The paper offers a reconstruction of Popper’s conception of the logical situation. It provides the analysis of the structure of this conception, its genesis, and the attempts at its explication, as well as its critical discussion. The authors confront Popper’s method of situational logic with Kmita’s method of humanistic interpretation.

Książek poświęconych refleksji nad pojęciem racjonalności ukazuje się obecnie wiele, zaś większość z nich przyjmuje bardziej lub mniej jasno wyrażony przesłankę, iż pojęcie to przeżywa obecnie głęboki kryzys. Samo pojęcie kryzysu jest przy tym na ogol stosowane w sposób, który należałoby nazwać intelektualną nonszalancją, gdyby tylko ów niefrasobliwy, niekiedy wręcz metaforyczny użytek, jaki się z niego czyni, był wynikiem świadomego zamiaru. Tak jednak zwykle się nie dzieje, a prace poświęcone trudnościom z prawidłowym zdefiniowaniem pojecia racjonalności i określeniem jego funkcji w (...) obrębie rozważań filozoficznych mówią o kryzysie tak, iż odbiorca ulega niekiedy nieodpartemu wrażeniu, iż chodzi o kryzys porównywalny do kryzysu ekonomicznego, przez który należy możliwie szybko i przy minimalnych stratach własnych przejść i jak najszybciej otrząsnąć się z minionych trudności. Nie miałoby sensu bliższe wnikanie w przyczyny owego stanu rzeczy, bowiem wiąże się one nierozerwalnie z pojmowaniem najważniejszych problemów filozoficznych, przez co niemożliwe jest choćby skrótowe ich omówienie. Przede wszystkim jednak - z punktu widzenia zarówno refleksji nad pojęciem racjonalności, jak i rozważań, które zmierzają do określenia, czy rzeczywiście mamy współcześnie do czynienia z tak poważnym kryzysem racjonalności, jak zdają się sugerować niektórzy autorzy prac poświęconych temu zagadnieniu - poszukiwanie owych przyczyn nie wydaje się czynnością potrzebny. (shrink)

Książek poświęconych refleksji nad pojęciem racjonalności ukazuje się obecnie wiele, zaś większość z nich przyjmuje bardziej lub mniej jasno wyrażony przesłankę, iż pojęcie to przeżywa obecnie głęboki kryzys. Samo pojęcie kryzysu jest przy tym na ogol stosowane w sposób, który należałoby nazwać intelektualną nonszalancją, gdyby tylko ów niefrasobliwy, niekiedy wręcz metaforyczny użytek, jaki się z niego czyni, był wynikiem świadomego zamiaru. Tak jednak zwykle się nie dzieje, a prace poświęcone trudnościom z prawidłowym zdefiniowaniem pojecia racjonalności i określeniem jego funkcji w (...) obrębie rozważań filozoficznych mówią o kryzysie tak, iż odbiorca ulega niekiedy nieodpartemu wrażeniu, iż chodzi o kryzys porównywalny do kryzysu ekonomicznego, przez który należy możliwie szybko i przy minimalnych stratach własnych przejść i jak najszybciej otrząsnąć się z minionych trudności. Nie miałoby sensu bliższe wnikanie w przyczyny owego stanu rzeczy, bowiem wiąże się one nierozerwalnie z pojmowaniem najważniejszych problemów filozoficznych, przez co niemożliwe jest choćby skrótowe ich omówienie. Przede wszystkim jednak - z punktu widzenia zarówno refleksji nad pojęciem racjonalności, jak i rozważań, które zmierzają do określenia, czy rzeczywiście mamy współcześnie do czynienia z tak poważnym kryzysem racjonalności, jak zdają się sugerować niektórzy autorzy prac poświęconych temu zagadnieniu - poszukiwanie owych przyczyn nie wydaje się czynnością potrzebny. (shrink)

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

Should we regard Jennifer Lackey’s ‘Creationist Teacher’ as understanding evolution, even though she does not, given her religious convictions, believe its central claims? We think this question raises a range of important and unexplored questions about the relationship between understanding, factivity and belief. Our aim will be to diagnose this case in a principled way, and in doing so, to make some progress toward appreciating what objectual understanding—i.e., understanding a subject matter or body of information—demands of us. Here is the (...) plan. After some ground clearing in §1, §2 outlines and motivates a plausible working model—moderate factivity—for characterising the sense in which objectual understanding should be regarded as factive. §3 shows how the datum that we can understand false theories can, despite initial suggestions to the contrary, be assimilated straightforwardly within the moderate factivity model. §4 highlights how the inverse kind of case to that explored in §3—viz., a variant of Lackey’s creationist teacher case—poses special problems for moderate factivity. With reference to recent work on moral understanding by Hills, §5 proposes a solution to the problem, and §6 attempts to diagnose why it is that we might originally have been led to draw the wrong conclusion. (shrink)

Historical Narrative: A Dispute Between Constructionism and Scientific Realism An intense discussion about the issue of historical narrative arose during the time when the naïve realism of classical historiography was being critiqued and led to a dispute, in the last century, between constructionism and critical or scientific realism. We can distinguish between constructionism and noetic constructivism. According to ontological constructionism all facts are human constructions; according to noetic constructivism, our notions and theories are constructs with objective meaning (sense and reference); (...) they refer to objective reality. Scientific realism recognizes the existence of noetic construction but does not regard facts as our constructions, as pure fictions. The point of contention is the question over whether historical narrative is merely a discursive construction or whether it is also a scientific reconstruction of the past. Resolving the dispute over whether historical narrative can be objectively true, or whether it is subject to empirical control or not, is dependent on finding the answer to this question. (shrink)

Protagoras, of all the ancient philosophers, has perhaps attracted the most interest in modern times. His saying ‘Man is the measure of all things’ caused Schiller to adopt him as the patron of the Oxford pragmatists, and has generally earned him the title of the first humanist. Yet the exact delineation of his philosophcal position remains a baffling task. Neumann, writing on Die Problematik des ‘Homo-mensura’ Satzes in 1938,2 concludes that no certainty whatever can be reached on the meaning of (...) the dictum, since ‘man’, ‘measure’, and ‘things’ are all ambiguous, nor can we tell which of the three is the predicate. The time is past when it was believed that a man's philosophy could be understood apart from the events of his life and the circumstances of his age: yet in the case of Protagoras the historical method of approach has hardly been attempted, although the impact of environment was perhaps more decisive in the formation of philosophical concepts in the Greek world than anywhere else. The reality about which the Greek philosopher spoke had three aspects: it was either the one universe of physics, or the political unity, or God. For example, the book of Heracleitus Περ φσεως was divided into three chapters or logoi, About the Whole, a political, and a theological. Neither physics nor theology supplies from its own subject-matter the form in which this reality was described. (shrink)

The achievements of the textile industry in Roman Britain are often underestimated as a result of the meagreness of our available evidence. The Edict on maximum prices issued by Diocletian in A.D. 301 shows that British capes commanded high prices on the markets of the Empire, and that in the late third century A.D. British rugs were the best in the world. In view of the competition from the traditional centres of rug manufacture in the East, this is an astonishing (...) achievement. (shrink)

The received translation and interpretation of many of the technical terms current in the textile industry of the Roman Empire are inaccurate, because lexicographers have either fought shy of being precise, or have thought that they recognized in the ancient world technical processes which originated at a much later date. The evidence is often equivocal or insufficient, but may still yield details that have been overlooked. The textile expression scutulatus, to take an example, deserves more attention than Blümner has devoted (...) to it. When it refers to the appearance of a garment, Lewis and Short, s.v. scutulatus, translate ‘diamond or lozenge-shaped, checkered’. It seems worth while to attempt a more precise translation, and, if possible, to estimate the significance in context of the goods so designated. (shrink)

If the world itself is metaphysically indeterminate in a specified respect, what follows? In this paper, we develop a theory of metaphysical indeterminacy answering this question.

In this article I try to refute the so-called "libertarian" theory of free will, and to examine how our conclusion ought to modify our common attitudes of praise and blame. In attacking the libertarian view, I shall try to show that it cannot be consistently stated. That is, my dscussion will be an "analytic-philosophic" one. I shall neglect what I think is in practice an equally powerful method of attack on the libertarian: a challenge to state his theory in such (...) a way that it will fit in the modern biology and psychology, which are becoming increasingly physicalistic. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper the authors describe Hrušovský’s model of the development of scientific knowledge, which, due to the influence of logical empiricism, he saw as cumulative, hypothetical-confirmationist and internalistic, i.e. taking into account only scientific factors. In the second part it is showed, that Hrušovský acknowledged the influence of the external factors, emphasizing at the same time the fundamental independence of scientific knowledge. He dismissed the vulgar eco nomism as well as the extreme internalism.

The article deals with the articulation of the model of empirical science in I. Hrušovský’s writings. Further, it examines Hrušovský’s conception of the development of scientific knowledge as related to his concept of “radical revision” . The authors draw mainly from Hrušovský’s books written in 1935 – 1948.

In his paper the author focuses on the analysis of 1. Kuhn's self-reflection, his discovery of hermeneutics and its importance for the new way of reading and understanding the text, 2. Kuhn's comprehension of the relation between history and philosophy of science and of many different factors which influence upon forming and development of a modern history of science, 3. Working out of Kuhn's specific conceptional apparatus , 4. Kuhn's cycle of scientific knowledge and 5. some methodological controversions concerning incomensurability (...) of scientific paradigms, understandig of the normal science and Kuhn's antirealism. (shrink)

Living out of silence, out of a fully functioning, lovingly attentive mind, and not just out of thought, out of a partially functioning mind, is requisite for depth or profundity in living or relating. A fully attentive, truly silent or meditative mind sees that there is real dualism of time and the timeless and that time and the timeless each has its own unique value. The timeless, or real silence, that which alone can make for depth in one's living and (...) relating, can be there only when, in one's awareness, time and all that is related to time, have come to an end. An examination of a wide variety of statements made by writers, both past and present, shows that these understandings are seldom there in contemporary writings, just as they were not there in writings that have come down to us from the past. 'Living beyond the One and the Many' invites readers to consider the possibility that what is presented in it can bring deep meaning to one's way of living in the world"--Publisher's description, back cover. (shrink)

Telling a patient that the outcome of his illness is not good, or even hopeless, requires sensitivity and the ability to communicate with him in the setting of a hospital which is an unnatural environment divorced from family and friends. It is a task which must be taught and learned by doctors and nurses.

Husserlian phenomenology, as the study of conscious experience, has often been accused of solipsism. Husserl’s method, it is argued, does not have the resources to provide an account of consciousness of other minds. This chapter will address this issue by providing a brief overview of the multiple angles from which Husserl approached the theme of intersubjectivity, with specific focus on the details of his account of the concrete interpersonal encounter – “empathy.” Husserl understood empathy as a direct, quasi-perceptual form of (...) intentionality through which the sense of the Other is constituted. Furthermore, his account of empathy is holistically integrated with his overall theory of intersubjectivity, including his discussions of the objectivity of nature, and the social, historical, and communal aspects of subjectivity. Husserl’s theory of empathy continues to cast a long shadow, influencing both the analytic and continental approaches to the problem of other minds, as well as contemporary account of social cognition in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

An Essay on Human Action seeks to provide a comprehensive, detailed, enlightening, and (in its detail) original account of human action. This account presupposes a theory of events as abstract, proposition-like entities, a theory which is given in the first chapter of the book. The core-issues of action-theory are then treated: what acting in general is (a version of the traditional volitional theory is proposed and defended); how actions are to be individuated; how long actions last; what acting intentionally is; (...) what doing one thing by doing another is; what basic action is; and what omitting to do something is. Attention is also given to the concepts of causation, intention, volition, deciding, choosing, and trying. Finally, a libertarian account of free action is tentatively proposed and defended. (shrink)

The existential analysis -- The death of dasein -- The timeliness of dasein -- The derivation of time -- The time of being.

While philosophical questions about health and disease have attracted much attention in recent decades, and while opinions are divided on most issues, influential accounts seem to embrace negativism about health, according to which health is the absence of disease. Some subscribe to unrestricted negativism, which claims that negativism applies not only to the concepts of health and disease as used by healthcare professionals but also to the lay concept that underpins everyday thinking. Whether people conceptualize health in this manner has (...) implications for medical care and public health, and so we set out to examine this claim in two studies. Participants were asked to assess and compare the health states of two people presented in two vignettes. We found that both lay people and medical students conceptualize health as something more than the absence of disease. We argue that our findings highlight a need to rethink unrestricted negativism and indicate a need to rethink the way the debate has traditionally focused on disease. (shrink)

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant claims that genius is a talent for art, but not for science. Despite his restriction of genius to the domain of fine art, several recent interpreters have suggested that genius has a role to play in Kant’s account of cognition in general and scientific practice in particular. In this paper, I explore Kant’s reasons for excluding genius from science as well as the reasons that one might nevertheless be tempted to think that his account (...) allows room for the scientific genius. I then argue that Kant’s concerns are not only epistemic, but also moral, and together, they give us good reason for resisting the veneration of genius. (shrink)