Slovak Academic Philosophy: Its Origins, Development and Current State The paper introduces the foreign reader to the main factors associated with the emergence of Slovak academic philosophy as well as to the ways in which it has developed, and also to those factors that have complicated or delayed its progress since 1921 when the Faculty of Philosophy, along with its Philosophical Seminars, began functioning at the newly-founded University of Comenius (1919), up to the present day.

Kripke-style models with two accessibility relations, one intuitionistic and the other modal, are given for analogues of the modal systemK based on Heyting's prepositional logic. It is shown that these two relations can combine with each other in various ways. Soundness and completeness are proved for systems with only the necessity operator, or only the possibility operator, or both. Embeddings in modal systems with several modal operators, based on classical propositional logic, are also considered. This paper lays the ground for (...) an investigation of intuitionistic analogues of systems stronger thanK. A brief survey is given of the existing literature on intuitionistic modal logic. (shrink)

Many tasks in statistical and causal inference can be construed as problems of entailment in a suitable formal language. We ask whether those problems are more difficult, from a computational perspective, for causal probabilistic languages than for pure probabilistic (or “associational”) languages. Despite several senses in which causal reasoning is indeed more complex—both expressively and inferentially—we show that causal entailment (or satisfiability) problems can be systematically and robustly reduced to purely probabilistic problems. Thus there is no jump in computational complexity. (...) Along the way we answer several open problems concerning the complexity of well-known probability logics, in particular demonstrating the ${\exists \mathbb {R}}$ -completeness of a polynomial probability calculus, as well as a seemingly much simpler system, the logic of comparative conditional probability. (shrink)

Technophobia is an irrational fear of either technological influence or\ntechnological artifacts. Philosophical interest for technophobia is\nthreefold: epistemological, existential and\nphilosophical-anthropological. In the last five decades, computers have\nchanged in major many areas of human life, including philosophy. The\nauthors have started rendering technophobical issues in philosophy with\nemergence of technophobical objections to each leap forward in\ncommunication medium. Next area of analysis is speculative fiction.\nDetermining the philosophical importance of speculative fiction, authors\noffered an overview of technophobical thesis in some of anthological\nworks.

We investigate how people ascribe responsibility to an agent who caused a bad outcome but did not know he would. The psychological processes for making such judgments, we argue, involve finding a counterfactual in which some minimally benevolent intention initiates a course of events that leads to a better outcome than the actual one. We hypothesize that such counterfactuals can include, when relevant, epistemic intentions. With four vignette studies, we show that people consider epistemic intentions when ascribing responsibility for a (...) bad outcome. We further investigate which epistemic intentions people are likely to consider when building counterfactuals for responsibility ascription. We find that, when an agent did not predict a bad outcome, people ascribe responsibility depending on the reasons behind the agents’ lack of knowledge. People judge agents responsible for the bad outcome they caused when they could have easily predicted the consequences of their actions but did not care to acquire the relevant information. However, when this information was hard to acquire, people are less likely to judge them responsible. -/- . (shrink)

Quantification is particularly seductive in times of global uncertainty. Not surprisingly, numbers, indicators, categorizations, and comparisons are central to governmental and popular response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This essay draws insights from critical data studies, sociology of quantification and decolonial thinking, with occasional excursion into the biomedical domain, to investigate the role and social consequences of counting broadly defined as a way of knowing about the virus. It takes a critical look at two domains of human activity that play a (...) central role in the fight against the virus outbreak, namely medical sciences and technological innovation. It analyzes their efforts to craft solutions for their user base and explores the unwanted social costs of these operations. The essay argues that the over-reliance of biomedical research on “whiteness” for lab testing and the techno-solutionism of the consumer infrastructure devised to curb the social costs of the pandemic are rooted in a distorted idea of a “standard human” based on a partial and exclusive vision of society and its components, which tends to overlook alterity and inequality. It contends that to design our way out of the pandemic, we ought to make space for distinct ways of being and knowing, acknowledging plurality and thinking in terms of social relations, alterity, and interdependence. (shrink)

In Liberating Oedipus?: Psychoanalysis as Critical Theory, Dr. Filip Kovacevic demonstrates how psychoanalytic theory can join political theory in designing alternative political norms and values. Kovacevic proves that political practice without an emancipatory psychology to guide it is potentially dangerous.

The thesis analyzes the position of Albanian women in the first decade of socialist rule in Montenegro, during which women became full members of society. The efforts of the communist authorities t...

The main idea behind this article is that in order to understand themeaning that Kant’s political philosophy is rendered to by the givensocio-historical context of a community we need to turn for help toartistic genius whose subjective “I” holds a general feeling of the worldand life. It is in this sense that authors of great novels can help us in twoways. First, their works summarise for our imagination artistic truth aboutman’s capacity for humanity, the very thing that Kant considers to (...) bethe scientifically improvable “fact of reason”. Second, works of greatwriters offer for our insight destinies of individuals who decide to pursuemoral dictate in a society, thus actualising the potential that lies hiddenin all of us, making us worthy of respect. As we lack objective scientificstandard of measurement, artist’s universal feeling of the world is impressedupon us through a narrative about a man who, in a given society and ina given moment, decides to exercise his autonomy and seek the divinein himself. Contemporary social scientists’ attempts to prove historicalprogress is characterised by the very lack of humbleness. Referring tothe great novelists’ works in this article is aimed to remind scientists ofrestraint and self-control demanded from them by the citizen of Konigsberg. (shrink)

This article approaches the paradigm shift of datafication from the perspective of civil society. Looking at how individuals and groups engage with datafication, it complements the notion of “data politics” by exploring what we call the “contentious politics of data”. By contentious politics of data we indicate the bottom-up, transformative initiatives interfering with and/or hijacking dominant processes of datafication, contesting existing power relations or re-appropriating data practices and infrastructure for purposes distinct from the intended. Said contentious politics of data is (...) articulated in an array of practices of data activism taking a critical stance towards datafication. In data activism, data as mediators take a central role, both as part of an action repertoire or as objects of struggle in their own right. Leveraging social movement studies and science and technology studies, this theoretical essay argues that data activism can be mapped along two analytical dimensions: “data as stakes” vs. “data as repertoires”, and “individual practice vs. collective action”. Mapping action repertoires and tactics along these axes allows us to chart the potential emergence of a political data subject at the intersection of these two dimensions. This furthers our understanding of people’s engagement with data in relation to other forms of activism and existing work in social movement studies. It also helps us interpreting potential trajectories of contemporary social movements, as they increasingly interface with data, devices and platforms. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore ways in which metaphors contribute to hermeneutical resistance, that is, to practices that overcome and/or ameliorate hermeneutical injustice. I distinguish two aspects of hermeneutical injustice and two corresponding kinds of resistance: exoteric and esoteric hermeneutical injustice/resistance. The former injustice consists in unjust harm due to an inability to make one's experience understood to others. The latter consists in such a harm due to an inability to fully understand one's own experiences. In exoteric hermeneutical resistance, metaphors (...) can overcome resistances in others to understand oppressed agents' contributions because of its automatic processing and anti-deniability. In esoteric hermeneutical resistance, metaphors may highlight common structures in various aspects of marginalised agent's experiences, they can provide means of denoting social properties obscured by hermeneutical injustice and they can exhibit hermeneutical injustice by resisting interpretation. I illustrate these practices through works by Emily Dickinson, Ralph Ellison, Frantz Fanon, Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs. Those examples show the power of metaphors in hermeneutical resistance. (shrink)

Recent discussion of the alleged adverse consequences of space colonization by Phil Torres in this journal is critically assessed. While the concern for suffering risks should be part of any strategic discussion of the cosmic future of humanity, the Hobbesian picture painted by Torres is largely flawed and unpersuasive. Instead, there is a very real risk that the skeptical arguments will be taken too seriously and future human flourishing in space delayed or prevented.

The aim of this study was to empirically investigate differences in role expectations, among the stakeholders involved, about the devolved personnel management role of front-line managers. In particular, we researched the role expectation differences between FLMs, their middle managers, and Human Resource practitioners. In total, nineteen semi-structured interviews have been conducted involving eleven FLMs, eight middle managers, and two HR practitioners working at the same Dutch hospital. Most discovered role expectation differences were related to how FLMs should execute their HR (...) tasks. FLMs were often uncertain if their role enactment met those of their middle managers and/or HR practitioners, herewith indicating role stress. Our findings underline the importance of paying attention to role expectations’ differences in aligning components of the HRM-performance relationship. Future research could include the role expectations of other important stakeholders, such as: subordinates and top management. The outcomes of this empirical work are translated into four interventions to diminish FLMs’ role stress. (shrink)

Tehnofobija je iracionalan strah od utjecaja tehnologije ili tehnoloških artefakata. Filozofski interes za tehnofobiju leži u tri sfere: spoznajnoj, egzistencijalnoj i filozofsko-antropološkoj. U posljednjih pet desetljeća računala su uvelike promijenila i filozofiju. Autori polaze u ocrtavanju problema tehnofobije u filozofiji od pojave tehnofobijskih komentara sa svakim skokom naprijed u sredstvima komunikacije. Sljedeće područje analize je spekulativna fikcija. Utvrdivši značaj spekulativne fikcije za filozofiju, nudi se pregled tehnofobijskih teza u nekim antologijskim djelima spekulativne fikcije.

Psycholinguistics as a discipline can be traced back further than one would think, but what we refer to as modern psycholinguistics emerged in the 1950s. The gradual accumulation of interdisciplinary knowledge, cross-linguistic research, and the development of ideas formed the foundation for new approaches. Indeed, interdisciplinarity, multi-methodology, and linguistic diversity are to this day inevitable and integral parts of psycholinguistics. The aim of this paper is to argue the interplay of different approaches and methodologies, namely in relation to syntactic processing. (...) The paper provides a general overview of former state-of-the-art and newer research trends, discusses the challenges of new approaches, and presents them in the context of a recently performed attachment preference study in Croatian. Using multiple methodologies, the study shows that Croatian is a high attachment preference language. More importantly, it illustrates the significance of a carefully planned research design and the relevance of obeying the properties of the studied language. These considerations are crucial in order to avoid that someone’s choice of theoretical framework and methods influences results. (shrink)

Allowing pupils to choose the content of their learning is an important step towards individualized development. Despite the need proclaimed by society for the development of competences in STEM area, educational cycles in this field are the least represented in the Croatian general education curriculum. This research was conducted in order to gain insight into pupils’ interests in the contents of technical culture and for school activities. The research was conducted on a stratified sample of primary school pupils in Croatia (...) aged 11 to 15 years. The analysis of the research results showed that the activities from ICT, robotics, programming and woodworking are the most attractive. When it comes to school activities, pupils most prefer sports activities, computer activities, experiments in science subjects and then technical activities. This result suggests that the school curricula needs to be redesigned so that pupils can develop according to their interests. Učenikova mogućnost izbora sadržaja učenja tijekom općeg obveznog obrazovanja važan je korak ka individualiziranom razvoju. Unatoč proklamiranim potrebama društva za razvojem kompetencija u tzv. STEM području, u hrvatskom su obrazovnom sustavu aktivnosti iz ovog područja najmanje zastupljene u kurikulumu općeg obrazovanja. Stoga je provedeno istraživanje interesa učenika za izbornu nastavu tehničke kulture te za aktivnosti koje bi odabrali kad bi mogli birati što će u školi učiti i raditi. Istraživanje je provedeno na stratificiranom uzorku učenika osnovnih škola u Hrvatskoj u dobi od 11. do 15. godine života. Analizom rezultata istraživanja ustanovljeno je da su aktivnosti iz IKT-a, robotike, programiranja i modelarstva najatraktivnija područja za izbornu nastave tehničke kulture. Kad je riječ o aktivnostima u školi, učenici bi najradije odabrali sportske aktivnosti, a potom slijede informatičke, prirodoznanstvene i tehničke aktivnosti. Ovakav nalaz ukazuje na nužnu preobrazbu školskog kurikuluma koji će učenicima omogućiti razvoj u skladu s njihovim interesima. (shrink)

Učenikova mogućnost izbora sadržaja učenja tijekom općeg obveznog obrazovanja važan je korak ka individualiziranom razvoju. Unatoč proklamiranim potrebama društva za razvojem kompetencija u tzv. STEM području, u hrvatskom su obrazovnom sustavu aktivnosti iz ovog područja najmanje zastupljene u kurikulumu općeg obrazovanja. Stoga je provedeno istraživanje interesa učenika za izbornu nastavu tehničke kulture te za aktivnosti koje bi odabrali kad bi mogli birati što će u školi učiti i raditi. Istraživanje je provedeno na stratificiranom uzorku učenika osnovnih škola u Hrvatskoj u (...) dobi od 11. do 15. godine života. Analizom rezultata istraživanja ustanovljeno je da su aktivnosti iz IKT-a, robotike, programiranja i modelarstva najatraktivnija područja za izbornu nastave tehničke kulture. Kad je riječ o aktivnostima u školi, učenici bi najradije odabrali sportske aktivnosti, a potom slijede informatičke, prirodoznanstvene i tehničke aktivnosti. Ovakav nalaz ukazuje na nužnu preobrazbu školskog kurikuluma koji će učenicima omogućiti razvoj u skladu s njihovim interesima. (shrink)

The main goals of this work are: Ethical and social aspects of policy, contemporary liberal democratic structures, morality in political decision-making, human rights and their individual conceptions, political-philosophical ideas, function of a social-scientific education, selected aspects of security policy, environmental policy, eco-social market economy and religion and law.

The Kiki-Bouba effect comprises a relation between two abstract figures and two non-words: the star-shaped figure is called 'Kiki' and the rounded figure 'Bouba'. The effect is explained by a sound-vision synaesthesia: certain sounds are associated with certain shapes in a non-arbitrary manner.When we asked the participants to decide which of the two figures, the star-shaped or the rounded one, to call yin and which yang, some 85% choose the star-shaped figure as yin. There are previous cases of synaesthesia where (...) personality is attributed to numbers or letters. In our results, the word Kiki is overall happy, clever, small, thin, young, unpleasant, and nervous. The starshaped figure is overall clever, tall, small, slim, nervous, unpleasant, and upper-class. That is, the correspondence above all concerns the qualifying adjectives clever, unpleasant, and nervous, as well as the physical appearance small and thin. This brings us to the fat-thin effect. Cinema, literature, comics, and children's programmes are full of contrasting figures: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Laurel and Hardy , Asterix and Obelix, Tintin and Captain Haddock, Bert and Ernie , or the Spanish comic about very naughty twin boys called Zipi and Zape . Our main conclusion is that first names and last names are not entirely arbitrary. There is a correspondence between names and physical characteristics and concepts . The Kiki-Bouba effect is a semantic one. (shrink)

Following the spread of Platonic anthropology, Christianity has started, already since the 2nd century A.D., to be dominated by dualism – a trend undisturbed by somewhat more holistic Thomism, and further strengthened by Cartesianism, which distanced Christian theology and soul even further away from the body. During the 1960s, theologians have become aware of the far more positive and inclusive attitude that the Bible has towards the body. Yet, a century before, the Adventist movement was born in conditionalism such as (...) presented by Hobbes in Leviathan (XLIV). Man does not have a soul; he is a “living soul” – a body vivified by the “breath of life” (Gen 2:7). Without the body, there is no life, nor, consequentially, eternal hell. To this Adventists have also conjoined a philosophy of health reform in which the care of the body has a key role, and upon which depends man’s intellectual and spiritual wellbeing. On this foundation, they have built a rich healthcare and educational practice. This physicalist version of Christian anthropology is a unique worldview contribution to philosophy of the body and a subject worthy of academic attention. (shrink)

Ob množici del grških in rimskih piscev, ki so bila prevedena v slovenski jezik, je Livijeva Zgodovina doslej ostala nekako ob strani. Razen posameznih odlomkov ni bilo prevedenega nič. Količina ohranjenega besedila, avtorjev slog z dolgimi stavčnimi periodami, izbranim besediščem in različnimi retoričnimi prijemi, vse to pred­stavlja za prevajalca gotovo precejšnjo oviro. Z novo knjigo, ki je pred kratkim izšla pri Slovenski matici in prinaša prvih pet Livijevih knjig v prevodu Primoža Simonitija, se sedaj to spreminja. Knjigo je uredil David (...) Movrin, ki je napisal tudi spremno besedo in pripravil obsežen spremni aparat. Prevod zajema nekje sedmino ohranjenega Livijevega dela, ob predvidenem nadaljevanju s skupino prevajalcev si lahko obetamo izid nadaljnjih zvezkov in v doglednem času tudi prevod vsega, kar se je od Livija ohranilo v rokopisnem izročilu. (shrink)

As a philosopher, legal ethicist, and expert in international criminal law, David Luban was uniquely positioned to challenge the morality and legality of the Bush administration's coercive interrog...

Kenneth Kai-chung Yung’s Chinese Émigré Intellectuals and Their Quest for Liberal Values in the Cold War presents the philosophical and political development of Chinese intellectuals who fled the mainland after the Communist takeover in 1949. Focusing on Yin Haiguang 殷海光, Zhang Junmai 張君勱, and Xu Fuguan 徐復觀, the author provides a comparative account and comprehensive overview of the many facets of intellectual discourse among Chinese post-war philosophers and public intellectuals.Yung’s book is structured into five chapters. While the first two chapters (...) introduce the reader to the general trends and historical circumstances of the post-war intellectual sphere, the ensuing chapters... (shrink)

A partir del análisis del ambientalismo desde las perspectivas que brindan diferentes discursos sobre desarrollo sostenible, los autores argumentan que, en un nivel de aplicación local, en comunidades y proyectos específicos, se pueden generar nichos de sostenibilidad, pese a que reconocen la extrema dificultad de este desafío; comparan viejas y nuevas propuestas para alcanzar la sostenibilidad, tales como: el desarrollo sostenible, el capitalismo natural, el decrecimiento sostenible o el ecologismo de los pobres. Por último, presentan dos casos con particularidades diferentes, (...) en los que comunidades pobres se resisten a la Raubwirtschaft o economía industrial de rapiña dominante, al buscar la construcción de nichos de sostenibilidad desde una perspectiva local y de comunalidad, mediante el ordenamiento comunitario territorial, la gobernanza democrática y la planeación participativa. (shrink)

Isabelle Stengers’ cosmopolitical proposal is an influential attempt by a European philosopher to transform the burdensome legacy of Western thought. Reconsidering her comprehensive engagement with the cosmology of the British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, this article reveals two concepts as foundational to Stengers’ cosmopolitics: civilization and commerce. While not usually associated with a critical political theory, in her development of what we call a commercial political ontology, Stengers explores the modes of inheriting these ostracized notions. By tracing the (...) genealogy of this political ontology back to Pericles’ first explicit defense of persuasion as a requisite for civilization, we argue that Pericles’ famous funeral oration provides the structure for Whitehead’s cosmology, and, ultimately, Stengers’ cosmopolitics. As such, we understand her cosmopolitical proposal as a dress rehearsal of a funeral eulogy for bourgeois society. (shrink)

The paper reconsiders the Weber Thesis of a linkage between Calvinism and capitalism. It first restates this sociological Thesis in terms of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination as its theological core and premise in virtue of being treated as the crucial religious factor of the spirit of modern capitalism. Consequently, it proposes that the Weber Thesis’ validity and consistency depends on that doctrine, succeeding or failing as a sociological theory with the latter depending on whether or not it is unique (...) in theological terms, as well as economic-social consequences. For that purpose, it reexamines and compares the Calvinist doctrine of predestination with the pre-Calvinist versions and infers that it is basically identical to or compatible with these. It then draws the implications for the Weber Thesis in respect of the degree of its validity or consistence. It concludes that the Weber Thesis likely is fail as a sociological-economic theory with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination to the extent that the latter is its theological ground and revealed not to be unique and new theologically and probably in terms of its societal effects. (shrink)

This paper aims to pave the way for religion’s potential revitalisation – outside of the ideological concept of the dialectics of contemporary society and within the historical context of the specific meaning of the secularisation of religion. Accordingly, in its understanding of religion, this paper’s discussion necessarily remains beyond the dialectics of secularity, since religion is not dependent on that kind of dialectics, but on the Sacred and its comprehension. Without the Sacred, we would be in a situation of ‘reoccurring (...) of the same’, as a result of which contemporary modern ideologies would negatively influence the life of the individual. The aforementioned then points to the need for multi-dimensional theoretical approaches resulting from the intricate social circumstances and various development courses of individual religions in the contemporary world. In this way the theoretical approaches to religion in contemporary society, primarily analysed based on prevalent theories of functionalism, phenomenology and the neo-Weberian tradition, exhibit diverse paradigms in their different explanations of the secularisation and revitalisation of religion. (shrink)