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Balkan Journal of Philosophy

Volume 1, Issue 1, 2009
Philosophy and the Future

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1. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Editorial Board Foreword
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2. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Nicholas Rescher Agency and the Future
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3. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
David Weissman Future Philosophy
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4. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Lu De Vos Philosophy and the Future
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Both, the individual and social life, discover the future in so far as they organise the structure of their own life out of their conscious subjectivity. With that consciousness they become aware that the only unconditioned future is dead, my personal disappearing as well as the end of mankind. After this discovery, the only possible action rests the care for all these consciousnesses, who know that there will be an end; such an action is also a free accepted care for those, who are so contingent, but at least know that they are so.
5. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Roberto Poli The Complexity of Anticipation
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An anticipatory system is a system with the capacity to anticipate its own evolution. This paper generalizes the idea of anticipatory systems from its original biological setting to the fields of cognitive and social sciences, and it shows that anticipatory systems are a generalization of autopoietic systems. Anticipatory systems, almost by definition, escape the possibilities of rote iteration. This argument shows that the complexity of an anticipatory system extends well beyond mainstream complexity theory. For this reason, the idea of systems of higher-order complexity has been introduced. These types of systems come in at least two forms: impredicative or self-referential systems, and living systems. It follows that anticipation does not necessarily require life.
6. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Hristo P. Todorov How Do We Conceive The Future?
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The theoretical philosophical interest in the future comes only after the practical one. Every philosophical reflection on the future builds on a practical approach towards the latter. As, on the one hand, human behavior is not fully determined while, on the other, people have the faculty of imagining future states of the world, everyone has an immediate practical interest in the future. Since human actions are determined by independently made decisions, people orient their actions according to purposes of their own choosing that lie in the future. In this paper I examine three different types of human approaches towards the future: predicting,intending, and promising. In their everyday experience, all individuals have developed some intuitive understandings of what constitutes a prediction, an intention, or a promise, which are resident in natural language as implicit meanings of words. Taking this everyday linguistic experience as a starting point, I try to formulate explicit understandings of predicting, intending, and promising. By predicting, we form an idea of the events we expect to happen. Insofar as predicting involves events that have not yet occurred and cannot be described, all predictions about them are uncertain. When the occurrence of particular events depends onhow we ourselves will act, we develop a peculiar readiness to act in a particular way. Intention consists in this readiness to perform a given action. The only way others can learn that someone intends to perform a particular action is if the person declares this intention. Declaration of an intention for action entails no obligation to perform the action. Such an obligation arises only if one makes an utterance of another type, namely if one makes a promise. There is not merely an intention to perform a particular action but that this intention is so serious that the promiser is ready to suffer possible sanctions if he or she fails to perform as promised. There is a close interrelation between predicting, intending, and promising as three different ways in which humans approach the future. Without predictions of the future, intentions for action cannot be formed; without intentions, obligations cannot be undertaken through promises.
7. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Michel Weber The Urizen of Whiteheadian Process Thought
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In order to assess the future status and applicability of process modes of thought, three steps are suggested: first, a systematic account of Process and Reality's conception of philosophical speculation; second, its application to the targeted question; third a complementary specification with the help of Whitehead's insistence on duty and reverence.
8. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Marin Aiftincă Global Culture and Cultural Identity: An Axiological Perspective
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In past decades, the globalizing phenomenon is joining with the new concept of .Global culture,. which designates a homogeneous cultural reality and modifies the axiological scale by placing utilitarian values on the highest level. In this paper, we analyse relations between culture and global culture, traditions, cultural identity and globalizing, global culture. Also, we reject the idea of .global culture . and conclude that in globalization conditions, any tradition and, essentially, any culture can exist and keep its vigour and identity as long as it is continually recreated in accordance with the claims of modernity.This recreation is the basis of any real dialogue. This dialogue enables the affirmation of cultural identity, even through its diversity, the development of the universal culture and, undoubtedly, theimprovement of the human condition.
9. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Teodor Dima Logic and the Future
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Over the last sixty years, marked by spaceflights and the cybernetization of the human activities, logic has preoccupied specialists, but at the same time, it has attracted the interest of many others with an extraordinary force. That is similar with what happened to physics in the first half of the twentieth century or to psychoanalysis, which, at a certain moment, had become an everyday conversational topic. Obviously, such phenomena do not equate with genuine public understanding of scientific knowledge, they only express a certain fascination for the mysterious and sensational side, for media propaganda and celebrity. Certain scientific domains have benefited occasionally from a certain mysticism they succeed in generating.
book reviews
10. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Vesselin Petrov Applied Process Thought I. Initial Explorations in Theory and Research, Mark Dibben & Thomas Kelly (Eds.)
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11. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Philip de Bary The Reason Why: A Theory of Philosophical Explanation by Edo Pivcevic
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12. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Bogdana Todorova Understanding Islam by Cafer S. Yaran
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13. Balkan Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Information for contributors
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