Descartes’ Theory of Abstraction in the Regulæ

Author(s): Grigore Vida / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2018

I analyze in this article the different ways in which Descartes uses abstraction in the Regulæ, discussing his project of a mathematical physics, the role of the imagination, and the status of numbers. I also try to show that the doctrine of simple natures cannot be well accommodated with the theory of abstraction developed in Rule 14, having instead a greater affinity with Descartes’ later theory of abstraction and exclusion (from the period after the Meditationes), in which imagination plays no role and everything happens at a strictly intellectual level. This interpretation is supported by the recent discovery of the Cambridge manuscript, which almost certainly records an early stage of composition and in which the doctrine of simple natures is absent, thus being very probably a later development.

Diana Steinbergová: Spinoza

Author(s): Pavel Bartošek / Language(s): Czech / Issue: 3/2006

Review of: Diana Steinbergová: Spinoza, Preložil Emil Višňovský. Vydavateľstvo PT, Bratislava 2004, 120 s.

Dichotomy in Semiotics of Royal Procession of the eighteenth Century

Author(s): Octavia Costea / Language(s): English / Issue: SUPPL./2012

Our work aims to highlight a several dichotomies in the semiotics of the royal procession, on the basis of comparative analysis of some passages of Dimitrie Cantemir and Voltaire, both living in the 18th century. Our premises are related to identifying the context of generating illuminist ideas, the author positions and the role of semantic network related to the display of the royal procession, in the antinomy circumstances - peace and war - well as the analysis of semiotics of significant passages. Dichotomy series identified by us emphasize, at the ethno-and socio-linguistic level, contradictory aspects of segmentation and various reifications of the Enlightenment in which lived the two sagacious critics, Dimitrie Cantemir and Voltaire.

DID DESCARTES COMMIT AN ERROR? NEW DIMENSIONS FOR COGITO ARCHITECTURE

Author(s): Valery Yevarouski / Language(s): English / Issue: 92/2017

The approaches to brain-mind-environment interaction practiced within classical epistemology, modern neurophilosophy, and neuroscience are considered together with the comparative research design,. The concept of natural dualism is introduced. On above grounds, the operational or protopraxis model of behaviour is discussed, which is based on the rigid distinctions between useful, harmful, and neutral fragments selected during life. For the human being, the environment is not limited to nature but includes the body as well as many cognitive processes. The question is who (or what) benefits in the end, if even our internal world is adjusted to its demands. By now it is a construct with philosophically presupposed meaning, which also can be interpreted as both cogito and the Self. Philosophy of psychiatry may propose the minimal or non-programmed cogito as an alternative starting point. This system can be enriched with two more elements – affective cogito and reward centre. Thus, we receive a harmonious categorical structure for the description of psyche and its external activity or practice.

Die Geschichte der Welt ist die ‚Geschichte Gottes.‘ Die Geburt der Zeit in Schellings Weltalter (Urfassung von 1811)

Author(s): Miklós Vassányi / Language(s): German / Issue: 1/2013

Dihotomii în Semiotica Alaiului Domnesc din Secolul al XVIII-lea

Author(s): Octavia Costea / Language(s): Romanian / Issue: SUPPL./2012

Our work aims to highlight a several dichotomies in the semiotics of the royal procession, on the basis of comparative analysis of some passages of Dimitrie Cantemir and Voltaire, both living in the 18th century. Our premises are related to identifying the context of generating illuminist ideas, the author positions and the role of semantic network related to the display of the royal procession, in the antinomy circumstances - peace and war - well as the analysis of semiotics of significant passages. Dichotomy series identified by us emphasize, at the ethno-and socio-linguistic level, contradictory aspects of segmentation and various reifications of the Enlightenment in which lived the two sagacious critics, Dimitrie Cantemir and Voltaire.

DIMITRIE CANTEMIR ŞI „IZVODITORIUL” VAN HELMONT

Author(s): Drago? Popescu / Language(s): Romanian,Moldavian / Issue: 1/2017

The study presentsinformation on the life and activity of Jan Baptist van Helmont, and the context inwhich the Romanian philosopher and prince Dimitrie Cantemir read and made use ofthe works of the Flemish medical doctor, chemist and alchemist.

DIMITRIE CANTEMIR, IN THE TIME AND SPACE OF HIS AGE

Author(s): Rare? Sorin ?opterean / Language(s): Romanian / Issue: 15/2018

Cantemir was a philosopher of history, which differs greatly from the chroniclers of G. Ureche, M. Costin and I. Neculce, by addressing the historical phenomenon itself. Cantemir has not only replicated the huge factual material gathered by him regarding the history of Turkey, the Caucasus, Moldova and other countries, but has prefigured a way to interpret the general course of the historical process. Hence, the history and philosophy of history was the domain in which the thinker first manifested himself as a remarkable scientist. We will try to surprise how the world / space were commented and how it was told in Dimitrie Cantemir's literary, scientific and philosophical discourse, the building of the ontological discourse.

Divisible Atoms Are Not Atoms

Author(s): Stanislav Južnic / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2018

The aim of the article is to help change the self-contradictory term ‘atom’. In this project, the support of modern Chinese scientists is expected. The contributions of Chinese to some researches in sciences are focused on finding out the preferences and most frequent stages of (European) paradigms involved in Chinese networks. Some predictions of future interests of Chinese sciences are provided. The Chinese holistic Confucian distrust in atoms is discussed as a possible new paradigm which could rename atoms as the destructible divisible entities of future physics, and with more difficulties also of chemistry.The word ‘atom’ meaning an indivisible not a compound entity is basically in contradiction with the characteristics of the item it is supposed to describe. The suffix ‘a (ἄ)’ provides a negation in Ancient Greek language. The suffix should be omitted to use tom (τομος) to manage the actual situation of a-toms (toms) as compound of elementary particles. In the late 19th century after the European Spring of Nations, two basically different concepts of atoms of chemists and physicists accomplished a kind of symbiosis. The suggestion is put forward that while indivisible atoms soon became contradictions in physics, they still retain some value in chemistry, which should be important for the panning strategy of attempt to change the name of atom.

Dlaczego jest mnóstwo rzeczy raczej niż prawie nic? – „słabe pytanie Leibniza”

Author(s): Lukasz Lamza / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 55/2014

The original Leibniz’s question „Why is there something rather than nothing?” is rephrased in a „weak” way: „Why is there a lot of things rather than almost nothing?”. The first part of the article argues for two propositions: 1) We may not reasonably expect a real answer to the original Leibniz’s question, mostly because the concept of „nothingness” cannot be defined in a way that makes sense and is operational. 2) The „weak” version of the question retains the philosophical „spirit” of the original. In the second part a methodology for answering the weak Leibniz’s question is presented - one of an analysis of the cosmic evolution in terms of the reasons and causes for the emergence of new types of natural objects and processes („things”). A representation the structure of the Universe is presented that is based on a list of ca. 900 names of things derived from the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) catalogue, representing all natural sciences. Further analyses concern the properties of the Universe and its evolution that cause new things to emerge all the time – although one may imagine and precisely describe a scenario where new things stopped appearing shortly after the Big Bang and now there is almost nothing in the Universe.

Dualizm na skraju załamania nerwowego. Medytacje o pierwszej filozofii jako zamysł zmysłowego doświadczenia abstrakcji

Author(s): Marta Olesik / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 19/2016

The text is a critique of the prevalent approach to Cartesianism and its stance towards sensuousness and matter, which is accused of being instrumental and reductive. The author’s aim is to surpass the binary opposition of sensuousness and abstraction, which constitutes the basis for this approach. To that end, Cartesian Meditations are analyzed in the context of the general crisis of experience which affected the Baroque era. Cartesian doubt transforms this sense of crisis into a method, systematically inflating subjective uncertainty. Referring to the baroque technique of anamorphosis, the text demonstrates that the critical uncertainty does not disappear with the introduction of cogito, but is transformed into the basis for the newly constructed rationality. This transformation is based on the relation between formal arbitrariness of Cartesian dualism and the metaphysical arbitrariness of absolute caprice, personified by the figure of the malicious demon. It is as this anamorphic transfiguration that the sensuousness of Cartesian rationality is constituted – and the text systematically traces Cartesian argument in this respect.

DÜŞÜNCE SİSTEMLERİNDE BEN VE BAŞKASI PROBLEMİ, ARTHUR RİMBAUD VE SANATTA ÖTEKİLİK ÜZERİNE

Author(s): Ezgi Tokdil,C. Arzu Aytekin / Language(s): Turkish / Issue: 28/2016

In the study, Arthur Rimbaud's used in "I is another" rhetoric that write prose-poem in 1871, named Letter of the Seer, are studied by examining under the influence of biographical datas and the intellectual structure is analyzed through the concept of "I", which is fall through of the modern philosophy. From the issue of "I" in the Descartes philosophy to Sartre's existential "I" besides romantics and literature, on concepts of "me and the other" in art is making a hermeneutic analysis.

Dwa żywioły bezkresu. Woda i powietrze w filozofii Gastona Bachelarda

Author(s): Joanna Kotowska / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 3/2013

The article proposes to look at the idea of the infinity from the perspective of a French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard. His theory concerning the four elements is one of the twentieth century’s most interesting elementary concepts. The aim of this work is to show a manifest link between the notion of the infinity and its realizations (materialization) on the physical plane, that is to say Bachelard’s water and air. Both of these elements represent their own, specific kind of infinity, which is nonetheless very close to a man, because not only conceivable but also present in everyday life. Every single contact with the element is a touch of infinity.

Egzystencjalna i formalno-ontologiczna problematyka substancji u Descartesa

Author(s): Karol Tarnowski / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 62supl./2017

The article is an attempt to analysis the ontological aspects of Descartes’ philosophy in the light of the existential and formal ontology of Roman Ingarden. Descartes resolves the philosophical problem of what is real by introducing the notion of substance. The substance is the keystone of Descartes’ philosophy functioning at different levels of his thought and being an attempt to connect the existence of the real and the ideal. The problem of substance includes existential issues, where the substance is treated as category, and formal-ontological ones, where the substance acts as a categorical quasi-nature, used to distinguish the different fields of reality. Substance as a category is characterized by (a) gradual, ontical self-sufficiency; (b) independence, which is associated with a property of exclusion, (c) ontical durability, and finally is treated as (d) existing thing (res existens). Secondly, the notion of the substance as being the subject of properties (hypokeimenon) leads to distinguish it as a quasi-constitutive nature, which is then considered in each of three types of substances: God, res cogitans and res extensa.

Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia (1646–1684) pierwsza kobieta philosophiae magistra et doctrix

Author(s): Joanna Usakiewicz / Language(s): Polish / Issue: XXVII/2015

The article presents the short biography and works of Venetian woman – Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, the first woman in history, who received doctoral degree in philosophy. It took place in 1678 on the University of Padua – “the Venetian University” since the fifteenth century. Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia was very well educated, especially in philosophy and theology. She also knew several languages: Latin, Greek, Spanish, Hebrew. Only part of her writings is kept, among which the most important are the four discourses on political problems.

Eliasz nauk. Apokaliptyka, paracelsjańska mistyka przyrody i narodziny nowoczesności (część druga)

Author(s): Marek Woszczek / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 19/2016

The myth of [H]Elias Artista (or ‘Elijah of the Arts’) is one of the most interesting components of the rich 16th-century Paracelsian tradition from the margins of the post-Reformation orthodoxy. It signals a surprising development within the Christian apocalyptic tradition since ‘Helias artium chymicarum’, the messianic Experimentator as a human Christ-like figure and an end-of-time counterpart of the biblical blacksmith Tubal-cain, is an original transformation of the Jewish apocalyptic Elijah in a context of the early modernity on the eve of the Thirty Years War. That figure is an example from the broader domain of the Paracelsian ‘theoalchemy’ (Telle), which may be construed as a typically modern hybrid in the Latourian sense. Furthermore, in order to understand the peculiar post-Reformation phenomenon of the mysticism of nature (Dorn, Khunrath, Gutman, Arndt, Boehme, and others), which is in stark tension with orthodox theologies, it is necessary to take into account that it was a product of the new powerful intellectual formation which can be dubbed the nature (or cosmological) apocalypticism. It is claimed that that ‘vertical’ (non-eschatological) apocalypticism of nature is an early modern form of the ancient Jewish apocalyptic tradition transformed under the new social-cultural conditions into a formula of the ‘learning the secrets of nature’ in a complex process of renegotiating the power relations, and it produced the ample resource of the cognitive motivations for experimental activity, quite independently of the gradually waning millenarian affects. Thus, that transformation is important for understanding the religious early modernity and its immanentist, activist attitudes and getting beyond the one-dimensional discourses of the secularization paradigm, which obliterates or ignores the ‘vertical’ axis of apocalypticism and fixes itself upon the horizontal (millenarian) dimension while (re)constructing the criticized unpicturesque ‘irreligion of progress’ (Löwith). Early modernity could be better understood as a diffused turn (effect) associated with the innovative material (e.g. medical or chemical) practices and their new conceptualisations of matter and knowledge, where philosophy, theology, science of matter and social revolt seem inseparable. The myth of the Elijah of the Arts, contrary to a superficial secularization interpretation, is one of the symptoms of the growing process of ‘de-eschatologization’ through the alternative direction of apocalypticism, i.e., shifting an interest to nature and matter as the religious objects available to exploration, which produced the new power conflicts typical of modernity but also the ‘laboratory’ as a space of unveiling that which is hidden in nature.

Eliasz nauk. Apokaliptyka, paracelsjańska mistyka przyrody i narodziny nowoczesności (część pierwsza)

Author(s): Marek Woszczek / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 19/2016

The myth of [H]Elias Artista (or ‘Elijah of the Arts’) is one of the most interesting components of the rich 16th-century Paracelsian tradition from the margins of the post-Reformation orthodoxy. It signals a surprising development within the Christian apocalyptic tradition since ‘Helias artium chymicarum’, the messianic Experimentator as a human Christ-like figure and an end-of-time counterpart of the biblical blacksmith Tubal-cain, is an original transformation of the Jewish apocalyptic Elijah in a context of the early modernity on the eve of the Thirty Years War. That figure is an example from the broader domain of the Paracelsian ‘theoalchemy’ (Telle), which may be construed as a typically modern hybrid in the Latourian sense. Furthermore, in order to understand the peculiar post-Reformation phenomenon of the mysticism of nature (Dorn, Khunrath, Gutman, Arndt, Boehme, and others), which is in stark tension with orthodox theologies, it is necessary to take into account that it was a product of the new powerful intellectual formation which can be dubbed the nature (or cosmological) apocalypticism. It is claimed that that ‘vertical’ (non-eschatological) apocalypticism of nature is an early modern form of the ancient Jewish apocalyptic tradition transformed under the new social-cultural conditions into a formula of the ‘learning the secrets of nature’ in a complex process of renegotiating the power relations, and it produced the ample resource of the cognitive motivations for experimental activity, quite independently of the gradually waning millenarian affects. Thus, that transformation is important for understanding the religious early modernity and its immanentist, activist attitudes and getting beyond the one-dimensional discourses of the secularization paradigm, which obliterates or ignores the ‘vertical’ axis of apocalypticism and fixes itself upon the horizontal (millenarian) dimension while (re)constructing the criticized unpicturesque ‘irreligion of progress’ (Löwith). Early modernity could be better understood as a diffused turn (effect) associated with the innovative material (e.g. medical or chemical) practices and their new conceptualisations of matter and knowledge, where philosophy, theology, science of matter and social revolt seem inseparable. The myth of the Elijah of the Arts, contrary to a superficial secularization interpretation, is one of the symptoms of the growing process of ‘de-eschatologization’ through the alternative direction of apocalypticism, i.e., shifting an interest to nature and matter as the religious objects available to exploration, which produced the new power conflicts typical of modernity but also the ‘laboratory’ as a space of unveiling that which is hidden in nature.

Emergencija mentalnog/racionalnog i potiskivanje/marginaliziranje tjelesnog

Author(s): Vanja Borš / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 03/139/2015

In this paper the attention is focused on the emergence of mental/rational thinking (level of consciousness), particularly in phylogenetic context, which is largely characterized by a deviation manifested in suppression and marginalization of the bodily. Namely, it is the emergence of the mental/rational which presents the beginning of the mentioned deviation (in mythic discourse presented and celebrated as the victory of the Hero over the Great Mother), that is, the suppression and marginalization of all that which has been or still is associated with the bodily: sexual, feminine, unconscious, nature, etc. Lastly, the starting point of this paper is that, through the deconstruction of the mind–body dichotomy, we need to awake the fundamentality of the bodily and thus, instead of suppressing and dissociating it as mentioned (which marks a considerable part of the Occidental history), transcend and integrate it healthily (which is characteristic of the integral thinking, that is, the integral level of consciousness).

ENCOMIUM IN I.B. VAN HELMONT ET VIRTUTEM PHYSICES UNIVERSALIS DOCTRINÆ EIUS

Author(s): Dimitrie Cantemir / Language(s): Romanian,Moldavian,Latin / Issue: 1/2017

Enlightenment’s faith in human creative possibilities

Author(s): Zbigniew Drozdowicz / Language(s): English / Issue: 41/2016

In this article I present an argument for the thesis that one of the most significant revaluations of the Enlightenment was the creation and popularization of faith in the effective shaping of fate by man himself. In every example the Enlightenment had been referring to the creative possibilities of human reason. However, major differences occurred in understanding this very reason and its application in the praxis between the main representatives of the period. In my remarks I recall just a few of selected representatives of the English, Scottish and French enlightenment philosophy. The broadening of that list with other names, including the representatives of other nations, would allow probably to present much more diversified variants of this Enlightenment faith which since that period is a specific distinguishing mark of modernity.