scholarly journals What is Mathematics, Really? Who Wants to Know?

2015 ◽  
Vol 29 (52) ◽  
pp. 756-772 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Friedrich Otte ◽  
Luiz Gonzaga Xavier de Barros
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Metaphysical Realism ◽  
Objective World ◽  
Mathematical Symbolism ◽  
Copernican Revolution

AbstractFamous physicists, like Einstein and Wigner have been wondering, why mathematical symbolism could play such an effective and decisive role in the development of physics. Since the days of Plato, there have been essentially two different answers to this question. To Plato mathematics was a science of the unity and order of this universe. Since Galilei people came to believe that mathematics does not describe the objective world, it is not a reflection of some metaphysical realism. It is rather a reflection of human activity in this world. Kant, by his “Copernican Revolution of Epistemology” seems to have been the first to realize this. For example, number, or more generally arithmetic, was to the Pythagoreans “a cosmology” (KLEIN, 1985, p. 45), to Dedekind it is a means to better distinguish between things. The paper sketches the transition from an ontological to a semiotic interpretation of mathematics.

scholarly journals Civilizational Narrative and Philosophy at Higher Education Institutions

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-121
Author(s):  
N. V. Kuznetsov ◽  
A. M. Sokolov
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Human Activity ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
Higher Education System ◽  
Philosophical Education ◽  
Bourgeois Society ◽  
Degree Of Maturity ◽  
The One

The authors proceed from the postulate that philosophical thinking is the highest form of human activity, integrating all other types of human activity as its elements. Hence, any occupation of a person can be understood in the authenticity of its content only in the horizon of philosophical thought. This is what the philosophical education of specialists should be focused on, regardless of the direction of their activities. The article analyzes the decisive role of philosophical thought in the formation of self-consciousness of bourgeois society. The authors argue that its success was predetermined by the development of new forms of communication that contributed to the discovery of a new dimension of human existence, involving new types of its development. The displacement of philosophy to the periphery of spiritual production indicates the extinction of creative initiative among the bourgeoisie. In conclusion, the authors turn to the experience of Soviet education as an attempt to further develop the civilizational narrative of European civilization, considering the reasons for its successes and failures. According to the authors, on the one hand, the presence of philosophy as a mandatory element of the higher education system in the USSR testified to the creative potential of the new civilizational initiative; on the other hand, this philosophy has not reached a sufficient degree of maturity to correspond to the level of Soviet society development.

Performance-based validation of the human activity profile

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luci Fuscaldi Teixeira-Salmela ◽  
Sandra J. Olney ◽  
Revathy Devaraj
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Activity Profile

Ice-free area expansion compounds the non-native species threat to Antarctic terrestrial biodiversity

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grant Duffy ◽  
Jasmine R Lee
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Native Species ◽  
Climate Scenario ◽  
Climatic Environment ◽  
Species Establishment ◽  
Suitable Habitats ◽  
Terrestrial Biodiversity ◽  
A Site ◽  
Area Expansion ◽  
Free Area

Warming across ice-covered regions will result in changes to both the physical and climatic environment, revealing new ice-free habitat and new climatically suitable habitats for non-native species establishment. Recent studies have independently quantified each of these aspects in Antarctica, where ice-free areas form crucial habitat for the majority of terrestrial biodiversity. Here we synthesise projections of Antarctic ice-free area expansion, recent spatial predictions of non-native species risk, and the frequency of human activities to quantify how these facets of anthropogenic change may interact now and in the future. Under a high-emissions future climate scenario, over a quarter of ice-free area and over 80 % of the ~14 thousand km2 of newly uncovered ice-free area could be vulnerable to invasion by one or more of the modelled non-native species by the end of the century. Ice-free areas identified as vulnerable to non-native species establishment were significantly closer to human activity than unsuitable areas were. Furthermore, almost half of the new vulnerable ice-free area is within 20 km of a site of current human activity. The Antarctic Peninsula, where human activity is heavily concentrated, will be at particular risk. The implications of this for conservation values of Antarctica and the management efforts required to mitigate against it are in need of urgent consideration.

Science Regained [1962]

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Aubenque
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Human Thought ◽  
Motion Time ◽  
First Philosophy

Pierre Aubenque’s “Science Regained” (1962; translated by Clayton Shoppa) was originally published as the concluding chapter of Le Problème de l’Être chez Aristote, one of the most important and original books on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In this essay, Aubenque contends that the impasses which beset the project of first philosophy paradoxically become its greatest accomplishments. Although science stabilizes motion and thereby introduces necessity into human cognition, human thought always occurs amidst an inescapable movement of change and contingency. Aristotle’s ontology, as a discourse that strives to achieve being in its unity, succeeds by means of the failure of the structure of its own approach: the search of philosophy – dialectic – becomes the philosophy of the search. Aubenque traces this same structure of scission, mediation, and recovery across Aristotelian discussions of theology, motion, time, imitation, and human activity.

Reforming Arab Reason

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 19-42
Author(s):  
Khalid Shibib
Keyword(s):  
Arab World ◽  
Legal Reasoning ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Arab Countries ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Intrinsic Factors ◽  
Knowledge Based ◽  
Present Information ◽  
Cultural Construct ◽  
Political Economic

As a humanitarian worker who was professionally involved for decades in crisis- and war-shaken countries, the author strove to understand the political, socioeconomic, and cultural factors contributing to conflicts. This contextualization, with a focus on Arab countries, confirmed what other thinkers found: the majority of political, economic, social, cultural, religious, and finally humanitarian crises in the Arab world are man-made and can be attributed to both extrinsic and intrinsic factors. Central to the latter appears to be a shared cultural construct that can be termed “Arab reason.” This essay tries to present information on various aspects of the crisis; to understand why reform efforts come so late and why are they are more difficult for Arabs than for other Muslims. It continues by looking at the knowledge systems that govern Arab reason and their evolution, including the decisive role of the religious knowledge system. From there, it proposes some reform ideas including a renewed legal reasoning process with the goal of a future-oriented, knowledge-based, and inclusive Arab Islamic vision. A pragmatic way forward could be an additional unifying eighth legal school (madhhab/madhāhib) to counter sectarian conflicts and violence. This essay is built on a targeted literature search and is not a comprehensive review of the growing literature generated by distinguished thinkers on various aspects of Arab Islamic identity.

The public and the private: reconfiguring the interrelationship during a civil act

2019 ◽  
pp. 53-69
Author(s):  
Natalia Kostenko
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Online Communication ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Physical Interaction ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

The subject matter of research interest here is the movement of sociological reflection concerning the interplay of public and private realms in social, political and individual life. The focus is on the boundary constructs embodying publicity, which are, first of all, classical models of the space of appearance for free citizens of the polis (H. Arendt) and the public sphere organised by communicative rationality (Ju. Habermas). Alternative patterns are present in modern ideas pertaining to the significance of biological component in public space in the context of biopolitics (M. Foucault), “inclusive exclusion of bare life” (G. Agamben), as well as performativity of corporeal and linguistic experience related to the right to participate in civil acts such as popular assembly (J. Butler), where the established distinctions between the public and the private are levelled, and the interrelationship of these two realms becomes reconfigured. Once the new media have come into play, both the structure and nature of the public sphere becomes modified. What assumes a decisive role is people’s physical interaction with online communication gadgets, which instantly connect information networks along various trajectories. However, the rapid development of information technology produces particular risks related to the control of communications industry, leaving both public and private realms unprotected and deforming them. This also urges us to rethink the issue of congruence of the two ideas such as transparency of societies and security.

Civilization stress, cardiovascular risk, evidence based medicine, guideline

2009 ◽  
Vol 150 (19) ◽  
pp. 895-902 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kornél Simon
Keyword(s):  
Cardiovascular Risk ◽  
Cardiovascular Diseases ◽  
Chronic Stress ◽  
Randomized Clinical Trials ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Profit Sharing ◽  
Pole Position ◽  
Ethical Question ◽  
Drug Sale ◽  
Target Values

Cardiovascular diseases have the pole-position on the list of morbidity and mortality statistics. Despite the great advances have been made in management of cardiovascular diseases, prevalence of these disorders increases worldwide, and even younger and younger ages are threatened. This phenomenon is strongly related to obesity and type 2 diabetes pandemic, which shows an unequivocal association with expansion of modernized life-style. The pathomechanism proposed to have central role is the chronic stress induced by civilized life-conduct. The authors criticizes the everyday practice suggested for management of cardiovascular diseases, focusing on normalization of cardiovascular risk factors, instead of fighting against the primary cause ie. chronic stress. There is growing evidence, that achieving the target values defined in guide-lines will not necessarily result in improvement of patient related clinical outcomes. The statistical approach generally practiced in randomized clinical trials is primarily striving for the drug-sale, instead of discovering novel pathophysiological relations. Pharmaceutical industry having decisive role in research and patient-care is mainly interested in profit-sharing, therefore patients’ interest can not be optimally realized, and costs are unnecessarily augmented. Separation of patient-, and business-oriented medical care is an ethical question of fundamental importance.

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