Non-Europeans and their Presence to History. Universality, Modernity and Decolonization in Ricœur’s Political Philosophy

This article reconsiders Paul Ricœur’s political philosophical writings on the task of decolonization and European responsibility in light of a horizon of intercultural dialogue. Departing from the exchange between Ricœur and his former student Enrique Dussel, it discusses the Ricœurian critique of modernity. After giving some background on Ricœur’s reflections on decolonization, it will clarify what Ricœur calls the “crisis of the concrete universal in the thinking and in the historical experience of Western Europe,” and what role cultural difference has in this crisis. Considering Ricœur’s explicitly European perspective, this will lead us to a critical discussion on the envisioned possibility of a world-historical subject. Finally, I will discuss the role of European self-reflection in relation to a horizon of intercultural dialogue and narration from a post-/decolonial perspective.

The Public of Contract, and of its Justification

In his most enlightening book Benson undertakes to give a public justification of contract law, which he distinguishes from a philosophical justification. This essay argues that this opposition is unsound. Benson’s justification is philosophical because it is internal: the justification contract provides for itself. As the justification is internal, the subject of the justification – those who, through it, understand the authority of contract – is the subject of what is justified: the subject of contract. This is the true public of the justification of contract law. And its justification to that public is nothing other than its philosophical justification. In a second step, the essay sketches how the justification of contract law develops so as to reveal its subject to be a concrete universal: civil society. Since that is understood in its philosophical justification, that, too, does not place the publicity of contract law in opposition to its philosophical understanding.

THE APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING RESPONSIBILITY FROM THE POSITION OF THE CONCRETE-UNIVERSAL THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT THEORY

The article deals with the problem of the most fundamental grounds for the analysis of different situations and meanings connected with responsibility. The proposed solution of this problem is based on concept of the concrete-universal. The conclusions of the concrete-universal theory of development make it possible to relate the objective principles of morality to the dynamics of interconnections of the universal moments that have been accumulating in the human nature in the course of the global development. The universal moments, abstracted by man in the form of categories, are organized in human existence in the form of certain aspects and interrelations that, being interwoven in a unique way, construct certain social situations and meanings reflecting thereof. The first stage of the research presents an analysis of the role of the world-inherent key universal moments in the formation of the phenomenon of responsibility. This helps to formulate the most fundamental characteristics of responsibility. The second stage offers a study of the specific forms of interconnections between the universal moments underlying certain aspects of responsibility. As a result, a categorical framework of universal moments representing a basis of responsibility was identified. This framework is inextricably linked with specific and unique content, is always filled with the concrete content of the circumstances existing at a particular period in time, of life situations of individuals. The paper shows how the concrete-universal organized in this way determines the most important situations and meanings related to the problem of responsibility. This approach made it possible to distinguish the substance of responsibility, connected with a certain objective situation, from its manifestations in the form of subjective components related to personal characteristics and states of a person, formulation of agreements, social norms and sanctions for their violation, various forms of accountability.

A Knowledge Representation of the Miller-Urey Experiment

We present an ontology log-OLOG- representation of the classical Miller-Urey experiment, usually considered as a paradigm for spontaneous generation of biomolecules on the prebiotic Earth and also, as a key in understanding the chemical evolution phenomena linked to the origins of life. Ologging The Miler-Urey experiment enables us, through the categorical notion of fibre product or pullback, to define the concept of Biogenic Space, as a space containing low complexity biogenic units subjected to appropriate physical and chemical conditions, facilitating the synthesis of highly complex organic molecules. Also, we characterize the Biogenic Space as a concrete universal object that could be associated with the preconditions for life inside various structures in the universe such as exoplanets and exomoons located in habitable zones, but also in interstellar and intergalactic organic clouds.

Formation synthesis. Revisiting the old problem

The key problem of social development is the unity and diversity of its staged transitions. Marxist literature of the second half of the 20th century tried to solve this issue within the framework of the formation synthesis concept. A concrete embodiment of this concept was implemented in medieval studies within the feudal synthesis concept. However, historical materialism largely gravitated to the abstract universal dialectic plan of historical reality analysis in which the description and explanation of the general in development was accompanied by a diminution of attention to the specific variety of the special in it. The excessive use of abstract-universal theory created a number of significant difficulties in the concrete analysis of the historical process, including difficulties in the analysis of specific transitions to a new formation. It is noteworthy that the variety of social development stages as a whole was described to the detriment of the diversity of individual societies, and vice versa. At the same time, empirical and conceptual generalizations were made in Soviet Marxism, which made it possible to go to the level of a concrete universal dialectic analysis of the historical process. In particular, it became possible to describe the formation transition as a process of the mutual transformation of the production methods of societies at different stages of development, which in turn made it possible to reveal the unity of the staged and synchronous diversity of historical reality.

Vocal imitation can create acoustic attractors to guide mothers to pups in a crowded colony of Mexican free-tailed bats: A case-study of computational modelling in behavioural biology

How can we understand vocal imitation, the rare ability of certain species to copy vocalizations and other environmental sounds? How can computational modelling assist us? Here we describe a step-by-step process of mutually accommodating biological data to an implemented computational model. We begin with observations of harbour seals and with a putative computational model of their vocalizations in a colony. At each point in the development of the model, we analyse our decisions from the perspective of a materialist theory of knowledge, drawing on its explicit claims regarding abstraction and the concepts of the abstract universal, the concrete universal and the biological totality. We are eventually led to focus on bats, specifically the Mexican free-tailed bat (Tadarida brasiliensis mexicana). A large colony is a pandemonium of visual, olfactory and auditory cues to a pup’s location. Our computational model shows that if each pup’s vocalizations are influenced by its neighbours, robust attractors develop in the soundscape across the colony. Vocal imitation radically simplifies the problem of a returning mother finding a particular pup. She need only ascend the gradient of similarity with her own infant’s vocalization. This strategy outperforms other simple spatial search strategies and yields a parsimonious explanation for the role of vocal imitation in bats. We reach this modelling conclusion in a principled and transparent manner.

The Individual as System

In British Hegelianism we find, forgotten, a weighty theory of individuality. This theory remains one of the most sustained attempts in the history of philosophy to analyze the individual, not in the social or psychological sense, but as a logical-metaphysical category. The Idealist conceptualization of the individual is bound with their unconventional theory of universals, for they argued that any individual is a “concrete universal,” and vice versa. This article reconstructs the British Idealist theory of individuality, highlighting its key insights: (a) the individual is not a simple unit, but a small system with interrelated parts; (b) the individual is not simply given, but is mediated by thought; (c) the individual is the conceptual glue holding the parts together and assigning them their respective places; (d) the conceptualization of the individual lies at the intersection of logic, aesthetics and systems theory.

DIALECTICS OF SOCIAL FORMS OF NECESSITY AND RANDOMNESS

The study aims to identify the socially necessary content in human existence and to contrast it with the content that has little or even negative significance for society development. Socially necessary means necessary in its higher, precisely human content, in relation to the human nature, society and individual. Since the necessary and random content in society are dialectically related, the study is reduced to revealing this interrelationship of the social forms of necessity and randomness. The study is based on the concrete-universal theory of development proposed by the group of authors under the leadership of V.V. Orlov. The concept of person developed by V.V. Orlov within the framework of this theory makes it possible to identify objective grounds for defining criteria for the degree of necessity of content in society. One of these grounds is linked with the universal, potentially infinite essence of a person, its deepest laws and needs, while the other ground, dialectically associated with that, is linked with a person’s work activity, its goals and objectives. These grounds allow one to trace the way the necessary content is distributed in the social and individual being of a person, revealing the most socially necessary content. The dialectical interrelationship of these grounds makes it possible to preserve the traditional approach to the understanding of necessity and randomness as correlative concepts turning into their own opposite under certain conditions. The study provides an important tool for critical analysis of the order existing in society and trends of its development in terms of the underlying needs of the universal human essence. In this light, it appears that the most necessary content in human existence is everything that contributes to unlocking of the fruitful potential of the human essence and corresponds to human values and humanistic ideals proven throughout the centuries.