14:1:
Challenges of Non-Soviet Poetry in Minsk During the BSSR Period
The interview given by Gershon Trestman (born July 29, 1947, Minsk), a Russian-language Belarusian and Israeli poet, prose writer, publicist, and playwright. He is a member of the Union of Writers of Israel, the Commonwealth of Russian-Speaking Writers of Israel “Stolitsa,” and the
International Federation of Russian Writers. His work has been recognized with the Yu. Stern and
Yu. Nagibin awards, as well as a gold medal for “outstanding achievements in literature and the arts” from the California Academy of Sciences.
Selected works: The One Who Crossed the River (Tel Aviv, 1996); Golem, or Faust’s Curse
(Moscow, 2007); A Small Country with a Great History (Israel, 2008, foreword by Avigdor Lieberman); The Great History of a Small Country (Israel, 2011); The Scroll of Esther (Jerusalem,
2013); The Land of Olive Guardians (Jerusalem, 2013); The Israeli Knot: The History of the Country – The History of Confrontation (Book-Sefer, 2014); The Land of Olive Guardians (Jerusalem,KKL-JNF, 2014); Job (Minsk, New Wineskins, 2014); ...Where There Are No
Coordinates. Poems and Epics (Jerusalem, 2017); The Book of Non-Being (Minsk, Logvinov, 2019); Alphabet for Elderly Children (Jerusalem, 2023).
Keywords: totalitarian society, poetry, existentialism, Minsk
No Perils of Rejecting the Parity Argumen
Many moral realists have employed a strategy for arguing for moral realism by
claiming that if epistemic normativity is categorical and that if this epistemic
normativity exists, then categorical normativity exists. In this paper, we will
discuss that argument, examine a way out, and respond to the objections people
have recently raised in the literature. In the end, we conclude that the
objections to our way out will do little in the way of motivating those who
already do not believe in categorical normativity, thereby severing the power
the aforementioned parity argument is designed to possess.
Keywords: Moral error theory, Meta-ethics, Companions in guilt, Nihilism.
Autonomy in Stratified Structures
This article proposes a minimalist concept of autonomy that is consistent with
determinism, but negates fatalism. Drawing on Nicolai Hartmann's stratified
ontology, it argues that autonomy is achieved not by suspending physical laws,
but by introducing new, higher-level determinations unique to individual
entities. The tension between general laws and individual autonomy is resolved
by emphasizing the unique properties and individual laws that apply to each
entity. The article also explains how this minimal autonomy makes sense of
setting goals and attempting to achieve them, demonstrating that even within a
deterministic framework, individuals can have meaningful influence over their
actions and outcomes.
Keywords: autonomy, stratified ontology, determinism, individuality,
philosophy of mind
Cuneiform Šumma Sentences: Conditionals or Implications?
The Author:
For a long time, it was believed in Assyriology and related disciplines
that šumma sentences, or grammatical conditionals, which appeared in
cuneiform texts and tablets of astrology, exorcism, law, extispicy,
oneiromancy, medicine, and divination, were linguistic expressions of
logical conditionals. F. Rochberg (2010; 2016) extended this belief,
suggesting that they are even material conditionals. Andrew Schumann
(2017; 2020; 2021) followed this, claiming that, as a result, we can
trace the origin of symbolic logic in cuneiform writings, through which
it moved to Greece. In this paper, after presenting this approach, I will
challenge it by showing that šumma/IF sentences and similar
constructs in cuneiform literature are arguments or implications that
suffer from the same confusion between conditional and implication
that Quine (1953/1966) highlighted when criticizing C.I. Lewis.
Keywords: logic, conditional, implication, cuneiform texts, argument,
Babylonian science, šumma
