Classicism in architecture and literature; Turkey; history.

VorbemerkungDer Beantwortung liegt eine allgemeine Stellungnahrae zum Unterricht an der Mittelschule, insbesondere im Hinblick auf die Mathematik bei. Die in Klammern [] gesetzten Ziffern verweisen auf die Punkte 1 bis 6 dieser Stellungnahme.

Danielle Macbeth disagrees with the view that there are logical truths in an ontological sense, and argues that we have no adequate epistemological account of our access to such features of reality. In my response I recall some main aspects of my ontological and epistemological formulation of logic as a science, and argue that neither Quine’s considerations against meaning, nor Benacerraf’s considerations against Gödel’s realism, show the untenability of an approach to logical truth in terms of logical propositions that denote (...) logical states of affairs.Danielle MacBeth discorda da tese que há verdades lógicas em um sentido ontológico e argumenta que não há um tratamento adequado de nosso acesso epistêmico à tais aspectos da realidade. Em minha réplica relembro algumas características principais de minha formulação ontológica e epistemológica da lógica como ciência, e argumento que nem as considerações de Quine contra a noção de significado, nem as considerações de Benacerraf contra o realismo de Gödel, mostram a invalidade de uma concepção de verdade lógica em termos de proposições que denotam estados de coisa lógicos. (shrink)

The analysis of historical literature allows to consider profoundly the development of national culture and science of the 18th-first half of the 20th centuries and the formation and change of different historical concepts. With the analysis of historical periods that are highlighted in the research, general trends in the changing of paradigms about Russian historical development were concluded, which were translated to mass historical consciousness from the beginning of the 18th century up to 1917. The periods were closely connected with (...) the specific political, historical and economic changes in Russian Empire and with the dominance of certain textbooks during this time. The books were selected because of a number of factors: their inclusion to the school curriculum, the number of publications, the equal number of textbooks devoted to different historical periods. For the analysis were used 19 textbooks, schoolbooks for different courses of secondary schools and primary schools. All the sources of educational literature were grouped into two concepts - officially-state and the liberal. Each publication was highlighted the dominant concept as a base for the whole textbook. There is also a characteristic of the concepts that are presented chronologically. The analysis represents school history books as an important source for the formation of state policy in the representing of Russian history, and, that is more important, for creation of the concept of the state of Russian history. (shrink)

The work is carried out in line with the Russian dialectology of the German language. Its relevance comes from the fact that it is devoted to one of the territorial forms of German, which was never before linguistically studied. The authors of the paper conducted the field work in the territory of Novosibirsk region and collected data that allow analyzing the language situation of the Germans residing there. In the proposed article, the first results of this analysis are presented, which (...) give an idea of the main social and linguistic characteristics of the native forms of the German language in Novosibirsk region. In particular, the main components of the linguistic situation of the ethnoterritorial community under consideration are identified, the communicative power of each component is described, and the dialect identification of the native forms of the German language in the surveyed region is carried out. When modeling the language situation of the Germans of Novosibirsk region, the phenomena caused by interlingual contacting are emphasized. The authors show that on the territory of Novosibirsk region there are German idioms long staying outside the main continuum of German language and representing unique language formations. These language formations show signs of West Central German, and also includes phenomena caused by language interference. The simulated language situation is characterized as unbalanced - the demographic and communicative capacities of German dialects in the region under consideration are much lower than those of languages with majority status. It is noted that the demographic and communicative capacities of the described territorial forms of German language are in the process of a rapid decline. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Going Beyond Theory: Constructivism and Empirical Phenomenology” by Urban Kordeš. Upshot: The naturalistic paradigm, which relies on the third-person perspective and the exclusion of the observer, cannot accommodate human experience in its scientific enterprise. I present a critical overview of Kordeš’s proposal to merge the constructivist epistemological framework and empirical phenomenology. I doubt whether constructivism actually requires empirical grounding, but I do see constructivism with instrumentalism as a possible framework in which researchers will be (...) able to make sense of the phenomenal data. (shrink)

A new line of self projection magazines that started blooming in Lagos, Nigeria, about the mid-1990s defined itself by filling almost completely every issue with photographs that depict politicians, businesspeople, sports and show business stars enjoying fruits of their extraordinary achievements on festive occasions. The magazine’s cozy coverage of the rich and famous irks a lot of serious cultural and literary critics who believe that this style resembles praise singing too closely. This paper, unlike mainline criticisms of the pictorial magazines, (...) takes praise singing to be a serious subject. Its central proposition is that the Nigerian magazine culture embraced these magazines because they have successfully translated into photography the panegyric tendency that pervades popular, self-projection arts in the underlying Yorùbá cultural environment of southwestern Nigeria. The sub-genre of Yorùbá panegyric that the magazines rework into the photographic medium is oríkì bọ̀rọ̀kìnní, or praise chants of the eminent. The paper analyzes sample issues of Ovation magazine to outline ways of placing contemporary African cultural forms in a long perspective and to propose an example of how inter-mediality operates today in popular cultures. In the concluding section, the essay proposes that a “poetic” understanding of photography, as opposed to “theatricality” and or melancholic substitution, represents the best way to think about the type of festive portraiture practiced in Ovationand its imitators. (shrink)

Even today, apologists for modernist and post-modernist architecture frequently appeal to what, following Sir Karl Popper, I will call historicist arguments. Such arguments have a particular poignancy when they are used to justify the replacement of some familiar part of an ancient city with some intentionally untraditional structure; as, for example, when a familiar nineteenth century block of offices in a prime city site is swept away to make room for something supposedly more fitting to the ‘new millennium’, a ‘twentieth (...) century contribution to monumental architecture’, a building ‘of substantial importance to the present age’. Similarly, those architects or consumers of architecture who fail to conform to whatever stylistic demands the age is held to demand are marginalized in many supposedly serious discussions of architecture, and made to feel out of place and out of time. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to the analysis of Kant’s approach to the ideas of universality and autonomy as the constitutive features of morality. The paper shows that Kant’s findings concerning these ideas were anticipated by the previous history of moral philosophy, mainly by the modern moral philosophers, who focused specifically on the elaboration of the philosophical concept of morality. Kant’s peculiar role was that, firstly, he conceptualized the ideas of universality and autonomy and formulated corresponding principles; secondly, Kant integrated both (...) principles into the concept of moral law and revealed the way by which the formula of universality and the formula of autonomy together with formula of humanity constitute the supreme principle of morality and essentially express the sense of morality itself. Kant believed that the reason for the failure of the previous attempts to explicate the supreme principle of morality was inability to understand that the moral agent is subject not only to universal but at the same time his own legislation. Thirdly, Kant, unlike his predecessors, in his examination of universality didn’t appeal to the human nature or nature of things. Fourthly, he underlined that the principle of universality and the principle of autonomy were not only interconnected but also shaped each other: the determination of will may be identified as a universal principle only if it is given through a moral agent’s rational will. And a moral agent may be identified as autonomous only if in his decisions and actions he is guided by principles that are universalizable. (shrink)

New aspects of spectral fluctuations of (quantum) chaotic and diffusive systems are considered, namely autocorrelations of the spacing between consecutive levels or spacing autocovariances. They can be viewed as a discretized two point correlation function. Their behavior results from two different contributions. One corresponds to (universal) random matrix eigenvalue fluctuations, the other to diffusive or chaotic characteristics of the corresponding classical motion. A closed formula expressing spacing autocovariances in terms of classical dynamical zeta functions, including the Perron–Frobenius operator, is derived. (...) It leads to a simple interpretation in terms of classical resonances. The theory is applied to zeros of the Riemann zeta function. A striking correspondence between the associated classical dynamical zeta functions and the Riemann zeta itself is found. This induces a resurgence phenomenon where the lowest Riemann zeros appear replicated an infinite number of times as resonances and sub-resonances in the spacing autocovariances. The theoretical results are confirmed by existing “data.” The present work further extends the already well known semiclassical interpretation of properties of Riemann zeros. (shrink)

This book examines Augustine's description of the actually existing world, especially that aspect most important for the human pursuit of happiness: the human being and God. It begins with an overview of the characteristics of the human individual and the context in which they must live out their lives, a context dominated by two seemingly contradictory realities: the existence of God and the existence of evil.

I argue in §1 that there is a clear distinction between predicate negation and sentential negation and that sentential negation is a special case of predicate negation operating on the predicate ‘is true’. In §2 I reply to Richard’s objections to negative properties on the basis of the conception of properties as identity conditions presented in Chapter 12 of Logical Forms.

In this paper I examine arguments by Benacerraf and by Chihara against Gödel’s platonistic philosophy of mathematics.Neste artigo examino argumentos de Benacerraf e de Chihara contra a filosofia platônica da matemática de Gödel.

In this paper I examine arguments by Benacerraf and by Chihara against Gödel’s platonistic philosophy of mathematics.

In §1 I reply to Jairo’s objections to my account of truth and falsity showing that my account of falsity does not imply that false sentences refer to something. In §2 I argue that Jairo’s main objection to my account of propositions as abstract properties is based on a misunderstanding concerning the purpose of this account. In §3 I examine Jairo’s suggestion that contradictory sentences can be said to describe possible states of affairs.

The classical concept of entropy was successfully extended to quantum mechanics by the introduction of the density operator formalism. However, further extensions to quantum decaying states have been hampered by conceptual difficulties associated to the particular nature of these states. In this work we address this problem, by (i) pointing out the difficulties that appear when one tries a consistent definition for this entropy, and (ii) building up a plausible formalism for it, which is based on the use of coherent (...) complex states in the context of a path integration. (shrink)

This is the first book to address philosophically the moral and political underpinnings of terrorism and anti-terrorism. It brings together authors with different attitudes and original perspectives on attitudes and ethical and practical justifications for terrorism.

It is well known that the medieval scholastics did not begin their philosophy systematically with an explicit theory of knowledge. Unfortunately many people have concluded from that fact that the very idea of an epistemology, and especially the idea of a critique of knowledge, was completely foreign to them. Within recent years authors such as Professor Van Steenberghen and Father Copleston have done a great deal to spread a correct understanding of St. Thomas’s views on this matter. Much evidence might (...) be adduced from the principal work of John Duns Scotus to show that he also took steps to justify man’s spontaneous conviction that some natural knowledge of truth with certainty can be attained. In this article we will consider some of these elements of Scotus’s philosophy as they are found in the volumes that have so far appeared in the critical edition of his works. (shrink)