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Modern philosophy has benefited immensely from the intelligence, and sensitivity, the creative and critical energies, and the lucidity of Polish scholars. Their investigations into the logical and methodological foundations of mathematics, the physical and biological sciences, ethics and esthetics, psychology, linguistics, economics and jurisprudence, and the social science- all are marked by profound and imaginative work. To the centers of empiricist philosophy of science in Vienna, Berlin and Cambridge during the first half of this century, one always added the great school of analytic and methodol ogical studies in Warsaw and Lwow. To the world centers of Marxist theoretical practice in Berlin, Moscow, Paris, Rome and elsewhere, one must add the Poland of the same era, from Ludwik Krzywicki (1859-1941) onward. American socialists and economists will remember the careful work of Oscar Lange, working among us for many years and then after 1945 in Warsaw, always humane, logical, objective. In this volume, our friend and colleague, Jerzy J. Wiatr, has assembled a representative set of recent essays by Polish social scientists and philosophers. Each of these might lead the reader far beyond this book, to look into the Polish Sociological Bulletin which has been publishing Polish sociological studies in English for several decades, to study other translations of books and papers by these authors, and to reflect upon the interplay of logical, phenomenological, Marxist, empiricist and historical learning in modern Polish social understanding.
Stephen Turner has explored the ongms of social science in this pioneering study of two nineteenth century themes: the search for laws of human social behavior, and the accumulation and analysis of the facts of such behavior through statistical inquiry. The disputes were vigorously argued; they were over questions of method, criteria of explanation, interpretations of probability, understandings of causation as such and of historical causation in particular, and time and again over the ways of using a natural science model. From his careful elucidation of John Stuart Mill's proposals for the methodology of the social sciences on to his original analysis of the methodological claims and practices of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, Turner has beautifully traced the conflict between statistical sociology and a science offactual description on the one side, and causal laws and a science of nomological explanation on the other. We see the works of Comte and Quetelet, the critical observations of Herschel, Buckle, Venn and Whewell, and the tough scepticism of Pearson, all of these as essential to the works of the classical founders of sociology. With Durkheim's essay on Suicide and Weber's monograph on The Protestant Ethic, Turner provides both philosophical analysis to demonstrate the continuing puzzles over cause and probability and also a perceptive and wry account of just how the puzzles of our late twentieth century are of a piece with theirs. The terms are still familiar: reasons vs.
This is a collection of some works of Polish philosophers and physicists on philosophical problems of time and spacetime. Without restricting the thematic scope of the papers, the issue conceming objectivity of time flow runs as a uniting thread through most of them. Partly it is discussed directIy, and partly the authors focus on themes which are of paramount importance for one's attitude to that question. In the first six papers the authors deal with their topics against the background of contemporary physics, its theories, its difficulties and discussed conjectures. For the paper of S. Snihur that background is provided by everyday worId-outlook, and the author discusses the problem of existence and character of the future in the light of basic principles of cIassical logic. The paper of A. P61tawski, about the views of the outstanding polish philosopher Roman Ingarden, enriches the thematic scope of the coIIection introducing into it some questions from philosophical anthropology and ethics. JERZY GOLOSZ MOTION, SPACE, TIME*. Abstract. The paper discusses the properties of spacetime we study by analyzing the phenomenon of motion. Of special interest are the spacetime symmetries. the spacetime structures and the ontological status of spacetime. These problems are considered on the grounds of the c1assical theories of motion contained in Newtonian physics, special and general theory of relativity. The controversy between an absolute and a relational conception of motion and its ontological implications are also analyzed.
This book tells the story of Wittgenstein interpretation during the past eighty years. It provides different interpretations, chronologies, developments, and controversies. It aims to discover the motives and motivations behind the philosophical community's project of interpreting Wittgenstein. It will prove valuable to philosophers, scholars, interpreters, students, and specialists, in both analytic and continental philosophy.
This monograph is unique in its kind, giving as it does an independent and self-contained introduction to the eight prominent verisimilitude proposals that make up the verisimilitude literature after the breakdown of Popper's definition in 1974. The author brings them together by comparing the ways in which they order propositional formulae. Using this method, he shows that the distinction of content and likeness definitions partitions the entire field of investigation. In addition, it is shown that the weak content definitions can be strengthened by incorporating considerations of similarity between possible worlds. The resulting refined verisimilitude definition has many desirable properties. For instance, it is the first qualitative proposal that evades the problem of truth-value dependence. In addition, in chapter five the often discussed and misunderstood problem of "language dependency" is solved. The book will be of interest to those working in the fields of logic, epistemology, philosophy of science, and (computational) linguistics.
impossible triangle, after apprehension of the perceptively given mode of being of that 'object', the visual system assumes that all three sides touch on all three sides, whereas this happens on only one side. In fact, the sides touch only optically, because they are separate in depth. In Meinong's words, Penrose's triangle has been inserted in an 'objective', or in what we would today call a "cognitive schema". Re-examination of the Graz school's theory, as said, sheds light on several problems concerning the theory of perception, and, as Luccio points out in his contribution to this book, it helps to eliminate a number of over-simplistic commonplaces, such as the identification of the cognitivist notion of 'top down' with Wertheimer's 'von oben unten', and of 'bottom up' with his 'von unten nach oben'. In fact, neither Hochberg's and Gregory's 'concept-driven' perception nor Gibson's 'data-driven' perception coincide with the original conception of the Gestalt.
Mathematics has stood as a bridge between the Humanities and the Sciences since the days of classical antiquity. For Plato, mathematics was evidence of Being in the midst of Becoming, garden variety evidence apparent even to small children and the unphilosophical, and therefore of the highest educational significance. In the great central similes of The Republic it is the touchstone ofintelligibility for discourse, and in the Timaeus it provides in an oddly literal sense the framework of nature, insuring the intelligibility ofthe material world. For Descartes, mathematical ideas had a clarity and distinctness akin to the idea of God, as the fifth of the Meditations makes especially clear. Cartesian mathematicals are constructions as well as objects envisioned by the soul; in the Principles, the work ofthe physicist who provides a quantified account ofthe machines of nature hovers between description and constitution. For Kant, mathematics reveals the possibility of universal and necessary knowledge that is neither the logical unpacking ofconcepts nor the record of perceptual experience. In the Critique ofPure Reason, mathematics is one of the transcendental instruments the human mind uses to apprehend nature, and by apprehending to construct it under the universal and necessary lawsofNewtonian mechanics.
A comprehensive survey of Martin-Löf's constructive type theory, considerable parts of which have only been presented by Martin-Löf in lecture form or as part of conference talks. Sommaruga surveys the prehistory of type theory and its highly complex development through eight different stages from 1970 to 1995. He also provides a systematic presentation of the latest version of the theory, as offered by Martin-Löf at Leiden University in Fall 1993. This presentation gives a fuller and updated account of the system. Earlier, brief presentations took no account of the issues related to the type-theoretical approach to logic and the foundations of mathematics, while here they are accorded an entire part of the book. Readership: Comprehensive accounts of the history and philosophy of constructive type theory and a considerable amount of related material. Readers need a solid background in standard logic and a first, basic acquaintance with type theory.