The exponential diophantine problem for.Mihai Prunescu -2020 -Journal of Symbolic Logic 85 (2):671-672.detailsWe show that the set of natural numbers has an exponential diophantine definition in the rationals. It follows that the corresponding decision problem is undecidable.
Arithmetic on semigroups.Mihai Ganea -2009 -Journal of Symbolic Logic 74 (1):265-278.detailsRelations between some theories of semigroups (also known as theories of strings or theories of concatenation) and arithmetic are surveyed. In particular Robinson's arithmetic Q is shown to be mutually interpretable with TC, a weak theory of concatenation introduced by Grzegorczyk. Furthermore, TC is shown to be interpretable in the theory F studied by Tarski and Szmielewa, thus confirming their claim that F is essentially undecidable.
The Logic of Vagueness and the Category of Synechism.Mihai Nadin -1980 -The Monist 63 (3):351-363.detailsIn his article “Issues of Pragmaticism” published in 1905, in The Monist, Charles S. Peirce complains that “Logicians have been at fault in giving Vagueness the go-by, so far as not even to analyze it.” That same year, occupying himself with the consequences of “Critical commonsensism,” he affirmed, “I have worked out the logic of vagueness with something like completeness,” a statement that causes the majority of the commentators on his work, including the editors of the Collected Papers to ask (...) where this logic is to be found. The fever for finding Peirce's manuscripts is fed by the hope of some researchers of discovering the logic of vagueness, a hope that has grown since Carolyn Eisele's publication of his mathematical works. Others - and I count myself among them - believe that in reality this is a matter of something already known. That is, they interpret the affirmation ending the paragraph of reproach addressed to logicians, “The present writer has done his best to work out the Stechiology, Critic, and Methodeutik of the subject,” as a tripartite semiotic of the vague, still limited, according to Peirce's older works, to symbols, that is, to the signs of natural language examined from the perspective of logic. (shrink)
Burgess' PV Is Robinson's Q.Mihai Ganea -2007 -Journal of Symbolic Logic 72 (2):619 - 624.detailsIn [2] John Burgess describes predicative versions of Frege's logic and poses the problem of finding their exact arithmetical strength. I prove here that PV, the simplest such theory, is equivalent to Robinson's arithmetical theory Q.
The “Affairs” of Political Memory.MihaelaMihai -2019 -Angelaki 24 (4):52-69.detailsSelf-serving hegemonic visions of history are institutionalized by dominant memory entrepreneurs, simultaneously imposing an authoritative version of “what happened” and their right to articulate it. These visions and the hierarchies of honour they consecrate are cultivated trans-generationally, aiming to ensure the community’s political cohesion, as well as the emotional attachments that can ensure its reproduction over time. This paper has three objectives. First, it brings insights from social epistemology to bear on a conceptualization of political memory-making and proposes the concepts (...) of “hermeneutical dissidence” and “hermeneutical seduction” to capture the critical interrogation of such mythologies. It highlights the obstacles facing any attempt at subverting them, particularly given the resilience of cognitive and emotional investments in particular schemas of perception and understanding in relation to the boundaries of the community and its history. Second, I transplant the descriptive concept of “affair” formulated by pragmatic sociologists into debates about political memory, infusing it with a dose of normativity in order to shed critical light on various types of hermeneutical dissidence from dominant, emotionally anchored, exclusionary imaginaries. Third, to render the theoretical proposal concrete, I introduce two “memory affairs,” both triggered by debates over the meaning and gender of political resistance. (shrink)
Dionysus reborn: play and the aesthetic dimension in modern philosophical and scientific discourse.Mihai Spariosu -1989 - Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.detailsIntroduction: Play, Power, and the Western Mentality Whereas play has always had an important, if sometimes unthemat- ized, role in Western literary ...
Denouncing Historical “Misfortunes”.MihaelaMihai -2014 -Political Theory 42 (4):443-467.detailsThis essay’s starting point is Judith Shklar’ diagnosis of a pathology marring democratic societies: complex injustices passing as “misfortunes” that nobody feels responsible for. I propose that denunciations can reveal the political nature of the suffering that everyone conveniently ignores, thus advancing democratic accountability. While denunciations can target various invisible injustices and take many forms, this essay deals with the case of societies with an unmastered past of violence. In order to avoid taking responsibility for the plight of victims, the (...) past is often redescribed in the language of “catastrophe” or “necessity.” Building on Hannah Arendt’s views on spectatorship and storytelling, this essay analyses theatrical denunciations addressing the wider community. Theatre—professional or amateur—can repoliticise neutralised areas of social interaction and transform passive onlookers into reflective spectators. The Argentinean performance of escraches and Thomas Bernhard’s play Heldenplatz are discussed as examples of successful political denunciations communicated in dramaturgical form. (shrink)
Mircea Djuvara.Mihai Badescu -2008 -Proceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 40:5-14.detailsHis philosophical thinking was influenced by his legal knowledge, but when reading carefully his articles and papers we can notice a detachment from the philosophical premises in the development of the concepts of law. Like Del Vecchio, Djuvara makes no difference between law and philosophy and therefore the legal philosophy looks like a completion of law, these two concepts being comprehended only by a general, epistemological and philosophical approach; the issues related to the philosophy of law are not only isolated (...) from the big philosophical issues but there are closely related to them so that the philosophy of lawintegrates completely in the general philosophy. (shrink)
Conjunctions of exponential diophantine equations over $${\mathbb {Q}}$$.Mihai Prunescu -forthcoming -Archive for Mathematical Logic:1-6.detailsIn a previous paper of the author it was shown that the question whether systems of exponential diophantine equations are solvable in $${\mathbb {Q}}$$ is undecidable. Now we show that the solvability of a conjunction of exponential diophantine equations in $${\mathbb {Q}}$$ is equivalent to the solvability of just one such equation. It follows that the problem whether an exponential diophantine equation has solutions in $${\mathbb {Q}}$$ is undecidable. We also show that two particular forms of exponential diophantine equations are (...) undecidable. (shrink)
No categories
Non-effective Quantifier Elimination.Mihai Prunescu -2001 -Mathematical Logic Quarterly 47 (4):557-562.detailsGenera connections between quantifier elimination and decidability for first order theories are studied and exemplified.
“Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Socio‑economic and Political Consequences 30 Years After.Mihai Stelian Rusu,Corneliu Pintilescu &Dalia Báthory -2019 -History of Communism in Europe 10:7-17.detailsThe fall of the Berlin Wall stood for a symbol of change and freedom across the socialist bloc and inspired the inhabitants in Eastern Europe to take action and revolt against dictatorial regimes. A long and often painful process of social, economic and political transformation began. Scholars grouped their research dealing with such transformations under the label of “Transitology” and the developing subfields of “transitional justice” and “memory studies” expanded and caught the academic interest. The present argument looks at the (...) emergence and evolvement of these fields in parallel with a growing and changing society. (shrink)
Reference, Intuition, and Intuition About Reference – Notes on the Experimental Philosophy of Language Debate.Mihai Rusu -2019 -Studia Universitatis Babeş-Bolyai Philosophia:121-144.detailsThe introduction of experimental techniques as a tool of philosophical investigation has created quite a stir in analytic philosophy in the last two decades. Experimental results have shed a new light on traditional debates in various fields and have led to a reappraisal of the use and merits of various methods and types of arguments in philosophy. This paper provides an overview of the central debate regarding Machery et al.’s results and conclusions about the interplay between theory and various methods (...) that are supposed to provide evidence for (a certain) theory. The debate is connected with the initial setting of the question of reference and, more generally, with the main staples of the philosophy of language. A large part of the paper is devoted to a discussion of the most important arguments and perspectives that have been developed or reformulated as a result of the debate on experimental philosophy. The final aim of the discussion is to provide a basic description of the contemporary landscape of philosophy of language and related epistemology, to inform future research designs and developments. (shrink)
No categories
On Wyatt's Absolutist Account of Faultless Disagreement in Matters of Personal Taste.Mihai Hîncu &Dan Zeman -2021 -Theoria 87 (5):1322-1341.detailsTheoria, Volume 87, Issue 5, Page 1322-1341, October 2021.
Theorizing change: Between reflective judgment and the inertia of politicalHabitus.MihaelaMihai -2016 -European Journal of Political Theory 15 (1):22-42.detailsIn an effort to delineate a more plausible account of political change, this paper reads Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory as a corrective to exaggerated enthusiasm about the emancipatory force of reflection. This revised account valorizes both Bourdieu’s insights into the acquired, embodied, durable nature of the political habitus and judgment theorists’ trust in individuals’ reflection as a perpetual force of novelty and spontaneity in the public sphere of democratic societies. The main purpose of this exercise is to reveal the mix (...) of continuity and discontinuity that is characteristic of most transformations in the political common sense of democratic societies. In other words, this paper seeks to offer a more complex understanding of the inertial character of reflective judgment and of the difficulty of shifting the categories that define the political common sense. By cross-pollinating the ever-growing literature on reflective judgment and Bourdieu’s sombre theory of politics, we can better calibrate our expectations regarding the possibilities of significant democratic transformation in late capitalist societies. (shrink)
Is Interaction Just a Dynamical Process?Mihai-Alexandru Petrișor -2022 -Studia Universitatis Babeş-Bolyai Philosophia:83-100.detailsIn this article I argue for a pluralistic vision of interaction and social cognition in general: we should imagine the landscape of types of interactions as a line segment whose ends represent radical positions (purely inferentialist or purely simulationist theories on one end and radical embodied cognition on the other) on which different types of interactions fall. The closer to any extreme a particular type is, then the more likely it is to be better explained by the theory the extreme (...) point represents. In order to delineate the controversy that stems from different conceptualizations of the same phenomenon and to articulate my position, I criticize Gallagher’s radical claims of embodied cognition as constituting social interaction. The main point that I make regarding his theory is that, even though it provides a satisfactory explanation for types that correspond to motor-perceptual processes, it only manages to metaphorically describe cases of interaction that involve articulated language use and, generally, semantically charged actions. Given that a serious researcher should be interested in accurate predictions or descriptions, it follows that Gallagher’s account is not all-encompassing, and, given the many virtues of other theories, we should adopt a pluralistic point-of-view. (shrink)
No categories
Finitistic Arithmetic and Classical Logic.Mihai Ganea -2014 -Philosophia Mathematica 22 (2):167-197.detailsIt can be argued that only the equational theories of some sub-elementary function algebras are finitistic or intuitive according to a certain interpretation of Hilbert's conception of intuition. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relation of those restricted forms of equational reasoning to classical quantifier logic in arithmetic. The conclusion reached is that Edward Nelson's ‘predicative arithmetic’ program, which makes essential use of classical quantifier logic, cannot be justified finitistically and thus requires a different philosophical foundation, possibly (...) as a restricted form of logicism. (shrink)
Values, Leaders and Social Representations.Mihai Şleahtiţchi -2018 -Human and Social Studies 7 (3):13-22.detailsWhen referring to values as “general principles of desirability” or as “social cohesion binders”, one should bear in mind that such notions contribute decisively to the shaping and crystallization of social representations. It would be improper to believe that there may be in-depth studies upon people, ideas and events, as this approach disregards the fact that social representations have the capacity of being strongly anchored in the dynamics of relational processes, to the symbolic relationships specific to a given social field, (...) to the values that constitute the eloquent expression of this dynamics and this specific field of research. An eloquent example in this respect is the way in which the social representation of leaders appears; data show that there is harmony between the image of power the leaders have or could have and the axiological dimensions of the group participating in the elaboration of such an image. (shrink)
No categories
Contributions a l’identification des commentaires au Livre des Sentences de Pierre Lombard conserves dans la bibliotheque Batthyaneum d’Alba Iulia.Mihai Maga &Alexander Baumgarten -2014 -Chôra 12:287-297.detailsThe Alba Iulia Battyaneum Library, subsidiary of the National Library of Romania, was visited in the summer of 2014 by the authors with the intent to explore the commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences which are preserved in the renowned collection of this library. With the help of research tools currently available, the authors verified 21 manuscripts and identified 20 commentaries, and also 4 copies of the Sentences’ text. Overall, the authors discovered five yet unmentioned copies of commentaries. The article presents (...) the newly ascertained details on 17 manuscripts, in relation with previously known data. (shrink)