The paper analyzes the implementation of the “Bologna reform” of higher education in the Republic of Serbia during the last fifteen years. Emphasizing neoliberalism as the ideological basis of the reform, the authors subjected the reform to a critical analysis of its normative goals and achieved achievements. The authors conclude that the restructuring of universities based on market principles and their transformation into for-profit organizations leads to the gradual collapse of the basic function of a modern university embodied in the (...) search for truth and the production of knowledge. Contrary to the proclaimed “knowledge society”, the reform led to the lowering of scientific and educational standards and the neglect of immediately inapplicable knowledge, which completely changed the social evaluation of knowledge and science and resulted in the establishment of a “society of ignorance”. (shrink)

Although he primarily remained acknowledged as an authoritative theoretician of capitalism and one of the ‘founding fathers’ of sociology as a scientific discipline in Germany, Werner Sombart dedicated a significant amount of attention to the critique of modern culture that coincided with his withdrawal from the active participation in political life during the beginning of the twentieth century. After he failed to motivate German social democracy to carry out a social reform, and following a very negative impression he got in (...) the encounter with modern industrial society while visiting the United States of America, Sombart criticised capitalism, parliamentary-democratic system and mass culture from the standpoint of ‘cultural pessimism’. In the journal Der Morgen: Wochenschrift für deutsche Kultur, and in some other papers, sharply but fruitfully Sombart criticised industrial mass culture. In it, he saw a direct reflection of spiritual poverty and general decadence of the capitalistic society. (shrink)

As bibliographical classification of published journal items affects the denominator in this equation, we investigated how the numerator and denominator of the impact factor equation were generated for representative journals in two categories of the Journal Citation Reports. We performed a full text search of the 1st-ranked journal in 2004 JCR category “Medicine, General and Internal” and 61st-ranked journal, 1st-ranked journal in category “Multidisciplinary Sciences” and journal with a relative rank of CMJ. Large journals published more items categorized by Web (...) of Science as non-research items : 63% out of total 5,193 items in Nature and 81% out of 3,540 items in NEJM, compared with 31% out of 283 items in CMJ and only 2 out of 126 items in AABC. Some items classified by WoS as non-original contained original research data. These items received a significant number of citations: 6.9% of total citations in Nature, 14.7% in NEJM and 18.5% in CMJ. IF decreased for all journals when only items presenting original research and citations to them were used for IF calculation. Regardless of the journal’s size or discipline, publication of non-original research and its classification by the bibliographical database have an effect on both numerator and denominator of the IF equation. (shrink)

Various notions of philosophy of language are present constantly in the whole work of Constantin Noica. His concerns are directed towards the language as a pivotal human ability and as a fundamental form of culture, towards the philosophy and the hermeneutics of the poetic language (especially of Eminescu’s language), as well as towards some linguistic and philosophical concepts related to the Romanian language as a historical language.

In this paper I present and discuss the main objections of France Veber (1890- 1975) against mathematical logic in general and the work of Mihael Marki (1864-1939), the first modern logician in Slovenia, in particular. Marki tried to develop an algebra of logic in the spirit of Boole and Schröder, and thereby to provide an axiomatic system of syllogistics with the least number of axioms. Veber's general objection to this project was that it tries to represent the essential qualitative (...) properties of judgements and inferences in quantitative (extensional) terms. Veber also criticized the subject-predicate analysis of judgements and eventually rejected the whole idea of logic as being a calculus, with judgements being treated like equations and inferences like operations in a calculus. Although much in this criticism - which is in certain respects similar to Husserl's reservations about a complete "mathematisation" of logic - is unfounded and misguided, the attack on the idea of logic being essentially a calculus is still interesting and relevant today. This idea is a symptom of a philosophical "desease" resulting from a one-sided "diet", as Wittgenstein put it. Thus one can agree with Veber to the extent that logic has to take into account the meaning of sentences, not just their symbolic form, and that it is therefore an "art" which can never be fully formalized, requiring much more "understanding" than usually thought. (shrink)