Chapter Prologue “The scientific theory I like the best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline baggage.” Max Born Ever since, ...

These are but just some of the stories covered in this entertaining book that deals with the history of physics from the end of the 19th-century to about 1930.Quips, Quotes and Quanta (2nd Edition) is unique in that it contains anecdotes on ...

We introduce a notion of multilocality, which is a generalization of local communitivity. We then present bilocal fields transforming as mass-m, spin-0 fields as well as a trilocal field transforming as a mass-m, spin-1/2 field. Possible interaction vertices are also given.

Przedmowa do II wydania "Tercetu metafizycznego" Barbary Skargi / Preface to the 2nd ed. of the Barbara Skarga's "Metaphysical Tercet".

-/- Medytacje filozoficzne, Fundacja na Rzecz Myślenia im. Barbary Skargi, Warszawa 2015. -/- Publikacja współfinansowana przez Muzeum Łazienki Królewskie w Warszawie. -/- Zbiór tekstów powstałych na podstawie wykładów, które zostały wygłoszone w ramach cyklu "Medytacje filozoficzne w Łazienkach" w latach 2013-2015. -/- -/- Spis treści: -/- Cezary Wodziński, Premedytacja Krzysztof Pomian, O wyjątkowości człowieka Zygmunt Bauman, O miłości i nienawiści… Tropami Barbary Skargi Tadeusz Sławek, Ciemne liturgie. Język, historia i gest błogosławieństwa Lech Witkowski, Rozprawa z autorytetem: w strone autorytu przejścia (...) Władysław Stróżewski, Doświadczenie czasu, doświadczenie istnienia Juliusz Domański, „Pradawna waśń filozofów z poetami” a kłopoty z dziedzictwem antycznym Serhij Żadan, Wolność jako odpowiedzialność Marcin Poręba, Co to jest rzeczywistość? Szymon Wróbel, Co to jest historia filozofii? Magdalena Środa, Moralność życia publicznego Kostiantyn Tyszczenko, Po co językoznawstwu metateoria? (shrink)

These fourteen essays were written to honor a philosopher and historian of philosophy who has been associated for more than thirty years with the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto. In keeping with Pegis’ historical interests, the essays are on topics relating to the ancient and especially the mediaeval period. Some of the contributions are not directly philosophical in content, e.g., "Nugae Hyginianae" by Wilma Fitzgerald, "Marriage and Family in English Conciliar and Synodal Legislation" by Michael (...) M. Sheehan, "Riddles relating to the Anglo-Saxon Scriptorium" by Laurence K. Shook, "A Middle English Christological Poem" by Edmund Colledge, "Three Forgotten Martyrs of Anazarbus in Cilicia" by Michael R. E. Gough, and "Greek Recentiores, Basil, Adversus Eunomium, IV-V" by Walter Hayes. But each of the essays reflects the meticulous scholarship for which the Institute is justly renowned. (shrink)

This paper introduces and discusses three models of future: a determinist model, a stochastic model, and the model of True Prophetic Knowledge. All three models coexist in natural languages and are represented both in their grammatical systems and in the text-building discourse strategies speakers and authors apply to.

The authors study opera from the perspective of the theories of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and argue that opera's second death corresponded with the rise of psychoanalysis in the early 20th century. With a preface by Lanfossi and an afterword by Alberto Toscano.

This paper explores the hypothesis that proper names serve as anchors identifying the individuals in the possible or real world. This hypothesis is tested on Old Icelandic narratives. A prominent feature of Old Icelandic sagas is that the narrative matter is not quite new. A Saga is reliable iff it refers to the events relevant for its audience and accepted as true by the whole community. I argue that proper names must be regarded as references to the background knowledge of (...) the medieval audience. I follow two contemporary Sagas based on the fresh events and show that proper names in a Saga mind were arranged in form of a database, each type of a personal designation having its charachteristic text-building profile. The form of the name and its frequency in the Saga are linked with the rank of the character. The high number of people mentioned in the Sagas is explained by the fact that the Sagas aimed at describing the real world, where the names of the individuals and the events they were involved cross-identified each other. Every character had its rigid identifiers. The total amount of propria is always higher than the number of active figures. I classify the Saga characters into five ranks and discuss their information-structural profiles. (shrink)

Donald Davidson has made enormous contributions to the philosophy of action, epistemology, semantics and philosophy of mind and today is recognized as one of the most important analytical philosophers of the late twentieth century. _Donald Davidson: Truth, Meaning and Knowledge_ addresses * Davidson's writings on epistemology and theory of language with their implications of ontology and philosophy of mind * the central issue of whether truth is the ultimate goal of enquiry, challenged by contributions from Richard Rorty and Paul Horwich (...) * Davidson's approach to semantics and applied linguistics as addressed by Kirk Ludwig, Gabriel Segal, Peter Pagin, Stephen Neale, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore and Reinaldo Elugardo * Davidson's advances in the philosophy of mind in relation to the views of Williard V. Quine, John McDowell and Peter F. Strawson, in essays by Roger Gibson and Anita Avramides. (shrink)

La metafisica di tradizione aristotelica e scolastica, lungo il corso del XVI secolo, ha vissuto un periodo di grande approfondimento. In questo lasso di tempo gli autori di quella che poi sarebbe stata definita "Seconda Scolastica" avanzarono soluzioni nuove, seppure presentate come tradizionali, alle questioni che nei secoli precedenti avevano costituito l'impalcatura dell'intero aristotelismo. In particolare, fu il tentativo dei primi Dottori della Compagnia di Gesù di rendere "moderna", e quindi adeguata ai tempi, la tradizione aristotelica, quello che nei secoli (...) a seguire avrebbe manifestato maggiore pervasività. All'alba della storia dell'Ordine Toledo, Perera e Fonseca con i commenti alle opere dello Stagirita, ma anche con l'organizzazione di un nuovo metodo di docenza e con la stesura di veri e propri manuali di studio, diedero vita ad un vero e proprio paradigma che avrebbe coinvolto tutte le espressioni culturali possibili dalla letteratura, all'arte fino al teatro. (shrink)

Purpose. Romanticism as a movement developed in Germany, where, becoming the philosophy of time in the 18th-19th centuries, spread to all European countries. The "mobility" of the Romantic doctrine, its diversity, sometimes contradictory views, attitude to man as a free, harmonious, creative person led to the susceptibility of this movement by ethnic groups, different in nature and mentality. Its ideas found a wide response in Ukraine with its "cordocentric" type of culture in the early nineteenth century. Since the peculiarity of (...) "Ukrainian Romanticism" was its "literary-centric" nature, the purpose of this study is to analyse and comprehend the place of man in the national philosophy and literature of this period. Accordingly, the main tasks of the work are as follows: to determine the main features, the nature of Ukrainian Romanticism; to trace the main vectors of comprehension and image of man in the literature of this time. Theoretical basis. The ideas of European Romanticism were creatively rethought and assimilated during the emergence of new Ukrainian literature. It provided samples of highly artistic works, unique names of talented writers – creators and thinkers, who in their works reflected the philosophy of time. Based on the works of F. Schlegel, partly E. Husserl, M. Heidegger, K. Jaspers, Romanticism in the Ukrainian humanities, in terms of philosophy, culturology, as well as at the intersection with literature, was studied by T. Bovsunivska, Y. Hrybkova, S. Efremov, N. Kalenichenko, S. Kozak, T. Komarynets, D. Nalyvayko, Y. Nakhlik, I. Ogorodnyk, V. Ogorodnyk, A. Sinitsyna, D. Chyzhevsky, M. Yatsenko, E. Kyryliuk, M. Biletsky, D. Dontsov, S. Efremov, G. Kostyuk, S. Krymsky, Y. Sherekh and others. Originality. The authors of the article prove that Romanticism in Ukraine, being "literary-centric" inherently, having absorbed the main ideas and features of European Romanticism, has its own features and vectors of formation and development. Man in this kind of movement, thanks to the means of art, appears very clearly as a spiritually rich, sensitive, vulnerable and strong person. For him or her, the highest value is freedom, the ability to make freely independent fateful decisions. Conclusions. Ukrainian writers, reflecting the philosophical ideas of Romanticism, saw in man a harmonious combination of "natural" and "social", through which he indirectly carries out his own national existence. In addition to the objective realities of the external world, in their works, Romantic writers appeal to the subjective, internal, spiritual, "ideal" world of the hero, who interacts with reality through his own system of values. At each level of development of the humanities and methodology of cognition, this allows a new reading of these works. (shrink)

In contrast to the theories of relativity, quantum mechanics is not yet based on a generally accepted conceptual foundation. It is proposed here that the missing principle may be identified through the observation that all knowledge in physics has to be expressed in propositions and that therefore the most elementary system represents the truth value of one proposition, i.e., it carries just one bit of information. Therefore an elementary system can only give a definite result in one specific measurement. The (...) irreducible randomness in other measurements is then a necessary consequence. For composite systems entanglement results if all possible information is exhausted in specifying joint properties of the constituents. (shrink)

The U.S. and Canadian health care systems are more similar than is commonly believed. This article debunks some of the powerful myths about these health care systems and opens up the discussion for greater policy learning from both sides of the border. Cross-border comparisons can yield a number of lessons from common policy challenges such as cost control, physician organization and payment, and the organization of health coverage and services for Native Americans and Indigenous Canadians.

This collection of ten essays elucidates some of the more challenging aspects of Anscombe’s work and affirms her reputation as one of our most original ...

This book compiles and reviews the most prominent linguistic theories into a single source that serves as an essential reference for future solutions to one of the most important challenges of our age.

The article proposes to further develop the ideas of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis by including into evolutionary research an analysis of phenomena that occur above the organismal level. We demonstrate that the current Extended Synthesis is focused more on individual traits (genetically or non-genetically inherited) and less on community system traits (synergetic/organizational traits) that characterize transgenerational biological, ecological, social, and cultural systems. In this regard, we will consider various communities that are made up of interacting populations, and for which the (...) individual members can belong to the same or to different species. Examples of communities include biofilms, ant colonies, symbiotic associations resulting in holobiont formation, and human societies. The proposed model of evolution at the level of communities revises classic theorizing on the major transitions in evolution by analyzing the interplay between community/social traits and individual traits, and how this brings forth ideas of top-down regulations of bottom-up evolutionary processes (collaboration of downward and upward causation). The work demonstrates that such interplay also includes reticulate interactions and reticulate causation. In this regard, we exemplify how community systems provide various non-genetic ‘scaffoldings’, ‘constraints’, and ‘affordances’ for individual and sociocultural evolutionary development. Such research complements prevailing models that focus on the vertical transmission of heritable information, from parent to offspring, with research that instead focusses on horizontal, oblique and even reverse information transmission, going from offspring to parent. We call this reversed information transfer the ‘offspring effect’ to contrast it from the ‘parental effect’. We argue that the proposed approach to inheritance is effective for modelling cumulative and distributed developmental process and for explaining the biological origins and evolution of language. (shrink)

Agency is a power, but what is it a power to do? The tradition presents us with three main answers: (1) that agency is a power to affect one’s own will, consequent upon which act further events ensue, beginning with the movement of a part of one's body; (2) that agency is a power to affect one’s own body, consequent upon which act further events ensue, beginning with the movement of an object that one touches; and (3) that agency is (...) a power to affect that material upon which one brings one's action to bear---e.g. the apple one is peeling (with a knife in one's hand). These three answers correspond to three increasingly expansive conceptions of the province of human agency. I refer to them, respectively, as volitionalism, corporealism and materialism. Only the first two are seriously considered in contemporary action theory. Favoring the third, and hoping to sharpen the conflict between the third and the first, I criticize the second. Corporealism has been a popular position—arguably, the default position in the philosophy of action—since Donald Davidson’s classic paper “Agency” (1971). Although it seems to occupy a sensible middle ground between volitionalism and materialism, corporealism is, I argue, indefensible: it shares the vulnerabilities of both its two rivals, without possessing the strengths of either. Nevertheless, reflection on corporealism lights the road to materialism, which, in the end, is the only possible alternative to volitionalism. (shrink)

Anscombe holds that a proper account of intentional action must exhibit “a ‘form’ of description of events.” But what does that mean? To answer this question, I compare the method of Anscombe’s Intention with that of Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic—another classic work of analytic philosophy that consciously opposes itself to psychological explanations. On the one hand, positively, I aim to identify and elucidate the kind of account of intentional action that Anscombe attempts to provide. On the other hand, negatively, I (...) hope to dispel the canard that Anscombe’s opposition to the causal theory of action is a product of “behaviorism.”. (shrink)

The conclusion of practical reasoning is commonly said to rest upon a diverse pair of representations—a “major” and a “minor” premise—the first of which concerns the end and the second, the means. Modern and contemporary philosophers writing on action and practical reasoning tend to portray the minor premise as a “means-end belief”—a belief about, as Michael Smith puts it, “the ways in which one thing leads to another,” or, as John McDowell puts it, “what can be relied on to bring (...) about what.” On this point there is little difference between followers of Davidson and followers of Anscombe, or between those who invoke Hume’s legacy and those who invoke Aristotle’s. But Aristotle himself held a very different position. According to him, the minor premise concerns particulars, a sphere controlled by perception. The perception of particulars—that is, of the really-existing people and things confronted in the field of action—plays no essential role in the modern account of rational agency. Because it does not, the modern account fails to explain how one could act for a reason, or how practical reasoning could deliver any conclusion. (shrink)