Between 1910 und 1915 the Hungarian philosopher Béla Zalai (1882-1915) developed his “comparative metaphysics of systems”, which had a significant influence on both the young Georg Lukács and also on Karl Mannheim. Through an analysis of Zalai’s approach to metaphysics, we show how he served to mediate between the realist Austrian philosophy of Meinong and of the early Husserl on the one side, and the German (idealistic, Kantian) philosophy then dominant in Hungary.

Between 1910 und 1915 the Hungarian philosopher Béla Zalai (1882-1915) developed his “comparative metaphysics of systems”, which had a significant influence on both the young Georg Lukács and also on Karl Mannheim. Through an analysis of Zalai’s approach to metaphysics, we show how he served to mediate between the realist Austrian philosophy of Meinong and of the early Husserl on the one side, and the German (idealistic, Kantian) philosophy then dominant in Hungary.

Written in the 1960s, TRUTH AND METHOD is Gadamer's magnum opus.

George Berkeley (1685-1753) is the superstar of Irish Philosophy. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1700 and became a fellow in 1707. In 1724 he resigned his Fellowship to become Dean of Derry, and in 1734 he was made Bishop of Cloyne. He settled in Oxford in 1752 and died the following year. The work of George Berkeley is marked by its diversity and range. His writings take in such topics as mathematics, psychology, politics, health, economics, deism and (...) education, as well as that with which he is most associated - philosophy. Whatever topic he dealt with, his grasp of the subject matter was always impressive and his criticisms of his contemporaries often acute. Among the most noteable of the British Empiricists, he took his starting point from Locke's new 'way of ideas', but he rejected abstract ideas and the possibility of real existence outside perception. It is for this doctrine that he is most known - that there is no such thing as matter, and that things are collections of ideas which can exist only in our minds and only for so long as they are perceived. This philosophy, summed up in his phrase 'to be is to be perceived', he termed 'immaterialism'. A.C. Fraser's collection includes a series of what were previously unpublished notes by Berkeley on all the main topics of his philosophy. This, the 1901 edition, was the first complete edition of his works. (shrink)

Words can mean different things to different people. This can be problematic, mainly for those working together in a bureaucratic institution, such as the secret service. Shared, certified, explicit and codified definitions offer a counter to subjective, solitary and/or culturally dominant definitions. It’s true that codified secrecy terms for secret services can be seen to involve a number of political, cultural, subcultural “languages”, but if words come from unclassified or declassified files, memorandums and/or records, one needs a deep understanding of (...) the secret services. A remarkable feature of this bureaucratic language is the evolving nature of, certain “keywords” as important signifiers of historical transformation. Thus, the changes in the language of the secret services depends at least as much on the internal changes of the secret services as on the transformation in the external political-social environment. In spite of the confusion of Hungarian secret services in the revolutions of 1918–1919 and the disintegration of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy, in the early 1920’s became a stable system. Between the two World Wars, the Hungarian State Police directed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Military Intelligence and Counter-Espionage directed by the Ministry of Defence, and the Hungarian Royal Gendarmerie directed by both of the Ministries had their own operational service. This structure existed unchanged until 1945. Simultaneously with the forward advance of the soviet troops, government began to re-establish the former system of the secret services in the eastern part of the country. After WWII, in 1946, the “State-protection Department” as political police became independent from the police. However, from the beginning, they remained under the control of the Communist Party. After 1950, the State Security Authority provided special services for the MIA and the Military Political Directorate of the MoD. After quashing the revolution in 1956, in the spring of 1957, the MIA Political Investigation Department was established which—with slight modifications—kept the structure created during the “state protection era”. The MIA III. The State-Protection General Directorate was established in 1962. The reorganization was finalized in the middle of the 1960’s, which resulted in the new system, which—with the structure of Directorates—became the ultimate structure of the state secret police until the abolishment of the MIA General Directorate III in January 1990. These organizational transformations were largely the result of exogenous historical-political changes. Moreover, each new period had a major impact on the organizational communication, language use and vocabulary of the secret services. This study seeks to interpret these historical transformations. (shrink)

A brilliant and comprehensive history of the creation of the modern Western mind. Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept—the mind—emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine, but fully neither. In this groundbreaking work, award-winning historian George Makari shows (...) how writers, philosophers, physicians, and anatomists worked to construct notions of the mind as not an ethereal thing, but a natural one. From the ascent of Oliver Cromwell to the fall of Napoleon, seminal thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Diderot, and Kant worked alongside often-forgotten brain specialists, physiologists, and alienists in the hopes of mapping the inner world. Conducted in a cauldron of political turmoil, these frequently shocking, always embattled efforts would give rise to psychiatry, mind sciences such as phrenology, and radically new visions of the self. Further, they would be crucial to the establishment of secular ethics and political liberalism. Boldly original, wide-ranging, and brilliantly synthetic, Soul Machine gives us a masterful, new account of the making of the modern Western mind. (shrink)

Throughout The Blessed and Boundless God, he proves his doctrine by demonstrating God's incomparableness in His being, attributes, works, and words. Swinnock is a pastor-theologian who views theology as the means by which we grow in acquaintance with God and, consequently, in godliness.

(1993). Is the improvement of human condition our field? Making Evolutionary science work for human betterment. World Futures: Vol. 38, Theoretical Achievements and Practical Applications of General Evolutionary Theory, pp. 17-31.

What are the differences between hypocrisy, change of mind, and weakness of will? Each typically involves a gap between word and deed, yet they do not seem morally equivalent. Moreover, they are intuitively different concepts, even though the conceptual boundaries between them are fuzzy. This paper explores diverse examples, attempting to identify elements which may be distinctive of each concept, with special attention to hypocrisy. It also provides a discussion of the appropriateness of such use of examples in moral philosophy.

‘Das Lebendige ist schön’: Remarks on Hegel’s Conception of Art The true importance of the role of the interpretation of art in Hegel’s later thinking is understandable only now, after the publication of the almost original version of the lectures on aesthetics. This article aims to highlight a usually neglected reading of Hegelian aesthetics, namely its Vergangenheitscharakter. The starting point for this is a thesis of Hegel’s: ‘What is alive is beautiful, in so far as the soul becomes apparent in (...) it.’It is ‘not yet sufficient’, yet it is true that in its endless approximation to a spiritually real ‘doubling of the Idea’it aims at something indefinite, or, rather, we are, with a work of art, in an unreal place or in a place where things are continuously changeable. The work of art entered into a time of art and history, which requires interpretation, whereby the ever- ‘changeable appearance of the Beautiful’ is manifested in the work of art itself. Its being alive accepts being threatened only by its conceptual/illusory appearance. (shrink)

The authors’ aim is to bring to the attention of readers the inadequacies of care for people in Hungary who are terminally ill. They believe that both objective and subjective factors cause these inadequacies. Most of these factors arise from moral dilemmas that could be eased or even solved if ethics education had a much more prominent place in the nursing curriculum. Even if nurses would not become automatically better persons morally, a much wider knowledge of medical/nursing ethics could significantly (...) improve nursing care both before and at the end of life. Although the article is also critical of the nursing care provided, it is not its purpose to make any generalizations. The study utilized selected passages from essays written by 76 practicing nurses on their personal experience of ethical dilemmas in their work environment, and a questionnaire administered to 250 students (registered nurses and health care students) studying for a college degree. This article is written by two authors who have formed an unusal alliance: a registered nurse with 29 years’ experience of bedside nursing, but who is currently a teacher of nursing ethics at a local health college, and a lawyer turned bioethicist. (shrink)

This article offers a detailed reading Gascoigne and Thornton’s book Tacit Knowledge, which aims to account for the tacitness of tacit knowledge while preserving its status as knowledge proper. I take issue with their characterization and rejection of the existential-phenomenological Background—which they presuppose even as they dismiss—and their claim that TK can be articulated “from within”—which betrays a residual Cartesianism, the result of their elision of conceptuality and propositionality. Knowledgeable acts instantiate capacities which we might know we have and of (...) which we can be aware, but which are not propositionally structured at their “core”. Nevertheless, propositionality is necessary to what Robert Brandom calls, in Making It Explicit and Articulating Reasons, “explicitation”, which notion also presupposes a tacit dimension, which is, simply, the embodied person, without which no conception of knowledge can get any purchase. On my view, there is no knowledgeable act that can be understood as such separately from the notion of skilled corporeal performance. The account I offer cannot make sense of so-called “knowledge-based” education, as opposed to systems and styles which supposedly privilege “contentless” skills over and above “knowledge”, because on the phenomenological and inferentialist lines I endorse, neither the concepts “knowledge” nor “skill” has any purchase or meaning without the other. (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to show links and parallels between Locke’s concept of the state of nature and the Unitarian (Socinian) denial of original sin. At first I will give an overview of the Unitarian history and thought, then I will logically and philologically demon- strate a parallelism of Locke’s hidden anthropology and the Unitarian doctrine on human being, with data of Locke’s Unitarian readings, especially writings of a Transylvanian theologian in the late 16th century, György Enyedi.

Despite a growing body of literature focused on understanding experiences of workplace dignity, attention has centered almost exclusively on employees with lower-level jobs. As a result, little is known about how workplace dignity and indignity are experienced by employees with middle- and upper-level jobs and how their experiences differ from those with lower-level jobs. We address these absences by interviewing employees from a diversity of lower-, middle-, and upper-level jobs about their experiences of indignity at work. We outline common dignity (...) threats, along with typical emotional responses and recourses employees use at each level. We find lower-level employees experience chronic dignity threats from being disrespected, devalued, demeaned, and dehumanized, to which their most typical response is endurance. Middle-level employees experience periodic dignity threats due to undermining of their work, confidence, and reputation. For them, the typical response is strategizing. Finally, on the rare occasions upper-level employees experience dignity threats, it usually is due to a disregard of their special expertise or denial of special rights, to which they respond by rising above. (shrink)