The aim the paper is to present Wittgenstein’s idea of analysis of language and his arguments in favour of his thesis that simple things exist. Starting point of the paper is Wittgenstein’s claim that the idea of simple things results from the assumption that what is complex may be analyzed. He claims also that postulate of there being simple elements is a consequence of postulates according to which propositions do have defi nite meanings and that world has definite structure: if (...) a proposition has no simple signs then it does not have specified sense, and if there were no simple objects then the world would not have a specified structure. What is lacking in Wittgenstein is a comprehensive reasoning in favour of the postulate of existence of simple things. The article gives a reconstruction of such reasoning. In order to accomplish this, following issues are presented and clarified: Wittgenstein’s understanding of the analysis of language; the difference between Wittgenstein’s and Russell’s approach to language analysis; actual meaning of assertion that meaning of a proposition is definite and that world has definite structure; philosophical interpretation of quantifiers and symbols of complexes. Key words WITTGENSTEIN, SIMPLE THINGS. (shrink)

The main goal of the paper is to present Wittgenstein's standpoint towards the question of identity of simple things and identity sign. The starting point of the paper is the presentation of the difficulties which Russell and Frege faced while analysing "A is B" type propositions.

BackgroundIn this study, we analyze the association of social isolation in the first phase of the pandemic with perceived stress among residents of Poland and Italy with a look at how these populations adjust to and comply with implemented regulations, guidelines, and restrictions.Materials and MethodsInternet survey with Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10) and questions regarding mobility patterns, attitude, and propensity to adjust toward the implemented measures and current health condition was made among Polish and Italian residents (Cronbach’s alpha 0.86 and 0.79, (...) respectively). The sample size was 7,108 (6,169 completed questionnaires in Poland and 939 in Italy).ResultsThe Polish group had a higher stress level than the Italian group (mean PSS-10 total score 22,14 vs 17,01, respectively;p< 0.01). There was a greater prevalence of chronic diseases among Polish respondents. Italian subjects expressed more concern about their health, as well as about their future employment. Italian subjects did not comply with suggested restrictions as much as Polish subjects and were less eager to restrain from their usual activities (social, physical, and religious), which were more often perceived as “most needed matters” in Italian than in Polish residents.ConclusionHigher activity level was found to be correlated with lower perceived stress, but the causality is unclear. Difference in adherence to restrictions between Polish and Italian residents suggests that introducing similar lockdown policies worldwide may not be as beneficial as expected. However, due to the applied method of convenience sampling and uneven study groups, one should be careful with generalizing these results. (shrink)

According to panqualityism, a form of Russellian monism defended by Sam Coleman and others, consciousness is grounded in fundamental qualities, i.e. unexperienced qualia. Despite panqualityism’s significant promise, according to David Chalmers panqualityism fails as a theory of consciousness since the reductive approach to awareness of qualities it proposes fails to account for the specific phenomenology associated with awareness. I investigate Coleman’s reasoning against this kind of phenomenology and conclude that he successfully shows that its existence is controversial, and so Chalmers’s (...) critique is inconclusive. I then present a critique of panqualityism that avoids this controversial posit, arguing that the panqualityist treatment of awareness faces an explanatory gap, failing to account for the intimate cognitive access to qualities which we are afforded, i.e. for our ‘strong awareness’ of qualities. The real worry for panqualityists is thus not the contested phenomenology of awareness, which Chalmers relies on, but rather the special way in which we are aware of qualities. (shrink)

This special issue addresses the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological viewpoint, especially contemporary phenomenological research on selfhood. In the introduction, we first offer a brief survey of the various classic questions related to personal identity according to Locke’s initial proposal and sketch out key concepts and distinctions of the debate that came after Locke. We then characterize the types of approach represented by post-Hegelian, German and French philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that whereas the (...) Anglophone debates on personal identity were initially formed by the persistence question and the characterization question, the “Continental” tradition included remarkably intense debates on the individual or the self as being unique or “concrete,” deeply temporal and—as claimed by some philosophers, like Sartre and Foucault—unable to have any identity, if not one externally imposed. We describe the Continental line of thinking about the “self” as a reply and an adjustment to the post-Lockean “personal identity” question. These observations constitute the backdrop for our presentation of phenomenological approaches to personal identity. These approaches run along three lines: debates on the layers of the self, starting from embodiment and the minimal self and running all the way to the full-fledged concept of person; questions of temporal becoming, change and stability, as illustrated, for instance, by aging or transformative life-experiences; and the constitution of identity in the social, institutional, and normative space. The introduction thus establishes a structure for locating and connecting the different contributions in our special issue, which, as an ensemble, represent a strong and differentiated contribution to the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological perspective. (shrink)

The article presents the first comprehensive interpretation of the ergon argument in Aristotle’s Protrepticus. It further argues that Aristotle in this argument distinguishes the ergon of an entity from the ergon of its virtue thus presenting a complicated argumentative structure which is explicitly simplified in the Eudemian Ethics. Based on the latest attempts to reconstruct the Protrepticus, the article shows the relation of the ergon argument to its other versions in both Ethics. This account not only clarifies the relation of (...) the Protrepticus to Aristotle’s other ethical writings, it shows that Aristotle intends the argument as a transition between describing what human being does and what a good human being does well, namely a natural transition from the descriptive to the normative. (shrink)

According to some interpreters, Foucault's encounter with the Greek and Roman ethics led him to reconsider his earlier work and to turn away from politics. Drawing mostly from Foucault's last and hitherto unpublished lecture course, this paper argues that Foucault's turn to ethics should not be interpreted as a turn away from his previous work, but rather as its logical continuation and an attempt to resolve some of the outstanding questions. I argue that the 1984 lectures on parrhesia should be (...) interpreted as Foucault's philosophical apology, as an attempt to defend himself against the charges of moral and epistemological nihilism, which were raised in response to his earlier work. In his last lectures, the Nietzschean Foucault somewhat surprisingly describes his earlier work as authentic Socratic philosophy and as ethical practice of freedom. In the conclusion, I assess the plausibility of Foucault's apology and speculate in which direction his work might have developed, had it not been cut off by his death. (shrink)

This is the first chapter of my Objects of Authority: A Postformalist Aesthetics (Routledge, 2023), made freely available online thanks to the funding received from the DFG (German Research Foundation) via Freie Universität Berlin. -/- The chapter introduces the idea of a postformalist aesthetic theory of reconstructing remote artefacts aesthetic statuses. The case is immune to the misgivings about aesthetic enquiry prevalent in the humanities and social sciences, since it does not assume that recovering such statuses involves experiencing the artefacts' (...) potential to provide an intrinsically rewarding gratification of the senses, of the intellect, or of both together. Postformalist aesthetics sees itself as part of a broad investigation into the nature of evaluative attitudes towards visually conspicuous artefacts. Such a broad investigation represents a necessary step towards establishing whether an object was meant to merit aesthetic attention. (shrink)

This article intends to shed light on the political and security developments in Yemen that ultimately resulted in the Saudi-led military operation in this country. It discusses the political background behind the Yemeni revolution of 2011, its positive outcome in the shape of the results of the National Dialogue Conference and the reasons for the collapse of the efforts to stabilize Yemen.

This article explores book of poems entitled Requiem for Saddam Hussein and Other Poems for the Poor in Spirit by Konrad Góra in the light of animal studies. Looking at the poetic and beyond poetic activity of its author, this work reffers to Joanna Żylińska's question about ethical living founded on understandig of life both as zoe and bios. Think of the special opposition of village and city is trying to read this book in connection with mentioned vision of life. (...) These both areas shows presentifications and redefinings of persona in poems from Requiem and beyond poetic activity. By concentrating on poems specific for „nature” and „civilization this research will show how the mechanism of subordinating bare life works and how it concerns to both sides of the opposition of village and city. This article ask also for non-victims community, position and power of modern literature and involvment. (shrink)

Cognitive architectures have often been applied to data from individual experiments. In this paper, I develop an ACT-R reader that can model a much larger set of data, eye-tracking corpus data. It is shown that the resulting model has a good fit to the data for the considered low-level processes. Unlike previous related works, the model achieves the fit by estimating free parameters of ACT-R using Bayesian estimation and Markov-Chain Monte Carlo techniques, rather than by relying on the mix of (...) manual selection + default values. The method used in the paper is generalizable beyond this particular model and data set and could be used on other ACT-R models. (shrink)

Narrative identity theory in some of its influential variants makes three fundamental assumptions. First, it focuses on personal identity primarily in terms of selfhood. Second, it argues that personal identity is to be understood as the unity of one’s life as it develops over time. And finally, it states that the unity of a life is articulated, by the very person itself, in the form of a story, be it explicit or implicit. The article focuses on different contemporary phenomenological appraisals (...) of the narrative account. The survey of this partly critical debate is followed by concluding observations concerning a possible phenomenological theory of personal identity. (shrink)

W artykule omówiono ważniejsze argumenty przeciw operacjonizmowi Percy’ego W. Bridgmana sformułowane na przestrzeni ostatnich dekad oraz przedyskutowano operacyjne sposoby definiowania czasu w mechanice klasycznej oraz nierelatywistycznej mechanice kwantowej. O ile w mechanice klasycznej nie napotyka się większych trudności w sformułowaniu operacyjnej definicji czasu, o tyle w formalizmie teorii kwantowej zadanie to staje się niemożliwe. Co, niezależnie od dyskusyjnego statusu czasu w mechanice kwantowej, prowadzi do ogólniejszego pytania, czy można pogodzić mechanikę kwantową z podejściem operacyjnym.

Anthropomorphism is a phenomenon that describes the human tendency to see human-like shapes in the environment. It has considerable consequences for people’s choices and beliefs. With the increased presence of robots, it is important to investigate the optimal design for this tech- nology. In this paper we discuss the potential benefits and challenges of building anthropomorphic robots, from both a philosophical perspective and from the viewpoint of empir- ical research in the fields of human–robot interaction and social psychology. We believe (...) that this broad investigation of anthropomorphism will not only help us to understand the phenomenon better, but can also indicate solutions for facil- itating the integration of human-like machines in the real world. (shrink)

A key component of the susceptibility to cognitive biases is the ability to monitor for conflict between intuitively cued “heuristic” answers and logical principles. While there is evidence that pe...

Locke claims that a person’s identity over time consists in the unity of consciousness, not in the sameness of the body. Similarly, the phenomenological approach refuses to see the criteria of identity as residing in some externally observable bodily features. Nevertheless, it does not accept the idea that personal identity has to consist either in consciousness or in the body. We are self-aware as bodily beings. After providing a brief reassessment of Locke and the post-Lockean discussion, the article draws on (...) phenomenological arguments that show the body as lived, that is, lived as one’s own body, but also possibly as “other” or “strange.” Against what has been claimed in recent writing, especially in literature on Merleau-Ponty, the author argues that the “mineness” of the body and its “alterity” are not two mutually exclusive features. In the final part of the article, the author suggests that the becoming strange of one’s own body may legitimately be considered as a prominent experience of what it means to be a person. (shrink)

Mezi jednáním a důvodem existuje zásadní vztah: není činu bez důvodu. Lze z toho však vyvodit, že je-li dán důvod, je dán i čin? Může mít čin dostatečný důvod? Studie zkoumá dvě podoby dostatečného důvodu : příčinu a premisu. Fenomenologická teorie motivace se staví jak proti myšlence, podle níž důvody jsou příčiny, tak proti přesvědčení, podle něhož důvody jsou premisy. Přínos fenomenologického výkladu motivace netkví především v představě, již rozpracoval Paul Ricoeur, že důvody jsou přítomné vědomí, nýbrž v originální paralele, (...) již rozvinul Merleau-Ponty mezi perceptivní a praktickou motivací. There seems to be a fundamental relation between action and reason: no action without a reason. But does this mean that the reason, once it is given, brings about the action? Can an action have a sufficient reason? The article distinguishes two forms of the sufficient reason: the cause and the premise. The phenomenological theory of motivation argues against the idea “reasons are causes” as well as against the idea “reasons are premises”. The novelty of the phenomenological account of motivation consists not in the assumption, developed by Paul Ricoeur, “reasons are present to a consciousness”, but in the more original analogy developed by Merleau-Ponty between the perceptual motivation on the one side and the practical motivation on the other. (shrink)

“Is every definition persuasive?” If essentialist views on definition are rejected and a pragmatic account adopted, where defining is a speech act which fixes the meaning of a term, then a problem arises: if meanings are not fixed by the essence of being itself, is not every definition persuasive? To address the problem, we refer to Douglas Walton’s impressive intellectual heritage—specifically on the argumentative potential of definition. In finding some non-persuasive definitions, we show not every definition is persuasive. The persuasiveness (...) lies not in syntactic or semantic properties, but the context. We present this pragmatic account and provide rules for analysing and evaluating persuasive definition—a promising direction for further research. (shrink)

Quantifiers in phrasal and clausal comparatives often seem to take distributive scope in the matrix clause: for instance, the sentence John is taller than every girl is is true iff for every girl it holds that John is taller than that girl. Broadly speaking, two approaches exist that derive this reading without postulating the wide scope of the quantifier: the negation analysis and the interval analysis of than-clauses. We propose a modification of the interval analysis in which than-clauses are not (...) treated as degree intervals but as degree pluralities. This small change has significant consequences: it yields a straightforward account of differentials in comparatives and it correctly predicts the existence of hitherto unnoticed readings, viz. cumulative readings of clausal comparatives. Finally, this paper also makes the case that using degree pluralities is conceptually appealing: it allows us to restrict the analysis of comparatives by mechanisms that are postulated independently in the semantics of pluralities. (shrink)

In this paper, I seek to defend the proposition that bewilderment can contribute to the interest we take in artworks. Taking inspiration from Alois Riegl’s underdeveloped explanation of why his contemporaries valued some historically distant artworks higher than recent art, I interpret the historical case of the European audiences’ fascination with the Fayum mummy portraits as involving such a bewilderment. I distinguish the claim about effective bewilderment from the thesis that aesthetic meaning resists discursive understanding and seek to establish that (...) bewilderment can figure positively in art appreciation, drawing on Richard Wollheim’s argument—developed in engaging Sigmund Freud’s essays on art—that posing obstacles to our understanding can actually contribute considerably to art’s effect: it prolongs and intensifies our engagement with the work. Riegl’s observation that some historically distant artworks have an especially strong effect is thus explained in terms of their anachronism: the effect is caused by the difficulties experienced in making sense of their contemporary look and their distant origin. (shrink)

Philosophical views of habit were deeply influenced by Aristotle. If we understand habit in relation to hexis, to the acquired disposition to act in a certain way, then habit becomes a key phenomenon of ethics. According to the famous quotation, "It makes no small difference, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference."1 And yet we can understand habit also as a dull and (...) rigid mechanism, as something that moves us away from humanity, as we read in Immanuel Kant: "The reason for being disgusted with someone's acquired habits lies in the fact that the animal here predominates over the man."2 Is habit more an expression of our... (shrink)

Artykuł ma na celu wstępne przedstawienie Jacques’a Derridy jako filozofa historii. Rozwijane przezeń pojęcia okazują się wiązać z konkretną wizją dziejów. Wizja ta ujawnia się już od pierwszych tekstów Derridy i stanowi nie tyle jeden z pomniejszych wątków, ile główny temat jego myśli. W artykule skupiono się na wybranym eseju Derridy, który doprowadził do jego sporu z Michelem Foucaultem. Zestawienie tych dwóch – skądinąd obu uznawanych za poststrukturalistów – filozofów służy uwydatnieniu kluczowej roli, jaką problem historyczności pełni w dziele Jacques’a (...) Derridy. Tekst stanowi tym samym zachętę do rewizji statusu Derridy w polskiej humanistyce. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of whether a general method is capable of accommodating the vast array of contexts in which art objects are studied. I propose a framework for such a general method, which is, however, limited to a specific research task: reconstructing the circumstances under which a culturally and/or temporally distant or “exotic” art object becomes interesting (or menacing) to look at. The proposed framework is applied to evaluate Anthony Forge’s essays on the visual art of the Abelam. (...) The essays played a central role in the rekindling of anthropological interest in visual art, but they have also been subject to criticism for forcing on Abelam art Western categories that distort the role art objects play in the Abelam world. Assessing the corpus in terms of the proposed framework allows me to exemplify the main differences between a pragmatic and a semantic approach to gaining access to the efficacy of culturally or temporally distant art. (shrink)

This paper develops a novel psycholinguistic parser and tests it against experimental and corpus reading data. The parser builds on the recent research into memory structures, which argues that memory retrieval is content‐addressable and cue‐based. It is shown that the theory of cue‐based memory systems can be combined with transition‐based parsing to produce a parser that, when combined with the cognitive architecture ACT‐R, can model reading and predict online behavioral measures (reading times and regressions). The parser's modeling capacities are tested (...) against self‐paced reading experimental data (Grodner & Gibson, 2005), eye‐tracking experimental data (Staub, 2011), and a self‐paced reading corpus (Futrell et al., 2018). (shrink)

This essay re-examines the once promising idea that style analysis can provide an independent source of insight into an artifact's non-stylistic context. The essay makes explicit the consequences of treating collective style as such a source in archaeology and anthropology of art, and further develops a new framing for the idea that avoids the criticisms largely responsible for the decline in theoretical interest in the epistemic import of visual style analysis since World War II. This re-framing proposes that inference from (...) style to context is permissible on those occasions when a collective style signals by its morphology its suitability to serve a certain function. And it does so because it prescribes publicly certain modes of behavior or spectatorship. Furthermore, the public nature of the signaling may be such that it allows even uninitiated spectators to get a sense of it and thus to gain access to some of the motivations and norms informing the collective's form of life. (shrink)

The article discusses the ecological aspects of John Milbank’s thought in the context of the growing climate crisis. For this purpose, the concept of integral ecology is interpreted in the spirit of Milbank’s integralism, which rejects the notion of “pure nature” as a manifestation of secularism and calls for theological grounding of the environmental discourse. This perspective allows us to see the limitations of the modern way of thinking, caught up in the metaphors of “conquest of nature” and “return to (...) nature.” As an alternative, the concept of “kenotic anthropocentrism” is proposed, which sees man as a rational, social, creative and religious animal, that somehow transcends his own nature, being called to union with God. On the one hand, such an approach proclaims the ontological superiority of man over other creatures, and on the other, it reminds us of his role as the guardian—and not the owner—of the Earth. Thus, it differs significantly from Clive Hamilton’s “modest anthropocentrism,” whose call to care for the environment is ultimately based on arbitrary freedom and the imperative of self-preservation. Milbank’s position is closer to Bruno Latour’s anthropocentrism emphasizing the role of man as a political representative of silent earthlings—rivers, mountains and animals. However, Milbank advocates a strong ontological hierarchy rejected by Latour, which makes him less sensitive to the material dimension of climate change. Moreover, Milbank’s militant anti-secularism may be an obstacle to a much needed broader discussion of the ecological crisis, even if his critique of modernity is hard to ignore. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to provide a plausible conceptual model of a specific use of images described as substitution in recent art-historical literature. I bring to light the largely implicit shared commitments of the art historians’ discussion of substitution, each working as they do in a different idiom, and I draw consequences from these commitments for the concept of substitution by image—the major being the distinction between nonportraying substitution and substitution by portrayal. I then develop an argument that (...) substitution by image in the desired, nonportraying sense needs to be thought of in terms of a figurative representation of an image’s subject as a generic object, what I will call its figurative instantiation. (shrink)

The endorsement of epistemically suspect (i.e., paranormal, conspiracy, and pseudoscientific) beliefs is widespread and has negative consequences. Therefore, it is important to understand the reasoning processes – such as lower analytic thinking and susceptibility to cognitive biases – that might lead to the adoption of such beliefs. In two studies, I constructed and tested a novel questionnaire on epistemically suspect beliefs (Study 1, N = 263), and used it to examine probabilistic reasoning biases and belief bias in syllogistic reasoning as (...) predictors of the endorsement of those beliefs, while accounting for analytic thinking and worldview variables (Study 2, N = 397). Probabilistic reasoning biases, analytic thinking, religious faith, and political liberalism consistently predicted various epistemically suspect beliefs, whereas the effect of syllogistic belief bias was largely restricted to pseudoscientific beliefs. Further research will be needed to examine the role the biased evaluation of evidence plays in the endorsement of epistemically suspect beliefs. (shrink)

The endorsement of epistemically suspect (i.e., paranormal, conspiracy, and pseudoscientific) beliefs is widespread and has negative consequences. Therefore, it is important to understand the reasoning processes – such as lower analytic thinking and susceptibility to cognitive biases – that might lead to the adoption of such beliefs. In two studies, I constructed and tested a novel questionnaire on epistemically suspect beliefs (Study 1, N = 263), and used it to examine probabilistic reasoning biases and belief bias in syllogistic reasoning as (...) predictors of the endorsement of those beliefs, while accounting for analytic thinking and worldview variables (Study 2, N = 397). Probabilistic reasoning biases, analytic thinking, religious faith, and political liberalism consistently predicted various epistemically suspect beliefs, whereas the effect of syllogistic belief bias was largely restricted to pseudoscientific beliefs. Further research will be needed to examine the role the biased evaluation of evidence plays in the endorsement of epistemically suspect beliefs. (shrink)

“Is every definition persuasive?” If essentialist views on definition are rejected and a pragmatic account adopted, where defining is a speech act which fixes the meaning of a term, then a problem arises: if meanings are not fixed by the essence of being itself, is not every definition persuasive? To address the problem, we refer to Douglas Walton’s impressive intellectual heritage—specifically on the argumentative potential of definition. In finding some non-persuasive definitions, we show not every definition is persuasive. The persuasiveness (...) lies not in syntactic or semantic properties, but the context. We present this pragmatic account and provide rules for analysing and evaluating persuasive definition—a promising direction for further research. (shrink)

When does art history begin? Art historiographers typically point to the Renaissance (Vasari) or, alternatively, to Hellenism (Pliny the Elder). But such origin stories become increasingly disconnected from contemporary disciplinary practices, especially as the latter try to rise to the challenge of conducting art history in a more diversified and global way. This essay provides an alternative account of art history’s origin, one that does not try to alleviate the sense of disconnect, but rather develops a global, non-Eurocentric account. The (...) account focuses less on genealogy and more on what necessitates something like an art-historical awareness or attention in the first place. Relying on examples from ancient Mesopotamia, it argues that art-historical thought can be identified whenever and wherever material objects are attended to or produced for their potential to manifest visibly and over time their meaning. (shrink)

The article’s aim is to clear the ground for the idea of aesthetic archaeology as an aesthetic analysis of remote artifacts divorced from aesthetic criticism. On the example of controversies surrounding the early Cycladic figures, it discusses an anxiety motivating the rejection of aesthetic inquiry in archaeology, namely, the anxiety about the heuristic reliability of one’s aesthetic instincts vis-à-vis remote artifacts. It introduces the claim that establishing an aesthetic mandate of a remote artifact should in the first place be part (...) of a quest after the norms of engagement an artifact’s kind signaled to the intended audience by its appearance. Rather than advocating for a new subdiscipline, the concept of aesthetic archaeology serves to bring into theoretical focus an aesthetic engagement with an artifact’s appearance under circumstances that rule out any acquired competence in distinguishing its aesthetic mandate perceptually—and thus rule out any aesthetic expertise. (shrink)