Volume 64 (2009), 2

After the rule of the canonized Marxism has come to an end, the present situation of philosophy in Hungary might be characterized as pluralistic and colourful. The academic, educational and institutional structure of philosophy, as well as the situation concerning the publication of journals and books has changed equally. In general, each of the relevant… Read more

In 2007, a debate took place between Hungarian representatives of the analytic and continental schools of philosophy. (1) Boldizsár Eszes and János Tőzsér concluded their article about the history of analytic philosophy by the claim that the only possible method of philosophising is analytic. (2) Answering on behalf of continental philosophers, Tibor Schwendtner… Read more

After a brief analysis of the specifics of teleological explanations as opposed to causal explanations, the paper seeks to establish the irreducibility of the former to the latter by arguing that teleological explanations are inextricably tied to our notion of intentionality. Since this result undermines the very possibility of “a physicalist reduction” of the… Read more

The author considers two arguments concerning the nature of space which occur in Berkeley and which he thinks are not sufficiently discussed. The first one concerns the phenomenology of space, the second the physics of space. The first one is the “mite” argument, while the second draws from Newton’s two thought experiments concerning absolute space: the “bucket”… Read more

The article deals with the notion of générosité, an important concept of the 17th century moral philosophy, as well as with the metamorphosis of the meaning of this passion and/or virtue. The starting point of this metamorphosis is générosité as a virtue of the late medieval and early modern French noble man, whereas the end point is générosité as the passion/… Read more

The paper deals with some of the contemporary theories of science which see the latter as an organized cognitive activity. On the background of the controversy concerning the nature of rationality and relativism the author underlines the contribution of the sociology of scientific knowledge, showing its role in reconceptualization of the dichotomy between… Read more

The starting point of the following considerations is the assumption that philosophical communitarian discourse as well the juridical discourse about communitarian rights represent two sides of the same phenomenon. When the European Union was founded, the ideological basis of the liberal democracies, concerning human and individual rights, seemed to be… Read more

The aim of this paper is to offer an overview of the main positions in ecological ethics as a special field of applied ethics. All approaches in this field endeavour to extend the area of ethics to the non-human world; they have built their systems using different theoretical constructions concerning the meaning of nature. One can enumerate the following main… Read more