Once flourishing in the early medieval India, the materialist Carvaka/Lokayata tradition of philosophy vanished centuries ago leaving mere bits from their foundational sutra, and from a few commentaries thereon. These are scattered in the works of their opponents, hence the winding path to reconstructing the Carvaka/Lokayata thought necessarily begins with evaluating the reliability of the source material. This paper deals with the problem of the brief account of two interpretations of the Carvaka/Lokayata aphorism: 'from these, consciousness', recorded by the 8th-century Buddhist authors Śantarak�ita and Kamalaśfla in the Lokâyata-parfk$a Chapter XXII of the Tattva-sańgraha(-pañjika), critically edited by the author of the present paper.

The current industrial constraints on production systems, especially availability problems

are complicating maintenance managers’ mission and making longer and further performance

improvement process. Dealing with these problems in a wiser managerial vision respecting

sustainability dimensions would be more efficient to optimize all resources. In this paper, and

after addressing the lean/sustainability challenge in a the literature to define main research

orientations and critical points in manufacturing and then maintenance specific context, two

case studies have been conducted in two production systems in Morocco and Canada, within

the objective to set a clearer scene of the lean philosophy implementation in maintenance

and within the sustainability scope from an empirical perspective. To activate the social dimension

being often non-integrated in the lean/sustainability initiatives, the article authors

reveal an original research direction assigning maintenance logistics as the leading part of our

approach to cover all sustainability dimensions. Furthermore, its management is discussed

for the first time in a sustainable framework, where the authors propose a new model considering

the lean/sustainable perspective and inspired by the rich Human-Machine interaction

memory to solve daily maintenance problems exploiting the operators’ experience feedback.

The author claims that Marx’s ideas have succeeded, the proletariat has been victorious in the class conflict but the victory is completely different from what Marx has expected. The vision of the proletariat state ended up in a total failure. The vestiges of Marx’s proposal testify to complete inapplicability of his main ideas to the circumstances of the contemporary world. The concept of a state managed by the proletariat class turned out to be defective. The ownership of the means of production has failed. The concept of private property defended itself and has even been strengthened. And where a public ownership won the upper hand, as in State Treasury, it turned out to be institutional and not collective. Moreover, the state interferes more and more vigorously in private businesses and their activities. On the other hand, however, the proletariat succeeded in the area of employment law where it won some durable legal guarantees. Thus Marx correctly perceived certain needs of the proletariat but proposed inapt solutions to them.

On a few examples of aquatic metaphors that invoke some of the most important philosophical concepts.

The author presents the concept of man in the philosophy of Erich Fromm. The article consists of two parts. In the first part, the author presents how Fromm characterised the existential situation of man; in the second part he describes love as the main factor in the action and development of a human being. Man is part of nature, subjected to the rules of its laws, but he also transcends nature by the ability to use mind. A human subject is aware of his/her limitations and weaknesses with regard to nature. He/she feels lost and lonely in relation to other people and the natural world. Therefore, s/he looks for the frame of orientation and references. This search is the most important existential problem. Love is the solution to all problems of human existence. According to Fromm, man is the subject of love.

This article provides an initial analysis, from a historical standpoint, of the problematic nature of conceptualizations of the notion of gene in molecular genetics. The starting point is an historical outline of the relation between classical genetics and molecular genetics; it is indicated how the conceptual baggage of classical genetics influenced the development of the concepts of gene used later in molecular biology. I also reveal two problems of genes in the philosophy of science, i.e., skepticism concerning genes and the concept of nominal gene. I conclude that concept of gene functioning within the framework of molecular genetics should be considered from the point of view of experimentalism and pragmatism. It seems that the concept of gene on the molecular level should be conceptualized—in order to remain functional—as broadly as possible and in relation to genetic material.

The leading purpose of this paper is to provide an answer to the question whether Karl Marx belongs to philosophy and history of philosophy, and whether placing him in these categories gives a fair picture of what he really intended to achieve. When analyzing Marx’s thought, one should remember that is his own eyes he was not a philosopher but a researcher who goes beyond the horizon of philosophy in order to undertake scientific and not ideological work aimed at organizing political battles of that time. Of course, what a particular thinker believes of himself cannot be an ultimate criterion for interpreting his/her academic output. The doubts are augmented when we consult Leszek Kołakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism – a book that is based on the assumption that “Karl Marx was a German philosopher”, and this starting point supports the critique of Marx’s thought. The problem arises from the fact that Leszek Kołakowski, who was a post-Marxist, despises science and philosophy, and sees myth as the basis of thought dynamics. Thus the question of the adequacy of his presentation of Marx aris es and strengthens the suspicion that Kołakowski did not present the real Marx’s philosophy but rather a myth of Marx’s theory centered on the idea of making people happy against their will and nature.

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.