Arnošt Kolman (1892–1979) was a Czech mathematician, philosopher and Communist official. In this paper, we would like to look at Kolman’s arguments against logical positivism which revolve around the notion of the fetishization of mathematics. Kolman derives his notion of fetishism from Marx’s conception of commodity fetishism. Kolman is aiming to show the fact that an entity (system, structure, logical construction) acquires besides its real existence another formal existence. Fetishism means the fantastic detachment of the (...) physical characteristics of real things or phenomena from these things. We identify Kolman’s two main arguments against logical positivism. In the first argument, Kolman applied Lenin’s arguments against Mach’s empiricism-criticism onto Russell’s neutral monism, i.e. mathematical fetishism is internally related to political conservativism. Kolman’s second main argument is that logical and mathematical fetishes are epistemologically deprived of any historical and dynamic dimension. In the final parts of our paper we place Kolman’s thinking into the context of his time, and furthermore we identify some tenets of mathematical fetishism appearing in Alain Badiou’s mathematical ontology today. (shrink)

The only encounter of the Czech philosopher and Communist official Arnošt Kolman with Bertrand Russell at the Tenth International Congress of Philosophy in Amsterdam in 1948 was unfortunate. Kolman’s paper, “The Tasks of Contemporary Philosophy in the Struggle for New Humanism”, aroused a vitriolic rejoinder by Russell. However, the text of the paper as published in the congress Proceedings has a conciliatory tone. This version could not have aroused such a reaction. There is, however, an article, with (...) a similar title, published in Czech in 1948, stating that this is Kolman’s paper from the congress. I argue that this article more likely reflects what Kolman actually said at the Congress. Finally, I provide an English translation of this article. (shrink)

Kolman''s philosophy has been, throughout the major part of his life, distinctly Stalinist. After he had been released from prison and after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. (1956), he became critical of Stalinist dogmatism in philosophy and politics. Although his philosophic thought underwent some — if only minor — changes, Kolman remained entirely within the framework of Marxist philosophy, retaining its foundations, as contained in the writings of the classics of Marxism — Marx, (...) Engels and Lenin. (shrink)

Článek podává systematický kritický přehled o pojetí mechanismu v tzv. nové mechanistické filosofii. Nejdříve je popsán vznik a hlavní principy NMF. Je ukázáno, že NMF vznikla do značné míry jako kritická reakce na, do té doby převažující, logický empirismus. Dále jsou představeny hlavní definiční znaky mechanismu, které jsou po té jednotlivě rozebrány. Na závěr jsou diskutovány přednosti a omezení NMF. Je argumentováno, že NMF nabídla novou a realističtější perspektivu na způsob, jakým se věda dělá a jak se dochází k vědeckým (...) objevům. Má i konstruktivní preskriptivní charakter, neboť povzbuzuje vědce k přemýšlení o vysvětlení jevů prostřednictvím mechanismů. Na straně druhé, pro vysvětlení komplexních jevů jsou heuristiky dekompozice a lokalizace, které tvoří jádro „tradičního" mechanistického přístupu, pouze prvotními aproximacemi a je potřeba je doplňovat dalšími, dynamičtějšími přístupy. (shrink)

Inferentialism is a philosophical approach premised on the claim that an item of language acquires meaning in virtue of being embedded in an intricate set of social practices normatively governed by inferential rules. Inferentialism found its paradigmatic formulation in Robert Brandom's landmark book Making it Explicit, and over the last two decades it has established itself as one of the leading research programs in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of logic. While Brandom's version of inferentialism has received wide (...) attention in the philosophical literature, thinkers friendly to inferentialism have proposed and developed new lines of inquiry that merit wider recognition and critical appraisal. From Rules to Meaning brings together new essays that systematically develop, compare, assess and critically react to some of the most pertinent recent trends in inferentialism. The book's four thematic sections seek to apply inferentialism to a number of core issues, including the nature of meaning and content, reconstructing semantics, rule-oriented models and explanations of social practices and inferentialism's historical influence and dialogue with other philosophical traditions. With contributions from a number of distinguished philosophers--including Robert Brandom and Jaroslav Peregrin--this volume is a major contribution to the philosophical literature on the foundations of logic and language. (shrink)

There has been a growing concern over establishing norms that ensure the ethically acceptable and scientifically sound conduct of clinical trials. Among the leading norms internationally are the World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki, guidelines by the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences, the International Conference on Harmonization's standards for industry, and the CONSORT group's reporting norms, in addition to the influential U.S. Federal Common Rule, Food and Drug Administration's body of regulations, and information sheets by the Department of (...) Health and Human Services. There are also many norms published at more local levels by official agencies and professional groups.Any account of international standards should cover both scientific and ethical norms at once – the two are conceptually intertwined. Recent sources recognize that “[s]cientifically unsound research on human subjects is unethical in that it exposes research subjects to risks without possible benefit.”. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to sketch a theory of musical experience which takes the empirical research seriously without abandoning or neglecting music’s transcendental features. The tension between the recent empirical approach, as represented particularly by Huron’s ITPRA theory, and the transcendental fact that music as an instance of art is something one can understand and, moreover, can understand oneself through, should be overcome by elaborating on the concept of emotion and the role it can play in musical understanding. (...) This will be done against the narrower background of the pragmatists’ theories of meaning, as represented by the semantic work of Meyer and Brandom, and their broader link to the philosophy of Hegel and the great systems of German idealism. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to analyze the broader significance of Frege’s logicist project against the background of Wittgenstein’s philosophy from both Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations. The article draws on two basic observations, namely that Frege’s project aims at saying something that was only implicit in everyday arithmetical practice, as the so-called recursion theorem demonstrates, and that the explicitness involved in logicism does not concern the arithmetical operations themselves, but rather the way they are defined. It thus represents the (...) attempt to make explicit not the rules alone, but rather the rules governing their following, i.e. rules of second-order type. I elaborate on these remarks with short references to Brandom’s refinement of Frege’s expressivist and Wittgenstein’s pragmatist project. (shrink)

Reviewing the beginnings and the further development of logicistic idea I am mainly focusing on the tradition of Frege and Russell, i. e. the tradition which was in the closest relationship with the enterprise of modern logic. I am trying to assess its connections to other „logistic“ programs such as Dedekind’s structuralism or Peano‘s axiomatism, to underline its specific features and the share in the success of modern logical semantics, including both its substantial contribution and limitations.

The article deals with Cantor's argument for the non-denumerability of reals somewhat in the spirit of Lakatos' logic of mathematical discovery. At the outset Cantor's proof is compared with some other famous proofs such as Dedekind's recursion theorem, showing that rather than usual proofs they are resolutions to do things differently. Based on this I argue that there are "ontologically" safer ways of developing the diagonal argument into a full-fledged theory of continuum, concluding eventually that famous semantic paradoxes based on (...) diagonal construction are caused by superficial understanding of what a name is. (shrink)

The article deals with the evolution of the foundations of arithmetic: from the auspicious beginnings with Frege and Dedekind through the cataclysm of Russell’s antinomy to the late writings of Hilbert and the work of Paul Lorenzen . The proposed historical and dialectic reconstruction does not consist in ad hoc attempts to overcome formal difficulties of the systems in question. It rather shows how Frege’s and Dedekind’s original intentions are to be understood and can partly be justified. For this, Gödel’s (...) famous results are of great importance. (shrink)

The article deals with the evolution of the foundations of arithmetic: from the auspicious beginnings with Frege and Dedekind through the cataclysm of Russell’s antinomy to the late writings of Hilbert and the work of Paul Lorenzen. The proposed historical and dialectic reconstruction does not consist in ad hoc attempts to overcome formal difficulties of the systems in question. It rather shows how Frege’s and Dedekind’s original intentions are to be understood and can partly be justified. For this, Gödel’s famous (...) results are of great importance. (shrink)

Ve svém příspěvku chci argumentovat pro takové chápání analytické filosofie, které ji nevymezuje novými tématy, ale specifickým přístupem, tzv. obratem k jazyku, jenž se ukáže být v souladu s principem pravé filosofie vůbec.

Since the appearance of Dummett’s monumental monograph in the early seventies of the last century there have been two interpretative traditions of reading Frege, one contradicting the other: the platonistic (or realistic) interpretation and the holistic (rationalistic) one. In this article, as a kind of intermediation, I firstly point out some pragmatic aspects of Frege’s work. Secondly, and more ambitiously, I outline the controversy between the most influential theories of truth (the correspondence, coherence, redundancy and pragmatic theory) in the light (...) of Frege’s philosophy. After all it was the concept of truth that Frege himself identified as the main objective of logic. (shrink)

Článek rozvíjí ideu Wittgensteinovy filosofické gramatiky a na příkladě její aplikace v hudbě ukazuje, jak Wittgenstein využívá pojmu "přehledného znázornění" ve vymezení filosofie jako něčeho, co nemůže být smysluplně vyřčeno. The paper elaborates on Wittgenstein’s idea of philosophical grammar by transposing it to the field of music and demonstrating how the concept of “perspicuous representation” can be used in delimiting philosophy as something that cannot be meaningfully said.

The article deals with Cantor’s diagonal argument and its alleged philosophical consequences such as that there are more reals than integers and, hence, that some of the reals must be independent of language because the totality of words and sentences is always count-able. My claim is that the main flaw of the argument for the existence of non-nameable objects or truths lies in a very superficial understanding of what a name or representation actually is.