With this nuanced and interdisciplinary work, political theorist Mihaela Mihai tackles several interrelated questions: How do societies remember histories of systemic violence? Who is excluded from such histories' cast of characters? And what are the political costs of selective remembering in the present? Building on insights from political theory, social epistemology, and feminist and critical race theory, Mihai argues that a double erasure often structures hegemonic narratives of complex violence: of widespread, heterogeneous complicity and of "impure" resistances, not (...) easily subsumed to exceptionalist heroic models. In dialogue with care ethicists and philosophers of art, she then suggests that such narrative reductionism can be disrupted aesthetically through practices of "mnemonic care," that is, through the hermeneutical labor that critical artists deliver—thematically and formally—within communities' space of meaning. Empirically, the book examines both consecrated and marginalized artists who tackled the memory of Vichy France, communist Romania, and apartheid South Africa. Despite their specificities, these contexts present us with an opportunity to analyze similar mnemonic dynamics and to recognize the political impact of dissenting artistic production. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, the book intervenes in debates over collective responsibility, historical injustice, and the aesthetics of violence within political theory, memory studies, social epistemology, and transitional justice. (shrink)

The notion of computation has changed the world more than any previous expressions of knowledge. However, as know-how in its particular algorithmic embodiment, computation is closed to meaning. Therefore, computer-based data processing can only mimic life’s creative aspects, without being creative itself. AI’s current record of accomplishments shows that it automates tasks associated with intelligence, without being intelligent itself. Mistaking the abstract for the concrete has led to the religion of “everything is an output of computation”—even the humankind that conceived (...) the computer. The hypostatized role of computers explains the increased dependence on them. The convergence machine called deep learning is only the most recent form through which the deterministic theology of the machine claims more than what it actually is: extremely effective data processing. A proper understanding of complexity, as well as the need to distinguish between the reactive nature of the artificial and the anticipatory nature of the living are suggested as practical responses to the challenges posed by machine theology. (shrink)

Introduction: Play, Power, and the Western Mentality Whereas play has always had an important, if sometimes unthemat- ized, role in Western literary ...

Over the last two centuries, the relationship between philosophy and science has completely broken down, so the question we are confronted with is: How can we develop a new philosophy, which will influence science decisively? The physicists of the last century rejected their contemporary philosophy. They considered that “philosophy today is dead” (Hawking and Mlodinow 2010). However, we believe that the great scientific problems are always philosophical, and only philosophical problems. Therefore, these problems can be solved only by philosophers and (...) scientists who operate at the greatest level of thinking: that of the “paradigm of thinking”. In fact, these great scientific problems can usually be solved by changing the “paradigm of thinking” for scientists. This book furnished more applications of the “epistemologically different worlds” (that replaced the “world”/”universe” – in their previous books (2008, 2010, 2011, etc.), the authors indicated that the notion of the world/universe is wrong). Following Aristotle’s “Prime Mover” (or the “Unmoved Mover”), we stop the regress ad infinitum by discovering the first EW, the EW0 (the Hypernothing). Even if one EW does not exist for any EDW, the Hypernothing was the first EW and all other EDWs correspond to the EW0. Chapter 2 is about the “Hypernothing”. The other chapters continue our works of applying the EDWs to different concepts/areas of Physics: quantum mechanics, elementary particles, thermodynamics (with its main notion, “entropy”), etc. In the last chapter, knowing that Einstein’s special and general theory of relativity are very correct (but in a book 2016 we showed that “spacetime” cannot ontologically exist), we re-write both theories without “spacetime”. Content, Introduction and Chapter 1, FREE at https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=gabriel+vacariu&rh=i %3Aaps%2Ck%3Agabriel+vacariu . (shrink)

In his article “Issues of Pragmaticism” published in 1905, in The Monist, Charles S. Peirce complains that “Logicians have been at fault in giving Vagueness the go-by, so far as not even to analyze it.” That same year, occupying himself with the consequences of “Critical commonsensism,” he affirmed, “I have worked out the logic of vagueness with something like completeness,” a statement that causes the majority of the commentators on his work, including the editors of the Collected Papers to ask (...) where this logic is to be found. The fever for finding Peirce's manuscripts is fed by the hope of some researchers of discovering the logic of vagueness, a hope that has grown since Carolyn Eisele's publication of his mathematical works. Others - and I count myself among them - believe that in reality this is a matter of something already known. That is, they interpret the affirmation ending the paragraph of reproach addressed to logicians, “The present writer has done his best to work out the Stechiology, Critic, and Methodeutik of the subject,” as a tripartite semiotic of the vague, still limited, according to Peirce's older works, to symbols, that is, to the signs of natural language examined from the perspective of logic. (shrink)

Vehement resentment and indignation are rife in societies emerging from dictatorship or civil conflict. How should institutions deal with these emotions? Arguing for the need to recognize and constructively engage negative public emotions, Mihaela Mihai contributes theoretically to the growing field of transitional justice. Drawing on an extensive philosophical literature and case studies of democratic transitions in South Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe, her book rescues negative emotions from their bad reputation and highlights the obstacles and the opportunities (...) such emotions create for democracy. By valorizing negative emotions, either through the judicial review of transitional justice bills or the criminal trials of victimizers, institutions realize the value of respect and concern for all while contributing to a public culture hospitable to democracy. (shrink)

Finitism is given an interpretation based on two ideas about strings (sequences of symbols): a replacement principle extracted from Hilberts class 2 can be justified by means of an additional finitistic choice principle, thus obtaining a second equational theory . It is unknown whether is strictly stronger than since 2 may coincide with the class of lower elementary functions.

The paper seeks to contribute to the transitional justice literature by overcoming the Democracy v. Justice debate. This debate is normatively implausible and prudentially self-defeating. Normatively, transitional justice will be conceptualised as an imperative of democratic equal concern. Prudentially, it can prevent further violence and provide an opportunity for initiating processes of democratic emotional socialisation. The resentment and indignation animating transitions should be acknowledged as markers of a sense of justice. As such, they can help the reproduction of democracy. However, (...) their public expression must be institutionally filtered through democratic norms. The consistent institutional instantiation of equal respect can educate and recuperate negative emotions for democracy. (shrink)

We show that the set of natural numbers has an exponential diophantine definition in the rationals. It follows that the corresponding decision problem is undecidable.

The old humanistic model, aiming at universalism, ecumenism, and the globalization of various Western systems of values and beliefs, is no longer adequate - even if it pleads for an ever-wider inclusion of other cultural perspectives and for intercultural dialogue. In contrast, it would be wise to retain a number of its assumptions and practices - which it incidentally shares with humanistic models outside the Western world. We must now reconsider and remap it in terms of a larger, global reference (...) frame. This anthology does just that, thus contributing to a new field of study and practice that could be called intercultural humanism. (shrink)

Relations between some theories of semigroups (also known as theories of strings or theories of concatenation) and arithmetic are surveyed. In particular Robinson's arithmetic Q is shown to be mutually interpretable with TC, a weak theory of concatenation introduced by Grzegorczyk. Furthermore, TC is shown to be interpretable in the theory F studied by Tarski and Szmielewa, thus confirming their claim that F is essentially undecidable.

We give a model-theoretic proof of the fact that for all infinite Abelian groups P ≠ NP in the sense of binary nondeterminism. This result has been announced 1994 by Christine Gabner.

Theoria, Volume 87, Issue 5, Page 1322-1341, October 2021.

In an effort to delineate a more plausible account of political change, this paper reads Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory as a corrective to exaggerated enthusiasm about the emancipatory force of reflection. This revised account valorizes both Bourdieu’s insights into the acquired, embodied, durable nature of the political habitus and judgment theorists’ trust in individuals’ reflection as a perpetual force of novelty and spontaneity in the public sphere of democratic societies. The main purpose of this exercise is to reveal the mix (...) of continuity and discontinuity that is characteristic of most transformations in the political common sense of democratic societies. In other words, this paper seeks to offer a more complex understanding of the inertial character of reflective judgment and of the difficulty of shifting the categories that define the political common sense. By cross-pollinating the ever-growing literature on reflective judgment and Bourdieu’s sombre theory of politics, we can better calibrate our expectations regarding the possibilities of significant democratic transformation in late capitalist societies. (shrink)

This essay’s starting point is Judith Shklar’ diagnosis of a pathology marring democratic societies: complex injustices passing as “misfortunes” that nobody feels responsible for. I propose that denunciations can reveal the political nature of the suffering that everyone conveniently ignores, thus advancing democratic accountability. While denunciations can target various invisible injustices and take many forms, this essay deals with the case of societies with an unmastered past of violence. In order to avoid taking responsibility for the plight of victims, the (...) past is often redescribed in the language of “catastrophe” or “necessity.” Building on Hannah Arendt’s views on spectatorship and storytelling, this essay analyses theatrical denunciations addressing the wider community. Theatre—professional or amateur—can repoliticise neutralised areas of social interaction and transform passive onlookers into reflective spectators. The Argentinean performance of escraches and Thomas Bernhard’s play Heldenplatz are discussed as examples of successful political denunciations communicated in dramaturgical form. (shrink)

Starting from the traditional approaches to teaching science and religion we discuss modern pedagogical methods based on inquiry. We explore whether and how the teaching methods specific to each discipline may benefit in the teaching of the other.

Many voices and stories have been systematically silenced in interpersonal conversations, political deliberations and historical narratives. Recalcitrant and interrelated patterns of epistemic, political, cultural and economic marginalisation exclude individuals as knowers, citizens, agents. Two questions lie at the centre of this article, which focuses on the epistemically – but also politically, culturally and economically – dominant: How can we sabotage the dominant’s investment in their own ignorance of unjust silencing? How can they be seduced to become acute perceivers of others’ (...) experiences of oppression and reckon with their own participation in it? Situated at the intersection between political theory, aesthetics and epistemology, this article contributes a so-far-unexplored suggestion: that certain literary works create epistemic friction between shared, entrenched prejudices on the one hand, and representations of epistemic exclusion or authority, on the other. Their power to illuminate ideational, moral and experiential limitations makes them valuable tools in problematising, rendering visible and dislocating epistemic injustice, as well as other marginalisations it intersects with. To advance this argument, the article relies on insights from aesthetics, unpacking fiction’s multidimensional epistemic potential. Audre Lorde exemplifies literary works’ ability to seductively sabotage bias and provide audiences with prosthetic visions of unfamiliar experiences of marginalisation. (shrink)

His philosophical thinking was influenced by his legal knowledge, but when reading carefully his articles and papers we can notice a detachment from the philosophical premises in the development of the concepts of law. Like Del Vecchio, Djuvara makes no difference between law and philosophy and therefore the legal philosophy looks like a completion of law, these two concepts being comprehended only by a general, epistemological and philosophical approach; the issues related to the philosophy of law are not only isolated (...) from the big philosophical issues but there are closely related to them so that the philosophy of lawintegrates completely in the general philosophy. (shrink)

This study explores the social representations of cloning taking in consideration a series of associated emotions and the subjects' level of religiosity. The participants in our study consisted of 356 subjects of different ages and professions. The data collection included four tasks for the subjects to fill in. First, they had to fill in a free task association: starting from the stimulus-word „cloning" they had to associate five words or expressions, and then rank these five words according to their importance. (...) The second task required polarity association for each of the expressions; thus, the subjects had to evaluate them as positive, negative or neutral in relation to „cloning". The third task was a questionnaire evaluating the level of religiosity (28 items). The last task included a list of 35 emotions (positive as well as negative) which subjects had to associate on a scale from 1 to 10 with the bio-medical procedure of cloning. The data analysis was focused on comparing the different groups defined in relation to the level of religiosity, affective polarity, age and level of education. We used the prototipicality technique, developed in the framework of the social representation's theory, in order to identify the elements of the social representations of cloning belonging to the previously mentioned variables. . (shrink)

It can be argued that only the equational theories of some sub-elementary function algebras are finitistic or intuitive according to a certain interpretation of Hilbert's conception of intuition. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relation of those restricted forms of equational reasoning to classical quantifier logic in arithmetic. The conclusion reached is that Edward Nelson's ‘predicative arithmetic’ program, which makes essential use of classical quantifier logic, cannot be justified finitistically and thus requires a different philosophical foundation, possibly (...) as a restricted form of logicism. (shrink)

When referring to values as “general principles of desirability” or as “social cohesion binders”, one should bear in mind that such notions contribute decisively to the shaping and crystallization of social representations. It would be improper to believe that there may be in-depth studies upon people, ideas and events, as this approach disregards the fact that social representations have the capacity of being strongly anchored in the dynamics of relational processes, to the symbolic relationships specific to a given social field, (...) to the values that constitute the eloquent expression of this dynamics and this specific field of research. An eloquent example in this respect is the way in which the social representation of leaders appears; data show that there is harmony between the image of power the leaders have or could have and the axiological dimensions of the group participating in the elaboration of such an image. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s mention of the term “phenomenology” in his writings from the middle period has long been regarded as puzzling by interpreters. It is striking to see him concerned with that philosophical approach, generally regarded as foreign to the tradition of Russell and Frege, in which Wittgenstein’s thought is commonly taken to have primarily developed. On the basis of partially unpublished material from Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, the thesis provides a reconstruction of the rationale and fate of his conception of phenomenology, which he (...) advances after his return to Cambridge in 1929. On the one hand, that conception is tributary to his longstanding task to philosophically clarify the workings of language. On the other hand, Wittgenstein’s concern with phenomenology develops against the background of his reconsideration of the resources for clarification provided by his early philosophy. His 1929 paper “Some Remarks on Logical Form” is elucidatory in this respect. The paper expresses a dissatisfaction with the Tractarian account of logical grammar and pleas for a “logical investigation of the phenomena themselves”. That plea echoes Wittgenstein’s notion of a “phenomenological language” in the manuscripts from the same period. The thesis addresses the intricacies of that notion and the reasons for Wittgenstein’s coming to criticize it. By contrast to the prevalent view in the literature, it turns out that he did not fully endorse for a definite period, and then suddenly abandoned, the idea of phenomenological language. Wittgenstein rather attempts to develop a viable means of clarification and of philosophical expression through phenomenological language, while critically exploring the assumptions and implications of that attempt at the very same time. (shrink)

Classical results of additive number theory lead to the undecidability of the existence of solutions for diophantine equations in given special sets of integers. Those sets which are images of polynomials are covered by a more general result in the second section. In contrast, restricting diophantine equations to images of exponential functions with natural bases leads to decidable problems, as proved in the third section.

The author argues that for the last 2,500 years, the science concerning the universe (o kosmoV) has been based on two metaphysical intuitions—the atomic one for more than 2,400 years, and the string intuition in the second half of the twentieth century.

We develop an abstract proof calculus for logics whose sentences are ‘Horn sentences’ of the form: $(\forall X)H \Rightarrow c$ and prove an institutional generalization of Birkhoff completeness theorem. This result is then applied to the particular cases of Horn clauses logic, the ‘Horn fragment’ of preorder algebras, order-sorted algebras and partial algebras and their infinitary variants.

Michael Dummett's argument for intuitionism can be criticized for the implicit reliance on the existence of what might be called absolutely undecidable statements. Neil Tennant attacks epistemic optimism, the view that there are no such statements. I expose what seem serious flaws in his attack, and I suggest a way of defending the use of classical logic in arithmetic that circumvents the issue of optimism. I would like to thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

In manuscripts from 1929, Wittgenstein envisaged a phenomenological language as a means to describe the experience of objects, alternative to an account of experienced objects provided by ordinary language - but the project failed. The chapter addresses that failure and its significance to philosophical methodology. Wittgenstein acknowledges that the ideal of a non-hypothetical description of immediate experience tempted not only him, but also other philosophers. The chapter traces an itinerary to his concerns that the fulfilment of that ideal - to (...) purely describe a purified experience - would eventually lead into "a bewitched swamp where everything comprehensible vanishes" and would ultimately involve an "inarticulate sound with which many writers would like to begin philosophy". Wittgenstein perceives variations of that sound in Husserl, Heidegger, and the private language he later addresses. (shrink)

The fall of the Berlin Wall stood for a symbol of change and freedom across the socialist bloc and inspired the inhabitants in Eastern Europe to take action and revolt against dictatorial regimes. A long and often painful process of social, economic and political transformation began. Scholars grouped their research dealing with such transformations under the label of “Transitology” and the developing subfields of “transitional justice” and “memory studies” expanded and caught the academic interest. The present argument looks at the (...) emergence and evolvement of these fields in parallel with a growing and changing society. (shrink)

Ars cogitandi is not the monopoly of a school, a people or an age, but it has crossed over the centuries and cardinal points, from the Platonic Academy of Athens to the Finnish University set up at Turku in 1640 and set down for good and for all at Helsingfors (the ancient name for Helsinki) in the year 1828. Ars cogitandi asphilosophy got here as a distinct brilliance following the classical Anglo-Saxon tradition of empiricism, represented at that time by Edward (...) Westermarck (1862–1939), who was professor of practical philosophy in Helsinki and professor of sociology at London School of Economics from 1907 until 19301. The Finnish School of Philosophy acquired its decisive acknowledgement by Eino Kaila, great scholar and chief of the school, who brought over to Finland the modern logic and the philosophy of the Vienna Circle. (shrink)

The theological aspect of the dispute between the modern philosopher René Descartes, and the Calvinist theologian, Gisbertus Voetius, remains a chapter insufficiently explored in Cartesian studies. This paper highlights a set of objections on natural theology addressed by Descartes and Voetius to each other. It shows and expands the common ground Descartes and Voetius held within natural theology. It argues that their contrasting views revolved mainly around the limits of natural theology. For Voetius, natural theology is extrinsically limited by the (...) revealed God, the external principle of faith. For Descartes, metaphysics or natural theology is intrinsically limited by the incomprehensible idea of the Infinite. (shrink)

Mihaela Mihai on the tension between some public art and the commitments of a liberal democracy.