Deleuze'a i Foucaulta wizje filozofii albo o dwóch strategiach zaangażowania w polu akademickim

Author(s): Iwona Młoźniak / Language(s): Polish Issue: 16/2019

In this article the author considers the differences between Foucault and Deleuze in defining the role of a philosopher as a public intellectual. The context for the analysis is the specific position of a philosopher in the academic field – between the university, where career advances may be curtailed, and the obligation to act publicly as an intellectual. The text focuses on perceptions of who a philosopher is as a “thinker” and as an “engaged intellectual” and on how these perceptions harmonized with tensions and transformations in the discipline in the twentieth century.

The Lack of the Body and the Body of Writing in Kierkegaard

Author(s): Flaviu-Victor Câmpean / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

Søren Kierkegaard existed only through his work, which comprises his literary and philosophical pseudonymous oeuvre, the Journal and the theological bodies of work. When unable to nourish this vivid production anymore, he launched his attack against the church in a periodical called the Instant, an effort he could not sustain for too long. In the midst of the attack he fell violently ill in the street in Copenhagen and died in hospital, without having previously been diagnosed with a serious or fatal illness. On the other hand, his body has always been rendered as a failure, even as a missing element in some passages that reveal symptoms of different kinds of hypochondria. These are due to what he confesses to be an “excess of spirit”, a hyper-spiritual subject that enacted a peculiar melancholic and incorporeal condition. The failing body pertains to the lack of an effective body that could sustain existence and at the same time enforces the solution to the question concerning the unavoidable ek-sistence in anxiety (Heideggerian avant la lettre) by way of an incorporeal body of writing. In this paper I will point out the connections between the function of Kierkegaard's writing as a vehicle for shaping identity and the metaphors of the failing body, using a psychoanalytical approach, while trying at the same time to keep close to Kierkegaard’s own style of allusions and bitter irony as an attempt to save the unique subject by writing.

Schmerzlokalisation und Körperraum

Author(s): Mihai Ometiță / Language(s): German Issue: 1/2020

The paper brings a challenge to Cartesian dualism, while introducing some under-explored manuscript remarks from Wittgenstein’s middle period, which are methodologically and thematically akin to some passages from Merleau-Ponty’s early period. Cartesian dualism relegates pain to mental awareness and location to bodily extension, thus rendering common localizations of pain throughout the body as unintelligible ascriptions. Wittgenstein’s and Merleau-Ponty’s attempts at doing justice to common localizations of pain are mutually illuminating. In their light, Cartesian dualism turns out to involve an objectification and a deappropriation of one’s body. Moreover, Wittgenstein’s unveiling a heterogeneous multiplicity of corporeal spaces (e.g. visual-space, tactile-space, feeling-space) rehabilitates the view, reinforced by Merleau-Ponty, that corporeal pain is intimately related to corporeal localization, while corporeal space is not part of the physical space of things.

Über den Schmerz, die Transfiguration und die Fruchtbarkeit des Schöpferischen im Denken Nietzsches

Author(s): Marcel Hosu / Language(s): German Issue: 1/2020

The paper offers an overview of the development of the concept of pain in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche beginning with the musical conception of tragedy in his first major work The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music published 1872 up until the second edition of The Gay Science in 1886. It distinguishes between three periods in his thinking with regard to pain by taking into consideration both his published and unpublished works.

Schmerz, Symptom, Sublimation Von der Phänomenologie zur Psychoanalyse

Author(s): Virgil Ciomoş / Language(s): German Issue: 1/2020

In medicine and psychiatry, pain often falls under the term “comorbid disorder”. We will therefore begin with a brief phenomenological analysis of the term “comorbidity”. The emphasis here will not be so much on “morbidity” but on the prefix “co”, more precisely on the fusion between the various forms of morbidity, including the pain itself. I would like to further state that the real thing that comorbidity is concerned with is essentially the interaction between the organic and the psychic, or, generally speaking, that between “body” and “soul”. The prefix “co” can denote at least three possible situations, depending on the respective context: an organic cause with psychological effects, a psychological cause with organic effects, or, a much deeper source of origin, which is both organic as also affects the psychic and thus leaves behind the mere duality of this pair of terms. As we shall see, this last meaning became the source of inspiration for one of the important working hypotheses of phenomenology, which is the reduction of dualisms as body-soul, inside-outside, etc. from the perspective of their common condition of possibility. This hypothesis is shared by both psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic clinic that emerges from it.

Волтер и Русо у Дидроовим писмима

Author(s): Milan N. Janjić / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 21/2020

The aim of this paper is to present themes of Diderot’s letters sent to Voltaire and Rousseau. The main research corpus includes letters from the fifth volume of Diderot’s selected works (Correspondance, 1997), edited by Laurent Versini, the French expert for the 18th century. Today we have only five letters sent to Rousseau in 1757, and seven to Voltaire, the first from 1749, and the last from 1773. In addition, the letters about Rousseau and Voltaire which Diderot sent to other addressees will also be considered in this analysis. Apart from the personal correspondence, an instructive insight will also be given by referring to Diderot’s other writings, in which the author, directly or indirectly, mentions Voltaire and Rousseau. While interpreting that in this article, a closer and more precise definition of professional, collegial and/or friendly relations among the three famous intellectuals of the French Enlightenment, will be discovered.

Adrift in History, Who Is This One?: Art in the Critical Zone

Author(s): Christine Ramsay / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

This article explores the capacity of art for representing the question of ecological grief now confronting us in the Anthropocene. My art work is an ongoing series of drawings and paintings of dead birds entitled “Adrift in History.” In reflecting on the meaning of this artistic practice through environmental narrative and art as a complex site of productive experimentation, I place the experience of grief—regarding both human and animal mortality in our rapidly diminishing environment in the Anthropocene—on display and for interpretation within multiple modalities. This project brings together art, literature, poetry, psychology, philosophy, phenomenology, environmentalism, cultural ecology, anthropology, ornithology, and naturalism to frame the cycle of life, death and transformation. My goal is to juxtapose an ecocritical theoretical lens with the art work to create a discursive intermedial effect—one that asks, reflexively, what the value might be of contemplating, while creating, an interspecies, archetypal image of the soul and its potential emotional resonance in the traumatic contemporary moment of the Anthropocene condition. In “Who Is This One?”—a recent suite in the series “Adrift in History”—I dwell on the image of the North American robin—Turdus migratorius—a common backyard species, and one of the many birds now facing great risk. So, I depict the robin at rest, contingently, in a state of limbo between life, death and the after-life. Influenced by Jon Young’s environmental narrative, What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World, and the ecocritical concept of strategic empathy, I represent what the robin might feel. I am interested in how such images—and their capacity to evoke sympathy in the system of affinities between the embodied human mind and the more-than-human world enfolding animals, nature, and the environment as interdependent forces—might contribute to efforts to move us through and beyond grief, toward active investment as answerable, and ethical agents of social change.

Novel and Anti-Novel. Moretti Before Distant Reading

Author(s): Alex Cistelecan / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

The paper discusses an intermediary phase in Franco Moretti’s intellectual journey, namely the 1990s. This is a period of transition in Moretti’s thinking, in which he is working simultaneously on two fronts: on the one hand, he is refining and bringing to completion the style of close reading analysis he developed in the previous decade – namely the combination of evolutionary theory, formal-rhetorical analysis, and eclectic Marxism (with its highly volatile mix of Lukács, Wallerstein, and Della Volpe); on the other, he is forging the tools and concepts of what would become, after 2000, his defining intellectual signature – distant reading. The two undertakings correspond to two opposed literary objects: on the one hand, the novel – with its regularity of form, large-scale reproduction, centripetal movement, bourgeois imaginary, and national focus; on the other, what we call the ‘anti-novel’, which is the modern epic in Moretti’s understanding – the few dozen ‘world-texts’, highly polymorphous and reproducible only in few and select occurrences, centrifugal in their movement, and transcending the national and bourgeois perspectives, rooted as they are in the critical, semi-peripheral junctures of the capitalist world-system. The paper dwells on some of the oppositions and similarities, overlaps and contradictions, theoretical problems and practical solutions, raised or offered by the two methodological approaches and their corresponding literary objects.

Mathematics as a love of wisdom: Saunders Mac Lane as philosopher

Author(s): Colin McLarty / Language(s): English Issue: 69/2020

This note describes Saunders Mac Lane as a philosopher, and indeed as a paragon naturalist philosopher. He approaches philosophy as a mathematician. But, more than that, he learned philosophy from David Hilbert’s lectures on it, and by discussing it with Hermann Weyl, as much as he did by studying it with the mathematically informed Göttingen Philosophy professor Moritz Geiger.

Creating new concepts in mathematics: freedom and limitations. The case of Category Theory

Author(s): Zbigniew Semadeni / Language(s): English Issue: 69/2020

In the paper we discuss the problem of limitations of freedom in mathematics and search for criteria which would differentiate the new concepts stemming from the historical ones from the new concepts that have opened unexpected ways of thinking and reasoning.We also investigate the emergence of category theory (CT) and its origins. In particular we explore the origins of the term functor and present the strong evidence that Eilenberg and Carnap could have learned the term from Kotarbiński and Tarski.

Abstract logical structuralism

Author(s): Jean-Pierre Marquis / Language(s): English Issue: 69/2020

Structuralism has recently moved center stage in philosophy of mathematics. One of the issues discussed is the underlying logic of mathematical structuralism. In this paper, I want to look at the dual question, namely the underlying structures of logic. Indeed, from a mathematical structuralist standpoint, it makes perfect sense to try to identify the abstract structures underlying logic. We claim that one answer to this question is provided by categorical logic. In fact, we claim that the latter can be seen—and probably should be seen—as being a structuralist approach to logic and it is from this angle that categorical logic is best understood.

No-signaling in topos formulation and a common ontological basis for classical and non-classical physical theories

Author(s): Marek Kuś / Language(s): English Issue: 69/2020

Starting from logical structures of classical and quantum mechanics we reconstruct the logic of so-called no-signaling theories, where the correlations among subsystems of a composite system are restricted only by a simplest form of causality forbidding an instantaneous communication. Although such theories are, as it seems, irrelevant for the description of physical reality, they are helpful in understanding the relevance of quantum mechanics. The logical structure of each theory has an epistemological flavor, as it is based on analysis of possible results of experiments. In this note we emphasize that not only logical structures of classical, quantum and no-signaling theory may be treated on the same ground but it is also possible to give to all of them a common ontological basis by constructing a “phase space” in all cases. In non-classical cases the phase space is not a set, as in classical theory, but a more general object obtained by means of category theory, but conceptually it plays the same role as the phase space in classical physics.

Quantum geometry, logic and probability

Author(s): Shahn Majid / Language(s): English Issue: 69/2020

Quantum geometry on a discrete set means a directed graph with a weight associated to each arrow defining the quantum metric. However, these ‘lattice spacing’ weights do not have to be independent of the direction of the arrow. We use this greater freedom to give a quantum geometric interpretation of discrete Markov processes with transition probabilities as arrow weights, namely taking the diffusion form ∂+f = (−Δθ + q − p)f for the graph Laplacian Δθ, potential functions q, p built from the probabilities, and finite difference ∂+ in the time direction. Motivated by this new point of view, we introduce a ‘discrete Schrödinger process’ as ∂+ψ = ı(−Δ + V )ψ for the Laplacian associated to a bimodule connection such that the discrete evolution is unitary. We solve this explicitly for the 2-state graph, finding a 1-parameter family of such connections and an induced ‘generalised Markov process’ for f = |ψ|2 in which there is an additional source current built from ψ. We also mention our recent work on the quantum geometry of logic in ‘digital’ form over the field F2 = {0, 1}, including de Morgan duality and its possible generalisations.

Information and physics

Author(s): Radosław Kycia,Agnieszka Niemczynowicz / Language(s): English Issue: 69/2020

This is an overview article that contains the discussion of the connection between information and physics at the elementary level. We present a derivation of Lindauer’s bound for heat emission during irreversible logical operation. In this computation the Szilard’s version of Maxwell’s demon paradox is used as a model to design thermodynamic implementation of a single bit of computer memory. Lindauer’s principle also motivates the discussion on the practical and emergent nature of the information. Apart from physics, the principle has implications in philosophy.

The homunculus brain and categorical logic

Author(s): Steve Awodey,Michał Heller / Language(s): English Issue: 69/2020

The interaction between syntax (formal language) and its semantics (meanings of language) is one which has been well studied in categorical logic. The results of this particular study are employed to understand how the brain is able to create meanings. To emphasize the toy character of the proposed model, we prefer to speak of the homunculus brain rather than the brain per se. The homunculus brain consists of neurons, each of which is modeled by a category, and axons between neurons, which are modeled by functors between the corresponding neuron-categories. Each neuron (category) has its own program enabling its working, i.e. a theory of this neuron. In analogy to what is known from categorical logic, we postulate the existence of a pair of adjoint functors, called Lang and Syn, from a category, now called BRAIN, of categories, to a category, now called MIND, of theories. Our homunculus is a kind of “mathematical robot”, the neuronal architecture of which is not important. Its only aim is to provide us with the opportunity to study how such a simple brain-like structure could “create meanings” and perform abstraction operations out of its purely syntactic program. The pair of adjoint functors Lang and Syn model the mutual dependencies between the syntactical structure of a given theory of MIND and the internal logic of its semantics given by a category of BRAIN. In this way, a formal language (syntax) and its meanings (semantics) are interwoven with each other in a manner corresponding to the adjointness of the functors Lang and Syn. Higher cognitive functions of abstraction and realization of concepts are also modelled by a corresponding pair of adjoint functors. The categories BRAIN and MIND interact with each other with their entire structures and, at the same time, these very structures are shaped by this interaction.

Category Theory in the hands of physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers

Author(s): Mariusz Stopa / Language(s): English Issue: 69/2020

Book review: Category Theory in Physics, Mathematics, and Philosophy, Kuś M., Skowron B. (eds.), Springer Proc. Phys. 235, 2019, pp.xii+134.

Измеренията на понятието „философия“ във византийската мисловна култура

Author(s): Georgi Kapriev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 26/2020

The paper answers in a systematic way the question of the existence and specificity of the concepts of philosophy in the culture of thought of the Eastern Roman Empire. It discusses the ambiguity of the term, the faces of theoretical philosophy, the competencies of philosophy, the philosophical-theological discourse, the relationship between philosophy and wisdom, as well as the definitions of philosophy.

За свободата на волята. Отново. (Парадоксът на Августин)

Author(s): Gergana Dineva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 26/2020

The present text outlines one possible interpretation of the Augustinian concepts of freedom and free will. What at first glance seems paradoxically incompatible within Augustine’s position, could be viewed as a result of his attempt to bring into line in the most consistent way the teachings of Scripture, especially of the New Testament, with the inherited powerful substantial-naturalist philosophical tradition of the Ancient thought. It is this specific hybridity of Augustine’s context that allows him to create a solid bridge between the classical Platonic-Aristotelian onto-realist philosophy of man and the Late Medieval philosophy of man as an ens morale.

За възможността-битие

Author(s): Nicolaus Cusanus / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 26/2020

Translation from the original Latin of the treatise by Nikolaus von Kues, Trialogus de possest.

Отвъд спиритуализма и мистицизма – антропологическата алтернатива

Author(s): Georgi Kapriev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 26/2020