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The paper deals with some conceptual trends in the philosophy of science of the 1980‒90s, which being evolved simultaneously with the computer revolution, make room for treating it as a revolution in mathematics. The immense and widespread popularity of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions had made a demand for overcoming this theory, at least in some aspects, just inevitable. Two of such aspects are brought into focus in this paper. Firstly, it is the shift from theoretical to instrumental revolutions which are sometimes called “Galisonian revolutions” after Peter Galison. Secondly, it is the shift from local (“little”) to global (“big”) scientific revolutions now connected with the name of Ian Hacking; such global, transdisciplinary revolutions are at times called “Hacking-type revolutions”. The computer revolution provides a typical example of both global and instrumental revolutions. That change of accents in the post-Kuhnian perspective on scientific revolutions was closely correlated with the general tendency to treat science as far more pluralistic and transdisciplinary. That tendency is primarily associated with the so-called Stanford School; Peter Galison and Ian Hacking are often seen as its representatives. In particular, that new image of science gave no support to a clear-cut separation of mathematics from other sciences. Moreover, it has formed prerequisites for the recognition of material and technical revolutions in the history of mathematics. Especially, the computer revolution can be considered in the new framework as a revolution in mathematics par excellence.

The paper aims to formulate theoretical and methodological foundations as well as basic research questions for studying intervention of artificial intelligence in everyday life of medical and life sciences in the 21 century. It is an invitation for professional philosophical, theoretical and methodological discussion about the necessity and reality of artificial intelligence in contemporary medical/life sciences and medicine. The authors commence with a proposition of their definitions of ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) and ‘artificial sociality’ (AS). The next section of the paper deals with a review of basic trends in medical/life sciences and medicine. In what follows the authors debate two problems related to incorporation of AI in reality of current medicine. The first is the potential revision of the principles developed in western medicine; the second is the alteration of the contents and forms of medical education. The authors theorize the dynamic interplay between structural expansion and cultural contraction of medicine and life sciences in current practices of higher education and explore how this introduces an essential tension between the necessity and reality for medical professionals to work with AI. The paper shows that attending to institutional dynamics serves as a critical and timely extension of disciplinary/cross/anti-disciplinary critiques of science and medicine, not only since the current inclusion agenda of the AI in medicine may do little to address the real concerns of a medical profession in the XXI century but also because it may inadvertently undermine the institutional recognition and epistemic acceptance of new anti-disciplinary vista for studying AI per se. In conclusion the authors underline basic outcomes of the discussion and propose further routes for inquiry and research.

According to the standard interpretation, counterfactuals fail to satisfy the following inference rules: contraposition, strengthening the antecedent and hypothetical syllogism. Contrary to the standard interpretation, Brogaard and Salerno (2008) argue that counterfactuals do satisfy these inference rules when context features are kept fixed in evaluating arguments with counterfactuals. For them, the main reason behind claiming that counterfactuals fail to satisfy these inference rules is the illicit shift in context when evaluating the arguments in question. If true, Brogaard and Salerno’s claim would have a devastating effect on the counterfactuals literature because almost the entire literature is based on the assumption that counterfactuals do not satisfy those inference rules. Given its importance, Brogaard and Salerno’s claim is examined in this paper. They are right in claiming that contextual features must be kept fixed throughout the evaluation of an argument, but the rest of their claim rests on a faulty reasoning. In the paper, I show that counterfactuals do fail to satisfy contraposition, strengthening the antecedent and hypothetical syllogism even when contextual features are kept fixed throughout the evaluation of an argument in the way Brogaard and Salerno require., Karşıolgusal önermelerin Lewis tarafından geliştirilen standart yorumuna göre, normal şartlı önermeler kullanıldığında geçerli olan bazı çıkarsama kuralları karşıolgusal önermeler kullanıldığında geçersiz olmaktadır. Bu çıkarsama kurallarından öne çıkanlar şunlardır: tersevirme,önbileşen güçlendirme ve varsayımsal kıyas. Brogaard ve Salerno (2008), literatürde genel kabul gören standart yorumun aksine, bu bahsi geçen çıkarsama kurallarının karşıolgusal önermeler kullanıldığında dahi geçerli olduğunu iddia etmektedirler. Brogaard ve Salerno’ya göre bu çıkarsama kurallarının kullanıldığı argümanları değerlendirirken eğer bağlama dair özellikler sabit tutulur ise bu durum açıkça görülecektir. Yani Brogaard ve Salerno'ya göre bahsi geçen çıkarsama kurallarının karşıolgusal önermeler için geçerli olmadığının düşünülmesi, argümanların değerlendirilmesinde bağlam özelliklerinin farkında olmadan değiştirilmesinden kaynaklanmaktadır. Brogaard ve Salerno’nun bu iddiası, eğer doğru ise, çok önemlidir. Çünkü karşıolgusal önermeler üzerine olanliteratürün tümü standard yoruma ve onun doğurduğu sonuçların kabulüne dayanmaktadır.Brogaard ve Salerno’nun iddiası doğru ise bu literatürün tümü anlamsızlaşacaktır. Bu makalede Brogaard ve Salerno’nun iddiası detaylı olarak incelenmektedir. Brogaard ve Salerno’nun belirttiği gibi argümanlar değerlendirilirken bağlama dair özellikler sabit tutulmalıdır. Ancak bağlama dair özellikler sabit tutulduğunda dahi karşıolgusal önermeler bahsi geçen çıkarsama kurallarını geçersiz kılmaktadır. Yani, Brogaard ve Salerno’nun ana iddiası yanlıştır. Bu makalede bu yanlışlık gösterilmektedir.

The paper is a short reply to the comments given on the paper ‘Social Networks for Researchers on the Internet: A New Sociality?’. The author emphasizes some essential differences of such communities from the traditional forms of scientific communication. Agreeing with the argument about the danger that social networks potentially carry, she associates it with the general features of the Internet space. In conclusion, it is accentuated that, despite their shortcomings, social networks offer a kind of new sociality based on the idea of visibility.

In my recent study Divining History: On Prophetism, Messianism and the Development of the Idea of the Spirit (Berghahn, 2016), I explored the notion of justice in the biblical-prophetic tradition. This paper is partly an extraction of the first and the last chapter of the book, but also goes further, as I try to delve deeper into the particular nature of this specific idea of justice. The paper consists of three parts. First, I turn to the Hebrew Bible and describe briefly the context in which the prophetic idea of justice first evolves. Second, I try to capture some of the defining characteristics of this idea. Third and finally, I try to indicate the relevance of this prophetic tradition for our contemporary politico-philosophical debates on justice by relating to the discourse on law and justice initiated by Jacques Derrida in the nineties and followed up by Giorgio Agamben in the last decades. (Less)

The paper focuses attention on Jerome’s interpretation of Ps. 15,8 in Tractatus in psalmum 15. After an introduction dealing with the right way to translate the verse according to Hebraica veritas, which shows his philological skills, he reveals his exegesis. The opening and concluding parts of this exegesis follow closely the Origen’s Homily on Psalm 15, but the long central section about the righteous highlights the particularity of Jerome’s exegesis; he uses other interpretations of Origen’s, but subordinates them to his own concerns to achieve original results. The study offers further proofs in favour of a proposal for dating this text.

In this paper, I try to reveal the nature of the transition problem in Kant’s Opus Postumum. Scientific developments in eighteenth century, particularly the ones in chemistry, forces philosophers to re-evaluate the role of scientific findings in the philosophical debates. In addition to these crucial developments, we observe that the a prioricity for Kant primarilydepends on the physical nature of the matter which implies moving forces, but the developments in chemistry add a new dimension to the problem. Once again, Kant, after the publication of the third Critique, starts to think about the possibility of a transition from The Metaphysical Foundation of Natural Science to physics. If we succeed to construct a proper transition, we not only save the sciences from being just aggregation of the empirical data, but we may fill the gap between the knowledge about the matter and the nature as a whole. Bu makalede Kant’ın Opus Postumum adlı yapıtında ele alınan geçiş sorununun doğasını ortaya koymaya çalışacağım. On sekizinci yüzyıldaki bilimsel gelişmeler, özellikle kimya alanındakiler, filozofları felsefe tartışmaları yürütürken bilimsel bulgularını rolünü yeniden değerlendirmeye zorlar. Bu önemli değişikliklerin yanı sıra Kant’ın önsellik anlayışının büyük ölçüde hareket eden güçleri ima eden fiziksel maddeye yaslandığını gözlemliyoruz. Kant bir kez daha üçüncü Eleştiri’nin basımından sonra, Doğa Biliminin Metafizik Temelleri’nden fiziğe geçiş olanağı üzerinde düşünmeye başlar. Eğer düzgün bir geçiş kurmayı başarırsak, bilimleri yalnızca deneysel veriler yığını olmaktan kurtarmakla kalmayacak, ayrıca maddeye dair bilgimiz ile bütün olarak doğa arasındaki boşluğu da doldurmuş olacağız.

The paper discusses several problems of metaphilosophy that were explored in the philosophical literature in Russia. Metaphilosophy tries to understand what is philosophy, what problems philosophers are dealing with, which methods they employ in their investigations, the nature of philosophical statements and so on. Philosophers in Russia tended to think of philosophy as a special type of worldview that exists together with the ordinary worldview and religious worldview. The author defines worldview as a collection of basic beliefs about the surrounding world, society, human being, the relations existing between individuals and society, about values and ideals. It is underscored that a worldview is always somebody’s worldview (it belongs either to an individual or a social group). The worldview problems explored by philosophers remain the same throughout thousands of years; what changes is how they are stated in different times. Every human being faces these problems if she has realized herself as an autonomous being and the reality splits for her into the I and the non-I. All philosophical problems revolve around three basic questions: what is the non-I (i.e. nature and society)? - this is the ontological question; what is I? (the anthropological question); what relations exist between the I and the non-I (the epistemological, axiological, ethical and other questions). The author also explores several stages of a philosophical investigation: an internal dissatisfaction with existing solutions, a search for a new perspective (meaning, idea, interpretation), development of the found solution. The author points at a number of characteristics that make philosophy different from science: philosophical statements and conceptions cannot be verified or refuted by experience, they are not universal. It is argued that the notion of truth in its classical interpretation cannot be applied to philosophical statements because the latter cannot be true or false. The author concludes that philosophical statements or conceptions express the subjective opinion of a given philosopher about the world and the human being. An obvious evidence for this is the existing pluralism of philosophical systems, schools, and trends.

The article analyzes the functioning of social networks for scientists on the Internet. The Internet has emerged as a social network for scientists. Then its development led to the formation of various network segments not related to scientific knowledge. It was based on the normative ideal of science. In the process of development, the Internet began to unite not only scientists. The normative ideal began to penetrate into network segments that were not directly associated to the activities of scientists. The development of the network has led to the formation of special social networks for scientists. However, as shown in the paper, such networks are not able to serve the basis either for the solidarity of scientists, or the formation of a new sociality of scientists, since the development of science has led to the formation of studies that cannot be represented in such networks. Scientists are better use general, not specialized, Internet social networks. In such communicative spaces, they can better deal with the tasks related to the communications with other social actors.

Through an imaginary dialogue with a defender of the transhumanism - whose most significant representative is the philosopher Nick Bostrom - this paper aims to critically evaluate the ethical legitimacy of becoming a posthuman when we grow up. After a characterization of the transhumanist project and a definition of posthuman condition, the axiological reasons that underlie the desire to become a posthuman are examined. In a second moment it will be discussed the issue of whether we should want to be a posthuman when we grow up. A comparison is carried out between the relative strength of the arguments for the legitimacy of the transhumanist project and the possible objections, which are mainly based in an appeal to the idea of human nature, that are usually produced by the critics of transhumanism, such as Francis Fukuyama. Finally, the real possibilities of becoming a post human are outlined and, considering the uncertainty about the future and the difference between what can and what should be done, we are asked to really think about what we want to be.

Are actions that are morally good, morally goosd because God makes them so (e.g., by commanding them)? Or does God urge humans to do them because they are morally good anyway? What is, in general, the relationship between divine commands and ethical duties? It is not an uncommon belief among theists that morality depends entirely on the will or commands of God: all moral facts consist exclusively in facts about his will or commands. Thus, not only is an action right because it is commanded by God, but its conformity to his commands is what alone makes it right. An action is right (wrong) solely because he commands (forbids) it, and solely in virtue of his doing so. This view has come to be known as the „divine command theory of morality". This paper is devoted to a brief reconstruction of claims and controversies surrounding the theory, beginning with Plato's Euthyphro, which is the historical initiator of the debate and to a reconstruction of the various lines of argument that have been set forth to defend the theory.

This paper intends to give a critical reading of Jean-Paul Sartre’s treatment of inter-consciousness relationship as presented in his work L'être et le néant, namely in the chapter L'existence d'autrui. Our main objective is to understand the treatment Sartre gave the referred issue in that particular work, but also to show that his theoretical standpoint falls short on a true determination of the meaning of the experience of Otherness for consciousness. Our method for approaching Sartre’s views stands on a detailed reading of the author’s own analyses, trying to show their limited scope and providing a different, less conflictual treatment and interpretation for the presented data. In Sartre’s view, consciousness (the Pour-soi, as he calls it, i.e., non-positional consciousness) is not inhabited by an ego, that is, it doesn’t have an ego until one becomes an object to it, similar to the remaining objects of the world, which occurs with the Other’s entry in the world. That being, Sartre’s fundamental problem is to know how is it possible for consciousness to constitute an ego as an object - as an object among other objects, but whose experience is, for consciousness, different from the one it makes of all other objects - , and, on a second step, to state its identity with that ego, i.e., to be that ego, without loosing, in the process, its subjective spontaneity and freedom. Taken as a subject/object kind of relation, as Sartre affirms it, the inter-consciousness relationship is condemned to failure, doomed to be a permanent struggle for domination of one over an other. Our analysis of the sartrian data as put forward in L'Être et le néant will show that Sartre’s thesis about inter-consciousness relationship is one-sided and that a more comprehensive interpretation of the above-mentioned relationship is possible, an interpretation based in the view that envisaging the Other as an object is founded on an anticipation of its subjectivity and of consciousness’ own subjectivity, that is, on a founding intersubjective relationship. According to our viewpoint, if it is true that an ego can be an object, it is already as a degraded ego and not as the ego properly said, born out of a relationship between subjects. The experience of Othemess shows consciousness, originally and immediately, what it can and should be, and that being has a positivity that remains an other for a concrete, knowable ego. That founding experience, which takes place at an affective level, has the meaning of an experience of the limits which, when surpassed, will allow consciousness to reach a higher dignity of being. Therefore it is as anticipation and project, as desire, as afectivity, that the relationship to an other takes place, as a pure relationality without masks, and not as a dialectical conflict, as Sartre intends to show with his occasionally convincing arguments.

Gerard of Bologna (d. 1317) was the first Carmelite master at the University of Paris in the Middle Ages. In Quaestio 6, article 1 of his incomplete Summa theologiae, Gerard discusses the issue of teaching and learning. During the course of his discussion he summarises his understanding of the process of cognition in human beings and he considers God, angels and human beings as teachers. Gerard insists on the necessity of the teacher-student relationship in the handing on of human knowledge.

Mark Sagoff characterizes the rush of biotechonology companies to patent genes as an affront to the American legal precedent prohibiting the patenting of "products of nature" (Sagoff, unpublished paper). He cites the robust economic incentives for biotech firms to increase their profit margins, the failure of legislators to establish clear laws to regulate or prevent the patenting of products of nature, the inability of the courts to uphold prior decisions disallowing patenting of similar natural objects, and the unwilling ness of bioethicists and environmental ethicists to intervene politically (while armed with philosophical justifications), as the chief causes of the unabated race to patent genes (whether or not we know their function). While Sagoff s observations are warranted and of significant value, they point primarily to inconsistencies in American case law and not so much to a priori principles to prevent gene patenting. My objective then is to flesh out a possible philosophical justification for prohibiting gene patenting, and allowing only for the patenting of specific methods and innovations tied to genetic research. My approach is three-fold: (1) I identify preliminary reasons (perceived harms) that are claimed to result from gene patenting; (2) I lay out Lockean limits to property ownership, his implicit distinction between inventions and discoveries of objects in nature, and then construct an argument against gene patenting that rests on this

Il est permis de voir dans la doctrine de la science de Fichte une tentative visant à conférer toute sa plausibilité à l’affirmation de Jacobi selon laquelle la philosophie transcendantale de Kant, si elle est comprise de manière conséquente, constitue la forme la plus radicale d’idéalisme. Or, pour montrer la cohérence de cet idéalisme, Fichte se doit de surmonter l’embarras de Jacobi face au problème de l’« objet qui affecte » dans la CRP. Je soutiens ici que la solution de Fichte au problème de l’affection consiste à remplacer la « sensation » par le « sentiment », ou plus précisément à substituer à la dimension objective de la sensation quelque chose d’entièrement subjectif : le sentiment. Fichte connaît les définitions kantiennes et il est parfaitement conscient du déplacement qu’il opère. Sauf qu’à la fin, il est contraint d’admettre la contingence absolue de cette « limitation du Je » qu’est le sentiment., Fichte’s doctrine of science can be seen as an attempt to make sense of the assertion of Jacobi according to which Kant’s transcendental philosophy, when understood correctly, amounts to the strongest form of idealism. Yet, in order to show the soundness of such an idealism, Fichte has to confront Jacobi’s problem concerning the nature of the infamous « object that affects » in the CPR. I argue in this paper that Fichte’s solution to the problem of affection consists in replacing “sensation” by “feeling,” or more precisely in substituting the objective dimension of sensation for something totally subjective: feeling. Fichte is well acquainted with the Kantian definitions and he is perfectly conscious of the shift he is making here. In the end however, he is obliged to admit the absolute contingency of this “limitation of the I” which defines feeling.