1891. The recovered manuscript of Aristotle's Constitutional History of Athens, now for the first time given to the world from the unique text in the British...

In philosophy, the criteria for personhood (PH) at a specific point in time (synchronic), and the necessary and sufficient conditions of personal identity (PI) over time (diachronic) are traditionally separated. Hence, the transition between both timescales of a person's life remains largely unclear. Personal habits reflect a decision-making (DM) process that binds together synchronic and diachronic timescales. Despite the fact that the actualization of habits takes place synchronically, they presuppose, for the possibility of their generation, time in a diachronic sense. (...) The acquisition of habits therefore rests upon PI over time; that is, the temporal extension of personal decisions is the necessary condition for the possible development of habits. Conceptually, habits can thus be seen as a bridge between synchronic and diachronic timescales of a person's life. In order to investigate the empirical mediation of this temporal linkage, we draw upon the neuronal mechanisms underlying DM; in particular on the distinction between internally and externally guided DM. Externally guided DM relies on external criteria at a specific point in time (synchronic); on a neural level, this has been associated with lateral frontal and parietal brain regions. In contrast, internally guided DM is based on the person's own preferences that involve a more longitudinal and thus diachronic timescale, which has been associated with the brain's intrinsic activity. Habits can be considered to reflect a balance between internally and externally guided DM, which implicates a particular temporal balance between diachronic and synchronic elements, thus linking two different timescales. Based on such evidence, we suggest a habit-based neurophilosophical approach of PH and PI by focusing on the empirically-based linkage between the synchronic and diachronic elements of habits. By doing so, we propose to link together what philosophically has been described and analyzed separately as PH and PI. (shrink)

Ethical questions have traditionally been approached through conceptual analysis. Inspired by the rapid advance of modern brain imaging techniques, however, some ethical questions appear in a new light. For example, hotly debated trolley dilemmas have recently been studied by psychologists and neuroscientists alike, arguing that their findings can support or debunk moral intuitions that underlie those dilemmas. Resulting from the wedding of philosophy and neuroscience, neuroethics has emerged as a novel interdisciplinary field that aims at drawing conclusive relationships between neuroscientific (...) observations and normative ethics. A major goal of neuroethics is to derive normative ethical conclusions from the investigation of neural and psychological mechanisms underlying ethical theories, as well as moral judgments and intuitions. The focus of this article is to shed light on the structure and functioning of neuroethical arguments of this sort, and to reveal particular methodological challenges that lie concealed therein. We discuss the methodological problem of how one can—or, as the case may be, cannot—validly infer normative conclusions from neuroscientific observations. Moreover, we raise the issue of how preexisting normative ethical convictions threaten to invalidate the interpretation of neuroscientific data, and thus arrive at question-begging conclusions. Nonetheless, this is not to deny that current neuroethics rightly presumes that moral considerations about actual human lives demand empirically substantiated answers. Therefore, in conclusion, we offer some preliminary reflections on how the discussed methodological challenges can be met. (shrink)

Schizophrenia is a disturbance of the self, of which the attribution of agency is a major component. In this article, we review current theories of the Sense of Agency, their relevance to schizophrenia, and propose a novel framework for future research. We explore some of the models of agency, in which both bottom-up and top-down processes are implicated in the genesis of agency. We further this line of inquiry by suggesting that ongoing neurological activity (the brain’s resting state) in self-referential (...) regions of the brain can provide a deeper level of influence beyond what the current models capture. Based on neuroimaging studies, we suggest that aberrant activity in regions such as the default mode network of individuals with schizophrenia can lead to a misattribution of internally/externally generated stimuli. This can result in symptoms such as thought insertion and delusions of control. Consequently, neuroimaging can contribute to a more comprehensive conceptualization and measurement of agency and potential treatment implications. (shrink)

Georges Frédéric Parrot (1767–1852), the first Rector of the University of Tartu (Dorpat) after it was reopened in 1802, was a son of the French Enlightenment. He considered it his mission to implement these ideas in the context of the new university. One of the foci of his activities was arranging the university according to a new type of statutes endorsing free development of all kinds of branches of science in the framework of the so-called ‘Academic Republic’, which (...) would be no longer dominated by theology. Parrot was successful in his pursuits. The University of Tartu became an outstanding centre of astronomy, mathematics and natural science—the fields Parrot himself was actively involved in. Today, the term Academic Republic is becoming more and more frequently used by the university employees again. The emphasis on the role of natural science, which was one of Parrot’s main ideas, caused the need for a New Enlightenment. This is the term invented by Nicholas Maxwell, the British philosopher of science. Although the focus of Maxwell’s New Enlightenment seems to be much narrower than that of the classical one, the final goal is still the same. According to Maxwell, making physics the science proper, the basis of constructing serious academic knowledge, has caused the concentration of research on the quest for some kind of special knowledge, the scientific one. Everything stops there. We have lost sight of the general goal of serving humanity, looking for solutions to actual grave problems that Homo sapiens is facing today. Obviously, to serve the whole humanity was the basic goal of the “original” Enlightenment as well. We have to restore the view of the so-called philosophes concerning the position of social science in the academia. It is social science (and the humanities) that form the basis for the understanding and solving the problems that are of real importance to human life. (shrink)

A collection of essays in French or English on the reception of Cartesian philosphy.

Cet article a pour but de montrer la proximité importante de deux auteurs, a priori très différents, au sujet de la question de la santé et de la maladie : Georges Canguilhem et Oliver Sacks. Ils se sont tous deux efforcés de critiquer une conception naturaliste et objectiviste de la santé et de la maladie, le premier en forgeant et en travaillant le concept de norme vitale, le deuxième en décrivant des patients atteints de troubles neurologiques. Ils se rejoignent (...) pour soutenir que la maladie n’est pas une réalité antinaturelle ou aberrante, mais une façon de vivre, une forme d’équilibre physiologique. Toutefois, leurs façons de concevoir la santé vont s’avérer très différentes, pour ne pas dire antinomiques. Canguilhem se reconnaît très influencé par Nieztsche : la santé, c’est la grande santé, la capacité à surmonter les maladies et les épreuves. Il s’ensuit un dualisme entre les héros de la grande santé et la vie plus faible et plus fragile de tous les autres, un dualisme que Sacks remet radicalement en cause lorsqu’il montre que la maladie est aussi une expérience qui nous ouvre à des possibilités nouvelles. Le dialogue qui peut s’ouvrir entre ces deux penseurs permet de problématiser des enjeux essentiels de la question de la santé et de la maladie. (shrink)

The dominant position of science in our culture has ended. In our postmodern world, belief that science will provide the answer to our problems and that progress is inevitable has been shaken, if not toppled. Optimism has been replaced by realism, creating a milieu for the development of intelligent Christian belief. Participating in the Trinity Institute's conference on ÒThe Church in a Postmodern Age, these six prominent scholars explore the breakdown of the basic tenets of the Enlightenment, the sorry state (...) of biblical literacy in our culture, Christian faith in a pluralistic world, the relevance of the Bible today, and the role of the church in our age. Contributors include Robert N. Bellah, Diogenes Allen, George A. Lindbeck, James B. Miller, Sandra M. Schneiders, and Rowan D. Williams. (shrink)

Max Weber and Georg Simmel are considered as ideal-typical founders of sociology. Whereas Simmel pleaded for a large conception of sociology, which would include the epistemological and metaphysical issues as well, Max Weber explicitly excluded philosophical questions from the domain of sociology. A philosophical reading of Max Weber's sociology, which uncovers his philosophy in the margins of his sociological texts, shows, however, that his sociology is predicated on a disenchanted Weltanschauung, a decisionistic ideology and a nominalist epistemology. Key Words: critical (...) theory • decisionism • disenchantment • epistemology • foundations • nominalism • philosophy • realism • Simmel • sociology • value-freedom • Weber. (shrink)

Résumé Le 3 octobre 2011, les zombies ont marché sur Wall Street. Cette parade carnavalesque, inspirée par les films de George A. Romero, agite les fantômes des laissés pour compte du capitalisme global. Mais le mythe du zombie est aussi le symbole d’une force politique informe, qui résiste à toute organisation, et sur laquelle se réfléchissent les désirs morts-vivants d’une société.

This is a review of Teresa Obolevitch's Faith and Science in Russian Religious Thought, which provides an intellectual history of the collaboration between fides and ratio in the course of the development of Russian thought, from its Byzantine origins to the twenty-first century. Obolevitch examines various approaches to combining faith and science in such eighteenth-century thinkers as Mikhail Lomonosov and Gregory Skovoroda, the nineteenth-century thinkers Victor Kudryavtsev-Platonov, Dimitrii Golubinsky, Sergei Glagolev, the Schellingian Peter Chaadaev, the Slavophiles Alexei Khomyakov and Ivan (...) Kireevsky, the writers Fedor Dostoevsky and Lev Tolstoy, Vladimir Soloviev, the twentieth-century philosophers Nikolai Lossky, Pavel Florensky, Semen Frank, Nikolai Berdyaev, Lev Shestov, Sergius Bulgakov, Alexei Losev, the Russian Cosmists Nikolai Fedorov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and Vladimir Vernadsky, and the Orthodox priest Georges Florovsky. The book ends with considerations on the Neo-Patristic synthesis of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the present review, I situate the book in the context of the author's works, I summarize it, editorializing occasionally, and I discuss the thesis of the book in the wider context of world religions. (shrink)

A volume integrating various parts of Fred Sommer's theory on logic and the philosophy of language and also extending it in a variety of ways, such as semantics and modal logic.

Fredric Jameson is the most challenging American Marxist hermeneutical thinker on the present scene. His ingenious interpretations (prior to accessible translations) of major figures of the Frankfurt School, Russian formalism, French structuralism and poststructuralism as well as of Georg Lukàcs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Max Weber and Louis Marin are significant contributions to the intellectual history of twentieth century Marxist and European thought. Jameson's treatments of the development of the novel, the Surrealist movement, of Continental writers such as Honoré de (...) Balzac, Marcel Proust, Alessandro Manzoni, and Robbe Grillet, and of American writers, including Ernest Hemingway, Kenneth Burke and Ursula LeGuin, constitute powerful political readings. Furthermore, his adamantly anti-philosophical form of Marxist hermeneutics puts forward an American Aufhebung of poststructuralism which merits close scrutiny. (shrink)

The article deals with the perception of the Pope John Paul II and Poland in the two speeches of the Presidents of the United States of America. The George W. Bush’s speech given on the occasion of the dedication of the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington DC on March 22, 2001 and the Donald Trump’s speech delivered in front of the Warsaw Uprising Monument on the Krasinski Square in Warsaw on July 8, 2017 were used as the (...) sources for the study. The former speech is a laudation in honor of the Pope from Poland, whose biography was considered by the 43rd President of the United States as one of the most interesting in human history. Among the most notable episodes of the pontificate, George W. Bush listed the 1979 pilgrimage to his homeland, the 1995 visit to Manila in Philippines, the unprecedented visits to a synagogue and a Muslim country, the forgiveness shown to Ali Ağca – the would-be assassin, and the visits to the United States during which the Pope from Poland reminded the people of human dignity and the virtues of a just society. The latter speech is a laudation on the spirit of the Polish nation. Donald Trump emphasized the steadfastness of the Poles in the struggle to preserve their cultural identity despite the loss of their homeland. He recalled the period of partition and extermination of the Polish nation by the German Nazis and the Soviet Communists during World War II. The 45th President of the United States reminded the world about famous Poles: Nicolaus Copernicus, Frederic Chopin, Casimir Pulaski, Thaddeus Kosciuszko and Saint John Paul II. He also spoke about the lasting ties between the Americans and the Poles and about the common values cherished on both sides of the Atlantic. On the example of social transformations in Poland and Europe initiated by John Paul II’s pilgrimage to Poland in 1979, Donald Trump emphasized the influence of faith in God on political and social transformations in the world. He also expressed hope for the survival of Western civilization based on faith in God and the preservation of family and freedom. (shrink)

Georges Frédéric Parrot, the first Rector of the University of Tartu after it was reopened in 1802, was a son of the French Enlightenment. He considered it his mission to implement these ideas in the context of the new university. One of the foci of his activities was arranging the university according to a new type of statutes endorsing free development of all kinds of branches of science in the framework of the so-called ‘Academic Republic’, which would be (...) no longer dominated by theology. Parrot was successful in his pursuits. The University of Tartu became an outstanding centre of astronomy, mathematics and natural science—the fields Parrot himself was actively involved in. Today, the term Academic Republic is becoming more and more frequently used by the university employees again. The emphasis on the role of natural science, which was one of Parrot’s main ideas, caused the need for a New Enlightenment. This is the term invented by Nicholas Maxwell, the British philosopher of science. Although the focus of Maxwell’s New Enlightenment seems to be much narrower than that of the classical one, the final goal is still the same. According to Maxwell, making physics the science proper, the basis of constructing serious academic knowledge, has caused the concentration of research on the quest for some kind of special knowledge, the scientific one. Everything stops there. We have lost sight of the general goal of serving humanity, looking for solutions to actual grave problems that Homo sapiens is facing today. Obviously, to serve the whole humanity was the basic goal of the “original” Enlightenment as well. We have to restore the view of the so-called philosophes concerning the position of social science in the academia. It is social science that form the basis for the understanding and solving the problems that are of real importance to human life. (shrink)