Filozofija i tehnika

Author(s): Heda Festini / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 02/2003

From the beginnings of philosophy, the problem of a method has a double meaning/level- it was every sort of research, and, at the same time, special research. In philosophy, second meaning was prevalent - every research was a proposition for a method, but in science such a method could be, at the same, a new theory. Consequently, the method is a general instruction for some technique. Techne, ars, technology ... are the principles of using the knowledge, i.e. general instructions for directing human activities, and could be divided on rational and magic, i.e. religious technique, the former more distinctively into symbolic, technique of behaviour and technology of production (Abbagnano). The solutions for the critique of science as a stetement of anti-technology are offered as follows: l) the call for a renewal of spiritual life and retum to precedent stages of development; 2) Husserl's call for intelligent behaviour; 3) Heidegger's quietistic reconcilation and waiting for something; 4) Abbagnano's searching for new corrective techniques. The author is pleading for the last solution, by intensifying it with a help of aporetic question: atomic bomb in World War II - yes or no? The answer is included in a fact that scientific research should not, and could not be stopped by any kind of principles. Bioethics too, could function as a corrective technique (Čatić), but it, as well as philosophy, should be directed towards politics and management, and not against science and technology.

Rousseau and the Roots of Modernity

Author(s): Christopher Lazarski / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2013

Freedom, Power and Causation

Author(s): Thomas Pink / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

Freedom or control of how we act is often and very naturally understood as a kind of power—a power to determine for ourselves how we act. Is freedom conceived as such a power possible, and what kind of power must it be? The paper argues that power takes many forms, of which ordinary causation is only one; and that if freedom is indeed a kind of power, it cannot be ordinary causation. Scepticism about the reality of freedom as a power can take two forms. One, found in Hume, now often referred to as the Mind argument, assumes incompatibilism, and concludes from incompatibilism that freedom cannot exist, as indistinguishable from chance. But another scepticism, found in Hobbes, does not assume incompatibilism, but assumes rather that the only possible form of power in nature is ordinary causation, concluding that freedom cannot for this reason exist as a form of power. This scepticism is more profound—it is in fact presupposed by Hume’s scepticism—and far more interesting, just because freedom cannot plausibly be modelled as ordinary causation.

OBRAZOVANJE I (DELIBERATIVNA) DEMOKRATIJA

Author(s): Ivana Janković / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 2/2015

The question of the importance of education in democracy is as old as democracy itself. Greek thinkers devoted much of their fruitful oeuvre to the concept of education, aiming at realization of better and more just life in the community. Modern thinkers, especially Locke, Rousseau and Mill, showed great interest for the issue of education of citizens in the democratic societies of their time. Dewey emphasized the importance of education in democracy like no one before, or after him. He devoted a significant part of his extensive work to the question of the role of and the kind of education that is fundamental for the members of community who want to prepare for participation in public life, in the best possible way. The issue of interrelation of democracy and civic education completely neglected after Dewey, again become relevant with appearance of deliberative democracy. Following Dewey’s tradition, I will argue that the form of democracy that calls for broad participation of citizens in solving public problems requires some education. The ability of people to participate in public deliberation depends on whether they have acquired certain skills, values and knowledge.

UM U ISTORIJI: KANTOVSKA IDEJA UNIVERZITETA

Author(s): Ivan Vuković / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 4/2014

Ce texte a deux parties. La première offre une reconstruction de l'argumentation du Conflit des facultés, tandis que la seconde essaye d'établir comment celle-ci pourrait être utilisée aujourd'hui, et à quelles conclusions amènerait-elle. Or, dans le Conflit des facultés Kant a demandé une réforme universitaire qui donnerait aux philosophes le droit de commenter et de critiquer les programmes scolaires que le gouvernement impose aux facultés de droit, de théologie et de médecine. Quoique le contexte ait bien changé depuis ce temps, le devoir du philosophe kantien reste aujourd'hui le même et il consiste dans la critique des usages politiques des hypothèses scientifiques au sens large du terme, qui ont comme conséquence la répression, l'exclusion sociale et l'attaque au droit naturel des femmes et des hommes, ou la subversion de la paix internationale. La réforme proposée par Kant reste, cependant, contradictoire en ce qu'elle elle prévoit un système d'éducation publique et limite le droit au débat aux cercles des savants.

Ukazał się tom pierwszy Universal Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Author(s): Katarzyna Stępień / Language(s): Polish Issue: 32/2/2022

Review of: Universal Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. A. Maryniarczyk, Vol. 1 (A-Ch), Lublin 2022, Polskie Towarzystwo Tomasza z Akwinu, ss. 1390 (ISBN 978–83–65792–34–1; ISBN 978–83– 65792–35–8 Vol. 1).

Die Erziehungskunst nach Karl Heinrich Seibt. Zur Pädagogik der Aufklärung in Prag

Author(s): Ivo Cerman / Language(s): German Issue: 1/2020

This article reconstructs the art of education course that was delivered by Karl Heinrich Seibt (1735–1806) at the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague from 1771 to 1799, starting even before Maria Theresa’s school reform. It was not, however, aimed at preparing teachers for public schools, but preparing preceptors for private education. Drawing on hitherto unknown manuscripts of students’ notes from his lectures, the article demonstrates how the course developed in two phases. The first went from 1771 to the trial of Seibt in 1779, where he was combating Montesquieu’s concept of education that saw the climate as the factor in determining the unchangeable character of a nation. The second phase, from 1784 to 1799, was influenced by German Reformpädagogik where Seibt styled himself as a man of compromise between a Rousseauian “Entwickler” (“developer”) and the traditionalist “Naturverbesserer” (“improvement of nature”). He was also more concerned with the practice of education and hygiene in this phase. Finally, the article suggests that Seibt saw the Catholic religion as the most important guarantee of proper moral education.

Radost a smutek v Pamětech Františka Jana Vaváka

Author(s): Dmitrij Timofejev / Language(s): Czech Issue: 02/2014

The article looks at how emotion is represented in Bohemian folk chronicles, i.e. texts of a historiographic character, written by autodidacts — mostly peasants and artisans. At the core of our analysis is the most famous work of this kind, Paměti Františka Jana Vaváka z let 1770–1816 (Memoirs of František Jan Vavák 1770–1816). Other writings from the turn of the 19th century (e.g. those of Václav Jan Mašek, Jan Petr, Ondřej Lukavský) are also considered. Our initial question is: How, and in which contexts, did Czech-speaking authors of the late 18th and early 19th century, having no opportunity to get acquainted with contemporary philosophical theories, express affects? The study shows that the emotions, especially joy and grief, are expressed in a way recommended by early modern rhetoricians (e.g. Cypriano de Soarez or Bernard Lamy): particular figures are associated with particular affects. Though the principle is the same, the figures used by autodidacts differ from those recommended by the rhetoric manuals. Being unable to read Latin, German or French rhetorics, the authors had probably grasped the principles of how to represent affect from their reading, but adapted them according to their own talent and vision. As might be expected given the rural origin and values of the authors, joy is expressed mostly in the context of weather favourable for the harvest, while grief is realised in the context of rising prices and natural disasters.

Aristocratic Enclaves as a Foreign Legal Element in Urban Space

Author(s): Marek Starý / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

Disciplination of the population in the medieval and early modern city may have been complicated by the presence of an alien element, which in the bourgeois environment was the nobility. In many cases, the nobility was able to acquire town houses and sometimes even managed to have them exempted from the jurisdiction of the municipal authorities and registered in the land tables. Be that as it may, these houses constituted legal enclaves of their kind. The study examines the legal conditions of these enclaves against the background of the legal developments in the Kingdom of Bohemia and Margraviate of Moravia in the fourteenth–seventeenth centuries and tries both to summarize the existing knowledge and to draw attention to some better though lesser-known sources that document this issue.

To the Origins of the True Existence of Western Thinking: Martin Heidegger and the Ghosts of the European Mind

Author(s): Viktor Okorokov / Language(s): English Issue: 33/2024

Objective. To show that despite the enormous efforts of M. Heidegger, he failed to find a new way of thinking. Scientific novelty. It is shown that the meeting of two different streams of historical thinking – the destructive thinking of Heidegger, who never stood on the ground of the Pre-Socratics (although he strived for this all his life), and the Pre-Socratic, which gradually lost its vitality in subsequent European culture, never took place. The different streams of thinking – the ancient Greeks and Heidegger – never crossed. The early Greeks sought to understand the nature of essence, that is, they were looking, according to Heidegger, for the first beginning of thinking (and for this they tried to use the tools of openness of thinking, but did not understand its reasons), while Heidegger, who consistently went through a long path of liberation from all the European ones known to him methods of understanding nature, on the contrary, sought to find ways to understand the true nature of human existence, that is, he looked for the second principle of thinking (but also failed to reveal its origins). It was found that European culture throughout its history has stopped between these two extreme streams of thinking – aimed, on the one hand, at the world of things (essence) and, on the other, at the inner world of man (existence), but in both of these streams there are genuine the beginnings of thinking remained unheard. The analysis shows that throughout his life, Heidegger was looking, in fact, not even for being, but for the being of thinking; more precisely, he was looking for thinking that could exist synchronously with the thought of the ancient Greeks, which allowed him, on the one hand, – to reveal the fall of European culture, and on the other hand, to try to find the motives for future thinking. In our opinion, Heidegger heard the main problem of European culture: logos does not illuminate thinking, does not carry either natural or divine light, it is only similar to a given (often artificial) logical scheme. All ancient religions spoke about this. The ancient Greeks knew this; Plato and Aristotle replaced the true divine light with a system of ideas, concepts, categories and logic. It seems that the concealment of the true light (nature and gods) is the path of the fall of European culture, about which Nietzsche, Wagner and Heidegger wrote. Thinking exists only where consciousness disintegrates in the spatio-temporal topos of its existence. And logos, as this study shows, can only exist in a split consciousness. Based on this, it is increasingly clear that we have not learned to think like the Greeks and, moreover, in our selfishness we may finally lose this opportunity. On my own behalf, I would like to add: what Heidegger failed to achieve can be clarified along the paths of contact between Western and Eastern thought.

Концепцията за критика на Мишел Фуко

Author(s): Miroslava Hristoskova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 6/2024

This paper examines Foucault’s concept of critique and points out the importance of critical attitude in his ontology of the present. Kant’s question of the Enlightenment is put in a new perspective: philosophical thought is oriented at defining the present and actual field of experience. Philosophy becomes an activity of diagnosing the present (ontology of actuality and ourselves) opposed to a search of universal structures of truth (analytics of truth). Foucault observes a relationship between Enlightenment and critique: a certain kind of attitude, a philosophical ethos that consists of critique of our historical existence. This critical attitude is understood as a philosophical ethos (critical work of thought over itself) and as a practice of freedom (a perspective of transforming oneself and creating new modalities of subjectivity).

Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) – stoupenec náboženské tolerance i absolutistického státu

Author(s): Radim Seltenreich / Language(s): Czech Issue: 94/2024

In his text the author examines Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), an important legal thinker of the early modern period in the Holy Roman Empire. He first of all gives the reader some basic information about his life, which is dominated by his time at the universities in Leipzig and, later, especially in Halle, which were the most important years of his academic career. In terms of its content, that is mostly connected with the theory of natural law and the absolutist state. The author points out, in particular, that unlike other theorists of this period, Thomasius emphasises more the historical conditionality of natural law. With Thomasius, as a defender of the model of the absolutist state, he then mentions the specific tasks of the state power that Thomasius defined, with the dominant role of the legislature, while acknowledging that it has the right to organise and administer the life of the churches, but not to interfere with the freedom of belief of the individual. Finally, Thomasius’ well-known opposition to witch trials is briefly recalled in the article.

Time in Dimitrie Cantemir’s Sacro-sanctae Scientiae Indepingibilis Imago (1700)

Author(s): Vlad Alexandrescu / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2023

Educated in Constantinople in the last decades of the 17th century, Dimitrie Cantemir (1673– 1723) encountered, on the one hand, the Paduan Aristotelianism transmitted by the Greek philosophical teachers trained in Venice and Padua, and, on the other, was inspired by a Platonic, Neoplatonic and Pseudo-Dionysian tradition, still alive in Eastern Christian thought. Written after a thorough study of the work of J. B. van Helmont, his treatise on time echoes these multiple roots and proposes a conception of time which affirms the non-categoriality and neutrality of the notion of time, its continuous, uniform, immovable, non-successive, immiscible, immutable character, distributive in the singular time of each creature (according to the model of Platonic participation), its participation in eternity, the emanation of eternity from the divine Intellect, and the precedence of time over Creation.

Kritička i an-arhička racionalnost. Immanuel Kant i Emmanuel Lévinas

Author(s): Srđan Maraš / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 01/173/2024

The article tries to indicate the key similarities and differences between Kant’s modern and Lévinas’s postmodern thinking on the ontological, ethical, and aesthetic levels. In doing so, the analysis and comparison is based on two basic types of rationality that we encounter here: critical and an-archic rationality. Despite certain non-negligible similarities that are manifested in these forms of rationality, the conclusion inevitably leads in the direction of highlighting their essential differences, which at decisive points in the end prove to be unavoidable and insurmountable.

Jürgen Habermas - Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie

Author(s): Lino Veljak / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 01/173/2024

Review of: Jürgen Habermas - Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (1–2) Suhrkamp, Berlin 2022.

Jeffrey Church (2022) Kant, Liberalism, and the Meaning of Life

Author(s): Adnan Hatibović / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 17/2024

Review of: Jeffrey Church (2022): Kant, Liberalism, and the Meaning of Life (Oxford University Press, 352 str.)

Gestika v raně novověkém herectví (a kazatelství?)

Author(s): Magdaléna Jacková / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2025

The performative aspect – delivery – was considered a crucial, if not the most important, component of rhetoric already in antiquity. This was undoubtedly also true for early modern homiletics. However, this aspect of sermons remains virtually unknown today, primarily because it could not be recorded in its time. Apart from visual representation, we must therefore rely on theoretical works whose authors, at least to some extent, addressed the performative form of preaching. These include both classical works, which served as the primary sources of inspiration in the early modern period, and contemporary studies. This paper aims to provide an overview, based on selected works, of the types of gestures preachers may have used during this period and the principles and rules that guided them. The starting point is Institutio oratoria by Marcus Fabius Quintilian, who, alongside Cicero, is regarded as the foremost authority in rhetoric, as well as two works by Jesuit authors: Joseph de Jouvancy’s De ratione discendi et docendi and Franz Lang’s poetics Dissertatio de actione scenica.

Zu Editionen der deutsch geschriebenen Handschriften aus Böhmen, am Beispiel der Memoiren von Heinrich Hieserle von Chodau (mit einigen sprachhistorischen Bemerkungen zur deutschen Originalfassung)

Author(s): Lenka Vodrážková / Language(s): German Issue: 2/2024

This article deals with the German written memories of Heinrich Hieserle von Chodau, which are deposited in the National Museum in Prague, based on the editions from 1979 and 2021. While the first edition of the memories contains a Czech version, partly translated from of the Early New High German original, and a commentary, the two‑volume edition from 2021 includes the reproductions of the German written original, its transliteration and its translation into Czech. The Czech translation is based on the 1979 version, which has been corrected for the purposes of the new edition and supplemented with originally omitted and shortened text passages. The edition also includes studies of the historical background, of the author and of the manuscript. The editions not only contribute to the German language in the Czech lands, but also point to the interdisciplinary co‑operation between historians and Germanists, who together bring one of the German written manuscripts of the Early Modern Period from Bohemia to the attention of the wider Czech and German reading circles. Since none of the editions discussed contains a linguistic‑historical commentary on the German of the manuscript, this article includes some linguistic‑historical remarks on regional aspects of the author’s German language.

СИСТЕМАТИЧЕСКОТО БОГОСЛОВИЕ В БЪЛГАРИЯ ПРЕЗ ХХ ВЕК – АКАДЕМИЧНИ ТРАДИЦИИ, ПРЕДСТАВИТЕЛИ И НАСОКИ

Author(s): Kostadin Nushev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2024

The marked 100-year anniversary of the establishment of the Faculty of Theology in Bulgaria in 1923 highlighted new tasks and defined some main priority directions for research by setting some important strategic goals in the field of research, systematization, documentation and popularization of the scientific creativity of researchers in the field of Systematic Theology. Efforts to research and systematize the main directions in the field of Dogmatic theology, Patrology, Christian ethics, History of religion, Philosophy and psychology of religion, Non-religious confessions and Inter-Christian dialogue, problems of sectarianism have emerged as an important priority in the studies that have continued over the last decade. Different Christian and non-Christian religious teachings, which were always deeply connected with the teaching and spiritual mission of the Church and the challenges to Christian scientific thought and higher theological education in Bulgaria throughout the twentieth century, are explored in systematic and comparative perspective.

Levinas and Kant: Right, Law, and the Other

Author(s): Richard A. Cohen / Language(s): English Issue: 19/2024

Beyond the deep affinities linking Immanuel Kant’s declared “primacy of practical reason” and Emmanuel Levinas’s “ethics as first philosophy,” these thinkers radically diverge, as do modern rationalism and contemporary phenomenology. The paper shows that Kant, despite his declaration, continues to give primacy to epistemology and reason, as evidenced by the supreme status of law – both in nature, to be sure, and in the autonomy of rational selflegislation. This contrasts with Levinas who recognizes as “original right” a moral imperative more exigent than the rule of law, emanating from the alterity or face of the other person. Such original right orders the self pre-originally or “an-archically” to a moral responsibility to and for the other person before all else. In this way, Levinas, in contrast to Kant, understands the source of intelligibility – including the rationality of logic and science – in and as the goodness of the priority of moral obligation.