Institute of Philosophy

In his seminars, Deleuze claims that Spinoza is ‘an absolute geometrist’. This article contextualizes, explains and substantiates this aspect of Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza. I position Deleuze’s reading within both the long-running scholarly debate on Spinoza’s relationship to mathematics and within the evolution of Deleuze’s own relation to Spinoza. Deleuze’s idea that Spinoza is a geometrist is shown to consist of three elements. First, according to Spinoza, geometry is more fundamental than arithmetic. Second, Spinoza frees geometry from the realm of fiction and abstract and develops, as Deleuze says, a ‘mathematics of the real’. Third, Spinoza finds in geometry a language of univocity, by which he can avoid the equivocity and hierarchy of the Aristotelian worldview.

ABSTRACT We examined how event plausibility and suggested frequency influence the formation of false beliefs and memories using a blind implantation paradigm. Participants ( N = 855) rated 20 events (two critical, high vs. low plausible) for experience and frequency. One week later, 103 participants ( M age = 33.7; 62.1% women) who had not reported the critical events received a follow‐up survey suggesting they indicated experiencing four true and one false event (once or repeatedly), rating event belief and recollection before and after imagination. The high plausible event elicited higher false beliefs than the low plausible event under suggested single, not repeated experiences, with no statistically significant effect of imagination. False memory ratings did not differ by plausibility or suggested frequency pre‐imagination. False beliefs and memories ranged from 9.1% (low plausible repeated) to 52% (high plausible single). These findings emphasize how factors such as suggested frequency differentially shape false belief and memory formation.

According to some recent studies, until the 16th or 17th century, there was no concept of religion as such (“religion in general”), because before then, people only recognised their own faith as religion, and it was only after the European Reformation, which created conditions for religious pluralism, that this situation changed. The purpose of this article is to introduce and validate an alternative perspective. The authors argue that long before the European Reformation, in both the Islamic East and Christian West, the concept of “religion” (“faith,” “sect,” etc.) was utilised by certain scholars, who were engaged in the comparative analysis of religions. Typically, the conceptual framework for such analysis was provided by (proto)science and philosophy: thus, ʾAbū Maʿšar (d. 886) examined religions in the naturalistic context of astronomy (astrology), while al-Fārābī (d. c. 950) used the core concepts of Aristotle’s moral and political philosophy. As early as the 13th century, Roger Bacon (c. 1214 – c. 1294) developed the ideas of his predecessors and produced what might be referred to as a synthetic medieval theory of religion, which, in turn, influenced the later discussions on “religion” and religions.

In recent years, discussions on the epistemology of model organism-based research have emerged in the philosophy of science. A key topic of discussion is how the epistemic insights gained from model organisms differ from those gained through other experimental organisms used in laboratory and field research. Here, we argue that model organisms are epistemically special due to their nature as ontogenetically changeable, standardized, and evolved material model carriers. These characteristics afford six important kinds of modeling versatility that biologists marshal in their investigations: (i) synchronic target versatility; (ii) synchronic scope versatility; (iii) diachronic target versatility; (iv) diachronic scope versatility; (v) manipulation versatility; and (vi) discovery versatility. In presenting these dimensions of modeling versatility, we also clarify key notions such as ‘representational target,’ ‘representational scope,’ and ‘representational power’ as these apply to modeling practices that involve model organisms.

The review of two books on onomastic grammar outlines the issues raised by their authors without critique or discussion. In these works, grammatical features of proper names are systematically revealed to diverge from those of common nouns, and the distinctions go far beyond the most apparent one: the use of the definite article. In a vast array of languages, number, case, gender, possessive structures, quantification, syntactic distribution — all signal that proper names and common nouns fall into different (sub)categories. Moreover, proper names themselves are not homogenous: personal names and place names can clearly be set apart from each other in morphosyntactic expressions of spatial relations and adpositional selection, among other disparities. While the majority of contributions under review touch upon these issues, there are more original ones that digress from the general line. They either focus on a highly specific problem, or provide more detailed classification of proper names, showing that the division into just personal and place names seems insufficient. The books contain rich empirical data, and more than one linguistic perspective on their analysis. The review should give a taste of the current state of grammar research in onomastics.

Any scientific theory in the natural sciences is an artificial, complex, and abstract construct, consisting of many components (ingredients, constituents, structural elements). It is developed by scientists to gain and comprehend experimentally verified new knowledge about its domain of study. It is helpful to distinguish between two meanings of the term “theory”. The application domains of specific theories include particular kinds of realities. Examples include Newton’s celestial mechanics and various classical, quantum, and quantum- relativistic theories of gases, fluids, molecules, atoms, and elementary particles (theory of atomic spectra, Bohr’s atomic theory, Planck’s quantum theory of black-body radiation, quantum theory of the hydrogen atom, quantum- relativistic theory of black holes, etc.). The names of specific theories usually include the names of the types of realities they study. Abstract theories serve as general frameworks for a group of specific theories of the same kind (in particular, macroscopic, microscopic, or megascopic kinds). Examples of abstract theories are classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, and the theories of relativity, which act as common frameworks for concrete theories from classical, quantum, and quantum- relativistic physics, respectively. The article compares concepts of complex structure and development of specific theories with notions of structure and development of automobiles. Such a comparison is more useful and heuristic than analyzing theories in terms of paradigms or interdisciplinary matrices, which, in any case, are not part of scientific theories. The work employed methods of terminological and content analysis of the original text of Newton’s Principia and the comparative method. The aim is to consider Newtonian celestial mechanics as the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) of all particular specific theories. The role of Euclidean geometry as a potential LUCA for abstract theories will be explored in another article. An analysis1 of Newton’s Principia showed that celestial mechanics encompasses a wider range of components than physicists and philosophers of science typically consider part of a theory. Main results. Taking this theory as a prototype for all specific theories, the article demonstrates the existence of sixteen types of components within it. Components of the same type form a specific subsystem of the theory as a polysystem. In any specific scientific theory, all these subsystems together constitute an interconnected whole that is necessary but not sufficient for generating new knowledge. Conclusions. The article is of a historical- scientific and theoretical- cognitive nature, and the results obtained can be applied in research on the history and philosophy of science, as well as in the teaching of natural science disciplines.