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Experimental philosophy relies on traditional philosophy to define the problems by which traditional philosophy objectifies its theories. As opposed to this approach, experimental philosophers strive to distinguish their colleague’s intuitions from folk intuitions, with regard to notions such as free will, determinism, the afterlife, moral responsibility. According to experimental philosophers, a theory can be verified through an empirical database, using inventories, questionnaires and even case studies. Thus, a philosopher’s concept of moral responsibility should not be taken for granted; instead, in striving for certainty, a philosopher’s theory should be compared with that of non-philosophers. This method does not devalue the philosopher’s opinion but rather supports philosophical concepts and theory with empirical data.Experimental philosophers tend to explore intuitions in order to find which beliefs are intuitively produced and which are not. Also, how large and significant is the difference between the intuitions of philosophers and those of ordinary people. A good way to find the answer is to survey both groups and see how their answers differ. In the article, the author explores what kind of intuitions philosophers and ordinary people have and share, and to what extent philosophical theories can be confirmed or rejected on the basis of a comparative analysis between the responses of these two groups.
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In imitation of a remark by Wittgenstein, in which he speaks of “Zufriedenheit”/ “contentment”, and with the help of other relevant remarks, the present brief paper tries to show the great importance the concept of “contentment” had for Wittgenstein. It is an important link between Life and Philosophy in Wittgenstein’s work, and demonstrates what he held to be the desirable way of living and philosophizing.
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The title phrase “The Owls Are Not What They Seem”, taken from the TV series Twin Peaks, is a motivating metaphor for reflections concerning the fact that contemporary non-classical science often provides us with what I call an epistemological surprise. The main lesson contained in this surprise is that things which we know from our centuries-long experience are in fact not what they appear to be. For the purpose, I discuss the misleading role of naïve philosophical realism lying in the background of the growth of contemporary scientific knowledge.
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This article addresses the postmodern attack on science. On the basis of relativism, postmodernism posits that science should not have a more privileged status than pseudoscientific or plainly anti-scientific disciplines. Some 20th-century philosophers have unfortunately provided intellectual ammunition for this attack. Levi-Strauss’s approach to rationality, Peter Winch’s criticisms of Evans-Pritchard, Wittgenstein’s notion of “language games”, Kuhn’s approach to the incommensurability of paradigms, and Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism, are duly addressed and criticized in the article. Likewise, Popper’s philosophy of science has been erroneously used by postmodernists to attack science. This article clarifies some of these misconceptions
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The present study is focused on the zoological content of Vasil Stoyanov-Beron’s book Natural history: Part One. Zoology”. As one of the first works of its kind in Bulgaria, the book particularly merits analysis, which would permit evaluating the level of zoological knowledge in the country at the time of its publication and enable making comparisons with the respective level of knowledge in other countries at that time as well as in the present. The article provides such an analysis. A significant characteristic of the book in question is that it combines zoological information that is still valid in our time with a variety of popular and accessible topics that are absent in the scientific style of writing today.
More...философско-историческите размишления на Иван Гюзелев
The text discusses philosophical and historical issues present in the works of the prominent Bulgarian educator Ivan Gyuzelev (1844–1916). His publications in the religious periodicals Church Newspaper and Associated Labor are commented on. The ideas of the philosopher regarding the connection between religion and social progress are analyzed. The article concludes that Gyuzelev represents a paradoxical combination between the basic views of the French Enlightenment and Christianity. His conception defines religion as a natural striving for perfection. According to this Bulgarian mathematician and philosopher, the relationship between Christianity and material and spiritual progress is directly proportional. His thesis is that Christianity is a religion of progress, and progress – just like Christian asceticism – is one of the pathways to the Kingdom of God.
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The idea of pluralisation of reason in a functional sense (utilisation, application) is a condition to understand the main problem of a discussion about reason in today’s times. This will take the form of a relation between scientific rationality (one that remains the most studied from a theoretical and methodological perspective) and other types of rationality (in art, in history, in actions).
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The work initially focuses on the beneficial distinction between scenery and landscape. It will gradually introduce auxiliary concepts for the presentation of land art, thus allowing it to be conceived not as an essence, which it does not represent, but as a processuality and a pictorial gesture of expression and suggestion.
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In this paper, one of my primary objectives is to analyze why adopting particular machine-learning techniques and using a moral AI as an adviser is an insufficient condition for eradicating racist human attitudes. By outlining some difficulties in justifying what artificial “explicit ethical agents” in Moor’s sense should look like, I explore why, even if the development of machine-learning techniques can be accepted in epistemic terms, it does not follow that the techniques in question will have a positive impact in changing immoral human behavior.
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The article considers the metaphors of “paper wave,” “paper pressing” and “paper genocide” as reflecting the social realities of the Russian education system, which are nonetheless poorly understood in sociolinguistics and mostly tabooed within respectable Russian academia and top-management. The relevancy and applicability of these metaphors are substantiated as their criteria, social contexts, and basic connotations are specified. “Paper genocide” is analyzed in journalistic and academic contexts as a term that reproduces the most significant aspects of genocide but with a social and non-criminal meaning. “Paper genocide” helps draw attention to the most acute social and managerial problem, a deadlock within the contemporary Russian education system.
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The main aim of this paper is to examine the tangible forms of cultural heritage represented by European hospital buildings from states across the Black Sea that are still functional or have been closed, and that are subjected, due to the lack of sustainable financial means for conservation and restoration, to degradation, abandonment, and destruction. For the purpose of this analysis, I will tackle both elements of the operational plan of hospital buildings that have been evaluated and registered as national monuments, from the perspective of their clinical functionality, and the elements of architecture and aesthetic forms behind such structures that embrace medical canons and particularities. Therefore, hospitals will be treated as entities of tangible cultural heritage that develop, through their complementary medical and cultural history, forms of intangible cultural heritage. This wide range of buildings can be reduced to two operational categories: hospital buildings designed from the beginning to fulfil a clinical functionality, and cultural buildings – from ecumenical establishments, castles, or villas, such as hermitages and churches, to military structures, such as garrisons – which have been adapted for historical, social, or political reasons to clinical conversion. I will analyse not only the national constraints, prejudgments, and values that contributed to a certain medical and cultural imaginary of state hospitals as monuments, but also the similar strategies and cultural policies that different states across the Black Sea have adopted in preserving the memory and structure of these buildings. The main question I address is: To what extent is it possible to create a network Black Sea region state hospitals as European cultural monuments, and what advantages might this bring to the attempt to perform a more reflective and inclusive notion of European identity? The current research is designed to be a starting point for the development of transectorial public policies, which could lead to an improvement in standards for quality of life, the infrastructures of medical units, and the preservation of tangible forms of cultural heritage, such as the public state hospitals classified as monuments.
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A world in constant motion, in a state of migration turbulence, presents humanity with new challenges and risks. Globalization is a blessing or a tragedy for humanity, occasioning the problem of how to preserve one’s identity, remaining “one’s own among strangers” while, at the same time, not becoming “a stranger among one’s own.” Integration processes in the world today are met with resistance by multidirectional processes that encourage a critical engagement with all spheres of life in modern society in order to counteract forces of depersonalization and the disappearance of one's identity – one's self – as expressed in the preservation of one's ethnic group, culture, religion, and so on. This is especially evident in attempts at preserving identity within Muslim communities in European countries. Given the growing Muslim population in Europe, it has become obvious that “European” and “Islamic” values are opposed in the context of preserving one's own identity, which is increasingly manifested in a religious context. Europe today has become a hostage of its values, which are despised by many of the immigrants who have poured into its borders. These are tolerance, political correctness, multiculturalism, democracy, and freedom of speech, among others, which are perceived as weakness and indecision. Eastern mentality, habits, and traditions are sometimes very different from European ones. The author examines the transformation of Muslim identity and the compatibility of “European” and “Islamic” values. The article also presents the opinions of various researchers on this issue, and provides possible scenarios for the trajectory of events, given continued intercultural contact through immigration and given the stakes and state of this collision of values.
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The aim of the paper is to reveal the epistemological pretensions and possibilities of the two general approaches to providing understanding of the strange behavior of the quantum objects. The first one is quantum logical, the other is theoretical-and constructive one. It has been shown that quantum logic based on the basic mathematical structure of quantum mechanics, the Hilbert space, demonstrates the empirical adequacy of this first theory about the micro-world. However, quantum logic refers to the empirical level of the behavior of quantum objects. It provides us with knowledge how they behave in different experimental situations, but remains silent about why they behave in this way, and not in another one. The latter knowledge could be principally reached through the theoretic-and-constructive approach. It exploits classical logic, but its results are non-classical theoretical models of quantum objects.
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This article focuses on contemporary discussions on the general concept of disease and its significance for clinical practice. Some authors (e.g., Haslow) believe that the general concept of disease does not play a key role in clinical decision-making. Others (Pellegrino, Clouser, Culver and Gert), on the contrary, emphasize the importance of the concept for public health and for the methodology of medical practice. Emphasis is also placed on the importance of the methodology of medical theory; it is pointed out that these debates started in the 1960s.
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A thought experiment with spatial structures formed by running water, establishes their phantom nature. We find their parts are always distributed over time, and the structures themselves never exist simultaneously in their entirety at any particular moment. The real problem, however, stems from the fact that, when something moves, it is also distributed over time. Hence, because of the motion of their constituent microparticles (molecules, atoms and elementary particles), all real physical structures are, in fact, phantom structures, i.e., they never simultaneously exist in their entirety at any particular moment. Therefore, they are indeed phantom structures, in the sense of being physically inaccessible to causal interaction in their entirety at any particular point of time. This calls into question the assumption of simultaneity and makes it possible to suggest the superposition of independent asynchronous, i.e., non-simultaneous, time waves existing in a shared space.
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In this article I argue that metaphysical creationism that we encounter in the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas, as opposed to American creationism and theological and biblical creationism, is a theory that stems from a purely philosophical explanation of the beginnings of the world and man. It is not, therefore, a biblical idea transferred to philosophy. Like the theism of the Aristotelian metaphysics, the theism of Aquinas’s metaphysics is not a religious (theological) theism, but a purely philosophical (metaphysical) theism, because it stems from a metaphysical explanation of reality. Metaphysical creationism is the ultimate explanation of the source of the existence of beings that are given to us in experience as both unnecessary in their own existence and changeable. American creationism, on the other hand, is a biological-cosmological interpretation of the biblical truth concerning the creation of the world within a certain time frame (the 7-day paradigm) and—at its starting point—refers to the data of Revelation, which it wants to confirm scientifically.This article is divided into two parts. The first part presents the key elements of the metaphysical theory of ex nihilo creation and the understanding thereof. In the second part, the elements of evolutionary theism are recalled which, from the point of view of metaphysical creationism, are the source of various paradoxes and, at times, even absurdities, and thus demand reconsideration.
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Contemporary Thomists strive to demonstrate a compatibility between Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics and the theory of biological macroevolution. Recently such positions have been promoted by Dr Mariusz Tabaczek. However, he admits that Aquinas’s teachings need to be substantially modified to make them compatible with theistic evolution. On his view, the main point of controversy is whether the creation of the world has been completed (as Aquinas maintains) or it continues (as it is required by theistic evolution). But the evolutionary postulate of continual creation understood as emergence of totally new substantial forms contradicts not only Aquinas’s doctrine but the classic Christian understanding of creation. Thomistic evolutionists cannot explain the origin of new substantial forms; they refer to accidental changes, such as random genetic mutations, whose accumulation over time would produce new species. This, however, is not possible in the light of Thomistic metaphysics because an accidental change does not produce a substantial change. Additionally, the Thomistic evolutionist concept does not tally with many facts discovered by contemporary science. Thomistic evolutionists abandon the fundamental concepts of Aquinas’s philosophy such as the substance-accidents fold and moderate realism as a cognitive attitude. Hence the conclusion that it is not possible to reconcile biological macroevolution with Aquinas’s teachings.
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In response to Michał Chaberek’s polemic with my position regarding theistic evolutionism, I refer to some key aspects of the Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy and theology in their encounter with the theory of evolution and point toward some inconsistences and flaws in the argumentation developed by my adversary. After defining crucial aspects of Aquinas’s understanding of creation, I emphasize that evolutionary changes belong to divine gubernatio, and not creatio. I also offer an analysis of the question concerning the need of a direct divine intervention in instantiation of a new species. Moving to metaphysics I comment on the Aristotelian-Thomistic substantialism, the analogical character of substantivity, and Chaberek’s alternative taxonomy of living organisms. Regarding philosophical theology, I answer the question concerning the source of the substantial form of the first representative of a new species, in reference to the categories of disposition of matter and accidental features of substances. Addressing once again metaphysical aspects of the evolutionary theory I suggest characterizing species transformation as a complex process, engaging many substantial and accidental changes.
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