To get distracted, to enclose and to give oneself. The Gesture of Transcendence in Jan Patočka The problem of transcendence can be traced throughout the whole work of Jan Patočka. The appeal to transcend our bonds to mere objectivity is a constant issue of his thought. It finds a new substantiation in the 1960s in his studies focusing on the meaning of the other as human being. The relation to the other person offers a special "occasion" or "place" of transcendence (...) and poses the challenge to transcend one's own particular setting. While in the mid-1960s Patočka maintains his earlier dramatic vocabulary to describe the process of transcendence, in the late 1960s his idiom becomes less vehement. Yet, it is precisely within this more "sober" framework that he symbolizes the process of transcendence with an emphatic turn to a "myth of the divine man" and its key metaphor of resurrection. To transcend means, for Patočka, always to liberate oneself from a state of self-distraction between things. However, in his late lectures, he briefly refers to a deeper layer, suggesting that this self-distraction has its "roots" in a self-enclosure or self-isolation, in the exclusive concentration on our own interests and in the illusion of our self-sufficiency. Transcendence, then, means to overcome this self-enclosure by means of a self-forgetting love. Are these rarely mentioned "roots" perhaps implicitly present in all Patočka's accounts of transcendence? (shrink)

This article aims to elucidate Patočka’s impact on contemporary Czech philosophy. As a preliminary, it presents Patočka’s general conception of the possible impact of philosophy as such. It seems that for Patočka, the clarifying function of philosophy was the most relevant, much more than its possible capacity to stimulate objective or social processes. It then explains what impact Patočka himself expected from his own activity as a philosopher. Here we can see that his main concern was to pass on the (...) great philosophical tradition neglected by Czech intellectuals, primarily ancient philosophy and German Idealism. Finally, it sketches the impact of Patočka’s writings and lectures that can actually be seen today in Czech philosophy—in the study of ancient and Classical German Philosophy, in new philosophical conceptions inspired by him, in phenomenology, and in debates about modern Czech history. (shrink)

In diesem Buch wird die grundlagentheoretische Frage nach dem Untersuchungsobjekt der Sprachwissenschaft mit dem aktuellen Thema "Medien" verbunden. Hierbei geht es insbesondere um den Kompetenzbegriff: Wenn es keine medienunabhängige Sprachkompetenz gibt, inwiefern ist die Kompetenz dann trotzdem "frei"? Im Anschluss an Wittgenstein wird die These entwickelt, dass sich Sprachkompetenz in vielen Fällen angemessener als "Sprachspielkompetenz" fassen lässt. Dieses Modell wird im Hauptkapitel ausgearbeitet und an zahlreichen Beispielen veranschaulicht.

Bei der Suche nach dem Geist handelt es sich seit Jahrhunderten um ein zentrales Unterfangen in der Philosophie, das u.a. durch die folgenden Fragen charakterisiert ist: Was sind Merkmale des Geistes? Welche Arten geistiger Zustände lassen sich unterscheiden? Ist eine naturwissenschaftliche oder physikalische Erklärung des Geistes möglich? Lässt sich das Geistige auf das Physikalische reduzieren? Ist das Physikalische kausal abgeschlossen? Was heißt es eigentlich, dass etwas physikalisch ist? Wie kann der Geist Handlungen bewirken? Können wir denn so handeln, wie wir (...) wollen? Ist unser Wille frei? Welche Rolle spielen neurowissenschaftliche Ergebnisse für die Entwicklung einer guten Theorie des Geistes? Und welche Rolle spielen philosophische Gedankenexperimente? Was macht überhaupt eine gute Theorie des Geistes aus? Dieser Band, der auch an Einsteiger gerichtet ist, versammelt Beiträge zur Suche nach dem Geist von Andreas Hüttemann, Holger Lyre, Jan G. Michel, Gernot Münster, Martine Nida-Rümelin, Achim Stephan und Henrik Walter. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungNach Oswald Bayer ist Schöpfung Gottes Anrede an den Menschen. Glaube an den Schöpfer ist Antwort auf das, was Gott uns in dieser Welt zusagt. Schöpfung bezieht sich auf die Gegenwart, nicht auf die Vergangenheit, auf Gottes persönliche Kommunikation mit uns und nicht nur auf unpersönliche Verursachung, auf Gottes aktive und persönliche Gegenwart in allem, das in dieser Welt geschieht, nicht auf jenseitige Transzendenz. Bayer ist darin zuzustimmen, dass die Schöpfung Gottes Gabe und Zusage ist und dass der Glaube an (...) den Schöpfer eine Antwort auf diese Anrede und eine Form der Welterfahrung ist. Die Art, wie Bayer diese Einsichten entwickelt, wirft jedoch einige schwerwiegende Probleme auf. In diesem Aufsatz werden vier Kritikpunkte vorgestellt. Erstens bringt die Bibel den Schöpfungsglauben nicht nur in Hymnen in der zweiten Person zum Ausdruck, sondern auch in Erzählungen in der dritten Person. Nehmen wir diese narrative Struktur ernst, müssen wir zweitens die Schöpfung als Gottes erste Tat in der Geschichte seines Volkes verstehen. In einer theoretischen Reflexion auf den Begriff der Schöpfung als Gottes ersten Akt, brauchen drittens wir einen theologisch modifizierten der 〉Kausalität〈 als Handeln. Schließlich und viertens ist Gott nicht nur frei in seiner Transzendenz und liebend in seiner Immanenz, wie Bayer behauptet, sondern auch liebend in seiner Transzendenz und frei in seiner Immanenz. Das bedeutet, dass wir im Gegensatz zu Bayers Darstellung auch Unterschiede der Art und Weise anerkennen müssen, wie der wollende und handelnde Gott in der Geschichte seiner Schöpfung wirksam ist.SummaryAccording to Oswald Bayer, creation is God's address to human beings. Belief in the Creator is a response to what God promises us in this world. Creation is about our present, not about the past; about God's personal communication with us, not about impersonal causation; about God's active and personal presence in everything that happens in this world, not about otherworldly transcendence. With Bayer it is right to say that creation is God's gift and promise, and that belief in the Creator is a response to this address and a way of experiencing this world. The manner in which Bayer spells out these insights, however, raises some serious problems. In this article four criticisms are made. First, the Bible expresses belief in God's creation not only in hymns in the second person, but also in narratives in the third person. Second, when we take these narratives seriously, we have to think about creation as the first act of God in the history of His people. Third, in a theoretical reflection about the concept of creation as God's first act, we need a theologically modified concept of ‘causation’ as agency. And last, God is not only free in His transcendence, and loving in His immanence, as Bayer claims, but also loving in His transcendence and free in His immanence. This implies, in contrast to Bayer's account, that we have to acknowledge differences in the way the willing and acting God is involved in the history of His creation. (shrink)

The strategy of deterrence suffers from at least 8 deficiencies: 1. The deterrence threat may be underestimated or overestimated. 2. The efficacy of deterrence is conditioned by o variety of factors. 3. Deterrence is highly questionable inasmuch as it represents the principle of revenge. 4. Deterrence may lead to self-deterrence. 5. Extended deterrence may have a low degree of credibility. 6. The stability of the deterrence system is constantly jeopardized. 7. Deterrence may lead to accidental nuclear war. 8. Moral acceptability (...) of deterrence is decreasing. Attempts to overcome these deficiencies by upgraded deterrence postures, arms control, unilateral disarmament and defensive systems have been futile. Therefore mankind will have to live with deterrence; efforts ought to be undertaken, however, to prevent a ‘nuclear Sarajevo’ by appropriate measures stabilizing the strategic system. (shrink)

It can be tempting to think of affect as a matter of the present moment – a reaction, a feeling, an experience or engagement that unfolds right now. This paper will make the case that affect is better thought of as not only temporally extended but as saturated with temporality, especially with the past. In and through affectivity, concrete, ongoing history continues to weigh on present comportment. In order to spell this out, I sketch a Heidegger-inspired perspective. It revolves around (...) two claims. The first is that we should understand what Heidegger calls 'Befindlichkeit' (findingness) as radical situatedness. Affectivity is a matter of 'finding oneself' constellated – thrown – into the world in ways that outrun what an individual or collective might grasp and process. The second claim is that the temporal dimension, as a relatedness to the past, takes precedence in affect's situatedness. Key to affect is the way in which the past continues to hold sway over present comportment, collectively and individually. In order to articulate this perspective, it is important to overcome the idea that affect must be understood mainly in terms of feeling or experiential states of other kinds. Better suited to grasp the idea of findingness is the concept of 'disclosive posture', as proposed by Katherine Withy. I suggest that this notion should be put at the fore of a phenomenological approach to situated affectivity. (shrink)

The paper examines the interplays between logic and politics in the Polish School of Logic starting from 1914. The Polish School of Logic flourished between 1920 and 1939. Philosophically, it was influenced by Kazimierz Twardowski (1866–1938). For Twardowski logic is fundamental for every kind of human activity, professional and private and this means that every argument should be formulated and proceed by correct inferential rules. These rules involve semiotics, formal logic and methodology of science. The paper shows how this position (...) was shared by Twardowski’s students, including Jan Łukasiewicz, Stanisław Leśniewski, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and Tadeusz Kotrabiński, as well as by the next generation of logicians and philosophers and especially by Alfred Tarski. These authors considered logic, philosophy and science as completely neutral with respect to politics and ideology but they also considered logical skills as indispensable in political activities. (shrink)

We introduce a cyclic proof system for the two-way alternation-free modal μ-calculus. The system manipulates one-sided Gentzen sequents and locally deals with the backwards modalities by allowing analytic applications of the cut rule. The global effect of backwards modalities on traces is handled by making the semantics relative to a specific strategy of the opponent in the evaluation game. This allows us to augment sequents by so-called trace atoms, describing traces that the proponent can construct against the opponent’s strategy. The (...) idea for trace atoms comes from Vardi’s reduction of alternating two-way automata to deterministic one-way automata. Using the multi-focus annotations introduced earlier by Marti and Venema, we turn this trace-based system into a path-based system. We prove that our system is sound for all sequents and complete for sequents not containing trace atoms. (shrink)

Higher-order logic, with its type-theoretic apparatus known as the simple theory of types (STT), has increasingly come to be employed in theorizing about properties, relations, and states of affairs—or ‘intensional entities’ for short. This paper argues against this employment of STT and offers an alternative: ordinal type theory (OTT). Very roughly, STT and OTT can be regarded as complementary simplifications of the ‘ramified theory of types’ outlined in the Introduction to Principia Mathematica (on a realist reading). While STT, understood as (...) a theory of intensional entities, retains the Fregean division of properties and relations into a multiplicity of categories according to their adicities and ‘input types’ and discards the division of intensional entities into different ‘orders’, OTT takes the opposite approach: it retains the hierarchy of orders (though with some modifications) and discards the categorisation of properties and relations according to their adicities and input types. In contrast to STT, this latter approach avoids intensional counterparts of the Epimenides and related paradoxes. Fundamental intensional entities lie at the base of the proposed hierarchy and are also given a prominent part to play in the individuation of non-fundamental intensional entities. (shrink)

By and large, the conditional connective in three-valued logic has two different functions. First, by means of a deduction theorem, it can express a specific relation of logical consequence in the logical language itself. Second, it can represent natural language structures such as "if/then'' or "implies''. This chapter surveys both approaches, shows why none of them will typically end up with a three-valued material conditional, and elaborates on connections to probabilistic reasoning.

Kearns (2021) reconstructs Berkeley’s (1713) Master Argument as a formally valid argument against the Materialist Thesis, with the key premise the Distinct Conceivability Thesis, namely the thesis that truths about sensible objects having or lacking thinkable qualities are (distinctly) conceivable and as its conclusion that all sensible objects are conceived. It will be shown that Distinct Conceivability Thesis entails the Reduction Thesis, which states that de dicto propositional (ordinary or distinct) conceivability reduces to de re propositional (ordinary or distinct) conceivability. (...) While Kearns (2021) set out to avoid the confusion of a de re claim with a de dicto claim, which Prior (1955) accused Berkeley of, Kearns can be accused of making a similar conceptual confusion. (shrink)

Niels Bohr and Philosophy of Physics: Twenty-First Century Perspectives examines the work, influences and legacy of the Nobel Prize physicist and philosopher of experiment Niels Bohr. While covering Bohr's groundbreaking contribution to quantum mechanics, this collection reveals the philosophers who influenced his work. Linking him to the pragmatist C.I. Lewis and the Danish philosopher Harald Høffding, it draws strong similarities between Bohr's philosophy and the Kantian way of thinking. Addressing the importance of Bohr's views of classical concepts, it discusses how (...) his interpretation of quantum mechanics now compares with a variety of issues that have arisen only since his lifetime, including decoherence and other non-collapse arguments. Balancing historical themes with contemporary ideas, Niels Bohrs and Philosophy of Physics reveals Bohr's on-going contribution to the philosophy of science and confirms his place in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Evidence-Based Medicine has little consideration for mechanisms and philosophers of science and medicine have recently made pleas to increase the place of mechanisms in the medical evidence hierarchy. However, in this debate the notions of mechanisms seem to be limited to 'mechanistic processes' and 'complex-systems mechanisms,' understood as 'componential causal systems'. I believe that this will not do full justice to how mechanisms are used in biological, psychological and social sciences and, consequently, in a more biopsychosocial approach to medicine. Here, (...) I propose, following (Kuorikoski, 2009), to pay more attention to 'abstract forms of interaction' mechanisms. The present work scrutinized review articles on depression and medically unexplained pain, which are considered to be of multifactorial pathogenesis, for their use of mechanisms. In review articles on these disorders there seemed to be a range of uses between more 'abstract forms of interaction' and 'componential causal system' mechanisms. I therefore propose to expand the notions of mechanisms considered in medicine to include that of more 'abstract forms of interaction' to better explain and manage biopsychosocial disorders. (shrink)

Wprowadzenie -- Roman ingarden -- Antoni kępiński -- Karol wojtyła -- Władysław stróżewski -- Józef tischner.

Introduction: what is a sentence? -- Slogans and other one-liners -- The poetic line -- Sentences terminable and interminable -- The democratic sentence -- Conclusion: the sentence fetish.

This book traces the development of the Polish theory of history, analyzing how Jerzy Topolski, Krzysztof Pomian, and Olga Tokarczuk have both built upon and transgressed the metahistorical theories of American historian Hayden White. By deconstructing and reconstructing contemporary theories of history, this research is a unique contribution to the fields of historiography and the philosophy of history.

G. A. Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality proposes that both concepts need rescuing from the work of John Rawls. Especially, it is concerned with Rawls’ famous second principle of justice according to which social primary goods should be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution is to the benefit of the worst off. The question is why this would ever be necessary if all parties are just. Cohen and I agree that Rawls cannot really justify inequalities on the basis given. But (...) he also thinks equality is the correct analysis of justice, though he provides no actual direct arguments for this. He does, however, provide a striking analytical argument claiming that fundamental principles of justice must be fact insensitive, and that Rawls’s view of justice violates this requirement. I argue that the requirement is itself misconceived and that principles of justice cannot possibly be fact insensitive in the sense developed by Cohen. Few philosophers share this view of Cohen’s—which I argue is due to several conceptual mistakes. With these ironed out, the contractarian view, broadly speaking, is seen to be plausible and powerful. Meanwhile Cohen appears to embrace intuitionism, a stance that cannot possibly be acceptable in social philosophy. In the end, Cohen is successful in arguing that Rawls cannot have what he wants, but neither is Cohen successful in claiming that justice is equality. (shrink)

Humanitarian aid’s psycho-therapeutic turn in the 1990s was mirrored by the increasing emotionalization and subjectivation of fund-raising campaigns. In order to grasp the depth of this interconnectedness, this article argues that in both cases what we see is the post-Fordist production paradigm at work; namely, as Hardt and Negri put it, the direct production of subjectivity and social relations. To explore this, the therapeutic and mental health approach in humanitarian aid is juxtaposed with the more general phenomenon of psychologization. This (...) allows us to see that the psychologized production of subjectivity has a problematic waste-product as it reduces the human to Homo sacer, to use Giorgi Agamben’s term. Drawing out a double matrix of a de-psychologizing psychologization connected to a politicizing de-politicization, it will further become possible to understand psycho-therapeutic humanitarianism as a case of how, in these times of globalization, psychology, subjectivity and money are all interrelated. (shrink)

Forms of understanding -- Understanding as organized beliefs -- On interpretation -- Representations -- Scientific explanation -- Causal explanations -- Other types of explanations -- The pragmatics of explanation -- Not just why-questions -- A rhetorical approach to explanation -- Pluralism and the unity of science.

Forms of understanding -- Understanding as organized beliefs -- On interpretation -- Representations -- Scientific explanation -- Causal explanations -- Other types of explanations -- The pragmatics of explanation -- Not just why-questions -- A rhetorical approach to explanation -- Pluralism and the unity of science.

How should we construe the unity, in affective experience, of felt bodily changes on the one hand and intentionality on the other, without forcing affective phenomena into a one-sided theoretical framework such as cognitivism? To answer this question, I will consider the specific kind of self-awareness implicit in affectivity. In particular, I will explore the idea that a bodily sense of ability is crucial for affective self-awareness. Describing the affective ways of “grasping oneself” manifest in a person’s felt sense of (...) ability will help us understand the intimate connection between bodily feelings and intentionality in affective processes. In order to illustrate these experiential structures in a concrete case, I will discuss experiential changes often reported by sufferers of depression. (shrink)

Forty years af ter the cold-bloo ded as sas - si na tion –or de red by the CIA– of Ernes to (Che) Gue va ra, (im pri sio ned and still ali ve in Bo li - via), a symbo lic let ter to him is writ ten by a do - mi ni que priest –Frei Bet to– a Bra zi lian, which re sult sin a sort of `act-of-so rr..

We introduce a family of local ranks $D_Q$ depending on a finite set Q of pairs of the form $(\varphi (x,y),q(y)),$ where $\varphi (x,y)$ is a formula and $q(y)$ is a global type. We prove that in any NSOP $_1$ theory these ranks satisfy some desirable properties; in particular, $D_Q(x=x)<\omega $ for any finite tuple of variables x and any Q, if $q\supseteq p$ is a Kim-forking extension of types, then $D_Q(q) (...) Kim-non-forking extension, then $D_Q(q)=D_Q(p)$ for every Q that involves only invariant types whose Morley powers are -stationary. We give natural examples of families of invariant types satisfying this property in some NSOP $_1$ theories. We also answer a question of Granger about equivalence of dividing and dividing finitely in the theory $T_\infty $ of vector spaces with a generic bilinear form. We conclude that forking equals dividing in $T_\infty $, strengthening an earlier observation that $T_\infty $ satisfies the existence axiom for forking independence. Finally, we slightly modify our definitions and go beyond NSOP $_1$ to find out that our local ranks are bounded by the well-known ranks: the inp-rank (burden), and hence, in particular, by the dp-rank. Therefore, our local ranks are finite provided that the dp-rank is finite, for example, if T is dp-minimal. Hence, our notion of rank identifies a non-trivial class of theories containing all NSOP $_1$ and NTP $_2$ theories. (shrink)

Many philosophical discussions hinge on the concept of knowability. For example, there is a blooming literature on the so-called paradox of knowability. How to understand this notion, however? In this paper, we examine several approaches to the notion: the naive approach to take knowability as the possibility to know, the counterfactual approach endorsed by Edgington (1985) and Schlöder (2019) , approaches based on the notion of a capacity or ability to know (Fara 2010, Humphreys 2011), and finally, approaches that make (...) use of the resources of dynamic epistemic logic (van Benthem 2004, Holliday 2017). (shrink)

Executive functions (EFs) and impulsivity are dimensions of self-regulation that are both related to psychopathology. However, self-report measures of impulsivity and laboratory EF tasks typically display small correlations, and existing research indicates that impulsivity and EFs may tap separate aspects of self-regulation that independently statistically predict psychopathology in adulthood. However, relationships between EFs, impulsivity, and psychopathology may be different in childhood compared to adulthood. Here, we examine whether these patterns hold in the baseline assessment of the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive (...) Development (ABCD) sample, a national sample of over 11,000 children (including 749 twin pairs) ages 9–10 years. We examine the phenotypic and genetic relationships among latent variables for different components of EFs and multiple facets of impulsivity. Additionally, we assess how EFs and impulsivity relate to composite measures and latent variables of psychopathology derived from parent report. EFs were weakly correlated with impulsivity, and the strength varied by impulsivity facet, emphasizing their separability. We did not identify significant genetic and environmental correlations between EFs and impulsivity. Moreover, controlling for their small relationships with each other, both EFs and some facets of impulsivity statistically predicted an Externalizing factor, attention problems, and social problems, and twin analyses suggested these relationships were genetic in origin. These findings indicate that EFs and impulsivity represent phenotypically and genetically separable aspects of self-regulation that are both transdiagnostic correlates of psychopathology in childhood. (shrink)

The oral eye is a metaphor for the dominance of global designer capitalism. It refers to the consumerism of a designer aesthetic by the 'I' of the neoliberalist subject, as well as the aural soundscapes that accompany the hegemony of the capturing attention through screen cultures. An attempt is made to articulate the historical emergence of such a synoptic machinic regime drawing on Badiou, Bellmer, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, Rancir̈e, Virilio, Ziarek, and Zizek to explore contemporary art (post-Situationism) and visual cultural (...) education. Jagodzinski develops the concept of an 'avant-garde without authority,' 'self-refleXion' and 'in(design)' to further the questions surrounding the posthuman as advanced by theorists such as Hansen, Stiegler and Ziarek's 'force' of art. (shrink)

The philosophy of the humanistic sciences has been a blind-spot in analytic philosophy. This book argues that by adopting a pragmatic analysis of explanation and interpretation it is possible to show that scientific practice of humanistic sciences can be understood on similar lines to scientific practice of natural and social sciences.