When do things change? When do things have some characteristics? I try to answer these questions by looking at different solutions Plato and Aristotle presented in their works. The famous analysis of change from the second half of Plato’s Parmenides claims that change happens outside of time, at an “instant”. On the contrary, Aristotle in the Physics explicitly argues that all change occurs only in time. However, both Plato and Aristotle also provide other analyses of change. How to deal with (...) this variety of explanations and tensions between them? In this paper, I argue that if we differentiate between several kinds of change, most of Plato’s and Aristotle’s analyses provide a thorough insight into the nature of change. For processes such as locomotion, change occurs exclusively within time. For changes where both the initial and final states occur only in time, such as a transition from motion to rest, change takes place in the ‘now’. However, for changes where both the initial and final states occur in both time and in the ‘now’ – for example, a qualitative change from being white to not being white – change does not occur in time nor in the ‘now’, but instead happens instantaneously. (shrink)

The pragmatist account of action in Brandom’s Making it Explicit offers a compelling defense of social embeddedness of acting. Its virtue consists of redefining the agent’s reasons for action in terms of her public commitments and entitlements. However, this account remains too intellectualist insofar as it neglects the embodied sense allowing the agent to respond to various situational demands and social constraints. In my article, I provide a less disembodied account of action that draws on Dreyfus’s emphasis on bodily skills (...) as constitutive aspects of intentional acting. Dreyfus’ notion of absorbed coping certainly highlights the role of body and affectivity in guiding the performance of action, but it ends up in underestimating the role of discursive and conceptual capacities in human agency. Against Dreyfus, I will demonstrate that involved and embodied coping not only answers to the demands of a given situation, but also involves responsiveness to reasons. My ambition is to defend a continuity between practical reasoning, i.e. our capacity to justify our performances through reasons, and our embodied coping skills, a continuity that has been overlooked by Brandom’s intellectualist and denied by Dreyfus’ anti-rationalist accounts. (shrink)

An introduction to an English translation of Jan Mukařovský´s lecture The Semiology of Art. In this lecture Mukařovský, a Czech aesthetician, literary historian, theorist, and leading proponent of Czech structuralism, develops his interpretation of the semiotics of art from a detailed explanation of the basic functions of the artistic sign. He emphasizes the role of the aesthetic function, which is dominant but latently and potentially contained in all the other functions of the linguistic and the artistic sign. He then defines (...) the artistic sign as the dialectical negation of the communicative sign. (shrink)

This volume presents mathematical game theory as an interface between logic and philosophy.

The occasion of the 100th anniversary of I. Kant’s death was a colossal impulse for many researchers of Immanuel Kant’s legacy. One of the goals of the paper is to introduce one of the less known anniversary critical texts, which appeared in the Russian intellectual milieu. It attempts to disrupt the usual approach regarding the interpretation of Bely’s comprehension of Kant’s legacy, i.e., Kant as a skeleton of philosophy or a police officer of thinking. The paper points to a more (...) systematically conceived scale of Bely’s reflections of Kant. From Bely’s point of view, Kant is the author of firm grounds for the shaping of thought. On the unstable background of philosophy, which during the historical development of thought succumbed to erosion, it is Kant’s philosophy that serves as the stabilizing base. Bely tries to highlight that Kant’s epistemology forms distinctively outlined the foundations of a knowledge of the world and philosophical comprehension not only of history but also of symbolism. The symbolism of Andrei Bely. (shrink)

This paper discusses some difficulties in understanding the Turing test. It emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between conceptual and empirical perspectives and highlights the former as introducing more serious problems for the TT. Some objections against the Turingian framework stemming from the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy are exposed. The following serious problems are examined: 1) It considers a unique and exclusive criterion for thinking which amounts to their identification; 2) it misidentifies the relationship of speaking to thinking as that of a (...) criterion; 3) it neglects the “natural” course of the development in semantics. However, these considerations suggest only that it is problematic to label a successful chatbot as a “thinking entity” without further qualifications, but not necessarily and once and for all incorrect. Philosophy has only little to say about the technical possibility of creating such an effective program. (shrink)

The essay presents Patočka’s intellectual relationship to Karl Jaspers on the basis of his texts from the 1960s and 1970s, with a starting point in the 1969 study What is Existence?. After introducing some general connections and differences, based in particular on the forms of heresy in both philosophers, the basic contours of the notion of existence are examined more closely. Patočka understands existence as the performance of a threefold movement that is in many respects problematic. The virtue of Jaspers’ (...) position, on the other hand, lies in its focused clarity. While both thinkers emphasize the concept of authentic performance, the key issue becomes its one-sidedness, which can be described as surrender without acceptance. (shrink)

Fine (J Philos Log 43:549–577, 2014) developed a truthmaker semantics for intuitionistic logic, which is also called exact semantics, since it is based on a relation of exact verification between states and formulas. A natural question arises as to what are the limits of Fine’s approach and whether an exact semantics of similar kind can be constructed for other important non-classical logics. In our paper, we will generalize Fine’s approach and develop an exact semantics for some substructural logics. In particular, (...) we will provide a truthmaker semantics for the Non-associative Lambek calculus and some of its extensions. This generalization will reveal some interesting connections between Fine’s recent work on truthmaker semantics and his early work on relevant logic. (shrink)

In this paper I will discuss some interesting philosophical questions bound to color science, in its variant founded by Berlin and Kay’s linguistic and anthropological research. I will first refer to various criticisms, expressed by dissenting scientists. Further criticisms implied by a rather philosophical perspective will follow; a particular attention is paid to the question of synchronicity vs . diachronicity. The controversy about Berlin and Kay’s conception is paralleled by the development of Wittgenstein’s views on color that I will sketch (...) in short. Wittgenstein’s philosophy offers tools for illuminating the problem from yet another point of view. In the final part of the paper, I will try to point to the limits of the conception of basic color categories, but also to assess its relevance and possible philosophical contribution in terms of language games variety; especially with respect to the Color Incompatibility The orem and its implications. (shrink)

This paper, based on ethnographically obtained data, discusses German language acquisition at an early age: the discovery of the interconnection between language and corporeality is the key component of the analysis based on videostudies. The body—conceived as an intermediary and content element of education, becomes an essential base for foreign language acquisition. This will be documented by tangible data and subsequent theoretical analysis with respect to relevant terminology of cultural anthropology (Körper and Leib). The principle of corporeality is further used (...) as a means of perceiving German language education in the sense of the so called language propaedeutic concept and as a means of the legitimisation of particular qualification and the role of foreign language teachers in preschool institutions. (shrink)

The paper deals with neo-Kantianism and the value theory in Hungarian philosophy on the threshold of the 20th century. It shows how neo-Kantianism contributed to the Hungarian philosophy’s being professionalized as well as the transformations of neo-Kantianism in the works of its leading representatives. It also offers a detailed analysis of the value theory of K Böhm, who created the first original Hungarian philosophical system.

The motif of shame represents an interesting and hitherto neglected intersection in the discussion of the relationship between Nietzsche and Plato. The first part of the essay recapitulates the function of this motif in Nietzsche’s culminating texts (mainly Zarathustra and Gay Science), while the second part focuses on the motif of shame in Plato’s work, specifically the two extreme contexts of death (Apology, Crito) and love (Symposium). It turns out that for both authors, shame is a constitutive moral phenomenon that (...) is thematized in relation to logos. Shame and logos thus stand in close and contrasting relation. Their tension is decisive for the life of the soul, for its upward movement (Plato) or gradation (Nietzsche). It is therefore not a simple subjugation of the “bad”, irrational element by the “good”, rational component of the soul that plays the central role but an interplay of irreducible, mutually demanding moments. The interpretation of their interplay has both historical and systematic importance—it sheds new light on the relationship between these seemingly opposing philosophers and contributes to answering the following question: what is there to be ashamed of? (shrink)

The paper discusses ecological grief as a particular affective phenomenon. First, it offers an overview of several philosophical accounts of grief, acknowledging the heterogeneity and complexity of the experience that responds to particular personal points of importance, concern and one’s identity; the loss triggering grief represents a blow to these. I then argue that ecological grief is equally varied and personal: responding to what the grieving person understands as a loss severe enough to present intelligibly a degradation of her life (...) and the world, to their meaningfulness or even sustainability. More specifically, both personal and ecological grief may manifest in an eroded sense of the future as a space in which one would invest oneself with plans, projects, ideas, desires, and endeavours. On the other hand, personal grief is, in some cases, conceptualised as having embedded the inherent possibility to come to closure or “move on” (e.g., by marrying again), while with ecological grief, the intelligibility of overcoming (replacing) the loss may be, depending on its scale, severely limited. I argue that this erosion of the future need not take the shape of paralysing sadness but rather of a disruption of taking some options of projecting oneself into the future seriously or as real. (shrink)

The article deals with the problem of inductive learning and predicting in dynamic processes, which can be formally represented as time series of atomic events. The central notion of sequential event is characterised as a finite subsequence of adjacent atomic events in a series. In the first part of the article an algorythmic model of learning is introduced. The criterion of learning is based on the frequency of a particular sequential event and on the time-distance of its previous occurrences from (...) the moment of learning. The second part deals with the problem of evaluation of hypotheses in the process of predicting sequential events. A first order language of sequential events and axiomatic theory of sequential events are defined. The theory is proved to be consistent (a model of the theory is constructed). Then a probabilistic evaluation function for sequential events is defined as an analogy of Carnapian confirmation function. In the conclusion this probabilistic evaluation is discussed from the point of view of the foundations of probability. (shrink)

Many legal theorists and linguists have addressed the notion of legal language from different perspectives. Despite that, the definitions of legal language vary. Almost all of the approaches conclude that legal language entails several types of communication. Nevertheless, not all of these categories are sufficiently researched. Some types of legal communication seem to be neglected. This lack of interest might be rooted in the uncertainty of whether these texts or utterances even fall under the scope of the concept of legal (...) language. In order to avoid this superficiality in subsequent research, it is first necessary to come to a clear determination of which communicative acts can be considered a part of legal language and which cannot. Accordingly, in this search for the definition of legal language, we should not neglect the fact that language is executed in concrete communicative acts, and the only means to grasp the language is through communication. The aim of this article is therefore to clearly delineate the boundaries of this concept. Based on analysis of how the given term is currently defined, I draw out the common features and trace the characteristics in which they differ. Taking into account these findings, I propose a novel comprehensive demarcation of legal language. This concept argues that the ‘legal’ nature of language should be determined by the context and function of the particular statement or exchange, in connection with the role of participants in the communication. This means that a particular act may be considered a part of legal language not in accordance with a certain form or lexicon used, but mainly by extralinguistic circumstances in the context of which it is being performed. (shrink)

Surrogacy has long been discussed in reproductive medicine. In the Czech Republic, surrogacy is not legally regulated. Because of this legal vacuum, there are no official procedures or organizations that openly deal with surrogacy. Potential surrogate mothers and applicants do not have many options for obtaining or sharing information. The only source is the Internet. Online forums are a popular tool for gaining information and contacts regarding surrogacy. The goal of this research was to use qualitative research methods to survey (...) the most searched and discussed topics on Czech online discussion forum websites. We used discussions that we found on www.emimino.cz between 2009 and 2019. This article analyses the comments of the Internet forum discussants/participants, their involvement, knowledge of surrogacy, the information sought and their opinions. In particular, the participants discussed where to find a surrogate mother or how to become one. This article attempts to outline the discussions ordinary people have about surrogacy outside official expert forums. (shrink)

lnek je zamen na vybran implikace mezi sociologickou hermeneutikou (pstup) a analzou metafor (analytick koncept). Konkrtn je een vztah lingvistickho kontextu textu (jako empirickho korpusu) a vyplvajcch (skrytch) implikac, kter jsou odhaliteln dky kontextu metaforickho vznamu. Uren vztah me pomoci k zpesnn role sociologick hermeneutiky v socilnch vdch, konkrtn k monosti volby v kvalitativnch metodch skrze kritickou metodologii. Vstupem lnku je konstatovn siln vazby mezi tvorbou kontextulnch metafor a postavenm polysmickho slova ve vt, kter dky tomu tvo zkladnm referenn objekt (...) empirickho korpusu pro samotnou analzu. (shrink)

A Riposte to Stanislav Sousedík’s View of Historical Facts.

Článek postupně analyzuje tři nesnáze, s nimiž se potýká filosofie při oslovování veřejnosti: hermetismus, bagatelizaci a vizionářství. Na základě kritiky těchto forem jsou postupně vymezovány podmínky, za nichž je dnes možné považovat filosofii za smysluplnou činnost.

The aim of this article is to problematize the concept of school culture both as a concept and as a subject of investigation. It deals with the historical roots of this concept and the fact that it is shrinking—a consequence of the managerial imperatives of effectiveness and accountability in education. School culture, in relation to the quality of schools and the quality of education, has become the subject of audits, arrived at through a developed network of standardisation in education, testing (...) and evaluation. The methodology of evaluation currently lending particular substance to school culture, however, generates different methodological perspectives on investigating school culture and thus research is becoming an instrument of political power. In the research it is then necessary to either abandon the concept of school culture or to free it from spinning round the cycle of evaluation/self-evaluation—a change in school culture—improving the “quality of the school”—a new evaluation/self-evaluation. One way to do this is to employ ethnographic approaches in research into schools and to understand school culture as a system of texts. (shrink)

We explore different ways to generalize Hintikka’s classic game theoretic semantics to a many-valued setting, where the unit interval is taken as the set of truth values. In this manner a plethora of characterizations of Łukasiewicz logic arise. Among the described semantic games is Giles’s dialogue and betting game, presented in a manner that makes the relation to Hintikka’s game more transparent. Moreover, we explain a so-called explicit evaluation game and a ‘bargaining game’ variant of it. We also describe a (...) recently introduced backtracking game as well as a game with random choices for Łukasiewicz logic. (shrink)

Despite their flaws, large language models (LLMs) deserve a fair chance to prove their mettle against human experts, who are often plagued with biases, conflicts of interest, and other frailties. For epistemically unprivileged laypeople struggling to access expert knowledge, the accessibility advantages of LLMs could prove crucial. While complaints about LLMs' inconsistencies and arguments for human superiority are often justified (for now), they distract from the urgent need to prepare for the likely scenario of LLMs' continued ascent. Experimentation with both (...) the capabilities and institutional architecture of LLMs is necessary. Neither tech-bashing nor excessive gatekeeping will suffice. As LLMs are here to stay and they keep improving, it is high time we started thinking about how to navigate the impending wave of their proliferation. (shrink)

Tato studie se zabývá dvěma spřízněnými jevy odehrávajícími se ve vědeckém prostředí. Jedná se o fenomén frustrace ve vědecké praxi a s ním spojenou touhu po rozpoznání vlastního výzkumu vědeckou komunitou a následně o otázku uznání od akademického společenství. Zmíněné fenomény jsou přitom úzce propojeny s ústředním tématem filosofie a sociologie vědy: kdo rozhoduje, co bude předmětem vědeckého bádání? Předkládaná studie nejprve představuje Mertonův mýtus o okamžitém rozpoznání vědeckého objevu a následně prostřednictvím exkurzu do oblasti ekonomie a na příkladech z (...) vědecké praxe poukazuje na jeho neplatnost. V závěru textu jsou společně s jejich dekonstrukcí navrhnuta možná řešení popsaných problémů. Text je také kritickým návratem ke dvěma studiím Josepha Agassiho, žáka Karla R. Poppera a tvrdošíjného zastánce kritického racionalismu, neboť právě Agassi ve svých dílech rozebírá dopady vědeckého vyloučení a neochoty naslouchat. (shrink)

Na základě analýzy otázky, jak se učíme ze zkušenosti představuje studie problém indukce nejprve tak, jak byl formulován Humem skrze jeho příčinu v nezdůvodnitelnosti principu uniformity přírody. Následně ukazuje Popperovo řešení problému spočívající v naprostém odmítnutí induktivního usuzování. Popperův přístup je podroben srovnání s reliabilistickou pozicí Davida Papineau - stanoviskem, že poznání je pravdivým přesvědčením generovaným spolehlivou metodou. Hlavním cílem textu je znovuotevření diskuze nad tématem neplatnosti indukce a možná redukce námitek vůči její logické neplatnosti na základě nahlédnutí reliabilistického stanoviska. (...) Vedlejším záměrem je pak ilustrovat možné styčné body mezi kritickým racionalismem s jeho důrazem na delegitimizaci vědění a reliabilistickým kritériem spolehlivosti. (shrink)

In diesem Beitrag wird argumentiert, dass Beispiele nicht nur als rhetorische Unterstützung für eine vorgestellte allgemeine These verwendet werden, sondern auch ohne Erklärung zirkulieren (ob mit oder ohne versteckte Absicht). Wir treffen oft auf Besonderheiten (Personen, Fälle, Situationen, Geschichten usw.), die erst mit der Zeit die Bedeutung eines Beispiels für etwas annehmen. Das Lernen aus solchen Beispielen ist ein langwieriger Prozess, der darauf beruht, dass man ernsthafte und bedeutsame Aspekte (oft im Zusammenhang mit wesentlichen Strukturen des menschlichen Lebens) erkennt, die (...) sich in ihnen widerspiegeln, und der dazu führt, dass man i) in der Lage ist, bedeutsame Verbindungen zu anderen Besonderheiten zu erkennen und ii) nach dieser Erkenntnis zu handeln. Es ist umstritten, ob i) und ii) untrennbar miteinander verbunden sind. Der schwer fassbare Charakter des Lernens an Beispielen - die Schwierigkeit, zu entscheiden, ob ein Lernen stattgefunden hat - wird am Beispiel umweltbezogener Handlungen illustriert. (shrink)

Tento článek se zabývá problematikou (organizované) nespolupráce a černého pasažérismu; jeho cílem je ukázat „spolupráci“ a „nespolupráci“ jako relativní pojmy odpovídající různým úrovním popisu. Závěrem naznačuje, že fenomén organizovaného obcházení pravidel může představovat problém pro naturalistické varianty teorie společenské smlouvy.

Článek se zabývá různými možnými úhly pohledu na problém závislosti, nakolik je relevantní pro filosofii. Nejprve diskutuje vztah mezi závislostí a akrasií; poté navrhuje další směry analýzy závislosti jakožto komplexního problému aktérova postoje k možnostem vlastní existence a pravidlům her a kontextů, v nichž se pohybuje.The paper deals with various possible points of view on the problem of addiction, as far as it is a relevant philosophical topic. It discusses first the relationship between addiction and akrasia; then it suggests other (...) directions for the analysis of addiction as a complex problem of the agent’s stance to the possibilities of her/his own existence and to the rules of the games and contexts within which she/he acts. (shrink)

Článek zkoumá status paměti jako determinanty přítomného lidského jednání na specifickém příkladu posttraumatické stresové poruchy. Snažím se ukázat, že vztah mezi prožitkem zpřítomněným pamětí a jednáním není kauzální a logický, nýbrž že ve světle prožitého traumatu (zprávy o něm) dává přítomné jednání smysl. Struktura této provázanosti je spíše narativní či hermeneutická.

The role of artificial intelligence in the Turing test is to imitate human beings to such an extent that people will not realize it is a machine. With the rise of deep learning (a subcategory of AI), the situation is changing rapidly as the new systems do not focus on imitating human intelligence but emphasize thorough solutions to specific issues. The main difference between predefined AI and deep learning (DL) is that these systems are self-learning and have verifiable results. Firstly, (...) we need to analyse the application of the Turing test in the Loebner Prize because, there, the primary emphasis is on aspects of human intelligence – learning, reasoning and understanding. Secondly, in the Turing test, only general intelligence is considered, and this can be questionable. If DL does not possess this form of intelligence, by this reasoning, we should consider it unintelligent. However, is such understanding correct? The third and last aspect questions whether the Turing test is beneficial for an AI designed for specific tasks because the results do not bring any new data and conclusions. (shrink)