Although the concept of “pure knowledge” is one of the most interesting and singular concepts in the philosophical work of Vasily Seseman, it can only be presented after a comprehensive analysis of the philosopher’s numerous works devoted to ontological, epistemological and logical problems. Seseman believes that the main philosophical trends at the beginning of the twentieth century, namely neo-Kantianism, intuitionism and phenomenology, could not present this concept, although they did try. According to the philosopher, the main reason for the inability (...) of neo-Kantianism, intuitionism and phenomenology to start talking about pure knowledge is their inability to assert the essential difference between objective and non-objective knowledge. Sesemann pays special attention when substantiating his concept of “pure knowledge” to the difference between his approach and that of the founder of modern phenomenology. The philosopher points out that even Husserl, who concentrated attention on the specifics of inner experience, puts this specific, in the end, in dependence on the process of cognition and reflection, completely ignoring its ontological foundations. While pure knowledge, according to Seseman, is neither non-objective, nor objective knowledge, nor non-objective, nor objective being, it, in fact, is non-knowledge and non-being. It is precisely this understanding by the philosopher of this phenomenon that allows him to characterize pure knowledge as premiseless and limitless and, in general, as free from any ontological or epistemological determinations. However, on the other hand, Sesemann insists that the phenomenon of pure knowledge has the meaning of not just a regulatory idea, an infinitely distant ideal, but also a real constitutive meaning, as a principle that reveals and determines the human striving for knowledge as an interconnected and necessary process that ascends from the onto-gnoseological stage of non-objective knowledge to the epistemological, and then the logical stage of objective knowledge. (shrink)

The widespread assessment of the early period of Semyon L. Frank’s work as being influenced by German Neo-Kantianism is in need of a critical scrutiny. There are several reasons why the Russian philosopher’s interest in Neo-Kantianism merits a closer look. First, two systemic theories belonging to different trends exerted a decisive influence on Russian philosophy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: German Neo-Kantianism and Vladimir Solovyov’s school of all-unity. Second, Frank himself and the German Neo-Kantians considered Nicholas (...) of Cusa to be one of their forerunners and pointed out the importance of his mathematical ideas for their mathematical studies. Thirdly and lastly, Frank paid particular attention, especially in his formative period as a philosopher, to the leading trend in the early twentieth century, namely German Neo-Kantianism, which led some students of his work to believe that German Neo-Kantianism played the decisive role in Frank’s abandonment of Marxism in favour of religious ontology. Frank’s fundamental disagreement with German Neo-Kantianism was expressed in his work The Object of Knowledge in which he criticised the Neo-Kantian concepts of number and time. Although Frank rightly points out the one-sidedness of the Neo-Kantian definition of number, most notably in the works of the Marburg philosopher Paul Natorp, on the whole his criticism of the Neo-Kantian concept of number and time as being different from his own is not entirely convincing. In my opinion, Frank’s attempt to explain the abstract concept of number through a still more abstract concept of all-unity was not crowned with success because he ignored the experience of Christian theology and the Trinity dogma as well as the profound thoughts of the Rev. Pavel Florensky on this topic. (shrink)

The article brings to light the idea that Russian Neo-Kantians were among the first in the history of European philosophy to recognize the significance and originality of Hermann Cohen’s philosophical system. In particular, they identified two related points that revealed the ingenuity of the great Marburg thinker: the creation of a new philosophical system and the synthesis of Kant and Hegel within that system. The article also discusses the particular focus on the part of Russian philosophers at the turn of (...) the twentieth century on Cohen’s ethical theories. It is argued that the full value of the German-Jewish thinker’s work for Russian philosophy is only starting to be appreciated, and that the work of Russian Neo-Kantians will be a great help in this endeavor. (shrink)

One of the most important tasks in each philosophical tradition is to determine the methodological foundations and the target reason for research practice. Russian Russian neo-Kantianism raises several fundamental questions, including the criteria for distinguishing individual systems and the possibility of their integral reconstruction, the identification of the independence of Russian philosophers in overcoming the key contradictions of transcendental idealism, as well as discussions regarding the contribution of Russian neo-Kantians to the history of the development of Russian and European philosophy. (...) No less significant is the problem of uniting Russian neo-Kantianism in the context of the general tradition of neo-Kantianism in its development to the latest trends. The prospect of turning to the heritage of Russian philosophers is largely determined by the design of post-Kantianism and post-Neo-Kantianism. In the works of A.I. Vvedensky, and then B.A. Focht, V.E. Seseman, S.L. Rubinstein, and many others, the transition from German classical idealism in the prism of the specifics of Russian philosophy to the formation of a new understanding of transcendental philosophy and its tasks was marked. In many ways, the proposed solutions were distinguished by originality and obvious independence, but at the same time they were implicitly within the boundaries of the tradition of German neo-Kantian philosophy set by I. Kant. Comparing the latest prospects for the development of neo-Kantian methodology, it can be assumed, not without reason, that Russian neo-Kantianism has largely anticipated the latest trends. Russian neo-Kantians need to reveal the unity of the entire tradition for an objective assessment and subsequent actualization of the heritage of the Russian Neo-Kantians, accompanying this process with a historical and philosophical reconstruction of individual systems of philosophy, but also identifying those perspectives for philosophy that were designated by Russian thinkers. Russian neo-Kantians' problem field of self-determination within the framework of the history of Russian and European philosophy is proposed in the content of the article. Special attention is focused on the unity of methodological tasks and the target reason for the research practices of thinkers who at different stages of their development contributed to the formation of the phenomenon of Russian neo-Kantianism. (shrink)

This report of the roundtable that took place on 25 November 2021 at The Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia attempts to explain the obvious growth of interest in Neo-Kantian philosophy in general and the philosophy of the head of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism, Hermann Cohen, in particular. In their contributions, the participants in the discussion demonstrated that the current interest in Neo-Kantianism does not solely or even largely have to do with the history of philosophy but rather with the (...) relevance of many of the ideas of Marburg Neo-Kantianism for the modern theory of cognition, the philosophy of culture, ethics and the philosophy of religion. The course of the discussion highlighted the relevance of Cohen’s theory of cognition based on logic and rationality. The main outcome of the discussion was the conviction that the potential of many of Cohen’s ideas has yet to be fully tapped and there are grounds for considering them to be heralds of a new philosophy which, in many of its features, is only maturing. (shrink)

The article attempts to raise a question and give an answer to it regarding the evaluation of the philosophical creativity of Hermann Cohen, the German-Jewish thinker of the late XIX - early XX century. Moreover, following the philosophical style of Cohen himself, the question posed and discussed in the article is not idle, but it contains a hypothesis that forms our answer in a certain way. It is important to identify the difficulties and intellectual determinants that prevent the formation of (...) a clear and unambiguous answer. At the same time these difficulties contain an initiating moment for opening a philosophical debate. The historical and philosophical reasons that make the very beginning of the discussion of the question more complex, are considered. The article, of course, cannot claim to be an exhaustive answer on such a fundamental topic, which is contained in the designated question. But the article itself, and the articles following it in the section devoted to the work of Herman Cohen, may be indicate that the time for this discussion has come. (shrink)

Recently, psychologists have explored moral concepts including obligation, blame, and ability. While little empirical work has studied the relationships among these concepts, philosophers have widely assumed such a relationship in the principle that “ought” implies “can,” which states that if someone ought to do something, then they must be able to do it. The cognitive underpinnings of these concepts are tested in the three experiments reported here. In Experiment 1, most participants judge that an agent ought to keep a promise (...) that he is unable to keep, but only when he is to blame for the inability. Experiment 2 shows that such “ought” judgments correlate with judgments of blame, rather than with judgments of the agent’s ability. Experiment 3 replicates these findings for moral “ought” judgments and finds that they do not hold for nonmoral “ought” judgments, such as what someone ought to do to fulfill their desires. These results together show that folk moral judgments do not conform to a widely assumed philosophical principle that “ought” implies “can.” Instead, judgments of blame play a modulatory role in some judgments of obligation. (shrink)

This article defends the view that liars need not intend to deceive. I present common objections to this view in detail and then propose a case of a liar who can lie but who cannot deceive in any relevant sense. I then modify this case to get a situation in which this person lies intending to tell his hearer the truth and he does this by way of getting the hearer to recognize his intention to tell the truth by lying. (...) This case, and further cases that I develop from it, demonstrate that lying without the intention to deceive is possible. (shrink)

We conducted two experiments to determine whether common folk think that so-called _tell-tale sign_ bald-faced lies are intended to deceive—since they have not been tested before. These lies involve tell-tale signs (e.g. blushing) that show that the speaker is lying. Our study was designed to avoid problems earlier studies raise (these studies focus on a kind of bald-faced lie in which supposedly everyone knows that what the speaker says is false). Our main hypothesis was that the participants will think that (...) the protagonists from our examples lied without intending to deceive, and the results of our surveys confirmed this hypothesis: most of our participants rated tell-tale sign lies as lies not intended to deceive. Therefore, our analysis suggests that common folk think that some lies are not intended to deceive. (shrink)

This paper refines the received analysis of deceptive lies. This is done by assessing some cases of lies that are supposedly not intended to deceive and by arguing that they actually involve sophisticated strategies of intentional deception. These lies, that is, merely seem not to be intended to deceive and this is because our received analysis of deceptive lies is insufficiently sophisticated. We need to add these strategies to our analysis of deceptive lying. The argument ends by presenting this refined (...) analysis. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe psychological and philosophical literature exploring the role of social influence in moral judgments suggests that conformity in moral judgments is common and, in many cases, seems to b...

In their paper published in 2017 in Philosophical Psychology, Ronja Rutschmann and Alex Wiegmann introduce a novel kind of lies, the indifferent lies. According to them, these lies are not intended to deceive simply because the liars do not care whether their audience is going to believe them or not. It seems as if indifferent lies avoid the objections raised against other kinds of lies supposedly not intended to deceive. I argue that this is not correct. Indifferent lies, too, are (...) either intended to deceive or are not lies at all, since they do not involve genuine assertions. (shrink)

A satisfactory analysis of human deception must rule out cases where it is a mistake or an accident that person B was misled by person A's behavior. Therefore, most scholars think that deceivers must intend to deceive. This article argues that there is a better solution: rather than appealing to the deceiver's intentions, we should appeal to the function of their behavior. After all, animals and plants engage in deception, and most of them are not capable of forming intentions. Accordingly, (...) certain human behavior is deceptive if and only if its function is to mislead. This solves our problem because if the function of A's behavior was to mislead, B's ending up misled was not an accident or a mere mistake even if A did not intend to deceive B. (shrink)

In his 2018 AJP paper, Shlomo Cohen hints that deception could be a distinct subset of manipulation. We pursue this thought further, but by arguing that Cohen’s accounts of deception and manipulation are incorrect. Deception under uncertainty need not involve adding false premises to the victim’s reasoning but it must involve manipulating her response, and cases of manipulation that do not interfere with the victim’s reasoning, but rather utilize it, also exist. Therefore, deception under uncertainty must be constituted by covert (...) manipulation. (shrink)

This paper examines the connection between lies, deception, and self-deception. Understanding this connection is important because the consensus is that you cannot deceive yourself by lying since you cannot make yourself believe as true a proposition you already believe is false – and, as a liar, you must assert a proposition you believe is false. My solution involves refining our analysis of lying: people can lie by asserting what they confidently believe is true. Thus, self-deceivers need not replace one belief (...) with another; rather, they may just increase existing credence in a proposition they already believe is true. (shrink)

People are remarkably smart: They use language, possess complex motor skills, make nontrivial inferences, develop and use scientific theories, make laws, and adapt to complex dynamic environments. Much of this knowledge requires concepts and this study focuses on how people acquire concepts. It is argued that conceptual development progresses from simple perceptual grouping to highly abstract scientific concepts. This proposal of conceptual development has four parts. First, it is argued that categories in the world have different structure. Second, there might (...) be different learning systems that evolved to learn categories of differing structures. Third, these systems exhibit differential maturational course, which affects how categories of different structures are learned in the course of development. And finally, an interaction of these components may result in the developmental transition from perceptual groupings to more abstract concepts. This study reviews a large body of empirical evidence supporting this proposal. (shrink)

Le merite de cette etude est son refus de reduire la theologie d'Eckhart au developpement systematique d'une seule notion fondamentale. Mais cette theologie n'y est pas non plus concue comme une sorte d'eclectisme ou chacune de ces notions aurait sa place et trouverait successivement son tour. S'il y a chez Eckhart une notion fondamentale, c'est celle de Dieu, ou, plutot, c'est celle de l'ineffabilite de Dieu. Dieu est l'etre, assurement, mais n'est-il pas plutot l'Un? Ou l'Intellect? Comprendre qu'il est chacune (...) de ces perfections, absolument, purement, donc en apparence a l'exclusion des autres, c'est justement en quoi consiste l'ignorance transcendante qui eleve Dieu au-dela de toutes les affirmations. Vladimir Lossky a ainsi voulu mettre en lumiere le refus qu'oppose Eckhart a toute tentative d'inclure la divinite dans une notion qui se tiendrait pour suffisante a la definir. (shrink)

This is an introductory survey of the emerging theory of two new classes of (discrete, countable) groups, called hyperlinear and sofic groups. They can be characterized as subgroups of metric ultraproducts of families of, respectively, unitary groups U (n) and symmetric groups $S_{n},\ n\in {\Bbb N}$ . Hyperlinear groups come from theory of operator algebras (Connes' Embedding Problem), while sofic groups, introduced by Gromov, are motivated by a problem of symbolic dynamics (Gottschalk's Surjunctivity Conjecture). Open questions are numerous, in particular (...) it is still unknown if every group is hyperlinear and/or sofic. (shrink)

My dear Aleksandr!I have finally found some quiet time for a slow and attentive read of your article “The Beginning of the Black Notebooks.”1 I very much liked the article, especially for your trul...

The work tends to point out the deficiency of some opinions claiming simplified presentation of the promise as the act that directly rise obligation for the promisor. Promises, either in the moral or legal sphere, are based on communication and so form an order of dependent steps that indicates their procedural nature. These characteristics may differ to a lesser extent, depending on the legal systems, moral norms of the society and its technical level and its needs. In all these cases, (...) however, the procedural characteristics of promises, especially in conditional promises, as well as the promises in contractual relations, persists. In our analysis we wish to show that the consistent conception of promise has to take into account a step of acceptance. The outcome of this approach relativizes a strong distinction between promise and offer. (shrink)

The aim of this book is to present the fundamental theoretical results concerning inference rules in deductive formal systems. Primary attention is focused on: admissible or permissible inference rules the derivability of the admissible inference rules the structural completeness of logics the bases for admissible and valid inference rules. There is particular emphasis on propositional non-standard logics (primary, superintuitionistic and modal logics) but general logical consequence relations and classical first-order theories are also considered. The book is basically self-contained and special (...) attention has been made to present the material in a convenient manner for the reader. Proofs of results, many of which are not readily available elsewhere, are also included. The book is written at a level appropriate for first-year graduate students in mathematics or computer science. Although some knowledge of elementary logic and universal algebra are necessary, the first chapter includes all the results from universal algebra and logic that the reader needs. For graduate students in mathematics and computer science the book is an excellent textbook. (shrink)

Sorensen says that my assertion that p is a knowledge-lie if it is meant to undermine your justification for believing truly that ∼p, not to make you believe that p and that, therefore, knowledge-lies are not intended to deceive. It has been objected that they are meant to deceive because they are intended to make you more confident in a falsehood. In this paper, I propose a novel account according to which an assertion that p is a knowledge-lie if it (...) is intended not to provide evidence that p but to make you stop trusting all testimonies concerning whether p, which is how they undermine your testimonial knowledge. Because they are not intended to provide evidence that bears on the truth of p, they are not intended to make you more confident in a falsehood; therefore, knowledge-lies are not intended to deceive. This makes them a problem for the traditional account, which takes the intention to deceive as necessary for lying, and an interesting example of Kant's idea that allowing lies whenever one feels like it would bring it about that statements in general are not believed. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine a kind of delusion in which the patients judge that their occurrent thoughts are false and try to abandon them precisely because they are false, but fail to do so. I call this delusion transparent, since it is transparent to the sufferer that their thought is false. In explaining this phenomenon, I defend a particular two-factor theory of delusion that takes the proper integration of relevant reasoning processes as vital for thought-evaluation. On this proposal, which (...) is a refinement of Gerrans’s account of delusion as unsupervised by decontextualized processing, I can have all my reasoning processes working reliably and thus judge that my delusion is false but, if I cannot use their outputs when revising the thought itself, the delusion will persist. I also sketch how this framework explains some interesting cases of failed belief-revision in the general population in which people judge that ~p but nonetheless continue to believe that p. (shrink)

Self-deception makes best sense as a self-defensive mechanism by which the self protects itself from painful reality. Hence, we typically imagine self-deceivers as people who cause themselves to believe as true what they want to be true. Some self-deceivers, however, end up believing what they do not want to be true. Their behaviour can be explained on the hypothesis that the function of this behaviour is protecting the agent's perceived focal benefit at the cost of inflicting short-term harm, which is (...) a basis for a unified account of the phenomenon. In this paper, I argue that this view is narrow. Cases of altruistic, benevolent, and even self-punishing self-deception also exist. There, the function is not the self-deceiver's benefit. In fact, self-deception may have no function at all. Therefore, I put forward a novel account that analyses the function of self-deception on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

We examine some of Connes’ criticisms of Robinson’s infinitesimals starting in 1995. Connes sought to exploit the Solovay model S as ammunition against non-standard analysis, but the model tends to boomerang, undercutting Connes’ own earlier work in functional analysis. Connes described the hyperreals as both a “virtual theory” and a “chimera”, yet acknowledged that his argument relies on the transfer principle. We analyze Connes’ “dart-throwing” thought experiment, but reach an opposite conclusion. In S , all definable sets of reals are (...) Lebesgue measurable, suggesting that Connes views a theory as being “virtual” if it is not definable in a suitable model of ZFC. If so, Connes’ claim that a theory of the hyperreals is “virtual” is refuted by the existence of a definable model of the hyperreal field due to Kanovei and Shelah. Free ultrafilters aren’t definable, yet Connes exploited such ultrafilters both in his own earlier work on the classification of factors in the 1970s and 80s, and in Noncommutative Geometry, raising the question whether the latter may not be vulnerable to Connes’ criticism of virtuality. We analyze the philosophical underpinnings of Connes’ argument based on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and detect an apparent circularity in Connes’ logic. We document the reliance on non-constructive foundational material, and specifically on the Dixmier trace −∫ (featured on the front cover of Connes’ magnum opus) and the Hahn–Banach theorem, in Connes’ own framework. We also note an inaccuracy in Machover’s critique of infinitesimal-based pedagogy. (shrink)

In his article, Grossmann argues that, in the context of human cooperative caregiving, heightened fearfulness in children and human sensitivity to fear in others are adaptive traits. I offer and briefly defend a rival hypothesis: Heightened fearfulness among infants and young children is a maladaptive trait that did not get deselected in the process of evolution because human sensitivity to fear in others mitigates its disadvantageous effects to a sufficient extent.

The article deals with the issues of comparing the teachings of Tolstoy and Lao-zi according to the criterion of palingenesis, which is the basis for the construction of the entire ideological corpus of the most important treatise of Taoism “Tao de jing”. Lao-zi formulated the lapidary formula of palingenesis in the fortieth zhang of this treatise, recreating a picture of the harmonization of the Middle Kingdom, arguing that return is the movement of the Tao, and weakening is the action of (...) the Tao. The principle of palingenesis is one of the fundamental principles for which Tolstoy uses Christological vocabulary, and Lao-zi uses embryological vocabulary. The choice of the palingenesis criterion for comparative analysis of the teachings is due to the fact that the latter works as an immutable law when setting the task of recreating harmony in social chaos. Based on the assessments of the content of the zhangs of the “Tao de jing” canon, a representative line of palingenesis elements is built: the category of knowledge/truth; the category of ignorance; the category of simplicity; the category of naturalness; the category of “baby”; the category of non-action; the category of nonviolence. The principles of Taoism are not expressed by Tolstoy with a research sequence in logical definitions, but appear as categories and trends, working in the worldview of the Yasnaya Polyana sage. In the works “What is my faith?”, “Sayings of the Chinese sage Lao-Tse”, “Non-doing”, Tolstoy's teaching is presented in its entirety and is therefore convenient for comparison with the Taoist classics. It is noted that Tolstoy's conceptual idea is based on the desire to convert people to the good - unity with all people. This orientation towards the good is nothing else than the return to man of his original nature, on the way to which the principle of palingenesis associated with the boycott of the civilization of violence is realized. The conducted research has shown that in the teachings of Lao-zi and Tolstoy, which record the experience of theoretical exploration of the world, the categories of palingenesis are common to the Russian and Chinese spirit. (shrink)