory and identity building in Communist Romania, comparative studies of participative art in post-authoritarian regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, or intricate artistic approaches of traumatic collective memories. (shrink)

The term transnationalism has developed into a concept with a broad meaning, defining anything having to do with transgressing the national boundaries. There are limits to it: it has more to do with non-statal actors, it relates to trans-border cultural, political and economic spaces, and it follows identity-defining experiences of individuals who have lived a complex, international life. The current issue of History of Communism in Europe is entitled Transnational Biographies. Destinies at the Crossroads before and after the Cold War (...) and deals especially with the latter situation. The volume comprises a rich diversity of articles that explore adventurous biographies, enriching the studies of transnationalism. (shrink)