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The author offers a possible Christian interpretation of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, the work through which one of the most important modern political thinkers, after decades-long dominance of positivism, brought back the normative-ontological view on politics to the historical scene. By doing this, the author aims to point to the Christian roots of Rawls’s concept of perfect procedural justice (which he calls ’uncorrupted justice’) through parallel analysis with the works of Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich related to defining the concepts of justice in Christianity and the role of God as the Lawmaker. The main thesis the author proves is that Rawls’s concept of the veil of ignorance, and justice understood as what is right rather than what is good, with the imperative of an individual accepting it regardless of the consequences it would have on them (knowing that they are doing what is right nevertheless), represents the essence of defining God as the Lawmaker in the way it is done by Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich.
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Can a man think of the world without thinking of God, the creator of the world? The metaphysics of understanding the man as a being who in his essence seeks answers to questions about being, finitude, infinity which is the interior woven into the metaphysical questioning of the necessity of existence. Ultimately man comes to know God in the finite world so that by knowledge, by deification through the great love of God he would gain eternity. God and man, divine and human, are the entities that strive to be known by the one to whom it is only given to know and that is the man as a being finite and infinite. The category of transcendence itself is the metaphysical essence that makes up metaphysical thinking and man's aspiration towards himself. Searching with the imperishable truth in the cognition of God and the world, Vasily Zenkovsky brings a new light to Russian philosophical ideas of God and the world understanding of the mentioned metaphysical entities through the prism of man as a being who is called to know the necessity of the logos of the eternal existence of God in the world.
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This paper tackles freedom of religion and freedom of speech in the domain of critique of religion in EU member states through three main models (French, German and English) that they employ in the organization of their relationship with the religious communities of their citizens. It mentions potential problems of these models of secularism in the domains of freedom of religion and freedom of speech, citing for each model at least a single illustration of widely known controversies from the XX and XXI centuries. The conclusion, after noticing general tendencies present in each model, raises several short theoretical questions related to secularism of the state and society - with a look at secularism in public and media space - in the postsecular world.
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The pure meaning of the name philosophy as „love of wisdom“ postulates its purpose of existence through searching, thinking, reasoning about what it really is. It was created from man and on a human scale, philosophy is a beam that illuminates what it has within and outside of it, it is the effort of the human mind to think, develop, and position the world within and around us. When we are called to boldly step onto the path of widsom it is the right time for philosophy. Concers that accompany this question are as old as philosophy itself, while Plato belived that man in maturity should be handled by a philosophical reflection, Epicurus was of a different opinion: „Not in my youth, let no one hesitate to engage in the philosophy and in no age let his philosophy to be a burden.“ On the origin of this Hellenic spirit of philosophy, Matthew Lipman justifies „philosophy with children“ as a way of developing thinking, undrestanding what children think or want to think about themselves and about everything that they are and will be in the world around them.
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In this paper I will refer to two composite and complex notions, narrative identity and political identity, which represent not only fundamental theoretical notions, but also components of an action that, integrated in the culture of dialogue, could lead to peace and balance in today’s world. The political identity – narrative identity distinction can be found both at the level of the individual (schematizing, the citizen has a political identity, the person has a narrative identity) and at that of society, if we accept on the one hand, that the basic meaning of the notion of political identity refers primarily to the citizens of a state (because starting with modernity, the free individual has power and political identity) or to certain groups organized on political criteria, and on the other hand that this notion also has the collective meaning of national-state identity, respectively cultural, which interacts both in content and form with that of civic identities. And because between the two composite notions, beyond the differences, there is above all cohesion, i.e. narrative identity contributes to the configuration and definition of political identity, just as political identity can represent a chapter or an important moment in a story, from a history, I will focus on the contribution of the narrative identity to the definition of thepolitical identity, having as a theoretical reference the contribution of Paul Ricœur in this matter, because Ricœur’s political philosophy shows us how to read and interpret what happens to man not only as an amount of ever-changing data, more or less accurate, as a more or less significant statistic, but also as a meaningful story.
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The text discusses the concept of ethics of touch in the Anthropocene from a theoretical perspective, highlighting how humans have influenced and how they continue to shape the world, especially through the digital space and the emerging technologies. The relationship between perception and touch is explored, both in an artistic context and in the virtual environment of video games, emphasizing the ethical implications of this technological evolution. Finally, visual representations of touch and how they reflect and perpetuate the traumatic nature of human interaction are discussed.
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There are at least two deep and related debates about explanation: about its nature and about its norms. The aim of this special issue of Philosophical Problems in Science/Zagadnienia Filozoficzne w Nauce (ZFN) is to survey whether or not a consensus is at hand in these debates and to help settle what it can. The overarching foci are twofold: (i) the nature of scientific explanation, with special attention to the debate between ontic and epistemic conception of explanation, and (ii) the norms of scientific explanation, with special attention to so-called ‘ontic’ (or better, ‘alethic’) norms like truth and referential success and epistemic norms like intelligibility and idealized understanding. It called for advocates of various conceptions to articulate the current state of these debates. Researchers and scholars from around the globe—including Poland, Canada, Korea, The Netherlands, the United States, Greece, Austria, and Belgium—contributed. The special issue also attempts to provide an opening for new work on the norms of explanation, such as truth or model-based accuracy, information compression, abstraction, and generalization.
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The ontic conception of explanation is predicated on the proposition that “explanation is a relation between real objects in the world” and hence, according to this approach, scientific explanation cannot take place absent such a premise. Despite the fact that critics have emphasized several drawbacks of the ontic conception, as for example its inability to address the so-called “abstract explanations”, the debate is not settled and the ontic view can claim to capture cases of explanation that are non-abstract, such as causal relations between events. However, by eliminating the distinction between abstract and non-abstract explanations, it follows that ontic and epistemic proposals can no longer contend to capture different cases of explanation and either all are captured by the ontic view or all are captured by the epistemic view. On closer inspection, it turns out that the ontic view deals with events that fall outside the scientists’ scope of observation and that it does not accommodate common instances of explanation such as explanations from false propositions and hence it cannot establish itself as the dominant philosophical stance with respect to explanation. On the contrary, the epistemic conception does account for almost all episodes of explanation and can be described as a relation between representations, whereby the explanans transmit information to the explanandum and that this information can come, dependent on context, in the form of any of the available theories of explanation (law-like, unificatory, causal and non-causal). The range of application of the ontic view thus is severely restricted to trivial cases of explanation that come through direct observation of the events involved in an explanation and explanation is to be mostly conceived epistemically.
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Some argue that the term “explanation” in science is ambiguous, referring to at least three distinct concepts: a communicative concept, a representational concept, and an ontic concept. Each is defined in a different way with its own sets of norms and goals, and each of which can apply in contexts where the others do not. In this paper, I argue that such a view is false. Instead, I propose that a scientific explanation is a complex entity that can always be analyzed along a communicative dimension, a representational dimension, and an ontic dimension. But all three are always present within scientific explanations. I highlight what such an account looks like, and the potential problems it faces (namely that a single explanation can appear to have incompatible sets of norms and goals that govern it). I propose a solution to this problem and demonstrate how this account can help to dissolve current disputes in philosophy of science regarding debates between epistemic and ontic accounts of mechanistic explanations in the life sciences.
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After Wesley Salmon’s causal-mechanical stance on explanation in the 1980s, the ontic-epistemic debate of scientific explanations appeared to be resolved in the philosophy of science. However, since the twenty-first century, this debate has been rekindled among philosophers who focus on mechanistic explanations. Nevertheless, its issues have evolved, necessitating scrutiny of the new trends in this debate and a comparison with the original controversy between Carl Hempel and Salmon. The primary objective of this paper is to elucidate three categorical dimensions in the ontic-epistemic debates, spanning from the original to the recent controversies. Subsequently, it will explore why the conception of explanation is linked to representations, what conditions are necessary for linguistic expressions to be explanatory, and what roles norms play in explanation. Consequently, contrary to the common stereotype, it will be argued that mechanistic explanations are more likely to be epistemic rather than ontic.
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Distinctively mathematical explanations (DMEs) explain natural phenomena primarily by appeal to mathematical facts. One important question is whether there can be an ontic account of DME. An ontic account of DME would treat the explananda and explanantia of DMEs as ontic items (ontic objects, properties, structures, etc.) and the explanatory relation between them as an ontic relation (e.g., Pincock, 2015; Povich, 2021). Here I present a conventionalist account of DME, defend it against objections, and argue that it should be considered ontic. Notably, if indeed it is ontic, the conventionalist account seems to avoid a convincing objection to other ontic accounts (Kuorikoski, 2021).
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The epistemology of models has to face a conundrum: models are often described as highly idealised, and yet they are considered to be vehicles for scientific explanations. Truth-oriented—veritist—conceptions of explanation seem thereby undermined by this contradiction. In this article, I will show how this apparent paradox can be avoided by appealing to the notion of fiction. If fictionalism is often thought to lead to various flavours of instrumentalism, thereby weakening the veritist hopes, the fiction view of models offers a framework much richer than it seems at first sight. To do so, I will call upon the concepts of modality, counterfactual structure and credible worlds. In the end, veritism of explanation and fiction can indeed go hand in hand, but the scope of explanations we can hope to draw from models must be more precisely delineated.
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In this paper, I discuss the differences between ontic and epistemic conceptions of scientific explanation, mainly in relation to the so-called new mechanical philosophy. I emphasize that the debate on conceptions of scientific explanation owes much to Salmon’s ontic/epistemic distinction, although much has changed since his formulations. I focus on the interplay between ontic and epistemic norms and constraints in providing mechanistic explanations. My conceptual analysis serves two aims. Firstly, I formulate some suggestions for recognising that both sets of norms and constraints, ontic and epistemic, are necessary for scientific theorising. Secondly, I emphasize that there are multiple dimensions involved in scientific explanation, rather than clear-cut alternatives between ontic and epistemic aspects. I conclude with a general observation that although contextual aspects of explanations are unavoidable, the epistemic-relativity of our categories, explanations and models can in fact be compatible with their objectivity. Instead of making hastily drawn ontological implications from our theories or models, we should carefully scrutinize them from the ontic-epistemic perspective.
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After having pointed that finiteness is man’s prerequisite for his concern with philosophy, the author claims that the death fear comes from the awareness of the possibility of losing his individuality. To be considered as a wise man one must not fear death. Still, the reasons given for serene facing death are not always correct. The author claims that Epicurus’ arguments are not convincing because there is no comfort in the opinion that allegedly all good or bad is connected with feelings and death is the end of every feeling. We are not afraid so much of the punishment awaiting us in afterlife as of possibility of dissolving in nothingness, absolute disappearance. After having stressed that philosophy is not a comfort but pathos of truth, the author explores three possibilities of the fate of soul in the afterlife: absolute disappearance, dissolving in the world’s soul and individual immortality. Since the understanding cannot decide which of these possibilities is the closest to truth, the author resorts to the consideration of the so called borderline experiences. The consideration of the reports of seeing of the resuscitated persons, the appearance of the deceased, the phenomenon of the so called panoramic life review and incorrupt bodies suggest (but do not prove) that faith in afterlife is correct. At the end the author reminds us that the awareness of death stimulates one to moral life and contributes to the intense experience of every moment as much as possible. He recommends us that when we are deciding whether to believe in afterlife we should take into consideration not only the understanding but to listen to the voice of heart.
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Драган Јаковљевић, Сазнање, толеранција, вера. Популарни есеји, Подгорица: 3М Макарије, 2014, стр. 304.
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This article deals with the new possibilities of integration of psychology and Christian faith/theology. There is no genuine integration without recognition of the unified presupposed foundations for integration. This work searches for the common philosophical, metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions or assumptions necessary for the integration of Christianity and psychology. This might be a viable construction for the possible implementation of a Christian psychology program.
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Having indicated difficulties in understanding the sacred in our secularized times, the author attempts to clarify the phenomenon by relying on commentaries by Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade. He emphasizes that Otto demonstrated that the sacred, as a religious category, cannot be reduced to the good. The sacred is a complex category that consists of irrational and rational moments. After detailed consideration of different dimensions of perception of the sacred, the author concurs with Ottos’s statement that the problem of the Western European man is the unfamiliarity with the perception of the sacred. The author also devotes considerable attention to Eliade’s delicate interpretation of the relation between the sacred and the profane, whether it be an object or a person, whether it be space and time. He concurs with Eliade’s judgement that profane has become predominant in lives of most of contemporary people, unlike mythical times when a man aimed at imitating an archetype. Having stressed that the ultimate goal of religion is man’s spiritual transformation, i. e. becoming sanctified, the author concludes that the destiny of the world depends on whether it will be reaffirmed or not.
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