From descriptive interpretation of "understanding" to abstract-gnosiological understanding of mentality. The historical deconstruction of the existential understanding introduced as ontologic property of constantly becoming stable "Being-in-the-World" allows us to interpret this concept as mentality. Through theprism of existential philosophy in general and its interpreters such as Jacque Le Goff it allows us to make a conclusion that mentality is one of complete formations of public consciousness. But in the course of such interpretation of mentality it is important to avoid the methodological situation in which Plato deadlocked, when he had decided to find out, what was beautiful itself. For the way out from this situation he had to introduce independently existing ideas and special space of ideas which define all the things and even gods. We, unfortunately, do not have such an opportunity which the history gave to Plato. Somehow to define structural and historical conditions for breaking out of mentality we shall be limited to the instruction that it is more complex, compound, but in the same time integrally complete formation historically actualized, unlike traditionally allocated kinds and forms of consciousness. Another important question is whether the concept "mentality" is acceptable for analysis of the current modern processes or it can only be used for the reconstruction of the completed formations. The mentality cannot be analyzed from inside. And we are inclined to consider that to operate the concept "mentality" in relation to a modern representative of civilization is inappropriate.

In this paper I want to address themes in what has arguably become, through one or other of its facets, the single largest philosophical topic of our day, one which, possibly because of the ocean of ink which it has generated, has discouraged technically unengaged, or less engaged, arm’s length not-obviously committed expressions of assessment, possibilities of some sort of ecumenical conjunction, and, not least, of surprise, about the debate itself, and atthe impasse the literature referred to may be argued to have in fact reached.

Semi-compatibilists intend to reconcile moral responsibility with causal determinism, even if determinism is incompatible with freedom to do otherwise. For them, moral responsibility does not require free will, which is not a necessary condition for moral responsibility. They agree with the view that causal determinism is incompatible with free will. Free will is incompatible with determinism as well as moral responsibility. Both compatibilists and semi-compatibilists argue for the compatibility between determinism and moral responsibility. However, the latter fails to prove sufficiently the reason why determinism is compatible with moral responsibility.

Robb & Heil describe a higher-order version of the popular Causal Exclusion Problem. In particular, they ask whether the argument that led to a change in focus from event causation to causal relevance of properties can be iterated, leading us to focus on the causal relevance of properties of those properties, or properties of properties of those properties, and so on. In this paper, I investigate this curious higher-order problem and argue that the appeal of both the original argument and its iterations reflects a lack of understanding of causal relata and a problem with the notion of causal relevance.

Many philosophers deny that two different material objects can “coincide”, i.e. share their spatial location and microscopic parts. But, there seems to be a difficulty in identifying these coinciding objects, since we have many kinds of predicates that appear to show differences between them. One prominent strategy to avoid such a difficulty is to argue that such “problematic” predicates merely indicate our ways of describing objects, and thus that any difference between coinciding objects is only apparent. I call this move "the semantic solution". The goal of this paper is to show that the semantic solution is unmotivated. The semantic solution, I argue, must distinguish problematic predicates from ones that indicate genuine properties. But the trouble is that in doing so it bringsmassive indeterminacy into our understanding of vast numbers predicates. Furthermore, indeterminacy would be hopelessly massive if every actual material object is made of “atomless gunk”, i.e. matter divisible into proper parts ad infinitum.

I aim to bring the idea of “degree of free will or freedom” into philosophical debates on free will by rejecting the formulation, ‘we are either free or not’. This idea is based upon my viewpoint of regarding freedom as a realistic phenomena actually occurring. First of all, I focus on the fact that it is vague whether an agent is free or not. This vagueness is interpreted as ontic vagueness, corresponding with the status of freedom as real. However, Evans’s argument regarding ontic vagueness must be considered as, according to his argument, ontic vagueness about identity and objects are impossible. I indicate that this argument assumes the truth-value gap position in borderline cases, hence we can avoid Evans’s argument by adopting truth-value glut position. Of course, the truth-value glut approach has serious difficulties, but I conclude with sketching out a possibility to develop this approach in the free will debate via the introduction of probabilistic valuation.

Realism is often characterized by the claim that sentences are true or false in virtue of their ‘fit’ with reality. However, philosophers motivated by the deflationary view of truth argue that the formulation and defense of realism does not require a substantial conception of truth. The role of truth in stating and defendingrealism can be accounted for in terms of its being a device for expressing generalizations. I sketch the outline of an argument against this position. I begin with the deflationary view of truth and its relevance for realism. I argue that the deflationary view of truth does not show that truth is only being used as a device for expressing generalizations. I then argue that a robust conception of truth is needed to make sense of the objectivity dimension of realism and for the realist explanation of how language contributes to our success in achieving our goals.

In the Introduction to the Transcendental Dialectic, of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant presents a conception of error. In the (Jäsche) Logic, he also deals with the problem of error, albeit in a different way. This paper aims at exposing this difference and arguing that, in the (Jäsche) Logic, error is explained moreconsistently and suitably than it is in the Transcendental Dialectic. It begins by considering judgment as the place of truth, falsehood and error, and inquiring into the cognitive faculties that take part in its framing. These faculties, whose roles cannot be interchanged, are the sensibility, passive and receptive, and the understanding, active and spontaneous. Erroneous judgment springs from the unnoticed influence of sensibility on understanding, which makes theunderstanding hold merely subjective grounds of judgment to be objective ones. This unnoticed influence is conceived, in the Transcendental Dialectic, in such a way that sensibility is, in a certain sense, held to be the determining ground of error, as if it were an active faculty, whereas that influence is conceived in the (Jäsche) Logic in such a way that the understanding itself is regarded as the source and author of error. This authorship agrees with the conception of the understanding as submitted to prescriptive laws, which is contained in the very definition of Pure General Logic, as a science of the a priori laws of how the understanding ought to think.

Kant’s moral philosophy is celebrated for its doctrines of the primacy of the good will, the categorical imperative, and the significance of autonomy. These themes are pursued in the section of the Critique of Practical Reason which Kant called the Analytic, as well as in less formal works such as The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. In his main work Kant added a Dialectic, which is less well studied but is still essential to understanding his whole project. The concept of the Highest Good, summum bonum, the ultimate goal in life, incorporates both an objective and a subjective element. It pronounces on what we ought to want and how we ought to want it: it bears on our happiness and on our virtue. The aim in the Dialectic is to highlight the tension that can result from these twoelements, so that the need for a rapprochement between them becomes better appreciated. This tension remains in contemporary moral philosophy, with its diverse approaches of virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism. Kant’s stance regarding this dialectical tension needs to be understood, by Kant scholars and by moral philosophers.

From the early 1840s on, Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian doctrine aroused the joint interest of Marx and Engels, who saw the English philosopher as one of the forerunners of socialism. Later, however, in the various editions (German, French, English) of Book 1 of Capital (1867/90), Bentham would be sarcastically branded by Marx as a “genius of bourgeois stupidity”. In their youth, both Engels and Marx had independently become interested in Bentham’s ideas, admiring some social-ethical themes, seen as heralding interesting developments for the cause of the proletariat. On Engels’s suggestion, Marx included Bentham’s name, alongside those of the major 18th–19th century English and French exponents of protosocialism, in a planned Library of the most outstanding foreign socialist writers (1845), which however remained only a draft. From his first stay in England (1842/44), the young Engels had embraced in particular the famous utilitarian principle of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” advocated by Bentham. Marx, on the other hand, after initially praising Bentham’s work, which he had read in a French translation during his exile in Paris (1844), harshly criticized the ambiguous implications of this principle. In fact, he believed thatbehind a misleading progressive façade, it constituted the philosophical equivalent of the later economic theory of labour productivity propounded by D. Ricardo in opposition to the theory of its mere quantitative extension put forward by A. Smith. In the London Manuscripts (1861/63) Marx will reveal the affinity betweenBentham’s principle of the happpiness of the greatest number of people, and Ricardo’s assumption of the ineliminable misery of the minority condemned to productive labour. Based on the collection of Marx’s and Engels’s texts (letters, drafts, notebooks, manuscripts, printed works), made available today thanks to the critical edition by MEGA1, this paper sets out to re-examine, im großen und ganzen, the main moments in their critique of Bentham’s Utilitarianism.

Kant saw in an old argument a threat to his criticism of traditional rational psychology. He called this argument the Achilles of all dialectical inferences. What the Achilles purports to prove is that the unity of consciousness requires the simplicity of the soul. The argument proceeds from, a distinction between two types ofactions that are ascribable to a subject. For example, when we say that a school of fish moves, this movement can be explained by referring to the movements of the fish constituting that whole. Thus, “moving” is an action type that can be attributed to an aggregate. The second premise says that the action of the thinking I cannot be regarded as the concurrence of several things acting. Thus, any thinking self has to be a simple subject because the action of the thinking self cannot be an aggregate of several actions of different subjects constituting that self. In this paper, Kant’s criticism of the Achilles argument is investigated.

Subject of my paper is the connection between Hegel’s philosophy of nature and the new conception of subjectivity developed in his works. At the centre of my reflection is the origin of desire from biological needs of the animal world, as affirmed by Hegel in the Encyclopaedia of philosophical sciences and inPhenomenology of Spirit. The animal nutrition is periodical: hunger and thirst are forms of lack, from which, in Hegel’s eyes, arises the first form of self‐consciousness: they produce a first, obscure and indefinite sense of self. The correspondent concept in Phenomenology of Spirit is desire, as awareness of limits, and also as necessity to overcome them: as impulse to action. The fight and recognition which follow imply this natural source. The formation (Bildung) of subjectivity itself presupposes in Hegel this fundamental role of desire: What I want to analyse is the measure in which philosophy of nature influenced Hegel’s theory of subjectivity. Researches of the last decades give a new evaluation of the importance of this part of his philosophy and show the evident links to romantic philosophy of nature. My paper intends to demonstrate that desire in Hegel’s philosophy shows an evident cognitive value and can be considered a key-instrument for a new conception of reason, not opposed to passions. This approach can be interesting within the present international debate about the strategic role of passions in our post-modern world.

The essence of the Man self-reflection has discovered Materialistic monism with understanding of substance as the reality of all existed, including universal: qualities – continuity, interruptness, corpuscleness, reflection; characteristics – transition from quantity to quality and vice versa, unity and struggle of opposites, denial of denial, unity of substance; states – rest, development, form, motion; processes – physical, chemical, biological, mental. The Materialistic monism consists of the unity of methodological, theoretical, sociological, statistical and practical levels of cognition, mastered by the Man through five known historical ways of the vital activity. Each successive historical period of life is characterized by more perfect forms of the Man bodiness, his common character and relationships, subject interaction, reflection and consciousness, and hence by it considerable broadening of the boarders of cognition and its set of instruments.Philosophical significance of the levels of cognition consists in their possibility to consider a phenomenon as universal, general, particular, separate and single; stratificated methods of cognition and technologies of penetration into different aspects of the phenomenon essence. The methodological cognition with itsown distinctive methods contains all other methods, thus this unity pretends to be the Modern Philosophy , including monistic, systemic, dialectial, metaphisical and empirical methods of cognition.

It is no doubt that philosophy is the important way of discourse of modernity and modernity is the contemporary context of philosophy. By examining the relationship between philosophy and modernity, we will discover that philosophy enables the complete establishment of modernity, and philosophy is theimportant driving force of the gradual evolution of modernity; Contemporary philosophy is the outcome of the crisis of modernity; The important mission of the contemporary Chinese philosophy is to answer the question that how it is possible to adopt modernity in China.

This paper is an introduction to micro-epistemology, philosophical reflection of "quantum wealth" as well as an anthropological analysis of the nature of human cognition in the scale of quantum. It covers the problems of the observation in and the trueness of micro-cognition, the perception of quantum phenomena, the relations between micro-cognition and practice as well as between macro-subject and micro-object, the descriptological turn in micro-cognition, the description of micro-world and some special descriptological problems in micro-cognition, etc. Micro-cognition, just as quantum theory shows, relates to a scale out ofordinary for human being. Quantum theory means a farther clarification of the background of human person’s existence and the human-world relation. It means an enormous extending of the framework of scientific theory, and thereby the rebuilding of the foundation of philosophy. It also means the refining and therationalization of our conceptual tools and, in a certain extent, the reconstruction of the foundation of epistemology.

Thinking about abnormalization, the author views abnormalizing as one of the means of entering the space where everything is born, and evaluates the place of this means in modern society. Over the course of human history, society established norms and taboos of all kinds, and the system of norms and taboosdetermined the society itself. This is especially important in modern society, the society where, besides self-reproduction, development is also one of the main objectives, which presupposes constant creation of new norms. How are norms created? What are the requirements for this? What kind of people can create new norms? What are the threats of this process? The author answers these questions and many others in the outlines of thought. While dwelling upon abnormalization, the author involuntarily touched the borders, the limits of the human world, took a look beyond the horizon of something totally different.

Kant’s analytic-synthetic distinction is often construed in terms of the question of whether or not the predicate is contained in or can be derived from the concept of the subject. Few have observed that Kant has another formulation of the distinction, a formulation that is based on the determinate-indeterminate distinction. In fact, it is this formulation that will shape the development of one of the main tasks of post-Kantian German idealism. It is my aim to explain how Kant, Maimon, and Fichte each define and address the problem of the synthetic a priori in terms of the determinate-indeterminate distinction.

The problem of subjectivity, based on the generalizing substantification of the predicate subiective occurs first in the discussions of the postulates of Kant’s theory of knowledge. At issue is that a human being has focused on a matter, and that his subjectivity has the responsibility of isolating a determinate domain.In fact, it is up to the human subject to focus on objects and to thematize them according to his operative conditions, which is how it expresses different epistemic standpoints. Kant’s philosophy provides the most adequate answers to the question about the anthropological conditioning of philosophy. My thesis is thattranscendental subjectivity includes an epistemic approach, which does not imply any kind of subjective conceptualism as opposed to forms of realism supported and structured by categories, it implies instead that without considering the epistemic standpoint, the question of the supposed primacy of transcendental over general logic or vice versa is irresoluble.

According to James Van Cleve, the principle with which Kant is concerned in the first analogy follows from the view that existence statements are properly made only with quantifiers and have to be expressible in the form ‘∃ xFx’. This thesis is extremely surprising and of great potential importance. It rests on the conviction that two more basic principles can be derived from the relevant view about existence statements. The first of these more basic principles is that there can be no coming to exist ex nihilo or ceasing to exist in nihilo; the second is that there cannot be a series of modes not grounded in an ultimate subject. This paper outlines the relevant view about existence statements, traces the argument provided by Van Cleve in support of his thesis, and concludes that the argument rests on adubious assumption that ‘Everything exists’ either means or entails ‘Everything always exists’.

The World abounds with infinite crimes, technogenic accidents, acts of nature, etc. And very often, speaking about infringement of laws, use a word "anarchy". In consciousness of one people this concept associates with fear, personifies something mad, uncontrollable, and not giving in to the control. In consciousness ofothers - it means permissiveness, impunity for any acts and even crimes. The philosopher, in my opinion, is the avocate of a historical value and validity. And consequently it is necessary to observe these principles in relation to any concept or the theory. The philosophical, political doctrine of anarchism sets as the purpose clearing of the person of pressure of any authorities and any forms of economic, political and spiritual authority. Aspiration to anarchy as thementality, meets already at cinics and in early christianity, and also in chiliastic sects of the Middle Ages. Occurrence of the philosophical theory of anarchism connect with names of German thinker Max Shtirner (Caspar Shmidt's pseudonym, 1806–1856), French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Prudon (1809 – 1865) and the largest theorists of this doctrine of Michail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. Humanistic value as a red string passes through all political doctrine of anarchism and, in my opinion, should be presented fairly in order to prevent substitution of concepts and with the purpose of observance of historical honesty.