The Retributivist approach to punishment attempts to address the challenges posed by utilitarian conception that punitive actions should strictly be associated with a costeffective means to certain independently identifiable goods at the expense of justice. Justice proffers how the guilty deserve to be punished and no moral consideration relevant to punishment outweighs an offender’s criminal desert. However, this just desert provokes difficulty in discerning proportionality between the moral gravity of each offence and the specific penalties attached. This consequently degenerates to another form of ‘lex talionis’ (revenge) in punitive justice.

Neurolaw is the emerging research field and practice of applying neuroscientific knowledge to legal standards and proceedings. This intersection of neuroscience and law has put up some serious claims, the most significant of which is the overall transformation of the legal system as we know it. The claim has met with strong opposition from scholars of law, such as Michael Pardo and Dennis Patterson (2011), who argue that neurolaw (and neuroscience more generally) is conceptually wrong and thus perceive most of it as “nonsense” (Patterson, 2003). I expose a flaw in Pardo and Patterson’s arguments by means of confirmation theory. My main point is that Pardo and Patterson use implicit hypothetico-deductivism in their attack on neurolaw, and that we have good reasons to doubt the employment of such a model, because it faces serious theoretical problems. I then demonstrate how the alleged problems associated with neurolaw disappear if we use a quantitative probabilistic account of confirmation. I also explain why it provides a better account for the way the legal system actually works.

This paper seeks to argue that advances in the study of freewill and responsibility are directly relevant to jurisprudence. Following Daniel Dennett attempts to discredit the existence of freewill with the help of experiments can be checked by arguing that freedom should be understood as something that has evolved over time rather than being a pre-existent feature of our species. The major function served by freedom is to ensure responsibility for actions. This understanding of freedom as something that evolved to enhance responsibility suggests that freedom can be developed further. This can be understood as enhancing the ability to follow social norms by overcoming factors that limit responsibility. Jurisprudence has to take into account the ability to follow norms as a variable, even within the category of adults, and treat violations accordingly. Further, efforts to enhance the capacity to be free from habitual reactions need to be made part of education, and the state has to focus on this aspect without which the task of ensuring adherence to law of citizens will remain incomplete.

Alfred North Whitehead, although probably known best for his collaborative work with Bertrand Russell on the Principia Mathematica, also developed an original theory of learning and instruction which has much to offer for our times. His theory will be discussed in this paper. In order to do so, two criteria are first developed which in their combination give rise to five categories: radical behaviorism, cognitivism, and radical constructivism, with the intermediary categories of moderate behaviorism and moderate constructivism. A great number of educational researchers are ascribed to one of these five categories. After discussing the shortcomings of the three major philosophical proponents of these three major educational approaches (Hume, Kant, and Berkeley), the basic assumptions of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism are presented, and his assumptions concerning learning and teaching are discussed in view of it. Finally, it is shown that Whitehead’s organismic philosophy is able to offer a frame for integrating Behaviorism, Cognitivism, and Constructivism, thereby solving a long standing scandal of education.

The paper explores the intricate interplay of two parallel developments: on the one hand, the Socratic turn in epistemology with its shifting focus on information retrieval, evidence-based reasoning, and the cognitive relevance of questions; and the advance of dynamic epistemic logic with its accent on knowledge-acquisition. Both are relevant for any realistic model of knowledge which pays due attention to learning. It is argued that the formal models are still wanting in some key respects, but the development of alternative and mutually complementing logical systems marks a promising trend for re-establishing the close links between epistemology and epistemic logic.

Whitehead believed that education must give us ideas that are usable in our actual lives. This line of thought is naturally provoked by the significant abundance of inert ideas that people pile up though education. The main reason for that, I claim, is the wrong focus of traditional education. It aims at producing individuals that would deliver high results on exams and tests. I take Whitehead’s claim the education must put emphasis on usable ideas as my starting point. I give a specific interpretation of useable ideas as abilities or functions. This provides a ground for connecting Whiteheadian thought to an already existing educational platform, offered by Nel Noddings. Noddings develops a cognitive theory of education which places cognitive structures (I assume a robust analogy between structures, functions, and abilities) in the center of educational concern. At the end of the paper, I estimate some consequences from adopting the terminology of functions for connecting between human and machine learning.

An undiscovered chapter in the history of architecture comes from the ex-Soviet Republic of Georgia. Poetics of Architecture is the name given to the studioworkshop at the Georgian Technical University set up by the Georgian architect Shota Bostanashvili (1948–2013). From 1990 until his death he delivered insightful, playful and rather provocative lectures on architecture at this university. He preferred to call his architectural philosophy, critical discourse on architecture. Themes ranged from poetics to metapoetics of architecture. His philosophy of architecture is illustrated by some of his designs and executed projects which demonstrate a drift from existentialism to the philosophy of play. This study includes reference to his last building, a project whose demolition Bostanashvili witnessed before passing away. Based on the concept of the return of the sacred, this edifice was a sort of counter movement to technogenic architecture.

The purpose of the present study is that of examining what I call Robert Nozick’s “evolutionist turn” in ethics. More specifically, my aim is to provide an answer to the following question: what type of ethical theory does Robert Nozick sketch in his last book, Invariances? My first objective will be that of delineating the philosophical framework which will accommodate my future discussion, highlighting the distinction between the metaphysical and scientific approaches to ethics as proposed by Ken Binmore, but also Emanuel Socaciu's taxonomy of ethical theories, which stems from the particular way in which moral philosophers tackle the nature of ethical norms and moral motivation. I then set forth to show that, in the philosophical framework previously described, Robert Nozick's approach from Anarchy, State, and Utopia should be seen as a metaphysical one. The last and most important part of my study aims to show how Nozick's “evolutionist turn” took place and developed, from his perspective on rationality in The Nature of Rationality, to his ethical theory advanced in Invariances.

Processuality as refusal to “freeze,” “eternize,” and fragment reality is an attempt to deconstruct the I’s main mechanism, which is, as it was named in psychoanalysis, the compulsion of repetition. Through this deceit and illusion fabrication mechanism, the knowing I tries to “freeze”, to “fixate” and to fragment reality, through “catching” it in different images, formulae, dogmas, theories, ideologies, symbols and systems which become just as many “icons” or graven images of reality. This attempt of deconstruction is made from the perspective of a philosophy/vision of process, quite sporadic in the Western space, bringing arguments from the perspective of Henri Bergson and Emil Cioran’s intuitionist philosophy, as well as from that of the new scientific paradigm of quantum mechanics. All these philosophies could be seen as philosophies of process, demanding as it were an understanding of reality in terms of process, and not of result. This understanding of process takes place with the help of intuition, the only one which can grasp, beyond the static, rigid and artificial concepts or categories of the intellect, the movement, “verb” or interior pulsation of things within the framework of an integration process which reveals the unity, non-separability, intercorrelation and mutual interconnectivity of things.

In the present inquiry I explore the concept of conceptual analysis, looking for ways for it to be improved, and I come to the following conclusions. Conceptual analysis as ordinarily understood in analytic philosophy is a method which consists in drawing a conclusion about what the definition of a predicate is on the basis of an armchair investigation into whether the predicate is semantically applicable in different possible cases; but, the concept of conceptual analysis can be improved by making two changes to it: 1) the investigation into whether the predicate is semantically applicable in different possible cases is not to serve as a basis for a conclusion about what the definition of the predicate is, but as a basis for a conclusion about whether this-and-this is an only necessary, only sufficient, both necessary and sufficient, or neither necessary nor sufficient condition for the predicate’s semantic application; 2) the investigation into whether the predicate is semantically applicable in different possible cases is done not only from the armchair, but also empirically.

In the first part of this text, the author exposes the main features of the liberal or civic state, because both communitarians and multiculturalists tend to criticize that type of state. Their critique of the liberal state and the liberal self as an unencumbered self is “culturalist” by its character. However, it is an expression of conceptual confusion, i.e. of their incomprehension of an essential difference between two conceptual levels: one that belongs to the purely normative rights-justifying perspective and the other that refers to the ontological perspective. Consequently, both of them reject the central liberal thesis according to which the right is prior to the good.The author agrees with an assessment of Richard Robson that multiculturalism is only a form of communitarianism. Contrary to communitarians and multiculturalists, he additionally argues that collective rights are incompatible with the civic state in its pure form because there are structural differences between civic and specific minority rights.Further, the author attempts to show that communitarianism and multiculturalism are forms of postmodernism. Namely, brought to their ultimate logical consequences, the mentioned orientations can be connected to the postmodern notion of radical, irreducible difference.In the conclusive part of the text, he summarizes the common points of communitarianism and multiculturalism and emphasizes the importance of these contemporary theoretical tendencies.

Conceptual analysis as a method of inquiry has long enjoyed popularity in analytic philosophy, including the philosophy of science. In this article I offer a perspective on the ways in which the method of conceptual analysis has been used, and distinguish two broad kinds, namely philosophical and empirical conceptual analysis. In so doing I outline a historical trend in which non-naturalized approaches to conceptual analysis are being replaced by a variety of naturalized approaches. I outline the basic characteristics of these approaches with illustrative examples, arguing that recent developments in the philosophy of science show that in order to achieve a more adequate understanding of scientific endeavour we need to prioritize the naturalized accounts of the method.

First a sketch of the current state of the debate of the phenomenon of consciousness is provided; based on it David Chalmer’s distinction between the weak and the hard problem of consciousness will be introduced. It will be indicated that Whitehead’s process philosophy is able to offer a promising basis for solving the hard problem by showing how the concept of consciousness is anchored in his metaphysical theory. In the remaining parts of the paper the so-called weak problem of consciousness will be addressed in more detail by comparing Whitehead’s speculative account with Piaget’s empirical research results concerning the phenomenon of consciousness. By showing that Whitehead’s and Piaget’s positions on consciousness overlap widely a kind of indirect empirical support of Whitehead’s philosophical position will be achieved. At those points where the two positions deviate – that is in only two points – there are indications that Whitehead holds the more plausible position. So this investigation confirms William Seager’s suggestion that more attention should be drawn to Whitehead’s process philosophy when trying to solve the hard, as well as the weak problem of consciousness. In order to substantiate this claim two topics are discussed from the point of view of Whitehead’s position of consciousness: (a) learning and consciousness and (b) artificial consciousness.

The bucket experiment in Newton’s Principia is quite simple. Nonetheless, physicists as well as philosophers and historians of science are still debating its purpose and success. I present two interpretations found in the literature. According to the first, Newton tries to prove absolute rotation and thus the existence of absolute space. According to the second, he tries to provide a definition of absolute rotation as it is used in his mechanics. Closely connected to this is his rejection of Descartes’ explanation of rotation and of motion in general. I conclude with a short discussion on whether the bucket experiment can be classified as a thought experiment.

According to Grimm (2014), we only understand a phenomenon if we know what other phenomena it depends on, and we identify dependencies according to how we answer “What if things had been different?” questions. I argue that this view meets with mathematical counterexamples. For, in mathematics, things couldn't have been different. I consider three replies Grimm may make, and argue they do not succeed.

We produce language forms via their relations in coordinate systems: languages. That is virtual language relativity. Languages are related to phenomena and work in the real life of communities. That is real language relativity. We use languages via symbolic behaviors, living in human communities. Relativism collapses at the level of successful exchange of experience between humans belonging to distant cultures. Relativism is a stance of not recognizing the real relatedness of all languages to one and the same human form and world. Absolutism (Universalism) is a stance of not recognizing relativity as definiteness, that is, the virtual interrelatedness of all languages. Languages are shaped by human life processes. We follow the path from “local languages,” which are analogous to ‘inertial systems’, (this represents ‘virtual relativity,’ which is analogous to special relativity in physics) to living people talking about one shared sensual world (this represents ‘real relativity’).

With a history spanning almost two centuries, during which technological advancements on the one hand, and the fluidity of social life on the other, have constantly posed new challenges, photography keeps redefining its place among visual artifacts, and its functions among self-regulatory societal mechanisms.As a widespread practice, photography has generated analyses and commentaries from many theorists of various fields, as well as from more than a few working photographers. Arguments and judgments on the status of photography with regard to its expressive possibilities, adhere to vastly different and often divergent points of view, and most importantly, raise considerable difficulties that prevent these discussions from relying on any methodological coherence.The present text presents some of these arguments and judgments. It aims to provide grounds for more orderly future debates on the artistic quality of photography and especially on the methods of investigating photographic artifacts.

The article analyzes the revision of the concept of politics caused by the exhaustion of the ideological paradigm. In modern philosophy politics acquires new meanings through prefixing, resulting in the emergence of such concepts as archi-politics, para-politics, ultra-politics, trans-politics, or bio-politics. These new concepts close the philosophical source of politics laid by the Greek tradition. The departure from philosophy as the source of politics is completed with the idea of police, in which prefixing as a way of conceptualizing politics reaches the linguistic limit. However, modern philosophy encompasses a more positive attitude, which is linked to the hermeneutic tradition of philosophizing of Heidegger and Gadamer that focuses on the preservation of thought and language in the source of political existence.

This article has been written in response to the texts by Richard Robson (“In What Sense is Multiculturalism a Form of Communitarianism”), and Slobodan Divjak (“Communitarianism, Multiculturalism and Liberalism”) with which the Balkan Journal of Philosophy (vol. 10, no 2, 2018) started a discussion on the theme Liberal Democracy and Cultural Diversity. I try to contest the position of these two authors–that multiculturalism and communitarianism belong to one and the same paradigm in political philosophy–by pointing out essential liberal normative elements in multiculturalist theory. My main thesis is that in order to clarify the relation between multiculturalism and communitarianism, we have to differentiate between descriptive and normative communitarianism. The latter is guided, in my opinion, by values, which stand in stark contrast with the liberal ones, whilst this is not the case with multiculturalism.