This text tries to shed some light on the origin of the idea of moral enhancement, on its epistemic and moral foundations. This requires a comparative analysis of similar ideas present in various trends of bioethics today - the analysis of the very roots of Poter?s global bioethics, the idea of moral enhancement, as well as the break between advocates of moral enhancement and John Harris, their transhumanist colleague, with whom they used to share the same perspective. In this article (...) we identify some basic starting points, similarities and differences between global bioethics and moral enhancement, and draw lines of demarcation between transhumanism and moral enhancement. (shrink)

The social and institutional background of this research can be summarized as the relation between public and governmental policies on the one hand, and the experience of patients and IVF experts on the other. Namely, one third of all pregnancies achieved in state-funded in vitro fertilizations obscure some ethical and health issues, especially among patients who abandon the state-funded IVF programme in Serbia. The goal of the current research is to identify, describe and understand ethical and social issues that parents (...) encounter in attempts to fulfil their idea of a sovereign life through IVF. The method comprised a tri-level analysis based on semi-structured interviews with participants who exhibit personal experiences of basic ethical principles and social and health needs within IVF. The results obtained indicate that all three explored levels of patients' experience build a picture of Assisted Reproductive Technology as a means of a sovereign or good life. However, the cultural image of the fulfilment of expected parental social roles resulted in a denial of autonomy and led to self-abnegation through silent acceptance of unethical practices. There is an overlap of the margins of secular ideas and roles on the one hand, and religiosity on the other, making such consent socially acceptable and more easily explainable. Finally, the conclusion reached is that apparently a decrease in sovereignty of parental decisions causes a loss of trust in state clinics and medical procedures, reduces solidarity and establishes norms and patterns of social injustice and inequality. (shrink)

Whatever we speak about enhancement as the, just, one array of the wide range of the bioethical fields, or as the kind of ideological and theoretical field, it is necessary to emphasize relevant ideological and theoretical distinctions between different approaches. Trying to give some fundamental shape to debate among them, as well within themselves, I specified three possible streams with more or less arbitrary boundaries. First one is transhumanistic stream , whose representatives openly promote the practice of genetic, prosthetic and (...) cognitive enhancement of human kind - transition from human to a post human society; bioconservative, whose representatives perceive a threat in the violation of human dignity, meddling in “God’s business” ( playing God ), and in changes to the nature of human beings; representatives of the “middle standpoint” consider that danger lies within the dialectic relation of “capitalism and medicine.” I present the tree ideological standpoints trying to building consistency through different ethical arguments. Discussing the relevant theoretical/ideological distinction between standpoints and their claims, I will argue that ideological distinction among standpoints is less relevant than contingency within their arguments. Such mutual contingence creates some similarity regarding epistemological and social issues. (shrink)

This text tries to shed some light on the origin of the idea of moral enhancement, on its epistemic and moral foundations. This requires a comparative analysis of similar ideas present in various trends of bioethics today - the analysis of the very roots of Poter?s global bioethics, the idea of moral enhancement, as well as the break between advocates of moral enhancement and John Harris, their transhumanist colleague, with whom they used to share the same perspective. In this article (...) we identify some basic starting points, similarities and differences between global bioethics and moral enhancement, and draw lines of demarcation between transhumanism and moral enhancement. (shrink)

This book engages in a critical discussion on how to respect and promote patients’ autonomy in difficult cases such as palliative care and end-of-life decisions. These cases pose specific epistemic, normative, and practical problems, and the book elucidates the connection between the practical implications of the theoretical debate on respecting autonomy, on the one hand, and specific questions and challenges that arise in medical practice, on the other hand. Given that the idea of personal autonomy includes the notion of authenticity (...) as one of its core components, the book explicitly includes discussions on underlying theories of the self. In doing so, it brings together original contributions and novel insights for “applied” scenarios based on interdisciplinary collaboration between German and Serbian scholars from philosophy, sociology, and law. It is of benefit to anyone cherishing autonomy in medical ethics and medical practice. (shrink)

Teoretichni proektorii -- Situat︠s︡ionni proektorii -- Ontologicheski proektorii.

This essay explores the theory of the plastic object as it was developed by the Peruvian art critic Mirko Lauer in the 1970s and 1980s, in dialogue with other ideas related to the Teoría Social del Arte (Social Theory of Art) developed in Latin America. Focusing on the Peruvian cultural debate, the author reconstructs Lauer’s trajectory and emphasises his critique of ‘Marxist aesthetics’, and explores them as conceptual tools for discussing the horizon of contemporary art today.

In recent decades, a number of authors have relied on the multiple realizability argument to reject methodological individualism. In this article, I argue that this strategy results in serious difficulties and makes it impossible to identify social entities and phenomena.

Introduction -- Plato -- Aristotle -- The rise of modernity -- Immanuel Kant -- Romanticism and historicism -- Phenomenology and hermeneutics -- Philosophes and philosophers -- Analytic philosophy -- Conclusion.

The work of the Paduan Aristotelian philosopher Iacopo Zabarella (1533–1589) has attracted the attention of historians of philosophy mainly for his contributions to logic, scientific methodology and because of his possible influence on Galileo. At the same time, Zabarella's views on Aristotelian psychology have been little studied so far; even those historians of Renaissance philosophy who have discussed them, have based their analysis mainly on the psychological essays included in Zabarella's De rebus naturalibus , but have avoided Zabarella's commentary on (...) Aristotle's De anima . This has led to an inaccurate, but widespread, understanding of Zabarella's views. The intention of this article is to provide a systematic analysis of Zabarella's arguments about the (im)mortality of the soul in the context of Aristotelian psychology. Zabarella's view that the soul is mortal according to Aristotle is remarkable for his time, while his elaboration of this position is far more comprehensive than that of Pietro Pomponazzi, the other significant Renaissance thinker who shared the same view. (shrink)

Philosophy of history is currently dominated by postmodernist anti-realists who claim that historiography can never provide true accounts of the past. The Poverty of Anti-realism exposes the faulty premises and reasoning behind such assertions and shows that anti-realism has political implications unforeseen and unwanted by its adherents.

The debate between the individualist and the holist understanding of social items (social entities, events, institutions, phenomena and so on) has a long history and potentially a wide range of political implications. Political positions and political assumptions often play a significant role in the debate and it is not rare that participants in the discussion seek to associate the positions they oppose with unpopular political views, instead of providing actual theoretical arguments. The tendency to associate individualist positions in the social (...) sciences with political libertarianism and neo-liberal economic agendas is particularly common. At the same time, disciplinary politics and concerns about the integrity of the social sciences (especially in the form of fears from their reducibility to psychology) also play an important role in the debate. In this paper I analyze such political assumptions that often motivate, or are stated to motivate, the debate. (shrink)

Art and ObjectsHARMANGRAHAM polity. 2020. pp. 204. £16.54.

The paper analyses possible contributions of philosophy and philosophers to architecture and architects’ work. During the twentieth century, a number of dominant positions in philosophy, such as the view that all thinking is verbal or that conceptual thinking determines the contents of perception, significantly limited the ground for productive intellectual interaction between architects and philosophers. With the demise of such positions in recent decades, one can hope that philosophy and philosophers could make genuine contributions to architectural theory.

The paper presents a realist perspective on the recent exchange in the Journal of the Philosophy of History between Adrian Currie and Daniel Swaim on the one side and Paul Roth and Fons Dewulf on the other. The first part presents a critique of Currie and Swaim’s view that the past is not determinate and can be changed. The second part states a series of arguments against Roth’s view that events exist only under description. The third part discusses the ontological (...) problems that Roth’s irrealism about the past fails to address. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMany long‐standing debates about anachronistic concept‐attributions derive from an essentialist understanding of concepts that is often difficult to sustain for metaphysical or epistemological reasons. The intentionalist alternative to essentialism elaborated in this article successfully clarifies and avoids many standard problems with anachronism.

The question posed by this text is: can we use Levinasian ethics in the field of literary studies? In order to provide the answer, Levinas?s attitude toward art will need to be analyzed. His work contains numerous scattered remarks about literature and other arts, but the most explicit statement on the relationship between art and ethics can be found in his essay?Reality and Its Shadow?. Since Levinas?s view on art in this essay is predominantly negative, it poses a significant problem (...) for the application of his theory in the field of literary studies. In order to overcome this difficulty, I use Blanchot?s reworking of Levinasian ethics, and open the possibility of a different relation between literature and ethics than the one originally suggested by Levinas. (shrink)

This paper deals with the latent religious aspects of the tremendous impact that the Inter­net manifests in every single segment of contemporary culture. Through comparative research of the ways primordial, archetypal cognitive matrices migrated throughout different modalities of our thinking and behavior in the 20th and 21st centuries, the following research argues that deep religious longings might have been hidden (ignored, even abused) in the various ways the planetary informational network is exploited in our times. As a consequence, an alarming (...) need for philosophical and theological rethinking and re-inspiring of this prodigious, unprecedented and omnipresent social prosthesis is recognized. (shrink)

The debate between individualism and holism in the philosophy of history pertains to the nature of the entities relied on in historical explanations. The question is whether explanations of historical items require the assumption that the collective historical entities used in these explanations are conceived of as irreducible to the actions, thoughts, and beliefs of individual human beings. In this paper I analyze two methodological problems that holist explanations face in the writing of intellectual history. The first problem derives from (...) the fact that holist explanations in intellectual history have to rely on the claim that certain beliefs were inconceivable to some individuals because they were members of specific collectives, whereas it is unclear how historical research can justify such claims when made from the holist position. The second problem pertains to the difficulties the holist position faces when it has to account for the novel properties of artifacts studied by intellectual history. (shrink)

The dominant view of twentieth century analytic philosophy has been that all thinking is always in a language; that languages are vehicles of thought. In recent decades, however, the opposite view, that languages merely serve to express language-­‐independent thought-­‐contents or propositions, has been more widely accepted. The debate has a direct equivalent in the philosophy of history: when historians report the beliefs of historical figures, do they report the sentences or propositions that these historical figures believed to be true or (...) false? In this paper I argue in favor of the latter, intentionalist, view. My arguments mostly center on the problems with translations that are likely to arise when a historian reports the beliefs of historical figures who expressed them in languages other than the one in which the historian is writing. In discussing these problems the paper presents an application of John Searle’s theory of intentionality on the philosophy of history. The debate between the view that all thinking is verbal and always in a language and the view that human beings think independently of any language has had an extensive history in the philosophy of language for the past hundred years. It also has numerous implications for the philosophy of history, where the problem can be stated in general terms as the question of whether a historian, when reporting the beliefs of historical figures, reports the thought-­‐contents or the sentences that these people believed to be true or false. Among English-­‐speaking historians of philosophy, the latter view was promoted by Arthur Danto, the former by Quentin Skinner and Mark Bevir. Both positions are reflected in specific problems of history-­‐writing, such as, for instance, the question whether and how a historian can report the beliefs of historical figures who articulated them in languages different from the language in which the historian is writing. Both positions also fundamentally rely on the assumption that it is possible and legitimate to provide translations of sentences from one language to another when reporting the beliefs of historical figures; but, as we shall see, they are not on equal footing when it comes to explaining what counts as a legitimate translation. This paper explores the implications that these two views on the role of language in human thinking have for the philosophy of history. It will show that the view that all human thinking is verbal is not compatible with some fundamental and standard practices of history-­‐writing. Thus, the paper can be seen as a contribution to the debate about intentionalism in history-­‐writing. It argues in favor of the intentionalist approach by introducing new arguments derived from the philosophy of language, while at the same time proposing a formulation of the intentionalist position that relies on John Searle’s philosophical elaboration on the concept of intentionality. (shrink)

This book examines the wide-ranging implications for historical research of the view that everything is physical and that no immaterial entities, forces, or phenomena exist. It presents the consequences of materialism for our understanding of the historical past, including the rejection of postmodernist perspectives on history.

In his latest book Frank Ankersmit develops a comprehensive philosophical perspective on the problem of the truth and reference of historical representations. The approach and the wider perspective of the book largely belong to what could be called the postmodernist paradigm, in spite of some recent attempts to interpret Ankersmit's recent work differently. Since his 1983 Narrative Logic Ankersmit has propounded the view that individual statements that constitute historical representations may have reference, but that representations themselves do not. His most (...) recent book remains faithful to this position and elaborates it further. This essay examines Ankersmit's arguments as well as the assumptions and implications of this view. (shrink)