Conceptual production of the journal Vidici, particularly its thematic issue The Dictionary of Technology, represents the cultural content that preserves the sparkle in understanding the technological aspects of social and mental alienation and reification. Even today it has not lost its ideological and theoretical relevance. It allows more accurate interpretation and a better understanding of the ideological trends as well as political and cultural events at the University of Belgrade in the first years after the death of Josip (...) class='Hi'>Broz Tito. Time period which is marked as an early post-Titoism has been explored poorly, and many interesting and significant events from the past were suppressed by the subsequent dramatic historical events. Special actuality of the Dictionary has been given by the harsh ideological criticism exposed in the form of the Analysis of the Dictionary of Technology that appeared as anonym material used by political forums and mainstream media to controvert and ban the Dictionary. While the authors of the Dictionary, based on metaphorical and allegorical insights, tried to get insight into the forthcoming crisis of the Yugoslav society, composers of Analysis wanted to defend blindly ideologically outlined stripe. (shrink)

The emotions surrounding the question of Kosovo’s future owe their intensity to the long history of human rights abuses in the province. The years 1945–1966 and 1987–1999, in particular, saw harsh repression of local Albanians and a systematic favoring of local Serbs. Since June 1999, the province has been under international supervision, and, in this period, Serbs complain that they have been the victims of repeated acts of violence at the hands of Albanians. This article provides an overview of human (...) rights abuses since 1945 and closes with a brief assessment of the international plan presented by UN mediator Martti Ahtisaari in February 2007. (shrink)

Even though Belgrade student protests emerged and ended abruptly after only seven days in June of 1968, they came as a cumulative point of a decade-long accumulated social dissatisfaction and antagonisms, as well as of philosophical investigations of the unorthodox Marxists of the Praxis school. It surprised the Yugoslav authorities as the first massive rebellion after WWII to explicitly criticize rising social inequality, bureaucratization and unemployment and demand free speech and abolishment of privileges. This article focuses on the intellectual destiny (...) and legacy of the eight professors from the Faculty of Philosophy close to the Praxis school, who were identified as the protests’ instigators and subsequently expelled from the University of Belgrade due to their “ethico-political unsuitability”. Under both international and domestic pressure, they were later reemployed in a separate research unit named the Centre for Philosophy and Social Theory, where they kept their critical edge and argued for political pluralism. From the late 1980s onwards, they and their colleagues became politically active and at times occupied the highest positions in Serbia – Dragoljub Mićunović as one of the founders of the modern Democratic Party and the Speaker of the Parliament, former Serbian President and Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica and former Prime Minister late Zoran Đinđić. Still, while some members became strong anti-nationalists and anti-war activists, other embraced Serbian nationalism, therefore pivoting the intellectual split into the so called First and Second Serbia that marked Serbian society during the 1990s and remained influential to this day. (shrink)

Authors De Marco and colleagues have presented a new model on the concept of invasiveness, redefining both its technical definition and practical implementation.1 While the authors raise valid critiques regarding the discrepancy in definitions, I cannot help but wonder about the purpose of redefining terms for which little confusion, if any, exists? This commentary seeks to scrutinise the rationale supporting the new model in the absence of significant clinical confusion and to explore the implications for clinical practice. Initially, one may (...) notice there is no mention of clinical relevancy, confusion among patients or whether the discrepancy in terms is causing miscommunication. It seems reasonable that some clinical confusion may exist, but so too does a similar imbalance of terms when speaking technically across the specialties; take depression and its definition as a primary example. While I certainly agree with the illustration of non-invasive prenatal testing being compared with venous blood draws as a disparity in terminology, little evidence suggests confusion concerning the nosology.2 The medical community, including both physicians and patients, recognises that the terminology is specifically used within the …. (shrink)

Technophobia is an irrational fear of either technological influence or\ntechnological artifacts. Philosophical interest for technophobia is\nthreefold: epistemological, existential and\nphilosophical-anthropological. In the last five decades, computers have\nchanged in major many areas of human life, including philosophy. The\nauthors have started rendering technophobical issues in philosophy with\nemergence of technophobical objections to each leap forward in\ncommunication medium. Next area of analysis is speculative fiction.\nDetermining the philosophical importance of speculative fiction, authors\noffered an overview of technophobical thesis in some of anthological\nworks.

On the twentieth anniversary of the death of one of the most important contemporary political and social philosophers, John B. Rawls (1921–2002), in this paper the authors deal with his understanding of the relationship between civil disobedience and freedom within the framework of a liberal constitutional democracy based on the rule of law. The fundamental starting point of Rawls’s theory, and thus of this work, is that civil disobedience expresses disobedience to the law within the limits of fidelity to the (...) law, although it is at the outer edge thereof. If the freedom of thought expressing disobedience to unjust laws is one of the fundamental freedoms, then civil disobedience can be understood not only as a corrective to liberal constitutional democracy but also as a realistic attempt to “save” it. This is an important topic of contemporary political philosophy, considering the increasingly widespread discourse about the crisis of liberalism in general today, and the impact of that crisis on the institutions of liberal constitutional democracy, among which the state stands out, but in fact law and the legal system as a whole. (shrink)

Tehnofobija je iracionalan strah od utjecaja tehnologije ili tehnoloških artefakata. Filozofski interes za tehnofobiju leži u tri sfere: spoznajnoj, egzistencijalnoj i filozofsko-antropološkoj. U posljednjih pet desetljeća računala su uvelike promijenila i filozofiju. Autori polaze u ocrtavanju problema tehnofobije u filozofiji od pojave tehnofobijskih komentara sa svakim skokom naprijed u sredstvima komunikacije. Sljedeće područje analize je spekulativna fikcija. Utvrdivši značaj spekulativne fikcije za filozofiju, nudi se pregled tehnofobijskih teza u nekim antologijskim djelima spekulativne fikcije.

The paper aims to present the philosophical background and justification of the theory of social realism. Social realism is a representative example of a literary period in which the autonomy of literature in terms of, for example, the aesthetic value of a literary work, was brought to a negligible level given the radical demands of regime poetics of writing in accordance with politics and ideology. Socialist-realism, poetics in which party writing and educating people in the form of socialist progress and (...) without any concern about literary creation are paramount, finds its postulates in theories of the Union of Russian Proletarian Writers (RAPP) and proletarian cultural and educational organization (Proletkult). Theorists of socialist realism poetics claim that their postulates find philosophical justification in Marx’s and Engels’ texts about art. The primary subject of analysis in the article will, therefore, be the connection between the theory of social realism and the classical Marxist conception of art. Based on the analysis, it can be concluded that the theory of social realism is justified by classical Marxist aesthetics regarding historical materialism which determines art, but not in the sense of denying the autonomy of the art. (shrink)

This article presents results from a multidisciplinary research project on the integration and transfer of language knowledge into robots as an empirical paradigm for the study of language development in both humans and humanoid robots. Within the framework of human linguistic and cognitive development, we focus on how three central types of learning interact and co-develop: individual learning about one's own embodiment and the environment, social learning (learning from others), and learning of linguistic capability. Our primary concern is how these (...) capabilities can scaffold each other's development in a continuous feedback cycle as their interactions yield increasingly sophisticated competencies in the agent's capacity to interact with others and manipulate its world. Experimental results are summarized in relation to milestones in human linguistic and cognitive development and show that the mutual scaffolding of social learning, individual learning, and linguistic capabilities creates the context, conditions, and requisites for learning in each domain. Challenges and insights identified as a result of this research program are discussed with regard to possible and actual contributions to cognitive science and language ontogeny. In conclusion, directions for future work are suggested that continue to develop this approach toward an integrated framework for understanding these mutually scaffolding processes as a basis for language development in humans and robots. (shrink)

How does a lawyer think? Does legal intuition exist? Do lawyers need imagination? Why is legal language so abstract? It is no longer possible to answer these questions by applying philosophical analysis alone. Recent advances in the cognitive sciences have reshaped our conceptions of the human mental faculties and the tools we use to solve problems. A new picture of the functioning of the legal mind is emerging. In The Legal Mind, Bartosz Brożek uses philosophical arguments and insight from the (...) cognitive sciences to depict legal thinking as a close cooperation between three cognitive mechanisms - intuition, imagination, and language - and addresses the question of how to efficiently use these mental tools. This novel and provocative approach provides a fresh perspective on legal thinking and gives rise to important questions pertaining to the limits of legal interpretation and rationality in the law. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 6, Page 60-62, June 2011.

O problema do conhecimento fácil tem sido definido na literatura epistemológica contemporânea com um problema que nasce de duas formas distintas. O propósito deste ensaio é mostrar que essas supostas maneiras diferentes de gerar o mesmo problema em verdade originam dois problemas distintos, que requerem respostas distintas. Um deles está relacionado à aquisição fácil (inaceitável) de conhecimento de primeira-ordem e o outro à aquisição fácil (inaceitável) de conhecimento de segunda-ordem. Além disso, é apresentada a maneira como o infinitismo, a teoria (...) epistêmica segundo a qual as razões que justificam uma opinião devem ser infinitas em número e não-repetidas, pode lidar com cada um desses problemas. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay presents the chief reasons for making a distinction between propositional and doxastic justification and, also, points out two things: no theory of propositional justification implies a theory of doxastic justification; infinitism is, essentially, a theory of propositional justification. Additionally, this paper tries to shed some light on the three conjointly sufficient conditions for a proper infinitist view of propositional justification.

It is nowadays widely understood that undeclared work cannot be efficiently combated without a holistic view on the mechanisms underlying its existence. However, the question remains whether we possess all the pieces of the holistic puzzle. To fill the gap, in this paper, we test if the features so far known to affect the behaviour of taxpayers are sufficient to detect noncompliance with outstanding precision. This is done by training seven supervised machine learning models on the compilation of data from (...) the 2019 Special Eurobarometer on undeclared work and relevant figures from other sources. The conducted analysis not only does attest to the completeness of our knowledge concerning the drivers of undeclared work but also paves the way for wide usage of artificial intelligence in monitoring and confronting this detrimental practice. The study, however, exposes the necessity of having at disposal considerably larger datasets compared to those currently available if successful real-world applications of machine learning are to be achieved in this field. Alongside the apparent theoretical contribution, this paper is thus also expected to be of particular importance for policymakers, whose efforts to tackle tax evasion will have to be expedited in the period after the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

In the paper authors present, examine, and test elements of the vital idea of the philosophical morphology as a method and a technique of philosophical investigation. The paper consists of some applications mostly concerning the method applied by L. Wittgenstein in PI and related later works, and of a series of examples concerning daily phenomena. In the first part the philosophical morphology is explicated as a method, and in the second and in the third part basic “commandments” of morphological technique (...) are described and examined, namely the first one – which says that one should “look-at exhaustively”, and the second one – which says that one should “see-as and describe synoptically”. In these parts some objections and replies to crucial morphological ideas are provided and accompanied with examples. (shrink)

Danski filozof Søren Kierkegaard duboko je proživljavao i promišljao vjeru, umjetnost i filozofiju pa, premda se umjetnosti i filozofije odrekao u ime vjere, to je samo prividno tako, jer je filozofiju sačuvao svojim izvanrednim filozofiranjem, a umjetnosti je sačuvao značajno mjesto u estetici braka i umjetnosti življenja. Što to znači estetički živjeti, i što znači etički živjeti? Kierkegaard ne polazi od estetičkog života umjetnika, već od etičkog i religioznog samoizbora koji život čini lijepim i umjetničkim djelom. Cilj nije umjetnost umjetničkog (...) djela, već umjetnost življenja, a to je moguće samo u vjeri.Dannish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard deeply lived through and contemplated faith, art and philosophy; althought he got rid of art and philosophy in the name of faith, this was only apparently, because he have preserved philosophy by his extraordinary thinking, and he also preserved important place for the art in the aestehtics of marriage and in the art of living. What does it mean to live aestehtically, and what to live ethically? Kierkegaard does not take the life of an artist as his point of departure, but he takes ethical and religious self-choice as the source of life which makes it artistic work and the work of beauty. The goal is not the art of artistic work, but the art of living, and that is possible only through the faith. (shrink)

The present collection represents an attempt to bring together several contributions to the ongoing debate pertaining to supervenience of the normative in law and morals and strives to be the first work that addresses the topic comprehensively. It addresses the controversies surrounding the idea of normative supervenience and the philosophical conceptions they generated, deserve a recapitulation, as well as a new impulse for further development. Recently, there has been renewed interest in the concepts of normativity and supervenience. The research on (...) normativity – a term introduced to the philosophical jargon by Edmund Husserl almost one hundred years ago – gained impetus in the 1990s through the works of such philosophers as Robert Audi, Christine Korsgaard, Robert Brandom, Paul Boghossian or Joseph Raz. The problem of the nature and sources of normativity has been investigated not only in morals and in relation to language, but also in other domains, e.g. in law or in the c ontext of the theories of rationality. Supervenience, understood as a special kind of relation between properties and weaker than entailment, has become analytic philosophers’ favorite formal tool since 1980s. It features in the theories pertaining to mental properties, but also in aesthetics or the law. In recent years, the ‘marriage’ of normativity and supervenience has become an object of many philosophical theories as well as heated debates. It seems that the conceptual apparatus of the supervenience theory makes it possible to state precisely some claims pertaining to normativity, as well as illuminate the problems surrounding it. (shrink)

It seems opportune to commemorate in ‘Augustinianum’ the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, insofar as he is an outstanding figure whose theoritical insight gave birth to the computer revolution of the twentieth centur y. His theories are equally important for the methodology supporting studies in the humanities.

The collection of Coptic literary papyri of the Egyptian Museum of Turin is one of the most important in the world, if not for the number of codices, certainly for their contribution to the knowledge of Coptic literature and codicology. This paper makes an exhaustive list of the codices and of the works that they contain, with reference to their publication, especially that of Francesco Rossi , who could read more than is visible today. The tables provided are useful because (...) the papyri have been set in different order , after Rossi’s publication. (shrink)

The topic of the impact of artificial intelligence on law, the legal profession and legal culture, in general, has not yet been sufficiently discussed in the Croatian scientific community. This paper aims to encourage a more comprehensive analysis of the relationship between the increasing use of artificial intelligence in our daily lives and the specifics of practising the legal profession in such an environment. Artificial intelligence is still a broad and heterogeneous field. It is therefore justified to ask the question: (...) Which of the many technologies currently being developed can be applied in the field of law? Which legal matters can be “entrusted” to the new technologies? To answer such and similar questions, it is necessary to have an excellent knowledge of both artificial intelligence and the law, as well as the areas in which they intersect. We have chosen criminal law, which is a part of public law and the ultimate social mechanism for responding to undesirable behaviour, as our object of study. We pay particular attention to its two important aspects: the element of culpability in a criminal offence and the possibility of autonomous decision-making in criminal law. The reflections have shown that Croatian criminal law may have the ability and potential to adapt to the challenges of artificial intelligence when it comes to culpability. On the other hand, the necessity and value of artificially intelligent decisions are questionable given the fundamental characteristics of criminal law. In conclusion, the authors express a departure from views of artificial intelligence as a decision-making substitute in criminal law but support the view that artificially intelligent legal technologies are an aid to decision-making. (shrink)

The paper deals with the critical questioning of the relation between legitimate imposed legal obligations and the rights to refuse these obligations based on the right of the freedom of conscience, i.e. conscientious objection. The critical perspective that is applied to conduct the questioning is a legal profession because, in Croatian legal culture, there is no articulated answer to the question of how to reconcile these two obligations within the legal profession. The paper draws on the comprehension of John Rawls’s (...) theory of conscientious objection since it is a systematic analysis of justice that shall submit subjective understanding of the good to the principle of right. In practice, the focus is on the grounds for acknowledging conscientious objection among lawyers as well on the obstacles to exercising this right. (shrink)

Environmental issues are among the most critical scientific and social problems of today. The human environment is an environment of inequality and crisis, and a platform for debate on the fairness of social order. The crisis is the result of human behaviour, which reflects the failure of development and unjust distribution of consequences. The gap between rich and poor on a global scale is evident in the disproportionate climate change impacts on countries and their ability to cope. In this respect, (...) the economic and political inequalities between First and Third World countries are fortified by ecological ones. The development of international environmental mechanisms such as the Kyoto Agreement is instrumental in this kind of change. The pursuit of tackling and controlling climate change has its unforeseen consequences, whereas in specific communities the existent inequalities are emphasised in new forms. If mechanisms developed for the environment, such as the market of carbon emissions and the carbon balance, lead to environmental injustice and disproportionately affects vulnerable groups, it raises the question of their purpose. On the path of Rawl’s idea on the fairness of social institutions, such system demonstrates itself as contradictory and unjust. (shrink)

Pendant plus de quinze ans, Léon N. Tolstoï a travaillé sur son seul traité esthétique intitulé Qu'est-ce que l’art? dans lequel il écrit que l'art n'est ni l'apparition d'une mystérieuse idée ou de la beauté divine, ni le produit de l'énergie de l'homme ou de l'expression de ses émotions, mais un moyen de communication entre hommes, nécessaire à la vie et à l'aspiration vers la bonté de tout humain. Pour lui, l'art est une forme de création communicative qui unit les (...) hommes dans des émotions identiques parmi lesquelles se distingue particulièrement l'importance du Bien. C’est précisément dans le transfert des émotions à l'aide du langage symbolique que repose la principale caractéristique de l'art. L'objectif de ce travail est la lecture des approches de Tolstoï envers l'esthétique et l'art, dispersées dans ses différentes œuvres, afin d'arriver à la vision de l'art en tant que forme particulière d’ « à la recherche de » mais aussi du reflet du Bien. Ce travail est rédigé dans l'idée qu'une recherche plus exhaustive des pensées esthétiques de Tolstoï peut modestement contribuer à la « réhumanisation de l'art ». (shrink)

Acknowledgments I wish to express my gratitude to Dr. Jakob Amstutz for his continual feedback during my writing of this work. ...