The article connects two issues: the city as text and neoclassical trends in urban design in the second half of the 20th century. These issues are presented on the examples of ideal cities: Washington 2000 – a design of Leon Krier, Nowa Huta and the residential complex of Ricardo Bofill in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. As a continuation of the ideal European city Shanghainese Lingang is presented designed by GMP.
I investigate the idea of science elaborated by Edmund Husserl in his later works, first of all, in Cartesian Meditations and the Crisis of European Sciences. The first part of this investigation has been published in the paper: Edmunda Husserla idea nauki i projekt fenomenologii jako nauki ścisłej [Edmund Husserl’s Idea of Science and the Project of Phenomenology as a Strict Science], Filozofia i nauka. Studia filozoficzne i interdyscyplinarne, 2019, 7 (2), pp. 247–264. Husserl claims that the transformation of philosophy into a strict science, which is the basic aim of his intellectual enterprise, is connected with a reform of all the positive sciences. Positive science is closely related to philosophy—both they have a common grounding and ideal. The paper also compares Husserl’s project of philosophy as a fundamental science with the today trends in philosophy and the plurality of its schools, attitudes, fields of problems and methods.
The author tries to explain what consequences for social morality ensue from the assumption that moral attitudes are expressed not only in words but also in reactive attitudes. P.F. Strawson assumes that acts of resentment can alter attitudes of those who have triggered them by their behavior. On the other hand, we are ready to control our outbursts of short temper and anger to a certain degree if we take into account agents’ motives and their limited ability to exercise self-control. Moreover, it seems that reactive attitudes – though less precise than verbal rebuke – are more frank and straightforward. Nevertheless, why must I, when I hear a mediocre academic researcher brag over and over again about his apparently essential contribution to philosophy, curb my moral assessment of his self-importance to the level of my irritation? Why should I feel constrained to keep my moral disgust in tune with my impatience mixed with amusement? Why shouldn’t I continue to believe that I can be an amiable character and a rigorous moral person at the same time?
The paper considers the idea of history as a science of Józef Kazimierz Plebański (1831–1897), the Warsaw historian and Polish student of Leopold von Ranke. In my article, I analyse assignments that Plebański set as history, the place of history in science in general, the problem of objectivity in history, and other major issues related to the study of the past in the thought of Plebański.
The symbolistic poetry of Alexander Blok is connected with the thinking of both philosophers and psychoanalysts about the world and the man inscribed in it by the phenomenon of “I”. When coming into contact with transcendence, the poet crosses the demarcation line dividing the rational and irrational world, consciousness and unconsciousness. In the first period of creativity, the Russian symbolist nourishes his imagination, infl uenced by the philosophy of Vladimir Soloviev, with longing for the ideal of femininity. The driving force of the Blok’s imagination becomes, understood after Freud, the desire to meet the ideal residing in the oneiric space, and then to unite with it at the dual level (physical and spiritual). From the psychoanalytic perspective, the cycle Verses about the Beautiful Lady is both an attempt to go beyond awareness and search for the sense of a poetic image, its original source in the unconscious, as well as entering into the mirror phase described by J. Lacan. Beautiful Lady plays a role of what the French psychiatrist appoints as an objet petit a: this object is essentially unreachable and that is why it raises a great desire in the lyrical subject. The mechanism of the transition from chaos to unity, though only apparent in Blok’s works, is identical to the psycho-physical experience of the child, observing himself in the mirror.
This paper proposes a generalized fractional controller for integer order systems with time delay. The fractional controller structure is so adopted to have a combined effect of fractional filter and Smith predictor. Interestingly, the resulting novel controller can be decomposed into fractional filter cascaded with an integer order PID controller. The method is applied to two practical examples i.e. liquid level system and Shell control fractionator system. The closed- loop responses resulting from the proposed method are compared with that of the available methods in the literature. For quantitative evaluations of the proposed method, Integral Absolute Error (IAE) and Integral Square Control Input (ISCI) performance criteria are employed. The proposed method effectively enhances the closed-loop response by improving the IAE values, reducing the control effort inputs to achieve the desired output. The disturbance rejection and robustness tests are also carried out. The robustness test reveals a significant improvement in the maximum absolute sensitivity measure. That is displayed in numerical simulations of the paper.
In the paper I present the famous argument between Peter F. Strawson and Bertrand Russell on definite descriptions. I do not go into details of the two rival solutions to the problem of definite descriptions. Instead I present the controversy against the background of two traditions within analytic philosophy, i.e. the philosophy of natural language (Strawson) and the philosophy of ideal language (Russell). In consequence, the aim of this paper is to sketch the principal features of the two traditions and to indicate their influence on the argument. In the first paragraph I discuss Russell’s theory of descriptions and present it as a result of dramatic changes that he had made in his philosophy before he finally presented them in On Denoting in 1905. The second paragraph deals with the two traditions within analytic philosophy after the linguistic turn and underlines the role of Strawson in the philosophy of natural language. In the third paragraph I analyze in detail Strawson’s arguments against the theory of descriptions and I focus on some details that are usually omitted in standard presentations. The fourth paragraph discusses Russell’s response to Strawson’s objections, i.e. the counter-arguments formulated from the standpoint of philosophy of ideal language. I end with some suggestions about how to reconcile both approaches.
The distinction between primary and secondary qualities, most famously outlined by Galileo, and subsequently supported, inter alia, by Descartes and by Locke, has widely been considered one of the crucial factors in the development of modern idealism. In its contemporary form, the distinction identifies some of the perceived properties as mental phenomena due to their content and structural dependence on the mind. However, this account of the primary/secondary distinction is largely different from its original version developed by the above-mentioned philosophers, within whose work the mental being of the perceived qualities was demonstrated objectively, from the conceptually-derived nature of matter, and not subjectively, by referring to the mind’s participation in the cognitive process. It was only at the next stage of the early modern subjectivisation of sense perception, best exemplified by such philosophers as Arnold Geulincx and Richard Burthogge, that the creative role played by the mind in sensation and, consequently, the mind-dependency of the sensible qualities was recognised – a turn influenced by the reinterpretation of Aristotelian philosophy offered by Jacopo Zabarella and the Paduan school, as well as by anti-Aristotelianism of the kind developed in Netherlands. Furthermore, the two different approaches to the primary/ secondary distinction can be linked with two main types of post-Cartesian idealism, i.e. Berkeleian and Kantian – a claim for which illustrative evidence from British philosophy, namely from Berkeley’s and Burthogge’s respective theories, can be drawn.