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Today, animal studies and related fields, such as posthumanism, multispecies ethnography and the like, are blooming. It is often said that we are now undergoing an “animal turn” or perhaps even a “species turn”, as suggested by Kirksey and Helmreich (2010). This latter “turn” was coined in order to accommodate newer and more encompassing works that are not limited to animals only (e.g. Kohn 2013; Cohen 2012; Marder 2013). Analyses of animals proliferate in any number of fields in the humanities and social sciences, and in interdisciplinary works and journals. However, philosophy has, in general and in broad strokes but admittedly with a few notable exceptions, not followed this new trend. In fact, as argued below, philosophy has seldom had much of interest to say about living beings other than humans, and even there it steadfastly avoids anything that would smack of the biological, of the animal. Ever since Socrates declared that it is the men who dwell in the city who are his teachers and not the trees in the countryside, animals have been thought of, at best, as poor in world. What follows is not, however, a survey of philosophical tracts and their commentary on animals. Such work is well underway elsewhere (e.g. Oliver 2009; Lippitt 2000; Calarco 2008; Lurz 2009; etc.). Instead, the chapter is divided into two parts: the first lays down the basic structure by which animals are expelled from philosophy, and the second part tells certain admittedly fanciful stories about what an “animal gaze” at human theorisers would look like.
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The article is concerned to a considerable philosophical problem of truth which is basically a pragmatist conception. The professor of the Sofia University Dimitar Mihalchev offers a discussion of the possibility to apply the method and the criterion of pragmatism conception in the science.
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The most recent discussions about centric discourses can well baffle the uninformed reader. On the one hand, post-war European cultural development was marked by attempts to overcome the ethnocentric and nationalist paradigms which had made European history into a history of wars, conflicts and intolerance.
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What is the thing that within one and the same story gathers closer such different notions as a master, a voice, a letter, a mirror, a noise? It is a record player, a machine which within itself has numerous components that enable the occurrence of these notions on the level of record player's communication.
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This article analyses various e-threats that were expressed in media texts that focused on e-threat discourses concerning the Estonian identity card’s security risk in 2017. The discourse of cyberthreats contains strong and controversial meanings because the peculiarities of cyberspace remain intangible for average readers who do not possess expert knowledge regarding ICT. The wider aim of the paper is to suggest how the topic of e-threats could be given public coverage without fuelling irrational anxiety and unwarranted threat scenarios. Our theoretical basis combines the frameworks of the Copenhagen School of security studies and ideas of cultural semiotics. We explain the semiotic logic of phobophobia (i.e. the abstract concern with the devastating impacts of the collective feeling of fear) and the discourse of fear that is characterized by a significant reliance on analogies, drawing vague demarcation line between reference objects and the dominance of negative emotional tonality. Our study demonstrates that the main actors of threat and the consequences of the identity card’s security problems were associated with unknown hackers and the damaging of the reputation of Estonia as an e-state.
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The focus of the study is an analysis of the interpretative method of Zdeněk Kožmín, which is demonstrated on the example of Karel Hynek Mácha’s work. Kožmín’s explanation encompasses selected Mácha’s sonnets and other poetic texts. Methodologically, Kožmín follows Jacques Geninasca’s sonnet interpretations and other structuralist analyses.
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The study focuses on characters in Arnošt Lustig’s prose. It primarily focuses on the consciousness in fictional characters. As a theoretical basis we chose publications Poetics (2001) Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Story and Discourse (2008) Seymour Chatman, Individuals in the Narrative Worlds Uri Margolin and Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction Dorrit Cohn. Aristotle’s concept of mimetic character, as an imitation of human beings, which followed formalist and structuralist poetics, consisted mainly of subordination “acting person” storyline. The relation of the characters to the storyline, so in the case of Lustig’s character is superiority characters story, because in narrative occupy a dominant position. We are interested in the interior world of the characters in autor´s prose. We observe consciousness of characters, emotions and experiences in the fictional world. The aim of the study observes ways of presenting the characters in the narrative, both from the point of view of the narrator, so from the perspective of the characters. Uri Margolin Individuals in the Narrative Worlds provides information that the person in the narrative can be regarded as a series of temporary conditions attached to each other.
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The article focuses on three different conceptions of space: Kant’s philosophical system presented in his Critique of Pure Reason, Heidegger’s conception of poetic space from his essay Poetically Man Dwells, and the general structural conception of space understood in its basic theoretical conditions. The aim of the paper is to show the change of the theoretical paradigm which refuses the idea of holistic and universalistic space, and, at the same time, to challenge Kant’s theory of space from the structural point of view. In this case we can talk about a turn, which emphasizes reference qualities instead of a priori qualities. The structural conception of space is further demonstrated on selected studies and texts.
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Autor stručne poukazuje na charakteristiky 20.storočia z hľadiska literárnych smerov a literárnych výbojov, ktoré zachvátili celú Európu. Posledným literárnym hnutím širšieho rozsahu bol symbolizmus, pričom v ďalšom literárnom vývine pri prekonávaní tohto smeru a jeho poetiky sa uplatnil vitalizmus, v každom kontexte inak, ale možno zaznamenať aj spoločné črty. Oproti metafyzickému smútku, asketizmu a introvertnosti symbolistickej poézie, zrodila sa poézia extrovertná, plná eufórie, bezpochyby poznačená bergsonovskou optimistickou filozofiou. Posuny básnickej senzibility v 20.storočí autor naznačuje na príkladoch z diela spisovateľov, ako Jiří Wolker, Stanislav Kostka Neumann, Fráňa Šrámek, Gumiliov, Vladimir Maiakovski, Mendelştam, Aron Cotruş, József Attila, Rázus, Ján Smrek, Lisaveta Bagriana, Julian Tuwim.
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The essay is designed to investigate the foundations of the conjunction of modern/postmodern premises that the world is a construct of discourses and their power. Such premises require the exclusion of the world of perception, including the lived world, and the appearance of the modern subject and its specific interpretation of reality. The question is as follows: how must the modern subject access such reality when it is assumed that such reality is not accessible to direct, perceptual intuition? Here we encounter the way how the subject must construct methodological and theoretical discourses which do not represent, but ‘make’ modern reality.
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The Cours de linguistique générale (1916), which became the master text for structuralist linguistics and semiotics, is characterized by a series of dichotomies. Some of them, e.g. langue and parole, signified and signifier, arbitrary and motivated, are very well known, others less so. This paper looks at Saussure’s semiotics in terms of these dichotomies, and considers how later critiques, such as Voloshinov’s (1929), and reformulations, particularly Hjelmslev’s (1935, 1942) and the concept of enunciation which emerged conjointly in the work of Jakobson, Lacan, Dubois, Benveniste and others, were shaped as responses to the Saussurean dichotomies. Also examined in terms of its contrast with Saussure is Bally’s stylistics. The aim is a fuller understanding of the shapes taken by structuralist semiotics, in view of the heritage on which they were based and the broader intellectual climate, including phenomenology and Marxism, in which they developed.
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What Adorno would detect as the phenomenon of an agonal situation of emigration shattered by vain misery that managed to wriggle out of the authoritarian fists and beyond the reach of the monstrous Nazi regime, is present almost a century later. And it refers to all dissidents, internal and external, indifferent or angry, all the same, observers, sages, analysts who "afforded" themselves a close or indirect encounter with the totalitarian nemani. Because, in the meantime, the world has not become a better place to live. The satraps and despots in a planetary motley composition take care of it zealously: from the Syrian meerkat, the North Korean midget, the Turkish namchor-brkajlia, the Myanmar Nobel laureate and her saffron-revolutionary generals, to the last in the line, the most dangerous, Russian mindless sadist - a black belt - what day? – every fucking day!
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The author of the article analyses the lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of a possible dialogue between biopolitics and biophilosophy. It is argued that the pandemic, despite the horrific sufferings it has caused to humankind, had a certain positive side to it as it made us raise our ethical, social and political consciousness to a qualitatively new level. In this sense, the new coronavirus might be viewed as a pharmakon, that is, both as a poison (as the etymology of the Latin word virus suggests) and as a remedy – or as a gift. The author, drawing attention to the fact that viruses, strictly speaking, are neither alive nor dead, yet play a significant role in the evolution of living organisms, argues that the “poisonous” gift of the new coronavirus and the gift of COVID-19 vaccines interact – either by way of the initiation of the selection process or by way of its correction (limitation) – in the process of natural selection of the members of human population, thus affecting human evolution: the “poisonous” gift of the virus acts positively, presenting a biological challenge to humans, and the gift of vaccines acts negatively, by way of correcting this process, that is, selectively limiting the extent and intensity of the challenge posed by the virus. It is evident that individuals vaccinated against COVID-19, though they are not completely exempt from the dangers of coronaviral infection, participate in the process of natural selection, initiated by the action of coronavirus, to a significantly lesser extent and degree. Bearing in mind that personal decisions to accept or decline the gift of a COVID-19 vaccine are related to certain personal convictions, one might claim that, in the process of this particular case of natural selection, holding to certain specific convictions selects humans for certain cognitively, ethically and socially important personal traits that play a role in personal decision-making and are, as we might suggest, at least partially influenced by genes. Therefore, not only the urgency to act promptly – to act in a biopolitical sense – in the face of such challenges as COVID-19 pandemic (and, in the future, in the face of dangers posed by similar pandemic diseases), but also the necessity to reflect – to reflect in biophilosophical sense – on the interaction between humans and viruses that takes place on a global scale and in a common biological medium highlight the importance of a new trend – that of the convergence between biopolitics and biophilosophy
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This contribution shows how the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has been confronted autobiographically with National-Socialism (1933-1945) and how his personal experience and the experience of the Jewish people under Hitlerism were translated in his philosophical understanding of ‘being’ as ‘il y a’ (in English: ‘there is’). The Holocaust provides a unique negative point of entry to understand Levinas’ ontological category which is as such not understandable since in the il y a, there is no longer a subject that stands before the objectivity of reality. On the contrary, the il y a is exactly the category that expresses a situation where the subject itself has no longer the ‘right’ to exist as such but still does not stop to exist. This violence of being is exactly what Hitlerism wanted to do in creating the Holocaust and submitting the Jewish people to it. This makes understandable how the whole philosophy of Levinas is an effort to overcome the il y a through a moral answer to the Holocaust.
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Digital media, and especially the widespread use of the internet, challenge our experience of embodied presence and consequently force us to rethink the definition of the ‘human’ body that informs our social practices. Starting from the online documentations of Guy Ben-Ary’s bio-artwork cellF (2015), Alvin Lucier’s seminal experimental music piece Music for Solo Performer (1965), and Stelarc’s performance RE-WIRED / RE-MIXED (2015) the present article participates in this debate by asking: what type of embodied identity is contoured in online specta(c)torship? From a methodological point of view, the article resonates with Mieke Bal’s insistence on the importance of the case study in art theory and in the philosophy of art. It aims at performing a philosophical intervention with respect to the contemporary understanding of embodiment starting from the experience proposed by the encounter with specific artworks. Drawing on the case studies mentioned above and on theories of embodiment formulated in a diversity of contexts — such as affect theory (Seigworth and Greg, Clough), feminist critique (Grosz, Butler), performance studies (Salazar Sutil) and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze —, the article contends that the problematic of the embodied subject, such as it appears in online specta(c)torship, is that of an ongoing misrecognition: an ongoing decentring of the thinking subject (of the cartesian cogito) in a continuous renegotiation of the bio-techno-logical ‘self’ that grounds the ‘I’ and is in turn grounded by it.
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In her work, the author problematizes, but also tries to shed light on, the phenomenon of female sexuality and the place and role of women in the symbolic space, by entering into a dialogue with representatives of l’écriture féminine (“women’s writing”), as a French branch of feminist philosophical-literary theory from the beginning of the 70s. those years of the 20th century. The first findings resulting from this polemical discussion reveal that the subject of interest of the theory of “women’s writing” is the inscription of the female body and female diversity in structural language and text, by means of deconstruction as a post-structuralist method. It will be shown that the search for a “hidden signifier” in language, which tends to express the unspeakable, implies a critical review of philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary-theoretical positions on the development of female sexual identity, as well as on the role of women in the symbolic order. Thus, Foucault’s texts question the archeology of sexuality in the narrative, under the strong influence of psychoanalysis. French psychoanalysts, led by Freud, through the phenomenon of hysteria, which Foucault reinterprets as a phenomenon of self-misunderstanding, open the way to consider the misunderstanding of one’s own desire and one’s own sexuality, while literary theorists in parallel introduce the discursive production of knowledge about sexuality, emphasizing the ubiquitous misunderstanding and exclusion of female sexuality. from the standard male language code. In the end, the author concludes that in the androcentric language, women are defined as “other”, and that they must enter into a dialogue with their otherness in order to reaffirm such an understanding of themselves and their sexuality.
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In her work, the author problematizes, but also tries to shed light on, the phenomenon of female sexuality and the place and role of women in the symbolic space, by entering into a dialogue with representatives of l’écriture féminine (“women’s writing”), as a French branch of feminist philosophical-literary theory from the beginning of the 70s. those years of the 20th century. The first findings resulting from this polemical discussion reveal that the subject of interest of the theory of “women’s writing” is the inscription of the female body and female diversity in structural language and text, by means of deconstruction as a post-structuralist method. It will be shown that the search for a “hidden signifier” in language, which tends to express the unspeakable, implies a critical review of philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary-theoretical positions on the development of female sexual identity, as well as on the role of women in the symbolic order. Thus, Foucault’s texts question the archeology of sexuality in the narrative, under the strong influence of psychoanalysis. French psychoanalysts, led by Freud, through the phenomenon of hysteria, which Foucault reinterprets as a phenomenon of self-misunderstanding, open the way to consider the misunderstanding of one’s own desire and one’s own sexuality, while literary theorists in parallel introduce the discursive production of knowledge about sexuality, emphasizing the ubiquitous misunderstanding and exclusion of female sexuality. from the standard male language code. In the end, the author concludes that in the androcentric language, women are defined as “other”, and that they must enter into a dialogue with their otherness in order to reaffirm such an understanding of themselves and their sexuality.
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The article attempts to present some methodological approaches, controversies, and dilemmas in the research of intellectual history. First, the paper shows a dispute over the subject matter and the definition of the discipline from the perspective of influential scholars in the field. The major part of the study aims to show several methodological approaches: the traditional method of the “history of ideas” in the USA, the linguistic contextualism of the “Cambridge school”, the relationship between postmodernism and intellectual history, as well as social intellectual history. Similarities and differences between selected approaches are discussed considering their contributions and shortcomings. The final part of the article examines contemporary trends within the discipline, offering one of the potential solutions for earlier crises and methodological difficulties.
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