Povijest najljepših otkrića i eksperimenata u fizici: od Aristotela do Higgsa

Author(s): Slavica Brkić / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 20/2015

The history of natural sciences reaches back to the distant past when man consciously started conveying knowledge and experiences to his descendants. In antiquity the research founded on experience was considered unworthy of man, while discoveries occurred accidentally. Physics, as a natural science, studies the objective reality existing independently on human consciousness. It is as a theoretical as experimental science, and it should be studied as such. How interesting is the historical development of experiments and discoveries, is shown by the editors of the American magazine “Physics World”, who in 2002 called their readers to give their vote for the most beautiful experiment in the history of physics. Some discoveries fascinate by the beauty of the idea, and some others by the importance for the development of physics. The development of historical ideas has a great educational importance for students for they have to understand that the development of physics is the work of people like them, rather than something developing outside of the space and time or exists by itself. In the last decades discoveries are not related to one man but rather to groups of scientists associated in collaborations working jointly on researches in specific areas of physics. In this paper we present the historical development of physics through interesting discoveries and experiments with the explanation why they found a place in our survey.

Мирослав Дачев. Слово и образ

Author(s): Elka Bakalova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 3/2003

Błąd antropologiczny jako podstawa totalitaryzmu

Author(s): Paweł Bortkiewicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 25/2015

The author of the article notices that discussions on the essence of totalitarianism revolve mostly around: the sphere of distorted political relations, replacing the authority with the dictate of the authorities, monopoly of one party in all spheres of life controlled by such a party. Alternatively, they focus on economic relations, which makes them particularly expressive, yet easily falsifiable. Referring to the reflections of John Paul II, the author notes that the Pope’s diagnosis of the current state of affairs concerning the Copernican revolution in philosophy is immensely interesting and extremely inspiring. It was a revolution in the cognitive sphere but, consequently, it led to the ‘exile’ of God from the real world and rendered Him be perceived as being existing in some other world. The aforementioned exile of God was meant to end with the death of God but this process led, in fact, to the destruction of man. The author states that without reference to the anthropological error it is impossible to understand the essence of moral evil of totalitarianism.

АНТИУТОПИЧЕСКИЙ ПАФОС И СПЕЦИФИКА ХРОНОТОПА В РАННЕЙ ПРОЗЕ В.О. ПЕЛЕВИНА

Author(s): Anastasia Leonidovna Bobyleva,Tatiana Gennadevna Prokhorova / Language(s): Russian Issue: 2/2014

The paper analyses the dystopian tendencies in Victor Pelevin’s prose of the 1990s. The features of the chronotope and the dialogic connections with classic dystopias are revealed. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the dystopian look at the future is replaced in Pelevin’s works by the post-utopian view on the present. At the same time, the nature of the chronotope is determined by the Buddhist conception of human life as a chain of sufferings and the idea of the circle of samsara. However, both post-utopian and Buddhist paradigms undergo travesty, which leads to the transformation of the chronotope and the conflict as well as to the reduction of the dystopian pathos. As a result, the genre of dystopia becomes an object of parody.

MİRZƏ FƏTƏLİ AXUNDOV, HEYDƏR HÜSEYNOVUN TƏDQİQİNDƏ

Author(s): Rəşad Əsgərov / Language(s): Azerbaijani Issue: 18/2013

Mirza Fatali Akhundov whose 200 years anniversary celebrated this year attended philosophical, scientific view, aesthetic and aesthetic thoughts and philosophical thoughts about religion, women and men law equality, the alphabet reform and etc. have been investigated in the article. The acquaintance of Akhundov with the European enlightener”s works and his services in the development of enlightened philosophical Huseynov’s studying here. From the beginning Akhundov have dealed all the events which took place in the East world with Islam religion and with the moollah who are religion carriers and then he kept loyal attention to Islam and valued highly positive influence to welfare. Taking into account the realism in intellect theory Akhundov adopted the unity of feeling and rationality. In the conclusion of Heydar Huseynov’s investigation it especially is pointed out that Akhundov’s scientific heritage played especial role in the development of national culture of Azerbaijan and all eastern peoples.

Shaftesbury as a Popperian: critical rationalism before its time? Part II

Author(s): Lydia Amir / Language(s): English Issue: 36/2016

Shaftesbury has assigned humor an unparalleled role within philosophy, which may be encapsulated in the following tenets: (1) ridicule is the test of truth; (2) humor and good humor have a habilitating function with regard to truth; (3) the most effective criticism is humorous; and (4) humor is the mark of rationality. In the present article, I introduce Shaftesbury’s views on ridicule, good humor and humor in order to assess both the originality and viability of Shaftesbury’s contribution. I argue, first, that Shaftesbury’s views on ridicule as a test of truth and on good-humor as habilitating truth are thoroughly original, but cannot be implemented without adhering to his metaphysics and epistemology. Second, Shaftesbury’s views on humor are only partially original, though these can be implemented independently of metaphysical and epistemological assumptions for the greatest benefit of philosophers in general and critical rationalists in particular. I conclude that not only does Shaftesbury anticipate the view that critical thinking is the core of rationality, the main principle of the view known as critical rationalism associated with the renown 20th century philosopher of science and social philosopher, Karl Popper, but he also offers a viable means to enhance criticism as rationality by taking into consideration the psychological resistance to criticism that Popper acknowledges but refuses to address.

Uniwersytet w przecięciu świata i domu. W stronę afirmacji myślenia osobnego

Author(s): Aleksnadra Kunce / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2016

This essay discusses the important question concerning the understanding of university. The author uses anthropological and philosophical approaches to develop the interpretation of the local-worldly university. Why shall we think about university at the intersection of the world and home? The main aim of the article is to describe and interpret problems of autonomy, location, and connection with regions. The author refers to Plato, Aristotle, Herder, Humboldt, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, Heidegger, Merton, Lyotard, Derrida, and Esposito. The explanation of the idea of wonder leads to the consideration of an important role of university as an independent and autonomous place in our common space. Thinking about university as an independent entity is an act of retreating from the conception of university as a centre of innovation, yielding unified and standardized thought, yet deprived of roots. University is not a realm of “the same.” If we take care of “the difference,” in particular, if we think about the Derridean term “différance”, we should affirm “the difference” in the daily practice of our universities. University is obliged to strengthen independent thinking and engaged practice, to encourage dealing with inconvenient themes and producing unprecedented narratives. We thus need to affirm our right to independence. Local orientation of university brings about the common creation of the space, which involves not only pride in one’s identity, but also a sense of the infinite, the impossible, the incomprehensible, and the strange. The local-worldly university leads us to recognition university at the intersection of the world and home.

Developmental Freedom and Social Order: Rethinking the Relation between Work and Equality

Author(s): Louise Haagh / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2007

This essay points to an institutional account of our existential interest in work as a missing piece in welfare analysis. In contrast with social liberals in the post-war era, both liberal economic and egalitarian discourses today espouse a narrowly atomistic account of human nature and the modern economy. Therefore they are unable to take account of the institutional bases of economic development, individual autonomy and social order, and the way these connect. The essay shows that a patterning of distributional outcomes is a reality in both deregulated and densely governed capitalist economies, but that only the latter offers real scope for social and individual choice. The influence of the atomistic account on liberal egalitarian thought however has produced an unambitious, imprecise, and in the case of welfare contractualism, a coercive, account of both individual freedom and social community. What is needed is a more explicit inclusion of a temporal dimension in welfare and economic analysis and a more differentiated framework of pluralist governance.

Morality and value neutrality in economics: a dualist view

Author(s): Cheng Li / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2019

This paper proposes a dualist view that economics exhibits the properties of both moral science and value-neutral approach, regardless of the normative-positive distinction. Our argumentation is derived from the understanding that, analytically, economics is a broadly-defined rational choice theory. As implied by this claim, on the one hand, economics behaves as a moral science for two main reasons: all economic theories and policy discussions are necessarily based on moral premises about means-end considerations; economics as an analytical approach can be and has been applied to explanations of a wide range of moral phenomena. On the other hand, since economists — without being informed of some ethical presuppositions of higher order — cannot deal with the comparisons among different value criteria, their approach remains neutral regarding judgmental positions, which should be given a priori to make economic enquiries possible. Ultimately, by this view we reconcile morality with value neutrality in economics, without slicing the discipline into two distinctive branches.

Book Reviews

Author(s): Metin Atmaca,Joost Jongerden,Sabri Ateş,Francis O’Connor,Marouf Cabi / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

Sebastian Maisel, ed., The Kurds: an Encyclopedia of Life, Culture, and Society, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2018, 376 pp., (978-1-4408-4256-6). Murat Yeşiltaş and Tuncay Kardaş, eds., Non-State Armed Actors in the Middle East: Geopolitics, Ideology, Strategy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 278 pp., (ISBN: 978-3-319-55287-3). Barbara Henning, Narratives of the History of the Ottoman-Kurdish Bedirhani Family in Imperial and Post-Imperial Contexts: Continuities and Changes. Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press, 2018, 756 pp., (ISBN: 9783863095512). Gareth Stansfield and Mohammed Shareef, eds, The Kurdish Question Revisited. London: C Hurst & Co., 2017, 712 pp., (ISBN-10: 0190687185; ISBN-13: 978-0190687182). Abbas Amanat, Iran: A Modern History, New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2017, pp. 1000, (ISBN-10: 0300112548, ISBN-13: 978-0300112542).

Fenntarthatóság és népesedés: globalizmus vagy lokalizmus

Author(s): János Tóth I. / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 4/2018

Today, sustainable development is very closely linked to neoliberal globalism that threatens with giving big capital excessive amounts of power. Moreover, globalization leads to the homogenization of mankind, that is, to the disappearance of languages, cultures and lifestyles, therefore it must be avoided. The only way to preserve the diversity of mankind is through achieving sustainability at local levels. Sustainability has demographical aspects as well – the overpopulation that characterizes Africa is just as unsustainable as the depopulation that is typical for Europe. For European nations, there are two ways to ensure stability in terms of population size: the global way (letting in more immigrants) and the local way (higher birth rates). The global solution is once more wrong – immigrants coming in large masses cannot be integrated. The ideal solution would be for everyone to bear 2-3 children, but the process would require a complete transformation of the general social attitude. The process would take place much faster and it would be easier if 10-15% of the couples, respectively of the women in childbearing age would undertake the task of giving birth and raising at least 5 children and the necessary framework could be the implementation of a new institution, that of full-time parenthood as a form of employment.

Някои аспекти на влиянието на изкуствения интелект върху медиите

Author(s): Stoyko Petkov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2018

The article discusses some aspects of the changes brought about by the entry of bot journalism and artificial intelligence into media practice. In the coming years, these innovations will change news organizations, starting with automated journalism, which provides the opportunity to personalize news content precisely, going through news created on demand and arriving at interactive voice-enabled news.

From the category theory in mathematics to bio-cosmology

Author(s): Milan Tasić / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

We argue that philosophy and mathematics could accomplish far more fruitful encounter with the Being, since by number it is possible to go to such an extent behind the reality (Pythagoras) and if the four causes of Aristotle would be (especially in the human sphere) over again actualized. Alain Badiou has already pointed that "mathematics is ontology," and now we have that the category theory in mathematics – having already covered other fields of this science – continues to find applications in a series of "non-traditional" domains of reality. In that correlation, philosophy could express too, its (primary) need for truth, justice, beauty, as well as for an overall development in the sense of human purposes – due to the undreamed power of the technological progress (say of hardware and software in informatics) today. In that manner, the philosophy of mathematics could radicalize its claims from the perspective of the slogan ''One and All'' of the first philosopher Thales and of such a (powerful) mathematical idiom in front of the reality of Being – this time, in the spirit of bio-Cosmology (neo-Aristotelism).

Cultural transformations of love and sex in the digital age

Author(s): Kristian Bankov / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

This second volume of our journal addresses an uneasy topic. It is uneasy exactly because it is too easy to speak about love and sex and yet say nothing. It is uneasy because there has not been tremendous academic interest in this topic within the field of humanities and social sciences, and contributions to the field have thus been sporadic and unsystematic. Moreover, it is uneasy because, compared to other aspects of our everyday life, love and sex concern our being in a way that it is difficult to observe in a neutral or scientific way.

The resilience of modern neoclassical economics – a case study in the light of Ludwik Fleck’s ‘harmony of deception’

Author(s): Arne Heise / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

In this paper, Ludwick Fleck’s philosophy and sociology of science will be briefly outlined in order to establish a ‘theory of the resilience of scientific misapprehension’. This theory will be use in order to gain insights into the modes of operation of defence and resilience of modern neoclassical economics in the face of recent harsh critique by singling out a case of extreme deviation of theoretical prediction from empirical evidence: minimum wages’ impact on employment.

Reconsidering economics in relation to sustainable development and democracy

Author(s): Peter Söderbaum / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

The challenge of sustainable development can be approached from different angles. In this essay it is argued that one also needs to examine the present close to monopoly position of neoclassical economic theory at university departments of economics in many parts of the world. An open debate is needed about paradigms in economics as well as ideological orientations.An alternative to neoclassical theory is outlined where individuals and organizations are regarded as political actors, each guided by an ideological orientation or mission. Reference is made to the 17 UN sustainable development goals suggesting that impacts need to be seen in multidimensional terms and an alternative definition of economics as “multidimensional management of limited resources in a democratic society” is proposed. It is argued that economics need to move away from its technocracy-oriented tendencies to democracy-oriented approaches. This is exemplified by a move away from neoclassical Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) to Positional Analysis as approach to decision-making and sustainability assessment.

The unrealistic realist philosophy. The ontology of econometrics revisited

Author(s): Mariusz Maziarz / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

The argument put forth in this article shows that the hitherto scientific-realist approaches to econometrics are incongruent with the realistically reconstructed empirical macroeconomics. The SR approaches share in common being realist about the relations depicted by (successful) models. The economic models of data are sensitive to minor changes in sample and estimating methods what creates the ‘emerging contrary result’ phenomenon: the community of econometricians accept models that are inconsistent. Being SR about econometrics equals committing oneself to the following trilemma: (1) it is feasible to indicate the successful models that rightly isolate/idealize the regularities of the economy (the knowledge thesis); (2) econometric models are about the economic world (the independence thesis); and, at least in some areas of application, (3) successful econometric models contradict each other.

Economic essays (part one): toward a realistic concept of choice

Author(s): Frederic B. Jennings Jr. / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

These essays were originally drafted 30 years ago between 1988 and 1990, and then they were filed away and rediscovered just this year. They represented an attempt to offer a simple and unadorned version of fundamental issues in economics pertaining to our urgent need for a realistic concept of choice on which to found our constructions. The first essay introduces the notion of ‘opportunity cost’ and our use of caeteris paribus in the process of partial analysis. The second essay offers two metaphors for economic behavior: the ‘neighborhood store’ where virtually all neoclassical choice occurs; and the ‘chessboard’ that opens three issues simply ignored in orthodox settings. The third essay addresses the problem of interdependence, since choice in this setting confronts our range of awareness as bounded where outcomes spread forever with externalities everywhere, ruling out additivity.

A Review of Piero Ferri, Minsky’s Moment. An Insider’s View on the Economics of Hyman Minsky, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019, 252 pp., ISBN 978-1-78897-372-4

Author(s): Andreas Stamate-Ştefan / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

IN MEMORIAM: Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-2019)

Author(s): Richard E. Lee / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019