This paper explores the relationship between epistemic and instrumental rationality in the methodology of science. Instrumental rationality concerns the means and ends of an action, epistemic rationality deals with the normativity of the rules of inference. There are many attempts to describe epistemic rationality as merely a kind of instrumental, as an instrumental rationality in service of cognitive or epistemic goals. The paper explores the instrumentalist conception of epistemic rationality, its philosophical importance, its plausibility and defensibility. The arguments of the proponents of the instrumentalist conception are compared to the attempts to naturalize moral judgments in philosophical ethics.
The philosophy of the sophist Antiphon is viewed as manifestation of a nihilistic attitude to the state and its laws in connection with the deepening crisis of polis values at the end of V century B.C.
The paper is a review of debates of the time. When Hilary Putnam had worked out his functionalist solution to the mind-body problem, he discovered that it was only a more precise version of Aristotle
Hippolytus has long been considered an early Christian martyr, bishop of Rome, even an anti-pope, and a prolific writer, who left to the posterity a large corpus of writings of various nature. Some of these writings are now extant in their entirety or in a fragmented form; others have recently been recovered or identified as Hippolytan. It is clear, however, that the state of affairs is hardly that simple and is poorly supported by the sources. As a result, a number of authorship and provenance hypotheses have been introduced to solve the problem. Who was Hippolytus and in which early Christian community did he flourish? The paper comments upon and responds to the recent advances to the problem, as outlined in Cerrato J.A. Hippolytus between East and West. The Commentaries and the Provenance of the Corpus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
The problem of the meaning of history is one of the main deep troubles in the Western (including Russian) philosophical tradition. There are two principal approaches to the problem: nihilistic approaches (history has no meaning, people just prescribe meanings to history
Criterion estimation of the spallation failure of a ceramic nozzle of an argon burner was performed near the nozzle outlet. An expression has been obtained for the size of a critical spallation failure fragment Lcr including the material constant
