Volume 19, Issue 5, May 2019, Page 72-74.

Ilan Pappe, one of the New Historians in Israel, answers Amaya et Bacha’s questions concerning the disciplinary proceedings initiated against him by the administration of the University of Haifa. Pappe argues that the measures taken against him were the result of his critique of Israeli academia for its lack of independence, as well as of his scholarly work on the « Nakba » and, in particular, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian village of Tantura at the founding of the state (...) of Israel. In an academic milieu characterized by conformism and cowardice, the work of the New Historians is less and less tolerated by the Israeli authorities. (shrink)

Noted Hungarian historian Karoly Szerencses provides brief, steam-of-consciousness essays to accompany each photo. Acting as the photographer's fictive guide, Szerencses introduces "Margaret" to each of her photos, providing her with an encapsulated historical background of the subject and in the process revealing the soul and conscience of the nation in 1938. As he says in farewell to Margaret at the end of their "tour": "... please remember us, our terrible fears; recite a prayer for us so that we may say, (...) for the very last time: they caught us by surprise, they meant to annihilate us, yet we managed to survive." --Book Jacket. (shrink)

Next SectionIn order to cope with the imperfective paradox, the assumption that the event in progress must get completed, if not in the actual world, then in a counterfactual world or worlds, has been a part of the standard modal approach to the progressive since Dowty (1977). This is generally coupled with the further assumption that some variant of normalcy should be used to single out the relevant counterfactual continuations. Recently, however, Bonomi (1999), Gendler Szabó (2004, 2008) and Wulf (2009) (...) have argued against these assumptions. The present paper suggests that the counter-arguments give compelling evidence that the truth-conditions of the progressive are weaker than is assumed by the standard approach, and that the normalcy requirement should be replaced by reference to the conditions necessary for the completion of the event. (shrink)

The text develops the ideas of philosophical application, taking into account various philosophical traditions, the most significant ones being the hermeneutical and the postmodern tradition. Therefore, the author’s conclusion is that the hermeneutical practice of application has the chance of bringing philosophy closer to human condition in the most adequate form for present-day conditions, as applied philosophy.

The problem of justice lies at the heart of the philosophy of jurisprudence. Then what justice does, the purpose for which a legal system exists, the central principle of jurisprudence, is to provide, for concrete cases, a basis for decisions as to what is just. In the lecture I will first of all deal with Kant's ideas about justice, as shown in his works. They can also be seen as examples of a concept of justice from a previous epoch. The (...) magnitude of these distances will become apparent when one bears in mind what Kant meant, and in what context, when he used this concept. At the same time Kant is the thinker who is most often mentioned in the contemporary discourse on justice. This is for two reasons. Firstly, Kant's position is exemplary for that position that holds that justice is the trancendental centre of any theory of jurisprudence; secondly, Kant is seen as the most significant thinker of that epoch, which is seen as the starting point for the present: the modern European Enlightenment. Finally I would like to contrast the concept of justice which has been developed in this way with the concept that seems fitting for the concrete situation of the Istanbul Congress of 2003. (shrink)

The problem of justice lies at the heart of the philosophy of jurisprudence. Then what justice does, the purpose for which a legal system exists, the central principle of jurisprudence, is to provide, for concrete cases, a basis for decisions as to what is just. In the lecture I will first of all deal with Kant's ideas about justice, as shown in his works. They can also be seen as examples of a concept of justice from a previous epoch. The (...) magnitude of these distances will become apparent when one bears in mind what Kant meant, and in what context, when he used this concept. At the same time Kant is the thinker who is most often mentioned in the contemporary discourse on justice. This is for two reasons. Firstly, Kant's position is exemplary for that position that holds that justice is the trancendental centre of any theory of jurisprudence; secondly, Kant is seen as the most significant thinker of that epoch, which is seen as the starting point for the present: the modern European Enlightenment. Finally I would like to contrast the concept of justice which has been developed in this way with the concept that seems fitting for the concrete situation of the Istanbul Congress of 2003. (shrink)

The semantics of progressive sentences presents a challenge to linguists and philosophers alike. According to a widely accepted view, the truth-conditions of progressive sentences rely essentially on a notion of inertia. Dowty suggested inertia worlds to implement this “inertia idea” in a formal semantic theory of the progressive. The main thesis of the paper is that the notion of inertia went through a subtle, but crucial change when worlds were replaced by events in Landman and Portner :760–787, 1998), and that (...) this new, event-related concept of inertia results in a possibility-based theory of the progressive. An important case in point in the paper is a proof that, despite its surface structure, the theory presented in Portner does not implement the notion of inertia in Dowty ; rather, it belongs together with Dowty’s earlier, 1977 theory according to which the progressive is a possibility operator. (shrink)

The author of this paper presents the main interpretative orientations regarding the concept on the minority being of the reformed Transylvanian bishop Makkai Sándor who lived in the inter-war period. The author tries to point out the philosophical, moral, and existential sides of this problem which has become deep-rooted and permanent in the consciousness of the Hungarian intellectuals from Transylvania, and which has been known as the problem of the minority existential paradox. To accomplish this, the author relies on the (...) theoretical and methodological possibilities provided by the philosophical hermeneutics. (shrink)

The practice of prenatal diagnosis has brought with it the utilization of pregnancy termination as a preventive approach. In this paper the genetic/teratologic, fetal and maternal indications for termination of pregnancy used in Hungary are described, as well as the legal requirements and the proposed mode of termination at the different stages of gestation. The author is the director of the largest prenatal genetic counseling service in Hungary. Keywords: elective abortion, medico-legal aspects, prenatal diagnosis, genetic disorders, Hungary, bioethics CiteULike Connotea (...) Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

The subject of this study, the step forward—which the author felt to be ‘of evolutionary value’—was occasioned by a Delphi discussion. The debate was opened by Varga's contrastive exposition of diagnoses of present history with respect to Hungary's accession to the European Union, offered by some leading Hungarian sociologists, in which he tried to place the views of these authors in a value sociological system by Charles Morris and Geert Hofstede. In Morris’ case, this involved recourse to his combination of (...) two systems: one semiotic, the other axiological; in Hofstede's, to his system of ‘software of the mind’ embracing axiology and organizational psychology. This synthesis was opposed by Kreutz who offered a new ordering principle which he advanced as truer to life. The present confrontation between the value sociological synthesis advanced by Kreutz, on the one hand, and the trends hallmarked by the names of Morris and Hofstede, on the other hand, provided the author with an opportunity to find a resolution of the tension between desired and desirable, for which he has gained some side light from Robert K. Merton's theory of the different degrees of insulation of role–activities from observability by members of the role–set. (shrink)

Florea Lucaci: Avatarul ideii de absolut. De la Kant la filosofia limbajului. Provopress, Cluj-Napoca, 2008.

In this article, using the recent work by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age as my point of departure, I will argue that Jean-Luc Nancy enables us to think past the competing binary of atheistic and religious experience and allows us to surpass the present narratives of secularism. In A Secular Age, Taylor himself seeks a middle ground between atheism and religion, arguing that it is possible to open ourselves to the cross-pressures of modern existence that find us caught between (...) scientific atheism and a need for spiritual and religious guidance. Here, Taylor finds a way of picturing ourselves within a secular age, remaining faithful to scientific rationalism, but still open to religion and a sense of a higher good. However, as I shall demonstrate, in his thesis Taylor misrepresents the Continental philosophical tradition (particularly Nietzsche and post-structuralism) that has itself sought to understand these cross-pressures of existence. Taking this misrepresentation, and specifically his reductive and colloquial analysis of Nietzsche, Camus, and Derrida, as my point of departure, I provide an alternative manner of thinking through the work of these writers, one that leads to a detailed analysis of Jean-Luc Nancy and his project the deconstruction of Christianity. In this analysis I argue that Nancy provides a manner of thinking that remains open and allows an experience of freedom, without seeking to close that sense of openness with explanation, nor maintaining that sense of openness with a conception of the divine. (shrink)

ABOUT WEAK AND STRONG EMPIRICAL NECCESSITY. CATEGORICAL, DISPOSITIONAL PROPERTIES AND LAWS OF NATURE Pohľady na empirickú nevyhnutnosť možno rozdeliť do dvoch skupín: teórie slabej nevyhnutnosti a teórie silnej nevyhnutnosti. Do prvej teórie patria koncepcie, ktoré uvažujú svet zložený z pasívnych vlastností, akými sú kategorické vlastnosti. Za zmeny vo svete sú zodpovedné zákony prírody, ktoré sa od možného sveta k svetu líšia, a preto aj prejavy týchto vlastností sú odlišné. Druhú teóriu, teóriu silnej nevyhnutnosti, zastávajú filozofi, ktorí predpokladajú existenciu silovo aktívnych (...) vlastností, dispozícií. Práve tieto sú zodpovedné za zmeny vo svete, a vo všetkých možných svetoch sa prejavujú nevyhnutne rovnako. Autor argumentuje v prospech existencie dispozičných vlastností a tvrdí, že dispozičný výklad sveta netrpí modálnymi absurdnosťami, ktorými trpia teórie slabej nevyhnutnosti. Hoci aj dispozičné teórie majú svoje problémy a hlavne mysterióznosti, ktoré môžu viesť až do metafyziky dispozičných monád. Kľúčové slová: dispozičné vlastnosti, kategorické vlastnosti, modality, nevyhnutnosť, zákony prírody. (shrink)

My article – as a first step in a comprehen- sive research program – attempts to verify the hypothesis according to which M. Eliade’s morphologi-cal and historical investigations of archaic religious- ness reveal the outlines of an archaic ontology. For this purpose, the article focuses upon Eliade’s conception of religious tradition as the carrier of the indivisible unity of sacred existence and religious experience. The ontological difference found in religious existence and revealed by religious experience is rooted in the essentially (...) hermeneutic nature of religious tradition. Therefore the perspective of philosophical hermeneutics proves very productive in the investigation of this problem. (shrink)

Proofs have been given that the light-cone approximation can be analyzed in terms of the extended quantum-mechanical description of the space-time measurements by the complex numbers. It is then proved that the so established description is able to support both the asymptotical scale-invariant cross sections and the threshold behavior of the high-energy production processes.

Proofs have been given that the underlying background of the scale-breaking contributions of the Pauli-Jordan functions and of the Feynman propagators is the existence of an energy dependent dispersion of the canonical scale dimension, respectively. The energy dependence of these dispersions can be established by taking into account the existence of the time dispersion, too. For the interacting fields the above functions are subject to the scale invariance restoration around the underlying proper-time dispersions, in so far as the short space-like (...) space-time region is considered. (shrink)

This paper compares the heuristic potential of three metaphorical paired concepts used in the relevant literature to characterise global relationships between the anthroposphere and the ecosphere. Methodologically, the guiding question is whether and to what extent metaphorical theses can support an arrival at hypotheses which accurately reflect reality and possess explanatory force. The predator-prey model implies that the populations of two species in such a relationship in principle exhibit coupled oscillations, giving prey populations the possibility of periodic regeneration. For some (...) time, however, the most important indicators of human destruction of nature have been showing a relentless upward trend which appears to render the tumour-host metaphor more appropriate. Another fact which favours this analogy is that a tumour develops within its host and from its host's normal cells, in a similar way to the emergence of the anthroposphere from within the biosphere. But the parasite-host analogy also allows the formulation of fruitful hypotheses, since ecological parasitology is equally familiar with varieties of autoaggressive interaction and provides a means of focusing particularly on the adelphoparasitic hierarchy within the anthroposphere. (shrink)

In my paper I examine the question of tolerance. In the first part of the discussion I follow up the process in the course of which the problem of tolerance appearing in connection to the practice of religious freedom in the 17th-18th centuries leaves the territory of religious morality and the relation of church and state, and is placed into the empirical sphere of a general human relation to the otherness of the other, and with it to the private sphere (...) of the individual. However, the intolerance continuously present in our life world still keeps the question in the forefront of theoretical interest. In the second part of the paper I examine the relationship of tolerance and intolerance, proving that the tolerance conceived as the experience of being tolerated induced intolerance. This situation can be exceeded by a change of attitude outlined by philosophical hermeneutics, the essence of which is the practical and behavioral application of the principle of “being thoughtful of the other”. (shrink)

ABOUT WEAK AND STRONG EMPIRICAL NECCESSITY. CATEGORICAL, DISPOSITIONAL PROPERTIES AND LAWS OF NATURE Pohľady na empirickú nevyhnutnosť možno rozdeliť do dvoch skupín: teórie slabej nevyhnutnosti a teórie silnej nevyhnutnosti. Do prvej teórie patria koncepcie, ktoré uvažujú svet zložený z pasívnych vlastností, akými sú kategorické vlastnosti. Za zmeny vo svete sú zodpovedné zákony prírody, ktoré sa od možného sveta k svetu líšia, a preto aj prejavy týchto vlastností sú odlišné. Druhú teóriu, teóriu silnej nevyhnutnosti, zastávajú filozofi, ktorí predpokladajú existenciu silovo aktívnych (...) vlastností, dispozícií. Práve tieto sú zodpovedné za zmeny vo svete, a vo všetkých možných svetoch sa prejavujú nevyhnutne rovnako. Autor argumentuje v prospech existencie dispozičných vlastností a tvrdí, že dispozičný výklad sveta netrpí modálnymi absurdnosťami, ktorými trpia teórie slabej nevyhnutnosti. Hoci aj dispozičné teórie majú svoje problémy a hlavne mysterióznosti, ktoré môžu viesť až do metafyziky dispozičných monád. Kľúčové slová: dispozičné vlastnosti, kategorické vlastnosti, modality, nevyhnutnosť, zákony prírody. (shrink)

Today’s philosophical thinking mostly deals with the problem of sin from a religious, phenomenological or ethical point of view. This paper is an attempt to find hermeneutical points of view for the possibility of an interpretation of sin which can be opened by philosophical hermeneutics with reference to our historical being, the linguistic form of experience and the experience of finitude. The train of thoughts takes us from the analysis of the concept “original sin” to the disclosure of the speculative (...) structure and existential meaning of the original sin. Throughout this examination, the essence of original sin is revealed as the medium and the universal experience-horizon of the history of human being and of meaning. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This paper focuses on a specific aspect of a Japanese rite of passage called Shichigosan. Although its origins go back to premodern Japan, its contemporary pattern truly reflects the modern living conditions of the Japanese. Today the ritual is one of the most popular family celebrations. Commercialization has significantly influenced the pattern of celebration in the postwar period and as a result, consumption practices have become inherent parts of the ritual. The paper examines this development from a historical perspective. Furthermore, (...) it discusses the process through which consumption practices contribute to the event’s significance, not diminishing but rather enhancing its importance in the observers’ eyes. Conspicuous consumption thus becomes a creative two-directional process, one which is sustained by families’ aspirations and desires, and one which is informed by forces emanating from the commercial sector and from the media. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with what I believe is the epistemological mission of Kant’s doctrine of taste. The third Critique inherits two problems from the first. The evident one is that the categorial constitution of nature must be complemented with the notion of purposiveness. The less evident one is that the transcendental theory of experience needs a common sense in order to secure a common objectivity. The judgment of taste, conceived of by Kant as a ‘cognition in general’ not restricted (...) to either the particular subject or the particular object, offers a solution. It turns out to be a judgment that cannot be made without assuming the purposiveness of nature and the uniformity of the cognizing subjects. (shrink)