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This paper is devoted to exploring the cultural background of the manifesto of the Cracow Circle, a philosophical group consisting of Józef Maria Bocheński, O.P., Jan Franciszek Drewnowski, Rev. Jan Salamucha and Bolesław Sobociński. The group was mentored by Jan Łukasiewicz and Rev. Konstanty Michalski. The manifesto of the Cracow Circle aimed to apply the programme of the Lvov-Warsaw School to Catholic theology and philosophy. Within the school, special emphasis was placed on Łukasiewicz’s version of the programme. The amendments to be carried out concerned: (a) refurbishing philosophical language to meet all the conditions of proper scientific discourse, (b) incorporating mathematical logic, (c) upgrading semiotics and methodology, and (d) using formal methods in philosophy. Four groups of circumstances are analysed as the milieu of the Cracow Circle at the beginning of the 20th century and in direct relation to the influential activities of its four founders: (a) esprit de l’époque, (b) state of philosophy, (c) state of logic, and (d) state of theology.
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In this paper the author recalls his meetings with J.F. Drewnowski, which took place near Warsaw. Drewnowski and others form the so-called Krakow circle (J. Salamucha, I.M. Bocheński, and also B. Sobociński were supported by J. Łukasiewicz and under the patronage of K. Michalski) intended to develop a program for improving Thomism by means of logic. After the war, the school of philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin would be involved in its development, but over time it adopted a more and more critical approach. This is especially true of M.A. Krąpiec, the key Polish existential Thomist. The logician and methodologist S. Kamiński was less radical in his criticism, whereas J. Kalinowski maintained his logical approach. The author of this article, who is a member of the Lublin School of Philosophy, takes this opportunity to raise questions, make comparative remarks, and formulate general considerations.
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This paper considers and assesses the discussion between J. F. Drewnowski and S. Kamiński concerning how to apply logic in philosophy (more precisely: in general metaphysics within the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition). In this debate, Drewnowski defended the position of the Krakow Circle according to which it is possible to apply the tools of formal logic in metaphysics. In opposition to Drewnowski, Kamiński formulated many arguments for the thesis that it is impossible to apply formal logic in philosophy. The second half of this paper draws some conclusions from this debate that are relevant to our current understanding of the application of logic in philosophy. n the final part of the paper we criticize Kamiński’s view, which is characteristic of the so-called Lublin philosophical school.
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This paper illustrates and critically evaluates Jan Franciszek Drewnowski’s philosophical views on mathematics and logic. It is based on four sources. The main source is his “Zarys programu filozoficznego” (“Outline of a Philosophical Program”) (1934). Further sources include two of Drewnowski’s papers, “Stosowanie logiki symbolicznej w filozofii” (“Application of symbolic logic in philosophy”) (1965) and “Uwagi o stosowaniu logiki symbolicznej” (“Remarks on applying symbolic logic”) (1967), as well as fragments from his diary. This paper aims to show how Drewnowski understood mathematics and mathematical theories, how he conceived logic and its role in science, as well as to what extent he was familiar with contemporary achievements in mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics and his awareness of their relevance for the philosophy of mathematics.
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According to Aristotle, logic is a tool for philosophy. After nearly two and a half thousand years, we can say that not only logic, but also other formal tools and structures (algebra, topology, branched proof, induction) are tools for philosophical and also scientific consideration. Jan F. Drewnowski supported the use of formal tools in philosophy.In this article I describe Drewnowski’s position in relation to the formal study of philosophical problems (using logic and mathematical concepts). I also present contemporary formal solutions to certain philosophical problems, which can be understood as a justification for Drewnowski’s anticipation of the „power of formalism” and which in his time -were not always well received.
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The concreteness of life presupposes not only death but equally the process of dying. Reflecting these Phenomena – dying and death – is necessary to make the phenomenon of life more compre-hensible. Both the individual and the social life need to be confronted with the factualness of cessa-tion. In this respect, every social form, which does not escape itself, cannot one-dimensionally cele-brate life without reflecting on death. A self-conscious life-entity must (1) be able to differentiate between living and dying and recognize its own death; (2) make itself known the deviations mecha-nisms of this process; (3) give thought to suicide and sense its limits; (4) reveal the obstructions that daily-life represents in order to reflect on this process. The reflection of dying and death may not represent something new, it is, however, an ever-vital moment of human life.
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Among the important conceptual innovations introduced in the second scholasticism era and motivated by theological debates following the Council of Trent were the theories of moral necessity and moral implication. As they were centred upon a view of moral necessity as a form of necessity weaker than physical (and, ipso facto, metaphysical and logical) necessity, and moral implication as weaker than physical (and, ipso facto, metaphysical and logical) implication, some interpretations of moral necessity encouraged the logic of statistical hypotheses and probability. Three branches of this debate are studied in this paper: the explanation of moral necessity in terms of suppositio (Vega, Molina, Hurtado, Sforza Pallavicino), the confrontation over the interpretation of moral necessity (Quirós, Herrera), and the theory of statistical quantification (Elizalde, Terill, de Benedictis).
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The present paper investigates the seventeenth-century debate on whether the agreement of all human beings upon certain notions—designated as the “common” ones—prove these notions to be innate. It does so by focusing on Descartes’ and Locke’s rejections of the philosophy of Herbert of Cherbury, one of the most important early modern proponents of this view. The paper opens by considering the strategy used in Herbert’s arguments, as well as the difficulties involved in them. It shows that Descartes’ 1638 and 1639 reading of Herbert’s On Truth—both the 1633 second Latin edition and Mersenne’s 1639 translation—was instrumental in shaping Descartes’ views on the issue. The arguments of Locke’s Essay opposing Herbert’s case for innatism are thus revealed to be ineffective against the case which Descartes makes for this same doctrine, since Descartes had in fact framed his conception of innateness in opposition to the very same theses as Locke was arguing against. The paper concludes by explaining how two thinkers as antithetical as Locke and Descartes came to agree on at least one point, and a truly crucial one: namely, that universal consent counts as a criterion neither for innatism nor for truth.
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This paper explores how, according to three early modern philosophers, philosophical theory should relate to our pre-theoretical picture of reality. Though coming from very different backgrounds, the Spanish scholastic, Domingo de Soto, and the English natural philosopher, Kenelm Digby, agreed that an ability to accommodate our pre-theoretical picture of the world and our ordinary way of speaking about reality is a virtue for a philosophical theory. Yet at the same time, they disagreed on what kind of ontology of the material world is implied by these. The Dutch Cartesian, Johannes de Raey, took a very different approach, and argued that the picture of reality we naturally develop from our early days onwards and the language associated with it have their use in domains such as law and medical practice, but are a poor guide to the ontology of the material world. Thus, if we are to arrive at a proper understanding of the nature of matter, we need to move beyond the picture of reality we naturally develop from our early days onwards in order to come to see that the nature of matter consists in bare extension.
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In his defense of innateness in New Essays on Human Understanding (1704), Leibniz attributes innateness to concepts and principles which do not originate from the senses rather than to the ideas that we are born with. He argues that the innate concepts and principles can be known in two ways: through reason or natural light (necessary truths), and through instincts (other innate truths and principles). In this paper I will show how theoretical and moral reasoning differ from each other in Leibniz, and compare moral reasoning and instincts as sources of knowledge in his practical philosophy. As the practical instincts are closely related to pleasure and passions, which are by nature cognitive, my emphasis will be on the affective character of instinctive moral action and especially deliberation which leads to moral action. I will argue that inclinations arising from moral instinct, which lead us to pleasure while avoiding sorrow, can direct our moral action and sometimes anticipate reasoning when conclusions are not readily available. Acting by will, which is related to moral reasoning, and acting by instincts can lead us to the same moral knowledge independently, but they can also complement each other. To illustrate the two alternative ways to reach moral knowledge, I will discuss the case of happiness, which is the goal of all human moral action for Leibniz.
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While contemporary accounts understand esteem and self-esteem as essentially competitive phenomena, early modern natural law theorists developed a conception of justified esteem and self-esteem based on naturally good character traits. This article explores how such a normative conception of esteem and self-esteem is developed in the work of Christian Wolff (1679–1754). Two features make Wolff’s approach distinctive: (1) He uses the analysis of common notions that are expressed in everyday language to provide a foundation for the aspects of natural law on which his conception of natural duties of esteem depends. (2) He develops a non-competitive conception of esteem and self-esteem into a cooperative conception, according to which enhancing the esteem in which others are held is seen as a tool for promoting self-perfection. Wolff’s ideas offer a solution to the well-known problems connected with competitive life-styles, and at the same time assign a central role in moral motivation to the desire of being esteemed and of having high self-esteem. Moreover, due to his emphasis on presenting a philosophical analysis based on common notions, he offers a solution that is meant to be persuasive from the perspective of everyday morality.
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In the years after the first circulation of Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo’s Padua anti-Copernican colleague, the staunch Aristotelian philosopher, Cesare Cremonini, published a book on ‘traditional’ cosmology, Disputatio de coelo in tres partes divisa (Venice, 1613) which puzzled the Roman authorities of the Inquisition and the Index much more than any works on celestial novelties and ‘neo-Pythagorean’ astronomy. Cremonini’s disputation on the heavens has the form of an over-intricate comment of Aristotle’s conceptions, in the typically argumentative style of Scholasticism. Nonetheless, it immediately raised the concern of Cardinal Bellarmin, the Pope and other Inquisitors. At a close reading, Cremonini’s interpretation of Aristotle’s cosmos proved radically anti-Christian. It represented a radicalization of Pomponazzian Alexandrism. In fact, Cremonini did not only circulate Aristotelian principles used by Pomponazzi to argue for the soul’s mortality (first, no thought is possible without imagination and the latter faculty is dependent on the body; secondly, all that is generated will eventually perish). He also wiped away all transcendence from the Aristotelian cosmos. In fact, he marginalized the function of the motive Intelligences by explaining heavenly motions through the action of animallike inseparable souls although he did not erase nor reduced all Intelligences to only one, in accordance with Alexander. Also, he put at the center of Aristotle’s cosmos the idea of its eternity, a thesis which he explicitly connected with the rejection of the idea of God the Creator. Cremonini assumed that the universal efficiens, that is the efficient cause of all motion and change in the world, is nothing but the first heaven. As a result of this radically naturalist reading of Aristotle, he banned God from the cosmos, reduced Him to the final cause of the world, and deprived Him of any efficiency and will. This essay on less explored sources of Renaissance astronomical debates considers the institutional, cultural and religious setting of Cremonini’s teaching and conceptions. It assesses the reasons for his troubles with the religious authorities, and the political support he was granted by the Serenissima Republic of Venice in spite of the scandalous opinions he circulated as a university professor. My reconstruction of his views is based on the Disputatio de coelo of 1613 and later works, which are directly connected with cosmo-theological polemics with the religious authorities: his Apologia dictorum Aristotelis de quinta coeli substantia (1616) and the unpublished book De coeli efficientia, two manuscript copies of which are preserved in the libraries of Padua and Venice.
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The essay draws on the concept of ‘asymmetric counter-concepts’ as developed by Reinhart Koselleck starting with twin-formulas such as ‘the familiar and the unfamiliar’ which are generally used to establish collective designations of the self and others and which institutionalize the axiological and the epistemological. These counter-concepts can have different semantic temperatures. The focus is on the underlying meaning-production schemes which produce value-asymmetries. The essay tries to show that a process of heating up these value-asymmetries is only one side of the history of such asymmetric counter-concepts from medieval to modern times. Simultaneously a cooling down can be observed in written texts from different periods; examples include the 12th century Rolandslied and the 16th century Essais of Michel de Montaigne. Full negation eliminates uncertainties and value insecurities. But the complexities and contingencies that emerge since Early Modern times then lead to losses of negatability (Negierbarkeitsverluste), which in turn render gains in unfamiliarity. The modern experience of the foreign is indeterminate otherness instead of determined negation that characterized pre-modern alterity. Modern societies therefore need to mediate between validity and contingency under the circumstances of plurality. Interpretational demands and uncertainty about the relevant interpretive frames increase. Foreignness is then experienced as unfamiliarity. This presupposes intellectual attitudes like irritability, curiosity, and willingness to learn. The modern concept of ‘culture’ then is proposed as a comparative pattern where only unavoidable structural asymmetry remains. It explains cultural differences and the experience of foreignness through heterogeneity. Using this specifically modern pattern, there is no longer a legitimate value slope between one’s own position and its negation. The distinction is then between the familiar and the unfamiliar.
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The article presents two early Romanian Marxist-Leninist books, authored by two Romanian representative marxists. Both books were simultaneously published in March 1946, shortly after the occupation of the country by the Soviet Army, as a consequence of Romaniaʼs defeat in the Second World War. Both have a strong programmatic character. The first book, Curente și tendințe în filozofia românească [Streams of Thought and Tendencies in Romanian Philosophy] was written by Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, at that time Minister of Justice in the newly installed communist Romanian Government. Streams of Thought and Tendencies in Romanian Philosophy strives to put in an unfavorable light the entire Romanian philosophical movement, on the basis of a severe analysis from the standpoint of Dialectical Materialism (which is, for the first time, systematically exposed by a Romanian communist figure), preparing it for the complete subsequent destruction and its replacement by Marxism, in its final Stalinist version. The main thesis of the book is that various Romanian philosophical contributions were poor imitations of obsolete Western philosophical ones, at their turn ready to be rejected and replaced. The second book, entitled Introducere în etica nouă [Introduction to New Ethics], was the first book of C. Ionescu-Gulian, a future prodigious communist figure, in charge of philosophical matters in Romania. The „New Ethics” that Gulian proposed to the public did not exist then, as he admitted. However, it envisages (anticipates) a new type of man: the Soviet man, in which the „New Ethics” buries its roots. Moreover, the „New Ethics” aims at and, at the same time, is obliged to justify the complete elimination of any opponent the new type of man could encounter during his universal affirmation as value creator. The „New Ethics” pays a special attention to the ethical concept of necessity, being also constructed as an ideological tool for an insistent (or: demanding) validation of any aggressive action of new human model as a self-defense action and it represents the first elaboration of Historical Materialism by an Romanian author. As a consequence of the distribution of the two books, the Communist Party acquired a theoretical basis to undertake further actions that led to the complete abolition of Romanian traditional schools of thought.
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This paper critically discusses the achievements of the most important representatives of the history of philosophy, sociology, political science in the interpretation of the fundamental philosophical issues and social phenomena of modern times. In the philosophical works which begin with the debate with Popper through the most recent papers in which the research in the modern and postmodern European philosophy is intensified, Milan Brdar critically reconsiders the main ideas of Descartes’ and Hegel’s philosophy trying to address the modern idea of reason as self-conscious self-relation in the spirit of analytic Cartesian method and radical philosophical self-reflection. This form of critical theoretical reconsideration implies that, if we want to be autonomous and free subjects not only of our individual but also of our collective way of life and history, we have to relate to ourselves as well as to others critically and to be conscious of that relation. This paper points out that the author starts from the crucial idea of the modern European philosophy that philosophy does not address, only the matter itself, but also one’s self-reflection. In his opinion the permanent self-reflection of philosophy represents the crucial condition which philosophy has to fulfill in order to become the reliable instrument of understanding of the society.
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