Review of Sandu Frunză, Între moartea politicii ș i moartea lui Dumnezeu. Eseuri despre literatur ă, religie ş i politic ă [ Between the Death of Politics and the Death of God. Essays on literature, religion and politics ],.

Provides readers with an illustration of the role and relevance of the humanities in tackling contemporary political phenomena and social issues such as populism and its effects on democracy.

This book concentrates on some leading questions in business ethics research in the last two decades and tries to find explanations concerning cultural issues. It focuses on the alignment or congruence between business ethics and cultural contexts with a special emphasis on Eastern European countries. The core of this book is doing business in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in order to throw light on the cultural issues related to business ethics. Its primary purpose is a finer view of the (...) impact of national, organizational and professional cultures in business ethics. The general questions encountered in this book are related to the nexus between culture and ethics in (CEE), national, organizational and professional cultures' link to (CEE) countries' ethics. The aim of this book is a deeper understanding of the cultural differences in Central and Eastern Europe. This might help organizations provide better opportunities for doing business across a wide cultural spectrum. With the increase of global mobility, cultural and ethical issues become more and more important. Multi-national corporations might garner a competitive advantage when they understand the importance of local culture and ethics. International business professionals may benefit from a deeper understanding of cultural values that affect the perceptions of individuals during negotiation and decision-making across cultures. Multinational companies that do not take into consideration or minimize the importance of cultural and ethical issues expose themselves to a higher risk of failure. The expectation of the authors of this book is that the conclusions would help alert international business scholars and practitioners of the need to thoroughly understand the cultural issues influencing ethics. (shrink)

The transcendental turn of Husserl's phenomenology has challenged philosophers and scholars from the beginning. This volume inquires into the profound meaning of this turn by contrasting its Kantian and its phenomenological versions. Examining controversies surrounding subjectivity, idealism, aesthetics, logic, the foundation of sciences, and practical philosophy, the chapters provide a helpful guide for facing current debates.

Bringing together established researchers and emerging scholars alike to discuss new readings of Husserl and to reignite the much needed discussion of what phenomenology actually is and can possibly be about, this volume sets out to critically re-evaluate the predominant interpretations of Husserl’s philosophy, and to adapt phenomenology to the specific philosophical challenges and context of the 21st century. “What is phenomenology?”, Maurice Merleau-Ponty asks at the beginning of his Phenomenology of Perception – and he continues: “It may seem strange (...) that this question still has to be asked half a century after the first works of Husserl. It is, however, far from being resolved.” Even today, more than half a century after Merleau-Ponty’s magnum opus, the answer is in many ways still up for grasp. While it may seem obvious that the main subject of phenomenological inquiry is, in fact, the subject, it is anything but self evident what this precisely implies: Considering the immense variety of different themes and methodological self-revisions found in Husserl’s philosophy – from its Brentanian beginnings to its transcendental re-interpretation and, last but not least, to its ‘crypto-deconstruction’ in the revisions of his early manuscripts and in his later work –, one cannot but acknowledge the fact that ‘the’ subject of phenomenology marks an irreducible plurality of possible subjects. Paying tribute to this irreducible plurality the volume sets out to develop interpretative takes on the phenomenological tradition which transcend both its naive celebration and its brute rejection, to re-articulate the positions of other philosophers within the framework of Husserl’s thought, and to engage in an investigative dialogue between traditionally opposed camps within phenomenology and beyond. (shrink)

Editorial IntroductionSUSI FERRARELLO AND IULIAN APOSTOLESCU.

In this contribution we first sketch an outline of the concept of lifeworld (_Lebenswelt_), to introduce the readers to the guest-edited collection of essays _Varieties of the Lifeworld: Phenomenology and Aesthetic Experience_, special issue of the “Continental Philosophy Review.” We trace back the origin of the concept of lifeworld to Husserl’s late phenomenology, although also explaining (on the basis of the careful historical-conceptual reconstructions offered by some distinguished scholars of Husserl and the phenomenological movement) that the development of Husserl’s phenomenology (...) of the _Lebenswelt_ was gradual and was connected, among other things, to the question of the natural world of experience. Then, quickly referring to Gadamer, Landgrebe, Fink and other authors belonging to the phenomenological tradition, we explain that different interpretations of the topic “Lifeworld” in Husserl’s thinking have been provided: In our view, this contributes to the fact that still nowadays this topic is a fascinating and philosophically stimulating one. Finally, making reference to more recent works by such authors as Figal, Gallagher, Zahavi and Shusterman (a pragmatist philosopher, whose somaesthetics is nonetheless very rich in insights that can be connected to phenomenological views of the body and its place in the world), we emphasize how the question concerning the lifeworld is still capable today to open a great variety of perspectives and plurality of paths for thinking, as testified by the essays collected in this guest-edited special issue of the “Continental Philosophy Review.”. (shrink)

The paper discusses Peano's defense and application of permanence of forms as a principle of practice. Dedicated to the memory of Mic Detlefsen.

This paper provides an algebraic reconstruction of Einstein’s argument for the incompleteness of quantum mechanics, in order to clarify the assumptions that underlie an understanding of Einstein completeness as categoricity.

The paper argues against an intuitive reading of the Stone-von Neumann theorem as a categoricity result, thereby pointing out that this theorem does not entail any model-theoretical difference between the theories that validate it and those that don't.

This paper argues against the view that the standard explanation of phase transitions in statistical mechanics may be considered a causal explanation, a distortion that can nevertheless successfully represent causal relations.

This unpublished paper, written in 2005 in the PhD philosophy program at Notre Dame, argues that algebraic structural realism faces a difficulty raised by the existence of inequivalent representations in quantum field theory.

The paper sketches an argument against modal monism, more specifically against the reduction of physical possibility to metaphysical possibility. The argument is based on the non-categoricity of quantum logic.

This paper, written in Romanian, explains why the eutaxiological argument, endorsed by scientists like Newton, Einstein, and Weyl, and recently defended by Richard Swinburne, is not defensible.

This paper, written in Romanian, compares fictionalism, nominalism, and neo-Meinongianism as responses to the problem of objectivity in mathematics, and then motivates a fictionalist view of objectivity as invariance.

A new form of skepticism is described, which holds that objectivity and understanding are incompossible ideals of modern science. This is attributed to Weyl, hence its name: Weylean skepticism. Two general defeat strategies are then proposed, one of which is rejected.

This paper considers Weylean invariantism, i.e., the view that objectivity requires categoricity, and argues that if the Stone-von Neumann theorem can be naturally interpreted as a categoricity result, the view is falsified by quantum field theory.

This paper argues that Weyl's criticism of Dedekind’s principle that "In science, what is provable ought not to be believed without proof." challenges not only a logicist norm of belief in mathematics, but also a realist view about whether there is a fact of the matter as to what norms of belief are correct.

This paper argues that a particular point raised by Schröder – that Frege's logical notation fails to be modelled on arithmetical notation – is based on a misunderstanding, for the modelling was meant as conceptual, rather than notational.

We present a unified look at myopic stability concepts for hedonic games, and discuss the status of the existence problems of stable coalition structures. In particular, we show that contractual strictly core stable coalition structures always exist, and present a sufficient condition for the existence of contractually Nash stable coalition structures on the class of separable games.

No, but the paper argues that Bohr understood his correspondence principle, or at least an aspect of that principle expressed by the notion of rational generalization, as grounded in Hankel’s principle of permanence.

This paper explains why spacetime singularities do not constitute a breakdown of physical laws, and points out that the difference between the metrics at singularities and those outside of singularities is factual, rather than nomological.

This paper argues that Weyl's view that scientific objectivity requires that concepts be freely created, i.e., introduced via Hilbert-style axiomatizations, led him to abandon the phenomenological view of objectivity.

This paper argues that Carnap's project in the Aufbau is best considered as an attempt to determine the conditions for both objectivity and understanding, thus aiming at refuting the skeptical contention that objectivity and understanding are incompossible ideals of science.

The essays presented in this issue focus on the phenomenological investigation of religious phenomena. Scholars belonging to different phenomenological traditions address the following groups of questions in order to describe the structure that makes a phenomenon religious.First, is it actually possible to talk about religious experience? In this issue we decided not to give a final answer but, rather, to refer to religious experience as the religious structure of phenomena. In fact, the main question that informs our current contributions is: (...) Could there be a phenomenology of religious experience?Second, we would like to ponder what different forms of phenomenological investigations can add to the description of... (shrink)