Popper's critical rationalism is widely accepted under scientists and philosophers of science as a proper method for the reconstruction of scientific theories. On occasion of the application of the Popperian ideas for the reconstruction of chemistry by Akeroyd the flaws of the critical rationalist approach are criticised and a methodical alternative is proposed, involving the operational definition of scientific terms.

The aim of this volume is to explore new approaches to the problem of the constitution of the various aspects of sociality and to confront these with received ideas. Therefore many of the contributions to this volume are devoted to a rather holistic and antireductionist conception of social objects, groups, joint actions and collective knowledge. The topics, that are dealt with are: a) the question of the ontological status of social objects and their relation to physical objects, b) collective agency (...) and c) the question whether there can be shared knowledge and shared beliefs - a rather new topic in the discussion of the social aspects of personal life. (shrink)

The paper asks about the reasons for the neglect of chemistry in modern philosophy of science and investigates in how far this science can be the object of an autonomous philosophical reflection. It is argued that from a culturalistic point of view chemistry indeed offers a field of interesting questions ranging from the reconstruction of its epistemological objects to the elucidation of the semantic functions of terms like "atom" or "molecule". It is further argued that the philosophical reflection upon chemistry (...) has important consequences for the didactic, the history and even the ethics of this science, making thus philosophy to a partner of chemistry in fulfilling its purposes in human society. (shrink)

In this paper a concept of pain is introduced that regards pain as a formal entity that can be realized in various material ways, similarly to the concept of justice. Pain utterances have rather the character of evaluative judgments and not of propositional descriptions. They aren’t therefore true or false, but adequate or inadequate, correct or wrong, according to the circumstances and the context, in which they are made. Because pain is constituted by the interplay of individual and public attitudes (...) also inside a given cultural context we are always capable of extending our concept of pain by integrating other cultural attitudes towards pain and also capable of giving arguments that shall convince the members of an other culture to accept our ideas about pain. (shrink)

The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the Fifth Conference on Collective Intentionality held at the University of Helsinki August 31 to September 2, 2006 and two additional contributions. The common aim of the papers is to explore the structure of shared intentional attitudes, and to explain how they underlie the social, cultural and institutional world. The contributions to this volume explore the phenomenology of sharedness, the concept of sharedness, and also various aspects of the structure of (...) collective intentionality in general, and of the intricate relations between sharedness and normativity in particular. Concepts of Sharedness shows how rich and lively the philosophical research focused on the analysis of collective intentionality has become, and will provide further inspiration for future work in this rapidly evolving field. (shrink)

Popper's critical rationalism is widely accepted under scientists and philosophers of science as a proper method for the reconstruction of scientific theories. On occasion of the application of the Popperian ideas for the reconstruction of chemistry by Akeroyd the flaws of the critical rationalist approach are criticised and a methodical alternative is proposed, involving the operational definition of scientific terms.

Our political thinking is driven, far more than philosophers recognize, by a concern for social equality and, more specifically, a concern to avoid relations of inferiority. Niko Kolodny argues that, in order to make sense of the most familiar ideas in our political thought and discourse - the justification of the state, democracy, and rule of law, as well as objections to paternalism and corruption - we cannot merely appeal to freedom (as libertarians like Nozick do) or to distributive fairness (...) (as liberals like Rawls do). We must, instead, appeal directly to claims against inferiority, that no one stands above or below. (shrink)

Often our reason for doing something is an "instrumental reason": that doing that is a means to doing something else that we have reason to do. What principles govern this "instrumental transmission" of reasons from ends to means? Negatively, I argue against principles often invoked in the literature, which focus on necessary or sufficient means. Positively, I propose a principle, "General Transmission," which answers to two intuitive desiderata: that reason transmits to means that are "probabilizing" and "nonsuperfluous" with respect to (...) the relevant end. I then apply General Transmission to the debate over "detachment": whether "wide-scope" reason for a material conditional or disjunction implies "narrow-scope" reason for the consequent or disjuncts. (shrink)

My subject is what I will call the “Myth of Formal Coherence.” In its normative telling, the Myth is that there are “requirements of formal coherence as such,” which demand just that our beliefs and intentions be formally coherent.1 Some examples are.

Quel rapport entretenait Marx avec la culture, l'histoire et la philosophie de la Grèce antique? Pourquoi le jeune Marx s'était-il intéressé à la pensée d'Epicure? Que représentait pour lui la philosophie enseignée par le fondateur de l'École du Jardin? A part l'aspect purement philosophique du rapport de l'auteur du Capital à la Grèce antique, on se donnera également pour tâche de mettre en perspective la contribution que les notions marxiennes de classe, de lutte des classes et d'exploitation peuvent apporter à (...) une compréhension féconde de l'histoire des formations sociales grecques, en partant de l'oeuvre majeure de l'historien britannique G. E. M. de Ste Croix. (shrink)

In this paper we will try to find resemblances of the operation of human consciousness with systems with the intention to simulate it mathematically. Also we will try to do the same for the non-conscious operations and try to synthesize the human mind in form of system with subsystems.

In this paper I argue that Mill’s ‘Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity’ regarding the human will and action cannot apply on all cases, and that the human mind has potentially the capacity to create freely a will or action that, no matter what kind of knowledge we possess, cannot be predicted. More precisely, I argue against Mill’s attempt of conjunction between the freedom of the will and the ‘Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity’ while I attempt a comparison with the relevant Kantian approach. (...) I then claim that a will cannot be free and be predicted at the same time, as both the elements of freedom and unpredictability of the will are founded on the very process of its formulation as an outcome of genuine creativity. I, thus, attempt to propose a more substantially free view of free will and action than the ones presented by the prominent conceptions. (shrink)

Normativity involves two kinds of relation. On the one hand, there is the relation of being a reason for. This is a relation between a fact and an attitude. On the other hand, there are relations specified by requirements of rationality. These are relations among a person's attitudes, viewed in abstraction from the reasons for them. I ask how the normativity of rationality—the sense in which we ‘ought’ to comply with requirements of rationality—is related to the normativity of reasons—the sense (...) in which we ‘ought’ to have the attitudes what we have conclusive reason to have. The normativity of rationality is not straightforwardly that of reasons, I argue; there are no reasons to comply with rational requirements in general. First, this would lead to ‘bootstrapping’, because, contrary to the claims of John Broome, not all rational requirements have ‘wide scope’. Second, it is unclear what such reasons to be rational might be. Finally, we typically do not, and in many cases could not, treat rational requirements as reasons. Instead, I suggest, rationality is only apparently normative, and the normativity that it appears to have is that of reasons. According to this ‘Transparency Account’, rational requirements govern our responses to our beliefs about reasons. The normative ‘pressure’ that we feel, when rational requirements apply to us, derives from these beliefs: from the reasons that, as it seems to us, we have. (shrink)

Comment le jeune Hegel définit-il la notion du positif, ainsi que le concept de positivité? Pour quelles raisons insiste-t-il tellement sur la critique du judaïsme et du christianisme dans ses écrits des années 1790-1800, en se fondant sur une conception novatrice de la positivité? Ce livre essaie de mettre en perspective à travers la lecture de certains textes, que la positivité est pour le jeune Hegel, la perte de la part de l'être humain de la maîtrise de sa propre vie, (...) la privation de l'autonomie du sujet au profit de l'autonomisation du monde des objets, aussi bien que l'asservissement des personnes à des lois et à des forces, lesquelles leur sont étrangères et hostiles. Ainsi cet ouvrage propose de comprendre la positivité, tantôt comme l'extension des rapports mutilés entre l'être humain, le monde et la nature, tantôt comme le prodrome du concept de l'aliénation. (shrink)

As prose dramatic texts Plato's dialogues would have been read by their original audience as an alternative type of theatrical composition. The 'paradox' of the dialogue form is explained by his appropriation of the discourse of theatre, the dominant public mode of communication of his time. The oral performance of his works is suggested both by the pragmatics of the publication of literary texts in the classical period and by his original role as a Sokratic dialogue-writer and the creator of (...) a fourth dramatic genre. Support comes from a number of pieces of evidence, from a statue of Sokrates in the Academy to a mosaic of Sokrates in Mytilene, which point to a centuries-old tradition of treating the dialogues in the context of performance literature and testify to the significance of the image of 'Plato the prose dramatist' for his original and subsequent audiences. (shrink)

It is argued that standard music notation pictures Aristotle’s time (time, as Aristotle conceived of it) in a number of important respects, which concern its micro-structure. It is then argued that this allows us to see some features of Aristotle’s time more clearly. Most importantly, Aristotelian instants can be pictured by bar-lines. This allows us to see as how radically devoid of any content Aristotelian instants should be interpreted. Thus, attention to music notation may show why Aristotle was not a (...) presentist. (shrink)

Logothetis, N.K.: Single units and conscious vision. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B-Biological Sciences 353, 1801-1818 (1998) Abstract.

We consider a paradox involving indicative conditionals (‘ifs’) and deontic modals (‘oughts’). After considering and rejecting several standard options for resolv- ing the paradox—including rejecting various premises, positing an ambiguity or hidden contextual sensitivity, and positing a non-obvious logical form—we offer a semantics for deontic modals and indicative conditionals that resolves the paradox by making modus ponens invalid. We argue that this is a result to be welcomed on independent grounds, and we show that rejecting the general validity of modus (...) ponens is compatible with vindicating most ordinary uses of modus ponens in reasoning. (shrink)