Locke’s theory of property is irreconcilable with intellectual property. Property-like titles in ideal objects cannot be introduced within the framework of the natural law, because they could constrain others from acts necessary for their survival. Nevertheless, followers of Locke’s theory of politics choose to belittle this conclusion and even Locke himself supported early copyright legislation. The inconsistency is important, for it depicts the problem of legitimization of intellectual property as political and demonstrates liberal reification of various aspects of social life.

Ali Enayat had asked whether two halves of Disjunctive Correctness ([Formula: see text]) for the compositional truth predicate are conservative over Peano Arithmetic (PA). In this paper, we show that the principle “every true disjunction has a true disjunct” is equivalent to bounded induction for the compositional truth predicate and thus it is not conservative. On the other hand, the converse implication “any disjunction with a true disjunct is true” can be conservatively added to [Formula: see text]. The methods introduced (...) here allow us to give a direct nonconservativeness proof for [Formula: see text]. (shrink)

We formulate and explore two basic axiomatic systems of type-free subjective probability. One of them explicates a notion of finitely additive probability. The other explicates a concept of infinitely additive probability. It is argued that the first of these systems is a suitable background theory for formally investigating controversial principles about type-free subjective probability.

One of the popular explications of the deflationary tenet of ‘thinness’ of truth is the conservativeness demand: the declaration that a deflationary truth theory should be conservative over its base. This paper contains a critical discussion and assessment of this demand. We ask and answer the question of whether conservativity forms a part of deflationary doctrines.

Conservativeness has been proposed as an important requirement for deflationary truth theories. This in turn gave rise to the so-called ‘conservativeness argument’ against deflationism: a theory of truth which is conservative over its base theory S cannot be adequate, because it cannot prove that all theorems of S are true. In this paper we show that the problems confronting the deflationist are in fact more basic: even the observation that logic is true is beyond his reach. This seems to conflict (...) with the deflationary characterization of the role of the truth predicate in proving generalizations. However, in the final section we propose a way out for the deflationist — a solution that permits him to accept a strong theory, having important truth-theoretical generalizations as its theorems. (shrink)

We discuss two desirable properties of deflationary truth theories: conservativeness and maximality. Joining them together, we obtain a notion of a maximal conservative truth theory - a theory which is conservative over its base, but can't be enlarged any further without losing its conservative character. There are indeed such theories; we show however that none of them is axiomatizable, and moreover, that there will be in fact continuum many theories of this sort. It turns out in effect that the deflationist (...) still needs some additional principles, which would permit him to construct his preferred theory of truth. (shrink)

In this paper I describe three similar projects, and investigate origins of their success. All of them are non-governmental and non-profit voluntary international initiatives that developed from small local projects. I claim that the basis of their success is universality of their underlying philosophy.

Prof. Barbara Stanosz była wieloletnią wykładowczynią Instytutu Filozofii Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego. W swej pracy naukowej zajmowała się głównie – choć nie wyłącznie – teorią języka, w szczególności semantyką oraz problemami logicznego opisu wyrażeń językowych. Jest autorką cenionych podręczników: to właśnie jej zawdzięczamy słynne Ćwiczenia z logiki – cieszący się ogromną popularnością zbiór zadań, ułatwiających przyswojenie materiału z zakresu rachunku zdań, logiki predykatów i teorii zbiorów. Warto wspomnieć, że oprócz aktywności naukowo-dydaktycznej rozwijała również działalność społeczną, będąc gorącą orędowniczką idei neutralności światopoglądowej państwa...

I explore the economic, social and cultural constraints of the regional mission of a university located beyond a metropolitan area or urban agglomeration, henceforth referred to as a “peripheral university.” In the first part of the paper, I briefly describe the “third mission” of a university and analyze it within the context of a “peripheral university”. The main constraints on the influence of regional mission and regional development are described. In the second part, I examine one type of a “peripheral (...) university,” namely a cross-border university, on a case study of a consortium of two universities: Viadrina University in Frankfurt am Oder and Collegium Polonicum – a department of Adam Mickiewicz University. I focus on issues like civil mission or problems of the regional contribution of a border university. I also analyze hidden-agenda concerns with respect to the trans-culture added value of the cross-border university. The ensuing analysis is based on interviews made with present and former rectors of those universities. (shrink)

Answering a question formulated by Halbach (2009), I show that a disquotational truth theory, which takes as axioms all positive substitutions of the sentential T-schema, together with all instances of induction in the language with the truth predicate, is conservative over its syntactical base.

This book analyses and defends the deflationist claim that there is nothing deep about our notion of truth. According to this view, truth is a 'light' and innocent concept, devoid of any essence which could be revealed by scientific inquiry. Cezary Cieśliński considers this claim in light of recent formal results on axiomatic truth theories, which are crucial for understanding and evaluating the philosophical thesis of the innocence of truth. Providing an up-to-date discussion and original perspectives on this central (...) and controversial issue, his book will be important for those with a background in logic who are interested in formal truth theories and in current philosophical debates about the deflationary conception of truth. (shrink)

We present an overview of typed and untyped disquotational truth theories with the emphasis on their (non)conservativity over the base theory of syntax. Two types of conservativity are discussed: syntactic and semantic. We observe in particular that TB—one of the most basic disquotational theories—is not semantically conservative over its base; we show also that an untyped disquotational theory PTB is a syntactically conservative extension of Peano Arithmetic.

In this paper, we present a reinterpretation of Roman Ingarden's theory of intentional objects. There are four types of intentional objects in Ingarden's ontology, we offer a detailed analyses of an intentional object that is a correlate of a text. Such an object is characterised by Ingarden as a two-sided and schematised formation. We focus on the notion of schematism. We classify different interpretations of schematism and propose our own definition of schematism of a purely intentional object.

We investigate what happens when ‘truth’ is replaced with ‘provability’ in Yablo’s paradox. By diagonalization, appropriate sequences of sentences can be constructed. Such sequences contain no sentence decided by the background consistent and sufficiently strong arithmetical theory. If the provability predicate satisfies the derivability conditions, each such sentence is provably equivalent to the consistency statement and to the Gödel sentence. Thus each two such sentences are provably equivalent to each other. The same holds for the arithmetization of the existential Yablo (...) paradox. We also look at a formulation which employs Rosser’s provability predicate. (shrink)

Mutilation, along with all forms of maltreatment of the dead, was widely condemned by Greek authors of the Classical period. In a culture where the obligation to bury and respect the dead was seen as one of the strongest moral compulsions universal to all men, mistreating the dead was considered to be the most outrageous and unholy of actions, more suitable, as Herodotus states, for barbarians than for Greeks, ‘and even in them we find it loathsome’. The importance of the (...) theme of mutilating the dead in theIliad, where one can find numerous and surprisingly detailed descriptions of warriors maltreating the corpses of their enemies, is therefore puzzling, to say the least. (shrink)

We present a semantic proof of Gödel's second incompleteness theorem, employing Grelling's antinomy of heterological expressions. For a theory T containing ZF, we define the sentence HETT which says intuitively that the predicate “heterological” is itself heterological. We show that this sentence doesn't follow from T and is equivalent to the consistency of T. Finally we show how to construct a similar incompleteness proof for Peano Arithmetic.

To explore the extent of embeddability of Leibnizian infinitesimal calculus in first-order logic (FOL) and modern frameworks, we propose to set aside ontological issues and focus on pro- cedural questions. This would enable an account of Leibnizian procedures in a framework limited to FOL with a small number of additional ingredients such as the relation of infinite proximity. If, as we argue here, first order logic is indeed suitable for developing modern proxies for the inferential moves found in Leibnizian infinitesimal (...) calculus, then modern infinitesimal frameworks are more appropriate to interpreting Leibnizian infinitesimal calculus than modern Weierstrassian ones. (shrink)

In the traditional sense, a work of art creates an illustration of the outside world, or of a certain text or doctrine. Sometimes it is considered that such an illustration is not literal, but is an interpretation of what is visible, or an interpretation of a certain literary or ideological message. It can also be assumed that a work of art creates its own visual world, a separate story or a separate philosophical statement. The Parc de La Villette represents the (...) last of these possibilities: it is a philosophical statement that develops the premises derived from poststructuralist philosophies and the philosophy of deconstruction. The uniqueness of its being status, however, is that it does so not only at the level of the theoretical assumptions, but also through its functioning as an active philosophical work. This means that a park is a happening philosophy. Its activity, however, does not refer only to the present tense, but is also an attempt to penetrate the future, all otherness and impossibility. This kind of activity assumes that the work, in a sense, does not yet fully exist, but is also still produced in the processes of its interpretation. The theoretical foundations of the park included texts by Bernard Tschumi, in which he questioned traditional ways of creating a work of architecture, postulating in return the use of a long series of negations, which were comparable to the crisis of metaphysics characteristic of contemporary philosophy. It is therefore no coincidence that the publication containing Tschumi’s theoretical text on Parc de La Villette was accompanied by an essay by Jacques Derrida developing some of the architect’s concepts. The next step in integrating philosophy into the process of park design was a series of discussions between Peter Eisenman and Derrida, who completely moved the creation of the park into the world of thoughts, without accentuating the need for their realization in the material reality. The main topic of these discussions was the problem of the chôra, which was taken up by later commentators and used to interpret the park as a work in which the philosophy of the beginning is manifested relating to issues of politics, morality and religion. The park was therefore interpreted as a space of invention within the scope of creating new rules of functioning of the community and democracy. Thinking about the political future may, however, exceed the horizon of ordinary expectations. Although philosophical thought is always connected with contemporary problems and metaphysics sometimes intertwines with current politics, yet at the same time the customs of philosophy also include crossing horizons and thinking about absolute otherness and impossibility. Initially, the chôra, différance, Absolute Otherness (tout autre) and the Impossibile were concepts of pure philosophy of atheistic character, but with the further development of the discussion, more and more theological motifs began to emerge. One of the reasons for this phenomenon was the fact that radical negations of all being, which were contemplated in contemporary philosophy (by Heidegger and Derrida, among others), had previously been manifested in negative and apophatic theologies (by Master Eckhart, among others). Also the category of the “Other”, taken from Emmanuel Levinas, was clearly connected with the thought about God. A further reason for connecting the chôra with the theological thought was the interest in the philosophy of deconstruction expressed by some theologians. Caputo in particular managed to persuade Derrida to participate in discussions on the current status of religion. In the late period of Derrida’s writing, further statements on religious topics appeared. All these reasons led to posing a question about the identity of the chôra and God. Although there were no satisfactory conclusions on this issue, the discussion was also important to create an interpretation of the park as a place of worship. The chôra, representing, according to Plato, the preoriginal emptiness is the place of every beginning, but it turns out that it is not neutral to the being created in it. The chôra deposits itself in every being as an irremovable beginning that interferes with its stability. The chôra, therefore, forces us into a palintropical movement, but it also turns out to be a pure compulsion, an erring necessity and a fundamental force from which, in the human perception, motifs useful to the individual and to the community are extracted. All definitions of this force, including its anthropomorphisation, are formulated in such a way that they allow for building private and collective morality upon them. Such definitions are changed depending on variable political situations. It is difficult to determine whether in the processes of changes in the formulation of “God’s names” any essential value is retained, which is not subject to change. The current definitions of the chôra (God?), which can be found, for example, in the philosophy of Caputo, stress that she is a combination of various and contradictory forces. This characteristic inherits much of Plato’s concept, reminds us of Master Eckhart’s views on Gottheit and, at the same time, is not unfamiliar to Tschumi, whose essays were an apologia of contradictions. The current concept of chôra, transferred into the sphere of politics, is the praise of social diversity and the protection of the difference from the forces of order. In the Parc de La Villette, the future community and democracy were elevated as a system of safe existence of individuals in all their singularity. The park is a temple of a future community in which individual beings have nothing in common. (shrink)

By a classical result of Kotlarski, Krajewski and Lachlan, pathological satisfaction classes can be constructed for countable, recursively saturated models of Peano arithmetic. In this paper we consider the question of whether the pathology can be eliminated; we ask in effect what generalities involving the notion of truth can be obtained in a deflationary truth theory (a theory of truth which is conservative over its base). It is shown that the answer depends on the notion of pathology we adopt. It (...) turns out in particular that a certain natural closure condition imposed on a satisfaction class—namely, closure of truth under sentential proofs—generates a nonconservative extension of a syntactic base theory (Peano arithmetic). (shrink)

Disquotational theories of truth are often criticised for being too weak to prove interesting generalisations about truth. In this paper we will propose a certain formal theory to serve as a framework for a solution of the generalisation problem. In contrast with Horwich’s original proposal, our framework will eschew psychological notions altogether, replacing them with the epistemic notion of believability. The aim will be to explain why someone who accepts a given disquotational truth theory Th, should also accept various generalisations (...) not provable in Th. The strategy will consist of the development of an axiomatic theory of believability, one permitting us to show how to derive the believability of generalisations from basic axioms that characterise the believability predicate, together with the information that Th is a theory of truth that we accept. (shrink)

The last century has been marked by numerous discussions about the concept of the temporality of the -Now-. The most essential elements of the topic of the -Now- are presented in atemporal analysis (and beyond) of <I>lebendige Gegenwart. In the author's analysis this notion is the core of phenomenology and a derivative phenomenologisation of the constitution of time. The first part of the book is dedicated to the necessary reconstruction of the category of the -Now-, the second treats about the (...) atemporality of the -Now-, the third one is an additional reference to Husserlian deepest transcendental reduction: the -Now- as being freed from temporality. Furthermore, the author compares his thoughts to the ideas and to the concept of the -modalization of the consciousness- that is present in the post-Husserlian temporalities.". (shrink)

Roman Ingarden was a prominent Polish philosopher, phenomenologist, and student of Edmund Husserl. A characteristic feature of his works was the almost complete absence of analyzes from the history of philosophy. That is why it is so surprising that right after the end of World War II, the first text analyzed when Ingarden started working at the Jagiellonian University was Aristotle’s “Poetics.” Ingarden published the results of his research in Polish in 1948 in “Kwartalnik Filozoficzny” and in the early 1960s (...) his essay was translated and published in the renowned American magazine “The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism” as “A Marginal Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics.” As far as I know today, this text does not arouse much interest among the many commentators and followers of Ingarden’s philosophy. Perhaps this state of affairs is justified: Ingarden’s own ideas are only repeated here, and their usefulness in the meaning of “Poetics” remains far from obvious. However, I think that this relative obscurity is worth considering now, because it shows how modern reason tries to control ancient concepts. The main purpose of this article is therefore to recon- struct the strategy by which philosophy tames the text of “Poetics,” especially its concepts such as catharsis and mimesis. The discovery and presentation of these treatments would not have been possible were it not for the mimetic theory of René Girad, which provides anthropological foundations for a critique of philosophical discourse. (shrink)

It is proved that the following conditions are equivalent: (a) there exists a complete, atomless, σ-centered Boolean algebra, which does not contain any regular, atomless, countable subalgebra, (b) there exists a nowhere dense ultrafilter on ω. Therefore, the existence of such algebras is undecidable in ZFC. In "forcing language" condition (a) says that there exists a non-trivial σ-centered forcing not adding Cohen reals.

This paper describes Tarski’s project of rehabilitating the notion of truth, previously considered dubious by many philosophers. The project was realized by providing a formal truth definition, which does not employ any problematic concept.

We apply Benacerraf’s distinction between mathematical ontology and mathematical practice to examine contrasting interpretations of infinitesimal mathematics of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, in the work of Bos, Ferraro, Laugwitz, and others. We detect Weierstrass’s ghost behind some of the received historiography on Euler’s infinitesimal mathematics, as when Ferraro proposes to understand Euler in terms of a Weierstrassian notion of limit and Fraser declares classical analysis to be a “primary point of reference for understanding the eighteenth-century theories.” Meanwhile, scholars like (...) Bos and Laugwitz seek to explore Eulerian methodology, practice, and procedures in a way more faithful to Euler’s own. Euler’s use of infinite integers and the associated infinite products are analyzed in the context of his infinite product decomposition for the sine function. Euler’s principle of cancellation is compared to the Leibnizian transcendental law of homogeneity. The Leibnizian law of continuity similarly finds echoes in Euler. We argue that Ferraro’s assumption that Euler worked with a classical notion of quantity is symptomatic of a post-Weierstrassian placement of Euler in the Archimedean track for the development of analysis, as well as a blurring of the distinction between the dual tracks noted by Bos. Interpreting Euler in an Archimedean conceptual framework obscures important aspects of Euler’s work. Such a framework is profitably replaced by a syntactically more versatile modern infinitesimal framework that provides better proxies for his inferential moves. (shrink)

The paper contains a discussion of a basic difficulty encountered by adherents of the disquotational conception of truth. The problem is that the disquotational theory seems to weak to prove many important truth-theoretical generalizations, like e.g. "All substitutions of the law of excluded middle are true". Various ways of saving the disquotationalist from this objection are analyzed and deemed unsatisfactory.

All through the XXth century it has been repeated that "there is an exact correspondence, almost coincidence between Euclid's definition of equal ratios and the modern theory of irrational numbers due to Dedekind". Since the idea was presented as early as in 1908 in Thomas Heath's translation of Euclid's Elements as a comment to Book V, def. 5, we call it in the paper Heath's thesis. Heath's thesis finds different justifications so it is accepted yet in different versions. In the (...) paper its historical and mathematical version is reconstructed. We next reconstruct Eudoxos' theory of proportions in an axiomatic fashion. Finally, we show that Heath's thesis both in the historical and mathematical version is false. To this end a counterexample is given; it is based upon a specific interpretation of the uniform distribution theorem. (shrink)

Galileo's paradox of infinity involves comparing the set of natural numbers, N, and the set of squares, {n2 : n ∈ N}. Galileo sets up a one-to-one correspondence between these sets; on this basis, the number of the elements of N is considered to be equal to the number of the elements of {n2 : n ∈ N}. It also characterizes the set of squares as smaller than the set of natural numbers, since ``there are many more numbers than squares". (...) As a result, it concludes that infinities cannot be compared in terms of greater--lesser and the law of trichotomy does not apply to them. Cantor's cardinal numbers provide a measure for sets. Cantor gives a definition of the relation greater–lesser between cardinal numbers and establishes the law of trichotomy for these numbers. Yet, when Cantor's theory is applied to subsets of N, it gives that any set can be either finite or of the power ℵ0. Thus, although the set of squares is the subset of N, they are of the same cardinality. Benci, Di Nasso introduces specific numbers to measure sets called numerosities. With numerosities, the following claim is true: numerosity of A < numerosity of B, whenever A ⊈ B. In this paper, we present a simplified version of the theory of numerosities that applies to subsets of N. This theory complies with Galileo's presupposition that when A ⊈ B, then the number of elements in A is smaller than the number of elements in B. Specifically, we show that as the numerosity of N is the number α, the numerosity of the set of squares is the integer part of the number √α, that is ⌊√α⌋, and the inequality ⌊√α⌋ < α holds. (shrink)

In the paper two definitions of moments of time as the sets of events are considered. The first one is Russell’s definition based on a relation simultaneity of events. The second one is my construction of moments of time grounded on a relation of being immediately preceding.

One of the most original assumptions is that political actors are groups of thematized information. They effectively test the political, traditional sources of meaning, and reservoirs of identity. The post-religiousness of the presentness is transcendentally neutral; there is no contradiction between the transcendental and the immanent. Why and how relics steal into the political? The social does not create any meaning considerably stronger than the empty meanings of dedicated metaphysics and discourses, but the social creates itself within the totariental (total (...) - poleless - disorienting). The book contains analyses of the implementation of political crises and crises of the political. In other words, two processes are simultaneously used by political actors in contemporary democracy. These tools are not only moderators of naturally spontaneous democracy. Economic, cultural, and political changes are pressed ahead by technically, sociologically and military equipped actors for whom democracy is efficient. (shrink)

Artykuł poświecony jest sposobom indywidualnego sprostania warunkom tego, co społeczne. Autor broni tezy, iż tylko indywidualna odpowiedź mędrca — geniusza — zasługuje na zainteresowanie jako ta, dzięki której możliwe jest sprostanie tym warunkom. Bagaż metafizycznych symbolizacji wspólnotowych jest przeszkadzającym w myśleniu balastem — jednakże tylko geniusz, mimo iż dzieli się ową wiedzą z innymi ,jest w stanie tego dokonać. Autor posługuje się przykładem mitu śmierci Homera oraz Platona relacją z obrony Sokratesa.

We show that a typed compositional theory of positive truth with internal induction for total formulae (denoted by PT tot ) is not semantically conservative over Peano arithmetic. In addition, we observe that the class of models of PA expandable to models of PT tot contains every recursively saturated model of arithmetic. Our results point to a gap in the philosophical project of describing the use of the truth predicate in model-theoretic contexts.

Tschumi believes that the quality of architecture depends on the theoretical factor it contains. Such a view led to the creation of architecture that would achieve visibility and comprehensibility only after its interpretation. On his way to creating such an architecture he took on a purely philosophical reflection on the basic building block of architecture, which is space. In 1975, he wrote an essay entitled Questions of Space, in which he included several dozen questions about the nature of space. The (...) questions he formulated could be regarded as analogous to the situation in the philosophy of the time, in which the interest in questioning the most obvious forms of understanding the world and intellectual categories increased. The research on space is an area common to many fields of natural sciences, humanities and artistic creation, but it also deals with other problems, such as issues of experience. The concept of space-time continuum proposed by Hermann Minkowski drew attention to the identity of time and space with the events taking place. Probably regardless of the postulates of physicists commenting on Einstein’s discoveries, also in philosophy it increased the importance of the concept of the event which became dominant in Heidegger’s latest work Contributions of Philosophy. Of the event. Furthermore, Tschumi’s reflections on space entered into relation with the problem of experience, which aroused the interest of a group of French philosophers trying to assimilate Georges Bataille’s concept of “inner experience”. Both Tschumi and Derrida referred to Bataille because his views could be used not only to modify the concept of the subject, but also to change the understanding of what constitutes the area of architecture. The discussion on experience has led to the recognition that the subject is not sovereign, but actually a form of what is on their outside. Such insights make it possible to treat the area of the Parc de La Villette as existing mainly when it is organised by its users. The decisive features of the Park are its assumptions, according to which it is a variety of active void that leads to agreeing new social relations with it. The park does not force to participate in already existing moral or political communities, but tries to move into an unknown future in which the scope of free functioning of individuals will be increased. Doubts about the principles of functioning of the individual self and its discovery as a whole composed of non-coherent parts, as well as its dependence on its own depth full of disordered forces, influenced the understanding of architecture as a set of contradictions whose source is a fundamental void anticipating the empty phenomenal space. The use of this phenomenal void in architecture, as well as the rejection of the whole and unity, had a specific political purpose and drew its inspiration from political analyses. In the Parc de La Villette, metaphysics and politics were brought closer together because the philosophy of void was used to create new conditions for community action. It can be argued that the source of this philosophy was the perception of errors in existing societies dependent on the shortcomings of traditional metaphysics. Spacing (espacement) was one of the key terms in Derrida’s philosophy, which was also combined with the concepts of différance and chôra. The study of the nature of space, especially its transition from the level of pure possibility to the level of sensual phenomenon, also contributes to understanding how well designed space can have an impact on its audience. This explanation is based on Tschumi’s assumption that the space of the Parc de La Villette contradicts the integrating approaches and instead exposes contradictions, but it does so in a way that combines incompatible properties into a single piece of architecture. The specificity of such integration is similar to the invention of a musical phrase, which is an ideological message: moral and political. Such a thesis may raise doubts, however, if both the clearly adopted assumptions and those deduced from the work allow for their ↪Quart Nr 2(52)/2019 logically ordered presentation then to a limited extent it may be assumed that the work has achieved a connection between a specific philosophy of space and its practical application. Derrida combined the problem of spatiality with the problem of transcendental imagination in Kant’s philosophy, who in the first version of Critique of Pure Reason assumed that pure imagination precedes the appearance of time and space, even in their transcendental forms. The imagination in such a situation can be described as a factor activating time and space, which indicates what function is played by movement in this activity. This leads us to recognize that the ultra originary source of pure forms of sensual intuition is movement, which in early Greek philosophy was identified with void and its lack of resistance to phenomena occurring in it. Derrida’s philosophy in search of a certain super-transcendental source of time and space pointed to différance which, like void or the chôra, does not have material features or even any other form of being. Différance is the primary cause of the disruption of motionlessness and the introduction of activity into motionless time and space, thus its activity can be described as spacing (espacement). Derrida’s discoveries in this respect are not entirely original, because Hegel already pointed out when examining the present that it is primarily a differential relation (differente Beziehung), which, being seemingly neutral, influences the present with supernatural force and makes it unidentifiable with itself. Differente Beziehung must similarly influence the originary space, negating its initial character by multiplying its divisions and expanding its boundaries. Différance acts by revealing contradictions wherever there is apparent undifferentiation. Tschumi, composing the Parc de La Villette as a variety of void and a set of incompatible layers, followed the rules of différance or the chôra: he made void visible together with its saturation with contradictions. If space can be considered to be the result of the activity of difference, such activity has a certain regularity, which influences the behaviour of its observers. Differences or contradictions fall into a certain rhythm, which can be considered a manifestation of transcendent order. The problem is that what can be considered the source of such order, namely the logos or God, is partly disorder and error. According to descriptions contained in Timaeus, the world is a combination of forces that drive to order with forces of erroneous necessity that resounds in every order and forces it to return to disorder. Derrida denied the possibility of understanding différance as a theological value, even if it were a negative or apophatic theology, but no categorical denial could be perfect. The assumption that différance or the chôra are not endowed with any substance properties cannot deny their activity, and thus a certain force. Already since Democritus, philosophy has multiplied the names of such a force and the contradictory variety of its manifestations, never forgetting also the necessity for reason to withdraw from the possibility of giving its correct characteristics. Such a withdrawal may be interpreted as an expression of respect and, in certain situations, as a cult of the force that precedes reasonableness. The Parc de La Villette, which is an artistic divagation about the contradictions and forces behind them, can be considered as a place of their sublimation, and therefore as a variation of the temple of what differs from order and disorder. (shrink)

In the traditional sense, a work of art creates an illustration of the outside world, or of a certain text or doctrine. Sometimes it is considered that such an illustration is not literal, but is an interpretation of what is visible, or an interpretation of a certain literary or ideological message. It can also be assumed that a work of art creates its own visual world, a separate story or a separate philosophical statement. The Parc de La Villette represents the (...) last of these possibilities: it is a philosophical statement that develops the premises derived from poststructuralist philosophies and the philosophy of deconstruction. The uniqueness of its being status, however, is that it does so not only at the level of the theoretical assumptions, but also through its functioning as an active philosophical work. This means that a park is a happening philosophy. Its activity, however, does not refer only to the present tense, but is also an attempt to penetrate the future, all otherness and impossibility. This kind of activity assumes that the work, in a sense, does not yet fully exist, but is also still produced in the processes of its interpretation. The theoretical foundations of the park included texts by Bernard Tschumi, in which he questioned traditional ways of creating a work of architecture, postulating in return the use of a long series of negations, which were comparable to the crisis of metaphysics characteristic of contemporary philosophy. It is therefore no coincidence that the publication containing Tschumi’s theoretical text on Parc de La Villette was accompanied by an essay by Jacques Derrida developing some of the architect’s concepts. The next step in integrating philosophy into the process of park design was a series of discussions between Peter Eisenman and Derrida, who completely moved the creation of the park into the world of thoughts, without accentuating the need for their realization in the material reality. The main topic of these discussions was the problem of the chôra, which was taken up by later commentators and used to interpret the park as a work in which the philosophy of the beginning is manifested relating to issues of politics, morality and religion. The park was therefore interpreted as a space of invention within the scope of creating new rules of functioning of the community and democracy. Thinking about the political future may, however, exceed the horizon of ordinary expectations. Although philosophical thought is always connected with contemporary problems and metaphysics sometimes intertwines with current politics, yet at the same time the customs of philosophy also include crossing horizons and thinking about absolute otherness and impossibility. Initially, the chôra, différance, Absolute Otherness (tout autre) and the Impossibile were concepts of pure philosophy of atheistic character, but with the further development of the discussion, more and more theological motifs began to emerge. One of the reasons for this phenomenon was the fact that radical negations of all being, which were contemplated in contemporary philosophy (by Heidegger and Derrida, among others), had previously been manifested in negative and apophatic theologies (by Master Eckhart, among others). Also the category of the “Other”, taken from Emmanuel Levinas, was clearly connected with the thought about God. A further reason for connecting the chôra with the theological thought was the interest in the philosophy of deconstruction expressed by some theologians. Caputo in particular managed to persuade Derrida to participate in discussions on the current status of religion. In the late period of Derrida’s writing, further statements on religious topics appeared. All these reasons led to posing a question about the identity of the chôra and God. Although there were no satisfactory conclusions on this issue, the discussion was also important to create an interpretation of the park as a place of worship. The chôra, representing, according to Plato, the preoriginal emptiness is the place of every beginning, but it turns out that it is not neutral to the being created in it. The chôra deposits itself in every being as an irremovable beginning that interferes with its stability. The chôra, therefore, forces us into a palintropical movement, but it also turns out to be a pure compulsion, an erring necessity and a fundamental force from which, in the human perception, motifs useful to the individual and to the community are extracted. All definitions of this force, including its anthropomorphisation, are formulated in such a way that they allow for building private and collective morality upon them. Such definitions are changed depending on variable political situations. It is difficult to determine whether in the processes of changes in the formulation of “God’s names” any essential value is retained, which is not subject to change. The current definitions of the chôra (God?), which can be found, for example, in the philosophy of Caputo, stress that she is a combination of various and contradictory forces. This characteristic inherits much of Plato’s concept, reminds us of Master Eckhart’s views on Gottheit and, at the same time, is not unfamiliar to Tschumi, whose essays were an apologia of contradictions. The current concept of chôra, transferred into the sphere of politics, is the praise of social diversity and the protection of the difference from the forces of order. In the Parc de La Villette, the future community and democracy were elevated as a system of safe existence of individuals in all their singularity. The park is a temple of a future community in which individual beings have nothing in common. (shrink)