The purpose of this article is to clarify some basic features of historical materialism insofar as it is a philosophic conception of history. Every serious philosophy of history must give an answer to at least three questions: What is the nature of historical reality? How is historical change being accomplished? What are the possibilities, the scope and the limits of historical knowledge?In historical materialism not one of these questions is sufficiently resolved. Contrary to Marxist-Leninist assertions, there is no necessary and (...) inseparable connection between dialectical and historical materialism. A materialist conception of history is compatible with many non-materialist metaphysical views. Further, historical materialism uses a superseded monocausal model of historical flux. Moreover, it is based upon a notion of historical causality which simply reproduces mechanical causality; but mechanical causality is inapplicable to historical events. Finally, the critique of historical knowledge isterra incognita for historical materialism. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to clarify some basic features of historical materialism insofar as it is a philosophic conception of history. Every serious philosophy of history must give an answer to at least three questions: What is the nature of historical reality? How is historical change being accomplished? What are the possibilities, the scope and the limits of historical knowledge? In historical materialism not one of these questions is sufficiently resolved. Contrary to Marxist-Leninist assertions, there is no "necessary" (...) and "inseparable" connection between dialectical and historical materialism. A materialist conception of history is compatible with non-materialist metaphysical views. Further, historical materialism uses a superseded monocausal model of historical flux. Moreover, it is based upon a notion of historical causality which simply reproduces mechanical causality; but mechanical causality is inapplicable to historical events. Finally, the critique of historical knowledge is terra incognita for historical materialism. (shrink)

Im Anfang des 20.Jahrhunderts unterzog eine Reihe von jungen, später berühmt gewordenen Philosophen den Marxismus einer tiefen Kritik. Ihnen ist es gelungen, wichtige Defekte der revolutionären Doktrinen aufzudecken und ihre verhängnivsollen Konsequenzen vorwegzunehmen. Diese Kritik ist auch für die gegenwärtige geistig-politische Situation aktuell.

Im Anfang des 20.Jahrhunderts unterzog eine Reihe von jungen, später berühmt gewordenen Philosophen den Marxismus einer tiefen Kritik. Ihnen ist es gelungen, wichtige Defekte der revolutionären Doktrinen aufzudecken und ihre verhängnivsollen Konsequenzen vorwegzunehmen. Diese Kritik ist auch für die gegenwärtige geistig-politische Situation aktuell.

Sehr früh machte sich die russischeintellektuelle und literarischeÖffentlichkeit mit den Ideen von Nietzschevertraut, und bald entbrannten – nach gutrussischer Art – heftige Kontroversen, in derenZentrum die russische religiöse Philosophiestand. Mit Ausnahme von Solov'ëv, der eineunwiderlegbare Kritik an Nietzsches Atheismusausübte, aber sich damit begnügte,versuchten Berdjaev, estov und Frank dieinneren Widersprüche und Ambivalenzen desPredigers des ``Übermenschen aufzudecken.''Diese Denker waren geneigt neben dem``Antichrist'' auch dem Gottsucher Rechnung zutragen, der, obschon Gott leugnet, dennoch umihn ringt und durch die Aufrichtigkeit undLeidenschaftlichkeit seines Erlebens derGottesfrage zu (...) ihrem besseren und tieferenVerständnis beitragen kann. (shrink)

Bulgarian philosophical life is particularly poor and fruitless. As well as in all communist countries the development of Bulgarian Marxism-Leninism was marked by some very sharp controversies between dogmatics and revisionists. Bulgarian Orthodoxes are particularly militant and intolerant and on the contrary, revisionists are in reality very moderate and rather conservative. Therefore the deviations are insignificant and the degree of the destalinization is very small.

Bulgarian philosophical life is particularly poor and fruitless. As well as in all communist countries the development of Bulgarian Marxism-Leninism was marked by some very sharp controversies between 'dogmatics' and 'revisionists'. Bulgarian Orthodoxes are particularly militant and intolerant and on the contrary, 'revisionists' are in reality very moderate and rather conservative. Therefore the 'deviations' are insignificant and the degree of the destalinization is very small.

Im Anfang des 20.Jahrhunderts unterzog eine Reihe von jungen, später berühmt gewordenen Philosophen den Marxismus einer tiefen Kritik. Ihnen ist es gelungen, wichtige Defekte der revolutionären Doktrinen aufzudecken und ihre verhängnivsollen Konsequenzen vorwegzunehmen. Diese Kritik ist auch für die gegenwärtige geistig-politische Situation aktuell.

Ignatow stawia sobie za cel dokładny rekonstrukcję ścisłego związku zachodzącego pomiędzy marksistowską antropologią - w pierwotnym kształcie prezentujący radykalny humanizm - a upadkiem komunizmu. W krótkim przeglądzie historycznymi stwierdza, iż zsekularyzowany humanizm marksistowski wyrósł z tradycji filozoficznej, reprezentowanej przez Herdera i Feuerbacha, czyniąc - podobnie jak oni – człowieka najważniejszą i najogólniejszą zasady metafizyczny. Dalszy rozwój filozofii marksistowskiej doprowadził najpierw do odrzucenia tej tezy, później zaś - przede wszystkim w leninowsko-stalinowskiej wersji marksizmu - do ideologizacji klasy proletariatu, a tym (...) samym do jednoznacznej negacji tradycyjnego humanizmu. (shrink)

Moral sensitivity and moral reasoning are essential competencies biomedical researchers have to develop to make ethical decisions in their daily practices. Previous research has shown that these competencies can be developed through ethics education. However, it is unclear which underlying mechanisms best support the development of these competencies. In this article we argue that the development of moral sensitivity and moral reasoning can be fostered through teaching strategies that tap into students’ moral imagination. We describe how moral imagination can stimulate (...) the development of these competencies through three different merits of moral imagination. Moral imagination can help students to 1) transfer and apply abstract moral concepts to concrete situations and contexts, 2) explore the perspective of others, 3) explore and foresee the moral consequences of different decisions and actions. We explain these three merits of moral imagination in the context of biomedical research and present a theoretical model for how these merits can be used to stimulate the development of moral sensitivity and moral reasoning. Furthermore, we describe multiple teaching strategies for biomedical curricula that tap into the three merits of moral imagination. These teaching strategies can inspire teachers to design ethics education that activates students’ moral imagination for the development of moral sensitivity and moral reasoning. (shrink)

Sociological propositions about the workings of cognition are rarely specified or tested, but are of central relevance to studies of culture, social judgment, and social movements. This paper draws out lessons of recent work from sociological theory, cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience on the embodied nature of knowledge and thought, and develops implications of these lessons for cultural and cognitive sociology. Knowledge ought to be conceived of as fundamentally embodied, because sensory information is a fundamental component of experience as it (...) is stored in long-term memory, and because bodily responses and intuitions often precede reflexive or strategic thought. I argue that the challenge of embodied knowledge for cultural sociology is threefold: to develop cultural theories of motivation; to specify the ways in which the body structures discourses endogenously; and to specify how embodied motivations and embodied discourses interact. (shrink)

Much of social life now takes place online, and records of online social interactions are available for social science research in the form of massive digital text archives. But cultural social science has contributed little to the development of machine-assisted text analysis methods. As a result few text analysis methods have been developed that link digital text data to theories about culture and discourse. This paper attempts to lay the groundwork for development of such methods by proposing metatheoretical and theoretical (...) foundations suitable for machine-assisted semantic text analysis. Metatheoretically I draw on the work of Elder-Vass, Kaidesoja and others to argue that digital text analysis methods ought to be based on a realist constructionist ontology that treats discourses as ontologically real emergent social entities that have causal relationships with non-discursive social and cognitive processes. Theoretically I follow Feldman and many others in arguing that language is fundamentally shaped by processes of embodied cognition. Researchers developing digital text analysis techniques must theoretically account for such processes if they wish to produce algorithms that can interpret texts in ways that supplement, and not only amplify, human interpretation. I critically survey contemporary text analysis methods that implicitly share these metatheoretical and theoretical positions and discuss some ways these can be further developed with newly available software. (shrink)

Verbal learning and memory summaries of older adults have usually been used to describe neuropsychiatric complaints. Bayesian hierarchical models are modern and appropriate approaches for predicting repeated measures data where information exchangeability is considered and a violation of the independence assumption in classical statistics. Such models are complex models for clustered data that account for distributions of hyper-parameters for fixed-term parameters in Bayesian computations. Repeated measures are inherently clustered and typically occur in clinical trials, education, cognitive psychology, and treatment follow-up. (...) The Hopkins Verbal Learning Test is a general verbal knowledge and memory assessment administered repeatedly as part of a neurophysiological experiment to examine an individual’s performance outcomes at different time points. Multiple trial-based scores of verbal learning and memory tests were considered as an outcome measurement. In this article, we attempted to evaluate the predicting effect of individual characteristics in considering within and between-group variations by fitting various Bayesian hierarchical models via the hybrid Hamiltonian Monte Carlo under the Bayesian Regression Models using ‘Stan’ package of R. Comparisons of the fitted models were done using leave-one-out information criteria, Widely applicable information criterion, and K-fold cross-validation methods. The full hierarchical model with varying intercepts and slopes had the best predictive performance for verbal learning tests [from the Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly study dataset] using the hybrid Hamiltonian-Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach. (shrink)