In this article I reply to criticism of my published work by N. Psarros (Journal for the General Philosophy of Science 28: 297–305,1997). I show that I had already answered the first criticism in my published work and not overlooked his supposed refutation. However I offer a plausible argument which he could have used to strengthen his claim. Psarros cites my work on Hopkins in his opening paragraph, but then makes no further reference to it in the text. (...) I indicated to Psarros verbally at Ilkley 1994 (and reiterate the message here) that Hopkins' work on Vitamins is the exemplar of a Popperian historical episode and must require addressing by the opponents of critical rationalism. (shrink)

Popper's critical rationalism is widely accepted under scientists and philosophers of science as a proper method for the reconstruction of scientific theories. On occasion of the application of the Popperian ideas for the reconstruction of chemistry by Akeroyd the flaws of the critical rationalist approach are criticised and a methodical alternative is proposed, involving the operational definition of scientific terms.

The paper asks about the reasons for the neglect of chemistry in modern philosophy of science and investigates in how far this science can be the object of an autonomous philosophical reflection. It is argued that from a culturalistic point of view chemistry indeed offers a field of interesting questions ranging from the reconstruction of its epistemological objects to the elucidation of the semantic functions of terms like "atom" or "molecule". It is further argued that the philosophical reflection upon chemistry (...) has important consequences for the didactic, the history and even the ethics of this science, making thus philosophy to a partner of chemistry in fulfilling its purposes in human society. (shrink)

The aim of this volume is to explore new approaches to the problem of the constitution of the various aspects of sociality and to confront these with received ideas. Many of the contributions are devoted to a rather holistic and antireductionist conception of social objects, groups, joint actions, and collective knowledge. The topics that are dealt with are: (a) the question of the ontological status of social objects and their relation to physical objects; (b) collective agency; and (c) the question (...) whether there can be shared knowledge and shared beliefs, a rather new topic in the discussion of the social aspects of personal life. (shrink)

The aim of this volume is to explore new approaches to the problem of the constitution of the various aspects of sociality and to confront these with received ideas. Therefore many of the contributions to this volume are devoted to a rather holistic and antireductionist conception of social objects, groups, joint actions and collective knowledge. The topics, that are dealt with are: a) the question of the ontological status of social objects and their relation to physical objects, b) collective agency (...) and c) the question whether there can be shared knowledge and shared beliefs - a rather new topic in the discussion of the social aspects of personal life. (shrink)

All variants of pragmatism share the flaw that their concepts of practice rely on the idea of the local value of actions with respect only to locally defined aims and not on the criterion of a universal goodness. This paper claims that such a criterion can be found with the aid of an ontologically founded theory of the Good, which regards forms not as solely noematic universals, but as real, though abstract, entities. The idea of goodness is derived from the (...) thesis of the immediate knowledge of the Good. Further consequences of this form of theoretical foundation of goodness are the abandonment of the dogma of the immediate reference of language to the world as well as of the dogma of the primacy of acting over thinking. (shrink)

In this paper a concept of pain is introduced that regards pain as a formal entity that can be realized in various material ways, similarly to the concept of justice. Pain utterances have rather the character of evaluative judgments and not of propositional descriptions. They aren’t therefore true or false, but adequate or inadequate, correct or wrong, according to the circumstances and the context, in which they are made. Because pain is constituted by the interplay of individual and public attitudes (...) also inside a given cultural context we are always capable of extending our concept of pain by integrating other cultural attitudes towards pain and also capable of giving arguments that shall convince the members of an other culture to accept our ideas about pain. (shrink)

Исследование посвящено философскому осознанию природы духовности человека. Автор рассматривает духовность внутреннего мира человека как единство высших чувств души и нравственного сознания. Для специалистов в области философии, методологии науки.

The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the Fifth Conference on Collective Intentionality held at the University of Helsinki August 31 to September 2, 2006 and two additional contributions. The common aim of the papers is to explore the structure of shared intentional attitudes, and to explain how they underlie the social, cultural and institutional world. The contributions to this volume explore the phenomenology of sharedness, the concept of sharedness, and also various aspects of the structure of (...) collective intentionality in general, and of the intricate relations between sharedness and normativity in particular. Concepts of Sharedness shows how rich and lively the philosophical research focused on the analysis of collective intentionality has become, and will provide further inspiration for future work in this rapidly evolving field. (shrink)

We argue that the appraisal of models in social epistemology requires conceiving of them as argumentative devices, taking into account the argumentative context and adopting a family-of-models perspective. We draw up such an account and show how it makes it easier to see the value and limits of the use of models in social epistemology. To illustrate our points, we document and explicate the argumentative role of epistemic landscape models in social epistemology and highlight their limitations. We also claim that (...) our account could be fruitfully used in appraising other models in philosophy and science. (shrink)