"Whether we think history has a definite logic of its own, or is merely the emergent quality of an irreducible contingency – it is usually taken as granted that it the same way in all its course. This is the case with some philosophers who argue against a conception of history as having an inherent logic. In this paper I present Postone’s critical reexamination of Marxian categories and argue that based on his project, we can criticize the presupposition of the (...) “sameness” of history. For although there is no transhistorically valid “logic of history”, something like it is constituted by the functioning of capitalism’s elementary categories. Keywords: history, historical time, logic of history, capitalism, traditional Marxism, Moishe Postone". (shrink)

Adrian Vlot used a lot of information when he wrote his article. I do not intend this brief presentation to give additional information or remarks on the topic. My aim is to support his ideas. I am a mathematician, physicist and theologian. I interpret science as a human activity describing and understanding the phenomena of the created universe based on observation, explaining the relationships in the universe afterwards and, in addition, discovering further areas via human intellectual abilities. In my interpretation (...) technology is something through which man makes use of the experience, knowledge, discovered relationships and laws in practice to create new tools or new materials which facilitate further research. That is how science and technology are related. In historical chronology, technology preceded science but later science also achieved results preceding their application in practice. Among others, the chronological intertwining is represented by Faraday and Maxwell’s activities. (shrink)

The paper explores Burke’s twofold solution to the paradox of negative emotions. His Philosophical Enquiry (1757/59) employs two models that stand on different anthropological principles: the Exercise Argument borrowed from authors like the Abbé Du Bos, guided by the principle of self-preservation, and the Sympathy Argument, propageted by notable men of lettres such as Lord Kames, ruled by the principle of sociability. Burke interlocks these two arguments through a teleologically-ordered physiology, in which the natural laws of the human body and (...) mind, secretly working in the depth of the nerve fibres, ensure both self-preservation and sociability. Utilizing both efficient and final causes throughout his Enquiry, Burke argues that the experiences of pain and terror – under certain conditions – are made agreeable (delight) by providence,so that the physiological mechanisms underlying these experiences could ensure the health and strenuousness of the nerve fibres amidst the corrupting pleasures of commercial society (Exercise Argument). Furthermore, due to the ambiguous character of this delight annexed to such experiences, they also function as exercises for our social passions (Sympathy Argument). Te 'egoistic' anthropological drive to remove the visceral uneasiness that dominates these experiences facilitates moral action when it is needed the most: when others in pain need our help. In accordance with the anthropocentric providentialism of the moderate Enlightenment, it is the design of the human frame that ensures the activities essential to our health (self-preservation) and moral conduct (sociability), a design that not only guarantees that pleasure, if exclusive and excessive, is 'inconvenient', and pain, if mitigated and harmless, is aesthetically agreeable, but also that our 'egoistic' drive to self-preservation ultimately improves sociability. (shrink)

György Alajos Szerdahely, the first professor of aesthetics in Pest, publishes his Aesthetica in 1778, a work, written in Latin, that not only engages with the eclectic university aesthetics of late-18th-century Germany and Central Europe, but also marks the beginning of the Hungarian aesthetic tradition. Szerdahely proposes aesthetics as the doctrine of taste, a philosophical discipline that can polish our manners and social conduct through a sensual-affective Bildung offered by art experiences. Highlighting his sources in both British criticism and German (...) aesthetics, the paper traces the development of Szerdahely's concept of beauty from beauty as form (uniformity amidst variety) to beauty in motion (sensibility). Initially, Szerdahely argues for unity and variety as the two main constituents of a beautiful object, evoking disinterested contemplation, but he then turns to sensibility as the third necessary condition of beauty: an object becomes aesthetically beautiful only if it has the power to strike the senses (Lux) and stir the affections (Vivacitas), enlivening the whole embodied person. The paper argues that this third principle of sensibility proves to be more emphatic than the first two, leading to (1) the aesthetic conception of beauty as an experiential quality; but more interestingly to (2) the incorporation of the element of self-preservation and self-love into aesthetic experience. The reason for the latter development lies in Szerdahely’s anthropological argument, which traces back every affection to the instantaneous apprehension of good or evil concerning ourselves, implying desire (Adpetitus) or aversion (Auersi) in our reactions. (shrink)

The regulatory NodD proteins of Rhizobium bacteria mediate the activation of a gene set responsible for symbiotic nodule formation by plant signal molecules. Here we discuss the signal recognition and gene activation properties of NodD and present a model summarizing the current knowledge on NodD action.

Book review of Dadejík, O., Kaplický, M., Ševčík, M., and Zuska, V. (2021) Process and Aesthetics: An Outline of Whiteheadian Aesthetics and Beyond. Prague: Karolinum Press. ISBN 978-80-246-4726-5.

The paper is meant to introduce a symposium on aesthetics in Hungary today. Through a brief survey of the Hungarian aesthetic tradition, which goes back to the eclectic “university aesthetics” of the late 18 th century and produced a number of prominent figures such as Georg Lukács and his disciples in the “Budapest School” in the 20th century, the paper seeks to point out some key characteristics of this tradition and to reflect on the intellectual landscape of contemporary aesthetics in (...) Hungary, diversified by many fields of study, methods and subdisciplines. (shrink)

Somaesthetics and Sport (ed. Andrew Edgar, Brill, 2022) is a multifaceted collection of essays: Richard Shusterman’s theoretical framework is robust enough to lend unity to the volume, but it mostly functions as a springboard for the individual papers, never suffocating their theoretical explorations or making the book repetitive or a boring read. The ten essays also communicate with one another through certain recurring notions such as agency, somatic awareness, the Suitsian account of games or the interdisciplinary intertwining of philosophical arguments (...) with the results of sport psychology and physiology. Displaying the various ways Shusterman’s somaesthetics can be used to further the philosophical analysis of the aesthetic experience of watching and doing sports, the volume fills a gap in the scholarship of the aesthetics of sport as well as in the interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics. (shrink)

The 18th-century emergence of aesthetics has been interpreted as a symptom of the entrance of a new image of man, individuality, a modern conception of subjectivity, a new mode of experience, as well as a new ideology or the modern concept of (fine) art into European consciousness. And even though these narratives all situate aesthetics within heteronomous contexts—from physiology and psychology to morality and politics, from social and economic history to belief and religion—one narrative came out as victorious, which neglects (...) the eighteenth-century interpenetration of various disciplines. It offers instead a teleological history of aesthetics which leads towards the concept of autonomy, aesthetic and/or artistic, as it takes shape, allegedly, in the aesthetics of Kant and then Romanticism. The new volume of the Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, entitled Beyond Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century British and German Aesthetics, joins the growing body of scholarship that re-examines the influential narratives of autonomy. (shrink)

A review of J. Colin McQuillan´s Early Modern Aesthetics.

Authors, especially “advocates for virtue,” writes Samuel Johnson in one of his Rambler essays, might consider following the example of monarchs, who, hiding themselves from the public, “avoid the conversation of mankind […], for men would not more patiently submit to be taught, than commanded, by one known to have the same follies and weaknesses with themselves.” It is easy to see, continues Dr. Johnson, that writing well is easier than living well: teaching navigation on land is not the same (...) as actually commanding a ship on sea, just as designing a life in “solitude, safety, and tranquility, with a mind unbiased, and with liberty unobstructed” is easier than actually living by that design “amidst tumult, and snares, and danger.” It is no surprise that allegedly even Milton was pleased that he did not disappoint an enthusiastic visitor and was “found equal to his own character”—a character born out of his textual world (Samuel Johnson, “The Rambler No. 14. (5 May, 1750)”, in Selected Essays from the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler, ed. W.J. Bate. Yale University Press, 1968, 39, 40, 38). Johnson’s essay speaks of his deep insight into the chasm between the thinking, breathing, embodied self and contingent life of a writer and the textual self and models of life sculpted in her works. This insight, needless to say, has become a cliché in twentieth-century criticism, which dispensed with the naive view that literary discourse, including autobiographical works, is somehow transparent, a reflection of the writer’s self. For this reason, it might seem odd to look at literature from the perspective of a tradition that considers writing a crucial technique of examining and cultivating the self—something the ancient Greeks termed epimelesthai sautou, “the care of the self,” which was once understood to be the true goal of philosophy itself, conceived as the “art of living.” Richard Shusterman’s latest book, Philosophy and the Art of Writing revitalizes this ancient tradition of philosophy as an embodied way of living, and examines the various ways the process and product of the art of writing can contribute to the philosophical life dedicated to self-examination and self-improvement, while also pointing out the ambiguities of such an enterprise. (shrink)

Review of Journal of Scottish Thought. Volume 7. Francis Hutcheson and the Origins of the Aesthetic, ed. SZÉCSÉNYI ENDRE, The University of Aberdeen Press. 2016. pp. 212. £10.00.

One of the main driving forces in the era of cyber-physical systems is the introduction of massive sensor networks into manufacturing processes, connected cars, precision agriculture, and so on. Therefore, large amounts of sensor data have to be ingested at the server side in order to generate and make the “twin digital model” or virtual factory of the existing physical processes for predictive simulation and scheduling purposes usable. In this paper, we focus on our ultimate goal, a novel software container-based (...) approach with cloud agnostic orchestration facilities that enable the system operators in the industry to create and manage scalable, virtual IT platforms on-demand for these two typical major pillars of CPS: server-side framework for sensor networks and configurable simulation tool for predicting the behavior of manufacturing systems. The paper discusses the scalability of the applied discrete-event simulation tool and the layered back-end framework starting from simple virtual machine-level to sophisticated multilevel autoscaling use case scenario. The presented achievements and evaluations leverage on the synergy of the existing EasySim simulator, our new CQueue software container manager, the continuously developed Occopus cloud orchestrator tool, and the latest version of the evolving MiCADO framework for integrating such tools into a unified platform. (shrink)

This article has two aims. The first is to introduce some novel data that highlight rather surprising pragmatic abilities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The second is to consider a possible implication of these data for an emerging empirical methodology in philosophy of language and mind. In pursuing the first aim, we expect our main audience to be clinicians and linguists interested in pragmatics. It is when we turn to methodological issues that we hope to pique the interest of philosophers. (...) Still, the methodological issue becomes pressing precisely because of the empirical finding—thus the first part is important for the philosophical readers as well. The game plan is as follows. Given our intended dual audience, we begin with background on autism and pragmatics. Some of this material will be familiar to some of our readership, but few will know all of it. (Those who do are invited to skip these sections.) We then present some results from our pilot study on a corpus of speech by people with ASD. The heart of our finding is that certain speakers with ASD, who have severe trouble with familiar pragmatic phenomena such as metaphor and conversational implicature, exhibit surprising abilities with respect to what is often called “pragmatic determinants of what is said.” We turn next to a possible implication of this finding: It seems to suggest that hitherto seemingly promising evidence from ASD about the semantics/pragmatics boundary is.. (shrink)

Animal and human studies suggest that parenting style is transmitted from one generation to the next. The hypotheses of this study were that a mother’s rearing experiences would predict her own parenting resources and current maternal mood, motivation to care for her offspring, and relationship with her parents would underlie this association. In a subsample of 201 first-time mothers participating in the longitudinal Maternal Adversity, Vulnerability and Neurodevelopment project, we assessed a mother’s own childhood maltreatment and rearing experiences using the (...) Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and the Parental Bonding Instrument. At 6 months postpartum, mothers completed questionnaires on parenting stress, symptoms of depression, maternal motivation, and current relationship with their own parents. The sample consisted of mostly high socioeconomic status mothers recruited from Montréal or Hamilton, Canada, with an age range from 18 to 43 years. More severe maltreatment and less supportive rearing by the mother’s parents predicted increased parenting stress at 6 months. These associations were mediated through distinct psychosocial pathways: maltreatment on parenting stress through symptoms of depression ; maternal rearing on parenting stress through maternal motivation and symptoms of depression ; and paternal rearing on parenting stress through current relationship with the father. Maternal rearing experiences predict a mother’s own parenting resources though distinct psychosocial pathways, including depressed mood, maternal motivation, and social support. (shrink)

Animal and human studies suggest that parenting style is transmitted from one generation to the next. The hypotheses of this study were that a mother’s rearing experiences would predict her own parenting resources and current maternal mood, motivation to care for her offspring, and relationship with her parents would underlie this association. In a subsample of 201 first-time mothers participating in the longitudinal Maternal Adversity, Vulnerability and Neurodevelopment project, we assessed a mother’s own childhood maltreatment and rearing experiences using the (...) Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and the Parental Bonding Instrument. At 6 months postpartum, mothers completed questionnaires on parenting stress, symptoms of depression, maternal motivation, and current relationship with their own parents. The sample consisted of mostly high socioeconomic status mothers recruited from Montréal or Hamilton, Canada, with an age range from 18 to 43 years. More severe maltreatment and less supportive rearing by the mother’s parents predicted increased parenting stress at 6 months. These associations were mediated through distinct psychosocial pathways: maltreatment on parenting stress through symptoms of depression ; maternal rearing on parenting stress through maternal motivation and symptoms of depression ; and paternal rearing on parenting stress through current relationship with the father. Maternal rearing experiences predict a mother’s own parenting resources though distinct psychosocial pathways, including depressed mood, maternal motivation, and social support. (shrink)