Both John Langshaw Austin and Willard Van Orman Quine were critical of the traditional division of propositions into the two categories: analytic and synthetic. their criticism has, however, a di erent character. Quine questions the usefulness of the notion of analyticity, whereas Austin does not accept the view that every proposition should be considered either analytic or synthetic. According to Quine, we have to abandon the notion of analyticity because we cannot de ne it in a satisfactory way. Quine’s criticism (...) is based on his conviction that the very notion of meaning is suspicious om the scienti c point of view. this general outlook is supported by arguments the point of which is to show that we cannot avoid an indeterminacy of translation. Austin criticises the distinction for di erent reasons. According to him, it is not the notion of meaning which is suspicious, but a certain model of this notion — a model which is based on false analogies. In my text, I compare these two approaches and point out that they have di erent metaphilosophical sources. the main di erence lies in the fact that, according to Austin, statements about linguistic meaning usually have a descriptive character, whereas Quine claims that linguistic meanings are theoretical entities. In the last part of my article, I discuss the thesis of indeterminacy of translation and assess its credibility, as it plays a key role in Quine’s criticism of the notion of meaning. (shrink)

The main aim of this article is to pose and consider the following question: Does the reasoning that led to Kripkenstein’s sceptical paradox undermine all versions of materialism, including nonreductive materialism? First, I present other versions of materialism in the philosophy of mind. Then I point out that, according to nonreductive materialists, one can neither define mental properties in terms of physical properties nor derive psycho‑physical laws from the laws of physics. The presently‑understood thesis of materialism is confined by the (...) following claim: the same distribution of physical properties entails the same distribution of mental properties. In other words, the mental properties supervene upon physical properties. This account then leads to the following formulation of the main question: Assuming that Kripkenstein is right, do mental properties supervene upon physical properties? Taking into account that answering this question requires a discussion of the notions of supervenience and Kripkenstein’s paradox, I devote two parts of my paper to these topics. The conclusion which I reach is as follows: If the reasoning that led to Kripkenstein’s paradox is correct, mental properties can only globally supervene upon physical properties, and consequently no version of materialism can be empirically justified. (shrink)

Stanisław Lem, a philosopher and futurologist, in his many works devoted much attention to the condition of human and the relation between human and technology. He coined the term ‘autoevolution’ in the course of forecasting unlimited technological augmentation of human abilities. Nowadays, the term may be associated with the conceptions presented by transhumanism, a 20th-century-born philosophical movement which advocates radical transformation of Homo sapiens by means of the achievements of scientific and technological progress. Lem’s attitude towards such a transformation of (...) human is complicated yet ultimately critical due to the fact that it poses a threat to human culture as such. The phenomenon of autoevolution undermines existing values and raises a question of authenticity of a future posthuman. We examine dependence between technology and culture, present Lem’s conception of autoevolution and his philosophy of culture, then we sketch a post-metaphysical dispute about authenticity, and finally show that Lem’s thought belongs to one of the arguing sides. (shrink)

Arnošt Kolman (1892–1979) was a Czech mathematician, philosopher and Communist official. In this paper, we would like to look at Kolman’s arguments against logical positivism which revolve around the notion of the fetishization of mathematics. Kolman derives his notion of fetishism from Marx’s conception of commodity fetishism. Kolman is aiming to show the fact that an entity (system, structure, logical construction) acquires besides its real existence another formal existence. Fetishism means the fantastic detachment of the physical characteristics of real things (...) or phenomena from these things. We identify Kolman’s two main arguments against logical positivism. In the first argument, Kolman applied Lenin’s arguments against Mach’s empiricism-criticism onto Russell’s neutral monism, i.e. mathematical fetishism is internally related to political conservativism. Kolman’s second main argument is that logical and mathematical fetishes are epistemologically deprived of any historical and dynamic dimension. In the final parts of our paper we place Kolman’s thinking into the context of his time, and furthermore we identify some tenets of mathematical fetishism appearing in Alain Badiou’s mathematical ontology today. (shrink)

Seeing how the idea of the ‘ruler cult’ and the necessary ‘myth-making’ to establish it exists to this day, as seen with the regime of a 21st century dictator like Kim Jong-il, it would be most interesting to see what parallels exist between cases of divine leadership and what we might learn about our contemporary cult rulers when looking at the dynamics of the two-millennia-old cult of the deified Emperor Augustus. As such, I have formulated a central question that focuses (...) on the reign of Divus Augustus, and in doing so provides opportunity to extrapolate from it new insights in similar but contemporary figures of leadership. A clear case of 'to understand motives in the present, one must look at actions in the past.'. (shrink)

If Jewish Bolsheviks could put an end to the imperial rule of the Romanovs, could they pose a threat to the vision of a Third Reigh? A question the German National Socialists are likely to have asked themselves before and on the eve of plotting the rise of the Nazi regime. After all, Europe had had a long-standing relationship with blaming the Jews for the world’s miseries. A relationship Germany was ready to refuel, as indicated by German Field Marshal Walter (...) von Reichenau, when he stated that ‘the most essential aim of war against the Jewish-bolshevistic system is a complete destruction of their means of power and the elimination of Asiatic influence from the European culture.’ But the German fears of Jewish interference with their great scheme for Europe’s future, must surely have been inspired by more than just the age-old conspiratorial allegation that Jews were the main forces behind world politics. As such, this essay will seek to inspect the apparent rise of antisemitic fears at the time, and put a case forward to show how religion played into all this. (shrink)

Dit werkstuk betrekt zich op de vraag of de de facto legitimiteit van Knoet de Grote als koning van Angelsaksisch Engeland, te verklaren is aan de hand van de theorieën over legitimiteit zoals gepostuleerd door Maximilian Carl Emil Weber (1864—1920). Bestaande literatuur over Knoet de Grote zijn troonsbestijging, zoals dat van vooraanstaand 19e-eeuws historicus Edward Augustus Freeman, zou een ‘geromantiseerd’ beeld hebben geschetst van de kwestie. Dit werkstuk zal kijken of dit beeld, aan de hand van Webers theorie over waar (...) legitimiteit in gegrond kan zijn, ten eerste terecht te noemen is en, ten tweede, of het Knoets status als legitiem vorst van het ‘Angelsaksische’ volk goed kan verklaren. (shrink)

One of the most widely discussed philosophical issues is the problem of future contingents. Basically, the challenge is to create an adequate semantic theory of future-tensed sentences. Twardowski (1900) suggests that future contingent statements should be analyzed using the concept of probability. The aim of this paper is to show that (1) such an analysis is not appropriate and (2) that Twardowski’s main theses imply the Thin Red Line Theory. I discuss three potential arguments against my proposal and sketch the (...) connection with Schaffer’s Parallelism Thesis (2012). (shrink)

The Operator Argument against eternalism holds that having non-vacuous tense operators in the language is incompatible with the claim that every proposition has its truth-value eternally. Assuming that (1) there are non-vacuous tense operators, (2) tense operators operate on propositions and (3) tense operators which operate on eternal entities are vacuous, it may be argued that eternalism is false. In this paper, I examine the Operator Argument. The goal is threefold. First, I want to present some aspects of the debate (...) in a more elaborate way, especially those concerning formal matters. Secondly, I will argue that eternalism can escape the Operator Argument. There are two main strategies for handling the Operator Argument. The first one is based on replacing temporal operators with object-language quantifiers. The second rejects the identification of compositional semantic value with assertoric content. My third goal is to show that none of them is as good as the strategy that adopts Timestamp Semantics (Fritz in Philosl Stud 176:2933–2959, 2019). I am going to argue that the quantificational treatment of tenses is compatible with temporalism and that the arguments for rejecting the identification of compositional semantic value with assertoric content provide, in fact, a motivation for the temporalist position. At the end, I will develop Timestamp Semantics by providing a novel formalization of it, and defend it against three potential counter-arguments. (shrink)

According to panqualityism, a form of Russellian monism defended by Sam Coleman and others, consciousness is grounded in fundamental qualities, i.e. unexperienced qualia. Despite panqualityism’s significant promise, according to David Chalmers panqualityism fails as a theory of consciousness since the reductive approach to awareness of qualities it proposes fails to account for the specific phenomenology associated with awareness. I investigate Coleman’s reasoning against this kind of phenomenology and conclude that he successfully shows that its existence is controversial, and so Chalmers’s (...) critique is inconclusive. I then present a critique of panqualityism that avoids this controversial posit, arguing that the panqualityist treatment of awareness faces an explanatory gap, failing to account for the intimate cognitive access to qualities which we are afforded, i.e. for our ‘strong awareness’ of qualities. The real worry for panqualityists is thus not the contested phenomenology of awareness, which Chalmers relies on, but rather the special way in which we are aware of qualities. (shrink)

This paper controverts the ability of intentionalism about perception to account for unique epistemic significance of phenomenal consciousness. More specifically, the intentionalist cannot explain the latter without denying two well-founded claims: the transparency of experience, and the possibility of unconscious perception. If they are true, intentionality of perception entails that phenomenal consciousness has no special epistemic role to play. Although some intentionalists are ready to bite this bullet, by doing so they effectively undermine one of the standard motivations of their (...) view, i.e. the claim that perceptual experiences justify beliefs. Consequently, whatever reason might there be to think that phenomenal consciousness has unique epistemic import, it is also a reason to reject intentionalism. I recommend replacing the latter with an unorthodox formulation of relationalism about perception. (shrink)

The most discussed of architectural marvels tend to be the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus or the Parthenon at Athens, supposedly because they are the ones we happen to have nominated ‘world wonders’; but that doesn’t mean all the rest of temple-type sites to be found across the greater Mediterranean area have less wonder about them. On the contrary; when wanting to explore and explain the role temples played in the lives of their ‘subscribers’ and a (...) temple site’s place as often the nucleus of a community, the Serapeum at Alexandria is as excellent a piece of architecture to examine as any. (shrink)

A truism of art history is that the lifespan of artworks can exceed their original social spaces: Artworks can sometimes be successfully transplanted into completely different settings where they continue to be valued. Does their potential to outlive their original context have to do with a specific feature of artworks’ ontology? Or with how human brains are wired? Or is it a mere function of their historical and social circumstances? I argue that David Summers’s magisterial _Real Spaces: World Art History (...) and the Rise of Western Modernism_ contains elements of a different answer. This answer focuses on what in artworks’ appearance causes them to be effective under various circumstances, without subscribing to the view that art is an irreducibly and inexhaustibly complex source of meaning. In delineating the Summersian perspective, I contrast it with the position (exemplified by the recent work of the archaeologist David Wengrow and the anthropologist Philippe Descola) that treats the art object as a document of underlying structures or currents. (shrink)

Both Hegel and the later Wittgenstein were concerned with the problem of how to begin speculation, or the problem of beginning. I argue that despite many differences, there are surprising similarities between their thinking about the beginning. They both consider different kinds of beginnings and combine them into complex analogies. The beginning has a subjective and an objective moment. The philosophizing subject has to begin with something, with an object. For Hegel, the objective moment is pure being. For Wittgenstein, the (...) objective moment is something that cannot be doubted. As regards the subjective moment, the philosophizing subject has to decide, without any reason, to conclude her quest for the presuppositionless beginning and finally begin at the beginning. The arational moment of this decision is echoed throughout any rational thought. Any application of a (rational) rule is, ultimately, a blind decision to apply this rule. (shrink)

This text maps the history of debate on the authenticity of Plato's or pseudo-Plato's Alcibiades I.

In this paper, I introduce a new theory of assertoric content. By ‘theory’, I mean both an extensionally correct definition and an elucidation of the mechanisms underlying assertoric content. In agreement with some existing work on the topic, I contend that assertoric content spans several content categories and is possibly constituted by an utterance’s standing content and explicature. I also offer a detailed explanation of how and why assertoric content can be determined by an utterance’s particularized conversational implicature. I call (...) my view the first-fill theory. This theory integrates recent developments in the literature related to the lying/misleading distinction. Additionally, my view accounts for intuitive judgments regarding the assertoric content of utterances that involve slips of the tongue. Finally, I also elucidate the apparent complexity of assertoric content by drawing parallels between the interpretative modes underlying it and those used in legal interpretation. (shrink)

The topic of exemplarity has attracted considerable interest in philosophy, legal theory, literary studies and art recently. There is broad consensus that exemplary cases mediate between singular instances and general concepts or norms. The aim of this article is to provide an additional perspective on the logic of exemplarity. First, inspired by Jacques Derrida’s discussion of exemplarity, I shall argue that there is a kind of différance between (singular) examples and (general) exemplars. What an example exemplifies, the exemplarity of the (...) example, eludes any fixed identity and follows a logic of supplement. Second, I shall present the so-called logic of exemplarity. The received paraconsistent view has it that the exemplar of X is an X and, at the same time, is not an X. Inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of the standard metre, I would like to present an alternative paracomplete view whereby we can say of an exemplar of X neither that it is an X nor that it is not an X. (shrink)

The article’s aim is to clear the ground for the idea of aesthetic archaeology as an aesthetic analysis of remote artifacts divorced from aesthetic criticism. On the example of controversies surrounding the early Cycladic figures, it discusses an anxiety motivating the rejection of aesthetic inquiry in archaeology, namely, the anxiety about the heuristic reliability of one’s aesthetic instincts vis-à-vis remote artifacts. It introduces the claim that establishing an aesthetic mandate of a remote artifact should in the first place be part (...) of a quest after the norms of engagement an artifact’s kind signaled to the intended audience by its appearance. Rather than advocating for a new subdiscipline, the concept of aesthetic archaeology serves to bring into theoretical focus an aesthetic engagement with an artifact’s appearance under circumstances that rule out any acquired competence in distinguishing its aesthetic mandate perceptually—and thus rule out any aesthetic expertise. (shrink)

Can past agents deliberately influence our historical awareness by designing objects’ appearances and sending them to us down the stream of time? We know they have certainly tried to do so by raising monuments. But according to an influential narrative, the efforts of these "monumentalists" are destined to fail: no monument can keep a legacy alive in perpetuity. In this article, I argue that this narrative misrepresents the nature of the monumentalists’ mission, and I set out to show that monumentality (...) should be understood as a means of addressing what I term “art-historical awareness.” This mode of historical awareness attends to artifacts’ appearances in search of visual manifestations of relevance that can survive the loss of context. Those who raise monuments aim to produce such artifacts, or what amount to intentional art-historical documents, and they do so in order to overcome the tension between the monuments’ nature as public art and their commemorative function. By visually manifesting a transcendent relevance, monuments ideally appeal to both present and distant audiences, insofar as these audiences are able to appreciate the monuments’ potential to sustain at least a semblance of relevance beyond their immediate contexts. (shrink)

Recently, it has been objected that naïve realism is inconsistent with an empirically well-supported claim that mental states of the same fundamental kind as ordinary conscious seeing can occur unconsciously (SFK). The main aim of this paper is to establish the following conditional claim: if SFK turns out to be true, the naïve realist can and should accommodate it into her theory. Regarding the antecedent of this conditional, I suggest that empirical evidence renders SFK plausible but not obvious. For it (...) is possible that what is currently advocated as unconscious perception of the stimulus is in fact momentaneous perceptual awareness (or residual perceptual awareness) of the stimulus making the subject prone to judge in some way rather than another, or to act in some way rather than another. As to the apodosis, I show that neither the core of naïve realism nor any of its main motivations is undermined if SFK is assumed. On the contrary, certain incentives for endorsing naïve realism become more tempting on this assumption. Since the main motivations for naïve realism retain force under SFK, intentionalism is neither compulsory nor the best available explanation of unconscious perception. (shrink)

According to unconscious perception hypothesis (UP), mental states of the same fundamental kind as ordinary conscious seeing can occur unconsciously. The proponents of UP often support it with empirical evidence for a more specific hypothesis, according to which colours can be seen unconsciously (UPC). However, UPC is a general claim that admits of many interpretations. The main aim of this paper is to determine which of them is the most plausible. To this end, I investigate how adopting various conceptions of (...) colour and perceptual phenomenal character affects UPC’s resilience to objections. This brings me to the conclusion that the most plausible reading of UPC is the one according to which the phenomenal character of colour perception (i) is constituted by colours qua primitive mind-independent qualities of the environment and (ii) is not essentially tied to consciousness. My conclusion not only identifies the most plausible interpretation of UPC, but also highlights and supports an unorthodox version of the relational theory of perception, which is a perfectly viable yet so far overlooked stance in the debate about unconscious perception. (shrink)

Brain activity determines which relations between objects in the environment are perceived as differences and similarities in colour, smell, sound, etc. According to selectionism, brain activity does not create those relations; it only selects which of them are perceptually available to the subject on a given occasion. In effect, selectionism entails that perceptual experience is diaphanous, i.e. that sameness and difference in the phenomenal character of experience is exhausted by sameness and difference in the perceived items. It has been argued (...) that diaphaneity is undermined by phenomenological considerations and empirical evidence. This paper considers five prominent arguments of this sort and shows that none of them succeeds. (shrink)

The paper addresses a question concerning George Ellis’s theory of top-down causation by considering a challenge to the “level-picture of nature” which he employs as a foundational element in his theory. According to the level-picture, nature is ordered by distinct and finitely many levels, each characterised by its own types of entities, relations, laws and principles of behavior, and causal relations to their respective neighbouring top- and bottom-level. The branching hierarchy that results from this picture enables Ellis to build his (...) model of modular hierarchical structure for complexity, his account of same-level, bottom-up and top-down causation, of emergence, equivalence-classes and multiple realisability. The three main arguments for the level-picture in Ellis’s works are reconstructed and shown to face serious problems. Finally, the paper presents a possible solution to this challenge by introducing a reformulation of certain fundamental points of Ellis’s theory that does without the level-picture of nature. This allows us to preserve all of his central claims about the model of complexity, the three types of causation, emergence, equivalence-classes and multiple realisability. Any problems pertaining to the level-picture can be remedied in the context of Ellis’s theory of top-down causation. (shrink)

When does art history begin? Art historiographers typically point to the Renaissance (Vasari) or, alternatively, to Hellenism (Pliny the Elder). But such origin stories become increasingly disconnected from contemporary disciplinary practices, especially as the latter try to rise to the challenge of conducting art history in a more diversified and global way. This essay provides an alternative account of art history’s origin, one that does not try to alleviate the sense of disconnect, but rather develops a global, non-Eurocentric account. The (...) account focuses less on genealogy and more on what necessitates something like an art-historical awareness or attention in the first place. Relying on examples from ancient Mesopotamia, it argues that art-historical thought can be identified whenever and wherever material objects are attended to or produced for their potential to manifest visibly and over time their meaning. (shrink)

In their Anachronic Renaissance, Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood identify two principles upon which, in fifteenth-century Europe, a work of art might establish its validity or authority: substitution and performance. It has become established wisdom that the dual schema of substitution and performance follows Hans Belting's dualism of the medieval cult of the image and the modern aesthetic system of art. This, I submit, is not just a mistake, but also prevents from evaluating one of the book's most ambitious contributions (...) to art-historical theory on its own merits. An analysis of the structure of the claims made by Nagel and Wood brings to light that the two concepts—substitution and performance—do not play the same role as the conceptual pair of Bild and Kunst in Belting's influential work. (shrink)

Robert Saudek, a Czech graphologist, journalist, diplomat, playwright, and novelist, was heavily influenced in his youth by Fritz Mauthner’s critique of language. Saudek later became a pioneer in the field of psychological graphology. In this article, I examine the impact of Mauthner’s critique on Saudek’s work and evaluate whether Saudek’s approach to graphology aligns with Mauthner’s ideas. I argue that, although Saudek’s graphology is rooted in Mauthner’s critique of experimental psychology, there remains room for further development in the field of (...) psychological graphology, centering on the analysis of language. With this in mind, I compare Saudek’s method and contemporary conceptual metaphor theory. I further suggest that Saudek’s extensive use of the autographs of well-known figures follows a method of working from examples, or specimens, which is not uncommon in the philosophy of science. Based on these findings, I propose a way of understanding Saudek’s graphology that challenges its characterization as a pseudoscience. (shrink)

Within theoretical and empirical enquiries, many different meanings associated with consciousness have appeared, leaving the term itself quite vague. This makes formulating an abstract and unifying version of the concept of consciousness – the main aim of this article –into an urgent theoretical imperative. It is argued that consciousness, characterized as dually accessible (cognized from the inside and the outside), hierarchically referential (semantically ordered), bodily determined (embedded in the working structures of an organism or conscious system), and useful in action (...) (pragmatically functional), is a graded rather than an all-or-none phenomenon. A gradational approach, however, despite its explanatory advantages, can lead to some counterintuitive consequences and theoretical problems. In most such conceptions consciousness is extended globally (attached to primitive organisms or artificial systems), but also locally (connected to certain lower-level neuronal and bodily processes). For example, according to information integration theory (as introduced recently by Tononi and Koch, 2014), even such simple artificial systems as photodiodes possess miniscule amounts of consciousness. The major challenge for this article, then, is to establish reasonable, empirically justified constraints on how extended the range of a graded consciousness could be. It is argued that conscious systems are limited globally by the ability to individuate information (where individuated information is understood as evolutionarily embedded, socially altered, and private), whereas local limitations should be determined on the basis of a hypothesis about the action-oriented nature of the processes that select states of consciousness. Using these constraints, an abstract concept of consciousness is arrived at, hopefully contributing to a more unified state of play within consciousness studies itself. (shrink)

Few years ago Krzysztof Czerniawski has published a book „Three Versions of Epistemic Theory of Truth: Dummett, Putnam, Wright”. It drew my attention, for there are many works which are concerned with the philosophical problem of truth, but only few comparative studies between different ideas concerning theory of truth. Author focuses on so-called Epistemic Theory of Truth, which assumes—according to the characteristics of Wolfgang Künne—that being true depends to some extent on our judgement. It is clear that there were far (...) more philosophers, who understood truth in similar way, e. g. Pierce, Brentano, Neurath, however, Czerniawski concentrates on the most recent history of Epistemic Theory of Truth. He also takes no account of philosophy of Habermas and Gadamer, whose ideas on truth can also be classified as „epistemic”, for they are built out of analytical tradition of philosophising. Thus, he chooses Michael Dummett, Hilary Putnam and Crispin Wright—three analytical philosophers who significantly contributed to the development of „epistemic” approaches to the problem of truth. (shrink)

This book offers an original philosophical perspective on exemplarity. Inspired by Wittgenstein’s later work and Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, it argues that examples are not static entities but rather oscillate between singular and universal moments. There is a broad consensus that exemplary cases mediate between singular instances and universal concepts or norms. In the first part of the book, Mácha contends that there is a kind of différance between singular examples and general exemplars or paradigms. Every example is, in part, (...) also an exemplar, and vice versa. Furthermore, he develops a paracomplete approach to the logic of exemplarity, which allows us to say of an exemplar of X neither that it is an X nor that it is not an X. This paradox is structurally isomorphic to Russell’s paradox and can be addressed in similar ways. In the second part of the book, Mácha presents four historical studies that exemplify the ideas developed in the first part. This part begins with Plato’s Forms, understood as standards/paradigms, before considering Kant’s theory of reflective judgment as a general epistemological account of exemplarity. This is then followed by analyses of Hegel’s conceptual moment of particularity and Kuhn’s concept of paradigm. The book concludes by discussing the speculative hypothesis that all our knowledge is based on paradigms, which, following the logic of exemplarity, are neither true nor false. (shrink)

In the sense-certainty chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, we find one of Hegel’s famous puns, which utilizes homophonic affinities and differences between the verb beiherspielen and the noun Beispiel. I argue that the effect of this pun is that the word Beispiel acquires, beyond its usual meaning of ‘example’ or ‘instance’, the meaning of a play of something inessential, a play in passing. After reviewing all available translations into English, I suggest that, in order to preserve this wordplay, one (...) can translate Beispiel as ‘by-play’. Furthermore, I analyse other occurrences of the word beiherspielen in the Phenomenology and elsewhere in Hegel’s texts. Next, I focus on the crucial importance of this pun for Derrida’s interpretation and critique of Hegel’s dialectic. Only for a certain loose translation of beiherspielen does Derrida’s reasoning appear plausible. I conclude with a discussion of the ideal of terminological uniformity in translating Hegel’s texts. In preserving the wordplay by translating Beispiel as ‘by-play’, one is forced to sacrifice the uniformity of translation. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung: Gegenstand der Arbeit ist das Konzept der metaphorischen Be-deutung, soweit dessen Ursprung in der analytischen Philosophie zu finden ist. In der Ein-leitung der Untersuchung werden jedoch auch ältere Theorien der Metapher vorgestellt, die aus der Perspektive der metaphorischen Bedeutung relevant sind oder als relevant be-trachtet werden können. Allen diesen Theorien liegt die Definition zugrunde, dass in der Metapher etwas als etwas anderes gesehen wird. Daher kann von einer Wahrnehmungs-metaphorik die Rede sein. Das erste Kapitel meiner Arbeit behandelt die Frage, (...) wie Metaphern in der Sprache zu erkennen sind. Es wird die Schlussfolgerung gezogen, dass eine Metapher, anstatt erkannt zu werden, vielmehr als solche akzeptiert werden muss. Im zweiten Kapitel werden zwei der bedeutsamsten zeitgenössischen Theorien der Metapher, nämlich von Max Black und Donald Davidson, erörtert und kritisch ausgewertet. Der Argumentation Davidsons zufolge muss die metaphorische Bedeutung als etwas All-gemeines verstanden werden, das nicht einer bestimmten Metapher, sondern der Metapher überhaupt zukommt. Dabei bleibt Davidson aber der Wahrnehmungs-metaphorik verhaftet, die bei ihm wie bei Black keine Erläuterung findet. Gegen Ende des zweiten Kapitels und hauptsächlich im dritten Kapitel werden drei Arten des Herangehens an die Wahrnehmungsmetaphorik vorgeschlagen: Sie kann entweder verworfen oder interpretiert oder aufgehoben werden. Die zwei letztgenannten Zugänge werden anhand der Schriften von Ludwig Wittgenstein, José Ortega y Gasset und Wallace Stevens weiter ausgearbeitet. -/- Abstract: This thesis investigates the concept of the metaphorical meaning originating in analytical philosophy. Also, in the Introduction are considered older theories of the meta-phor, which can be seen from the perspective of the metaphorical meaning. All these ac-counts are based on a definition that in the metaphor is something seen as something else. Therefore, all our understanding of the metaphor issues from a visual perception. But that’s a metaphor, too. Chapter I. examines the question, how to detect metaphors in lan-guage. It is concluded that metaphors must be accepted instead of detected. The chapter II. aims at introducing and criticizing the two nowadays prominent analytical theories of metaphor given by Max Black and Donald Davidson. The consequence of the argumenta-tion by Davidson is that the concept of the metaphorical meaning has to be applied to the metaphor as such, not to any particular one. In their theories, Davidson and Black are still likening the metaphor to the visual perception but this simile or rather metaphor remains unexplained. The final chapter III. presents three approaches how to deal with the visual perception metaphor in explanations of the metaphor: it can be rejected, interpreted or sublated. The last approaches are elaborated on the basis of writings by Ludwig Wittgen-stein, José Ortega y Gasset and Wallace Stevens. (shrink)

Conceptual Metaphor Theory makes some strong claims against so-called Classical Theory which spans the accounts of metaphors from Aristotle to Davidson. Most of these theories, because of their traditional literal-metaphorical distinction, fail to take into account the phenomenon of conceptual metaphor. I argue that the underlying mechanism for explaining metaphor bears some striking resemblances among all of these theories. A mapping between two structures is always expressed. Conceptual Metaphor Theory insists, however, that the literal-metaphorical distinction of Classical Theories is empirically (...) wrong. I claim that this criticism is based rather on terminological decisions than on empirical issues. Conceptual Metaphor Theory focusses primarily on conventional metaphors and struggles to extend its mechanism to novel metaphors, whereas Classical Theories focus on novel metaphors and struggle to extend their mechanisms to conventional metaphors. Since all of these theories study metaphors from the synchronic point of view, they are unable to take into account any semantic change. A diachronic perspective is what we need here, one which would allow us to explain the role of metaphor in semantic change and the development of language in general. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to provide a plausible conceptual model of a specific use of images described as substitution in recent art-historical literature. I bring to light the largely implicit shared commitments of the art historians’ discussion of substitution, each working as they do in a different idiom, and I draw consequences from these commitments for the concept of substitution by image—the major being the distinction between nonportraying substitution and substitution by portrayal. I then develop an argument that (...) substitution by image in the desired, nonportraying sense needs to be thought of in terms of a figurative representation of an image’s subject as a generic object, what I will call its figurative instantiation. (shrink)

The catuṣkoṭi or tetralemma is an argumentative figure familiar to any reader of Buddhist philosophical literature. Roughly speaking it consists of the enumeration of four alternatives: that some propositions holds, that it fails to hold, that it both holds and fails to hold, that it neither holds nor fails to hold. The tetralemma also constitutes one of the more puzzling features of Buddhist philosophy as the use to which it is put in arguments is not immediately obvious and certainly not (...) uniform: sometimes one of the four possibilities is selected as ‘the right one’, sometimes all four are rejected, sometimes all four are affirmed. It seems that this confusion is only exacerbated by the plethora of treatments we find in the modern commentarial literature, many of which try to analyze the tetralemma by recourse to notions of modern logic. Despite some important work done during the last decades a comprehensive study of the origin and development of the catuṣkoṭi from its use in the earliest Buddhist literature up to its later employment in the Buddhist philosophical works of Tibet, China, and Japan remains yet to be written. The present paper is obviously not intended to fill this gap, but has the specific objective of giving an interpretation of Nāgārrjuna’s employment of the tetralemma which makes both logical sense and is in accordance with his general philosophical position. (shrink)

The article presents a perspective on the scientific explanation of the subjectivity of conscious experience. It proposes plausible answers for two empirically valid questions: the ‘how’ question concerning the developmental mechanisms of subjectivity, and the ‘why’ question concerning its function. Biological individuation, which is acquired in several different stages, serves as a provisional description of how subjective perspectives may have evolved. To the extent that an individuated informational space seems the most efficient way for a given organism to select biologically (...) valuable information, subjectivity is deemed to constitute an adaptive response to informational overflow. One of the possible consequences of this view is that subjectivity might be (at least functionally) dissociated from consciousness, insofar as the former primarily facilitates selection, the latter action. (shrink)

A platitude questioned by many Buddhist thinkers in India and Tibet is the existence of the world. We might be tempted to insert some modifier here, such as “substantial,” “self-existent,” or “intrinsically existent,” for, one might argue, these thinkers did not want to question the existence of the world tout court but only that of a substantial, self-existent, or otherwise suitably qualified world. But perhaps these modifiers are not as important as is generally thought, for the understanding of the world (...) questioned is very much the understanding of the world everybody has. It is the understanding that there is a world out there —independent of our minds — and that when we speak and think about this world we mostly get it right. But the Madhyamaka thinkers under discussion here deny that there is a world out there and claim that our opinions about it are to the greatest part fundamentally and dangerously wrong. (shrink)

In view of the philosophical problems that vex the debate on situated affectivity, it can seem wise to focus on simple cases. Accordingly, theorists often single out scenarios in which an individual employs a device in order to enhance their emotional experience, or to achieve new kinds of experience altogether, such as playing an instrument, going to the movies or sporting a fancy handbag. I argue that this narrow focus on cases that fit a ‘user/resource model’ tends to channel attention (...) away from more complex and also more problematic instances of situated affectivity. Among these are scenarios in which a social domain draws individuals into certain modes of affective interaction, often by way of attunement and habituation to affective styles and interaction patterns that are normative in the domain in question. This can lead to a phenomenon that is not so much ‘mind extension’ than ‘mind invasion’: affectivity is dynamically framed and modulated from without, often contrary to the prior orientations of the individuals in question. As an example, I discuss affective patterns prevalent in today’s corporate workplace. I claim that workplace affect sometimes contributes to what is effectively a ‘hack’ of employees’ subjectivity. (shrink)

Die vorliegende Publikation dient als Grundlage für die interdisziplinäre Entwicklung einer Zertifizierung von Künstlicher Intelligenz. Angesichts der rasanten Entwicklung von Künstlicher Intelligenz mit disruptiven und nachhaltigen Folgen für Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft und Alltagsleben verdeutlicht sie, dass sich die hieraus ergebenden Herausforderungen nur im interdisziplinären Dialog von Informatik, Rechtswissenschaften, Philosophie und Ethik bewältigen lassen. Als Ergebnis dieses interdisziplinären Austauschs definiert sie zudem sechs KI-spezifische Handlungsfelder für den vertrauensvollen Einsatz von Künstlicher Intelligenz: Sie umfassen Fairness, Transparenz, Autonomie und Kontrolle, Datenschutz sowie Sicherheit und (...) Verlässlichkeit und adressieren dabei ethische und rechtliche Anforderungen. Letztere werden mit dem Ziel der Operationalisierbarkeit weiter konkretisiert. (shrink)

We cannot but begin this volume with Wittgenstein’s famous remark that “Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different.” (MDC: p.157) This is, however, a casual remark, and it seems that we should not put too much emphasis on it. (For a discussion of how the remark should properly be understood, see Chapter 20.) In (...) compiling this collection of essays we adopted from this remark the idea that the problem of difference in identity is the common topic between Hegel and Wittgenstein. The remark presents a certain interplay (or, one might say, dialectics) of identity and difference. And it is questions of identity and difference between Hegel and Wittgenstein (with respect to certain aspects of their works, under certain interpretations, etc.) that are addressed by the essays in this volume. (shrink)

According to metaphysical coherentism, grounding relations form an interconnected system in which things ground each other and nothing is ungrounded. This potentially viable view’s logical territory remains largely unexplored. In this paper, I describe that territory by articulating four varieties of metaphysical coherentism. I do not argue for any variety in particular. Rather, I aim to show that not all issues which might be raised against coherentism will be equally problematic for all the versions of that view, which features far (...) more nuance and diversity than is typically ascribed to it. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to defi ne a certain type of argumentation, which has been scarcely described so far in either Polish or foreign literature in the fi eld of argumentation theory, and thus to systematize the problems of research on semantic procedures in argumentation. The analysis of the ways in which a modifi cation of meaning can affect the power of arguments inclines to distinguish a new type of argumentation - semantic argumentation. The concepts of persuasive defi (...) nition and classifi cation as well as methods of their application in the formulation of an argument will also be analyzed. The defi nition of semantic argumentation proposed here may give rise to some problems, typical when introducing a new concept, which is why the second part of the article is devoted to the issues related to the proposed shape of the defi nition. The defi nition is necessary for further research on semantic argumentation, its typology and for the assessment of its correctness. (shrink)

This introduction to the special issue of the British Journal of Aesthetics, ‘Remote Art: Engaging with Art from Distant Times and Cultures’, presents the notion of art’s remoteness in the context of debates about inter-cultural diversity. It discusses the various aspects of remoteness, how it figures in the individual contributions to the issue, and suggests possible avenues for future scholarship.

This article surveys theories of metaphor in analytic philosophy and cognitive science. In particular, it focuses on contemporary semantic, pragmatic and non-cognitivist theories of linguistic metaphor and on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory advanced by George Lakoff and his school. Special attention is given to the mechanisms that are shared by nearly all these approaches, i.e. mechanisms of interaction and mapping between conceptual domains. Finally, the article discusses several recent attempts to combine these theories of linguistic and conceptual metaphor into a (...) unitary account. (shrink)

I argue that Hegel and Wittgenstein, each in their own specific way, used the idea of God at the beginning of creation as a complex analogy for other kinds of beginning, most notably the beginning of philosophical thought. Hegel’s Logic describes God’s mind before the creation of the world, i.e. God’s pure thinking. For a philosopher, beginning afresh means resolving to consider this kind of abstraction from the existence of the world. Wittgenstein, by contrast, says that the idea of a (...) creator of the world does not explain anything. It marks the terminus ad quem of asking for explanations; we must not ask further who created the creator of the world. Wittgenstein generalizes this for any kind of reasoning: “Explanations come to an end somewhere.” (Philosophical Investigations: §1) Any sort of explanation must eventually arrive at its terminus ad quem, which means only that any kind of reasoning must have its logical beginning. (shrink)

Celem artykułu jest pokazanie konsekwencji przyjęcia longtermizmu w wersji skrajnej dla postrzegania obowiązku likwidacji skrajnej biedy w świetle zasady równego rozważania interesów. W artykule argumentuję na rzecz hipotezy, że konsekwentny zwolennik myśli etycznej Petera Singera skorygowanej o postulaty long- termizmu musi przyjąć, iż obowiązki wobec przyszłych ludzi uchylają obowiązki wobec obecnie żyjących ludzi, nawet znajdujących się w tak niekorzystnym położeniu jak skrajna bieda. W pierwszej części artykułu szkicuję argumenty Singera na rzecz moralnego obowiązku likwidacji skrajnej biedy za pomocą efektywnych metod (...) aż do znacznego obniżenia własnego poziomu życia. Przybliżenie tych szeroko znanych poglądów stanowi ramy argumentacji na rzecz hipotezy badawczej. Następnie krótko charakteryzuję efektywny altruizm, na gruncie któ- rego wyrosło nowe podejście w ramach konsekwencjalizmu: longtermizm. Postulaty i założenia longtermizmu w ujęciu W. MacAskilla i T. Orda zestawiam z myślą Singera, aby doprowadzić ich argumentację do logicznych wniosków, które wspierają hipotezę badawczą artykułu -/- Moral duties towards the poor and longtermism The aim of the article is to show the consequences of adopting strong longtermism for the perception of the obligation to eliminate extreme poverty in the light of the principle of equal consideration of interests. In the article, I argue in favor of the hypothesis that a consistent supporter of Peter Singer’s ethical thought adjusted to the postulates of longtermism must assume that obligations towards future people abrogate duties towards current people, even those in such an unfavorable situation as extreme poverty. In the first part of the article, I sketch Singer’s arguments for the moral obligation to eliminate extreme poverty using effective methods, up to significant decrease in one’s level of life. An outline of these widely known views constitutes the framework of arguments in favor of the research hypothesis. Then I briefly characterize effective altruism, which is the basis for a new approach within consequentialism: longtermism. I compare the postulates and assumptions of longtermism as presented by W. MacAskill and T. Ord with Singer’s thought in order to bring their argumen- tation to logical conclusions that support the research hypothesis of this article. (shrink)