Benžamen Konstan
Decembra 1930 navršilo se je sto godina od smrti Benžamena Konstana, ≫oca parlamentarnog liberalizma i psihološkog romana ≪, kako ga nazva jedan njegov skorašnji biograf.
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Decembra 1930 navršilo se je sto godina od smrti Benžamena Konstana, ≫oca parlamentarnog liberalizma i psihološkog romana ≪, kako ga nazva jedan njegov skorašnji biograf.
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The article deals with the attitude of Nicollò Machiavelli towards virtues and its political meaning explained in his famous work The Prince. Philosopher discusses the meaning of virtues in different stages of his reasoning. He makes partial conclusions at each stage and leads to the final conclusion, which states that virtues are harmfull for the prince, while the deceptive appearance of virtues is most useful. The context of classical political philosophy allows to demonstrate that Machiavelli’s proposal to use deception of virtues equates to a perfect injustice. It can be concluded that Machiavelli breaks radically with the Platonic tradition of political philosophy and starts creating a new tradition on the grounds of ideas of ancient sophists about human nature and politics.
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The collection of Vilnius University Library contains an incomplete, anonymous manuscript of a Polish translation of The Contest of the Faculties by Immanuel Kant. Numerous features of the manuscript (terminology, syntax and handwriting) confirm that it is a fragment of the lost translation by Józef Władysław Bychowiec, one of the most important popularisers of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy in Poland and Lithuania at the beginning of the 19th century. The manuscript is the earliest known work by Bychowiec, probably completed during his philosophical studies in Königsberg.
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The question whether Kant is a conceptualist has attracted significant attention of Kant scholars in recent decades. I present all three dominant positions in the debate (strong conceptualism, weak conceptualism, nonconceptualism) and argue that strong conceptualism and nonconceptualism are less plausible interpretations of Kant’s philosophy. I argue that the first cannot explain Kant’s commitments related to the incongruents, animals, and infants. The second one, meanwhile, cannot explain Kant’s argument on causation against Hume. At the end of the paper, I try to show that the key to a plausible and convincing interpretation of Kant as a weak conceptualist is the distinction between categories and empirical concepts.
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A challenge to Kant’s less known duty of self-knowledge comes from his own firm view that it is impossible to know oneself. This paper resolves this problem by considering the duty of self-knowledge as involving the pursuit of knowledge of oneself as one appears in the empirical world. First, I argue that, although Kant places severe restrictions on the possibility of knowing oneself as one is, he admits the possibility of knowing oneself as one appears using methods from empirical anthropology. Second, I show that empirical knowledge of oneself is fairly reliable and is, in fact, considered as morally significant from Kant’s moral anthropological perspective. Taking these points together, I conclude that Kant’s duty of self-knowledge exclusively entails the pursuit of empirical self-knowledge.
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This paper discusses the quotation frequency and reference strategies of Leon Battista Alberti, Federico Borromeo, and Gabriele Paleotti. These three Catholic art theoreticians of Early Modern period engaged Classical texts as the point of reference and expertly manipulated the Classical sources to provide contextual arguments in the formation of their own artistic theories. Alberti, Borromeo, and Paleotti directly alluded or referred to Pliny the Elder, Plutarch, Xenophon, Strabo, Aulus Gellius, and other Classical sources rather extensively. This can be noticed from various quotation strategies applied in Alberti, Borromeo, and Paleotti treatises and by statistical data on quotation frequency in Alberti’s De pictura, Paleotti’s Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane, and Borromeo’s De pictura sacra.
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This paper focuses on the mathematisation of mechanics in the seventeenth century, specifically on how the representation of compounded rectilinear motions presented in the ancient Greek Mechanica found its way into Newton’s Principia almost two thousand years later. I aim to show that the path from the former to the latter was optical: the conceptualisation of geometrical lines as paths of reflection created a physical interpretation of diagrammatic principles of geometrical point-motion, involving the kinematics and dynamics of light reflection. Upon the atomistic conception of light, the optical interpretation of such geometrical principles entailed their mechanical generalisation to local motion; rectilinear motion via the physico-mathematics of reflection and the Mechanica’s parallelogram rule; circular motion via the physico-mathematics of reflection, the Archimedean squaring of the circle and the Mechanica’s extension of the parallelogram rule to centripetal motion. This appeal to the physico-mathematics of reflection forged a realist foundation for the mathematisation of motion. Whereas Aristotle’s physics rested on motions which had their source in the nature of the elements, early modern thinkers such as Harriot, Descartes, and Newton based their new principles of mechanical motion upon selected elements of the mechanics of light motion, projected upon the geometry of the parallelogram rule for rectilinear and, ultimately, circular motion.
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This article discusses the role of Michelangelo Buonarroti in the Seventeenth-century art theory treatises of Cardinal Federico Borromeo De pictura sacra and Musaeum. In the referred text we can notice an ambivalent approach to the artistic genius of Buonarroti. In several cases Borromeo mentions Michelangelo as an artistic example who equalled or even exceled the great artists of Antiquity, albeit in other paragraphs the author criticises the artist for his aesthetic fallacy. A close reading of De pictura sacra and Musaeum, as well as an analysis of Borromeo’s didactic programme in the newly established Accademia del disegno in Milan allows to heed that Cardinal was rather an admirer of Michelangelo’s personality and talent. In De pictura sacra Buonarroti and other Renaissance Masters serve a rhetoric function and allow to conceptualise the theological and aesthetic framework for a post-Tridentine Catholic religious art.
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The article explores Kant’s notion of the human being as the ultimate end of nature, presenting an ethical interpretation of this notion. The author of this article believes that the analysis of Kant’s assumptions will allow a deeper understanding of our own hermeneutical situation, in which ecological problems force us to rethink our relationship with nature and the meaning of human existence. Analyzing Kant’s early texts on Lisbon earthquake and his reflection on the sublime in the Critique of Judgement, the author asks how the experience of an uncontrolled natural element complements Kant’s ethical vision of nature’s teleology. Emphasizing the importance of insight into human vulnerability for the implementation of moral purpose in nature, the article outlines guidelines for interpretation that allow the relevance of Kant’s position in the context of contemporary environmental ethics.
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The article deals with the absence of medical studies at the Vilnius Jesuit Academy. The question in the historiography is linked rather with the local peculiarities than the Jesuit attitude toward medicine in particular. Some attempts to establish medical studies in Vilnius during the 16th and 17th centuries are discussed in the context of Early-modern Jesuit universities that forbade Jesuits to involve themselves in academic medicine. The exclusion of medicine from Jesuit schools is analyzed as an intentional dissociation from the rise of the learned medicine and early modern philosophical tendencies of the medicalization of the soul. Jesuits also introduced the pattern of medicus religiosus instead of medicus philosophus, which represented their image of medical practitioner.
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Review of: Antonio R. Damasio, Eroarea lui descartes : emoţiile, raţiunea şi creierul uman, Bucureşti, Humanitas, 2005, 332 p.
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The essay deals with the contemporary forms of skepticism related to Internet and social media in particular. There are two main sources of digital skepticism today. The overwhelming information and the pluralism of opinions hamper the judgement and make it difficult to attain certainty in everyday beliefs. On the other hand, the modern philosophy and science hold sway over the contemporary understanding of knowledge as certain, theoretical and universal representation of the world. The clash between the two opposing attitudes – the insecurity in social media as a main source of information and the quest for certainty in knowledge creates the digital skepticism that further leads to suspicion and ressentiment. The essay demonstrates the negative outcomes from the digital skepticism and finds a remedy in the skeptical tolerance presented in the philosophy and essays of Montaigne.
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The complex phenomena of thought and communication, seen from the view point of Christian ideas, were imposed, first, in the Roman Empire, including then, in the Middle Ages and in modern times, the whole of Europe and a good part of the civilized world. World, Man, Truth and God – are favorite themes of Christian philosopher Aurelius Augustine, as a „method" for explaining and understanding of faith in terms of reason. Reaching the circle of divine goodness and forbearance and understanding of human sensitivity as „thinking reed" – is the essence of the reflections of physicist, philosopher and geometer Blaise Pascal. And the „methodical doubt" of René Descartes establishes the principles underlying modern rationalism, but only after the French thinker makes – in his philosophical discourse – a simple demonstration of the existence of God as perfect being differing from the human individual by the well known imperfections of the human being.
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The inventive spirit of the thinker of Königsberg had manifested itself ever since the „pre-criticism” stage of his life, when he wrote and published several books, but was also dealing with cosmology, among other things, and published a unique work on celestial mechanics („Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven”, 1755), a book which contains extremely valuable ideas to the history of science, as they configure that which at present constitutes the Kant-Laplace theory. His system of thought is found in his four basic philosophical works: „Critique of Pure Reason” (1781) – gnoseology, „Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals” (1785) and „Critique of Practical Reason” (1788) – contain his ethical doctrine, and the „Critique of Judgment” (1790) – include his esthetic concept and the issue of finality in organic nature. The detailed description of the gnoseological process in three steps (each one having a specific name: sensitive intuition, exaltation from direct contemplation to the analytical intellect, pure reason), the description of duty or practical reason from which the categorical imperative as a moral law is derived, and the description of „logic” and „communicable beauty” – is achieved through rational arguments and reveals a breathtaking systemic structure, which was rightly called later, not without admiration: „ Kant's steel scaffolding!”
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This paper seeks to examine Leibniz's concept of virtual memory, and to determine its role within the monadological conception of the world. Leibniz's notion of memory is certainly ambiguous, which will be seen in the paper, through the explication of places in Leibniz's texts, in which memory is differently defined. More precisely, we will see that Leibniz distinguishes different functions within the notion of memory, and accordingly names them differently, yet they are all encompassed within virtual memory, which forms both the ontological and epistemological basis of the Leibniz universe. In the first part of the paper we will outline the principled monadological settings and the reasons why virtual memory has a large share in them. In the second part, we will examine the places in which Leibniz writes about memory, seeking to unify them within our understanding of virtual memory, in addition to the differences that exist between these definitions. For us to be able to adequately emphasize importance of Leibniz approach to concept of memory, it will be necessary to confront his understanding with that of the tradition, especially focusing on Aristotle. Finally, we will see why such a Leibniz memory setting, we suppose, is necessary to increase knowledge in any way.
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This paper examines the metaphysical problem of causation with particular reference to Hume’s denial of necessary connection between a cause and its effect. It argues that Hume’s arguments for his denial of necessary connection between a cause and its effect relies on memory as a reliable medium of knowledge. It concludes that given the metaphysical problem of memory traces and the epistemic status of memory belief, it is doubtful whether Hume’s position can be defended consistently.
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Hryhorii Savych Skovoroda’s religious and philosophic ideas have attracted considerable attention in academic scientific discourse in postcommunist Ukraine. This is due not only to the humanistic-democratic paradigm of modern transformations in society, but also the methodological principles of historical and philosophical knowledge. We have tried to make a syncretic analysis of Skovoroda’s life and creativity based on the works of Romanian literary critic Mahdalyna Laslo-Kutsiuk (1928–2010), in particular by analysing the origins of Skovoroda’s philosophical doctrines, rethinking the Bible and specificity of his literary works. Skovoroda’s greatness lies in the fact that without losing his identity against the background of a rather fundamental philosophical tradition in Ukraine, he occupied and still occupies perhaps the most avant-garde position. He was one of the first philosophers to restore and develope the phenomenon of wisdom in new European civilisation, which was removed by the overall project of rationally-epistemological and rationally-scientific interpretations of philosophy after the ancient times. Analysis of the latest studies of Slavic and Western investigations of Skovoroda shows that this branch is interdisciplinary. Philosophers, historians, culture experts, literary critics, specialists in the history of religion have studied the heritage of this prominent Ukrainian philosopher. Expansion of the methodological spectrum started in the 1990s, meaning that the art of Skovoroda should be apprehended as penetrating synthetic phenomena in which the essential components of the Baroque world-view are combined with the culture of late antiquity, patristic tradition and even European humanism.
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This paper is both an expanded review and an article insisting on some problems of the philosophical methods and the treatment of the human subjectivity. Thus, it starts from the book of Tibor Szabó, Le sujet et sa morale: Essais de philosophie morale et politique, Szeged, Centre Universitaire Francophone, 2016, and, first, highlights how the description of the human subject in the world may stay within the frame of the metaphysical suppositions or may divert from it. This position towards a metaphysical approach is that which differentiates the contents of the normative messages of philosophies. Secondly, the paper points out the adventures of the modern continental philosophy to both avoid the interdependence of the objective and subjective factors of the human subject and society and their unitary complex, and to reveal this interdependence and its concrete aspects.
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The objective of this article is to analyze the differences between the two forms of skepticism as conceived by Hegel, i.e. ancient and modern skepticism. We shall examine this in the first part of this work and in the second, we shall see how for Hegel, ancient skepticism is in fact a moment of philosophy and not its enemy, as was the case for Sextus Empiricus. Finally, in the third part, we will explore the paradox at the heart of this Hegelian distinction. This paradox lies in the fact that Hegel seems to misinterpret skepticism as Greek philosophers such as Pyrrho first conceived it, abolishing all appearances or phenomena as a result. Therefore, ancient skepticism, according to Hegel, has more resemblance to nihilism than to the way of life as purported by the ancient skeptics themselves.
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This article deals with a perpective of interpreting Leibniz’s theory of substance, in the manner of understanding the concept of substance or monad as phenomena for our mind, soul, spirit or for our consciousness. This hypothesis relies on the correspondence, which Leibniz himself preferred, between metaphysics and immanence spheres. The article demonstrates that Leibniz’s philosophy poses many difficulties regarding the term monad or substance, especially on the field of metaphysics-empiric correspondence. At the same time, the article displays the systematic points where Leibniz should have introduced consciousness in discussion for the coherence of his philosophy, which could have the chance for substance to gain the status of a real phenomenon.
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