Author Archives: Nicolae Sfetcu

The main systems By introducing a distinction between the sensible and the intelligible, Plato founds, without naming it, what will later be called metaphysics, as the science of being insofar as it “is” and that it is what it is … Read More

Performance art is developing in Europe and the United States and many movements, such as Fluxus, are gaining an international base. In Europe, it was undoubtedly after his trip to Japan, from September 23, 1952 to January 1954, that Yves … Read More

Since David Wiggins and his article of 1967, the reflection on personal identity, one of the most difficult and disturbing in the philosophy of mind, has often relied on the “argument from fission” to challenge our most ingrained beliefs about … Read More

According to Popper, falsifiability provides a solution to the problem of induction, raised by Hume, and to that of demarcation, which he also calls Kant’s problem. Popper explains that he was influenced by Kant, but benefited from a different context: … Read More

The conditions under which freedom of expression applies are ambivalent. On the one hand, it is considered fundamental, since it conditions the exercise of other freedoms. Thus, superior courts, both supranational and national, enshrine its importance in similar terms. For … Read More

The characteristics of the universe in which we evolve depend on about fifteen physical constants. In the current absence of a unifying principle, they are considered independent of each other. The advent of supercomputers allowed astrophysics to model the development … Read More

The inquiry theory The inquiry as fixation of belief in Peirce In The Fixation of Belief (1877), Peirce thinks of inquiry not as the pursuit of truth per se, but as a struggle to move from irritating and inhibiting doubt … Read More

Thomas Nagel The philosopher of mind Thomas Nagel, although long associated with a form of epistemological dualism concerning the body-mind relationship (the “dual aspect theory”), introduced himself in a book by 2012 as an idealist, in direct opposition to materialism … Read More

A contested science Immanuel Kant asserts, in the introduction to his Prolegomena: “since the origin of metaphysics, however far its history goes back, nothing has happened that could have been more decisive for the destinies of this science than the … Read More

Riots occur not when incomes fall, but when differences between incomes increase. ~ Nicolae Sfetcu

Performance art is believed to be rooted in the radical Futurist and Dadaist soirees of early 20th century Europe. Others situate its beginnings in connection with the questioning of modernist visions in the 1960s and 1970s marked by political protest … Read More

(Zombies as portrayed in the movie Night of the Living Dead, direction and cinematography by George A. Romero) In philosophy of the mind, a “zombie” (philosophical zombie or p-zombie) designates a being physically and externally indistinguishable from a conscious being, … Read More