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The article investigates the relationship between Wolf and Societas Alethophilorum.
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The article investigates the relationship between Wolf and Societas Alethophilorum.
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The paper discusses Leibniz’s project for a lingua universalis undertaken in his first period, 1666- 1679, when he was enthusiastic about the possibility of creating a universal language based on the “alphabet of human thought”, which he viewed as the “most important instrument for the perfection of the human mind”. The article analyzes the main issue confronted by the young Leibniz, i.e., the creation of a list of “primitive notions”, also discussed by Descartes in his letter to Mersenne from 20th November 1629. Leibniz’s response to the issues raised by Descartes is outlined together with how he resolved them by means of the theory of so-called “blind thought” (cogitatio caeca). The article concludes with a brief account of the influence these ideas in Leibniz’s work had on the 19th century pioneers of modern logic.
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This paper discusses the epistemic status of bodily sensations—especially the sensations of pain, hunger and thirst—in the second part of Descartes’ Sixth Meditation. It is argued that this part is an integral component of Descartes overall purely epistemological project in the Meditations. Surprisingly perhaps, in contrast with his standardly taken infallible, internalist and foundationalist position, Descartes adopts a fallibilist, externalist and reliabilist position as regards the knowledge and beliefs based on bodily sensations. The argument for this conclusion is justified by an analysis of both the criterion of nature’s teachings and the concept of true errors of nature in terms of Wilfrid Sellars’ distinction between the logical space of reasons and the empirical space of causes.
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Many contemporary social epistemologists take themselves to be combatting an individualist approach to knowledge typified by Descartes. Although I agree that Descartes presents an individualist picture of scientific knowledge, he does allow some practical roles for reliance on the testimony and beliefs of others. More importantly, however, his reasons for committing to individualism raise important issues for social epistemology, particularly about how reliance on mere testimony can propagate prejudices and inhibit genuine understanding. The implications of his views are worked out more fully by some of his immediate successors; I examine how François Poulain de la Barre, and (briefly) Mary Astell analyze the social conditions for epistemic agency in a Cartesian vein.
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In this article I endeavour to present the axis of the dispute between Hobbes and Descartes on the ground of Meditation, and its most important moments. I focus primarily on the analysis of the most important accusations made by Hobbes and the reconstruction of some of his views, which at the time could only be found in The Elements of Law, Nature, and Politics. This work was the first major and coherent attempt to speak out on cognitive-theory and social issues; I strive to defend the thesis that understanding the content of Objections requires knowledge of this work. The mature form of the work shows that the Englishman already had his views well thought-out and could feel quite confident in formulating from their perspective critical remarks on Descartes’s philosophy, to which, it seems, he may have owed quite a lot.
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The article attempts to outline the history of French genetic research upon 18th-century manuscript collections. Contrary to the stereotypical view of the 18th century as a period when manuscripts were allegedly destroyed in order to hide evidence of the painstaking execution of the final version of a work, this epoch did leave us manuscripts, frequently full of corrections, which suggest that the Enlightenment thought and literature kept searching and experimenting. The Enlightenment philosophical and political concepts had undergone many stages before they adopted the shape we are familiar with. Thanks to the existence of their preliminary, draft versions, enlightenment novels, theatrical plays and poems provide an opportunity to observe the whole process of creation. The fascinating workshop of enlightenment drafts and subsequent versions of written works shows an area of literary and philosophical work marked by aesthetic and ideological conflicts, which shook the authors in their process of artistic creation.
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This essay deals with the post-Machiavellian phase of the history of prudence in Western political thought. After the sudden rise of Machiavellism, or the reason of state discourse, the second half of the 16th century saw an effort to turn back to a more traditional understanding of the virtue of prudence, or at least to try to combine prudence and reason of state in a way which would help to moderate its subversive power. Confronting the warlike events of their age, in their politically oriented writings the two hero of the present paper, Montaigne and Lipsius, expressed an interest in the question how a more tradition-based concept of prudence could and should find its place once again in politics. The paper is going to show how Montaigne’s prudence integrates much of Machiavelli’s insight, while Lipsius’s concept of prudence combines “reason of state” and Christian stoicism. Finally it will be argued that both thinkers represent varieties of early modern conservative prudence, or alternatively, of political realism.
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This article is devoted to the role and significance of paradoxes in the philosophical thought and mysticism of the sixteenth-century Bengali Vaishnava theologian Jīva Gosvāmī. He situates his system within the Vedānta school, where the main category distinguishing its branches and deciding on their specific character is the relation between the Absolute, the phenomenal world and the human being. In Gosvāmī’s school, this relation involves identity and distinctness (bhedābheda) of those categories at the same time, referred to by the word acintya (“inaccessible to reason”), which further stresses this ontological paradox. Although doctrinally the most important, it is not the only paradox in Gosvāmī’s thought. Adopting this core metaphysical thesis engendered many other aporias, including those concerning the nature of the soul, the concept of bhakti (loving devotion to a deity) and the idea of liberation (mukti), which Goswāmī then attempts to solve in his most important philosophical treatise – Ṣaṭsandarbha.
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Bacon’s projects of natural history were extremely popular in the mid-seventeenth century, especially for a group of people devoted to experimental activities, namely the Hartlib Circle. Ralph Austen, one member of the Hartlib Circle, tried to construct his own project of natural history using Bacon’s Sylva sylvarum as a pattern and following the Baconian scheme with particular interest for the methodological aspects entailed by such an endeavor. This paper provides an account of Austen’s attempts at writing a natural history as found in his Observations upon some part of Sr Francis Bacon’s Naturall History. It discusses the methodology and aims served by such an enterprise, both practical and theoretical: the role of experimentation in the process of compiling a natural history as the most reliable activity able to provide accurate knowledge of the natural world and the determination to provide general rules and axioms about nature.
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In this short essay I will aim to show that literary fiction is consistently at the vanguard of the exploration of philosophical problems relating to the concept of world, while what we think of as philosophy, in the narrower sense, typically arrives late on the scene, picking up themes that have already been explored in literary texts that are explicitly intended as exercises of the imagination. I will pursue this argument with a sustained investigation of the shared aims and methods of Miguel de Cervantes and René Descartes.
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Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities presents a wide array of possible cities—cities whose composition turns on a productive ambiguity of their being described or invented by Marco Polo in his conversations with Kublai Khan. Implicit in this book is also a theory about how all possible cities are composed. The method turns on decompos¬ing a city down to its basic elements and recomposing it in different ways through the imagination. I argue that there is a close affinity between Calvino’s theory of fictional cities and Leibniz’s theory of possible worlds. The main similarity is that both theories are combinatorial—they suppose that possibilities are produced by combination and variation of basic elements. The paper presents Leibniz’s theory of possibility in its metaphysical context and explores the similarity (as well as some differences) with Calvino’s cities in their literary context. I suggest that there is a rather strong relation between the theory of literary fiction implicit in Invisible Cities and Leibniz’s theory of possibility, in that both define the possible in terms of the conceivable. Indeed, Leibniz often refers to literary examples to substantiate his position, and I argue that this reveals an essential feature of his theory.
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Starting from Plato's understanding of dialectics, this paper examines the nature, purpose and meaning of human practice. This examination tends to point out an importance of the relation between true knowledge and human engagement. It indicates that a neglection of dependence between practice and knowledge causes a fatal dominance of common belief and revanchism in history. The collapse of dialectics is, implicitly, re-examined as the central event of the beyond-metaphysical reality of the region. True knowledge, therefore, is understood here as the foundation of human dwelling which, through the reality of historical existence, reaches a desired peace: a good life. Finally, this point justifies philosophy as a life well lived.
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The paper is written in order to demonstrate the lack of soundness of the present counter-Enlightenment attacks against reason and science. The characterisation of Enlightenment cannot only refer to the logical consequences of the universally manifested reason –(the wishful thoughts about) the humans‘ education and educability and thus the changing the world for the better –without substantiating them. Kant has substantiated the Enlightenment epistemology that supports even today the human endeavour to live in a better world. As the purpose of the analysis is the epistemological way of comprehension –i.e. the rational all the way, coherent to the end, thus the scientific questioning of the premises of every theory –the paper thus features only a selection from among the coryphaei of the Enlightenment movement. It starts from Kant‘s ―Copernican revolution‖ –a metaphor used by him that may rightfully be employed in order to evaluate his philosophy –which, in the view expressed here, consists in the interdependence of the constructivist epistemology and the categorical imperative ethics. Actually, and this is the thesis promoted here, this epistemology and this ethics constitute a continuous and unique structure and just this unitary epistemological-ethical structure, called here even the Enlightenment epistemology, is the basis of the Enlightenment perspective and theory of comprehension. But this perspective and comprehension form a methodological pattern for the approach of the world and for the reason to be of the human knowledge. Thus, the paper is not a simple reminder of an old page of the history of philosophy. And neither should the history of philosophy be thought of as an evolution of ideas, where there would exist just a simple transmission and taking over of the relay from one paramount theory to another and where at one time or another the respective preponderant theory would exist alone. The Enlightenment pattern was not the only one when it appeared, and so much less today. The epistemological analysis of some contemporary facts emphasizes the contradictory views expressed within the Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment manners. There are presented Enlightenment type arguments and anti-Enlightenment arguments, put face to face. Thus, the paper shows that the Enlightenment perspective and understanding defeat the counter-Enlightenment attacks and they outline a methodological framework for the current interpretation of science and technology.
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Johann Gottfried von Herder, whose life epitomized the cosmopolitan character of the intellectual elite in the greater Baltic region of his time, was born in 1744 in a small East Prussian town. A Russian army surgeon quartered in his town in 1761-62 befriended him and helped finance his way to Konigsberg where he first studied medicine, and then theology and philosophy. Immanuel Kant, from whom he later became estranged, was his influential teacher. After his studies, he became a Protestant minister and teacher in Riga, then a largely self-governing German city within the Russian Empire. Later, he travelled to France, and eventually moved to Weimar. [...]
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Croatian literary culture of the 18th century is marked by stylistic pluralism, considering that its Enlightenment character and its didactic (educational, moralistic and Catholic) and utilitaristic dimensions are emphasized the most. Austrian catechism was the fundamental book of school religious education from 1777 until 1847 in the whole Habsburg Monarchy, and it played an important role in the upbringing of children, but also of the entire family and social community in the spirit of Josephine politics. This topic is viewed from the perspective of Immanuel Kant who found it important to emphasise the dangers to which the fetishisation of ecclesiastical norms can lead to, i.e. to hinder the development of critical moments of liberty and upbringing. The absence of Enlightenment period in Croatian countries of the Habsburg Monarchy is complexly conditioned: from religious resistance and changes in a social and political sense to stagnancy and lack of education of a large part of the population, altogether favourable to the Croatian nobility and clergy.
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Mustafa Ejubović - Šejh Jujo is one of the most prolific Bosniak writers who wrote in oriental languages. He wrote about almost all Islamic disciplines, and especially about disputation. This paper is a contribution to the study of the written legacy of Mustafa Ejubović. Given that the subject of this paper is disputation, which is considered a branch of logic, this paper gives a brief overview of the development of logic as a discipline, with a special focus on its development in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the so-called Arabic logic was studied. This paper gives an overview of ten Ejubović’s works available from the field of disputation. Two of those ten works have been translated into Bosnian, and three have not yet been found. During the analysis of each of the manuscripts, it was concluded that Ejubović left a considerable number of over 400 pages of manuscript text from the field of disputation. After the presentation of his works, the paper gives brief insights into disputation, explaining the basic concepts of the discipline. After that, a brief overview of a debate according to principles of the discipline is given along with quotations from Ejubović’s works, as well as some other works from disputation. His contribution to this discipline deserves much more extensive and detailed work.
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The main intention of this paper is to reconstruct the conceptual and historical genesis of the idea and value of political peace from the point of view of political philosophy at the intersection between late scholasticism and early modernity. The paper consists of three related parts. The first part highlights methodological and contextual reasons why the idea of political peace has been overshadowed throughout history by dominant discourses on war. The second part deals with conceptual clarifications. The nature of war is distinguished from other types of conflict and three interpretative approaches to war are analyzed: political realism, fundamentalist-moralistic view of the holy war, and the many theories of natural law that give rise to conceptions of just war, but also the first abolitionist perspective or idea of ending all wars. Early theoretical articulations of the notion of peace indicated modern-day emancipation of politics from the tutelage of metaphysics and classical ethics, thus separating the value of political peace from its original oneness with cosmic and psychological peace. The third part of the paper highlights key moments in the historical genesis of the value of political peace in the works of Aurelius Augustine, Marsilius of Padua, and William of Ockham.
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Although it is common to associate the thought of A. Jokubaitis with political philosophy, this article argues that his texts also allow us to talk about a specific moral philosophy of A. Jokubaitis. At the center of it we find an attempt to articulate and discuss the grounding ideas of morality. The article argues that the first two ideas – an idea of unconditional character of morality and an idea of ontological grounding – are related to Kant’s influence on A. Jokubaitis philosophy. These two ideas allow us to explain morality as an autonomous part of reality, which is different from the empirical one but nonetheless real. This part of reality is grounded in the first-person perspective of a moral subject and can be characterized by implicit normativity and unconditionality. The first-person perspective structures a radically different relation to our reality, which allows us to be agents, not simply spectators. Such an interpretation of Kant allows to associate A. Jokubaitis with his contemporary Kantians, such as Ch. Korsgaard, B. Herman, O. O’Neill, and A. Reath. However, the third idea, the one of a person, which becomes more visible in his book Politinis idiotas, transcends the Kantian conception of practical reason and encourages to perceive morality and its grounding in a much wider context. The concept of a person allows A. Jokubaitis to distance himself from Kantian rationalism and integrate social and mystical aspects of morality, which he has always found important.
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At the core of Thomas Aquinas metaphysics of being lies the actual divide between the act of being (actus essendi) and the essence of every living being. This context of metaphysics alone allows the understanding of the meanings of eternity and time as used by Thomas Aquinas. Duns Scotus understands being in a different way, he provides the concept of univocity of being, in other words, the meaning of being does not change with regard of its affiliation to the God or to the created living being. In this way, supposedly, the rational mind of man can, in effect, attain the God:in the same way as we gain comprehension of any living being, so we are granted the ability to comprehend the God on the condition that our minds are sufficiently deep. Thomas Aquinas proposition about the underlying inability of human rationality to attain the God is erased from this approach. As early as the 15th century the followers of Thomas Aquinas forgot or openly critisised their educator‘s proposed reality of the divide between the act of being and the essence of being, and showed tendencies to accept Duns Scotus’ concept of the univocity of being. In this way the comprehension of being, and even that of the God, has become limited to the rules of human ratio,i.e. the rationalising of the comprehension of being has taken place. The law of causality, which Thomas Aquinas held applicable only to the domain of the created beings, modern scholastics introduced to the domain of the Divine being, as though the God could be comprehended as the ultimate cause and measured by the identical meaning of the cause concept, which is professed in the created world. The God is turned into Causa sui; a phantom concept, broadly spread among modern scholastics, but entirely foreign to Thomas Aquinas. The very modern scholasticism here, in a manner of speaking, converges with the general post Cartesian European metaphysics, particularly with its Leibnitz version. Eternity gains the understanding of a rationally interpreted concept of immobility, i.e. creating logical opposition to mobility and by abstracting from all features of mobility to produce a pure idea of immobility – eternity. The Thomas Aquinas’ concept of eternity here is forgotten or intentionally relocated to the field of theology, clearly separate from philosophical thinking. The concept of time, in its own turn, is devoid of its onthological weight, which it used to show in Thomas Aquinas’ texts. Now time is no more a measure of onthological passing of the created being, but an inconsiquential measure of physical movement. Hence stem endless and sterile disputes about the „subjectivity“ and „objectivity“ of time, disputes alien to Thomas Aquinas. The article concludes, that scholastics discussed in the article, despite their ambitions to pass as official interpreters of Thomas Aquinas, distorted the meaning of his texts. More, they became shareholders of the overall Western post Cartesian methaphysics, irrespective of their declarative struggle with the outcomes of this metaphysics (particularly in the area of morales). The assumption that thinking is a mere technique, as well as the whole world, and the God is mere technician, makes it pointless to fight the consequences of technology: it is senseless to destroy something what you are producing yourself continuously. The article ends in discussion about the meaning of philosophy in Thomas Aquinas works and its relevance for the modern world.
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