Tom 16 (2016): Zeszyt 1 (October 2016)

The article considers the connection between ethics, in particular Kant’s practical philosophy, and economics. The author examines historical reasons for Kant’s ethic not to have become part of the economic discourse and interprets modern business processes from Kant’s perspective. The article aims to demonstrate the possibilities of applying the philosophical instruments of Kant’s morals to concrete economic issues.

In this paper I concentrate on Euclidean diagrams, namely on those diagrams that are licensed by the rules of Euclid’s plane geometry. I shall overview some philosophical stances that have recently been proposed in philosophy of mathematics to account for the role of such diagrams in mathematics, and more particularly in Euclid’s Elements. Furthermore, I shall provide an original analysis of the epistemic role that Euclidean diagrams may (and, indeed) have in empirical sciences, more specifically in physics. I shall claim that, although the world we live in is not Euclidean, Euclidean diagrams permit to obtain knowledge of the world through a specific mechanism of inference I shall call inheritance.