Publications

In this chapter we are going to examine the logical connections between various descriptions of the Scientific Revolution proposed by Alexandre Koyré. We are going to propose an attentive and detailed reading of texts written by Koyré in different periods of his life in order to identify various aspects of his interpretation of the revolution in thought that occurred in early modern Europe. His most famous description of the Scientific Revolution (the dual characterization) indicates two aspects of the process that led to the emergence of classical physics: “destruction of the Cosmos” and “geometrization of space”. However, Koyré frequently used other expressions for characterization of the period, such as “mathematization of Nature”, or transition “from the world of more-or-less to the universe of precision” and “from the closed world to the open universe”. We could expect that Koyré would try to reduce his initial dual characterization to one single formula. I argue here that, on the contrary, the duality of description had a special meaning which permits us to keep in focus the complexity of the intellectual change that occurred during 17th century, when new science was rising from a new conception of reality, and a new world-view was emerging from the new science

Modern complexity studies and their interdisciplinary character are under consideration in this article. The conceptual framework of complexity studies includes such methodologically significant notions as nonlinearity, self-organization, creative chaos, co-evolution and blow-up regimes. It is argued that interdisciplinarity corresponding to a holistic worldview becomes a powerful trend in modern science. At the same time, evolutionary holism constitutes a philosophical basis for complexity studies. The possible future developments of complexity studies as a fundamental interdisciplinary paradigm are discussed as well. It is shown that interdisciplinary research will define the character of science in the medium-term future.

Frankfurt-type cases with covered manipulation received a great attention in the debates about freedom of will and moral responsibility. They pretend to give the refutation of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) and to show that we can intuitively blame or praise an agent who was not able to do otherwise. In this paper, I will try to make explicit some basic intuitions underlying the agent's responsibility in Frankfurt-type cases, which were surprisingly ignored in the contemporary debates. The key intuition is that the responsibility of the agent in Frankfurt-type cases is always grounded at the point of overcoming the uncertainty preceding action. This overcoming is crucially important for agent's responsibility and immune to any manipulation of counterfactual intervener.

Book Note: Disclosing the World: On the Phenomenology of Language, by Andrew Inkpin Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016, pp. xvi + 381, US$43 (hardback).

This paper identifies a tension in Frege’s philosophy and offers a diagnosis of its origins.Frege’s Context Principle can be used to dissolve the problem of propositional unity. However, Frege’s official response to the problem does not invoke the Context Principle, but the distinction between “saturated” and “unsaturated” propositional constituents. I argue that such a response involves assumptions that clash with the Context Principle. I suggest, however, that this tension is not generated by deep-seated philosophical commitments, but by Frege’s occasional attempt to take a dubious shortcut in the justification of his conception of propositional structure.

Koyré, his historical and philosophical studies, influence and heritage.

Koyré in Context, correlated studies and paradigms in the sciences, and in the history and philosophy of sciences

The article investigates different approaches to theoretical grounding of humanitarian intervention. Firstly conception of intervention offered by Walzer, who is known to be an advocate of unilateralism, is examined. For him states should be proactive and decisive in cases when human rights are violated somewhere. Schmitt’s arguments counter military actions in the name of moral issues are considered as well; while Schmitt’s ideal of politics as a sphere free of moral impurities seems to be imperfect. Multilateralism is proposed as alternative for Walzer’s and Schmitt’s approaches - humanitarian intervention may be justified as measure initiated by supra-state body.

On the epistemological implications of 19-century psychology of music from J.F. Herbart to H. von Helmholtz

Abstract. There is widespread opinion that, notwithstanding deviations, the political life of humanity on a large scale is on the path of progress, and humans are becoming freer and more enlightened with time. I am going to contend with this opinion, namely, with a part of it telling that the prevailing mass of the people strives to achieve more freedom and enlightenment. On the opposite, freedom, individual independence, and political rights (not to be confused with social rights, such as state care and protection) are of minor importance to the mass. The ideology of liberalism in its classical form, as created by John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill and others, yields to the pressure of the ideology of state paternalism. The pressure comes not only from above (that is, from authorities); the people also welcome more paternalism. They appear not to value their individual freedom and independence, and they are inclined to give them up voluntarily to some mighty organization such as the state in exchange for care, protection and leadership. Liberalism has played an important role in the development of human civilization and the formation of the Western world, but new ideologies and political practices are pushing it out of people’s minds. For the author, as adherent of classical liberalism, this is unfortunate. However, I wish to treat this issue realistically, even if the facts conflict with my own convictions and desires.

Methodological remarks on the connection of music and language in Johann Friedrich Herbart's philosophical psychology.

This article focuses on Ockham`s analysis of the truth conditions of past-tense, future-tense propositions and modal propositions. The main goal of this paper is to show the main similarities between them. In both cases Ockham distinguishes two ‘senses’ and suggests to create new type of propositions.

What is being? This is, from the Greeks to Hegel (according to Heidegger), the guiding question of ontology and the history of philosophy as metaphysics. And the answer is presence: ‘being’ means ‘being present’, ‘presencing’; ‘to be’ means ‘to be present’. By clarifying the limit of this philosophy of presence, however, it is possible to go beyond it, to a thinking of being as presence and absence—for both coming-to-presence and going-out-into-absence are ways in which beings are, and being happens. And yet, are presence and absence the only ways to think being? On the contrary—there is a third. From the Greeks (through Hegel) to Heidegger, the being that fails to come to presence, but also does not simply remain in absence—this is what is merely implied, an implication. But then what does it mean to think being as implied? Being as implying? As an implication?

Everything real joins together in the unity of the world”—so begins the Ideas. And with this, it seems that Husserl provides the clearest example of how to think our world, not just within the phenomenological tradition (as a modification and reestablishment of Greek metaphysics, as truly universal ontology), but in the history of philosophy—the total unity of history—our history, that animated Greek philosophy from its beginnings. But what is this world? And what is its unity? Or more precisely, how can unity join everything real—humans and animals, plants and stones, indeed the whole of nature, the entire cosmos—together in the world? Or is there not another way of thinking unity, of going to the unity of the world itself? And one that has implications (intentional or not) for phenomenology, for our thinking of unity, perhaps even for the crisis of an entirely “unquestioned” philosophical tradition?

A threat is a strange thing—for it is neither simply a deed done, nor undone. But if we think the threat in terms of the presence or absence of an actual or potential threat—as the history of philosophy (from the Greeks, through Hegel, to us) has done, then we miss what is threatening. For the threat—whether to life and limb, freedom or identity, or to an individual or group, family and friends, civil society or a state or the world as a whole—is the suspension of action. Then the threat is prior to possibility and impossibility, necessity and contingency, presence and absence. But this too, is a threat—and one that implicates us—at least insofar as the implied threat implies the threat of implication.

Dans quelle mesure et dans quel sens peut-on parler d’une « méthode » par rapport aux écrits patristiques ? La question même nous fournit l’a priori fondamental pour l’enquête suivante : on entend par là que les textes concernés ne sont pas construits εἰκῇ, mais qu’on est en mesure de discerner derrière eux un principe organisateur, une voie (μέθοδος) suivie par l’auteur plus ou moins consciemment. Dans l’Antiquité tardive, à laquelle appartiennent, au moins chronologiquement, les Péres de l’Église, ce principe organisateur est offert par deux piliers de la formation classique : la rhétorique et la philosophie.

The paper discusses the realistic application of Plato’s Kallipolis, providing results of recent studies on Greek colonization and cultural poetics. The Republic is just one among other colonization projects proposed by Athenian intellectuals in 4th century BC. Participants of the dialogue are quite familiar with real colonization practices. Socrates gives concise and clear indications on the typical recolonisation scenario to implement. The notoriously enigmatic saying that the ideal polis is to be found “nowhere on earth,” should be examined in the context of legendary tales about the foundations of colonies.

The paper considers Plato’s theory of language through the prism of the Timaeus’ metaphysics. It is argued that the apparent contradictions of Plato’s philosophy of language are the consequence of the two-fold nature of language, and that the metaphysical scheme proposed by Plato in the Timaeus can shed a light on his coherent theory of language. The linguo-metaphysical isomorphism of the Timaeus presupposes that (1) words and material elements have their own meaning and nature respectively; (2) they can be reduced to an infinite variety of amorphic sounds and receptacle; (3) the participation in truth is possible only at the level of narrative and universe. According to this scheme the universe (κόσμος), as well as any speech (λόγος), can be explained by the reduction to its constituent elements, but it will be only necessary explanation. Whereas for Plato, the true understanding of cosmos and logos is possible only on the level of the coherent unity of the whole, which represents the ideal paradigm in the best possible way.

In what follows, we shall try to reconstruct the making of the protreptic genre, relying mainly on the Corpus Platonicum (CP), considered as a collection of texts produced by Plato and his disciples. The focus will be, first, on the premises which led to the creation of the specific text labelled as ‘protreptic’ in the Euthydemus; second, we shall trace subsequent recognition of protreptic as a genre, documented in the spurious Clitophon.

This chapter attempts to outline the disciplinary tradition of protreptic and to highlight certain methodological difficulties connected to it. The lamentations concerning “the scandalous state of genre theory” (Jordan 1986:328) in general and the protreptic genre in particular have themselves become a generic convention in studies dealing with this topic, and not without reason. To begin with, the genre received in antiquity no rhetorical treatment as a distinctive form of oratory, whereas references to the protreptic χαρακτήρ in philosophers are scarce and contradictory. Our capacity to proceed by means of description is also limited, for many writings entitled “protreptic” have only survived in fragments (and reconstructions often proceed from the postulation of a “generic pattern”, which itself needs justification). Another complicating factor is that the historical and philological instrumentarium has been supplemented, with varying success, with approaches like motif analysis, theories of intertextuality or narratology, or various communication approaches. Consequently, the term ‘protreptic’ has come to be used in a loose and imprecise manner depending on the position adopted by the author.  The next vexing problem encountered by those who wish to understand protreptic concerns demarcation. Protreptic frequently appears in combination with other literary types, (auto)-biography, paraenesis, or epistolography, for example. How do different types cohabit within one piece of writing? Various, sometimes mutually exclusive, solutions have been suggested by scholars which we will discuss in what follows. Lastly, problems are aggravated by the fact that historians of philosophy on the one hand, and biblical scholars and specialists in Jewish and Christian literature on the other, have approached the term “protreptic” and its cognates in very different ways. Although the interdisciplinary gap seems to be diminishing the question still remains open as to how the classical forms of protreptic were adapted in the prophetic religions like Judaism and Christianity.

This article deals with the theories of the civil education, carried out by two prominent early modern pedagogical scholars – Jan Amos Komenský and Giambattista Vico. The author states that, whereas according to Komenský the civil prudence consists in the so-called “emendation of cases” and is considered in terms of the Christian-Stoic ascetics, in Vico the civil paideia primarily concerns the prereflective virtue and relies on topics and rhetoric.