Proceedings of the XXII World Congress of Philosophy

With the use symbols by political subjects arises the problem of their understanding. Groups of symbols can be created in such a way to contain a message. The state coat of arms is a political symbol, in which is concentrated a number of meanings and significance. The coat of arms — it is a symbol garnished with colossal endless meaning and potential withing its power. Besides this, the state coat of arms appears in numbers like mandalas: it is like this archaic symbol, that combines various geometric shapes expressing the idea of order. The state coat of arms perceptively unites people of different genders, ages, social status andfaith into a united orderly community. A person contemplating the state coat of arms understands it as the center of the universe. The coat of arms is transformed into endlessness, attaining the result of uniting the macrocosm — society and state — and with the macrocosm — man. The function of political symbols exists so as to represent the “body” of a concrete political subject or society as a whole, at the same time in every part of a text “is highlighted” yet another part of the endless semantical richness of the symbol. Political symbols have important significance for the support or destruction of socio-political order. But the chief essence ofpolitical symbols — is the ability to give meaning to all political activities, and the regular “exposition” of state symbols guarantees the stability of the existing socio-political system.

The paper presents the reflection on philosophical foundations of contemporary physical concepts of global history and global structure of Universe. It shows that Democritus's dualism of "matter and void" is changed now in dualism of "matter and energy" in the frame of the strings theory, where anything what looks like "a void" is absent. At the same time the Poincare-Perelman's theorem calls to rethink Democritus's philosophy in the light of "space and hole" discourse and call it to come back. On the level of philosophy doctrines for contemporary fundamental physics it in necessary to combine dialectically the concept of "matter and void/hole" and the concept "matter and energy" (or "matter and singular conditions"). It is possible to do on the way of rethinking of H. Bergson's ideas presented in his book "Matter and memory". The conclusion is that fundamental dualism consists the relation "visible matter - invisible historical memory" inside of Universe.

The aim of this paper is to consider the vicissitudes of “area studies” from the Second World War to the present focusing eventually on the normative imperative to develop a new paradigm of “planetary thinking.” First an overview of the history of “area studies” will be given from the start in the U.S. during the Second World War in response to the geostrategic imperative for America to know its new geopolitical responsibilities in a world divided by war. This security imperativemorphed into the postwar requisite to develop a counterhegemonic strategy against soviet communism in the hot spot parts of Asia, Latin American, and later Africa. The latter military-oriented strategy was added to with research into development and modernization in the third-world through to the boundary displacement of areas studies at the end of the Cold War into the current era of globalization. At this very historical moment of transition a new rationale for area studies emerged in the form of a geoeconomic imperative – both in the U.S. and, with a different gloss, in South Korea in the late 1990s. Second, on the basis of this historical apercu, the argument will be proposed that, given the problem of global warming and the issue-area of global inequality lurking behind the UnitedNation’s Millennium Development Goals, a pressing contemporary task for philosophy is to make a critical contribution to developing a new planetary perspective for area studies informed by a constitutive philosophical anthropology attendant to the species being of human beings.

I present an outline of a normative and non selectionist theory capable of ascribing functional statements to biological items. Biological items are ussually exemplified by the organs as well as traits or behaviours. But we can consider representations too. In fact, my proposal is focused towards a teleosemantical theory of mental content. The teleosemantic approach explains the content of beliefs in terms of the biological functions of those states. Usually, teleosemantical theories of mental representation either ellaborate previously a general theory of functions for biological items, this is the case for Millikan, Neander or Price, orassume a previous selectionist one, as Papineau does. But these proposals are frequently adaptationist in order to keep normatitvity in whatever functional adscription. The recent contributions to the state of the art show the problems of this kind of selectionist view. But they don’t consider the problem of normativity in functional adscriptions. And this problem become important when we pay attention to mental representations as biological facts. I propose an outline of a nonselectionist nor adaptationist account of biological functions capable of keeping normativity. My account is suitable to biological traits, in general, and mental representations characterized in terms of biological functions.

The main purpose of the paper is to justify the thesis that the presence of biological information is conditional for existence and persistence of life. We will begin with the notion of biological information. In this proposition information is identified with impact, and it is shown the dependence of its location and functioning on the level of organization of animate matter. In accordance with a suggestion of Thomas Aquinas, it seems that precisely information is the reason for the appearance of socalled immanent activities where new life appears.

Biology, established around 1800 as the “science of life,” has developed as not only a specific scientific discipline but it has also continually served as a kind of social knowledge. Biological knowledge supported the modern order of the sexes and the two-sex model that it was structured along, as well as modern racism and multiple forms of social inequality articulated by dichotomizing the normal and abnormal. However, the fledgling discipline of biology alone was not capable of developing the epistemological as well as political-ethical competence necessary for attaining this central status in the order of knowledge; it was possible only because philosophy and the emerging social sciences gave biology a specific status. The paper outlines the closely connected, but different attitudes of Kant and Schelling towards biological knowledge. While focusing on their different epistemic strategies towards the new form of nature knowledge, I also point to their different political-ethical articulations of biological knowledge. I conclude that a critical analysis of philosophies of nature around 1800 contributes not onlyto an understanding of the symbolic power of biology in the modern order of knowledge but also to rethinking philosophy’s relation to scientific knowledge today.

To bring our topic within manageable limits, the attempt will be made to approach the philosophy of nature in a systematic manner. Borrowing the quantitative categories of one, some and all, nature will be treated as first as singular, then a whole or totality and finally discussed in terms of various distinctions which set nature apart as a part. Past philosophic treatments will be discussed when germane to this treatment, as an example of a particular view of nature. I will argue that nature is not a per se being, cannot be singular or the whole and that the various distinctions that separate the natural from other—the artificial, theconventional, etc.—are inadequate.

Cosmology is defined as the science of the large-scale structure of the universe. Indian cosmology is a philosophical theory regarding the cycle of creation from supreme consciousness to matter and from matter to supreme consciousness. It deals with the creation of the cosmic mind and the microvita, and origin-evolution-future of matter, individual mind and life. There is important input from Vedic and Tantric traditions. This school follows subjective approach by dealing with absolute (spiritual) as well as relative (psycho-physical) knowledge of the universe. The scientific cosmology is a developing multi-disciplinary science regarding origin-evolution-future of matter and life. This science follows objective approach by dealing with physical knowledge of the universe. The paper will focus on scientific analysis of the basic concepts of Indian cosmology.

Within the scope of multifactor approach, the ways and peculiarities of nonlinear paradigm formation and its establishment, as well as, multidimensional nature and essence of things in a single research field of the interdisciplinary science that is directly based on the perception of multidimensional integrity of the real world were significantly reconsidered. The idea of multifactorness is deployed as the scientific and logical basis for the methodology of scientific and philosophical research. In the course of investigation, it was revealed that the contemporary level of understanding the notional diversity of "multidimensionality" concentrates within the conceptual structures of nonlinear thinking style considering the principle of oriental world-perception and world-understanding.

Author tried in this paper to deduce the principles of subjective world from some new concepts on objective world. I believe, through a full understanding of the objective world, we may easily approach to a general understanding of our subjective world – the human mind itself. One of the major obstacles to achieving this goal is that we still do not have a theoretical system that can describe both the worlds with the same concepts. In this paper I will put forward some of such concepts first and then try to deduce mind’s general organization and activities on the basis of those concepts.

Explanation of the reason of ecological crisis – a key to development of a valuable paradigm new to the western mentality. The western variant of development has led to accident of self-destruction of the person or its exit on autotrophic stay out of the Earth. The dream cosmists (Tsiolkovsky, Vernadsky, Teilhard de Chardin, etc.) is half carried out, say, in connection with an exit racketeers in space. In traditional culture this exit was always: «Dao», the Buddhism, and shamanism. In traditional culture the relation to an inhabitancy was regulated always by the developed system of a taboo and the restrictions producing internalinterfacing space unities. Time puts a problem of judgement of this unity for an exit from environmental problems.

Life on our planet is a global ensemble termed bios. We emphasize that bios and the Earth per se form an integral system that behaves as a single coherent object. This idea is strongly supported by our knowledge of the organization of bios and its evolution on the geological time scale. This article considers interactions between the Earth, a self-organizing system, and bios, its subsystem, in ontological terms. Both systems are open. They are characterized by non-linear processes.

The problem of construction of the unification theory which would become the universal tool for rethinking not only epistemology, philosophy of science and technology but all kinds of human experience is discussed. As like mathematics, Conceptgenesis or General Unification Theory has the hypertheoretical status for its applications. As the natural science, it investigates the natural events streams with “initial” and “boundary” conditions in the corresponding conjuncture. Law ofuniversal simulation is key principle of the Unification Theory. Accordingly with this Theory, the same structure of updating of object may be observable in various conceptual domains. These inconstancy structures should become the basis for General Identification and Classification of a subject of supervision.

Eyesight is practically a main organ of senses for man orienting in the world. But it is also a result of evolutional development of nature from 600 to 450 mln. years according to evolutional scale and still it preserves its stable contradictory inner structure. The genesis of eyesight has been reconstructed in Arthropoda type. It was made possible by using a philosophical approach, namely, by considering this process from the dualism point of view. Two Laurence's concepts were used as basic interrelated categories. They are intranspecific and interspecific aggressiveness. Development of the two interrelated opposites results in the formation of a new kind – eyesight (Hegelian not Marx’s), typical for all succeeding kinds of animals. The eye has become a unity consisting of on- and off-type ganglionic cells, that percept both fixed end non-fixed objects simultaneously. The two eyes of higher animals and man allow to orient in the world, and depending on outside conditions, they can fully enough demonstrate one of the stable contradictory inner tendencies. This is just one of the directions in studying philosophy of nature.

Using logic analysis method with contemporary philosophy conception, made the definition of a life. Analyzing the reason of a disease and characteristics of drug, explained the Chinese traditional theory of materia medica. Demonstrated the best drug contain the function of Monarch drug, Minister drug, serviceman drug and missioner drug, instructed human drug reseach in future.

Though many philosophers and scientists have been tried to define life, the view of materialism is substantiated by modern bioscience. Reductive approach of biology, however, cannot explain the holistic nature of life. As the science of complexity showed, life form is appeared on earth by emergence with self-organized criticality. From the interdependency of emergent life on others, man could be called as 'Homo interdependant' on network of biosphere. Phylogeny of life in evolutionary process showed 'difference and repetition'. With the emergent nature of life, difference caused the individuality, which is a one of most distinguished features of life. Furthermore, because Individual experience cannot be replaced by others, responsibility of each daily life was also emerging.

The notion of chance plays an important role in some philosophical analyses and interpretations of scientific theories. The most obvious examples of that are the theories of evolution and quantum mechanics. This notion, however seems to be notoriously vague. Its application in such analyses, more often than not refers to its common-sense understanding, which, by definition, cannot be sufficient when it comes to sound philosophical interpretations of scientific achievements. The paper attempts at formulating a ‘typology of chance’. It distinguishes eight different meanings of this notion. Those meanings can be found in classical philosophical accounts of chance, in the common usage of this term, or form logical possibilities of its understanding. Subsequently, the paper points to those forms of the notion in question which may and may not be properly applied to scientific theories and ideas – given usual characteristics of natural sciences. It also shows – by the examples of particular theories mentioned above – which of the distinguished forms of the notion of chance are actually applicable in the context of these theories.

The present thesis, compatible with Darwinian theory, endeavours to provide original answers to the question of why the evolution of species leads to beings more complex than those existing before. It is based on the repetition of two main principles alleged to play a role in evolution towards complexity, i.e. "juxtaposition" and "integration". Juxtaposition is the addition of identical entities. Integration is the modification, or specialisation, of these entities, leading to entities on a higher level, which use the previous entities as units. Several concrete examples of the process are given, at the genetic level (introns), at the anatomical level and at the social level. Structures where integration at one level leaves the units at a lower level in a state of relative autonomy can be describedusing the metaphor of the "mosaic", and the description can also be applied to the human brain and functioning of thought, where essential functions such as language or memory have a mosaic structure.

Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm reveals a pattern of scientific progress, in which normal science alternates with scientific revolution, but he underrated too much the function of scientific test in his pattern. Wesley C. Salmon pointed out that, on criticizing the so-called testing pattern of science, Kuhn focused all his attention on a single testing model, namely hypothetico–deductive (H–D) schema. However, as a matter of fact, many philosophers of science had already abandoned that schema and taken Bayesian schema as a proper testing model. The main difference between Bayesian schema and the H–D schema lies in that the former is a testing model for more than one theory while the latter just for a single theory. Since Kuhn, multi-theoretical testing model has become aconsensus among experts, that is, a theory and its rivals should be faced with testing together, rather than a theory being tested in isolation. Kuhn was correct in finding the H–D schema not appropriate to scientific test, but didn’t catch the propriety of Bayesian schema in this field. This led to his disapproval of the logic or method of scientific test. I agrees largely with Salmon’s appraisal of Kuhn’s view on scientific test, and gives a further argument for it. I’ll employs Bayesian schema to re-examine Kuhn’s theory of paradigm, uncover its logical, or rational, components, and thereby illustrate the tension structure of logic and belief, rationality and irrationality, and comparability and incommensurability in the process of scientific revolution.

This paper discusses Hacking’s experimental realism and suggests a concept of realization to the issue about realism. I first rephrase Hacking’s experimental realism by reconstructing them into two theses and three arguments. Then I consider that Resnik’s objection to Hacking’s experimental realism. According to my understanding of Hacking’s experimental realism, Resnik’s objection failed because of his position at theory realism. Nevertheless, I think that there are still two problems about the experimental aspect of the experimental realism. They are the pessimistic induction of experimental science argument and the combination of apparatus argument. I attempt to give a new perspective on the realism issue by proposing a set of related concepts containing categorization, model, and realization. Last, I show that this conceptual scheme can give a better solution of the two problems and cast a new light on the realism issue.