In this study, Qāḍī Abd al-Jābbār’s views on knowing Allah (ma‘rifatullah) and following issues have been analysed. In this context, either the divine message has reached to a person or not, it is examined whether ma‘rifatullah is obligatory (wajib) upon him. Subsequently, it is discussed whether this obligation is ensured by reasoning (‘aql) or revelation (naql). Furthermore, while keeping in mind the role of intellect (nazar) and argumentation (istidlāl), we have established and evaluated religious state and source of nazar and (...) istidlāl. Also, we discussed to what extend God can be the subject of knowledge and from which aspects He can be known. Besides, we discussed whether ma‘rifatullah is an obligation and if not what its justification is. In addition, we examined whether imitative knowledge (taqlīd) is possible in the case of ma‘rifatullah or not and whether it’s sufficient to know God just by taqlīd without the reasoning at all. Finally, Qāḍī Abd al-Jābbār’s opinions on the religious situation of people to whom the divine revelation did not reach at all and so they lack of knowledge on God. (shrink)

_Freiheit nach Kant_ analyzes Kant’s conception of freedom from a historical and systematic point of view. It considers its position in the history of philosophy, its impact on German Idealism, and finally discusses the systematic relevance of Kant’s theory.

In this paper, I first seek a relatively plausible formulation of the safety principle. To this end, I refute a recent form of safety by Duncan Pritchard and then defend another weaker form of safe...

Aristotle has interpreted research done by empirical methods using metaphysical concepts extensively. According to some authors, his metaphysically intoned philosophy of biology is compatible with the modern theory of evolution and with some of the essential topics of ecological ethics. We will try to show how the interpretation of the substantial whole, under the aspect of the notion of potentiality, is Aristotle’s contribution to the debates of eco-ethical holism. Furthermore, we will show how Hans Jonas also finds the possibility of (...) valuing the individual organic substance in Aristotle’s works, which are not only representatives of the human species. Hans Jonas pleads for a revision of the modern theory of evolution, which, combined with some of Aristotle’s metaphysical elements, could avoid the reductionism to which it was exposed after Descartes. (shrink)

These notes discuss formalizing contexts as first class objects. The basic relationships are: ist(c,p) meaning that the proposition p is true in the context c, and value(c,p) designating the value of the term e in the context c Besides these, there are lifting formulas that relate the propositions and terms in subcontexts to possibly more general propositions and terms in the outer context. Subcontextx are often specialised with regard to time, place and terminology. Introducing contexts as formal objects will permit (...) axiomatizations in limited contexts to be expanded to transcend the original limitations. This seems necessary to provide AI programs using logic with certain capabilities that human fact representation and human reasoning possess. Fully implementing transcendence seems to require further extensions to mathematical logic, ie. beyond the nonmonotonic inference methods first invented in AI and now studied as a new domain of logic. (shrink)

Neuroscience is one of the most propulsive of all sciences and very often, directly or not, it tries to answer the question: What is man? However, neuroscientific research does not acknowledge the concept of man as a unity of body and soul. The modern scientific research paradigm therefore rests on physicalism, while theologians are turning towards non-reductive physicalism. In this paper, we will highlight a few key points of the theory of philosopher and theologian Nancey Murphy, which is based on (...) the deconstruction of Aquinas's thought about the human soul and its reduction to the physical. We aim to show that she neglected the full scope of Aquinas teachings. In the second part of this paper, for the scientific paradigm of humans we shall propose new-old hylomorphism, and try to complement certain points of such a system with modern neuroscientific views. The aim of this work is to offer advice for the interdisciplinary cooperation between neuroscience, philosophy and theology alongside the guidelines of Aristotelian-Thomistic hylomorphism. (shrink)

The two-visual-systems hypothesis proposed by Goodale and Milner is a radical one. If it were to be true, then our common sense such as we are acting on what we are perceiving should be completely abandoned. In this paper, I argue that the hypothesis over-generalizes what happens in simple tasks to what happens in complex tasks. By contrast, I demonstrate that what happens in complex tasks is compatible with our common sense. In a word, though what we are acting on (...) may come apart from what we are perceiving in some cases, that is not the whole story. (shrink)

According to the sensitivity account of knowledge, S knows that p only if S's belief in p is sensitive in the sense that S would not believe that p if p were false. It is widely accepted that the sensitivity condition should be relativized to belief-formation methods to avoid putative counterexamples. A remaining issue for the account is how belief-formation methods should be individuated. In this paper, I argue that while a coarse-grained individuation is still susceptible to counterexamples, a fine-grained (...) individuation makes the target belief trivially insensitive. Therefore, there is no principled way of individuating belief-formation methods that helps the sensitivity account to accommodate different cases. (shrink)

Di yi juan. Si wei xue, yuan li lun he zhe xue juan -- Di er juan. Mei xue juan -- Di san juan. Fu hao fen xi he yu yan fen xi juan -- Di si juan. Wen hua xue yu dao de zhe xue juan -- Di wu juan. Shi wen juan.

This article introduces the problem of inexistence to studies in genre and gender, providing a hermeneutic point of reference for literary history and trans theory. It seeks to negotiate the affinities and disaffinities between queer and trans by foregrounding the latter’s struggle for existence against the former’s mobilization of a rhetoric of negative relationality, while at the same time preserving the bonds of intimacy across and beyond the coalition of LGBTQIA+. Such queer intimacy is read in relation to a haptic (...) technology of queer close reading, enabling differentially sexed bodies to imaginatively inhabit each other. I begin by considering how Djuna Barnes’s close, haptic readings of Henry James and Marcel Proust enact a reversal of sex, but I consider how the affective evidence of these trans moments do not amount to trans existence but raise the ethical necessity of holding open the difference between the ephemeral trans experiences within cis existence and the real struggle for trans existence of trans subjects today. Such a divide, however, is simultaneously held against the moments of intimacy that are capable of being produced across cis and trans subjects through such close reading and cross-inhabitation of bodies. To read trans literary history before trans, I thus propose the notion of trans inexistence through an interpretation of Jacques Maritain’s figure of the “angel” and Hegel’s “beautiful soul.” By situating Barnes’s and Jean Genet’s own characterizations of their transfeminine characters in terms of the angel in a post-Romantic, Catholic context, I interpret the trans angel as a figure of inexistence, tied to a minimal transcendence from the terms of history and materiality, including the sexed body. Finally, I consider how Genet’s phenomenology of proprioception draws together the problems of queer intimacy, haptic reading, and trans inexistence. In analyzing how Genet and his characters cross-inhabit each other’s bodies via proprioceptive mimicry, I unfold both the vast potential and the limits of the intimacies constructed across cis male and transfeminine lives and the accompanying role played by the literary mode of romance. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore an intriguing view of definable numbers proposed by a Cambridge mathematician Ernest Hobson, and his solution to the paradoxes of definability. Reflecting on König’s paradox and Richard’s paradox, Hobson argues that an unacceptable consequence of the paradoxes of definability is that there are numbers that are inherently incapable of finite definition. Contrast to other interpreters, Hobson analyses the problem of the paradoxes of definability lies in a dichotomy between finitely definable numbers and not finitely definable (...) numbers. To bypass this predicament, Hobson proposes a language dependent analysis of definable numbers, where the diagonal argument is employed as a means to generate more and more definable numbers. This paper examines Hobson’s work in its historical context, and articulates his argument in detail. It concludes with a remark on Hobson’s analysis of definability and Alan Turing’s analysis of computability. (shrink)

This paper presents a historical-philosophical reconstruction of Leibniz’s theory of education. In the introduction, I point out the exegetical problems involved in locating Leibniz’s “philosophy of education” within the broader corpus of his works and in uncovering an appropriate theoretical framework within which it is possible to contextualise and reconstruct Leibniz’s thought on education. It is then shown that this framework is provided by Leibniz’s practical philosophy, i.e. his ideas about the optimal state and the common good. I analyse the (...) key theses of Leibniz’s ethics and political philosophy to uncover the background of the idea of the respublica optima and explain how education, in Leibniz’s view, should enable the perfection of the individual and society and contribute to the realisation of the common good. Finally, it is argued that in his educational project Leibniz articulated an idea of the Enlightenment that is far more progressive than the educational ideas of the philosophers we usually associate with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. (shrink)

U ovom radu autor izlaze Hajdegerovo shvatanje sustine tehnike kao opasnosti i mogucnost umetnosti kao ono-spasonosnog. U tom smislu autor smatra da Hajdeger promislja sustinu tehnike kao i umetnosti polazeci od povesne konstelacije istine bivstvovanja ili udesa razotkrivanja. Ovo povesno promisljanje podrzano je Hajdegerovim etimoloskim analizama pojmova poiesis i techne.

U ovom clanku se razmatra Gadamerovo shvatanje vaznih hermeneutickih pojmova predrasude, autoriteta i tradicije. Izvodjenje razumevanja, u kojem su predrasude neizbezne, odredjeno je kao proces njihovog neprekidnog korigovanja. Pozitivno vrednovanje pojmovnog para autoriteta i tradicije karakteristican je motiv filozofske hermeneutike, za koju autoritet ne poseduje negativni prizvuk, vec je zasnovan na slobodnom i racionalnom prihvatanju. Povezanost razumevanja sa tradicijom je dinamicni odnos, u kojem ni tradicija ni subjekat razumevanja ne ostaju nepromenjeni. Odatle se izvode dve implikacije: da se smisao nekog (...) teksta ne moze iscrpsti i da je njegovo razumevanje beskonacan proces; i da suspenzija predrasuda uspeva tek tamo gde ih takoreci 'filtrira' tradicija. Autor istice napetost u Gadamerovom shvatanju hermeneuticke produktivnosti tradicije i vremenskog odstojanja kao instance koja doprinosi razumevanju. (shrink)

Bilješke koje je Martin Heidegger unosio u takozvane »crne bilježnice« potakle su, netom nakon objavljivanja, intenzivne diskusije, osobito oko pitanja antisemitizma i nacionalsocijalizma. Je li se Heideggerova osobna naklonost ka ovim ideologijama odrazila i na njegovo filozofsko djelo? U ovom ogledu razmatra se jedna, s ovim pitanjima povezana, važna tema u Crnim bilježnicama – tema sveučilišta. Ona postaje frekventnija u tri navrata, obilježena značajnim događajima u Heideggerovoj profesionalnoj biografiji: preuzimanjem funkcije rektora sveučilišta u Freiburgu, napuštanjem te funkcije te isključenjem iz (...) nastave u sklopu poratne denacifikacije Njemačke. Pokazuje se da shvaćanje sveučilišta u Crnim bilježnicama odgovara idejama predočenim u Heideggerovu rektorskom govoru, kao i da to shvaćanje nije jednako nacionalsocijalističkom, već izražava filozofovo »narodnjačko« misaono usmjerenje. Iako posjeduje neke elemente vokabulara koji su bili prisutni u nacističkoj propagandi, Heidegger svoje stavove o stvarnosti i budućnosti sveučilišta integrira s drugim svojim idejama – kritikom svođenja znanja na tehničke aspekte, kritikom izoliranja znanosti u samostalna područja i uopće kritikom zapadnjačkog mišljenja. The notes that Martin Heidegger made in the so-called Black Notebooks stimulated, immediately after publication, intense discussions, especially on the issue of anti-Semitism and National Socialism. Does Heidegger’s personal fondness for these ideologies reflect on his philosophical work? In this essay, one important topic related to these issues in Black Notebooks is discussed – the topic of university. It became more frequent on three occasions, marked by significant events in Heidegger’s professional biography: taking over as rector of the University of Freiburg, leaving that position, and exclusion from teaching as part of the postwar denazification of Germany. It turns out that the understanding of the university in the Black Notebooks corresponds to the ideas presented in Heidegger’s rector’s speech, and that this understanding is not equally National Socialist, but expresses the philosopher’s “populist” thinking. Although he possesses some elements of vocabulary that were present in Nazi propaganda, Heidegger integrates his views on the reality and future of the university with his other ideas – a critique of reducing knowledge to technical aspects, a critique of isolating science into independent fields, and a critique of Western thought. (shrink)

The notes that Martin Heidegger made in the so-called Black Notebooks stimulated, immediately after publication, intense discussions, especially on the issue of anti-Semitism and National Socialism. Does Heidegger’s personal fondness for these ideologies reflect on his philosophical work? In this essay, one important topic related to these issues in Black Notebooks is discussed – the topic of university. It became more frequent on three occasions, marked by significant events in Heidegger’s professional biography: taking over as rector of the University of (...) Freiburg, leaving that position, and exclusion from teaching as part of the postwar denazification of Germany. It turns out that the understanding of the university in the Black Notebooks corresponds to the ideas presented in Heidegger’s rector’s speech, and that this understanding is not equally National Socialist, but expresses the philosopher’s “populist” thinking. Although he possesses some elements of vocabulary that were present in Nazi propaganda, Heidegger integrates his views on the reality and future of the university with his other ideas – a critique of reducing knowledge to technical aspects, a critique of isolating science into independent fields, and a critique of Western thought. (shrink)

People’s affective experiences can be influenced by multiple informational inputs. It remains unclear however how this occurs? In this paper, we investigate the construction of affective experience...

This article is based on the author's extensive research on the missionaries to Tibet from the Disciples of Christ USA, and discusses various missionary efforts to transmit scientific and practical knowledge such as medicine, building, and agriculture in Eastern Tibet from 1904–1919. It shows that American missionaries played a prominent and distinctive role in the dissemination of scientific and practical knowledge as a result of their hard work and wisdom. In this sense, they made an important contribution to the development (...) of Tibetan society and the modernization movement in early twentieth-century Eastern Tibet. (shrink)