Balkan Journal of Philosophy

Organic Marxism, a new development in the history of Marxism, has elicited scrutiny in China. Beyond merely being considered absurd, it has been accused of curbing China’s development on the pretext of ecological motivations,weakeningChina’s dominant ideology by introducing ideological competition, and enabling religious infiltration by promoting Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy and constructive postmodern philosophy, which are of a religious nature. Fortunately, organic Marxism has survived despite fierce attacks from fundamentalist Marxists. This paper intends to answer three questions related to this topic: How can organic Marxism survive in China? What is it about organic Marxism that attracts the Chinese most? What lessons can be learned from the fundamentalist Marxists’ attacks?

Mugham is deeply rooted in Azerbaijan’s history as it is undoubtedly depicted as the pearl of Azerbaijani musical art. Mughаm (Azerb. Muğam) (God sent music) is one of the main genres in traditional Azerbaijani music, part of the musical-poetic art of Azerbaijan’s nation. The Mughаm embodies philosophical poetry including the philosophy of music as a complement to the harmony of being. In 2008, UNESCO proclaimed the Azerbaijani Mugham as one of the masterpieces of verbal and intangible cultural heritage. This music must be understood in its two dimensions – as an example of an art and as a way of thinking, in which Sufism and Mysticism are two lines that intersect. The aim of the article is to show the unity of Azerbaijan’s spiritual culture and the synthesis of music and religion. Special attention is focused on Mugham as a type of connection with God, through mystical love and spiritual experience. This perspective differs from that of common research and discussions of Mugham, which view it principally as a unique type of poetic-musical communication between performers and a devoted audience. The post-Soviet period allowed Western scholars to become acquainted with the musical works of Azerbaijani masters of Mugham and to compare their musical-aesthetic features with those of German Romanticism. In this paper, we move beyond such considerations to claim that Mugham ought to be recognized ‘as a spiritual process preserving the dynamism of thinking’. The report will conclude with the concomitant claim that Mugham represents an intercultural philosophy.

The article addresses the two sides of the work of Nicholas Maxwell – his criticism of science and his call to bring about a revolution in academia encouraging it to become much more effective in tackling the real problems humanity is facing. I would use: It focuses on the connection of these two aspects of Maxwell’s work and provides a critical analysis of Maxwell’s conceptual framework. It is argued here that the two sides of Maxwell’s whole conception are not necessarily connected, and do not have to be. Academia can be more effectively organized even without a change in our understanding of science. Maxwell has argued that academia has to aim at making wisdom rather than knowledge its goal. The knowledge-inquiry framework that currently prevails should be exchanged for wisdom-inquiry. Maxwell has explained his understanding of wisdom in several publications, while not being fully consistent in his explanations of what wisdom-inquiry has to embrace. In addition, Maxwell’s original approach to rationality goes against traditional attitudes. Maxwell is definitely critical of the Enlightenment but his attitude to Romanticism remains unclear. Related to these, the article addresses the future tasks of universities.

In the following paper, I address the worry that there is an increasing gap between the way the world is perceived by students and by their professors and teachers respectively. I argue that even if there is indeed a huge difference between our two generations, ‘the gap’ becomes irrelevant when we engage in philosophising. I will attempt to provide three short proposals on how to eradicate the gap when teaching philosophy. My hope is to show that, if we really want to make an attempt to eliminate the lack of understanding between the students and us, there are four basic rules that we could apply to our educational method. My argument makes use of the concepts of truth-value, consensus and epistemic normativity.

The paper is devoted to the problem of investigating the identity of a personality in contemporary philosophy. The author states that some factors (intensification of cultural and communicative exchange, population migration, information technologies) have led to a significant transformation of the phenomenon of identity at the civilizational stage. The presented points of view and approaches of contemporary philosophers (representatives of psychoanalysis, existentialism, etc.) that the author relies on indicate a crisis of identity. The author of the paper describes creativity, communication, reflection, value-semantic sphere, cultural and symbolic environment as the criteria of identity. The author also constructs her own model of the identity system based on the famous Russian researcher, G.P. Shchedrovitsky’s concept of the system, as the way to avoid a crisis of identity. The author comes to the conclusion that the identity of a modern person is wholly constructed, in contrast to the phenomenon of pseudo-identity. The results of the paper can be applied in sociology, cultural studies, psychology in the context of the problem of personal and collective identity.

This article will address descriptive and normative concepts vis-à-vis their inferential value and epistemic evolution within the social sciences. The analysis focuses mainly on the normative concept, which arises in the intersection between various disciplines of the social sciences, blending within itself a dialectic between the subjective and the objective, between the individual and the social. The descriptive concept – which acts as a link between logos qua language and the empirical reality – will have less elaborated analysis. The article’s purpose is convenient for readers acquainted with the field in question as well as those for whom the topic is less known. Indeed, the article is intended to address the above concepts from the point of view of the political scholar. However, during the research process, it was considered appropriate that these conceptions have an interdisciplinary heuristic reflection in order to be of value and interest to scholars of political science, philosophy, and law. As a first step, we will present in classical form the meaning and explanation of the concepts in question, based on linguistic and philosophical dictionaries. The article also focuses on the solid definition given to the concept of normativity – understood in legal terms – by Hans Kelsen through his idea of a Base Norm (Grundnorm) and his critique of Max Weber’s sociological conception of norms. Secondly, we will outline the dichotomy between the concepts of “is” and “ought” – the former analyzed by Kant as a hypothetical imperative, as a determinant of goals and actions based on desires and, the latter considered as a categorical imperative, as a normative determinant based on reason. Another dimension of normativity is seen from the perspective of analytical jurisprudence, the dialectic created between formalists and anti-formalists in the treatment of morality, both in subjective and social terms. Finally, the emphasis will be placed on normativity in politics and in spoken language, dimensions that define the normative approach.

The article reviews cases of unsuccessful implicatures and possible reasons for misunderstanding the speaker’s meaning. The focus is on explaining misunderstanding with the graded salience hypothesis. Under review are examples of cases where the conventional meaning and intended meaning differ thus resulting in a misunderstanding. The graded salience hypothesis offers an explanation of how we understand expressions based on personal preference priority, so the main argument made is that in cases of misunderstanding the speaker and the listener prioritize different meanings attributed to the same expression due to differences in knowledge, personal background, familiarity with the expression in particular usage, etc. There are also cases of scalar implicatures where the inference meaning is not always the same. In such cases, the speaker’s meaning could be misunderstood if the listener considers a different meaning of the scalar expression as more salient than the one the speaker wishes to convey.

Ontological parsimony requires that if we can dispense with A when best explaining B, or when deducing a nominalistically statable conclusion B from nominalistically statable premises, we must indeed dispense with A. When A is a mathematical theory and it has been established that its conservativeness undermines the platonistic force of mathematical derivations (Field), or that a non numerical formulation of some explanans may be obtained so that the platonistic force of the best numerical-based account of the explanandum is also undermined (Rizza), the parsimony principle has been respected. Since derivations resorting to conservative mathematics and proofs involved in non numerical best explanations also require abstract objects, concepts, and principles under the usual reading of “abstract,” one might complain that such accounts turn out to be as metaphysically loaded as their platonistic counterparts. One might then urge that ontological parsimony is also required of these nominalistic accounts. It might, however, prove more fruitful to leave this particular worry to the side, to free oneself, as it were, from parsimony thus construed and to look at other important aspects of the defeating or undermining strategies that have been lavished on the disposal of platonism. Two aspects are worthy of our attention: epistemic cost and debunking claims. Our knowledge that applied mathematics is conservative is established at a cost, and so is our knowledge that nominalistic proofs play a genuine theoretical role in best explanations. I will suggest that the knowledge one must acquire to show that nominalistic deductions and explanations do indeed play their respective theoretical role involves some question-begging assumptions regarding the nature and validity of proofs. As for debunking, even if the face value content of either non numerical claims, or conservative mathematical claims, or platonistic mathematical claims didn’t figure in our causal explanation of why we hold the mathematical beliefs that we do, construed or understood as beliefs about such contents, or as beliefs held in either of these three ways, we could still be justified in holding them, so that the distinction between nominalistic deductions or non numerical explanations on the one hand and platonistic ones on the other turns out to be spurious with respect to the relevant propositional attitude, i.e., with respect to belief.

The paper presents the classical theory of the subject in the predication judgment, and then the Hegelian doctrine on the subject, with the intention of conducting a comparative analysis. The results of the analysis sustain the viewpoint according to which between the classical subject and the subject of speculative judgment there are some relations that entitle one to consider speculative judgment as a development of classical judgment, for the cases in which the subject is taken as a process.

In the present article, the author analyses the interpretation of the phenomenon of Christ by Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. The author uses comparative and hermeneutic methods of historical and philosophical research. Dostoevsky's Christ and Nietzsche's Jesus are interpreted as “conceptual characters” (G. Deleuze), occupying an important place in the philosophical constructions of both thinkers. Stating the epoch-making event of the “death of God” in European culture, they discover the origins of nihilism in Christianity itself and attempt (each in his own way) to recreate the original, pristine Christianity. Reconstruction of the original image of Christ makes it possible to comprehend not only the historical destiny of Christianity and the European portion of humanity, but also the prospects for overcoming the crisis of European and Russian (in the case of Dostoevsky) self-consciousness. It is argued that both interpretations, although far from orthodox Christianity, play the role of a central link in the development of the philosophic thinking of the Russian writer and German philosopher from the critical deposition of European humanism and metaphysics to new projects of human existence in the world. The conceptual images of Dostoevsky's Christ and Nietzsche's Jesus personally embody the spiritual attitudes and models of life that are timeless in nature, and at the same time serve as an expression of the “fundamental metaphysical positions” (M. Heidegger) of existential thinkers. The assertion of the absolute genuineness and beauty of the moral ideal of Christ allows Dostoevsky to return transcendence to the godless world – to substantiate the neo-Christian version of metaphysics, the religious-existential ontology. The “Glad Tidings” of Jesus, his life and death, appear in Nietzsche’s works as a practical elimination of transcendence, the Platonic dualism of the “true” and “visible” worlds. The spiritual attitude of Jesus reveals a direct affinity to Nietzsche's anti-metaphysical “philosophy of becoming”.

Evolutionary models for scientific change are generally based on an analogy between scientific changes and biological evolution. Some dissimilarity cases, however, challenge this analogy. An issue discussed in this essay is that despite natural evolution, which is currently considered to be non-globally progressive, science is a phenomenon that we understand as globally progressive. David Hull's solution to this disanalogy is to trace the difference back to their environments, in which processes of natural selection and conceptual selection occur. I will provide two arguments against this solution, showing that Hull's formulation of natural selection prohibits him from removing the environment from the selection process. Then I point to a related tension in his theory, between realism and externalism in science, and give some suggestions to solve these tensions.

The article reviews the concepts of the French anthropologist and political theorist Sylvain Lazarus and the philosopher Alain Badiou, who suggest a new perspective on the subjective foundations of politics as thought. The focus on the subjective foundations of politics can be explained by the initial ambiguity in the works of the French theorists, who interpret the activities of the intellectual activist in different ways. The paper shows that Sylvain Lazarus is more concerned with the intellectual activity of political activists, whom he categorizes as political activists and politicians by the degree of intellectual activity. It was concluded that, according to Lazarus, politicians occupy a priority position. They are presented as professional lone thinkers with revolutionary consciousness, which allows them to think politics from the perspective of a probable revolution. In this regard, the politics, according to Lazarus, is a politics of revolutionary action. It was found that in Alain Badiou’s theory the semantic emphasis is on the participation of intellectuals in politics. Based on Plato’s thought on the development of a philosopher, Badiou formulates the idea of an exemplary subject of politics. The exemplary subject of politics is a philosopher-mathematician who is good at mathematical logic.

The purpose of the article is to present the possibility of integrating basic learning theories into the Extended Intelligent Learning System for data processing, optimization, adaptation and decision making in learning, which is based on the combination of teacher and intelligent tutor with artificial intelligence implemented, which supports the target formation, learning strategy, pedagogy and control. As a framework for the creation of the integrative model of theories, process philosophy is used, which enables a better understanding and explanation of the different paradigms and their functional combination. The article explores the strengths and weaknesses of selected theories and focuses primarily on constructivism, as numerous studies on learning theories have found that a constructive approach to learning is at the heart of many models in both traditional and digital learning in the Era of Big Data. The article explores certain influential learning theories, including the AI methods, their advantages, flaws and fields of intersection with neurosciences in terms of their application in intelligent training systems. The goal of developing the integrative model is to realize the learner's potential in personalized knowledge formation in an intelligent learning environment and to enhance the efficiency of learning.

This paper reveals the importance of learning emotion concepts due to the efficiency of emotional granularity during the categorization of emotions. There are two ways of learning emotion concepts that can contribute to emotional granularity. First, we can learn emotion words. Second, we can learn the implicit content of our emotion concepts, i.e. how emotions feel to us. In order to complete the second task, we need to acquire vivid awareness and vivid memory of the implicit content of our emotion concept. I claim that only after completing the second task can we learn emotion words in a way that is efficient for the categorization of emotions. The problem with that claim is that we do not know how to study the implicit content of our emotions, and how to obtain vivid awareness of it. In this article, I sketch a basic solution to this problem. The article has three parts. In the first part, I outline Lisa Barrett’s Conceptual Act View in order to reveal the functional role of emotion concepts in our brains. In the second part, I explain Anna Wierzbicka’s classical attempt to define emotion concepts. In the third part, I suggest how it is possible to study the fine-grained details of our emotional experience in a scientific way. The goal of developing the integrative model is to realize the learner's potential in personalized knowledge formation in an intelligent learning environment and to enhance the efficiency of learning.

The paper develops a semi-formal model of learning which modifies the traditional paradigm of artificial neural networks, implementing deep learning by means of a key insight borrowed from the works of Marvin Minsky: the so-called Principle of Non-Compromise. The principle provides a learning mechanism which states that conflicts in the processing of data to be integrated are a mark of unreliability or irrelevance; hence, lower-level conflicts should lead to higher-level weight-adjustments. This internal mechanism augments the external mechanism of weight adjustment by back-propagation, which is typical for the standard models of machine learning. The text is structured as follows: (§1) opens the discussion by providing an informal overview of real-world decision-making and learning; (§2) sketches a typology of decision architectures: the individualistic approach of classical decision theory, the general aggregation mechanism of social choice theory, the local aggregation mechanism of agent-based modeling, and the intermediate hierarchical model of Marvin Minsky's “Society of Mind”; (§3) sketches the general outline of ANIMA – a new model of decision-making and learning that borrows insights from Minsky's informal exposition; (§4) is the bulk of the paper; it provides a discussion of a toy exemplification of ANIMA which lets us see the Principle of Non-Compromise at work; (§5) lists some possible scenarios for the evolution of a model of this kind; (§6) is the closing section; it discusses some important differences between the way ANIMA was construed here and the typical formal rendering of learning by means of artificial neural networks and deep learning.

We survey some of the consequences of the managerialism of science and education as practiced in European countries and its main results: the Bologna declaration and the Bologna process. One notable feature of this process is the gradual introduction of currently fashionable management terms into school curricula. These linguistic changes are the direct result of the neoliberal philosophy behind the concept of knowledge economy, namely, that all sciences must justify their economic value; moreover, the introduction of such terms is via government “strategic documents” that are never the result of a democratic public debate. As a case in point, we examine two such strategic documents issued by the Bulgarian ministry of education.

The creative industry daily faces genuine challenges in its work when it comes to advertising and meeting clients’ demands. Indeed, technology and the necessity of updating creativity resources urge on new approaches during campaigns, at least in the creative department. Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation stand for essential aspects in challenging new resources of creativity in a field where copywriters and art directors unfold incredibly sensitive messages based on strong and relevant insights. The present paper aims to point out the difficulties and opportunities of creative work in any advertising agency, by exploring the purpose, the barriers and the prospects of this activity in the context of a complex relationship between client and agency, brand and consumers. One could perhaps say that copywriters are just gifted people able to simply follow instructions given by the planning department. Actually, they have their own psychological and social barriers, which represent real challenges. Therefore, we have investigated these issues by conducting semi-structured interviews based on their creative experiences in both cases, as juniors and seniors, respectively. The data collected via semi-structured interviews are investigated by using content analysis.