"In the sweat of your face you will eat bread" - this well-known biblical imperative from the Book of Genesis is best suited to the general characteristics of the life path of the famous Ukrainian scholar and theologian Ivan Ivanovich Ogienko, also known as Metropolitan Ilarion. All his long enough life, from early childhood to his death, he worked for the benefit of his native Ukrainian people, expressing his hard work one of the most significant of his existential (...) traits. Maybe that's why Christianity came to the liking of the ancient ancestors of Ukrainians, who called for individualization through the hard work they never frightened, because they found in it not only livelihood but also the joy of unlucky fate. In the image of his widowed and hard-working mother, Ivan Ogienko saw the fate of the entire enslaved Ukraine and, from an early age, firmly believed that only a conscientious work for the good of his people could earn the right to God's reward. "Serve the people, then serve God!" became the main life principle of I. Ogienko, the amazing hard work of which requires a separate and meticulous scientific research. (shrink)

Clearly a Late Antiquity’s phenomenon, the Neoplatonism represented to the ancient men the last bastion of its old traditions, the religion of their ancestors and classical culture. Especially the neoplatonic philosophy of Plotinus, that had engendred precepts which, by its meanings, resounded through the last voices of paganism and survived the Middle Ages into the scholastic philosopy. Although the ideas of Plotinus achieved such later importance, it were the main problem conceiving the conflicts between the philosophers Porphyry and Iamblichus. That (...) will be the starting point of this paper, which analyzes the layers of Neoplatonism throught its historical context. (shrink)

In the 1870s, Carl Neumann proposed the so-called method of the arithmetic mean for solving the Dirichlet problem on convex domains. Neumann’s approach was considered at the time to be a reliable existence proof, following Weierstrass’s criticism of the Dirichlet principle. However, in 1937 H. Lebesgue pointed out a serious gap in Neumann’s proof. Curiously, the erroneous argument once again involved confusion between the notions of infimum and minimum. The objective of this paper is to show that Lebesgue’s sharp criticism (...) of Neumann’s proof was only partially justified. (shrink)

In this work, we propose a meaningful extension of description logics for non-monotonic reasoning. We introduce \, a logic allowing for the representation of and reasoning about both typical class-membership and typical instances of a relation. We propose a preferential semantics for \ in terms of partially-ordered DL interpretations which intuitively captures the notions of typicality we are interested in. We define a tableau-based algorithm for checking \ knowledge-base consistency that always terminates and we show that it is sound and (...) complete w.r.t. our preferential semantics. The general framework we here propose can serve as the foundation for further exploration of non-monotonic reasoning in description logics and similarly structured logics. (shrink)

Frege's account of indirect proof has been thought to be problematic. This thought seems to rest on the supposition that some notion of logical consequence ? which Frege did not have ? is indispensable for a satisfactory account of indirect proof. It is not so. Frege's account is no less workable than the account predominant today. Indeed, Frege's account may be best understood as a restatement of the latter, although from a higher order point of view. I argue that this (...) ascent is motivated by Frege's conception of logic. (shrink)

Contemporary research offers a more compelling account on the complex emotion of envy than the traditional view of envy as simply something bad. This essay explains how Logic-Based Therapy can use this account to coach individuals struggling with negative species of envy. Given that jealousy and envy are often equated, the essay differentiates the two; explains the conditions that make the four species of envy possible; identifies cardinal fallacies associated with negative species of envy; proposes counteractive virtues, and describes ways (...) to help people struggling with negative species of envy acquire these virtues. (shrink)

La pérdida inesperada de nuestro amigo Pablo Posada Varela el pasado doce de septiembre representa una tragedia a duras penas expresable. Escribir sobre algo o alguien implica un ejercicio de distancia; consiste, ante todo, en buscar, escoger y tomar una perspectiva (o varias, acaso unidas todas ellas en la concreción de un espectro, del espectro fenomenologizante, figura conceptual acuñada por Pablo). Si escribir se ha, que ocurra entonces desde la cercanía, que hoy más que nunca llega transverberada de desgarro, incredulidad (...) y estupor. (shrink)

The phenomenon of self-love elicits conflicting reactions. Some believe it is the key to happiness, while others are skeptical. This essay defines self-love as wholehearted concern for one's well-being, argues that it does not imply selfishness, arrogance, or vanity, discusses reasons to value self-love, and describes ways Logic-Based Therapy can be used to help people love themselves.