The point of view expressed in the present research is directed towards the ideational “torsion” from rationalism to the “language-games” drawing up an analysis according to which one can notice the rationalist and post-rationalist aspects in the philosophy of communication, and the consequences of these perspectives, which could be of great interest as regards the philosophical concepts related to communication, to man or to the human community. As a matter of fact, “the torsion” is only apparent; it cannot hold a (...) dramatic change of the thinking range, from “rationalism” to “neo-positivism”, as regards the comment on Habermas’ theory of communication, as compared to Wittgenstein’s ideas about “the language-games” as central elements of human communication. Jürgen Habermas manifest a specific turn in his way of thinking, aiming at the contemporary modulation of the rationalist approach by means of inter-subjectivism orhumanism, and stressing the modulation of the logical approach, by means of “language-games” and “life-forms.”. (shrink)

Any logical analysis – and therefore philosophy itself – begins with the question: is there an indubitable knowledge? To answer this question Bertrand Russellappeals to tradition – both mathematical and philosophical – in which he recognizes himself. The process used by Russell, in order to build mathematics on a new foundation, was to build concepts logically, starting from atomic elements and known relationships. For example, a logical construction as that of the “class” is that a sentence, which includes a fixed (...) concept, is turned into a logically equivalent statement (example analyzed by Russell is “Scott” and “the author of Waverley”) which unlike the first, entails relations that include concepts. Thus, the primitive concept can be replaced and removed. The new method was named the “theory of types” and became the intellectual program of Russell and his successors. Among the method’s performances is solving logical and mathematical paradoxes. The importance of Russell’s logical investigations exceeded the reductionist program, stimulating the formalist program of philosophy andmethodology and the logical analysis of the language of science with a logical-mathematical apparatus. This program was definitively concluded, it seems, by Kurt Gödel’s results on the decidability problem in the formal axiomatic systems of P type, a problem closely linked to the question of “truth” and the two other meta-theoretical properties of P formal systems, namely “consistency” and “completeness”. Gödel’s Theorems do not affect the now established legitimacy of a meta-theoretical system concerning the formalizing processes, but prove that the hilbertian original program to reduce mathematics to logic is old and the very meaning of the whole process of realizing it must be analyzed again. Considering that in a formal P system, the decision process is demonstrability of true statements, Gödel’s research findings prove the consubstantial relationship of the four meta-theoretical properties Truth-Consistency-Completeness-Demonstrability. (shrink)

Ars cogitandi is not the monopoly of a school, a people or an age, but it has crossed over the centuries and cardinal points, from the Platonic Academy of Athens to the Finnish University set up at Turku in 1640 and set down for good and for all at Helsingfors (the ancient name for Helsinki) in the year 1828. Ars cogitandi asphilosophy got here as a distinct brilliance following the classical Anglo-Saxon tradition of empiricism, represented at that time by Edward (...) Westermarck (1862–1939), who was professor of practical philosophy in Helsinki and professor of sociology at London School of Economics from 1907 until 19301. The Finnish School of Philosophy acquired its decisive acknowledgement by Eino Kaila, great scholar and chief of the school, who brought over to Finland the modern logic and the philosophy of the Vienna Circle. (shrink)

The author argues that for the last 2,500 years, the science concerning the universe (o kosmoV) has been based on two metaphysical intuitions—the atomic one for more than 2,400 years, and the string intuition in the second half of the twentieth century.