The phenomenological tautology of life in Michel Henry’s works shows us that the radical concept of self-affection, in its own immanence, cannot be described in another way, either by metaphor or analogy for example, but only by that immediate relation like adequacy on itself: “life as life”. The reduplication of the fundamental concept in Henry’s last “theological” turn introduced a new Transcendence: the Self-Affection of the Absolute Life, the Christian God as Revelation. In this way, we can diversify the tautology (...) of life trying to read it using Saint Maximus the Confessor’s theology: “Life as Life” like the Absolute phenomenological Life of Trinity in Unity; “life as Life” for the creation of the human living by the Living God; “life as life” for the existence of the man, ek-sisting in a world affected by the original transgression; “Life as life” for the Incarnation of the Logos of God; “life as Life — 2” for the rebirth of the human living into Christ and His Mystical Body. (shrink)

Ioan Chirila, Cartea profetului Osea – Breviarum al gnoseologiei Vechiului Testament Editura Limes, 1999.

Sandu Frunza, Iubirea si Transcendenta. O introducere la problema spatiului median al experientei religioase in Iudaism si Crestinismul Rasaritean Editura Dacia, Cluj, 1999.

The encounters of the Romanian philosopher C. Noica with his youger disciples - Gabriel Liicean, Andrei Pleșu, Sorin Vieru et alii - in the transylvanian Carpathian mountains, in the Păltiniș resort were perceived by Noica’s followers as a real philosophical school and an idealistic alternative to the compulsory marxist ideology. In spite of that, the orthodox thinker and literary critic N. Steinhardt took it as a way of avoiding the tough reality of communism and a negation of the Christian (...) religion. Therefore, he criticised that option and the pretention of the “Păltiniș School” to create a viable alternative to the officially imposed marxist vision. Steinhardt’s article received critical answers not only from the members of the so-called School, but also from another thinker and literary critic, Adrian Marino, who thought that both Noica and Steinhardt are wrong and the younger thinkers should act against Nicolae Ceaușescu’s agressive dictatorship by meas of civic and democratic activity. The study tries to emphasize the existence of more than one alternative to the communist ideology in Romania’s 1980s, generally considered as a frozen epoch for free philosophical and politically relevant discussions. (shrink)

Suppose we are asked to draw up a list of things we take to exist. Certain items seem unproblematic choices, while others (such as God) are likely to spark controversy. The book sets the grand theological theme aside and asks a less dramatic question: should mathematical objects (numbers, sets, functions, etc.) be on this list? In philosophical jargon this is the ‘ontological’ question for mathematics; it asks whether we ought to include mathematicalia in our ontology. The goal of this work (...) is to answer this question in the affirmative, by drawing on considerations on the the applicability of mathematics to natural science. (shrink)

Steiner defines naturalism in opposition to anthropocentrism, the doctrine that the human mind holds a privileged place in the universe. He assumes the anthropocentric nature of mathematics and argues that physicists' employment of mathematically guided strategies in the discovery of quantum mechanics challenges scientists' naturalism. In this paper I show that Steiner's assumption about the anthropocentric character of mathematics is questionable. I draw attention to mathematicians' rejection of what Maddy calls ‘definabilism’, a methodological maxim governing the development of mathematics. I (...) contend that because definabilism is anthropocentric, its rejection casts doubts on Steiner's assumption. (shrink)

Some of the post-socialist countries of Europe experienced after the fall of communism what some called a religious revival. Anthropologists and sociologists alike were sure that they discovered serious evidence against the case of secularization theory. What unfortunately most of them failed to observe was the particular shape and form of this religious growth and the structural changes of the religious mentalities occurred in the process of transition from a closed, ideologically monopolized society, to a pluralistic one. After more than (...) half of a century of atheistic ideologization of the public sphere, Romania remains one of the most religious countries of both Eastern and Western Europe. The thesis of this article is that this fact is due to the lack of modernization of the Romanian social system both before and during the post-socialist period. (shrink)

The paper argues that scientific progress is best characterized as an increase in scientists' understanding of the world. It also connects this idea with the claim that scientific understanding and explanation are captured in terms of unification.

This is a study about the meaning of happiness (εὐδαιμονία) in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (EN). It is argued that εὐδαιμονία in EN means actuality, and it has to be interpreted through the lenses of two metaphors used by Aristotle in EN 1.7 1098a21 and 10.6 1176a30: the “perimeter of good” and the “imprint of happiness.” To explain the meaning of happiness Aristotle first has to delineate the “perimeter of good” of human beings, and he does that with the help of (...) two criteria: the final end [τέλος] and the function of humanity [ἔργον ἀνθρώπου]. These two criteria are metaphysical concepts which describe the “good” as the final metaphysical aim of every person, and the best every person can be. This metaphysical teleological aim is the “actuality of the soul” according with excellence. This is the “perimeter” within which Aristotle enquires about εὐδαιμονία—the good of humans. (shrink)

I identify and characterize a type of noncausal explanation in physics. I first introduce a distinction, between the physical properties of a system, and the representational properties of the mathematical expressions of the system’s physical properties. Then I introduce a novel kind of property, which I shall call a dual property. This is a special kind of representational property, one for which there is an interpretation as a physical property. It is these dual properties that, I claim, are amenable to (...) noncausal (mathematical, in fact) explanations. I discuss a typical example of such a dual property, and an example of an explanation as to why that dual property holds (the explanation of the quantization of the linear momentum). (shrink)

The Dignity of the Children according to the New Testament teaching should be a landmark for modern era. New Testament raised the dignity of the unborn child, from a simple mass of cells to a child who has the right to be born and live. The child born has the value of a person that to enjoy family and society not only for economic potential but for the soul value as they bear the image of God. Children of different ages (...) have the right to be baptized, have access to the grace of the Sacraments and become saints. In fact the true dignity of man is his power to become a saint. And the child is the image of the saint, heir of the Heaven. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate a particular two-stage supply chain network design problem with fixed costs. In order to solve this complex optimization problem, we propose an efficient hybrid algorithm, which was obtained by incorporating a linear programming optimization problem within the framework of a genetic algorithm. In addition, we integrated within our proposed algorithm a powerful local search procedure able to perform a fine tuning of the global search. We evaluate our proposed solution approach on a set of large (...) size instances. The achieved computational results prove the efficiency of our hybrid genetic algorithm in providing high-quality solutions within reasonable running-times and its superiority against other existing methods from the literature. (shrink)

The past three decades have witnessed the emergence, at the forefront of political thought, of several Kantian theories. Both the critical reaction to consequentialism inspired by Rawlsian constructivism and the universalism of more recent theories informed by Habermasian discourse ethics trace their main sources of inspiration back to Kant's writings. Yet much of what is Kantian in contemporary theory is formulated with more or less strict caveats concerning Kant's metaphysics. These range from radical claims that theories of justice must be (...) political, not metaphysical, to more cautious calls for replacing Kant's metaphysics with a more modest ontology, for instance, one informed by the relatively recent linguistic turn in philosophy. The volume will consist of thirteen state-of-the-art essays which explore the relationship between politics and metaphysics in Kant and Kantian political philosophy. All essays will be published for the first time in this volume and will be preceded by an Introduction from the editors. Given the current "legitimation crisis" of modern liberal democracies, the purpose of the collection as a whole is to revisit the question concerning the role of metaphysics in moral and political philosophy and to suggest new perspectives on the question of legitimation. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant's work continues to be a main focus of attention in almost all areas of philosophy. The significance of Kant's work for the so-called continental philosophy cannot be exaggerated, although work in this area is relatively scant. The book includes eight chapters, a substantial introduction and a postscript, all newly written by an international cast of well-known authors. Each chapter focuses on particular aspects of a fundamental problem in Kant's and post-Kantian philosophy, the problem of the relation between the (...) world and transcendence. Chapters fall thematically into three parts: sensibility, nature and religion. Each part starts with a more interpretative chapter focusing on Kant's relevant work, and continues with comparative chapters which stage dialogues between Kant and post-Kantian philosophers, including Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jean-François Lyotard, Luce Irigaray and Jacques Derrida. A special feature of this volume is the engagement of each chapter with the work of the late British philosopher Gary Banham. The Postscript offers a subtle and erudite analysis of his intellectual trajectory, philosophy and mode of working. The volume is dedicated to his memory. (shrink)

This paper investigates the Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem (GTSP), which is an extension of the well-known Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), and it searches for an optimal tour in a clustered graph, such that every cluster is visited exactly once. In this paper, we describe a novel Memetic Algorithm (MA) for solving efficiently the GTSP. Our proposed MA has at its core a genetic algorithm (GA), completed by a Chromosome Enhancement Procedure (CEP), which is based on a TSP solver and the (...) Shortest Path (SP) algorithm and for improving the convergence characteristics of the GA, a Local Search (LS) operation is applied for the best chromosomes in each generation. We tested our algorithm on a set of well-known instances from the literature and the achieved results prove that our novel memetic algorithm is highly competitive against the existing solution approaches from the specialized literature. (shrink)

This book challenges the standard view of the relationship between Kant's and Sartre's practical philosophies, making a case for regarding Kant as one of Sartre's most significant predecessors. By using an original comparative methodology, the book identifies several fundamental theses of Sartre's practical philosophy despite the common reading of Sartre as a philosopher without a practical philosophy. Furthermore, the book shows that Sartre's practical philosophy proves to be closer to Kant than dominant contemporary Kantian theories are. Starting from the similarities (...) between Kant and Sartre, the book uncovers the project of a critical ethics which is philosophically more compelling than dominant contemporary Kantian theories. (shrink)

The Kantian Mind is an outstanding guide and reference source to Kant's thought and essential reading for all students and scholars of Kant and contemporary Kantian thought.

On the Beginnings of the Greek Doctrine of the Transmigration of Souls. In this article, I state that attendant on the acceptance of the idea of an immortalsoul is a legitimate question concerning the soul's status before the individual's birth and after its death. Whether the Greeks were the originators of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls or this was an influence from another culture is still open to debate.

A discussion of the way to assign probabilities via the principle of indifference.

During the last two decades, the intra-industry trade between western companies and former socialist enterprises in Central and Eastern Europe gradually shifted from the subcontracting of marginal operations such as final assembly to the outsourcing of products and intermediate inputs. To further enhance their competitiveness, firms in Central and Eastern Europe have yet to take one more step forward: integrate services with manufacturing. Developing such capabilities hinges, aside from intensive training and learning on the existence of functional interactive knowledgebased innovation (...) systems. Whereas Central and East European economies exhibit conspicuous weaknesses in this last respect, they still possess a countervailing advantage that is apt to lure foreign investors into the region: lower wage rates relative to western countries across all industries and skill levels. Offshoring therefore seems to be the most appropriate means to reconcile the two sides of the coin. (shrink)

In keeping with an already entrenched paradigm, international trade in tasks exerts upward pressure upon skilled workers’ wages in both home and host countries. Yet certain empirical evidence from intra-European trade shows that sometimes things occur in reverse, that is high skilled workers’ wages in home countries may decline as a result of offshoring, an outcome that looks like an inverse “maquiladora effect”. I try to show that such deviations do not fly in the face of mainstream theory but rather, (...) they reflect the different conditions under which offshoring is performed today as compared to the ones prevailing two decades ago. (shrink)

The article comments upon the report written by the French captain Aubert about the Romanian space during the XIXth century. It analyses the richness of documentation data contained by the report, through the lenses of the historical anthropological categories of “the other’s image”. The author concludes that the report was elaborated in a period when French interests for the Romanian space was rising.

In 1962, after insisting upon the Vienna moment and comparing the points in the second Leopold Diploma, the author believed that the union was fulfilled in Vienna where the imperial authorities played an essential role. The Jesuits, who were considered the artisans of the union up to that moment, were reduced to the role of negotiators and forgers of the documents of 1697, 1698 and 1700. Because of the resentments against the “traitors” of the nation, S. Dragomir could not or (...) did not want to understand the great change brought about in the history of Transylvanian Romanians by the political programme initiated by Inochentie. When we take into account the fact that Dragomir was one of the nationalists at the beginning of the 20th century in Transylvania, it is hard to understand his refusal to identify the birth of nationalism in Transylvania with the political action caused by the Greek- Catholic bishop. His historical writings were also influenced by the new political realities in Romania after 1944. The author hesitated to establish the causes of the religious movements led by Visarion Sarai and Sofronie of Cioara because he was influenced by the Marxist philosophy. In his interwar studies he thought the movements led by Visarion Sarai and Sofronie of Cioara had religious determinations and aimed at reestablishing the Orthodox faith. After 1955 the historian changed his conclusions, considering them social and national movements against the Hapsburgs. (shrink)

Religion was always perceived as the threshold between two worlds. It is a space where individuals are supposed to be connected to a different reality through the mediating power of a particlular ritual, at a specific time and in a certain space. A new space of appearance is the expected outcome along with this relocation from profane to sacred. Religious broadcasting could be conceptualized as a visual and acoustic “altar”. The ritual, space and time are the pillars of this audio-visual (...) “cathedral” the very space that could build the bridge between sacred and profane, and the means for this mediated, symbolic transfer. This paper tries to outline the power of media representation in the context of religious broadcasting that uses ritual and imagination to maintain and negotiate the distinction between sacred and profane and to generate alternative narratives. In this regard, the religious broadcasting, presuming the sacerdotal role to represent, mediate and interpret the relationship between sacred and profane is being conditioned by a ritualized medium. As a result, the religious messages could end up as a ritualized mystification that would jeopardize the production of meaning. (shrink)