We provide a philosophical reconstruction and analysis of the debate on the scientific status of cosmic inflation that has played out in recent years. In a series of critical papers, Ijjas et al. have questioned the scientificality of the current views on cosmic inflation. Proponents of cosmic inflation have in turn defended the scientific credentials of their approach. We argue that, while this defense, narrowly construed, is successful against Ijjas et al., the latter's reasoning does point to a significant epistemic (...) issue that arises with respect to inflation. A broadening of the concept of theory assessment is needed to address that issue in an adequate way. (shrink)

Zuse proposed that the universe is being computed by some sort of cellular automaton or other discrete computing machinery, challenging the long-held view that some physical laws are continuous by nature. Calculating Space is the title of MIT's English translation of Konrad Zuse's 1969 Rechnender Raum, the first work on digital physics. This is the LaTeX edition by A. German and H. Zenil based on the MIT's English translation with permission from the MIT and Konrad Zuse's son Horst (...) Zuse. Followed by an afterword by A. German and H. Zenil. (shrink)

As we look beyond our terrestrial boundary to a multi-planetary future for humankind, it becomes paramount to anticipate the challenges of various human factors on the most likely scenario for this future: permanent human settlement of Mars. Even if technical hurdles are circumvented to provide adequate resources for basic physiological and psychological needs, Homo sapiens will not survive on an alien planet if a dysfunctional psyche prohibits the utilization of these resources. No matter how far we soar into the stars, (...) our psychologies for future generations will be forever tethered to the totality of our surroundings. By shaping our environment toward survival and welfare during the voyage to Mars and in a Martian colony, we indirectly shape our psyches and prepare them for a mission of unprecedented alienation and duration. Once on Mars, human factors such as leadership structure, social organization and code of conduct, group size, gender balance, developmental cycle, mobility, length of stay and the ecological settings and type and manner of subsistence, will create a novel Martian culture. The degree that settlers are severed from the Earth will affect how radically foreign this culture will be when compared with cultures on Earth. (shrink)

The article presents relations between transhumanism and religion with emphasis on their ambiguity. Despite its decidedly secular self-interpretation, tranhumanism appears to be smuggling religious or crypto-religious contents. Attempting to show this, I begin with short, general characteristics of transhumanism. Then its eschatological and metaphysical themes are pointed as the main bearers of religious dead weight. This allows to depict the ways transhumanist thinkers try to elaborate religious undercurrent of their own stance, and the critique of transhumanism developed by Christian theologians (...) and philosophers of religion. (shrink)

As one of the most prominent figures of dystopic posthumanism Francis Fukuyama views biotechnological revolution as presumably the most dangerous challenges we are going to face in what he calls our posthuman future. In his opinion human enhancement will lead inevitably to some forms of eugenic practices, blurring the difference between humans and other live forms, posing the problem of legal status of modified individuals, etc. Hence he calls for establishment of a new regulatory instruments for controlling biotechnological research and (...) development. Those instruments, Fukuyama says, should refer to and protect his original notion of human nature. In the article I try to criticaly examine the way Fukuyama constructs this notion. (shrink)

The text examines methodological consequences of anti-metaphysical turn of British empiricism in the field of anthropology. I argue that this shift reinforces anthropology in its descriptive and interdisciplinary form, because destruction of metaphysically grounded subjectivity carried out in the course of evolution of empiricism provides epistemological legitimization of the idea of anthropological research as morally neutral and religiously indifferent procedure. In the final part of the article the difficulties caused by application of this new methodology are emphasized.

The paper presents anthropological issues as one of the main topics of Nietzsche’s philosophy. I begin with how Nietzsche defines the goals of his anthropological reflection and then I identify the perspective of naturalism as its central interpretational tool. Subsequently I try to show how it is instrumentalized in order to develop correct – according to Nietzsche – characteristics of human being, and as a mean of Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics. In this way conceiving man as “homo natura” allows to (...) reflect on human in axiological context not limited by old metaphysical beliefs. This attempt of combining naturalistic dimension with axiological one determines specific character and importance of Nietzsche’s anthropology. (shrink)

On the broken myth in the philosophy of religion and theology Abstract. The article deals with the concept of broken myth, thus named by the German theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich (1886 - 1965). The thesis related to this concept is that all religions, including Christianity, use a mythical language. This language is expressing moral truths and metaphysical intuitions, but not the objective facts and states of affairs that may provide knowledge. The broken myth does not imply the rejection of (...) myth as a mere untruth, but rather its split into untruth, which is the garment of the story understood literally, and truth, which is (although not always and to varying degrees) a moral and spiritual inspiration. The broken myth is self-aware, but not discredited. The author formulates six reasons that can speak in favor of such view. He believes that its acceptance by the community of believers can be very difficult, so the traditional discourse of faith, in which one understands literally credo articles (including the notions of mystery and analogy), must be considered not as an anachronism, but as an autonomous partner of dialogue. -/- . (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is to undertake a conceptual investigation of the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm: a psychological project initiated by Paul Baltes and intended to study the complex phenomenon of wisdom. Firstly, in order to provide a wider perspective for the subsequent analyses, a short historical sketch is given. Secondly, a meta-theoretical issue of the degree to which the subject matter of the Baltesian study can be identified with the traditional philosophical wisdom is addressed. The main result yielded (...) by a careful conceptual analysis is that the philosophical and psychological concepts of wisdom, though not entirely the same, are at least parallel. Finally, one of the revealed aspects of the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm, i.e. its relative neglect of the non-cognitive and personal aspects of wisdom is brought to the fore. This deficiency, it is suggested, can be remedied by the application of the virtue ethics' conceptual framework. (shrink)

The practical aspect of ancient philosophy has been recently made a focus of renewed metaphilosophical investigation. After a brief presentation of three accounts of this kind developed by Martha Nussbaum, Pierre Hadot, and Michel Foucault, the model of the therapeutic argument developed by Nussbaum is called into question from the perspectives offered by her French colleagues, who emphasize spiritual exercise (Hadot) or the care of the self (Foucault). The ways in which the account of Nussbaum can be defended are then (...) discussed, including both a ‘negative’ defense, i.e. the indication of the weaknesses of Hadot and Foucault’s proposals, and a ‘positive’ one focused on the points in which Nussbaum can convincingly address doubts about her metaphilosophical account. In response to these analyses, some further remarks made by Hadot and Foucault are discussed in order to demonstrate that their accounts are not as distant from Nussbaum after all. Finally, a recent metaphilosophical study by John Sellars together with a therapeutic (medical) model developed by the author of the present article are suggested as providing a framework for potential reconciliation between all three accounts discussed and a resource for further metaphilosophical studies. (shrink)

My contention is to adumbrate three general premises leading to religious tolerance. The first is that emphasis should be laid much more on ethics than on metaphysics. Religions greatly differ in supernatural beliefs but all advocate justice, love, truthfulness, self-control and other virtues. Second, the beliefs about God are not true in their exact meaning, but rather as remote analogies to scientific truth. Religion is more resemblant of poetry than science. Third, real tolerance consists in the readiness to assimilate some (...) of the values of other religions, since no one has expressed the transcendent in an exhausting and perfect way. Key Words: tolerance, ethics, objective knowledge, world religions, openness for the Other. (shrink)

A questão “por quê ser moral”, que foi formulada expressamente no contexto do debate filosófico acadêmico por Francis Herbert Bradley, divide os leitores quando buscam sua resposta em Kant. Uns acham, como Gerold Prauss, que Kant negue a possibilidade de tal resposta e diga que a moral precisa ser aceita como um fato simplesmente dado, o “fato da razão”. Contudo, como tal imediatismo ou “decisionismo transcendental” parece insatisfatório, um outro grupo defende a assim chamada “interpretação do agente racional”, onde este (...) último apresenta o valor supremo, absoluto, que fundamenta a moral e, com isso, apresenta a razão em virtude da qual devemos agir moralmente. Mas tal valor absoluto ou já é moral, mas então a resposta dada à questão “por quê ser moral” entra num círculo vicioso. Ou tal valor faz a moral depender de algo fora da moral o que, conforme Kant, destruiria toda moral. A solução do problema é a seguinte: Kant não deriva a moral de um pressuposto extramoral nem pressupõe a própria moral como simplesmente dada, mas explica o originar da moral. Ela origina da razão prática pela volta dessa razão sobre si mesma que constitui sua autonomia. Por este seu originar, a moral não é uma mera derivação de algo pressuposto, mas algo radicalmente novo, original, autónomo. Pelo outro lado, existe, sim, uma fundamentação da moral, i.e., um processo compreensível de sua constituição. Com isso, Kant evita o imediatismo: a moral não precisa ser simplesmente aceita como um fato puro, mas pode ser compreendida pela razão. (shrink)

The starting point of our considerations is the two books published in 2010: "Ill Fare the Land" by late Tony Judt and "Not for Profit" by Martha Nussbaum. The authors of both books share the conviction that neoliberal changes in the world of global capitalism radically impoverish culture and their consequences may be dramatic and irreversible. In our paper we would like to emphasize the dangers to solidarity and social cohesion posed by neoliberal postulates. We also claim that promoting the (...) neoliberal ideology in the context of higher education and institutions of civic society endangers the very democracy understood as reasonable pluralism (in John Rawls' terminology), consisting in rationality, plurality of opinions, lifestyles, and conceptions of good, as well as consensus as the aim of social and political practices. (shrink)

W tekście rozważane są zagadnienie realności i związana z nim tematyka epistemologiczna w trzecim okresie filozofii Fryderyka Nietzschego. Analizując ten obszar filozofii Nietzschego, autor zwraca szczególną uwagę na problem życia. Opisuje go za pomocą metafory pnącej się wzwyż spirali. Metafora ta rozwijana jest przez autora w kontekście koncepcji „ekstatycznego tańca kratofanicznego” Zbigniewa Kaźmierczaka. Autor rozpoczyna rozważania od interpretacji stanowiska Nietzschego na temat trzech władz poznawczych: świadomości, rozumu i języka metafizycznego. Następnie stara się opisać wpływ, jaki — zdaniem filozofa — wywierają (...) one na powstanie koncepcji realności. Z tego powodu przechodzi do analizy struktury woli. W ostatniej części tekstu autor dokonuje analizy koncepcji realności, zestawiając wyniki badań z metaforą spirali. (shrink)

In this paper I consider how theology impacted on the uprising philosophy in ancient Greece. In the €rst part of my text I analyze the concept of theology and philosophy and I want to know the relation between these two ideas. I am especially interested in point of the line separating theology and philosophy. e main question concerning it is when we could say about theology that it is already philosophy, and reversely – when we could say about philosophy that (...) it is still theology in Greek meaning. For the better understanding of the answer of this question I analyze Hesiod’s Teogony. Hesiod of Beotia is accepted as a poet and theologian and that is why I pay attention to him in the second part of my text. (shrink)

Conceptual analysis, like any exclusively theoretical activity, is far from overrated in current psychology. Such a situation can be related both to the contingent influences of contextual and historical character and to the more essential metatheoretical reasons. After a short discussion of the latter it is argued that even within a strictly empirical psychology there are non-trivial tasks that can be attached to well-defined and methodologically reliable, conceptual work. This kind of method, inspired by the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Peter (...) Strawson (conceptual grammar), and Gilbert Ryle (conceptual geography), is proposed and formally depicted as being holistic, descriptive, and connective. Finally, the newly presented framework of connective conceptual analysis is defended against the “Charge from Psychology,” in a version developed by William Ramsey, claiming that conceptual analysis is based on psychological assumptions that have already been refuted by empirical psychology. (shrink)

The author presents a schematic outline of two approaches in contemporary philosophy of technology, the first of which is rather pessimistic, with technological progress seen as a rising force which subjugates humans and, to use Martin Heidegger’s words, “hampers, oppresses and drags them along in its tracks.” Also underscored is the failing relation between scientific and technological progress and moral development. The second approach, presented in reference to the thoughts of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, interprets scientific and technological progress as (...) the creation of tools enabling the unity of mankind and further evolution. The author supports Teilhard’s view, which he sees as a better motivation to build a better world. (shrink)

For the prominent figures of dystopic posthumanism biotechnological progress means not only new possibilities of solving the most nagging problems, but also many extremely dangerous consequences: a modification of social organization, an undermining of morality, and some changes in the way we understand our identity. Thinkers such as Fukuyama, Kass, Sandel and Habermas consider those consequences as a threat to human nature. In the article I examine the way they construct the latter notion (i.e. human nature) in their arguments.

Many eminent philosophers of religion and theologians have postulated metaphorical understanding of religious dogmas instead of a literal one. Despite differences all have been sympathetic to Christian moral tradition and to religion in general. They proclaim a "third way" beyond traditional theism and atheism. The metaphorical approach to religious beliefs has gathered momentum in the context of the processes of globalization. The Church however defends traditional, literal interpretation of its dogmas. First, the difference between literal and metaphorical understanding of religious (...) dogmas is explained. Then reasons for and against each position are examined with a conclusion that instead of the “subsumption” of the one paradigm by another, for the undefinite future both should be treated as a justified and autonomous discourses remaining in a dialogue. (shrink)

The global spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) or coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) has led to the imposition of severely restrictive measures by governments in the Western hemisphere. We feel a contrast between these measures and our freedom. This contrast, we argue, is a false perception. It only appears to us because we look at the issue through our contemporary moral philosophy of utilitarianism and an understanding of freedom as absence of constraints. Both these views can be (...) substituted with more sophisticated alternatives, namely an ethics of virtue and a notion of freedom of the will. These offer a fuller picture of morality and enable us to cooperate with the current restrictions by consciously choosing to adhere to them instead of perceiving them as draconian and immoral. We ask whether we should collaborate with the restrictions and argue that considerations of virtue will lead to an affirmative answer. More broadly, virtue ethics permits to deal with the practical concerns about how an individual should behave during this pandemic, given the current lockdown measures or lack thereof. -/- In section 1, we present how utilitarianism and a notion of freedom as negative liberty support the opposition to restrictive measures. In section 2, we outline an alternative based on an ethics of virtue and a more elaborated notion of free will. In the concluding section 3, we argue that considerations of virtue should guide the individual and public response to the emergency. (shrink)

Some features of Hegel’s Philosophy of History make it hardly acceptable in the 21st century. It proposes a final destination (Endzweck) of history, together with a principle of rational, dialectic necessity to take it there. In fact, these conceptions are not as absurd as they may seem to contemporary eyes. Nevertheless, the article doesn’t pretend to defend them, but aims to show that there is, behind these two, a third principle which is well worth to be defended –and which, in (...) fact, can systematically maintained without support from the other two. This we can call the “Principle of ethical asymmetry in history”. However, we also can name it by the formula Hegel himself coined: the “progress in the consciousness of liberty”. To explain this idea, the article evidences that the fundamental characteristic of all normativity is practical knowledge de se. In morality or ethics, this turns reflexive and self-determining. Liberty in Hegel’s sense effectively realizes this knowledge de se not only in a formal and abstract way, as in Kant, but concretely in history and in specific communities. However, since liberty in this process always remains linked to that normative self-comprehension which constitutes our practical self-consciousness, the processes of historical realization of liberty are normatively irreversible. Precisely for this process has an element of objective and unconditional aspect. The article concludes with some remarks as to how this principle of ethical asymmetry in history can serve as a basis of e new ethical theory which is strongly normative and, at the same time, sensitive to historic context an human finitude. (shrink)

Kant mostra que uma teoria fundamental da normatividade e da moralidade não pode dar nem uma explanação nem uma prova da normatividade, mas apenas pode articular e explicitar sua origem. Ela pode fazer isso indicando o lugar ou o topos e a virada ou a trope de seu originar. Conforme Kant, o topos da normatividade é a vontade enquanto razão prática e sua trope é o uso geral desta razão que tipicamente é instrumental, no sentido da reflexão. A trope da (...) origem da moralidade é a autonomia, i.e., a virada da razão prática sobre si mesma, tornando-se pura neste ato. Nisso, a razão prática estabelece sua própria forma como lei para si mesma, na forma do imperativo categórico. Em consequência disso, a ética fundamental serve duas funções : formalmente, ela fornece evidência da originalidade e autenticidade da moralidade; materialmente, ela fornece um princípio criteriológico para o conteúdo da moralidade. O artigo argumenta que Kant estava certo em sua visão da fundamentação da ética, mas estava errado com relação à maneira como ele tentou cumprir as exigências estabelecidas. O topos da normatividade e, em consequência disso, da moralidade, não pode ser a razão, mas precisa ser a consciência ou, mais exatamente, o saber de se ; e sua trope fundamental não pode ser reflexão e, depois, autonomia, mas precisa ser o que pode ser descrito como conversão da consciência. Essa conversão pode ser identificada com o philein no sentido de Aristóteles. Este “amar amigável” tem quatro aspectos diferentes: desejo, cognição, benevolência e reconhecimento. Quando este philein for recíproco e estiver continuamente vivido, nasce a philia, a amizade. Essa é descrita, consequentemente, como o topos da origem de normatividade e moralidade. (shrink)

The introduction to the volume and the overview of the idea of naturalizing the mind.

Approaching the settlement of our Moon from a practical perspective, this book is well suited for space program planners. It addresses a variety of human factor topics involved in colonizing Earth's Moon, including: history, philosophy, science, engineering, agriculture, medicine, politics & policy, sociology, and anthropology. Each chapter identifies the complex, interdisciplinary issues of the human factor that arise in the early phases of settlement on the Moon. Besides practical issues, there is some emphasis placed on preserving, protecting, and experiencing the (...) lunar environment across a broad range of occupations, from scientists to soldiers and engineers to construction workers. The book identifies utilitarian and visionary factors that shape human lives on the Moon. It offers recommendations for program planners in the government and commercial sectors and serves as a helpful resource for academic researchers. Together, the coauthors ask and attempt to answer: “How will lunar society be different?”. (shrink)

In his article Banicki proposes a universal model for all forms of philosophical therapy. He is guided by works of Martha Nussbaum, who in turn makes recourse to Aristotle. As compared to Nussbaum’s approach, Banicki’s model is more medical and less based on ethical argument. He mentions Foucault’s vision to apply the same theoretical analysis for the ailments of the body and the soul and to use the same kind of approach in treating and curing them. In his interpretation of (...) philosophical therapy, there are, however, some controversial issues, to which we would like to call attention: -/- Is restoring health by a philosophical method of treatment – health understood as a person’s ability to reach his/her vital goals – a convincing explication of philosophical therapy in general? In order to answer this question, it may be useful to look at Plato. It is not only Platonism (and especially Neo-platonism since Plotinus) that questions the idea that therapy is necessarily connected with „vital goals“. Buddhist and Gnostic philosophies are questioning „the vital“ in general. The immense effort in the history of philosophy to liberate the mind from the body casts doubt on the project to explain philosophical therapy solely in analogy to medical therapy. -/- According to Banicki a therapeutic philosophy has to identify the diseases it attempts at curing. There are, however, reasons for associating the term therapy with suffering/risk rather than disease. If a therapy aims at reducing the fear of death, as for example many classical philosophical therapies do, then there is no disease to be cured. A model based on chances and risks also has the advantage that the Buddhist and Stoic reinterpretation of desires/emotions as “diseases” can be dropped in contemporary philosophical therapy. -/- Banicki mentions the comparison of therapies as one of the primary goals of modelling. Methods should be verified by a statistical correlation between method and therapeutic success and/or by a theory which justifies the method. Some forms of therapies, however, avoid theory-specific terms and concepts in favor of an unprejudiced interpretation of the patient’s statements. Others share the (Nietzschean) aspiration to explore and change measures of value. If the therapeutic process is seen as a unique phenomenon, then there can be no theory and no statistics with co-occurrences. -/- According to Banicki philosophical therapy has to describe techniques which qualify as genuinely philosophical. Techniques like maieutics and hermeneutics, however, are antique philosophical “inventions”, which were later adopted by psychotherapy. If meditation is accepted as a therapeutic tool – as it was in ancient times – then there is not only a methodical but also an emotional relation to religion. If finally, the Socratic search for a good life is seen as one of the characteristics of philosophical therapy, then delimitation even turns into a criterion for non-philosophical therapies. The search for a good life requires an interdisciplinary approach. -/- For the concretization of the formal structure, we suggest a typology of therapies, which is based on chances and risks. Such a typology has the advantage, that it can model conflicting (and even opposing) forms of therapies. The variety of therapeutic goals and methods is a consequence of the historical development towards conceptual freedom. (shrink)

In 1965, Konrad Lorenz grounded the innate–acquired distinction in what he believed were the only two possible sources of information that can underlie adaptedness: phylogenetic and individual experience. Phylogenetic experience accumulates in the genome by the process of natural selection. Individual experience is acquired ontogenetically through interacting with the environment during the organism’s lifetime. According to Lorenz, the adaptive information underlying innate traits is stored in the genome. Lorenz erred in arguing that genetic adaptation is the only means of (...) accumulating information in phylogenetic experience. Cultural adaptation also occurs over a phylogenetic time scale, and cultural tradition is a third source from which adaptive information can be extracted. This paper argues that genetic adaptation can be distinguished from individual and cultural adaptation in a species like Homo sapiens, in which even adaptations with a genetic component require cultural inputs and scaffolding to develop and be expressed. Examination of the way in which innateness is used in science suggests that scientists use the term, as Lorenz suggested, to designate genetic adaptations. The search for innate traits plays an essential role in generating hypotheses in ethology and psychology. In addition, designating a trait as innate establishes important facts that apply at the information-processing level of description. (shrink)

The modern Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics describes an emergent multiverse. The goal of this paper is to provide a perspicuous characterisation of how the multiverse emerges making use of a recent account of (weak) ontological emergence. This will be cashed out with a case study that identifies decoherence as the mechanism for emergence. The greater metaphysical clarity enables the rebuttal of critiques due to Baker (2007) and Dawid and Th\'ebault (2015) that cast the emergent multiverse ontology as incoherent; (...) responses are also offered to challenges to the Everettian approach from Maudlin (2010) and Monton (2013). (shrink)

According to John D. Norton's Material Theory of Induction, all inductive inferences are justified by local facts, rather than their formal features or some grand principles of nature's uniformity. Recently, Richard Dawid (Found Phys 45(9):1101–1109, 2015) has offered a challenge to this theory: in an adaptation of Norton's own celebrated "Dome" thought experiment, it seems that there are certain inductions that are intuitively reasonable, but which do not have any local facts that could serve to justify them in accordance (...) with Norton's requirements. Dawid's suggestion is that “raw induction” might have a limited but important role for such inferences. I argue that the Material Theory can accommodate such inductions, because there are local facts concerning the combinatoric features of the induction’s target populations that can licence the inferences in an analogous way to existing examples of material induction. Since my arguments are largely independent of the details of the Dome, Norton's theory emerges as surprisingly robust against criticisms of excessive narrowness. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer an analysis of the radical disagreement over the adequacy of string theory. The prominence of string theory despite its notorious lack of empirical support is sometimes explained as a troubling case of science gone awry, driven largely by sociological mechanisms such as groupthink (e.g. Smolin 2006). Others, such as Dawid (2013), explain the controversy by positing a methodological revolution of sorts, according to which string theorists have quietly turned to nonempirical methods of theory assessment (...) given the technological inability to directly test the theory. The appropriate response, according to Dawid, is to acknowledge this development and widen the canons of acceptable scientific methods. As I’ll argue, however, the current situation in fundamental physics does not require either of these responses. Rather, as I’ll suggest, much of the controversy stems from a failure to properly distinguish the “context of justification” from the “context of pursuit”. Both those who accuse string theorists of betraying the scientific method and those who advocate an enlarged conception of scientific methodology objectionably conflate epistemic justification with judgements of pursuit-worthiness. Once we get clear about this distinction and about the different norms governing the two contexts, the current situation in fundamental physics becomes much less puzzling. After defending this diagnosis of the controversy, I’ll show how the argument patterns that have been posited by Dawid as constituting an emergent methodological revolution in science are better off if reworked as arguments belonging to the context of pursuit. (shrink)

Abstract. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the debate on Begriffstheorie between Ernst Cassirer, the Swe¬dish philosopher Konrad Marc-Wogau, and, virtually, Moritz Schlick. It took place during in the late thirties when Cassirer had immigrated to Sweden. While Cassirer argued for a rich “constitutive” theory of concepts, Marc-Wogau, and, in a different way, Schlick favored “austere” non-con¬sti¬¬tutive theories of concepts. Ironically, however, Cassirer used Schlick’s account as a weapon to counter Marc-Wogau’s criticism of his rich con¬¬sti¬tu¬¬tive theory (...) of concepts. With the help of modern Formal Concept Theory (FCT) it can be shown, however, that Marc-Wogau’s argument is flawed. (shrink)

In his ground‐breaking study Complicity, Christopher Kutz introduces the notion of ‘participatory intentions’ (individual intentions whose content is collective) to explain an agent's complicity with groups or organisations. According to Kutz, participatory intentions allow us to hold individuals morally accountable for collective wrongs independent of their causal contribution to the wrong and its ensuing harm. This article offers an alternative account of complicity. Its central claim is that an agent's complicity might be due to the dependence of his professional role (...) on the normative principles that make up the organisation or institution in whose practices he partakes. In other words, there might arise a constitutive failure in an agent's attempt to ascribe to himself a non‐complicit professional identity. I use the case of SS‐Judge Konrad Morgen in order to illustrate this understanding of complicity. (shrink)

In some recent papers (G. ‘t Hooft and others), it has been argued that quantum mechanics can arise from classical cellular automata. Nonetheless, G. Shpenkov has proved that the classical wave equation makes it possible to derive a periodic table of elements, which is very close to Mendeleyev’s one, and describe also other phenomena related to the structure of molecules. Hence the classical wave equation complements Schrödinger’s equation, which implies the appearance of a cellular automaton molecular model starting from classical (...) wave equation. The other studies show that the microworld is constituted as a tessellation of primary topological balls. The tessellattice becomes the origin of a submicrospic mechanics in which a quantum system is subdivided to two subsystems: the particle and its inerton cloud, which appears due to the interaction of the moving particle with oncoming cells of the tessellattice. The particle and its inerton cloud periodically change the momentum and hence move like a wave. The new approach allows us to correlate the Klein-Gordon equation with the deformation coat that is formed in the tessellatice around the particle. The submicroscopic approach shows that the source of any type of wave movements including the Klein-Gordon, Schrödinger, and classical wave equations is hidden in the tessellattice and its basic exciations – inertons, carriers of mass and inert properies of matter. We also discuss possible correspondence with Konrad Zuse’s calculating space. (shrink)

It has been known for long time that the cosmic sound wave was there since the early epoch of the Universe. Signatures of its existence are abound. However, such a sound wave model of cosmology is rarely developed fully into a complete framework. This paper can be considered as our second attempt towards such a complete description of the Universe based on soliton wave solution of cosmological KdV equation. Then we advance further this KdV equation by virtue of Cellular Automaton (...) method to solve the PDEs. We submit wholeheartedly Robert Kurucz’s hypothesis that Big Bang should be replaced with a finite cellular automaton universe with no expansion. Nonetheless, we are fully aware that our model is far from being complete, but it appears the proposed cellular automaton model of the Universe is very close in spirit to what Konrad Zuse envisaged long time ago. It is our hope that the new proposed method can be verified with observation data. But we admit that our model is still in its infancy, more researches are needed to fill all the missing details. (shrink)

Michel Haar supports the natural, but he fails to see that the drives behind technology— people's curiosity, exploration and desire to control—could not be more natural. They are, after all, part of our evolutionary heritage. As Konrad Lorenz, the famous ethologist, shows in Behind the Mirror. In his discussion of alienation, Haar also overlooks the work of Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel prizewinning economist, who explores the emergence of the extended society of worldwide markets in his book Fatal Conceit. Hayek (...) predicts that there will always be a tension between our instinctive need for the closeness and familiarity of the tribal-like grouping and the extended market. I contrast Haar also with the perspective of William Warren Bartley III in his book Unfathomed Knowledge, Unmeasured Wealth, in which a Bartley expounds a logical/epistemological argument to the effect that alienation of our products is insuperable. (shrink)

The articles in this issue reflect the results of the 25th Altenberg Workshop in Theoretical Biology on ‘‘The Meaning of ‘Theory’ in Biology’’ held at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Altenberg, Austria, 30 June–3 July, 2011.

"The Answer is blow'in in the wind" (Bob Dylan).