The purpose of the text is to engage in a well thought critique of the Enlightenment project carried out by Nicholas Maxwell and to reflect upon the proposal of its reconstruction. Maxwell’s intellectual position is not at all obvious: he is neither a radical rationalist, nor a defender of scientific rationality, nor a postmodern and social constructivist. Postmodernists and social constructivists opposed the very idea of reason and rational inquiry, and have been thoroughly critical of what knowledge-inquiry represents. Indeed, such (...) criticisms could not be further from Maxwell’s position. According to Maxwell, what is wrong with knowledge-inquiry is not its embodiment of reason but, to the contrary, its gross and damaging irrationality. From Maxwell’s point of view we suffer not that much from the excess of rationality, but its deficit. Maxwell does not share open criticism of anti-Enlightenment thinkers from Nietzsche to Foucault, but more so he escapes the beliefs of a scientifically focused group of philosophers who see the main force of emancipation of humanity in a narrowly understood science followed by physics, the methodology of verification, and naturalism as a basic ideology. The author of the text thus poses the question: what can save our culture if it is neither sciencenor the rejection of science? Does the replacement of the category of knowledgeinquiry with wisdom-inquiry—which Maxwell converts us to—bring us any closer to a solution in our consideration of knowledge and life, science and politics, facts and values, nature and society? In Western culture wisdom has always been an object of desire, and it was so, inter alia, because unlike knowledge it has never been precisely defined and further specified. Philosophers developed a warm feeling towards wisdom and sought for wisdom, but had they lived by wisdom? Finally, the author challenges the most difficult question: can we rationally excuse our hopes for wisdom and hope that it may one day be embodied in the work of institutions and the actions of individuals? (shrink)

The contour of a family of filters along a filter is a set-theoretic lower limit. Topologicity and regularity of convergences can be characterized with the aid of the contour operation. Contour inversion is studied, in particular, for iterated contours of sequential cascades. A related problem of continuous extension of maps between maximal elements of sequential cascades to full subcascades is solved in full generality.

We introduce a notion of ideal type such that any two ideals with the same ideal type are isomorphic. From this we infer, under the axiom t = h, that each ideal which consists of all nowhere Ramsey sets contained in some family of infinite subsets of natural numbers is isomorphic with the ideal of all nowhere Ramsey sets.

Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way (Madhyamaka) doctrine met with the objection that it is a mere verbal attack (vitaṇḍā) against other philosophical positions. As one of the Madhyamaka critics pointed out: because Nāgārjuna does not hold own position, he is not able to justify his criticism of the essence (svabhāva). The article is an answer to the question whether, in the context of Indian philosophy, it is possible to know things devoid of essences. Theory of knowledge of this kind, i.e. the concept (...) of omniscience (sarvajña) was presented in Aṣṭasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā sutra. Associations between Nāgārjuna’s texts and the sutra suggest that omniscience could be a substrate for epistemological position of the Middle Way. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to present two natural deduction systems for Intuitionistic Sentential Calculus with Identity ( ISCI ); a syntactically motivated \(\mathsf {ND}^1_{\mathsf {ISCI}}\) and a semantically motivated \(\mathsf {ND}^2_{\mathsf {ISCI}}\). The formulation of \(\mathsf {ND}^1_{\mathsf {ISCI}}\) is based on the axiomatic formulation of ISCI. Its rules cannot be straightforwardly classified as introduction or elimination rules; ISCI -specific rules are based on axioms characterizing the identity connective. The system does not enjoy the standard subformula property, but due (...) to the normalization procedure non-subformulas can label only leaves of proofs. In \(\mathsf {ND}^2_{\mathsf {ISCI}}\), we propose only two general identity-related rules, in reference to the treatment of the identity connective in First-Order Logic. (shrink)

Stereotype accuracy is a contentious topic. Part of the problem is that typically stereotypes are generic statements whose truth status is unclear due to the fact that they are ill-defined quantitatively. The article focuses on the epistemic aspect of stereotypical beliefs. In the ongoing debate, I side with those who argue against stereotypes being wrong or inaccurate by virtue of definition alone. I propose that, when possible, stereotype accuracy should be assessed in probabilistic terms by inspecting how likely a generic (...) statement is to be true when applied to individual representative of the relevant group. This approach applies equally well to investigating the actual and the perceived accuracy of stereotypes. (shrink)

The article is an attempt of analysis and interpretation of the “Young Poland“ comedy written by Włodzimierz Perzyński in psychopathological or psychoanalytical perspective. The author draws reader’s attention to artistic achievements of Włodzimierz Perzyński who was a Polish novelist, comedy writer, columnist and poet, satirist and ironist and he died eighty years ago. The article is informally built out of two parts: Michel Foucault’s cultural criticism is a context of the first part, in the second one the author uses general (...) psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud and Karen Horney. A neurotic personality, neurotic disturbances in the relations between people and activities of individuals in the different social situations are an object of analysis and interpretation. The author discussing one of the most famous Perzyński’s comedies tries to show that the Polish writer’s plays are interesting and opening a lot of perspectives of interpretation. (shrink)

In my paper I present David Hume's philosophy from the perspective of Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of signs. I argue that by interpreting impressions and ideas as iconic signs it is possible to avoid many inconsistencies in Hume's philosophy. Apart from that it makes possible to avoid Hume's scepticism about the existence of the external world by introducing Peirce's concept of the dynamic and immediate object. What is more, the generative structure of signs helps us to deal with the "gmissing (...) shade of blue" problem. (shrink)

Wittgenstein introduced his claim about colour incompatibility originally in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , where he stated that there could be only one colour in one place and time. It is commonly believed that Wittgenstein abandoned his conception of logical atomism when he realized the consequences of this claim. The aim of this article is to provide an interpretation of the colour incompatibility claim in terms of Wittgenstein’s phenomenology. I will focus on two works of great significance for the claim: Some (...) Remarks on Logical Form and Philosophical Remarks . These two works were written between 1929 and 1930, which is the beginning of the “middle period” in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. I will focus not only on Wittgenstein’s formulation of the colour incompatibility claim, but also on how this claim was justified. The explanation of Wittgenstein’s justification of this claim will help to understand his phenomenology and theory of philosophical grammar. (shrink)

Dharmakīrti argues that there is no pramāṇa (valid means of cognition or source of knowledge) for a thesis that is a self-contradiction (svavacanavirodha). That is, self-contradictions such as ‘everything said is false’ and ‘my mother is barren’ cannot be known to be true or false. The contemporary scholar Tillemans challenges Dharmakīrti by arguing that we can know that self-contradictions are false by means of a formal logical inference. The aims of the paper are to answer Tillemans’ challenge from what we (...) take to be Dharmakīrti’s or Dharmakīrtian (someone who is like Dharmakīrti) perspective and to demonstrate the unique features of Dharmakīrti’s view of inference. By so doing, we show that the epistemology in relation to the formal conception of logic that underlies Tillemans’ challenge is problematic from Dharmakīrti’s or Dharmakīrtian perspective. The paper, thus, presents Dharmakīrti’s view of inference and logical reasoning as well as a Dharmakīrtian challenge to the formal conception of logic that is the dominant contemporary conception. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFacial mimicry has long been considered a main mechanism underlying emotional contagion. A closer look at the empirical evidence, however, rev...