Philosophical Congress Research Articles

Tasks of Contemporary Philosophy: Paper at the X. International Philosophical Congress in Amsterdam, 11.–18. viii. 1948

138 jakub mácha c:\users\arlene\documents\rj\type3602\red\rj 3602 134 red.docx 2017-01-09 4:03 PM (Jan.–March 1958): 66–71. Hook, Sidney. “On the Battlefield of Philosophy”. Partisan Review 16 (March 1949): 251–68. —. Out of Step: an Unquiet Life in the 20th Century. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. Kolman, Arnošt. Kritický výklad symbolick é metody moderní logiky [Critical Exposition of the Symbolic Method of Modern Logic]. Prague: Orbis, 1948. —. “Úkoly soudobé filosofie” [Tasks of Contemporary Philosophy]. Tvorba 17, no. 33 (18 Aug. 1948): 647–8. http://ar chiv.ucl.cas.cz/index.php?path=Tvorba /17.1948/33/647.png. —. “The Tasks of Contemporary Philosophy in the Struggle for New Humanism ”. Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of Philosophy. E. W. Beth, H. J. Pos, and J. H. A. Hollak eds. (Library of the Tenth International Congress of Philosophy.) Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1949. Vol. 1: 33–41. https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/ purchase?openform&fp=wcp10&id=cp 10_1949_0001_0140_0141. —. Zaslepená generace: Paměti starého bol- ševika [The Blindfolded Generation: Memoirs of an Old Bolshevik]. Czech edn. Prague: Host, 2005. Mácha, Jakub, and Jan Zouhar. “Arno št Kolman’s Critique of Mathematical Fetishism”. Read to Society for the Study of the History of Analytic Philosophy , Dublin, June 2015. Forthcoming in R. Schuster, ed., The Vienna Circle in Czechoslovakia. (Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook.) Berlin: Springer. Russell, Bertrand. “Postulates of Scienti fic Inference”. Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of Philosophy , 1: 33–41. In Papers 11: 13. Mostly reprinted in HK, Pt. vi, Ch. 9. TASKS OF CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY Paper at the X. International Philosophical Congress in Amsterdam, 11.–18. viii. 1948 by Arnošt Kolman ur current times call for the most responsible of decision-making. Never before in its thousand years of history has mankind stood at such a fateful crossroads as it stands today. For never before has Man had such a tremendous opportunity to subjugate the elements to his goals, and never before has there arisen the need to subordinate his society to the laws of reason. Since the moment when Prometheus first accidentally turned the visible movement of rubbing sticks or striking flints into fire—the motion of invisible molecules—up to the time when, with the help of modern industrial engineering and science, the invisible movement of these nuclear particles have now themselves been transformed into such an explosion—into the movement of huge bodies, the development of our race has never before experienced such a dizzying rise above the animal realm. At the same time, as a result of the continued division of labour, the development of mankind has resulted in an ever larger and ever more severe rupture of its own society. Precisely because of this, the way to a happy life for all of us without exception to a social status, which was dreamed of by the brightest heads and noblest hearts of all ages l= Kolman and Russell at the 1948 Congress of Philosophy 139 c:\users\arlene\documents\rj\type3602\red\rj 3602 134 red.docx 2017-01-09 4:03 PM and nations, is now leading us today onto the edge of an abyss, wherefrom arises the real danger of the destruction of all the achievements of culture, and the death for hundreds of millions of lives. How then to keep the world from slipping down this route instead of climbing to the heights of real humanity? And from not falling into complete barbarity and savagery? And how then to alert people today, who are indifferent to these real threats, or are intimidated by them, to take up united action against this horrific danger? There are those of us who seek in vain not knowing how to get rid of the genie summoned by man: some would like to drive it back into its bottle— banish any further advances in science and technology; others however do not object that the world—for its salvation—must submit to the violence of those who declare of themselves that they are the monopolistic owners of the most powerful destructive means; and the third group are just deceiving themselves , expecting that it will be...

Analysis, Mathematics, and Logic in Russell’s Early Philosophy

russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 36 (winter 2016–17): 163–90 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036–01631; online 1913–8032 c:\users\arlene\documents\rj\type3602\red\rj 3602 134 red.docx 2017-01-09 4:03 PM oeviews ANALYSIS, MATHEMATICS, AND LOGIC IN RUSSELL’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY James Levine Philosophy / Trinity College Dublin 2, Ireland jlevine@tcd.ie Jolen Galaugher. Foreword by Michael Beaney. Russell’s Philosophy of Logical Analysis: 1897–1905. (History of Analytic Philosophy series.) Basingstoke and NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. xii, 218. isbn 13: 978-1-137-302069 . £60; us$110 (hb). n this book Jolen Galaugher discusses a number of key turning-points in Russell’s early philosophy: his break from Idealism in 1898–99; his acceptance of logicism in the period following the International Congress of Philosophy in Paris in August 1900 at which he was impressed by Peano and his students; and his arrival at his theory of descriptions in 1905 in the context of his attempts to grapple with various versions of what Russell called “the Contradiction”. Her overall purpose is to examine the interplay between the view of the analysis of propositions that Russell accepts following his break with Idealism and his developing views within the philosophy of mathematics. The main merits of the book are the way in which it highlights unresolved issues in our understanding of Russell’s early development and brings to bear relevant evidence in attempting to address those issues. However, as Galaugher acknowledges, the book’s “arguments are complicated in places” (p. 2), and it is not an easy read. Like some other books in this series, it appears to be based on a recently completed phd dissertation, and, like some dissertations, it combines a serious engagement with recent scholarship with a manner of presentation that presumes a shared understanding with the reader of a number of central issues and positions, and so does not clearly articulate and defend her understanding of those issues and positions to the uninitiated or sceptical reader. Hence, while the book will be useful to scholars already familiar with the sorts of issues it addresses, it would be hard to recommend it to someone coming to this material for the first time. The book consists of five chapters. In the first, Galaugher outlines some f= 164 Reviews c:\users\arlene\documents\rj\type3602\red\rj 3602 134 red.docx 2017-01-09 4:03 PM central elements of Russell’s position during his Idealist period and some of the steps involved in his dismantling that position. In the second, she argues more specifically, that in rejecting Idealism, Russell was not, as it is sometimes presented, simply following G. E. Moore—that his engagement with Leibniz’s views led Russell to go beyond Moore in certain ways and to adopt his characteristic view that relations are “external”. In the third, she discusses aspects of Russell’s logicism and its development in the period following the Paris Congress. In the fourth, she focuses on Russell’s logicist definition of the cardinal number and the notion of “class” that underpins it, arguing that in the face of the Contradiction, and his changing view of class and propositional function, it becomes questionable whether Russell and Frege should be said to endorse the same definition of cardinal number. In the fifth, she examines aspects of Russell’s coming to reject the theory of denoting concepts in favour of the theory he presents in “On Denoting”, arguing that by doing so Russell reaffirms his commitment to his post-Idealist view of a “decompositional” view of analysis as opposed to Frege’s function/argument style of analysis. Each of the aspects of Russell’s views that Galaugher examines concerns issues on which Russell often changed his mind, sometimes within a quite short period of time. While much of the material relevant to understanding these changes of mind has now been published in the Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Russell scholars have not fully assimilated it. Galaugher not only calls attention to a number of features of Russell’s early development that are not yet fully understood...

Arnošt Kolman and Bertrand Russell at the 1948 International Congress of Philosophy

The only encounter of the Czech philosopher and Communist official Arnošt Kolman with Bertrand Russell at the Tenth International Congress of Philosophy in Amsterdam in 1948 was unfortunate. Kolman’s paper, “The Tasks of Contemporary Philosophy in the Struggle for New Humanism”, aroused a vitriolic rejoinder by Russell. However, the text of the paper as published in the congress Proceedings has a conciliatory tone. This version could not have aroused such a reaction. There is, however, an article, with a similar title, published in Czech in 1948, stating that this is Kolman’s paper from the congress. I argue that this article more likely reflects what Kolman actually said at the Congress. Finally, I provide an English translation of this article.

Dwa nieznane listy Witkacego do Kazimierza Twardowskiego

Letters of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz to Kazimierz Twardowski, professor of philosophy were published in 1988 in a monograph by Ryszard Jadczak, and later in 2013 – in a new monograph by the author of materials presented herein in volume 17 of Witkiewicz’s Dzieła zebrane. The letter from December 1936 concluded the correspondence between Witkiewicz and Twardowski. While working on Witkacy’s letters to different addressees, I have discovered that two of the letters, which had been previously identified as addressed to professor Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, were in fact letters to Twardowski from 1937! (the letters were lost, but their photocopies survived). Determining that professor Twardowski is the addressee of the letters turned out to be extremely difficult, as no envelopes with addresses have survived, and the letters contain salutations “Dear Professor”- which could mean many people. In addition, the content of the letters (concerning mostly the publishing of Witkacy’s articles) did not make it easier to identify the addressee properly, as both Twardowski and Ajdukiewicz were editors of philosophical journals. What is more, Ajdukiewicz was Twardowski’s student and son-in-law, and after World War II he settled in Poznań (the letters were from Poznań), which made unambiguous identification complicated. What was helpful for the editor were Witkiewicz’s letters written after philosophical congress in Cracow in September 1936, and the letter by from December 1936. Thanks to a thorough analysis of Witkiewicz’s correspondence, it was possible to determine that what was believed to be letters to Ajdukiewicz was in fact letters to Twardowski.

Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance as a Phenomenon of Spiritual Culture

The radical transformation of Russian culture in the perestroika and post-perestroika period, inevitably led to a fundamental rethinking of the attitude to religion. Transformation of assessing the significance of religion for Russian culture can be represented in the form of a pendulum, sharply swinging in the direction from the militant, uncompromising atheism, which had the status of official ideology in the USSR, to unconditionally positive assessment of Orthodoxy as a religion traditional for Russia. To the point was described the degree of radicalism of changing attitudes to religion in contemporary Russia academician L. N. Mitrokhin’s speech at the III Congress of Philosophy. He noted that 15 years ago “official, escort godlessness was rejected” and “the era of religious euphoria, which were summed up in the belief that without religion (it was mostly about Orthodoxy) Russia has no future, was began”. (Rationality and culture on the threshold of the III Millennium, 2003, p. 84) The new status of religiosity in contemporary Russia makes a very topical solution of a number of questions. It is necessary to understand: first, why does a movement from atheism to religion take place. Secondly, weather there is any reason to suppose that Orthodoxy will become the spiritual leader in modern Russia. And thirdly, are the modern Russians in need of religion, and in which namely. Informed decision of these questions is possible only at referring to the study of the history of religion in Russia of the Soviet period and makes necessary the depth analysis of religious processes in modern Russia. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n3s4p103

Trends of the World Philosophy Congress in the Past Ten Years

Trends of the World Philosophy Congress in the Past Ten Years

Foreword to Selected Papers from the XXIII World Congress Of Philosophy

Foreword to Selected Papers from the XXIII World Congress Of Philosophy

Preface to Selected Papers from the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy

Preface to Selected Papers from the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy

Enriques e la società filosofica italiana: scienza, filosofia e riforma dell'università

In the aftermath of the IV International Congress of Philosophy, organized by Enriques at Bologna in April 1911, Croce harshly criticized the mathematician of the overly scientific nature of the conference. He also attacked Enriques on a personal level, calling him the President of a weakly composite and inert Italian Philosophical The latter criticism, generally considered insignificant because it is too personal and lacking in philosophical content, on the contrary deserves some attention: in fact it seems to refer to the intense activity of reforming Italian schools and universities to which Enriques had dedicated himself in the previous five years, in his role as President of the Italian Philosophical Society. The Author focuses both on Enriques’ lucid and thorough analysis of the problems that affected Italian universities in the early 20th century and on his original proposals for reform. These aspects underline the leading role played by the mathematician in the cultural and political debate of the time and explain the harsh tones in his dispute with Croce.

"Fare rete" in filosofia e tra filosofi e scienziati: la fondazione della S.F.I. (1905) e di "Scientia" (1907)

The article focuses on two major institutions founded by the same scholar, Federigo Enriques (1871-1946): the Italian Philosophical Society (1905- ) and the journal Scientia (1907-1988). Through a series of International Philosophical Congresses, starting in Paris in 1900, a network of philosophers, mathematicians and other scientists came into existence. The opening address given by Enriques to the fourth International Philosophical Congress, in Bologna in 1911, discussed ‘the problem of reality’, a theme particularly attractive to different philosophical traditions and schools, as well as to scientists from different areas. Two of the talks are considered here, one by Enriques himself and the other by Agostino Gemelli, future founder of the Catholic University in Milan. The aim of the article is to highlight the still persistent gap in Italy between the philosophical and scientific environments. While investigating the causes, the article also points to the importance of trying new ways to bridge this gap.

Discussing „Wirtschaftsethik“ With Regard to „Business Ethics“ and „Economic Ethics“ – Report on a DGPhil Panel at the 23rd World Congress of Philosophy in Athens 2013

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The 9th Polish Congress of Philosophy (Gliwice-Katowice-Wisła, 17-21 September, 2012)—Report

The article discusses the highlights of the 9th Polish Congress of Philosophy held in Gliwice-Katowice-Wisła, Poland from September 17–21, 2012. The conference was organized by the Institute of Philosophy of the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Silesia and the Department of Applied Social Sciences of the Faculty Organisation and Management, Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice. Aleksandra Kuzior of the Silesian University of Technology opened the conference.

Introduction to Selected Papers from The XXII World Congress of Philosophy

Introduction to Selected Papers from The XXII World Congress of Philosophy

Foreword to Selected Papers from The XXII World Congress of Philosophy

Foreword to Selected Papers from The XXII World Congress of Philosophy

Preface to Selected Papers from The XXII World Congress of Philosophy

Preface to Selected Papers from The XXII World Congress of Philosophy

The 9th Polish Congress of Philosophy (Gliwice–Katowice–Wisła, 17–21 September, 2012)—report

The 9th Polish Congress of Philosophy (Gliwice–Katowice–Wisła, 17–21 September, 2012)—report

Іван Мірчук і Слов’янський філософський з’їзд у Варшаві (1927)

For the first time in domestic literature the article describes the circumstances of par-ticipation of Ukrainian delegation in the Slavic philosophical congress in Warsaw (1927) and describes toe polemics around the presentation of Ivan Mirchuk.

РИСК И ОБЩЕСТВО РИСКА Обзор материалов круглого стола, прошедшего 27 августа 2009 г. в рамках работы V Российского философского конгресса

Review of materials from the round table held on August 27, 2009 as part of the V Russian Philosophical Congress.

XXII World Congress of Philosophy and Nepali Representation

This year's XXII World Congress of Philosophy met on July 30-August 05 in Korea under the Congress's theme Rethinking Philosophy Today. This is a congress which meets every five years. Last time it met in 2003 in Turkey and the next time will be in Greece, the homeland of philosophy indeed, in 2013. Philosophers and philosophy teachers from more than eighty-two countries participated in this quintessential philosophy congress. Most of them including myself presented papers at a series of different sessions. Almost all of the rest of the countries except my own country had more than one delegate. I was the single delegate from Nepal. This speaks much about ourselves besides the fact of our economic hardship, because participation from 'poor' countries like Ethiopia, Sudan, and Nigeria included more than a single delegate. Despite some bitter feelings about our backwardness, I represented my country with a high feeling. The XXII Congress was important for us Asians, because it is the first ever of these congresses to have met on Asian soil in the long history of its one hundred and eight years. It was an opportunity to display the beauty and strength of our philosophical systems and traditions to the global communities. The heavy presence of philosophers from China, India, Japan and Korea definitively asserted what was Asian in the congress. Nepali representation at such a historic congress was very crucial for the promotion of the Nepali image in the global intellectual community, and I was very conscious of this fact. Who we are matters in how far we engage in dialogue with the global community. Our long isolationism can no longer help us to define who we are. For the first time in the history of the Nepali philosophical tradition, I stood high in front of a colorful gathering of very distinguished philosophers and spoke in a Nepali voice about our interest in the establishment of a cooperative society for philosophy and humanistic studies in South Asia. I was quite aware that we alone could do nothing unless intellectual colleagues of our neighboring countries extended their helping hands. But I was proud when Professor Bhuvan Chandel, current Secretary of the Centre for Studies in Civilizations in New Delhi, embraced me saying Nepal is our identity! after the gathering. At least we could make our presence and influences known and felt to our own Indian counterparts. Finally, I realized that the global community (although we can question the validity of such a community) is welcoming us to come up with our own voice. They are sympathetic to listening to our voice. How much we want to come out of our 'exotic' hibernation depends on us. Whether we want to maintain same past isolationism in a kind of illusory prelapsarian bliss, or whether we want to come up to the global front is up to us. Keeping the local sovereignty intact and letting it interact with the global is a need of every society today. To initiate a dialogue with the global does not necessarily mean to be westernized. Unfortunately, some of our people still suffer from this common misconception. The truth as it appears to me is that we must properly interact with the global, not only to resist what we are not but also to assert what we are, culturally and socially. …

Learning from Others: What South Korean Technology Policy Can Teach the U.S.

I have recently traveled to South Korea, where Seoul National University hosted the XXII World Congress of Philosophy, the first time the congress has been hosted in Asia. I was astonished by the pervasive use of many of the latest technological advancements. Among the most impressive changes were environmental. The methods employed in hotels and at the University for minimizing unnecessary consumption of electricity were exemplary. Given the great need America has now for developing its economy, and preferably in a way that does not easily lend itself to outsourcing, South Korea can serve as a model for change implemented through the development and manufacturing of advanced technological tools including high‐speed internet access, which will be the focus of the present paper. Some changes have begun already in some arenas of industry and responsiveness to environmental forces, such as in Toyota's decision to move from making SUV's in its new factory coming to Tupelo, Mississippi, to making only the Prius. But Americans have let the governmental incentives for a number of environmentally preferable products run out, and have not lead the way in the propagation of new renewable energy source technologies. Also, America's common approach to the propagation of technological and business development with the use of tax‐incentives is fundamentally different far less forceful than the South Korean approach I will discuss.