This paper analyses the formation of power of the Christian regime of truth in the context of Foucault’s concept of strategic formations. The main emphasis is on the sexual formation of power in three focal points of its agency. The first focal point is formed around the conflict between the Old Testament truth regime and the Canaan cult of fertility. The second focal point is formed around the influence of ancient philosophical thought, primarily through the philosophy of stoicism, which sees (...) abstinence from the sexual act as an opening to divine inspiration and around medical knowledge of antiquity. The third focal point is formed around control mechanisms of the Christian regime of truth through classification, regulation, prohibition, tariffing offences and corrections of doctrine. The main purpose of the formation of power is the vertical structuring of the regime of truth in its anthropomorphic and androcentric immanence. (shrink)

The text offers a reappraisal of Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History from the perspective of global politics today and its similarities with the socio-economic and political situation in Europe and the Americas during the 1920s and 30s; more specifically, the impact of crises on the erosion of trust in liberal representative democracy and the concomitant rise of mostly rightwing populist movements and their strongmen leaders, aided to a significant degree by the media, ‘old’ and ‘new’ alike. The (...) purpose of the text is to draw lessons from Benjamin’s vision of materialist historiography for our current political predicament. (shrink)

In paper [5] it was shown that a great part of model theory of logic with the generalized quantifier Q x = there exist uncountably many x is reducible to the model theory of first order logic with an extra binary relation symbol. In this paper we consider when the quantifier Q x can be syntactically defined in a first order theory T. That problem was raised by Kosta Doen when he asked if the quantifier Q x can be eliminated (...) in Peano arithmetic. We answer that question fully in this paper. (shrink)

Empirical advances have been made in understanding how human language, in its combinatorial complexity and unbounded expressivity, may have evolved from the communication systems present in our evolutionary ancestors. However, a number of cognitive processes and neurobiological mechanisms that support language may not have evolved specifically for communication, but rather from abilities that support perception and cognition more generally. We review recent evidence from comparative behavioural and neurobiological studies on structured sequence learning in human and nonhuman primates. These studies support (...) the notion that certain sequence learning abilities are evolutionarily conserved and engage corresponding inferior frontal brain regions across the species, regions also involved in processing language in humans. Alongside the cross-species similarities is evidence for human specialisations, illuminating the likely evolutionary pathways towards language in modern humans. We argue that cognitive abilities that were in place for animals to learn combinatorial relationships in the sensory world were available and co-opted for language in humans. (shrink)

This paper studies the epistemic failures to reach understanding in relation to scientific explanations. We make a distinction between genuine understanding and its negative phenomena—lack of understanding and misunderstanding. We define explanatory understanding as inclusive as possible, as the epistemic success that depends on abilities, skills, and correct explanations. This success, we add, is often supplemented by specific positive phenomenology which plays a part in forming epistemic inclinations—tendencies to receive an insight from familiar types of explanations. We define lack of (...) understanding as the epistemic failure that results from a lack of an explanation or from an incorrect one. This can occur due to insufficient abilities and skills, or to fallacious explanatory information. Finally, we characterize misunderstanding by cases where one’s epistemic inclinations do not align with an otherwise correct explanation. We suggest that it leads to potential debates about the explanatory power of different explanatory strategies. We further illustrate this idea with a short meta-philosophical study on the current debates about distinctively mathematical explanations. (shrink)

Human language is a salient example of a neurocognitive system that is specialized to process complex dependencies between sensory events distributed in time, yet how this system evolved and specialized remains unclear. Artificial Grammar Learning (AGL) studies have generated a wealth of insights into how human adults and infants process different types of sequencing dependencies of varying complexity. The AGL paradigm has also been adopted to examine the sequence processing abilities of nonhuman animals. We critically evaluate this growing literature in (...) species ranging from mammals (primates and rats) to birds (pigeons, songbirds, and parrots) considering also cross‐species comparisons. The findings are contrasted with seminal studies in human infants that motivated the work in nonhuman animals. This synopsis identifies advances in knowledge and where uncertainty remains regarding the various strategies that nonhuman animals can adopt for processing sequencing dependencies. The paucity of evidence in the few species studied to date and the need for follow‐up experiments indicate that we do not yet understand the limits of animal sequence processing capacities and thereby the evolutionary pattern. This vibrant, yet still budding, field of research carries substantial promise for advancing knowledge on animal abilities, cognitive substrates, and language evolution. (shrink)

The main themes and aims of this book are understanding aesthetics, contemporary art and the end of the avant-garde not from the traditional viewpoint of the metaphysics of the beautiful and the sublime but rather thru close connection to the techno-genesis of virtual worlds. This book tackles problems in contemporary art theory such as the body in space and time of digital technologies, along with other issues in visual studies and image science. Further intentions exhibit the fundamental reasons for the (...) disappearance of the picture in the era of virtual reality starting from the notion of contemporary art as realized iconoclasm; art has no world for its "image". The author argues that the iconoclasm of contemporary art has severe consequences. This text appeals to philosophers of art and those interested in contemporary art theory. (shrink)

The paper establishes a correlation between nihilism and history from the premise of the end of metaphysics in the age of the technosphere. In presenting the genealogy of the postmodern turn in contemporary philosophical thinking, the author critically deals with Vattimo’s thesis that Heidegger’s notion of overcoming metaphysics is the key to understanding postmodernity. Despite its close proximity to Nietzsche and Heidegger, it is undeniable that the main notion must be derived from late Wittgenstein’s thinking, as Lyotard did in his (...) analysis of the “postmodern condition”. It is a notion of “language games” that introduces into consideration the relationship between the pragmatics of knowledge, the performativity of language and the event horizon. In this way, it will be shown that postmodernity cannot be any “new” epoch but rather a re-actualization of the condition determined by the rule of technoscience, cybernetics and plural patterns of culture in post-industrial society. Based on his previous analyses of this problem, collected in the books The Postmodern Game of the World, Identity Politics, The Posthuman Condition, and Technosphere I–V, the author believes that only extensive analysis and interpretation of Lyotard’s premises allows one to reach the right philosophical path to the answer to the question of the essence of nihilism in the face of Being, and the technosphere as computation, planning, and construction of the inhuman. In contemporary times, what is left of postmodernity is neither “telling stories” about the stylistic tendencies of the modern and neomodern, the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde, nor, moreso, the conflict of the universality and particularity of society and culture. All that remains is the feature of the unwavering “fate” of this nihilism of the technosphere: from the postmodern condition to the posthuman condition, thought is confronted with the challenge of an event that goes beyond anything seen in the history of Western metaphysics. When the image precedes the language and the writing to speaking, we find ourselves in a closed circle of turns and reversals of metaphysics. It is time to step out of this “vicious circle” in which the living becomes non-living, the Being becomes the information, the system of objects replaces society, and the human-too-human with inhuman as such. (shrink)

In Deleuzeʼs studies on film, it is striking that the dismantled “essence” of metaphysics as an ontology is synthetically linked with a new approach not only to the movement of the concept, speaking in Hegelʼs language but also to the thinking as an event. That is even more true for the understanding of that which lasts in time and thus has the character of the thought-image. As the author points out in this article, Deleuze establishes this by turning the brain (...) into a screen, and the film from the sphere of the so-called reality becomes the virtual code of the world as an image. The difference between concept and image eliminates the difference between the image no longer preceding the term and the term no longer preceding the image. How crucial this turn will be to Deleuzeʼs notion of the cinema can be seen in the derivation of the concept of an event. The image and term correspond to the singularity of the event. The problem with comprehending Deleuzeʼs “images-ontology” shows that film cannot be reduced to the autonomous production of a cinematic way of thinking unless we have previously clarified what movement is and how it is created. In this paradigmatic case, a cinema cannot be viewed simply as a “visual code” of contemporary art. Its “essence” is revealed in that it enables the image-movement and image-time to synthetically realize the possibilities of the technosphere as computation, planning and construction. Eventually, the cinematic thinking advocated by Deleuze becomes a question of the possibility of film as a meta-film reaching a new level of philosophical consideration of what becomes and emerges with a new set of relations between Being and event. (shrink)

The author analyzes the politics of responsive interculturalism in Bernhard Waldenfels? thought, starting from the assumption that after Husserl?s phenomenology only two fundamental concepts - body and the Other - should be considered. In contemporary German?post-phenomenology? the first concept was systematically articulated by Hermann Schmitz, while the latter theme has been advanced in Waldenfels? works as the phenomenology of the alien, up until the end of Western metaphysics. In the two parts of the discussion, the author draws on his fundamental (...) hypothesis about aporias and paradoxes of interculturalism, since responsiveness and xenology cannot reach the positive definition of the concept of culture in the era of global entropy. The analysis, therefore, deals with the questions: what is the responsiveness of man in relation to the Other, including the different ways of his presence in the world; and whether the Other as alien and uncanny calls into question the basic assumption of phenomenology as such - the intentionality of consciousness? nema. (shrink)

This paper pursues two aims. First, to show that the block universe view, regarding the universe as a timelessly existing four-dimensional world, is the only one that is consistent with special relativity. Second, to argue that special relativity alone can resolve the debate on whether the world is three-dimensional or four-dimensional. The argument advanced in the paper is that if the world were three-dimensional the kinematic consequences of special relativity and more importantly the experiments confirming them would be impossible.

There are several important criticisms against the unificationist model of scientific explanation: Unification is a broad and heterogeneous notion and it is hard to see how a model of explanation based exclusively on unification can make a distinction between genuine explanatory unification from cases of ordering or classification. Unification alone cannot solve the asymmetry and irrelevance problems. Unification and explanation pull in different directions and should be decoupled, because for good scientific explanation extra ad explanandum information is often required. I (...) am presenting a possible solution to those problems, by focusing on an often overlooked but important element of how theoretic unification is achieved—the conceptual frameworks of theories. The core conceptual assumptions behind theories are decisive for discriminating between explanatory and non-explanatory unification. The conceptual framework is also flexible enough to balance the tension between informativeness and maximum systematization in constructing explanatory inferences. A short case study of orthogenetic and Darwinian explanations in paleontology is presented as an illustration of how my addition to the unificationist model is applicable to a historical debate between rival explanations. (shrink)

An important epistemological lesson can be learned from the impossibility to determine the one-way velocity of light and the immediate implication that simultaneity is conventional. The vicious circle -- to determine whether two distant events are simultaneous we need to know the one-way velocity of light between them, but to determine the one-way velocity of light we need to know that the two events are simultaneous -- is an indication of the need for a profound change of our view on (...) reality. (shrink)

This volume is dedicated to the centennial anniversary of Minkowski's discovery of spacetime.

The present paper pursues two aims. First to show that the experiment proposed by Stolakis [1986] does not lead to absolute synchronization in a single frame of reference and therefore also to the measurement of one-way velocity of light. Second, by consecutively considering the problems of the conventionality of simultaneity and of existence to show that the simultaneity of distant events can be a matter of convention only in a four-dimensional world. * I am grateful to the anonymous referees for (...) their useful suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show that the Lorentz contraction of a rod is possible only if the rod’s world path is a real four-dimensional object. This result demonstrates that special relativity does require reality at the microscopic level to be a four-dimensional world represented by Minkowski spacetime.

As there have still been attempts to regard gravity, a 100 years after Einstein's general relativity, not as a manifestation of the non-Euclidean geometry of spacetime, but as a physical field, it is high time to face the ultimate judge -- the experimental evidence -- to settle this issue once and for all. Two rulings of the ultimate judge are reminded -- the experimental fact that falling particles do not resist their fall rules out the option that gravity may be (...) a force, and the experiments that confirmed the relativistic effects are impossible in a three-dimensional world, which also implies that gravity is indeed manifestation of the geometry of the real spacetime. It is also stressed that not only are attempts to impose a kind of scientific democracy in physics doomed to failure, but such attempts might, in the end, hamper the advancement of fundamental physics. (shrink)

Should physicists deal with the question of the reality of Minkowski space (or any relativistic spacetime)? It is argued that they should since this is a question about the dimensionality of the world at the macroscopic level and it is physics that should answer it.

The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the analysis of the kinematical effects of special relativity holds the key to answering the question of the dimensionality of the world. It is shown that these effects and the experiments which confirmed them would be impossible if the world were three-dimensional. Section 2 shows that relativity of simultaneity, conventionality of simultaneity, and the existence of accelerated observers in special relativity would be impossible if the world were three-dimensional. Section 3 (...) deals with the dimensionality of physical objects and demonstrates that the relativistic length contraction and the twin paradox would be impossible if the physical bodies involved in these relativistic effects were three-dimensional objects. (shrink)

Dans cet article, je présente une approche sémantique de l’analyse de la fonction de la métaphore du paysage dans la biologie de l’évolution. Le concept de paysage adaptatif a suscité une attention considérable dans la philosophie de la biologie récente. La plupart des auteurs ont considéré ce concept de l’une des deux manières suivantes: en tant qu’outil heuristique, comme partie intrinsèque de modèles mathématiques robustes, ou comme un ensemble définissable d’analogies sur lesquelles les modèles sont basés et testés. Chacune de (...) ces visions conduit à la conclusion que la valeur de la métaphore du paysage dépend seulement du succès des modèles que sous-tend la métaphore, en vue de représenter adéquatement la dynamique de l’évolution. J’essaie de montrer que cette conclusion, ainsi que les visions qui y conduisent, ne tiennent pas compte d’épisodes importants dans l’histoire de la métaphore du langage. Ces visions proviennent plutôt de thèses générales, en philosophie des sciences, quant au rôle des métaphores dans les théories scientifiques. L’analyse sémantique que je propose met en lumière le fait que la fonction première du concept de relief adaptatif, au cours de la synthèse évolutionniste, a été de servir de cadre général d’unification conceptuelle, qui a rendu possible la conciliation de phénomènes empiriques hétérogènes. De ce point de vue, la métaphore du paysage est un outil linguistique-théorique qui ne doit pas être abandonné (et qui ne l’est de fait pas) suite à la falsification des modèles construits et interprétés au moyen de la métaphore. (shrink)

That abortion is the unjust killing of an innocent human person is the contention of the authors of this book. It does not intend to be a comprehensive defence of a pro-life position; rather, it ad...

Over a hundred years ago in his paper "Space and Time" Hermann Minkowski demonstrated the profound meaning of the relativity postulate - the experimental fact that physical phenomena are the same in all inertial reference frames implies that the Universe is an absolute four-dimensional world in which all moments of time have equal existence due to their belonging to the fourth dimension. Since then there has been no consensus on the reality of this absolute world, which we now call Minkowski (...) spacetime or simply spacetime. I will argue that facing the ultimate judge - the experimental evidence - allows us to settle this issue once and for all. (shrink)

The paper is based on the experiences of a fieldwork researcher. Two studies of everyday life are compared. In spite of the differences in theoretical frameworks and methodologies, important similarities are identified, leading to identical basic results. These similarities are to be found in the dependence of the everyday survival on political survival, of everyday life on political life, of coping on political developments. The similarity is proved by pointing to the shared broader socio-historical framework in which both studies have (...) been located, and to the uniqueness of the environment/area in which both have taken place. This leads to the final conclusion on the relation between the character of everyday life and the collective character/mentality, where the key mediator is political life and the character shaped within its domain. In a culture basically structured as a warrior culture, in the circumstances of huge civilizational changes at the global world scene, the local political mentality assumes specific features, somewhat modified in comparison with the traditional ethos. These features in turn directly shape the everyday, particularly of ordinary people, beyond the centers of power and global decision-making. U tekstu se iznosi iskustvo jednog terenskog istrazivaca/intervjuera. Uporedjuju se dva istrazivanja svakodnevnog zivota. Uprkos razlikama u teorijskim polazistima i metodskim resenjima, podvlace se slicnosti koje su dovele do istovetnosti osnovnog rezultata. Njih treba traziti u zavisnosti svakodnevice opstanka od politickog opstanka, svakodnevnog zivota od politickog zivota, prezivljavanja od politickih desavanja. Da bi se dokazala ova slicnost ukazuje se na zajednickost sireg drustveno-istorijskog okvira u koji su oba istrazivanja smestena, a preko njega, i na jedinstvenost podneblja/prostora na kome se oba odvijaju. To vodi krajnjem zakljucku o vezi karaktera svakodnevnog zivota od kolektivnog karaktera/mentaliteta, pri cemu je kljucni posrednik politicki zivot i karakter oblikovan u njegovoj sferi. U jednoj, u osnovi, ratnicki strukturisanoj kulturi, a u uslovima krupnih civilizacijskih potresa na globalnoj svetskoj sceni, politicki mentalitet u lokalnim uslovima zadobija osobene crte, donekle modifikovane u odnosu na tradicionalni etos, koje potom, neposredno oblikuju i svakodnevicu, pre svega, obicnih ljudi, izvan centara moci i globalnog odlucivanja. (shrink)