Abstract This article traces a historical shift, and in particular its erasure from memory on the intellectual map of the West, in concepts of subjectivity across practices of rabbinic thinking in late antiquity, medieval interpretations of the Talmud, and modern talmudic scholarship. I first introduce a comparative perspective that relies on a mutual hermeneutics of philosophical and talmudic traditions. I consequently engage with Alain de Libera's archaeological analysis of the birth of the thinking subject in medieval philosophy and theology. In (...) this light, I analyze the role of the notion of the thinking subject in construing the Talmud from Maimonides to contemporary Talmud criticism. Finally, I explore the implications of de Libera's program of a philosophical archaeology of the thinking subject for mapping the complex relationship of mutual presupposition and exclusion between philosophical, rhetorical, and talmudic traditions of thinking in antiquity, as manifested in the larger scope of these traditions. (shrink)
Speciation is an aspect of evolutionary biology that has received little philosophical attention apart from articles mainly by biologists such as Mayr (1988). The role of speciation as a terminus a quo for the individuality of species or in the context of punctuated equilibrium theory has been discussed, but not the nature of speciation events themselves. It is the task of this paper to attempt to bring speciation events into some kind of general scheme, based primarily upon the work of (...)Sergey Gavrilets on adaptive landscapes, using migration rate, or gene flow, as the primary scale, and concluding that adaptive and drift explanations are complementary rather than competing. I propose a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic selection, and the notion of reproductive reach and argue that speciation modes should be discriminated in terms of gene flow, the nature of selection maintaining reproductive reach, and whether the predominant cause is selective or stochastic. I also suggest that the notion of an adaptive “quasispecies” for asexual species is the primitive notion of species, and that members of reproductively coherent sexual species are additionally coadapted to their mating partners. (shrink)
In 1988, David Hull presented an evolutionary account of science. This was a direct analogy to evolutionary accounts of biological adaptation, and part of a generalized view of Darwinian selection accounts that he based upon the Universal Darwinism of Richard Dawkins. Criticisms of this view were made by, among others, Kim Sterelny, which led to it gaining only limited acceptance. Some of these criticisms are, I will argue, no longer valid in the light of developments in the formal modeling of (...) evolution, in particular that of Sergey Gavrilets’ work on adaptive landscapes. If we can usefully recast the Hullian view of science as being driven by selection in terms of Gavrilets’ and Kaufmann’s view of there being “giant components” of high-fitness networks through any realistic adaptive landscape, we may now find it useful to ask what the adaptive pressures on science are, and to extend the metaphor into a full analogy. This is in effect to reconcile the Fisherianism of the Dawkins–Hull approach to selection and replicators, with a Wrightean drift account of social constructionist views of science, preserving, it is to be hoped, the valuable aspects of both. (shrink)
Machine generated contents note: List of contributors; Acknowledgments; Introduction: the humanist tradition in Russian philosophy G. M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole; Part I. The Nineteenth Century: 1. Slavophiles, Westernizers, and the birth of Russian philosophical humanism Sergey Horujy; 2. Alexander Herzen Derek Offord; 3. Materialism and the radical intelligentsia: the 1860s Victoria S. Frede; 4. Russian ethical humanism: from populism to neo-idealism Thomas Nemeth; Part II. Russian Metaphysical Idealism in Defense of Human Dignity: 5. Boris Chicherin and human (...) dignity in history G. M. Hamburg; 6. Vladimir Solov'iev's philosophical anthropology: autonomy, dignity, perfectibility Randall A. Poole; 7. Russian panpsychism: Kozlov, Lopatin, Losskii James P. Scanlan; Part III. Humanity and Divinity in Russian Religious Philosophy after Solov'iev: 8. A Russian cosmodicy: Sergei Bulgakov's religious philosophy Paul Valliere; 9. Pavel Florenskii's trinitarian humanism Steven Cassedy; 10. Semën Frank's expressivist humanism Philip J. Swoboda; Part IV. Freedom and Human Perfectibility in the Silver Age: 11. Religious humanism in the Russian silver age Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal; 12. Russian liberalism and the philosophy of law Frances Nethercott; 13. Imagination and ideology in the new religious consciousness Robert Bird; 14. Eschatology and hope in silver age thought Judith Deutsch Kornblatt; Part V. Russian Philosophy in Revolution and Exile: 15. Russian Marxism Andrzej Walicki; 16. Adventures in dialectic and intuition: Shpet, Il'in, Losev Philip T. Grier; 17. Nikolai Berdiaev and the philosophical tasks of the emigration Stuart Finkel; 18. Eurasianism: affirming the person in an 'Era of Faith' Martin Beisswenger; Afterword: on persons as open-ended ends-in-themselves (the view from two novelists and two critics) Caryl Emerson; Bibliography. (shrink)
The paper attempts to establish a methodological complementarity between Foucault’s and Deleuze’s accounts of the body on the basis of Nietzsche’s theory of active and reactive forces systematically elaborated in Deleuze’s Nietzsche et la philosophie. Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche’s physics of forces opens up two prospective developments of Nietzsche’s legacy: the genealogical critique of the historical body produced by reactive forces on the one hand and the invention of a new unknown body produced by active forces on the other. The (...) paper shows how throughout their careers both Foucault and Deleuze pursue these two divergent yet mutually complementary scenarios respectively. Given the shared background of both thinkers, neither is complete without the other, especially when the question of resistance is at stake. Just as active force is necessarily presupposed by the existence of reactive force in the Nietzschean calculus, Foucault’s reactive body cannot exist without its own inverse, Deleuze’s active ‘body-without-organs’. (shrink)
The article presents a verbal and mathematical model of medium-term business cycles (with a characteristic period of 7–11 years) known as Juglar cycles. The model takes into account a number of approaches to the analysis of such cycles; in the meantime it also takes into account some of the authors' own generalizations and additions that are important for understanding the internal logic of the cycle, its variability and its peculiarities in the present-time conditions. The authors argue that the most important (...) cause of cyclical crises stems from strong structural disproportions that develop during economic booms. These are not only disproportions between different economic sectors, but also disproportions between different societal subsystems; at present these are also disproportions within the World System as a whole. The proposed model of business cycle is based on its subdivision into four phases: – recovery phase (which could be subdivided into the start sub-phase and the acceleration sub-phase); – upswing/prosperity/expansion phase (which could be subdivided into the growth sub-phase and the boom/overheating sub-phase); – recession phase (within which one may single out the crash/bust/acute crisis subphase and the downswing sub-phase); – depression/stagnation phase (which we could subdivide into the stabilization subphase and the breakthrough sub-phase). The article provides a detailed qualitative description of macroeconomic dynamics at all the phases; it specifies driving forces of cyclical dynamics and the causes of transition from one phase to another (including psychological causes); a special attention is paid to the turning point from the peak of overheating to the acute crisis, as well as to the turning point from the downswing to recovery. The proposed mathematical model of Juglar cycle takes into account the following effects that are typical for the market economy: • positive feedbacks between various economic processes; • presence of a certain inertia, time lags in reactions of the economic subsystem to the change in conditions; • amplification by the financial subsystem of positive feedbacks and time lags in the economic subsystem; • excessive reaction to changing conditions during the acute crisis sub-phase. The authors suggest that the current crisis turns out to be rather similar to classical Juglar crises; however, there is also a significant difference, as the current crisis occurs at a truly global scale. Yet, due to this truly global scale of the current crisis, the possibilities of regulation with the national state's measures have turned out to be ineffective,whereas the suprastate regulation of financial processes hardly exists. It is shown that all these have led to the reproduction of the current crisis according to a classical Juglar scenario. (shrink)
We agree that supernatural beliefs are pervasive. However, we propose a more general account rooted in how people trace ordinary objects over time. Tracking identity involves attending to the causal history of an object, a process that may implicate hidden mechanisms. We discuss experiments in which participants exhibit the same “supernatural” beliefs when reasoning about the fates of cups and automobiles as those exhibited by Bering's participants when reasoning about spirits.
The dynamic approach to understanding of the human consciousness, its cognitive activities and cognitive architecture is one of the most promising approaches in the modern epistemology and cognitive science. The conception of embodied mind is under discussion in the light of nonlinear dynamics and of the idea co-evolution of complex systems developed by the Moscow scientific school. The cognitive architecture of the embodied mind is rather complex: data from senses and products of rational thinking, the verbal and the pictorial, logic (...) and intuition, the analytical and synthetic abilities of perception and of thinking, the local and the global, the analogue and the digital, the archaic and the post-modern are intertwined in it. In the process of cognition, co-evolution of embodied mind as an autopoietic system and its surroundings takes place. The perceptual and mental processes are bound up with the structure of human body. Nonlinear and circular connecting links between the subject of cognition and the world constructed by him can be metaphorically called a nonlinear cobweb of cognition. Cognition is an autopoietic activity because it is directed to the search of elements that are missed; it serves to completing integral structures. According to the theory of blow-up regimes in complex systems elaborated by Sergey P.Kudyumov and his followers, the idea of co-evolution is connected with the concept of tempoworlds. To co-evolve means to start to develop in one and the same tempoworld and to use the possibility – in case of a proper intergation into a whole structure – to accelerate the tempo of evolution. The cognitive activities of the human being can be considered as a movement (active walk) in landscapes of co-evolution when he cognizes and changes environment and is changed himself by the very activities. The similar conclusion can be drawn from Francisco Varela’s conception of enactive cognition. (shrink)
Philosophy of science is the object of metaphilosophical investigations. Metaphilosophy is the philosophy of philosophy. Philosophy is an archetypical thinking of being or an experience-of-being. History of Greek-European tradition of philosophy has three archetypes of thinking: objectivity, subjectivity, and inter-subjectivity. They are three archetypical contexts of interpretations of the concept of a philosophy of science too. Is philosophy of science part of philosophy? Is philosophy ofscience part of epistemology? What are methods of philosophy of science? These questions are the topics (...) of metaphilosophy. The topic of a scientific fact is a focal point of contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science. Is a scientific fact a fallible knowledge? The nature of a scientific fact is discussed in keeping with to the opposition of fallibilism and infallibilism. If fallibilism is universal quality of knowledge then there is a problem: is a scientific fact a fallible knowledge too? We are understanding and make clear the nature of a scientific fact by correlation of facts with: (1) data and evidence; (2) languages and theories; (3) methods of empirical investigations; (4) values, norms, and conventions of scientific investigations. Philosophy of science communicates with philosophy ofeconomics as the contemporary branch of philosophy. Its problems arise from the relationship of philosophy and philosophy of science with economics and practice. (shrink)
Pothos suggests dispensing with the distinction between rules and similarity, without defining what is meant by either term. We agree that there are problems with the distinction between rules and similarity, but believe these will be solved only by exploring the representations and processes underlying cases purported to involve rules and similarity.
We describe in detail the first experimental test that distinguishes between an event-based corpuscular model of the interaction of photons with matter and quantum mechanics. The test looks at the interference that results as a single photon passes through a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The experimental results, obtained with a low-noise single-photon source, agree with the predictions of standard quantum mechanics.
The belief in the Darwinian theory of evolution appeared to be shaken when one tried to interpret statements of molecular biology in it. As a consequence there arose a theory of non-Darwinian neutral evolution. The supporters of this theory believe that under natural conditions no factors exist which can distinguish and select organisms on their internal (molecular) structure. In the opinion of these neutralists natural selection cannot in principle control the molecular constitution of organisms. Contrary to the viewpoint of the (...) critics of neutralism it is impossible to admit that nucleic acids, proteins and other biomolecules can evolve without the participation of natural selection. This controversy in contemporary theoretical biology can be solved by integrating the conceptions of molecular ecology with Darwinian theory. Molecular ecology acknowledges the interactions of organisms by means of chemical substances synthesized by them. Such chemical ecological factors play a leading part in the selective stages of biomolecular evolution. These diverse chemical ecological interrelations take place intensively when living beings interact with parasitic microbes. (shrink)
Complex systems can be characterized by classes of equivalency of their elements defined according to system specific rules. We propose a generalized preferential attachment model to describe the class size distribution. The model postulates preferential growth of the existing classes and the steady influx of new classes. According to the model, the distribution changes from a pure exponential form for zero influx of new classes to a power law with an exponential cut-off form when the influx of new classes is (...) substantial. Predictions of the model are tested through the analysis of a unique industrial database, which covers both elementary units (products) and classes (markets, firms) in a given industry (pharmaceuticals), covering the entire size distribution. The model's predictions are in good agreement with the data. The paper sheds light on the emergence of the exponent tau approximately 2 observed as a universal feature of many biological, social and economic problems. (shrink)
This paper investigates man's feeling of law, i . e. the perception of law, the comprehension of law and its influence on human activity, in the countries that have historically belonged to the Orthodox tradition. Consciousness of law is based, firstly, upon a concept of law, and, secondly upon a certain attitude to law, i.e. the place of this concept in everyday life and human activity. The paper treats those elements of the Orthodox outlook that constituted certain inherent mechanisms of (...) culture, and thus greatly influenced the process of formation of the feeling of law in the countries of the Orthodox culture. These elements include interaction of the Orthodox Church and the State, then the problem of the meaning of life according to the Orthodox doctrine, and finally the way personality is perceived and treated in the Orthodox outlook. The paper also considers particular features of the Orthodox outlook as they were exposed in the course of the cultural history of Orthodox countries. (shrink)
From descriptive interpretation of "understanding" to abstract-gnosiological understanding of mentality. The historical deconstruction of the existential understanding introduced as ontologic property of constantly becoming stable "Being-in-the-World" allows us to interpret this concept as mentality. Through theprism of existential philosophy in general and its interpreters such as Jacque Le Goff it allows us to make a conclusion that mentality is one of complete formations of public consciousness. But in the course of such interpretation of mentality it is important to avoid the (...) methodological situation in which Plato deadlocked, when he had decided to find out, what was beautiful itself. For the way out from this situation he had to introduce independently existing ideas and special space of ideas which define all the things and even gods. We, unfortunately, do not have such an opportunity which the history gave to Plato. Somehow to define structural and historical conditions for breaking out of mentality we shall be limited to the instruction that it is more complex, compound, but in the same time integrally complete formation historically actualized, unlike traditionally allocated kinds and forms of consciousness. Another important question is whether the concept "mentality" is acceptable for analysis of the current modern processes or it can only be used for the reconstruction of the completed formations. The mentality cannot be analyzed from inside. And we are inclined to consider that to operate the concept "mentality" in relation to a modern representative of civilization is inappropriate. (shrink)
According to Popper, democracy, and the one of the western type at that, is the best form of the state system which makes open society possible. At the same time, democratic traditions and institutions have been historically developing not only in the West but also in the East. A number of crucial principles of Buddhistcivilization forming throughout the millennium appear to be quite corresponding to the model of open society. The principles of universal humanism and compassion as the staple of (...) the world; the principle of universal responsibility for forming social institutes and organizations aimed to solve problems common to all people; the principle of tolerance and common ethical direction of all world religions can be attributed to such principles. The humanistic ideal of Buddhism is an individual satisfied with life in society and living in harmony with nature. Buddhism encourages self-restriction and social solidarity, justice and equality, pure thoughts and deeds. Buddhist civilization lies “in between” since in most cases it acts a close-to-perfect mediator among other cultures and civilizations, various ethnic groups and peoples. (shrink)
The modification of Frege's semantics that consists in using only one reference (Bedeutung, denotate) truth instead of two references truth and falsity is proposed. According to Frege 1) every true sentence stands for truth, 2) every false sentence stands for falsity. We modify the second statement: 2*) every false sentence doesn't stand for truth. The modification of sentential logic interpretation will consist in change of semantic rules: a) every formula A stands either for truth or falsity, b.1) the formula A (...) has value T iff the formula A stands for truth, b.2) the formula A has value F iff the formula A stands for falsity. Let’s change rules a) and b.2) on: a*) every formula A either stands or doesn't stand for truth, b.2*) the formula A has value F iff the formula A doesn't stand for truth. So, we have only one reference but still two values. The proposed approach can be extended to non-classical cases, for which the bivalence principle doesn't take place. An ordered pair of the sentences A, ~A is put in correspondence to the sentence A. Each sentence of ordered pair can either stands or doesn't stand for truthindependently from the other. Thus for each pair of sentences we have four possible variants of reference which are generate four functional values. (shrink)
From the end of the XX century academic community has been extensively discussing globalization issues affecting economy, politics and culture. First and foremost there grew anticipations of an ecological disaster on a global scale associated with environmental pollution. Solution of these problems on a global scale is based on a sustainable development strategy. The sustainable development is a balance between natural environment (biosphere) and artificial environment (technosphere). Russian thinkers of the early XX century introduced a notion of noosphere. One of (...) the landmarks of sustainable developmentmust become ecosophy. Asian civilization has been developing in the spirit of ecosophy. It shows that one can live in equilibrium with natural surroundings and scientific progress, preserving spiritual culture and maintaining high spiritual standard. Extending of culture dialogue became more essential in XXI century. (shrink)
