In the art of radical Informel, we encounter works with emphasised non-pictoriality, non-semantics and non-referentiality, as well as a tendency towards entropy, layering and the disintegration of form through destructive processes such as deformation, perforation, incision, scratching, the accumulation of structures and masses, fragmentation, stripping and burning. In this paper, theoretical models of interpretation for the art of radical Informel are pointed out through the concepts of the aesthetics of ugliness, i.e. brutal aesthetics, such as (1) deformation, (2) disfiguration, (3) (...) formlessness and (4) entropy – using the example of the informal works of Croatian authors Ivo Gattin, Eugen Feller and Marijan Jevšovar, which result from their attitude towards art and painting. The artists have deliberately created paintings that are not “beautiful” by opposing the classical values of art and beauty through oppositional and negative approaches, nihilism, destruction, deformation and the abolition of the surface of the painting as forms of anti-aesthetics. (shrink)

Psychology has always defined itself as a science and yet it has lacked the theoretical and methodological unity regarded as characteristic of the natural sciences. Nicolò Gaj explores the topical question of unification in psychology, setting out a conceptual framework for considerations of unity and disunity, and exploring the evidence of its fragmentation. He takes a critical look at the history of the most prominent attempts at unification, and at the desirability and feasibility of the whole project. The book represents (...) a unique and valuable attempt to address the issue of unification from a philosophical perspective, and via a combination of theoretical and empirical research. (shrink)

Hobbes' philosophy is one of the high points of a century of great philosophical achievement and Leviathan is recognized as one of the great classics of political theory. But the response from Hobbes's contemporaries to his secular analysis of society demonstrated the challenging nature of his ideas. This collection of many of the major contemporary responses to his thought by leading figures, mostly never republished, provides an outstanding source for assessing his immediate impact and the long-term importance of his work.

Some of the series' finest lectures have been lost for many years, unavailable to the public in any form -- until now.

In a scenario characterized by unpredictable developments, such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic, epidemiological models have played a leading part, having been especially widely deployed for forecasting purposes. In this paper, two real-world examples of modeling are examined in support of the proposition that science can convey inconsistent as well as genuinely perspectival representations of the world. Reciprocally inconsistent outcomes are grounded on incompatible assumptions, whereas perspectival outcomes are grounded on compatible assumptions and illuminate different aspects of the same object (...) of interest. In both cases, models should be viewed as expressions of specific assumptions and unconstrained choices on the part of those designing them. The coexistence of a variety of models reflects a primary feature of science, namely its pluralism. It is herein proposed that recent over-exposure to science’s inner workings and disputes such as those pertaining to models, may have led the public to perceive pluralism as a flaw—or more specifically, as disunity or fragmentation, which in turn may have been interpreted as a sign of unreliability. In conclusion, given the inescapability of pluralism, suggestions are offered as to how to counteract distorted perceptions of science, and thereby enhance scientific literacy. (shrink)

The COVID-19 outbreak has seen people in many countries asked to radically modify their way of life in compliance with sweeping safety measures. During the current crisis, technology is turning out to be key, in that it allows practitioners to deliver psychological services to people who would otherwise be unreachable. However, professionals cannot solely rely on their traditional modes of practice, in that different methods are required to bring to light the needs of those affected by the emergency. People are (...) being overwhelmed by a cascade of unusual and unexpected events that are putting a strain on their everyday routines and usual meaning-making systems; ongoing challenges to their employment and financial status will likely divert personal resources away from psychological well-being. We therefore argue that psychologists should also consider the needs of the general population. Among those who may require help – aside from the main targets of psychological intervention, such as healthcare personnel and COVID-19 patients and their relatives – specific attention should be paid to those who are not at the center of the crisis. We suggest that this large segment of potential users may benefit from a non-medical approach focused on the promotion of meaning-making processes. Indeed, the disruptive nature of the current situation hinders sense-making and threatens to undermine psychological balance and well-being, at an individual as well as at a societal level. The present article proposes a methodological perspective based on the reconstruction of meaning-making processes (sense of coherence, predictability, metaphors, narratives). Specifically, psychological interventions should promote personal and collective resources with a view to: “normalizing” current distressful experiences (i.e., acknowledging that such reactions are normal in light of the present situation); widening the observational field, taking relational contexts into account, and promoting an understanding of distressful experiences as coping strategies; fostering meaning-making/reconstruction processes through the use of appropriate metaphors and narratives; promoting a sense of coherence. We present two clinical vignettes to illustrate how these principles might be applied in practice. In conclusion, the exceptional psychological challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic require practitioners to adopt a broad and flexible perspective on clinical intervention. (shrink)

Individual objects have potentials: paper has the potential to burn, an acorn has the potential to turn into a tree, some people have the potential to run a mile in less than four minutes. Barbara Vetter provides a systematic investigation into the metaphysics of such potentials, and an account of metaphysical modality based on them. -/- In contemporary philosophy, potentials have been recognized mostly in the form of so-called dispositions: solubility, fragility, and so on. Vetter takes dispositions as her (...) starting point, but argues for and develops a more comprehensive conception of potentiality. She shows how, with this more comprehensive conception, an account of metaphysical modality can be given that meets three crucial requirements: Extensional correctness: providing the right truth-values for statements of possibility and necessity; formal adequacy: providing the right logic for metaphysical modality; and semantic utility: providing a semantics that links ordinary modal language to the metaphysics of modality. -/- The resulting view of modality is a version of dispositionalism about modality: it takes modality to be a matter of the dispositions of individual objects. This approach has a long philosophical tradition going back to Aristotle, but has been largely neglected in contemporary philosophy. In recent years, it has become a live option again due to the rise of anti-Humean, powers-based metaphysics. The aim of Potentiality is to develop the dispositionalist view in a way that takes account of contemporary developments in metaphysics, logic, and semantics. (shrink)

In his essay?The Protestant Ethic? Max Weber explains the specific economic development and the foundation of capitalism in Western Europe due to the appearance of protestant sects and the?spirit of capitalism?. By doing so, Weber assigns religion a significant place among the factors of social and economic development. Taking Weber?s theory and argumentation as a starting point, this article drafts a thesis on?orthodox ethic? and determines its role in the development of the?spirit of capitalism? in orthodox countries. For that purpose (...) this article compares political-historical circumstances on the territory of the Western and Eastern Church on one, and pictures the theological-philosophical basis of both Protestantism and Orthodoxy on the other side. U svom eseju?Protestantska etika? Maks Veber specifican ekonomski razvoj i utemeljenje kapitalizma u zemljama Zapadne Evrope objasnjava po?javom protestantskih sekti i svojevrsnim protestantskim?duhom kapitalizma?, dodeljujuci na taj nacin religiji znacajno mesto medju ciniocima drustvenog i ekonomskog razvoja. Polazeci od Veberove teorije i argumentacije, u ovom radu se zeli postaviti teza o?pravoslavnoj etici? i odrediti njena uloga u razvoju?duhu kapitalizma? u pravoslavnim zemljama. Pri tome se uporedjuju kako politicki-istorijske okolnosti na teritoriji Zapadne odn. Istocne crkve, tako i teolosko-filozofske osnove protestantizma s jedne, i pravoslavlja s druge strane. (shrink)

Stajn Rokan, norveski sociolog koji se bavio procesima nastanka drzava, nacija i demokratije u Evropi, ostavio je za sobom mnostvo pojedinacnih radova u kojima je pokusao da razvije svoj makro model politickog razvoja Evrope. Cilj mu je bio da na osnovu razlicitih istorijskih procesa, koji su uticali na stvaranje drzava i nacija, kao i na demokratizaciju, objasni mnogostranost evropskih drzava. Njegov pristup je, pri tome, antideterministicki i sirok, po cemu se uostalom njegova teorija i razlikuje od vecine drugih koje se (...) takodje bave procesima nastanka drzava i nacija. Zbog te svoje kompleksnosti se Rokanova teorija cini pogodnom za istorijsku komparativnu makrosociologiju kao i za analizu dugorocnih razvojnih puteva. Ovaj clanak ce u prvom delu prikazati Rokanovo shvatanje teorije u nacelu. U drugom delu ce se prikazati s?ma teorija, njene varijable i dimenzije. (shrink)

This article intends to critically envisage limits and values of philosophy of art of Arthur Danto and to point out the main problems of the theory of supstitutional representation, when placed within wider theoretical frame of traditional aesthetics, such as the notion of meaning in the philosophy of art of Arthur Danto. The article focuses on the notions of exteral and interal representation and denotation of non-existent and existent entities substituted by representation. This article intends to question the validity of (...) Danto?s position. Ovaj tekst pokusava da kriticki sagleda domete i vrednosti filozofije umetnosti Artura Dantoa i da istakne osnovne probleme sa kojima supstituciona teorija reprezentacije mora da se suoci, kada se ona zastupa u sirem teorijskom okviru tradicionalne estetike, kakav je pojam znacenja u filozofiji umetnosti Artura Dantoa. Posebnu paznju tekst usmerava na pojmove eksteralne i interalne reprezentacije i denotacije nepostojecih i postojecih entiteta, koji se reprezentacijom supstituiraju. Autor nastoji pokazati da je stav koji Danto zastupa apsurdan. (shrink)

How does thinking affect doing? There is a widely held view that thinking about what you are doing, as you are doing it, hinders performance. Once you have acquired the ability to putt a golf ball, play an arpeggio on the piano, or parallel-park, reflecting on your actions leads to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis--that's what is widely believed. But is it true? After exploring some of the contemporary and historical manifestations of the idea, Barbara Gail Montero (...) develops a theory of expertise which emphasizes the role of the conscious mind in expert action. She aims to dispel various myths about experts who proceed without any understanding of what guides their action, and she analyzes research in both philosophy and psychology that is taken to show that conscious control and explicit monitoring of one's movements impedes well practiced skills. Montero explores a wide range of real-life examples of optimal performance, in sports, the performing arts, healthcare, the military, and other fields, and draws from psychology, neuroscience, and literature to offer a refreshing and persuasive view of expertise, according to which expert action generally is and ought to be thoughtful, effortful, and reflective. (shrink)

This book presents the most important problems of reference and considers their solution. It presupposes no technical knowledge, presents analyses from first principles, illustrates every stage with examples, and is written with verve and clarity. This is the ideal introduction to reference for students of linguistics and philosophy of language.

Dispositions are modal properties. The standard conception of dispositions holds that each disposition is individuated by its stimulus condition(s) and its manifestation(s), and that their modality is best captured by some conditional construction that relates stimulus to manifestation as antecedent to consequent. I propose an alternative conception of dispositions: each disposition is individuated by its manifestation alone, and its modality is closest to that of possibility — a fragile vase, for instance, is one that can break easily. The view is (...) expounded in some detail and defended against the major objections. (shrink)

Abilities are in many ways central to what being an agent means, and they are appealed to in philosophical accounts of a great many different phenomena. It is often assumed that abilities are some kind of dispositional property, but it is rarely made explicit exactly which dispositional properties are our abilities. Two recent debates provide two different answers to that question: the new dispositionalism in the debate about free will, and virtue reliabilism in epistemology. This paper argues that both answers (...) fail as general accounts of abilities, and discusses the ramifications of this result. (shrink)

It is a familiar point that many ordinary dispositions are multi-track, that is, not fully and adequately characterisable by a single conditional. In this paper, I argue that both the extent and the implications of this point have been severely underestimated. First, I provide new arguments to show that every disposition whose stimulus condition is a determinable quantity must be infinitely multi-track. Secondly, I argue that this result should incline us to move away from the standard assumption that dispositions are (...) in some way importantly linked to conditionals, as presupposed by the debate about various versions of the ‘conditional analysis’ of dispositions. I introduce an alternative conception of dispositionality, which is motivated by linguistic observations about dispositional adjectives and links dispositions to possibility instead of conditionals. I argue that, because of the multi-track nature of dispositions, the possibility-based conception of dispositions is to be preferred. (shrink)

Some presuppositions seem to be weaker than others in the sense that they can be more easily neutralized in some contexts. For example some factive verbs, most notably epistemic factives like know, be aware, and discover, are known to shed their factivity fairly easily in contexts such as are found in (1). (1) a. …if anyone discovers that the method is also wombat-proof, I’d really like to know! b. Mrs. London is not aware that there have ever been signs erected (...) to stop use of the route… c. Perhaps God knows that we will never reach the stars…. (The examples in (1) are all naturally occurring ones, discovered by David Beaver with the aid of Google; cf. Beaver 2002, exx. 32, 43, and 51, respectively.) On the other hand some other factives, e.g. regret, matter, and be surprised, do not exhibit the same type of behavior: (2) a. If any of the students regrets behaving badly, they’ll let us know. b. It doesn’t matter that the chimpanzees escaped. c. Was Bill surprised that spinach was included? Unlike the examples in (1), those in (2) could not be used appropriately in contexts where the speaker was not assuming that the complement clause was true. Our main concern will be trying to find the cause of this difference. However, before we get to that, we will look more closely at the concept “presupposition” itself, as well as its close neighbor in the linguistic literature, “conventional implicature” (section 2), and also at various ways of getting rid of presuppositions (section 3). In section 4 we will investigate two possible explanations for differences in presupposition triggering – the “lexical alternative” approach of Abusch (2002, 2005), and a suggestion of Ladusaw’s involving detachability of presuppositions. The final section contains concluding remarks. (shrink)

In this paper I develop a framework for environmental philosophy on the ground of what I call a radical relationalism based on Whitehead’s thought. Accordingly, relations are ontologically prior to and constitutive of entities rather than being conceived as external link(ing) between them. On this ground an alternative, relational axiology can be developed that challenges the current environmental ethics debate and its dichotomy between intrinsic and instrumental values. In the last section, I show how such an axiology can become an (...) important ally for global environmental justice struggles and help support what the anthropologist Arturo Escobar calls a “decolonial view of nature.”. (shrink)

According to essentialism, metaphysical modality is founded in the essences of things, where the essence of a thing is roughly akin to its real definition. According to potentialism (also known as dispositionalism), metaphysical modality is founded in the potentialities of things, where a potentiality is roughly the generalized notion of a disposition. Essentialism and potentialism have much in common, but little has been written about their relation to each other. The aim of this paper is to understand better the relations (...) between essence and potentiality, on the one hand, and between essentialism and potentialism, on the other. It is argued, first, that essence and potentiality are not duals but interestingly linked by a weaker relation dubbed ‘semi-duality’; second, that given this weaker relation, essentialism and potentialism are not natural allies but rather natural competitors; and third, that the semi-duality of essence and potentiality allows the potentialist to respond to an important explanatory challenge by using essentialist resources without thereby committing to essentialism. (shrink)

This paper deals with the problem of the subject in Bachelard?s concept of surrationalism. Focusing on the epistemological character of surrational creativity, the issue of the subject is approached through the analysis of the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity in the surrational act. Comparing the character of novelty in surrealism and surrationalism, the paper introduces Bachelard?s distinction between formal and material imagination, with the latter further discussed through the prepositions?against? [contre] and?in? [dans]. Bachelard?s theory of the internal dialectic - the (...) theory of subdivision of the subject - is analyzed through his concept of reverie. The last chapter deals with the dialectic between the apodictic and the assertoric subject, aiming to reconsider the idea of interiority and repose. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to fill the gap in studying logics for biprobability structures. We introduce the logic equation image with two conditional expectation operators and prove the completeness theorem. © 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

The article examines the patient-doctor relationship, relying on Michel Foucault’s concept of the clinical gaze. We argue that during the last decades, a profound transformation of the social nature of medicine took place, one that Foucault’s understanding of the clinical gaze cannot adequately account for. First, the article offers an elaboration of the three-node network of clinical gaze, the clinic, and nosology to explain the positioning of the doctor and the patient within the specific social ontology generated by the rise (...) of medicine. We then discuss intensive but irresolute developments brought by technological advancements, especially the X-ray tube. Finally, we argue that in the contemporary clinic, equipped with a plethora of sophisticated devices, the position of the doctor endured the most radical transformation in comparison with Foucault’s proponent of the clinical gaze at the dawn of modern medicine. (shrink)

The article examines the patient-doctor relationship, relying on Michel Foucault’s concept of the clinical gaze. We argue that during the last decades, a profound transformation of the social nature of medicine took place, one that Foucault’s understanding of the clinical gaze cannot adequately account for. First, the article offers an elaboration of the three-node network of clinical gaze, the clinic, and nosology to explain the positioning of the doctor and the patient within the specific social ontology generated by the rise (...) of medicine. We then discuss intensive but irresolute developments brought by technological advancements, especially the X-ray tube. Finally, we argue that in the contemporary clinic, equipped with a plethora of sophisticated devices, the position of the doctor endured the most radical transformation in comparison with Foucault’s proponent of the clinical gaze at the dawn of modern medicine. (shrink)

Clanak nastoji da utvrdi identitet umetnickog dela u slikarstvu, muzici i knjizevnosti. Rasprava je po svom karakteru ontoloska. Posebna paznja posvecena je problemu falsifikata umetnickog dela u razlicitim umetnostima. Tu razlikujem dve vrste falsifikata: fake i forgery. Prva vrsta falsifikata postoji iskljucivo u umetnostima u kojima je umetnicko delo singularan fizicki objekat, takozvanim autografskim umetnostima, dok se druga vrsta falsifikata moze pojaviti i u drugim, alografskim, umetnostima, iako mnogo redje. Sa problemom falsifikovanja umetnickog dela usko je povezano pitanje mogucnosti redukovanja (...) umetnickog dela na formalni simbolicki sistem, koji bi predstavljao svojevrsnu definiciju umetnickog dela. Rasprava pokazuje da konzistentna analiza ontoloskog statusa umetnickog dela u razlicitim formama umetnosti, daje naizgled neintuitivne i iznenadjujuce rezultate. (shrink)

The prototypes of definiteness and indefiniteness in English are the definite article the and the indefinite article a/an, and singular noun phrases (NPs)1 determined by them. That being the case it is not to be predicted that the concepts, whatever their content, will extend satisfactorily to other determiners or NP types. However it has become standard to extend these notions. Of the two categories definites have received rather more attention, and more than one researcher has characterized the category of definite (...) NPs by enumerating NP types. Westerståhl (1985), who is concerned only with determiners in the paper cited, gives a very short list: demonstrative NPs, possessive NPs, and definite descriptions. Prince (1992) lists proper names and personal pronouns, as well as NPs with the, a demonstrative, or a possessive NP as determiner. She notes, in addition, that “certain quantifiers (e.g. all, every) have been argued to be definite” (Prince 1992: 299). This list, with the quantifiers added, agrees with that given by Birner & Ward (1998, 114). Ariel (1988, 1990) adds null anaphoric NPs. (shrink)

Ulrich Beck's best selling Risk Society established risk on the sociological agenda. It brought together a wide range of issues centering on environmental, health and personal risk, provided a rallying ground for researchers and activists in a variety of social movements and acted as a reference point for state and local policies in risk management. The Risk Society and Beyond charts the progress of Beck's ideas and traces their evolution. It demonstrates why the issues raised by Beck reverberate widely throughout (...) social theory and covers the new risks that Beck did not foresee, associated with the emergence of new technologies, genetic and cybernetic. The book is unique because it offers both an introduction to the main arguments in Risk Society and develops a range of critical discussions of aspects of this and other works of Beck. (shrink)