The author examines the “veil of ignorance” thought experiment and the principles of justice of John Rawls via two main directions of criticism. First, although Rawls constructs a veil of ignorance with Kantian categories, the author derives Rawls’s motivation from the link between justice and the tradition of curbing pleonexic human nature, arguing that in this context Rawls’s Kantian rhetoric is actually driven by the Hobbesian fear of instability arising from the problem of cooperation in the social contract tradition. Second, (...) the veil of ignorance is a cunning instrument of the privileged to preserve their previously acquired advantages, control stability, and cover up socio-political injustices. At the same time, the principle of difference that derives from it does not reduce the gap of inequality – economic and historical – but legitimizes and establishes it. In fact, Rawls’s bourgeois liberalism and its theoretical constructs serve to hedge the well-off by securing and increasing what they already have. (shrink)

(1996). Repairing the moral deficits of capitalism: The role of the nonprofit sector. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 595-600.

High artistic achievements were repeatedly connected with poetry in the tradition of Western aesthetical thought, and the poetry with eliciting emotions. The same has happened within the tradition of film reviewing and theorising: poetry has been repeatedly evoked as a paradigmatic artistic achievement of particular films. But among the different affective states that can be elicited in humans by arts, attribution of ‘poetry’ typically addresses the eliciting and articulation of particular general moods, not the specific, episodic, short-term emotions. In this (...) paper, specified are the differences among emotions and moods, and how a distinct mood is achieved is demonstrated by the close analysis of the introductory descriptive scene in the film Citizen Kane. However, the crucial question is how very different and heterogeneous stylistic means pointed out in the analysis of the scene could elicit a particular, unique, holistic mood. In short, the answer is given by understanding that in the same way in which the moods selectively regulate our relations toward the world, choosing for the perception mood-congruent features of the world to sustain a particular mood, so the filmmakers choose a repertory of stylistic solutions congruent with the selectivity of the intended mood to elicit it in the immersed film viewer. (shrink)

The Heideggerian question posed here as “what does it mean to dwell in a global age” leaves open, invites even, the possibility of committing two conceptual mistakes from which, depending on the theoretical universe we inhabit, two separate sets of problems arise. On the one hand, if the adverbial “in a global age” is taken to denote a radical historical caesura between “our age” and the age in which the concept was first deployed, one has to prove that the caesura (...) is indeed not only historically operative but legitimate on an ontological level. This would, however, be a futile attempt: there hardly exists an essential, qualitative difference between the ontological regime of “our global age” and the one sketched in Heidegger's 1954 essay “Building Dwelling Thinking.” We have not been blessed by any epochal turns, despite important switches – to move for a second to a different register—in regimes of accumulation. Thus, it may be concluded, the ontological question about the state of “dwelling in a precarious age” has already been posed and answered by Heidegger himself—from an ontological perspective, he is our contemporary. And of course, to such question there can in fact be only one answer: it is the same “metaphysics” that has precluded the possibility of “dwelling” throughout modernity that gave rise to our age as global. But then to avoid the mistake sketched out above and the repetition of an already accomplished analysis, the question as it is posed for us here should be taken as a politicization of the original concept, foreign to a puritanically ontological Heideggerian diagnostics, although building on its foundations: what is to be done historically at this moment to enter “dwelling”? (shrink)

A common understanding of quantum mechanics (QM) among students and practical users is often plagued by a number of “myths”, that is, widely accepted claims on which there is not really a general consensus among experts in foundations of QM. These myths include wave-particle duality, time-energy uncertainty relation, fundamental randomness, the absence of measurement-independent reality, locality of QM, nonlocality of QM, the existence of well-defined relativistic QM, the claims that quantum field theory (QFT) solves the problems of relativistic QM or (...) that QFT is a theory of particles, as well as myths on black-hole entropy. The fact is that the existence of various theoretical and interpretational ambiguities underlying these myths does not yet allow us to accept them as proven facts. I review the main arguments and counterarguments lying behind these myths and conclude that QM is still a not-yet-completely-understood theory open to further fundamental research. (shrink)

Bosonic and fermionic particle currents can be introduced in a more unified way, with the cost of introducing a preferred spacetime foliation. Such a unified treatment of bosons and fermions naturally emerges from an analogous superstring current, showing that the preferred spacetime foliation appears only at the level of effective field theory, not at the fundamental superstring level. The existence of the preferred spacetime foliation allows an objective definition of particles associated with quantum field theory in curved spacetime. Such an (...) objective definition of particles makes the Bohmian interpretation of particle quantum mechanics more appealing. The superstring current allows a consistent Bohmian interpretation of superstrings themselves, including a Bohmian description of string creation and destruction in terms of string splitting. The Bohmian equations of motion and the corresponding probabilistic predictions are fully relativistic covariant and do not depend on the preferred foliation. (shrink)

The article examines whether countries should legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide. Firstly, context of the debate is provided by defining the key terms and giving the overview of how the debate evolved throughout history. The arguments in favor of legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide are addressed, namely the argument from autonomy and self–determination and the claim for the “right to die with dignity”. The consequences which were showed to occur in the countries which legalized euthanasia and/or assisted suicide are analyzed, (...) and the case study on the Netherlands and Belgium is made. Finally, the model for the dignity–respecting health–care is proposed followed by the call for bigger accessibility and funding for palliative care. (shrink)

(1997). Super‐paradigms, art, and science: Romanticism and the birth of social science. The European Legacy: Vol. 2, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas, pp. 749-754.

(1996). The Conradian inheritance in the African novel. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 101-108.

(1996). Public opinion and democratic culture: The French revolution. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 175-180.

To relax the apparent tension between nonlocal hidden variables and relativity, we propose that the observable proper time is not the same quantity as the usual proper-time parameter appearing in local relativistic equations. Instead, the two proper times are related by a nonlocal rescaling parameter proportional to |ψ|2, so that they coincide in the classical limit. In this way particle trajectories may obey local relativistic equations of motion in a manner consistent with the appearance of nonlocal quantum correlations. To illustrate (...) the main idea, we first present two simple toy models of local particle trajectories with nonlocal time, which reproduce some nonlocal quantum phenomena. After that, we present a realistic theory with a capacity to reproduce all predictions of quantum theory. (shrink)

Since Bohmian mechanics is explicitly nonlocal, it is widely believed that it is very hard, if not impossible, to make Bohmian mechanics compatible with relativistic quantum field theory. I explain, in simple terms, that it is not hard at all to construct a Bohmian theory that lacks Lorentz covariance, but makes the same measurable predictions as relativistic QFT. All one has to do is to construct a Bohmian theory that makes the same measurable predictions as QFT in one Lorentz frame, (...) because then standard relativistic QFT itself guarantees that those predictions are Lorentz invariant. I first explain this in general terms, then I describe a simple Bohmian model that makes the same measurable predictions as the Standard Model of elementary particles, after which I give some hints towards a more fundamental theory beyond standard model. Finally, I present a short story telling how my views of fundamental physics in general, and of Bohmian mechanics in particular, evolved over time. (shrink)

(1996). Statelessness: The making and unmaking of political identity. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 820-825.

Even though the Bohmian trajectories given by integral curves of the conserved Klein-Gordon current may involve motions backwards in time, the natural relativistic probability density of particle positions is well-defined. The Bohmian theory predicts subtle deviations from the statistical predictions of more conventional formulations of quantum theory, but it seems that no present experiment rules this theory out. The generalization to the case of many particles or strings is straightforward, provided that a preferred foliation of spacetime is given.

Name der Zeitschrift: Millennium Jahrgang: 13 Heft: 1 Seiten: 211-274.

U članku se daje prikaz Schopenhauerovih razmišljanja o ljudskoj spolnosti i homoseksualnosti, te o ženama, koja je ovaj znameniti filozof iznio u svojim djelima Svijet kao volja i predodžba i Parerga i paralipomena. U prikaz je uključena i kritika Schopenhauerovih stavova, a postavlja se i načelno pitanje: može li se i u kojem smislu jedna filozofija smatrati »velikom« ukoliko su ne samo uz nju, nego i u njoj prisutni stavovi koji su obilježeni krajnjom proizvoljnošću i negativnim predrasudama?This paper presents Schopenhauer’s (...) views on human sexuality and women that were brought out in his works Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and Parerga und Paralipomena. The article contains a critique of his attitudesand it attempts to answer a principal question: is it possible to consider a philosophy as being ‘major’ if it contains, and not only incidentally,attitudes of extreme arbitrariness and negative prejudices. (shrink)

(1996). Integration and disintegration trends in European economic development. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 474-478.