In relativistic theories, the assumption of proper mass constancy generally holds. We study gravitational relativistic mechanics of point particle in the novel approach of proper mass varying under Minkowski force action. The motivation and objective of this work are twofold: first, to show how the gravitational force can be included in the Special Relativity Mechanics framework, and, second, to investigate possible consequences of the revision of conventional proper mass concept (in particular, to clarify a proper mass role in the divergence (...) problem). It is shown that photon motion in the gravitational field can be treated in terms of massless refracting medium, what makes the gravity phenomenon compatible with SR Mechanics framework in the variable proper mass approach.Specifically, the problem of point particle in the spherical symmetric stationary gravitational field is studied in SR-based Mechanics, and equations of motion in the Lorentz covariant form are obtained in the relativistic Lagrangean problem formulation. The dependence of proper mass on potential field strength is derived from the Euler-Lagrange equations as well. One of new results is the elimination of conventional 1/r divergence, which is known to be not removable in Schwarzschild gravitomechanics. Predictions of particle and photon gravitational properties are in agreement with GR classical tests under weak-field conditions; however, deviations rise with potential field strength. The conclusion is made that the approach of field-dependent proper mass is perspective for development of SR gravitational mechanics and further studies of gravitational problems. (shrink)

Lorsqu'on pense à la politique culturelle de l'URSS, un seul mot vient à l'esprit : jdanovisme. Tout le monde connaît Andreï Jdanov, le commissaire du peuple à la culture de Staline et ses diktats en matière de création. En revanche, on ignore tout de son " prédécesseur " et pour ainsi dire, son opposé : Anatole Vassiliévitch Lounatcharski. Nul hasard. L'idéologie a tout intérêt à réduire le communisme au goulag, Lénine à Staline, le matérialisme dialectique à Lyssenko et la critique (...) marxiste à quelques vulgates du réalisme socialiste. Mais pour tous ceux qui n'ont jamais accepté le communisme dans sa version momifiée, à commencer par Lénine lui-même, devenu pharaon malgré lui dans un mausolée sur la place rouge, il est enfin temps de découvrir son plus proche conseiller en matière de culture, Anatole Lounatcharski, philosophe, artiste et révolutionnaire. (shrink)

Stig Kanger made important contributions to logic and formal philosophy. Kanger's most original achievements were in the areas of general proof theory, the semantics of modal and deontic logic, and the logical analysis of the concept of rights. But he contributed significantly to action theory, preference logic and the theory of measurement as well. This is the second of two volumes dedicated to the work of Stig Kanger. The first volume is a complete collection of Kanger's philosophical papers. The present (...) volume contains critical essays on the various aspects of Kanger's work as well as some biographical sketches. Lennart Åqvist, Jan Berg, Brian Chellas, Anatoli Degtyarev, Lars Gustafsson, Sören Halldén, Kaj Børge Hansen, Sven Ove Hansson, Risto Hilpinen, Jaakko Hintikka, Ghita Holmström-Hintikka, Lars Lindahl, Sten Lindström, Ingmar Pörn, Dag Prawitz, Wlodek Rabinowicz, Krister Segerberg, Amartya Sen, Sören Stenlund, Göran Sundholm, and Andrei Voronkov have contributed to this volume. (shrink)

With increasing influence of illiberalism, freedom should not be considered or interpreted lightly. Post-truth contexts provide grounds for alt-right movements to capture and pervert notions of freedom of speech, making universities battlefields of politicised emotions and expressions. In societies facing these pressures around the world, academic freedom has never been challenged as much as it is today. As Peters and colleagues note, conceptualisations of ‘facts’ and ‘evidences’ are politically, socially, and epistemically reconstructed in post-truth contexts. At the same time, with (...) intelligence commodified, reified or marginalised, freedom of speech and of mobility can entail fights for entitlements, or escapes from local responsibilities. The decline and corruptions of democratic free speech and academic freedom, or the absence of forces to defend them, are thus serious challenges. These challenges grow as the competition of ideas, sometimes under the rubric of academic freedom, often implies the power struggle and questioning of statuses in the so-called ‘marketplace of ideas’. Competition as a value invoked in some conceptualisations of freedom, becomes more important than human dignity, which was originally supposed to expand and strengthen under democratic conceptions of freedom in higher education. What had been happening to freedoms, of speech, teaching, and learning, across different subject positions and cultures of higher education, remains largely underexplored, as alt-right movements, neoliberalism and illiberalism, and post-truthism values and orientations expand. (shrink)

Interview of Illia Davidenko, Kseniia Myroshnyk, Daria Popil with Anatoly Loy.

It has been shown recently that monodic first-order temporal logic without functional symbols but with equality is incomplete, i.e., the set of the valid formulae of this logic is not recursively enumerable. In this paper we show that an even simpler fragment consisting of monodic monadic two-variable formulae is not recursively enumerable.

The study contains the review, analysis, assessment of the current state and prospects for further scientific study of the materials of the Russian state archives, including the personal funds of philosophers and philosophical institutions of Russia in the 19th-20th centuries, which are of the greatest relevance to historians of Russian philosophy. In this regard, on the one hand, the study considers the largest research and scientific-publishing historical and philosophical projects, testifying to the already achieved results of the scientific development of (...) vast arrays of archival documents; on the other hand, a number of collections of Russian state archives (federal, regional, municipal, departmental) have been monitored in order to identify archival collections that were little or insufficiently studied from this point of view. The results of the collective research presented in the article can be considered as the beginning of a large systematic work on the analytical mapping of the content of Russian archival collections relevant to the problems of the history of Russian philosophy. The study shows the importance and productivity of conducting parallel research work both with the personal funds of Russian philosophers of the 19th-20th centuries, and with funds containing documentation of philosophical institutions (magazine editorial offices, faculties, departments, research institutes, publishing houses of philosophical literature, professional and thematic associations of philosophers). In this regard, the question was raised about the need to develop historical and philosophical archiving and source studies in Russia, to include this set of subjects into the system of training historians of philosophy, and also about the need to coordinate the joint efforts of historians of Russian philosophy towards the formation of an archive of Russian philosophy as a significant and publicly available mapped resource. The results obtained in the course of the study should contribute to the emergence of the history of Russian philosophy as a dynamically developing branch of Russian science to a qualitatively new source study and methodological level, necessary for solving the large-scale research tasks, related, in particular, to the scientific preparation of academic collections of works by Russian philosophers and the development of modern fundamental history of Russian philosophy. (shrink)

Social conventions are those arbitrary rules and norms governing the countless behaviors all of us engage in every day without necessarily thinking about them, from shaking hands when greeting someone to driving on the right side of the road. In this book, Andrei Marmor offers a pathbreaking and comprehensive philosophical analysis of conventions and the roles they play in social life and practical reason, and in doing so challenges the dominant view of social conventions first laid out by David (...) Lewis. Marmor begins by giving a general account of the nature of conventions, explaining the differences between coordinative and constitutive conventions and between deep and surface conventions. He then applies this analysis to explain how conventions work in language, morality, and law. Marmor clearly demonstrates that many important semantic and pragmatic aspects of language assumed by many theorists to be conventional are in fact not, and that the role of conventions in the moral domain is surprisingly complex, playing mostly an auxiliary and supportive role. Importantly, he casts new light on the conventional foundations of law, arguing that the distinction between deep and surface conventions can be used to answer the prevalent objections to legal conventionalism. Social Conventions is a much-needed reappraisal of the nature of the rules that regulate virtually every aspect of human conduct. (shrink)

This article puts into conversation Friedrich Nietzsche’s perspectivism and a particular expression of “African animism,” drawn from my ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana. Nietzsche’s perspectivism extends interpretation beyond the human species into natural processes. Like perspectivism, African animism troubles the binaries—body/soul, nature/culture—that permeate anthropocentric thinking. Human-nonhuman relations are refigured as socio-ecological relations: the earth may be regarded as life-generating ancestors; baobab trees may approach humans as kin. These two images of the world intersect, but they do not mesh together. Nietzsche adopts (...) perspectivism as active intersections between dynamic processes, within an open universe that has not been predesigned for humans. Animism tends toward a world of personalized relationships that would reach harmony if we would only lighten our ecological footprint. I draw upon such resonances to advance a new ethic of experiential environmentalism that treats ecological threats as lived risks and shared experiences with a lively and communicating “environment.”. (shrink)

In our paper, ‘Escaping hell: divine motivation and the problem of hell’, we defended a theory of hell that we called ‘escapism’. We argued that, given God's just and loving character, it would be most rational for Him to maintain an open-door policy to those who are in hell, allowing them an unlimited number of chances to be reconciled with God and enjoy communion with Him. In this paper we reply to two recent objections to our original paper. The first (...) is an argument from religious luck offered by Russell Jones. The second is an argument from Kyle Swan that alleges that our commitments about the nature of reasons for action still leaves escapism vulnerable to an objection we labelled the ‘Job objection’ in our original paper. In this paper we argue that escapism has the resources built into it needed to withstand the objections from Jones and Swan. (shrink)

Опонуючи дискусійній рецепції метафізики Декарта, автор зосереджується на її тлумаченні як умов особистісної самореалізації. Інтерпретація мислителя в контексті незавершеної революції Коперника прояснює чинники актуалізації належних засадин людської поведінки. У процесі звернення до приватного листування обґрунтовується правомірність а) оцінки періоду роботи над незавершеними «Правилами для керування розумом» як етапу метафізики та б) з’ясування мотивів роботи над незавершеним ним текстом. Аналіз спадщини Декарта як осмислення умов розбудови особистості увиразнює її змістовну спорідненість із вченням Канта. Йдеться насамперед про межі людського знання як передумову (...) свободи, а також про принципову відмінність знань людини та зовнішніх речей. Глибоке знайомство з метафізикою Декарта свідчить про її дистанціювання від науки та релігії та його розважливе ставлення до ідеї абсолютизації мислення. А оскільки усвідомлення метафізичності людської природи зумовлює звертання Декарта до мистецтва, то подальші перспективи дослідження автор пов’язує з вивченням його ролі. (shrink)

This article focuses on the problems of application of artificial intelligence to represent legal knowledge. The volume of legal knowledge used in practice is unusually large, and therefore the ontological knowledge representation is proposed to be used for semantic analysis, presentation and use of common vocabulary, and knowledge integration of problem domain. At the same time some features of legal knowledge representation in Ukraine have been taken into account. The software package has been developed to work with the ontology. The (...) main features of the program complex, which has a Web-based interface and supports multi-user filling of the knowledge base, have been described. The crowdsourcing method is due to be used for filling the knowledge base of legal information. The success of this method is explained by the self-organization principle of information. However, as a result of such collective work a number of errors are identified, which are distributed throughout the structure of the ontology. The results of application of this program complex are discussed in the end of the article and the ways of improvement of the considered technique are planned. (shrink)

In Philosophy of Law, Andrei Marmor provides a comprehensive analysis of contemporary debates about the fundamental nature of law—an issue that has been at the heart of legal philosophy for centuries. What the law is seems to be a matter of fact, but this fact has normative significance: it tells people what they ought to do. Marmor argues that the myriad questions raised by the factual and normative features of law actually depend on the possibility of reduction—whether the legal (...) domain can be explained in terms of something else, more foundational in nature. In addition to exploring the major issues in contemporary legal thought, Philosophy of Law provides a critical analysis of the people and ideas that have dominated the field in past centuries. It will be essential reading for anyone curious about the nature of law. (shrink)

Розглядається формування базових положень античного дискурсу стосовно феномену реальності, його спрямованість і подальша рецепція середньовічною теологією. Філософське осмислення феномену реальності почалося у ранніх представників античної філософії і поступово сформувало систему онтологічних і гносеологічних понять, що поступово сформували два основних напрямки дискурсу – ідеалістичний і реалістичний. Представники класичного періоду – Платон і Арістотель – реалізували його інтенції у своїх філософських системах, але підвалини вже були закладені їх попередниками, зокрема Гераклітом, Демокрітом, Парменідом і Зеноном. Напрацювання античних мислителів були сприйняті середньовічними теологами і (...) трансформовані у контексті християнської системи уявлень про світ. З одного боку античний дискурс звузився до єдиної моделі теологічного, християнського ідеалізму. Але з іншого, середньовічна модель реальності доповнилася самостійною категорією часової протяжності, що мала лінійну спрямованість. В перспективі це робило можливим реалізацію ідеї діалектичного розвитку, як властивості реальності. (shrink)

I ventured to think during the war. I wrote several blogs on the topic "War and Intelligence". Everything seems out of place here. War requires action (participation, protection, assistance), and thought wants concentration in peace. I am not engaged in scientific research, I just think about what I can, what I have, and what I carry with me, without referring to sources and reference books. I'm thinking about this very: how does the event of the war relate to the ability (...) — and maybe even the duty — to think. I wrote two posts. They consider intelligence (intellectus) as a kind of responsibility. All knowledge, awareness, concepts, sciences, discursive practices, etc. — are secondary. They make sense in the primary context of responsibility. All intellectual pursuits have meaning and meaning as aspects of the answer to the question that constitutes a human being as human. This is being-in-question. (shrink)

The article proposes to view Maidan as a historic event that generated widely influential new meanings. The authors interpret Maidan not only as a political phenomenon, but as an event that rehabilitated the idea of human dignity and solidarity, and demonstrated the possibility of creating a new community where people come together not because they share a common past, but because they choose a common future—it provided people the occasion to make free choices concerning their futures. At the same time, (...) Maidan raised the question of European identity once again. The European idea is that of an incomplete, free individual in search of himself; European culture is Maidan—the space in which people of different cultures communicate. European culture does not create a specific identity and puts any identity into question. The European idea and patriotic idea are the internal contradictions of Maidan. (shrink)

We obtain a nonasymptotic lower time bound for deciding sentences of bounded second-order arithmetic with respect to a form of the random access machine with stored programs. More precisely, let P be an arbitrary program for the model under consideration which recognized true formulas with a given range of parameters. Let p be the length of P and let N be an arbitrary natural number. We show how to construct a formula G with one free variable with length not more (...) than 400 symbols and a value f of x such that the time required by P to decide the truth of G is at least N+1 steps. Furthermore, the G constructed does not depend on P and the length of f is less than p+400. (shrink)

Public interest in the legacy of Russian religious philosophy, and above all in the legacy of V. S. Solovyov, reached its peak at the turn of the 1990s, after which it declined. As indirect evidence of this, we can note the remaining unrealized idea of installing a monument to the philosopher, slowing down the pace of work on the release of a complete collection of his works, and reducing the number of works dedicated to him. The year of the centenary (...) since the death of Solovyov was symptomatic, when the authoritative representatives of the Russian philosophical community, S.S. Khoruzhiy and P.P. Gaidenko made an ambiguous assessment of Solovyov's ideological heritage and its significance for the subsequent development of Russian socio-philosophical and religious-theological thought. In the article the statement that the genealogy of the critical interpretation of Solovyov's legacy goes back to the works of the philosopher and theologian G.V. Florovsky is substantiated. Florovsky influence in Russian studies, as well as in post-Soviet Russia in general is difficult to overestimate. In this regard, the author draws attention to the ideological evolution of Florovsky, which gives the key to his interpretation of Solovyov's philosophy. The analysis showed that Florovsky's critical reinterpretation of Solovyov's legacy had both a theoretical, theological, and doctrinal character, and was caused by certain socio-psychological factors related to the generational conflict between representatives and heirs of the Russian religious and philosophical Renaissance of the early XX century. It is demonstrated that the reception of Solovyov by Florovsky was very significant, influential and archetypal for Russian religious and philosophical thought, both in Russia and abroad. (shrink)

In this note we demonstrate that the results of observations in the EPR–Bohm–Bell experiment can be described within the classical probabilistic framework. However, the “quantum probabilities” have to be interpreted as conditional probabilities, where conditioning is with respect to fixed experimental settings. Our approach is based on the complete account of randomness involved in the experiment. The crucial point is that randomness of selections of experimental settings has to be taken into account within one consistent framework covering all events related (...) to the experiment. This approach can be applied to any complex experiment in which statistical data are collected for various experimental settings. (shrink)

Generic statements (e.g., “Birds lay eggs”) express generalizations about categories. In this paper, we hypothesized that there is a paradoxical asymmetry at the core of generic meaning, such that these sentences have extremely strong implications but require little evidence to be judged true. Four experiments confirmed the hypothesized asymmetry: Participants interpreted novel generics such as “Lorches have purple feathers” as referring to nearly all lorches, but they judged the same novel generics to be true given a wide range of prevalence (...) levels (e.g., even when only 10% or 30% of lorches had purple feathers). A second hypothesis, also confirmed by the results, was that novel generic sentences about dangerous or distinctive properties would be more acceptable than generic sentences that were similar but did not have these connotations. In addition to clarifying important aspects of generics’ meaning, these findings are applicable to a range of real-world processes such as stereotyping and political discourse. (shrink)

The author of the paper ascertains that in the treatment of material beginning of the world two opposed methods of approach had grown up: qualitative and quantitative ones. The first can be traced back to Miletus school. The other goes to Pythagorean philosophy. The qualitative treatment (Aristotelian one in the main) predominated from the fourth century B.C. to early XVII A.D. But from the second part of the XVII age and right up to our days the quantitative approach plays prevalent (...) role not in philosophy only, but also in exact natural sciences. The author supposes that these two approaches don’t exclude, but compensate each other, and no one of them should dominate. Both methods can resolve own epistemological tasks. Unfortunately, from I.Newton, quantitative approach has prevailed in natural sciences. Ignoring qualitative method, scientists (especially of nowodays) try to resolve the epistemological problems of cognition natural phenomena with its help. As a result arbitrary formal mathematical theories come into existence. Such conceptions create only semblance of resolution theproblem. Among them the author reckons for example the Large Burst theory, based on the model of enlarging universe and also the theory of planetary model of atom.In the paper author refers to his own scholarly works, where he proposes by the way alternative conception evolution of universe. (shrink)

The article provides a comprehensive view of the problem of continuity and succession in contemporary Russian philosophy by considering the filiation of ideas as well as external factors of historical, socio-cultural, mental, and psychological nature. Examined as well are factors both conducive and detrimental to the continuity and succession of ideas. The major part of the article concerns the most important philosophical schools in contemporary Russia and offers an analysis of their ideological genealogy within the history of Russian and Soviet (...) philosophical thought. (shrink)

The article “Prevention of corruption in public procurement: importance of general legal principles” examines the importance of general legal principles in the sphere of public purchases. The purpose of the work is to analyse the information on possible methods of prevention of and fight against corruption. The main result of the work is the conclusion that strict adherence to the general legal principles is one of the corruption-reducing factors. While combating corruption in the field of public procurement, general legal principles (...) should not be divided into primary and secondary principles, because they are all equally important and complement each other. Audit of the normative acts regulating public procurement shall be performed in the Member States of the European Union; positivisation of the following principles will effectively prevent manifestations of corruption in the area of public procurement: the principle of responsibility; principle of permanent composition of the procurement commission; the principle of in dubio pro reo; the principle of compensation; the principle of control; the principle of objectivity; the principle of completing the procurement procedure within a reasonable time period. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is the hermeneutic reconstruction of the political in the original concepts of K. Schmitt and H. Arendt. The scientific novelty lies in the analysis of the approaches of K. Schmitt and H. Arendt to the identification of the essence of the political. As a result, the differences between the theoretical approaches of K. Schmitt and H. Arendt were revealed, which correlate with each other according to the principle of complementarity. According to K. Schmitt, in the (...) era of modernity there is a monopolization of politics by the state, which acquires an external character and is implemented in the space of international relations. H. Arendt considers the political as the quintessence of active life, which is carried out by free people, first in the space of the ancient polis, and in later times – in other formats of publicity. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to reveal the specifics of the functioning of ideologies and political religions in modern society. The article examines primary sources and modern publications on ideologies and political religions. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that the classical tradition of studying ideology as a kind of false consciousness and, at the same time, as a strategy of social hegemony in modern society is reconstructed; a rational explanation of the circumstances under which Conservatism, Liberalism, Marxism (...) arose as three fundamental answers to questions about changes, values and power; the essence of civil and totalitarian religions as forms of secondary sacralization of institutions, values and collective political subjects is determined. As a result, the similarities and differences of ideologies and political religions in modern society were revealed. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to propose a mechanism for assessing the competitiveness of an enterprise. The article deals with modern methods of assessing the competitiveness of an enterprise, the existing methods are classified into economic and managerial. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that this paper attempts to form a mechanism for assessing the competitiveness of an enterprise based on the systematization of methods for assessing the competitiveness of an enterprise and the formulated algorithm (...) for their effective application. As a result, it is revealed that with the help of the proposed algorithm, a step-by-step methodological assessment of the competitiveness of the enterprise is carried out and its alternative competitiveness is evaluated. The algorithm allows you to identify the weaknesses of the operation of the enterprise, their causes and ways to eliminate them. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Defending the distinction between believing and accepting a proposition, I argue that cases where agents allegedly exercise direct voluntary control over their beliefs are instances of agents exercising direct voluntary control over accepting a proposition. The upshot is that any decision to believe a proposition cannot result directly in one’s acquiring the belief. Accepting is an instrumental mental action the agent performs that may trigger belief. A model of the relationship between acceptance and belief is sketched and defended. The (...) consequences of the distinction between belief and acceptance, and the model of belief control sketched are then applied to the recent case made by Carl Ginet in defense of the conceptual and psychological possibility of agents exercising direct voluntary control over their beliefs. n. (shrink)

The first part of the interview with Anatoly Akhutin, dedicated to the informal philosophical movement that began in the USSR during the Khrushchev Thaw, the trends of this movement in the 1970s, the phenomenon of soviet «doublethink» and the origins of Eurasianism’s modern versions.

This Element focuses on some core conceptual and ontological issues related to pantheistic conceptions of God by engaging with recent work in analytic philosophy of religion on this topic. The conceptual and ontological commitments of pantheism are contrasted with those of other conceptions of God. The concept of God assumed by pantheism is clarified and the question about what type of unity the universe must exhibit in order to be identical with God receives the most attention. It is argued that (...) the sort of unity the universe must display is the sort of unity characteristic of conscious cognitive systems. Some alternative ontological frameworks for grounding such cognitive unity are considered. Further, the question of whether God can be understood as personal on pantheism is explored. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to explore some of the main pragmatic aspects of communication within the legal context. It will be argued that in some crucial respects, the pragmatics of legal language is unique, involving considerations that are not typically present in ordinary conversational contexts. In particular, certain normative considerations that are typically settled in a regular conversational context are unresolved and potentially contentious in the legal case. On the other hand, the essay also argues that a careful (...) distinction between various pragmatic aspects of language use enables us to offer some generalizations about types of pragmatic enrichment that could be taken to form, or not to form, part of what is actually determined by legal expressions. (shrink)

When Aristotle limits the manifestation of true courage to the military context only, his primary target is an overly inclusive conception of courage presented by Plato in the Laches. At the same time, Aristotle explicitly tries to demarcate his ideal of genuine courage from the paradigmatic examples of courageous actions derived from the Homeric epics. It remains questionable, though, whether Aristotle is truly earnest in his efforts to distance himself from Homer. It will be argued that Aristotle's attempt to associate (...) with Homer the two forms of specious courage—courage of the citizen troops and spirit-caused courage—fails to provide sufficient criteria for the demarcation in question. All the essential elements of the Aristotelian account of courage, such as a voluntary choice, a noble goal, and a thumos-driven reaction guided by reason are exemplified by a number of Homeric characters as well. It is thus likely that the philosopher's account of courage largely incorporates the poetic tradition at a new level, rather than supersedes it. (shrink)

We propose that human reasoning relies on an inherence heuristic, an implicit cognitive process that leads people to explain observed patterns (e.g., girls wear pink) in terms of the inherent features of their constituents (e.g., pink is an inherently feminine color). We then demonstrate how this proposed heuristic can provide a unified account for a broad set of findings spanning areas of research that might at first appear unrelated (e.g., system justification, nominal realism, is–ought errors in moral reasoning). By revealing (...) the deep commonalities among the diverse phenomena that fall under its scope, our account is able to generate new insights into these phenomena, as well as new empirical predictions. A second main goal of this paper, aside from introducing the inherence heuristic, is to articulate the proposal that the heuristic serves as a foundation for the development of psychological essentialism. More specifically, we propose that essentialism—which is the common belief that natural and social categories are underlain by hidden, causally powerful “essences”—emerges over the first few years of life as an elaboration of the earlier, and more open-ended, intuitions supplied by the inherence heuristic. In the final part of the paper, we distinguish our proposal from competing accounts (e.g., Strevens' K-laws) and clarify the relationship between the inherence heuristic and related cognitive tendencies (e.g., the correspondence bias). In sum, this paper illuminates a basic cognitive process that emerges early in life and is likely to have profound effects on many aspects of human psychology. (shrink)

Mainstream political liberals hold that state coercion is legitimate only if it is justified on the grounds of reasons that all may reasonably be expected to accept. Critics argue that this public justification principle is self-defeating, because it depends on moral justifications that not all may reasonably be expected to accept. To rebut the self-defeat objection, I elaborate on the following disjunction: one either agrees or disagrees that it is wrong to impose one’s morality on others by the coercive power (...) of the state. Those who disagree reject PJP, they understand politics as war. Those who agree accept PJP, they understand politics as competition. Political competitors abide by PJP to avoid politics as war, by enforcing PJP on political combatants they engage in a war that is unavoidable. In both cases their exercise of political power has a justification that is reasonably acceptable to all. (shrink)

The article gives an overview of works on philosophy published in the 19 th and 20 th centuries in Belarus, widely influenced by the reception of philosophical views and trends of leading Western European thinkers. The main philosophical ideas of German philosophers (I. Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, K. Marx, F. Nietzsche and others) found creative reflections among the intellectuals of the Northwestern Krai (Region) of the Russian Empire, which included Belarus in the 19 th century. The authors analyze the role of (...) foreign ideas in the first third of the 20 th century on the example of one of the first textbooks on dialectical materialism published by S.Ya. Wolfson in the 1920s (has undergone seven editions). On the basis of the analysis of dissertations (over 800 dissertation of the 1950s–1980s), the authors demonstrate the significance of Western socio-philosophical ideas for the development of philosophical culture in Belarus. Considering the content and features of the processes of transfer of foreign philosophical ideas for two centuries, it can be concluded that is the dominance of the conceptions of German philosophy, especially in the 19 th century. Interest in German philosophy also prevailed in pre-war Soviet philosophy, while the focus was on Marxism and materialistic philosophy in general. Another trend is the significant role of works on the history of philosophy, including personalities and approaches. All this demonstrates that national Belarusian thought developed in the context of European philosophical culture. (shrink)