This paper discusses an important phase in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s analytic philosophy through a comparative examination of the profound correspondences that exist between his concept of silence and the poetics of another crucial authorial figure of the 20th century: James Joyce. Based on the hypothesis that there are striking resemblances between their early works, that is, between Joyce’s realistic short-story collection Dubliners and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the article employs mostly close-reading, analytical-interpretative and comparative methods. It argues that silence was an intentional (...) intellectual, aesthetic and ethical choice of both these authors, their way to preserve the autonomy of metaphysics and to honour the beauty of the unspoken. Starting from their common critical treatment of the habitual and largely alienated speech, the discussion connects Wittgenstein’s philosophical attitudes regarding the imprecision and inadequacy of every-day language and Joyce’s notion of ‘spiritual paralysis’ of the city-life, which he saw as the main motive for writing his collection about fin-desiècle Dublin. On the grounds of their shared views about the limits of words, behind which there are worlds that cannot be properly uttered, the idea of silence – or the highly significant narrative absence – grows to permeate the work of both. In the case of Wittgenstein, it is a call for a new philosophy, or anti-philosophy, which in negating metaphysics in effect preserves its independence from a discursive speech which cannot express it, whereas in the case of Joyce, correspondingly (and almost simultaneously), it is a quest for a new literary mode that will foreground a particular Modernist allusiveness, rhetoric of omission and deliberately incomplete, gnomonical narrative structures. (shrink)

In medicine, professional behavior and ethics are often rule-based. We assessed whether instruction on formal criteria of authorship affected the decision of students about authorship dilemmas and whether they perceive authorship as a conventional or moral concept. A prospective non-randomized intervention study involved 203s year medical students who did (n = 107) or did not (n = 96) received a lecture on International Committee of Medical Journal editors (ICMJE) authorship criteria. Both groups had to read 3 vignettes and answer 4 (...) questions related to the distinction between conventional and moral domains. Written justification of student’ choices whether the authorship in a vignette was right or wrong was rated by 4 independent raters as based on justice or a rule. Formal instruction had no effect on students’ decisions on authorship in the vignettes (44, 34 and 39% ICMJE-consistent answers for 3 vignettes, respectively, by students receiving instruction vs. 38, 42 and 30% for those without instruction; P > 0.161 for all vignettes). For all dilemmas, more students decided contrary to ICMJE criteria and considered their decisions to be a matter of obligation and not a choice and to be general across situations and sciences. They were willing to change their decision if a rule was different only for peer situations but not for mentor–mentee situations. The number of students who used rule-based justification of their ICMJE criteria-consistent decisions was significantly higher in the instructed than in the uninstructed group. Instruction about formal authorship criteria had no effect on student’s decisions about authorship dilemmas and their decisions were related to the moral rather than a conventional domain. Teaching about authorship and other professionalism and integrity issues may benefit from interventions that bring intuitive processes into awareness instead of those fostering rule-based reasoning. (shrink)

In this article, we introduce a theory on the dynamic development of affective processes, affect regulation, and the relationship between emotions and sport performance. The theory focusses on how affective processes emerge and develop during competitive sport involvement. Based on Scherer’s component process model, we postulate six components of emotion that interact with each other in a circular fashion: triggering processes, physiological reactions, action tendencies, expressive behaviors, subjective experience, and higher cognitive processes. The theory stresses the dynamics of affective processes (...) and describes the consequences for performance in competitive sports. It assumes that the peculiarities of different sports must be taken into account in order to understand the affective processes, and offers starting points on which strategies can be used to effectively regulate affective states. Consequences for research and practice are derived and discussed. To study the development of affective processes, future research should test the assumptions in ecologically valid contexts, such as real competitions or competition-like situations, using multi-component measures of emotions. (shrink)

The text seeks to provide insight into some of the basic theoretical considerations and problems that the Marxist theory of the state has met. In this sense, it does not pretend to provide an ultimate interpretation of the relation of the state and capital, but to present to a reader a basic argumentation of the main Marxist approaches and the general contribution of the Marxist theory to this problem. In the first part the text highlights some of the key issues (...) that materialist theory of the state should try to offer answers to, while the second part gives a review of a different approaches to this topic. Presented approaches and arguments should be seen more as an ideal-types, and they should introduce a reader to the general directions and problems of the Marxist approach to the state and capital relation. nema. (shrink)

The paper traces a three-century-long tradition of a mistaken attribution of the Defence of Eunuchs by Theophylact of Ohrid. Since Peter Lambeck, chief librarian of the Hofbibliothek in Vienna, identified in 1671 the author of the treatise as Theodore Pedagogue, a poorly known tutor to the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, the incorrect attribution was readily adopted and further disseminated by a series of scholars of the next generations. Although the issue of the authorship was successfully resolved as early as 1768 (...) by Angelo Bandini, head of the Laurentian Library in Florence, the information remained unfamiliar to writers of the following centuries, leaving the entrenched error to persist until the late 1970s, on the eve of the first critical editions of the Defence. The article follows the tangled history of the erroneous attribution, attempting to establish a kind of stemmatic regularity between several branches of the abortive tradition. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:This article refurbishes the view of antiutopianism as the ruling orthodoxy of late-capitalist common sense (pragmatics) and writings plus media (narrative). After a half-century descent into a contemporary neofeudalism (Fascism 2.0), the operation of totalized antiutopianism on utopian narrative genres is powerfully evident in the TV series Game of Thrones, a rigidly Social Darwinist fantasy world, reveling in mass slaughters and presupposing neofeudalism: a black fable for lesioned personalities.

Orwell, as he himself remarked, came from a lower, professional-service fraction of the English and imperial ruling class that was ‘simultaneously dominator and dominated’ (Raymond Williams), so that a combination of state and monopoly power became his abiding nightmare. His horizon was, as of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, a revolutionary socialism committed to freedom and equality, opposed both to Labourite social democracy and to Stalinist pseudo-communism. In this article, I concentrate on Nineteen Eighty-Four, drawing on narratology (its agential (...) system, spacetime descriptions, and composition – ‘the Winston story’, the ‘Goldstein excerpts’, and the Appendix on Newspeak) and history. I conclude that Nineteen Eighty-Four has an interesting, but limited, ‘Tory anarchist’ stance and horizon: in revolt against the rulers, but not believing that the revolt can succeed (in direct polemic with the Communist Manifesto). In Orwell’s view there are ‘three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle and the Low’, but the mindless and passive Low reduce this to the Middle against the High, or intellect and impotence versus cynical power. ‘No economics’ entails here ‘no class struggle’, and a fair amount of misogyny. Orwell’s textural skill was penetrating, but his thematics very limited. Still, he was one of the first to notice the long-duration slide of politics toward fascism, even if he drew a mistaken consequence from it, as evident in his early conflation of Stalinism and Nazism into an untenable ‘totalitarianism’. Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a concerned, appealing, and in some ways useful text, albeit one that ultimately lacks wisdom. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In the introduction to the 2015 reprint of her classical Partial Visions, Angelika Bammer cites the pithy injunction of the American poet and feminist thinker Adrienne Rich: “We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth … the visions, and the thinking necessary to sustain, console, and alter human existence. … Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy (...) will develop new meaning; thinking itself will be transformed.” Based on sustaining, consoling, and radically altering the present dire state of human existence, the author leads to two sets of initial arguments: Where Are We, and What Are We Doing Wrong. What follows are samples of possible answers, perhaps representative beyond themselves. (shrink)

The most widely used attractive logical account of knowledge uses standard epistemic models, i.e., graphs whose edges are indistinguishability relations for agents. In this paper, we discuss more general topological models for a multi-agent epistemic language, whose main uses so far have been in reasoning about space. We show that this more geometrical perspective affords greater powers of distinction in the study of common knowledge, defining new collective agents, and merging information for groups of agents.

The article describes a troubled history of eugenics in the US, from its beginnings at the end of the 19th century, through the whole of the 20th. It is a part of a larger historical study on eugenics. It focuses on Davenport, Laughlin, Estabrook and the Eugenic Record Office, on the early racist eugenicists like Grant and Ross, and on sterilization legislation in the twenties and thirties. The intention however was to put the historical debate into a contemporary context, or (...) at least to show that some eugenic ideas have lived long after everybody thought they were dead. There are some hints and quotations that show it might still be possible to misuse sterilisation in the US today. (shrink)

U članku se opisuje burna povijest eugenike u Sjedinjenim Državama tijekom cijelog 20. stoljeća. Premda je nacistička eugenika notornija po svojim groznim posljedicama, činjenica je da je većina američkih saveznih država imala zakone koji su dopuštali sterilizaciju “nesposobnih” i da je golem broj ljudi prisilno steriliziran. Neki su zakoni ukinuti tek 1967. ali postoje i naznake zakonodavstva o sterilizaciji koje bi mogle dopustiti zloupotrebe karakteristične za rane godine 20. stoljeća. Međutim, glavnina članka opisuje ideološke izjave najvećih američkih eugeničara poput Davenporta, (...) Laughlina, Estabrooka iz Eugenic Record Officea, Granta, Rossa i drugih, kao i socijalne motive koje su eugeniku činili tako popularnom ideologijom sve do Drugog svjetskog rata. Jedna od sugestija članka jest da su eugeničke ideje i dalje latentne u drukčijim oblicima “znanstvenog rasizma” koji traje i danas.The article describes a troubled history of eugenics in the US, from its beginnings at the end of the 19th century, through the whole of the 20th. It is a part of a larger historical study on eugenics. It focuses on Davenport, Laughlin, Estabrook and the Eugenic Record Office, on the early racist eugenicists like Grant and Ross, and on sterilization legislation in the twenties and thirties. The intention however was to put the historical debate into a contemporary context, or at least to show that some eugenic ideas have lived long after everybody thought they were dead. There are some hints and quotations that show it might still be possible to misuse sterilisation in the US today. (shrink)

Autor secira polemiku otvorenu osvrtom Tončija Matulića na knjigu Darka Polšeka Sudbina odabranih objavljenom u Filozofskim istraživanjima 98/2005: 671-693. Okosnica ovoga članka je seciranje Matulićevih stavova kako nema bitne razlike između stare eugenike i nove, i njegovih sveobuhvatnih antiliberalnih, paternalističkih i navodno „bioetičkih“ argumenata. Polšek koristi argumentaciju J. S. Milla iz djela O slobodi i tvrdi da demokratsko i pravedno društvo mora poštivati i „puke želje“ budućih roditelja u ostvarenju njihovih prava da odgajaju djecu, kao i da bude u mogućnosti, (...) između ostalog, izbjeći daleko veće opasnosti kolektivizma i svih vrsta intervencija države u privatne stvari što je i iznjedrilo sve ružne oblike eugenika u prošlosti. Štoviše, Polšek raspravlja o tome da svatko treba poštivati te liberalne principe kako bi ozbiljno shvatio neosporne principe bioetike: osobnu autonomiju, neovisnost i jednakost.The author dissects a polemic by Tonèi Matuliæ against Polšek’s book Sudbina odabranih printed in Filozofska istra®ivanja,98 , pp. 671–693. The main point of the article is a dissection of Matuliæ’s views that thereis no fundamental difference between old eugenics and new, and of his overall anti-liberal, paternalist,and allegedly ‘bioetical’ contentions. Polšek uses J. St. Mill’s arguments from On Libertyand argues that a democratic and a just society has to respect ‘mere wishes‘ of prospective parentswhen fulfilling their right to bear children, as to be able, among other things, to avoid far greaterdangers of collectivism and all sorts of state intervention in private matters, from which ugly formsof eugenics arose in the past. Moreover, Polšek argues that one has to respect these liberal principles in order to take seriously uncontested principlesof bioethics: of personal autonomy, independence, and equality. (shrink)

We look at bimodal logics interpreted by cartesian products of topological spaces and discuss the validity of certain bimodal formulae in products of so-called cardinal spaces. This solves an open problem of van Benthem et al.

Clarke and Beck use behavioural evidence to argue that approximate ratio computations are sufficient for claiming that the approximate number system represents the rationals, and the ANS does not represent the reals. We argue that pure behaviour is a poor litmus test for this problem, and that we should trust the psychophysical models that place ANS representations within the reals.

Epsilon terms indexed by contexts were used by K. von Heusinger to represent definite and indefinite noun phrases as well as some other constructs of natural language. We provide a language and a complete first order system allowing to formalize basic aspects of this representation. The main axiom says that for any finite collection S 1,…,S k of distinct definable sets and elements a 1,…,a k of these sets there exists a choice function assigning a i to S i for (...) all i≤k. We prove soundness and completeness theorems for this system S ε i fin. (shrink)

Autor je zamislio da objavi tri teksta u tri sveske "Filozofije i drustva" u kojima ce, oslanjajuci se na stvorenu iskustvenu naucnu evidenciju, pokazati obim i stepen religioznosti nekih evropskih drustava, potom u posebnom tekstu ruski slucaj i na kraju religioznost i vezanost ljudi za religiju i crkvu u Srbiji. Ovakav sled objavljivanja ima svoju logiku: ocekujuci sprovodjenje empirijskog ispitivanja pod nazivom "Evropsko istrazivanje vrednosti" u gotovo svim evropskim zemljama, i po prvi put u Srbiji sredinom 2008. godine, autor zeli (...) da najpre prezentuje rezultate prethodnih socioloskih istrazivanja, reprezentativne za evropski prostor, a potom i za pravoslavni prostor u zemlji sa najvecim brojem pravoslavaca u svetu. Tako ce u poslednjem prilogu autor moci da komparira religijsku situaciju u Srbiji ne samo sa religioznom Evropom nego i sa religioznom pravoslavnom Rusijom. (shrink)

The paper looks at how Marxist humanists around the Yugoslav philosophical journal Praxis engaged with existentialist and phenomenological categories. After presenting the early 1950s critiques of existentialism in Yugoslavia, the paper considers how the categories used by the representatives of existentialism (and phenomenology) were interpreted and incorporated by Yugoslav Marxist humanists in the 1960s.

In this article I have dealt with empirical proofs for the Russian religious renaissance which came after the fall of the Soviet socialistic empire and carried on all through the nineties as a pro-religious consensus and a religious belief. Likewise, I have dealt with proofs suggesting certain limitations of the renaissance in question which manifested mainly in irregular fulfillment of religious duties. U ovom clanku autor se bavi empirijskim dokazima za rusku religioznu renesansu koja je nastupila nakon urusavanja sovjetske socijalisticke (...) imperije i kao proreligiozni konsenzus i religijsko verovanje odrzala se tokom 90-ih godina proslog veka. Takodje, autor se bavi i dokazima koji upucuju na izvesna ogranicenja pomenute renesanse, ponajvise izrazena kroz problematicnu redovnost ispunjavanja verskih duznosti. (shrink)

In the last decade and a half the process of desecularization has been undoubtedly verified in Serbia. Not only that the changes have been verified in the religious complex in general, but in traditional religious groups in particular as well. The revival of religiousness and people?s attachment to religion and church have been clearly proved in all aspects of religious life: in the areas of religious identification, doctrinaire religious beliefs and ritual religious practices. It should also be noted that in (...) times of extremely turbulent political and social changes in the Balkans, all traditional religious complexes, orthodox, catholic and Muslim, began forming close ties with political and state, public and binding domains, which was absolutely unthinkable of a decade and a half ago. Which leads us to the crucial question: can religion make a contribution to the process of integration coming form the surrounding countries as the imperative of foreign powers on one hand, and as the striving of the majority of population in all the post socialist countries in the Balkans on the other hand, or will it only cause damage and interfere with the process of integration of those societies into the European commonwealth of nations? This article discusses different opinions that view the traditional complexes of religion, language and nation as disruptive factors of modernization of the Balkan countries, as well as completely opposite opinions based on the experiences of traditional Islamic societies in which religion is not a factor that hinders their rapid modernization. U poslednjih petnaestak godina proces desekularizacije je u Srbiji nedvosmisleno empirijski verifikovan. Verifikovane su promene u religijskom kompleksu uopste, a posebno kod tradicionalnih religijskih zajednica. Revitalizacija religioznosti i vezanosti ljudi za religiju i crkvu jasno je dokazana u svim podrucjima religijskog zivota: u podrucju konfesionalnog religijskog identifikovanja, zatim doktrinarnih religijskih verovanja i u podrucju obredne religijske prakse. Takodje, u vremenu izuzetno burnih politickih i socijalnih promena na Balkanu, tradicionalni religijski kompleks, bilo pravoslavni, katolicki ili islamski, poceo je da stupa u tesnu vezu sa politickim i drzavnim, javnim i obavezujucim, sto je pre jedne i po decenije bilo potpuno nezamislivo. Odatle, presudno pitanje: moze li religija u tom vidu da doprinese integrativnim procesima koji dolaze iz okruzenja, sa jedne strane kao strani imperativi, sa druge strane kao teznja preteznog dela stanovnistva ovih balkanskih post socijalistickih drzava, ili ce samo da steti i presudno da ometa proces ulaska ovih drustava u evropsku porodicu naroda? Ovaj projekat treba da odgovori na pitanje: da li tradicionalni kompleks religije, jezika i nacije u balkanskim uslovima predstavlja otezavajucu okolnost za integraciju balkanskih drustava u Evropu ili ovaj tradicionalni kompleks nece biti tome smetnja, kao sto pokazuju neka iskustva tradicionalnih islamskih drustava u kojima religija nije faktor koji ometa njihovu ubrzanu modernizaciju. (shrink)

For the contemporary Serbian sociology of religion it is evident that the process of desecularization has been present on the social scene of Serbia in the last fifteen years. Sociologists have provided arguments for this claim based on data gathered in Serbia during this period. The religious changes in question have been empirically recorded in all aspects of attachment to religion and the church, that is, in aspects of religious identification, doctrinal beliefs and religious behavior. Certain political subjects and social (...) scientists feel that social life in Serbia is getting increasingly, and that religion and church are exerting influence within social fields they are not supposed to, if Serbia is to become a secular, democratic state. The paper analyzes some major conditions of the clericalization of the Serbian society. U savremenoj srpskoj sociologiji religije nije sporno da je u poslednjih petnaestak godina na drustvenoj sceni proces desekularizacije. Sociolozi su taj proces argumentovali pozivajuci se na iskustvenu evidenciju koja je za to vreme stvorena u Srbiji. Navedene religijske promene empirijski su evidentirane u svim segmentima vezanosti za religiju i crkvu, dakle: u segmentu religijskog identifikovanja, doktrinarnog verovanja i religijsko-obrednog ponasanja. Postoji misljenje nekih politickih subjekata i drustvenih naucnika da se drustveni zivot u Srbiji sve vise klerikalizuje i da religija i crkva ispoljavaju svoj uticaj tamo gde ne bi smelo da ga bude ukoliko Srbija treba da bude laicka, demokratksa drzava. U tekstu se analiziraju neki od vaznih uslova klerikalizacije drustva. (shrink)