The doctrine of idols is one of the most famous aspects of Bacon's thought. Yet his claim that the idols lead to madness has gone almost entirely unnoticed. This paper argues that Bacon's theory of idols underlies his diagnosis of the contemporary condition as one of ‘universal madness’. In contrast to interpretations that locate his doctrine of error and recovery within the biblical narrative of the Fall, the present analysis focuses on the material and cultural sources of the mind's tendency (...) towards error. It explains the idols in terms of Bacon's materialist psychology and his exposé of the debilitating effects of language and traditional learning. In so doing, it highlights the truly radical nature of the idols. For Bacon, the first step towards sanity was to alert people to the prevailing madness. The doctrine of idols was intended as a wake-up call, preparing the way for a remedy in the form of his new method of inquiry. The paper concludes by indicating how Bacon's method aimed to treat ‘universal madness’, and it suggests that his diagnosis influenced John Locke. (shrink)

В монографии в широком историческом контексте охарактеризован процесс возникновения и развития сущностного наполнения принципа природосообразности в истории филисофско-педагогической мысли от античного периода по Новое время.

Kant’s dissertation for the Master’s degree Succinct Exposition of Some Meditations on Fire was written in Latin in 1755 as a sample (specimen) preceding a Master’s exam, but its first printing did not appear until 1838. What is the relevance of this Master’s dissertation for historical and philosophical studies? To answer this question I analyse the structure and give a brief summary of the dissertation, look at the history of its writing and try to identify the place of this work (...) among Kant’s other papers on natural philosophy. I then demonstrate that Kant’s concept of ether as an elastic matter of fire, heat and light containing the forces of attraction and repulsion originates in the dissertation On Fire. I identify the provisions in Kant’s early works which he later develops in the Master’s dissertation and establish continuity between the text of On Fire and the so-called Physical Monadology, draw parallels between the ideas enunciated by Kant in his first dissertation and the interpretation of ether in the printed works that followed. Finally, I put forward the hypothesis of the heuristic potential of the On Fire treatise for the analysis of Kant’s manuscript legacy. Perhaps this dissertation will enable researchers to clear up some tangled propositions in Kant’s Opus Postumum. However, a series of further studies is needed to verify the hypothesis. (shrink)

The article discusses the problem of the possibility of knowing the future, especially the future of social phenomena compared with the future of natural ones. This problem is formulated as a dilemma: the future can be explored or can be only constructed. The idea of constructive character of knowledge of the future is viewed in two possible interpretations.The first one is a special case of the constructivist interpretation of knowledge, according to which different pictures of the future are arbitrarily constructed (...) on the basis of information about the past and current state. The second interpretaion can be presented in the form of a praxeological question: what should be an action in relation to the future, first and foremost to the future of social phenomena - cognitive or creative. It is shown that, in the first case, there is an ability to interpret knowledge of the future from the point of view of epistemological realism, in the second case, both cognitive and creative types of activity as a pragmatic position in relation to the future are necessary and cognitive activity cannot be reduced to creative one. It is also shown that forecaster’s dilemma reflects the problematic nature of forecasting under the conditions of transformation of scientific rationality and point of view of common sense, which is observed in recent decades. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to reveal philosophical ideas in the mythology and folklore of the indigenous peoples of North America. An important question: "Can we assume that the spiritual culture of the American Indians contained philosophical knowledge?" remains relevant today. For example, European philosophy is defined by appeals to philosophers of the past, their texts. The philosophical tradition is characterized by rational argumentation and formulation of philosophical questions that differ from the questions of ordinary language. However, the problem (...) lies in the term "philosophy", which belongs to the so-called "philosophical untranslatability" and has many definitions. The question of whether philosophy is exclusively a phenomenon of European culture is still controversial. In the article, the concept of philosophy is used in a broad sense, which allows the analysis of the intellectual heritage of the culture of the indigenous people of North America for philosophical ideas. Theoretical basis of the study consists of primary sources, which are limited due to the "documentary horizon". It contains myths about the Twins, ritual rhetoric, examples of dream interpretation practices and the practical wisdom of tribal chiefs. The Chronicle of "Vallamolum", or "the Red List", testifies to the special idea of the Indians about history and their own historicity. Analysis of cosmogonical and cosmological ideas reveals the special features of the anthropological ideas of the North American Indians. Combined with the philosophical ideas of the Puritan philosophy of the settlers of New England, this analysis allows us to explore in more detail the processes of acculturation. The study uses critical literature from scholars and leading researchers of the wisdom and philosophy of Native Americans, such as Michael Yellow Bird, J. Baird Callicott, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dennis H. McPherson, Lewis Henri Morgan, Thomas M. Norton-Smith, J. Douglas Rabb, Paul Radin, Jon Ewbank Manchip White. The views of early American philosophers: R. Williams, W. Penn, R. W. Emerson, on the problem of the relationship between the culture of settlers and the indigenous people of North America are noteworthy. Originality lies in the application of historical and philosophical methodology, identifying the features of philosophizing in the spiritual culture and worldview of the indigenous people of North America. Conclusions. In the conclusions, the obtained results complement the history of the origin and development of philosophical thought of the early American philosophy. (shrink)

The reasonable human nature appears in the Enlightenment’s philosophy as a reduction of the human being and its manifestations to a complex of natural impulses when all former norms of perception, reflections, inclinations, actions and the moral principles, which lie in their basis, are canceled in the free human self-experimenting. The monarchy idea depreciates when its citizens turn in the public good’s proponents on the basis of a blind republican consent about the egoism’s limitation (Robespierre) and a prosopo-peia of freedom (...) that gives to a nation the self-government illusion. The reconsideration of the revolutionary moment as a self-affirmation of romantic spirit is connected for Tolstoy with the “world will” novel poetics opening evolutionary moment in the affective and reflexive dynamics of the hero’s consciousness, the limiting witness of the narrator and the author’s horizon of progressive movement to the historical process’s purpose that creates the belief in the need of coexistence with other participating consciousnesses. The revolutionary and evolutionary reflection of Tolstoy is related to the monoteis-tic prosopopoeia of divine kenosis. From an artistic representation of signifying articulations of the evolutionary world the teacher’s reflection of Tolstoy is born. For Tolstoy revolution is the moment of the senseless violence aiming to eliminate the common evil of the world. The conceptual basis of literary culture as an art and ideological formatting of reactive consciousnesses for Tolstoy is an infinite aspiration to the human self-limitation. (shrink)

Purpose of this article is the historical reconstruction of the studies in philosophical anthropology in Soviet Ukraine. Theoretical basis. In the philosophical tradition of independent Ukraine, there is an opinion that at the intersection of the 1960s and 1970s, there was an anthropological turn in the national philosophical thought. The authors provide a holistic and comprehensive reconstruction of philosophical understanding of man in the works of Ukrainian thinkers of the Soviet era. Originality. It has been proved that before the emergence (...) of the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Ukraine Academy of Sciences and the restoration of the Philosophy Department at Kyiv State University, the writings of Ukrainian philosophers in the 1920s and 1930s emphasize specifically the "ideological" factor of human existence. Based on the materials of M. Maksymovych Academic Library and the library at H. Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, there have been revealed and traced the specific features and peculiarities of the transformation of main accents in philosophical and anthropological studies of Soviet Ukrainian researchers in the post-war period. Conclusions. The studied problems developed in Soviet Ukraine in two vectors. The focus was on man as a social phenomenon and a "product of ideology" on the one hand, and, on existential aspects of a human being with its internal contradictions, understanding of its nature and the sense of existence, on the other hand. It has been established that the anthropological problems were the focus of not only scientists of the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Ukraine Academy of Sciences, but also of teachers of Kyiv State University. The authors grounded the thesis that, unlike the 1940-1950s, when the focus was on philosophical problems of natural science and philosophical personology, the 1960s bring forward not only philosophical and anthropological studies but also ethical and aesthetic issues, logic and scientific atheism. (shrink)

Disjunctive Syllogism, that is, the inference from 'not-A or B' and 'A', to 'B' can lead from true premises to a false conclusion if each of the sentences 'A' and 'not-A' is a statement of a partial truth such that affirming one of them amounts to denying the other, without each being the contradictory of the other. Such sentences inevitably occur whenever a situation which for its proper precise description needs the use of expressions such as 'most probably true' and (...) so forth, is described (less precisely) by sentences not containing such expressions. (shrink)

section 1. Conceptual underpinnings -- section 2. Relevance and strategies of Nai Talim -- section 3. Mainstreaming Nai Talim -- section 4. Explorations and applications of Nai Talim -- section 5. Focus on Nai Talim in specific sectors -- section 6. Models of Nai Talim -- section 7. Nai Talim in the reckoning.

1. Those having a detailed and first-hand knowledge of Descartes’s work seem agreed that it was highly original, genuinely critical and of permanent importance in the history of thought. And though they would differ in opinion on what are the reasons best advanced in support of their estimate, a majority would seem to regard the “Cartesian revolution” as summing up what is most meritorious in Descartes’s philosophy and most lasting in his influence. They would find Professor E. Gilson speaking their (...) mind when he declares, “Sur ce qu’il y a de nouveau et de strictement original dans sa pensée, aucun doute ne saurait subsister. Descartes est la revendication personnifiée du mathématisme universel. (shrink)

There are, I imagine, five considerations that will serve as a point d'appui to the future historian of our century's philosophy, aiding him to interpret with fair adequacy the working faith and working postulates of one large and influential group of present thinkers. The members of this group, he will point out, however much they differ in other respects, accept in common and act upon this five-fold assumption, namely, that progress in philosophy depends upon it abandoning its traditional claim to (...) being systematic and final, in favour of “more modest” attempts at the piecemeal solution of particular problems; these piecemeal attempts being conceived as essentially co-operative undertakings, calling for assistance from men of science no less than from philosophers, so that the character of philosophical research is broadly not very dissimilar to that of scientific research; that this, in turn, necessitates an abandonment of the claim to, and the search for, “necessary” and certain knowledge, and an acceptance of knowledge that is probable as rationally sufficing; from all of which it follows, lastly, as something very like a corollary, that philosophers can deal profitably only with “hypothetical questions,” seeking to discover, from certain things provisionally taken as true, what other things may or must also be true. It is by these methodological convictions, by some declared, by others not, that much of the best work in Britain and America during this first third of our century has been inspired. (shrink)

In the process of history, not only models of the world, but the very subject of philosophy, changes. Therefore, it seems to me, it is not quite right to reject the definition of culture as a personal or subjective aspect of history just because subject and object are attributes of rational knowledge. If we speak of culture as the being in which man lives, the question naturally arises as to how man can exist without being related to society and, in (...) general, what is man? The very concept of culture assumes that man is not just an individual but a person, because he possesses reflective thought. A second point: the novelty of contemporary philosophy lies in the point that, in the process of its development, philosophy began to understand-and it was precisely the contemporary period that brought it to this-that its only subject is man. This is important because such an understanding of the subject of philosophy makes it possible not to counterpose it to culture or isolate it from the latter, but to make it a guide to culture in the sense that culture itself presupposes reflective thought. Now, specifically on A. Iu. Shemanov's paper. (shrink)

The separable hidden variables theory (Bhave [1986]) of Aspect's [1982] four single channel polarizers is developed further to consider possible modified Aspect's experiment with four double channel polarizers. It is shown that Aspect's commutator is not a truly stochastic commutator, and that until such a truly stochastic commutator is devised, experiments based on Bell's inequalities (like those of Aspect's) cannot be adequate experimental tests of quantum nonseparability.

Analysis of the DNA sequence associated with the nuclear matrix has made it possible to identify several types of DNA matrix association. Permanent attachment sites are detected in both transcriptionally active and inactive nuclei. Furthermore, replication origins have been shown to be permanently attached to the nuclear matrix. In transcriptionally active nuclei, expressed genes are also associated with the nuclear matrix. Finally, a special group of attachment sites is described; these sites are believed to maintain the fixed positions of individual (...) chromosomes in interphase nuclei. (shrink)