Cover of Balkan Journal of Philosophy
Already a subscriber? - Login here
Not yet a subscriber? - Subscribe here

Displaying: 1-17 of 17 documents


1. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 1
Editorial Board Special issue devoted to the topic of “Communication”
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
articles
2. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 1
Johannes A. Hans van der Ven Religion’s Political Role in A Rawlsian Key
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In Political liberalism (expanded edition) Rawls repeatedly urges religions to accept liberal democracy for the right reasons, including reasons that are based on their own religious premises and not simply as a modus vivendi. This article is an exploration of that field. The first part is a hermeneutic analysis of Luke’s account of St Paul’s speech to the Areopagus in Athens, as it tries to find common ground with Hellenistic philosophy by means of deliberative rhetoric. In the second part these two characteristics (i.e. finding common ground and using deliberative rhetoric) are examined as building blocks for intrinsic acceptance of liberal democracy, albeit in a formal rather than a substantive key. The common ground Luke explored was religious, whereas in our day, at least in North-Western Europe, religion is espoused by a cognitive minority. But intercontextual hermeneutics metaphorically permits us to use the following quadratic equation: as the Lucan Paul related the Christian message to his philosophical context in order to find common ground with his listeners, so we have to relate this message to our context, the common ground being not philosophical but political. This article advocates playing a bilingual language game for religion to present its convictions to public debate and, in due course, translate them into the language of public reason. Such translation requires deliberative rhetoric and argumentation, in accordance with the logical and epistemological rules of practical reason.
3. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 1
Plamen Makariev Non-public and Public Reasons: Rawls’ “proviso”, Habermas’ “translation” and the Issue of Cultural Rights
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
The aim of this paper is to explore the split between two kinds of reasoning – non-public (culturally dependent) and public (characteristic for the procedures of policy design and, more generally, of taking generally binding decisions within the institutions of power). A largely acknowledged problem is that attempts to influence the public policies from the positions of cultural communities cannot be rationally substantiated because the arguments used are in most cases not recognized as valid by the general public, which does not share the particular beliefs and assumptions that guide reasoning in a contextually “embedded” cultural environment. This “barrier” between non-public and public reasoning is hindering the progress of recognizing minority rights and allowing the input of religiously inspired ideas into public life, to say the least. More concretely, my purpose is to point out certain philosophical debates which can provide, in my opinion,theoretical “instruments” that might help reconceptualize the possibilities for communication between the nonpublic and the public domains. I mean first of all, but not only, the theories of political liberalism and deliberative democracy as well as the differentiation between “substantivist” and “procedural” kinds of discourse.
4. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 1
Carl G. Wagner Universality and Its Discontents
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In framing the concept of rational consensus, decision theorists have tended to defer to an older, established literature on social welfare theory for guidance on how to proceed. But the uncritical adoption of standards meant to regulate the reconciliation of differing interests has unduly burdened the development of rational methods for the synthesis of differing judgments. In particular, the universality conditions typically postulated in social welfare theory, which derive from fundamentally ethical considerations, preclude a sensitive treatment of special cases when carried over to the realm of judgment aggregation, especially in the case of probabilistic judgment.
5. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 1
Nenad Miscevic Offensive Communication: The Case of Pejoratives
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Pejoratives carry with themselves as part of their meaning the stereotype containing representations (concepts) of negative qualities ascribed to the target, and the claim that the target is bad because it has these negative qualities. This is the kernel of our conceptual truth conditional proposal that this paper expounds and defends. The paper starts with a brief taxonomy of views, and very briefly mentions the reasons for disagreeing with the majority of them. The paper then argues for our truthconditional conceptual view from ordinary nasty inferences involving pejoratives, and then passes to figurative pejoratives offering a novel argument from the metaphorical nature of them. Decoding metaphorical meaning is a cognitive task. Since cognition has to do with semantic traits, and since the cognitive task is a good indicator of semantic structure, this cognitive complexity indicates interesting semantic properties of pejoratives, namely that the negative material involved in the traditional uses of such a pejorative is not merely expressive, but is part of its cognitive, truth-evaluable meaning. Some objectionsand replies follow. The conclusion briefly discusses the pragmatics of pejoratives pointing to the ubiquitous but little noticed use of pejoratives in the third person, slurring in absentia. This use suggests a novel interpretation of the perlocutory nature of the use of pejoratives.
6. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 1
Ioan Biris The Relation of Similarity and the Communication of Science
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
It has been said, not without some justification, that the knowledge process is, after all, a forward from „the identical to identical”, which means, firstly, that the advance of knowledge involves the principle of reduction, and secondly, that every step forward in knowledge involves the relationship of similarity, since the operation of reduction can not function without it. But this means, further, that all scientific knowledge must assume the methodological principle of derivation of the future from the past. However, it also means that any communication of science is based on similarity to find those images to match – in a more accessible language – pictures of the more technical languages. Such a situation was acknowledged by some scientists but also by some philosophers of science. In the following we try to reconstruct a possible way of this approach.
7. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 1
Martina Blečić Communication, Implicature and Testimony
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Conversational implicatures, as a widely examined instance of indirect communication, can enrich philosophical pursuits in many domains. Applied to the field of the epistemology of testimony, the theory of conversational implicatures raises many questions that could in turn provide novel insights about how we should treat other people’s testimonies. The problem is not whether people acquire knowledge and form their beliefs on the basis of other people’s words or on the basis of their beliefs – the problem lies in being able to detect those cases in which beliefs and words do not match. I suggest that the use and the decoding of implicatures is a rational process and that correctly formed implicature-based beliefs are justified because of their rationality. I also suggest that minor differences between the speaker’s and the hearer’s communicative moves can generate cases of epistemic (bad) luck that can be treated as predictable outcomes of a communicational faux pas.
8. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 1
Iris Vidman Communicative View of Literature
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
It is often said that literature is cognitively valuable, and that there are many things that we learn from literary fiction. But it is hard to say how exactly this process of acquiring new beliefs and expanding our knowledge takes place through engagement with literature. In this paper, I develop an account of this process, claiming that literary works are a special kind of testimony. I then go on and claim that testimony can not only transfer knowledge from one person to another (this is the role testimony is traditionally given), but can also help an audience in reaching some other cognitive states considered valuable, such as understanding. Grounding literature in its social (institutional) setting and insisting on its humanistic aspect, in the last part of the paper I develop the roles of author-as-testifier and reader-as-audience and try to show how a reader can in fact learn from literary fiction.
9. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 1
Claudiu Baciu Language as Symbolic Form in Ernst Cassirer
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In this paper I discuss Cassirer’s interpretation of language as symbolic form by looking at it from the perspective of his general functionalist conception. Thisfunctionalism was developed by Cassirer in his early work Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff in relation to an analysis of the modern science. Later, the results of this investigation evolved into a new understanding of human cultural activity as an activity of creating meanings.
10. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 1
Corina Daba-Buzoianu The Communicational Perspective of the Unhistorical Image
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
The paper begins from the idea that an image is being shaped in the communication process and depends for this shaping on social interaction. The unhistorical elements of the image (archetype, myths and symbols), together with the historical ones (representation and stereotype), are transmitted through communication processes that depend of the ways that individuals and groups relate. Considering this, the paper argues that we may discuss a certain historicity of myths and symbols if we approach a communication point of view, as they are forms of interpreting and decoding reality.
11. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 1
Anton Adămuţ Polemics as Subtle form of Communication: The Case of A Romanian Philosopher - Camil Petrescu
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Camil Petrescu (1894-1957) was a Romanian novelist, dramatist, poet and philosopher. His PhD thesis in philosophy was entitled The Aesthetic Method of Theater, and wasinfluenced by Joseph Gregor, Julius Bab, Gordon Craig, Constantin Stanislavski, Adolphe Appia, and William Butler Yeats.. His thesis was published in 1937. In Romanian literature, he was the initiator of the modern novel, with the volume The Last Night of Love, the First Night of War (1930). As a philosopher he was influned by and continued to studyPlato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, James, Bergson and Husserl. Petrescu is the first Romanian philosopher to write a micro-monograph about Husserl (1938). His main philosophical work, entitled The Doctrine of Substance (deposited in 1942 to the Library of Vatican), was published in 1988 (The Doctrine of Substance, volumes I-II). In this paper, I present a placement of the Romanian philosopher in his time and in the relationshe has with his contemporaries, some of them of world-class (Mircea Eliade, Eugen Ionesco, Emil Cioran, inclusiv Constantin Noica).
discussion
12. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 1
Robert P. Crease Theory and Theoretical Objects in an Existential/Hermeneutic Conception of Science
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
13. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 1
Pro and con discussion regarding the tenets of the hermeneutic philosophy of science (continuation)
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
book reviews
14. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 1
Marţian Iovan An Anthropological Perspective on Religion in Late Modernity
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
15. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 1
Maksim Mizov When Life Confirms Our Scientific Searches!
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
16. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 1
Monica Jitareanu Cognition and Perception
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
17. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 1
Anita Kasabova A New edition of Reichenbach’s book
view |  rights & permissions | cited by