An overview of the history of the concept of matter highlights the fact that alternative modes of explanation were successively employed. With the discovery of irrational numbers the initial conviction of the Pythagorean School collapsed and was replaced by an exploration of space as a principle of understanding. This legacy dominated the medieval period and had an after-effect well into modernity—for both Descartes and Kant still characterized matter in spatial terms. However, even before Galileo the mechanistic world view slowly entered (...) the scene—the world as chaos, particles in motion. Elevating movement to become the guiding principle in our understanding of matter dominated the main tendency of modern physics until the (end of the) 19th century. The discovery of irreversible processes (radio-activity for example) directed 20th century physics towards an exploration of the meaning of energy-operation. It turned out that even within 20th century physics long-standing legacies prevailed, because an account of the nature of matter continued to be torn apart by atomistic and holistic views—confronted by the problem of constancy and change (radical transformability versus persistence). Concrete, material reality exceeds the scope of any single mode of explanation—an insight that also serves a better understanding of the wave-particle duality. (shrink)

Both through his own work and that of his students, Franz Clemens Brentano had an often underappreciated influence on the course of 20 th - and 21 st -century philosophy. _The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School_ offers full coverage of Brentano’s philosophy and his influence. It contains 38 brand-new essays from an international team of experts that offer a comprehensive view of Brentano’s central research areas—philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and value theory—as well as of the principal (...) figures shaped by Brentano’s school of thought. A General Introduction serves as an overview of Brentano and the contents of the volume and three separate bibliographies point students and researchers on to further avenues of inquiry. Systematic and detailed, _The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School_ provides readers with a valuable reference to Brentano’s work, and to his lasting importance in the history of philosophy and in contemporary debates. (shrink)

A Christian approach to scholarship, directed by the central biblical motive of creation, fall and redemption and guided by the theoretical idea that God subjected all of creation to His Law-Word, delimiting and determining the cohering diversity we experience within reality, in principle safe-guards those in the grip of this ultimate commitment and theoretical orientation from absolutizing or deifying anything within creation. In this article my over-all approach is focused on the one-sided legacy of mathematics, starting with Pythagorean arithmeticism (“everything (...) is number”), continuing with the geometrization of mathematics after the discovery of irrational numbers and once again, during the nineteenth century returning to an arithmeticistic position. The third option, never explored during the history of mathematics, guides our analysis: instead of reducing space to number or number to space it is argued that both the uniqueness of these two aspects and their mutual coherence ought to direct mathematics. The presence of different schools of thought is highlighted and then the argument proceeds by distinguishing numerical and spatial facts, while accounting for the strict correlation of operations on the law side of the numerical aspect and their correlated numerical subjects (numbers). Discussing the examples of 2 + 2 = 4 and the definition of a straight line as the shortest distance between two points provide the background for a brief sketch of the third alternative proposed (inter alia against the background of an assessment of infinity and continuity and the vicious circles present in contemporary mathematical arithmeticistic claims). (shrink)

The transcendental problem that obsessed the great Western philosophers such as Kant and Husserl should be, according to Wittgenstein, conceived as a matter of understanding a process of reasoning in which a conclusion follows necessarily from stated rules. Once these rules, regarded as a priori categories by Kant and as eidos and eidetic relations by Husserl, are demonstrated to be no more than the language usages or rules of language-games related to our forms of life, Kant’s transcendental idealism and Husserl’s (...) transcendental phenomenology no longer have a leg to stand on. (shrink)

فلسفۀ دین ماکس شلر در واقع پدیدارشناسی ذات‌نگرِ دین است. محور مباحث او دربارۀ دین مفهومی تحت عنوان «کنش دینی» است، که شلر آن را نوعی «دادگی» معرفی می‌کند، که در آن امر الوهی/قدسی داده می‌شود. او معتقد است «شخص» در کنش دینی با خدا ارتباط برقرار می‌کند، و تجربۀ این ارتباط منحصربه‌فرد و تحویل‌ناپذیر است. این کنش بداهتی دارد که متفاوت با بداهت مورد نظر در منطق است و از شهود پدیدارشناسانه مایه می‌گیرد. از نظر شلر، کنش دینی بُعدی (...) بنیادین و ذاتی از ابعاد وجودی انسان است. او سه مشخصۀ ذاتی کنش دینی را برمی‌شمرد، که مختص به این کنش هستند، و عبارت‌اند از فراروی از جهان، پر شدن با امر الوهی، و لزوم پذیرش از جانب امر الوهی. به این منظور، ابتدا نگاهی به شناخت شهودی و نقش عاطفه در آن از نظر شلر می‌اندازیم. آنگاه پس از تبیین مفهوم کنش دینی و دادگی امر الوهی و مشخصات آن از نظر شلر، با بررسی و ارزیابی ویژگی‌های طرح‌شدۀ کنش دینی، به چند اشکال می‌رسیم: ارتباط کنش دینی با «خدا» - به مفهوم ادیان ابراهیمی و غیرابراهیمی - وضوح ندارد؛ ویژگیِ فراروی از جهان نیز مستلزم پذیرشِ پیشینیِ «فراجهان» است؛ و روش شلر در تعیین بُعد بنیادیِ انسان با وظیفۀ پدیدارشناسی فاصله‌ای پرناشدنی دارد. (shrink)

In this article, the author considers the particularities of Franz Brentano’s psychognosy in the context of notion of “basic” or “analytic” truths and his methodological approaches to scientific, philosophical investigations as well as his influence upon Kasimir Twardowski, who was the pupil of Brentano and accepted the main points of his methodological program. The author also stresses that the study of Brentano’s and Twardowski’s heritage is important for tracing the origin of scientific/analytic philosophy. It is very important to investigate Brentano-Twardowski (...) relations in the context of the concept of “basic truths” or “analytic truths”. Brentano stresses that “basic truths” can be found thanks to “psychognosy” or “pure psychology”. For Twardowski, psychology is the base for philosophical investigations because it helps to understand the formation of notions and judgements. This article is also dedicated to the inquiries of Brentano’s and Twardowski’s legacy provided by Ukrainian scholars Borys Dombrowskiy and Yanosh Sanotskiy. The reception of Brentano’s theory of judgement in Dombrowskiy’s works and the problem of Brentano’s psychologism in Sanotskiy’s works were examined. (shrink)