Gerade heute, wo sich die Aufmerksamkeit der führenden Philosophen, Logiker und Mathematiker erneut auf die Grundlagen der systematisch-deduktiven Mathematik richtet, ist dieses Buch von zeitnaher und tiefer Bedeutung.

The thirty year long friendship between Imre Lakatos and the classic scholar and historian of mathematics Árpád Szabó had a considerable influence on the ideas, scholarly career and personal life of both scholars. After recalling some relevant facts from their lives, this paper will investigate Szabó's works about the history of pre-Euclidean mathematics and its philosophy. We can find many similarities with Lakatos' philosophy of mathematics and science, both in the self-interpretation of early axiomatic Greek mathematics as (...) class='Hi'>Szabó reconstructs it, and in the general overview Szabó provides us about the turn from the intuitive methods of Greek mathematicians to the strict axiomatic method of Euclid's Elements. As a conclusion, I will argue that the correct explanation of these similarities is that in their main works they developed ideas they had in common from the period of intimate intellectual contact in Hungarian academic life in the mid-twentieth century. In closing, I will recall some relevant features of this background that deserve further research. (shrink)

…entities? 2. How to be a nominalist 2.1. “Speak with the vulgar …” 2.2. “…think with the learned” 3. Arguments for nominalism 3.1. Intelligibility, physicalism, and economy 3.2. Causal..

Traces the life of the influential Marxist philosopher, and discusses the formation of his political beliefs.

In an aticle written in 1917 for the Hungarian journal Nyugat (Occident), Freud speaks of three deep humiliations that scientific investigation had to inflict on the selflove of humanity. The first is cosmological, which is associated with the work of Copernicus, who proved that the habitat of man, the earth, is not at the center of the universe. The second is biological, and it is indebted to the work of Darwin, who destroyed man's belief in his divine descent, thus making (...) it impossible for him to break his bonds of solidarity with the animal world. The third is psychological. (shrink)

Philosophers and linguists alike tend to call a semantic theory ‘Russellian’ just in case it assigns to sentences in which definite descriptions occur the truth-conditions Russell did in ‘On Denoting’. This is unfortunate; not all aspects of those particular truth-conditions do explanatory work in Russell's writings. As far as the semantics of descriptions is concerned, the key insights of ‘On Denoting’ are that definite descriptions are not uniformly referring expressions, and that they are scope-bearing elements. Anyone who accepts these two (...) claims can account for Russell's puzzle cases the way he did. Russell had no substantive argument for the claim that ‘The F is G’ entails ‘There is at most one F’; in fact, he had important misgivings about it. I outline an argument against this claim, and I argue that by holding on to uniqueness contemporary semanticists make a momentous mistake: they keep the illusion alive that there is a way to account for linguistic meaning without addressing what linguistic expressions are for. (shrink)

In this paper I examine one of the effects of László Ravasz’s (1882-1975) theological thinking, former professor of Practical Theology at Protestant Theological Institute, Kolzosvár-Cluj-Napoca, namely the development of his spiritual life and its impact on his theological scientific position. Due to the limitations of the scope of this paper, I could present the less well-known views of Ravasz’s work on the mission. John R. Mott’s lecture in Kolozsvár-Cluj-Napoca provides, among others, the certainty that in the modern theoretical approach of (...) the young Ravasz he approached the tasks of pastoral ministry, preaching, dissemination of the gospel, theological education in a modern and actual way. This notion was not perfect, but it helped to bring about a new impetus for the Hungarian Protestant worldview that was stuck in rationalism and liberalism, and for the value theology to constitute a positive transition to the dialectical theology. Ravasz was an authentic representative of this transition. (shrink)

Cet article entend examiner l’iconographie d’un bas-relief qui se trouve à Budapest et provient probablement de Naples. Il a été sculpté en lychnites de Paros vers la fin de l’époque hellénistique ou aux tout débuts de l’époque impériale. Il représente une scène unique : Éros se posant sur une roue en train de tourner. Cette scène n’est pas le cliché instantané d’un quelconque jeu d’équilibre, et il n’existe pas non plus de mythe auquel l’associer. Il faut donc l’interpréter de manière (...) métaphorique, pour lui-même. Cette image d’Éros peut évoquer différents types de champs sémantiques, dénués de véritables rapports les uns avec les autres, voire se contredisant. Si l’on passe en revue les multiples significations des motifs composant l’image dans la culture gréco-romaine à partir de sources iconographiques, archéologiques et textuelles, il existe cinq thématiques différentes qui peuvent être rapprochées de la scène du relief. De plus, cet Éros représenté dans une situation d’équilibre précaire est lié au Kairos, le « Moment opportun ». L’objet, œuvre unique d’un sculptor doctus anonyme, montre donc les traits essentiels du dieu. (shrink)

This review addresses the 100-year-old Hill equation (published in January 22, 1910), the first formula relating the result of a reversible association (e.g., concentration of a complex, magnitude of an effect) to the variable concentration of one of the associating substances (the other being present in a constant and relatively low concentration). In addition, the Hill equation was the first (and is the simplest) quantitative receptor model in pharmacology. Although the Hill equation is an empirical receptor model (its parameters have (...) only physico-chemical meaning for a simple ligand binding reaction), it requires only minor a priori knowledge about the mechanism of action for the investigated agonist to reliably fit concentration-response curve data and to yield useful results (in contrast to most of the advanced receptor models). Thus, the Hill equation has remained an important tool for physiological and pharmacological investigations including drug discovery, moreover it serves as a theoretical basis for the development of new pharmacological models. (shrink)

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the space of possible analyses of the phenomenon of quantifier domain restriction, together with a set of considerations which militate against all but our own proposal. Among the many accounts we consider and reject are the ‘explicit’ approach to quantifier domain restric‐tion discussed, for example, by Stephen Neale, and the pragmatic approach to quantifier domain restriction proposed by Kent Bach. Our hope is that the exhaustive discussion of this special case of (...) context‐dependence will provide guidelines for how to decide, for an arbitrary case of context‐dependent discourse, whether it should be treated syntactically, semantically, or pragmatically. (shrink)

I will sketch a possible way of empirical/operational definition of space and time tags of physical events, without logical or operational circularities and with a minimal number of conventional elements. As it turns out, the task is not trivial; and the analysis of the problem leads to a few surprising conclusions.

A recent analysis by de Barros and Suppes of experimentally realizable GHZ correlations supports the conclusion that these correlations cannot be explained by introducing local hidden variables. We show, nevertheless, that their analysis does not exclude local hidden variable models in which the inefficiency in the experiment is an effect not only of random errors in the detector equipment, but is also the manifestation of a pre-set, hidden property of the particles ("prism models"). Indeed, we present an explicit prism model (...) for the GHZ scenario; that is, a local hidden variable model entirely compatible with recent GHZ experiments. (shrink)