This daily diary study examined the within-person coupling between four emotion regulation strategies and both subjective well-being and perceived stress in daily life of geriatric nurses. Participants ( N = 89) described how they regulated their emotions in terms of cognitive reappraisal and suppression. They also indicated their subjective well-being and level of perceived stress each day over 3 weeks. At the within-person level, cognitive reappraisal intended to increase positive emotions was positively associated with higher subjective well-being and negatively associated (...) with perceived stress. Suppression of the expression of positive emotions was negatively associated with subjective well-being and positively associated with perceived stress. However, cognitive reappraisal intended to down-regulate negative emotions and suppression as a strategy to inhibit the expression of negative emotions were not associated with daily well-being or perceived stress. Off-days were rated as days with higher subjective well-being and lower perceived stress in contrast to working days. At the between-person level, individuals who reported more daily negative affect reported increased suppression of positive emotions, corroborating the within-person findings. Moreover, findings indicated that nurses with more years of experience in the job reported higher subjective well-being and less perceived stress. These results provide insights into important daily emotional processes of geriatric nurses, both at workdays and in their leisure time. (shrink)

In this new book, Marko Zlomislić argues that Slavoj Žižek's work does not contain any sort of radical emancipatory project, especially as it passes through the ideology of communism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The evidence for the failure of communism is vast and includes the more than six hundred mass graves recently located in Žižek's homeland of Slovenia. Zlomislić demonstrates that the way out of the capitalist dilemma is not a repetition of communism but a return to the late medieval (...) notion of haecceity or "individual thisness" that was rejected by modernity. Haecceity, or the indescribable and indefinite here and now of the person, shows that the late medieval Franciscans were already "postmodernists." It is no wonder that the totalitarianism of the modernist Hegel is embraced by thinkers such as Žižek, Badiou, Hardt, Negri, and Laclau and was already rejected by Leibnitz, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Levinas, Deleuze, and Derrida. This important book shows that Žižek's work must be rejected because it does not uphold the dignity, worth, and uniqueness of the person. (shrink)

The article explores the specific conception of art developed by Danko Grlić, a prominent member of the Yugoslav Praxis School. Grlić conceptualised art beyond both aesthetic norms and technological determinism. Within the context of praxis philosophy, a distinct theory of the subject and a Marxist humanist approach, he reconceptualised art as a distinct type of praxis, a revolutionary and creative practice of changing existing living conditions. The article explains how his unique understanding of art leads Grlić to analyse, criticise and (...) refute various Marxist approaches to art: art as an ideology, art as a reflection of the objective world, art as sociological analysis. Moreover, while sharing many ideas and conceptions with Walter Benjamin’s materialist conception of art, Grlić reached the point where he became critical due to Benjamin’s belief in technology concerning processes of emancipation, which Grlić viewed with scepticism. (shrink)

The prediction error minimization framework denotes a family of views that aim at providing a unified theory of perception, cognition, and action. In this paper, I discuss some of the theoretical limitations of PEM. It appears that PEM cannot provide a satisfactory explanation of motivated reasoning, as instantiated in phenomena such as self-deception, because its cognitive ontology does not have a separate category for motivational states such as desires. However, it might be thought that this objection confuses levels of explanation. (...) Self-deception is a personal level phenomenon, while PEM offers subpersonal explanations of psychological abilities. Thus, the paper examines how subpersonal explanations couched in the PEM framework can be thought of as related to personal level explanations underlying self-deception. In this regard, three views on the relation between personal and subpersonal explanations are investigated: the autonomist, the functionalist, and the co-evolutionary perspective. I argue that, depending on which view of the relation between the personal and subpersonal is adopted, the PEM paradigm faces a dilemma: either its explanatory ambitions should be reduced to the subpersonal domain, or it cannot provide a satisfactory account of motivated reasoning as instantiated in self-deception. (shrink)

This is a wide ranging and deeply learned examination of evolutionary developmental biology, and the foundations of life from the perspective of information theory. Hermeneutics was a method developed in the humanities to achieve understanding, in a given context, of texts, history, and artwork. In Readers of the Book of Life, the author shows that living beings are also hermeneutical interpreters of genetics texts saved in DNA; an interpretation based on the past experience of the cell (cell lineage, species), confronted (...) with and incorporating present environmental clues. This approach stresses the history, not only of the digital record saved in the DNA, but also of the flesh - the cellular organization which has a direct time-continuity with the very origins of life. This book is aimed at reconciling two opposite approaches to life. The first strictly sticking to a belief that all phenomena observed in the realm of the living can be explained from laws of physics. The opposite stressing the importance of features characteristic for a given level of description. To bring both views into a common understanding, the first part gives a comparison of the two problem solving strategies. The second part surveys the development of 20th century biology, bringing to light branches that never became part of the research mainstream. The third section of the book reviews a large body of recent evidence that can be interpreted in favor of the hermeneutic arguments. (shrink)

Regress arguments have convinced many that reasoning cannot require beliefs about what follows from what. In this paper I argue that this is a mistake. Regress arguments rest on dubious (although deeply entrenched) assumptions about the nature of reasoning — most prominently, the assumption that believing p by reasoning is simply a matter of having a belief in p with the right causal ancestry. I propose an alternative account, according to which beliefs about what follows from what play a constitutive (...) role in reasoning. (shrink)

The SynBioSecurity argument says that synthetic biology introduces new risks of intentional misuse of synthetic pathogens and that, therefore, there is a need for extra regulations and oversight. This paper provides an analysis of the argument, sets forth a new version of it, and identifies three developments that raise biosecurity risks compared to the situation earlier. The developments include a spread of the required know-how, improved availability of the techniques, instruments and biological parts, and new technical possibilities such as “resurrecting” (...) disappeared pathogens. It is first shown that the general argument from SynBioSecurity needs to be qualified and that many improvements to biosecurity have already been implemented, most notably in the United States. Second, I suggest a new strain of the argument: the situation that most branches of synthetic biology fall under the gene technology regulation in the European Union and that this regulation in its current form does not adequately address SynBioSecurity risks together provide a weighty reason to review and possibly refine the legislation as well as the supervisory practices. Ethically speaking, the rise in the relative risk of bioterrorism brings to the fore new extrinsic issues. (shrink)

What are the similarities and the differences of icons from the same workshop depicting the same subject? An important portable icon with the representation of the Dormition of the Virgin, hitherto unknown, preserved today in the Art Collection of the University of Göttingen, helps answering this question. The studydeals with the fascinating journey of this icon from Venetian-dominated Crete in the 15th century to Germany of the 18th century. Furthermore, this paper shows that the icon of Göttingen belongs to a (...) group of a numerous icons that they all derive from the same icon-workshop of the renowned Cretan painters Andreas and Nikolaos Ritzos in Candia. Finally, it turned out that this icon was also the inspiration for Cretan painters of the 17th CE such as Emmanuel Lambardos and Viktor. (shrink)

The paper explores Sreten Petrović’s contribution to Marxist aesthetics. Petrović developed his theory within the framework of the Yugoslav Praxis School, although he was not a member of it. Petrović followed Danko Grlić, a prominent member of the Praxis School, in explaining art as a specific emanation of praxis – free, creative, autonomous and self-emancipatory activity beyond the commodity form of capitalist society. Art was thus understood as the liberation and emancipation of Being and its essence. However, Petrović also introduced (...) a novelty – he claimed that art can never be fully understood nor explained. According to him, the only true Marxist aesthetics, given our limited cognitive abilities and the capitalist imperative of producing commodities, would be to limit aesthetics to meta-aesthetics and affirm the ‘critique of the aesthetic mind’. We argue that by limiting aesthetics to meta-aesthetics Petrović is following the young Wittgenstein and his proposition that the world is unintelligible to philosophy. Accordingly, we claim that Petrović’s contribution should be seen as an important contribution to Marxist aesthetics. (shrink)

Empirical research into political sentiments gives force to the proposition that, in the context of the 2013–14 Euromaidan and subsequent war, Ukrainian national identity, for most of its history predominantly ethno-cultural, has undergone changes justifying its qualification as ‘civic’. In this article I discuss the ethno-cultural orientation, conventional during the 19th and 20th centuries, of Ukrainian literary history, a scholarly genre that has a tradition of promoting the cause of Ukrainian nation-building; I identify contemporary examples of discourses in the literary (...) sphere – literary works themselves, literary anthologies and the public statements and debates of writers – that embody or applaud civic identities akin to those in evidence on the Euromaidan; and I reflect upon the values, inclusive and multicultural, that a Ukrainian national literary history rhetorically in harmony with post-Euromaidan sentiment would evince. (shrink)

Which epistemic value is the standard according to which we ought to compare, assess and design institutional arrangements in terms of their epistemic properties? Two main options are agent development and attainment of truth. The options are presented through two authoritative contemporary accounts-agent development by Robert Talisse?s understanding in Democracy and Moral Conflict and attainment of truth by David Estlund?s treatment, most prominently in Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework. Both options are shown to be unsatisfactory because they are subject to (...) problematic risk of suboptimal epistemic state lock-in. The ability of the social epistemic system to revise suboptimal epistemic states is argued to be the best option for a comparative standard in institutional epistemology. nema. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an epistemological argument for freedom from poverty, building on Gerald Gaus’ work on political and moral disagreement in New Diversity Theory (NDT). NDT argues that diversity and disagreement are fundamental to political and moral learning. In this paper, I address Gaus’ central arguments in NDT, and focus on what I argue to be the key epistemological distinction of his account—namely, the argument that the relevant diversity, which is conducive to political and moral learning and should (...) therefore be protected by an institutional order, should not be defended or defined by reference to its performance with regards to discovery of true beliefs, but by reference to the independent epistemic value of protection of disagreeing, redundant and distant investigators. I develop a restatement of this argument from the perspective of institutional epistemology, and show that (along with constitutional liberties, polycentric self-governance and markets) freedom from poverty must be considered an institutional “device” conducive to such a conception of diversity. While Gaus rejects redistributive policies at the level of an institutional order, it is precisely his account of the epistemic powers of diversity and disagreement which provides the strongest defense of minimal redistribution. (shrink)

The concept of the ‘infodemic’ has become a popular explanation for the rejection of anti-COVID-19 crisis governance measures. In this paper, we argue that infodemic is an inherent property of society under free institutions misused to pursue an epistemically vicious political epistemology. Furthermore, we provide an alternative account of political epistemology of COVID-19 governance and popular resistance to it. Namely, we argue that 1) pandemics represent a complex problem, and some level of resistance to governance which restricts liberties while informed (...) by ongoing scientific and political learning processes is inevitable, and 2) the resistance is exacerbated by the history of technocratization of governance and the exclusionary socio-economic inequalities which condition political and epistemic deficiencies easily exploitable by the political entrepreneurs of right-wing populism, particularly under the conditions of social media which gamifies public discourse. Thus, we argue, the correct response to the cultures of rejection of anti-COVID-19 measures is to change the underlying political and economic conditions and not to limit speech or restrict franchise as the infodemic diagnosis suggests. (shrink)

This paper concerns the apparent fact — discussed by Sinan Dogramaci and Brian Weatherson — that inductive reasoning often interacts in disastrous ways with patterns of reasoning that seem perfectly fine in the deductive case. In contrast to Dogramaci's and Weatherson's own suggestions, I argue that these cases show that we cannot reason inductively about arbitrary objects. Moreover, as I argue, this prohibition is neatly explained by a certain hypothesis about the rational basis of inductive reasoning — namely, the hypothesis (...) that inductive reasoning is fundamentally reasoning about what normally happens. (shrink)

U radu se nudi opis konteksta unutar kojeg je formuliran poznati dokaz za nužnost identiteta. Iznosi se formalni prikaz ovog dokaza kako ga je formulirao poznati filozof i logičar Saul Kripke. Također se razmatra gledište filozofa Allana Gibbarda koji nasuprot Kripkeu brani tvrdnju da neki iskazi identiteta mogu biti kontingentni. Osnovni cilj rada je upoznati domaćeg čitatelja s formalnim aspektom rasprave o nužnosti identiteta te dati kratki pregled konteksta unutar kojeg su formulirani argumenti za nužnost identiteta. In the paper, we (...) offer an overview of the context within which the well-known proof of the necessity of identity is formulated. A formal account of this proof is presented as formulated by the renowned philosopher and logician Saul Kripke. Furthermore, we discuss the account of the philosopher Allan Gibbard, who defends the claim that some statements of identity can be contingent. The main goal of the paper is to acquaint the readers who understand the Croatian language with the formal aspect of the discussion on the necessity of identity and to give a brief overview of the context within which the arguments for the necessity of identity are formulated. (shrink)

MIRJAM HORN, POSTMODERN PLAGIARISMS: CULTURAL AGENDA AND AESTHETIC STRATEGIES OF APPROPRIATION IN US-AMERICAN LITERATURE, WALTER DE GRUYTER, BERLIN/BOSTON, 2015.Marko Bogunović.

Aristotle was the founder not only of logic but also of modal logic. In the Prior Analytics he developed a complex system of modal syllogistic which, while influential, has been disputed since antiquity--and is today widely regarded as incoherent. Combining analytic rigor with keen sensitivity to historical context, Marko Malink makes clear that the modal syllogistic forms a consistent, integrated system of logic, one that is closely related to other areas of Aristotle's philosophy. Aristotle's modal syllogistic differs significantly from (...) modern modal logic. Malink considers the key to understanding the Aristotelian version to be the notion of predication discussed in the Topics--specifically, its theory of predicables and the ten categories. The predicables introduce a distinction between essential and nonessential predication. In contrast, the categories distinguish between substantial and nonsubstantial predication. Malink builds on these insights in developing a semantics for Aristotle's modal propositions, one that verifies the ancient philosopher's claims of the validity and invalidity of modal inferences. While it acknowledges some limitations of this reconstruction, Aristotle's Modal Syllogistic brims with bold ideas, richly supported by close readings of the Greek texts. (shrink)

Both G.F.W. Hegel and Carl Schmitt took seriously the problem of political sovereignty entailed by liberal political theories. In Dictatorship (1919) and Political Theology (1922), Schmitt rejects liberal political theories that argue for the immediate unity of democracy and legality i.e., popular sovereignty, because he thinks they cannot secure political sovereignty. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel denounces popular sovereignty for similar reasons. Yet given Schmitt’s negative assessment of Hegel their positions are seldom related to one another. I argue in (...) this paper that Schmitt’s analysis of liberal political theories is similar to Hegel’s analysis of Rousseau’s liberal ideas. I contend, however, that Schmitt’s solution, which collapses the distinction between the executive and the legislative power in favor of the former, fails to secure political sovereignty. Contrary to Schmitt, Hegel conceives of the liberal predicament as a basic determination of any political state that rests on the division of the legislative and executive power. Hegel argues that the constitutional monarchy is a genuine instantiation of political sovereignty that can maintain not only the division of these powers, but also their unity. In this regard, I argue that Hegel’s conception of the division of powers provides a more convincing theory of the problem afflicting modern states than Schmitt’s and at least deserves to be taken more seriously by critics of Schmitt’s solution such as Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Jurgen Habermas, Andreas Kalyvas and Chantal Mouffe. (shrink)

I develop an account of our capacity to know what we consciously believe, which is based on an account of the phenomenology of conscious belief. While other recent authors have suggested that phenomenally conscious states play a role in the epistemology of self-ascriptions of belief, they have failed to give a satisfying account of how exactly the phenomenology is supposed to help with the epistemology — i.e., an account of the way “what it is like” for the subject of a (...) conscious belief makes it rational, for her, to self-ascribe that belief. I argue that an account according to which the phenomenology of belief is transparent — i.e., such that in having a conscious belief one is aware of the world as being a certain way, rather than of anything distinctively mental — is adequate to this task. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to show, first of all, how landscape cannot but stand out on the horizon of a cognitive flux that affects every aspect of our being in the world (or, better said, of our being in the world) world). A special role will be reserved for aesthetic mediation, to be understood as a n act that regulates the epistemic negotiation between what is in the center and what is ”in the surroundings”. In this sense, the (...) work will start from bio cognitive assumptions on the species specific ways in which an organism circumscribes and enriches its world, and will then finally arrive at considerations that should, in our hopes, demonstrate how aisthesis is, in fact, the conceptual category that best lends itself to describing this process, in virtue of the particular gnoseological value it assigns to the se nsitive body and its extension extension. (shrink)

This paper examines the social theory of Lester Frank Ward, one of the most significant representatives of early American social theory, with particular attention to his conception of the state, which can be described as Hegelian. The first part of the paper gives a brief overview of early American social theory: its basic features, the issues that were the focus of attention during this period in the development of sociology in the US, and its most significant representatives. The basic features (...) of Ward’s social theory are then presented and examined in more detail. It is pointed out that it is: conceptual and essentially based on the natural sciences; based on the distinction between pure and applied sociology; systematic; supportive of progressive and pro-social reforms. It was directed against the individualist tradition. His theory was based on the belief that the human mind can direct social progress and that the order based on social inequalities, which is a product of the laissez-faire doctrine, cannot guarantee freedom and prosperity. The fundamental institution capable of doing so is the state. Therefore, the central part of this paper is devoted to his conception of the state and makes a comparison with Hegel’s theory of the ethical state contained in Hegel’s philosophy of objective spirit – philosophy of law and philosophy of history. It concludes by pointing out that Ward’s theory indicated the general direction of development of social circumstances towards the era of collectivism, and was also atypical of American social theory in some of its features. (shrink)

This article examines the possible roots of the sixth-century astrologer/astronomer, Varāhamihira. Ritual instructions from astrological texts on the yātrā are compared with the preliminary services of the Atharvaveda Śāntikalpa to demonstrate that much of the astrological ritual system can be seen as an adaptation of Atharvan śānti ritual. This analysis illuminates both the possible interchange between Vedic and Jyotiḥśāstric ritual systems and Varāhamihira’s considerable expertise as a ritualist.

Contemporary French philosophers such as Levinas, Bataille, and Derrida, along with the existentialists Kierkegaard and Nietzsche have all made use of Franciscan insights in order to safeguard the ipseity that cannot be reduced or totalized.1 In keeping with the taste that concerns me, this paper will examine Derrida’s turn to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and how such a turn may place Derrida within a catholic and Franciscan tradition.

This paper discusses how an understanding of Jung's psychological types is important for the relevance of Gilbert's multi-modal argumentation theory. Moreover, it highlights how the types have been confirmed by contemporary neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Based on Gilbert's approach, I extend multi-modal argumentation to the area of legal argumentation. It seems that when we leave behind the traditional fortress of “logical” legal argumentation, we "discover" alternate modes that have always been present, concealed in the theoretically underestimated rhetorical skills of arguers.

This paper argues that Thomas Hobbes?s theory contains an account of progressive defragmentation and unification of power, accompanied by the progression in human reasoning capacities. If the consequence of human nature is abandonment of natural condition and subjection to a sovereign, then similar principles should apply to the sovereigns themselves, since Hobbes sees them as continuing to exist in the state of nature. In turn, the relations between sovereigns must also lead to defragmentation of political authority, either by conquest or (...) through peaceful submission. Total defragmentation of power might also have eschatological consequences, as the unified power of one human being over the whole world would remove?external violence? as a cause of?the dissolution of a commonwealth? while the perfection of reason would progressively remove the?internal? causes. This is a hypothetical situation that could relate Hobbes?s description of the Kingdom of God from Leviathan to his wider political theory by marking the single sovereign representative of now immortal all-encompassing Leviathan as the Antichrist and thus announcing the second coming of Christ. nema. (shrink)

This paper explores the phenomenon of revisionism in historiography, while focusing in particular on illegitimate revisionism and negationism. It is indisputably true that historiography must be subject to constant revisions. Like all scientific theories, it needs to be characterized by a sort of?conservative? openness towards new ideas; however, revisions and negations are often put forward without scientific grounding. They reject the well-established historiographical methods, while opening themselves to various kinds of ideologies, biases and manipulations. The paper further offers a synthesized (...) overview of the revisionist practice in dominant parts of the society and historiography in post-communist Serbia. The change in the ideological paradigm that occurred in the 1980s was accompanied by a politically motivated reinterpretation of the past, which primarily focused on World War II in Yugoslavia. In Serbia in the 1990s, Tito?s Partisans were no longer celebrated as national heroes and fighters against fascism; they were replaced by the royalist and nationalist Chetniks led by Draza Mihailovic, whose collaboration with the occupying forces was purposefully glossed over. The nationalist interpretation of history and the new revisionist politics in Serbia were supported by the state and the activities of its three branches: legislative, executive and judicial. In spite of the political changes that took place in Serbia in 2000, the dominant nationalist matrix in historical interpretations and revisionist politics remained unchanged. (shrink)

It has been argued that a biomarker-informed classification system for antisocial individuals has the potential to overcome many obstacles in current conceptualizations of forensic and psychiatric constructs and promises better targeted treatments. However, some have expressed ethical worries about the social impact of the use of biological information for classification. Many have discussed the ethical and legal issues related to possibilities of using biomarkers for predicting antisocial behaviour. We argue that prediction should not raise the most pressing ethical worries. Instead, (...) issues connected with ‘biologisation’, such as stigmatization and negative effects on self-image, need more consideration. However, we conclude that also in this respect there are no principled ethical objections against the use of biomarkers to guide classification and treatment of adult antisocial individuals. (shrink)

In this study, we examine the influence of senior leadership on firms’ corporate social responsibility. We integrate upper echelons research that has investigated either the influence of the CEO or the top management team on CSR. We contend that functional experience complementarity between CEOs and TMTs in formulating and implementing CSR strategy may underlie differentiated strategies in CSR. We find that when CEOs who have predominant experience in output functions are complemented by TMTs with a lower proportion of members who (...) have experience in output functions, there is a pronounced effect on the community, product, and diversity dimensions of CSR. In turn, when output-oriented CEOs are complemented by output-oriented TMTs, we observe an effect on the employee relations dimension of CSR. Interestingly, we find no influence of CEO-TMT complementarity on the environment dimension of CSR. In general, our empirical results support the relevance of the interaction between CEOs and their TMTs in defining their firms’ CSR profile. (shrink)

The role of intuition in understanding in general and in scientific understanding in particular is still very much a subject of a lively philosophical discussion. The role of intuition in thought experimenting is much disputed in its own right, and the arguments range from those that deny any substantial role of intuition in the final inference that the thought experiment is meant to illustrate (eg. Norton or Williamson) to the pivotal role some form of intuition might play (eg. Brown or (...) Miščević). So far, mostly Platonists were defenders of intuition, but in his recent book, Miščević takes on a formidable task to mount a defense of intuition as seen from a naturalist-evolutionist point of view and within his mental modelling approach to thought experiments. I will, while acclaiming certain – and considerable – merits of his approach, nevertheless, insist that certain aspects of intuitive comprehending as it is meant to be going on in the process of thought experimenting remains inexplicable in the naturalist scheme such as Miščević’s. The more mysterious (not to say Platonist) aspects of intuition will, hopefully, be revealed through the analyses of the two very famous thought experiments of Einstein which also figure quite importantly in his scientific opus. I will also have something to say about a few related problems as addressed by Miščević in his book regarding the description of thought experiment and more general imaginative enactments in thought, as well as on whether there is an essential difference between scientific (primarily physical) and metaphysical thought experiments and other thought experiments or related modes of thinking. (shrink)

Virgin birth controversy enjoys a privileged status in the history of anthropology and reflects the exceptional interest anthropology takes in “biological facts” of human procreation. In the widest sense, this controversy centers around procreative beliefs, or more precisely, the “discovery” of people who were considered to be ignorant of the facts of physiological paternity and the causal relationship between copulation and pregnancy (in humans). This paper offers an overview of the main theoretical approaches and an insight into the variety of (...) empirical findings presented by the numerous participants in the virgin birth debate. It especially focuses on a critical assessment of the provided argumentation on the subject of procreative ignorance, as well as the matter of interpretation of ethnographical facts and an analysis of the meaning of “biological facts” from a cross-cultural perspective. (shrink)

The author analyses an approach within the framework of urban sociology, characteristic to Chicago School. This approach combined certain biological premises in understanding the city with the typical sociological approach, seeing the city as a superorganism and a product of nature, which is why it is called the ecological theory of the city. In this regard, the connection between biology and sociology, as well as the theory of Robert Ezra Park and Ernest Watson Burgess, as typical representatives of this sociological (...) trend, will be the subject of special analysis, aiming to bring the reader closer to the ecological approach in urban sociology. The topic of particular interest is Park’s idea of the city as a product of nature, with symbiotic substructure and cultural superstructure, as well as Burgess’s idea of city growth and the theory of the concentric zones of city structure. Other issues of the ecological theory of the city were also analysed. (shrink)

Śaiva Rites of Expiation: A First Edition and Translation of Trilocanaśiva’s Twelfth-Century Prāyaścittasamuccaya. Edited and translated by R. Sathyanarayanan, with an introduction by Dominic Goddall. Collection Indologie, vol. 127. Pondicherry: Institut Française de Pondichéry; École Française d’Extrême Orient, 2015. Pp. 651.

Motivated by the analogy which holds within the context of discovery between mathematics and physics, we aim to show that there is a connection between two fields within the context of justification too. Based on the careful analysis of examples from science (especially within the domain of physics) we suggest that the logic of scientific research, which might appear as enumerative induction, is deduction, and we propose it to be universal generalization inference rule. Our main argument closely follows the analysis (...) of the structure of physical theory proposed by theoretical physicist Eugene P. Wigner. (shrink)

In this paper, the possibility of private language argument in Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus is analyzed. The concept of ‘language that only I could understand” is connected to solipsism, or the impossibility to understand other people’s way of seeing the world. But all members of the same community are able to communicate using the same language, so this language is a general language, and there is no private language, just a private perception of the world. Contemporary linguistic theories of Chomsky and (...) de Saussure are close to this interpretation of private language. (shrink)

The present paper undertakes a hermeneutic analysis of the hitherto little investigated preface of Theodore Metochites᾽ Paraphrase of the natural scientific works of Aristotle. Based on a problematic quotation at the very beginning of the proem, the article shows that paraphrase does not only mean, for Metochites, the language-specific clarification of the obscure Aristotelian texts but mainly the elucidation and simplification of the relationship of physics to the rest of the philosophical curriculum, as well as of the interconnection between Aristotle‘s (...) separate treatises of natural sciences. The preface proves to be an indirect, i.e. encoded testimony for the exegetical competition of Theodore Metochites with his coeval George Pachymeres and the most prominent ancient paraphraser of Aristotle, namely Themistius. (shrink)