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The review of: HORSKÝ, Ján. TEORIE A NARACE. K noetice historické vědy a teorii kulturního vývoje. Praha: Argo, 2015, 274 s. ISBN 9788025713204.
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The article presents new facts and original analyses of the donation activities and the Wills of Dr. Petar Beron. A number of confirmed opinions about specific donations, teacher support, etc., are found to contain serious omissions and inaccuracies. Many important, but hitherto supressed or unknown, data about abuses involved in the donations are pointed out and analyzed in detail ford the first time in the article. The author reveals so far unknown, or barely touched upon, aspects of the social, political, and economic context of the Wills.
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This article suggests that human action in Machiavelli is both materialistic and temporalized. It further argues that Reinhart Koselleck’s view of Machiavelli’s understanding of time as historical circularity is misleading. The author is making the case that Machiavelli drew from Lucretian materialism to strip political concepts of content via an animal-materialist anthropology and ontology holding that man, as any animal, is material reality acting under an atomic arrangement wherein no time, whether linear or circular, can exist. The conclusion is that Koselleck’s interpretation of the circularity of time in Machiavelli kept him from seeing his role as an antecedent of the conceptual and temporal revolution underlying the Sattelzeit.
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Thou art perfect then our ship hath touched upon the deserts of Bohemia?” asks Antigonus in act 3, scene 3, of William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1609-10). Czechs are inclined to see Shakespeare’s furnishing of their country with a coastline as a typical example of foreigners’ ignorance of their land, which was to reach its shameful nadir in British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s description of Czechoslovakia in 1938 as “a faraway country” inhabited by quarreling peoples “of whom we know nothing.” Such flights of geographic fancy can rankle with those unlucky enough to have to suffer their consequences; Chamberlain was distancing the Czech lands from the known world in order to justify his acquiescence in Adolf Hitler’s carving them up. Shakespeare, however, was probably doing no more than signaling that the second part of his fable was set in an imagined Arcadia, a realm of youth and innocence located at the opposite moral pole from the world-weariness, sophistication, and decadence of the equally fictionalized Sicilian court in which the play begins. [...]
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Bendyk discusses two interpretations of violence and its sources. The first refers to René Girard’s mimetic theory, where violence is a product of religion and culture; and the second stems from the Enlightenment, which presents violence as a product of human rationality. In Girard’s interpretation the apocalypse is a real option for the end of history, the second one leads to enlightened catastrophism, which removes the necessity of the apocalypse.
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In my paper, I examine the meaning and significance of the more widely interpreted humanist tradition for Gadamer. I apply the ’wide’ attribute because on the one hand the interpretation of the tradition itself by Gadamer raises important aspects, on the other hand I also deal with Gadamer’s interpretation of myth, in addition to “humanist leading concepts”. In my paper I deal with the following questions: the human sciences and the humanist tradition – methodological reflections; the main characteristics of the interpretation of the concept of “formation” (Bildung) by Gadamer; common sense, taste and judgment as “humanist leading concepts”; the historical aspects of the meaning of myth; myth and logos; myth and reason; myth and science.
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In the paper, the most important and resonant episodes of M.N. Pokrovsky’s “rehabilitation” as a researcher were studied. Based on the analysis of various published and unpublished sources, a number of conclusions were drawn. Firstly, the period of late 1950s – 1960s was marked by the rejection of the previous assessments of M.N. Pokrovsky’s legacy that became popular in the historiography of the Stalin era at the level of party and political discourses, as well as among researchers. Secondly, historians proposed different models for studying M.N. Pokrovsky’s legacy; the ubiquitous feature of all models was the use of archival sources. The “living memory” and personal experience of the academic community served as an integral supplement to the “cold” documentary facts. Thirdly, the active participation of Soviet historians in returning of M.N. Pokrovsky to the historiographic pantheon was of great importance. M.V. Nechkina, E.A. Lutsky, and A.L. Sidorov were among them. Interestingly, they were among the authors of an earlier published two-volume edition against M.N. Pokrovsky. At the same time, the limits of what was “acceptable” or not were still defined by the government authorities. This influenced the presentation of scientific knowledge to the professional community.
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The methodology for studying nations and nationalism in modern Russian historiography was analyzed. The concept of Russianness was considered, and, as a result, it was demonstrated that the scope of tools and methods used in intellectual history can be expanded. The scientific and research discourse of the notions of nation, nationalism, and, in particular, Russianness was outlined. The conceptualization of the latter – in the works by A.I. Miller, M.D. Dolbilov, and E.A. Vishlenkova – was considered. The limits of the concept were defined. Its place in the historiographical notions of nation and nationalism, identity and empire was revealed. The intentions of the authors of historiographic statements were identified based on the works published by the Cambridge School of Intellectual History. The biographical approach was used: the role played by personal views of a researcher, which inevitably humanize the history of historiography, was discussed. Special attention was paid to cognitive metaphors enabling both deconstruction of the meaning of statements and identification of the content of their internal structures, such as ideologemes or frames.
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The paper focuses on the way the notion of trauma functions and is justified in the contemporary discourse on history. The author refers to the works of Aleida Assmann and examines the critique brought forward against memorial culture. Deconstructing Assmann’s argument, the author concludes that there are two levels of discourse that support and justify each other: the level of fact and the level of value. The first one deals with the problem of traumatic events and expanding memory about them, which is explained as a change of time regime. The second one deals with the ethical turn that made the change of the time regime possible. To analyse historical trauma, the article suggests breaking the connection between these two levels and examining their foundations separately.
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The purpose of the research is to study the influence of methodological pluralism as a meta-approach on the formation of modern historical science; to examine the role that diverse approaches played in the scientific study of the past; to demonstrate the importance of a multi-vector view of history as an integral part of the study of the past. The relevance of the research: these are interdisciplinary interactions between both socio-humanitarian and natural sciences. The consequence of this is the emergence of the phenomenon of methodological pluralism as the basis of modern historical science. Conclusions: in the process of research we discovered that diverse methodological approaches influence the historical science, which ultimately leads to the emergence of the new directions in historical knowledge. Research methods: analytical and synthetic, inductive and deductive, comparative approach. The novelty of the article lies in the analysis of the potential of methodological pluralism in the discourse of post-classical historical science. The productivity of using modern interdisciplinary approaches in the study of processes that have taken place in the past is substantiated.
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The paper establishes a correlation between nihilism and history from the premise of the end of metaphysics in the age of the technosphere. In presenting the genealogy of the postmodern turn in contemporary philosophical thinking, the author critically deals with Vattimo’s thesis that Heidegger’s notion of overcoming metaphysics (Verwindung) is the key to understanding postmodernity. Despite its close proximity to Nietzsche and Heidegger, it is undeniable that the main notion must be derived from late Wittgenstein’s thinking, as Lyotard did in his analysis of the “postmodern condition”. It is a notion of “language games” that introduces into consideration the relationship between the pragmatics of knowledge, the performativity of language and the event horizon. In this way, it will be shown that postmodernity cannot be any “new” epoch but rather a re-actualization of the condition determined by the rule of technoscience, cybernetics and plural patterns of culture in post-industrial society. Based on his previous analyses of this problem, collected in the books The Postmodern Game of the World, Identity Politics, The Posthuman Condition, and Technosphere I–V, the author believes that only extensive analysis and interpretation of Lyotard’s premises allows one to reach the right philosophical path to the answer to the question of the essence of nihilism in the face of Being, and the technosphere as computation, planning, and construction of the inhuman. In contemporary times, what is left of postmodernity is neither “telling stories” about the stylistic tendencies of the modern and neomodern, the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde, nor, more so, the conflict of the universality and particularity of society and culture. All that remains is the feature of the unwavering “fate” of this nihilism of the technosphere: from the postmodern condition to the posthuman condition, thought is confronted with the challenge of an event that goes beyond anything seen in the history of Western metaphysics. When the image precedes the language and the writing to speaking, we find ourselves in a closed circle of turns and reversals of metaphysics. It is time to step out of this “vicious circle” in which the living becomes non-living, the Being becomes the information, the system of objects replaces society, and the human-too-human with inhuman as such.
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Unter der Annahme, dass der Orientalismus und Balkanismus nicht einmal rudimentär die reichhaltigen interkulturellen Beziehungen zwischen Europa und dem Mittelmeer erfasst, argumentiert die vorliegende Forschungsarbeit, dass es nötig ist, einen weiteren Diskurs in Ermangelung einer besseren Bezeichnung unter dem Namen Mediterranismus einzubeziehen. Darunter sind kulturelle Imaginationen des Mittelmeeres als philosophische und poetische Denkfigur der europäischen Schriftkultur zu verstehen. Die Hauptaufgabe ist dabei auf der Grundlage der Begriffsgeschichte in Fragmenten und der Deduktion der heuristischen theoretischen Hypothesen eine Rekonstruktion und kontrastive und komplementäre Komparation dieser drei Diskursformationen durchzuführen, unter der Einsicht, dass sie unter den Bedingungen der Moderne bei der europäischen Selbstbesinnung zugleich entgegengesetzt und miteinander verwoben sind. Daher enthalten sie eine ganze Reihe von perzeptiven, affektiven und kognitiven Gegensätzen und Widersprüchen, die gesondert in weiteren Forschungsarbeiten zu untersuchen sind.
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Review of Vincent Brown’s book Tacky’s Revolt. The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA—London 2020. (Łukasz Zaremba)
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Contrary to the widespread portrayal of Bloch’s philosophy as “mystical,” “eschatological,” “idealistic” etc., the essay shows that it is best interpreted through the framework of a Marxist philosophy of praxis. Similarly, to Labriola and Gramsci, Bloch develops his concept of materialism from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach. His concepts of the “highest good” and of an “alliance technique” take up young Marx’s perspective of a reconciliation between humans and nature; his theory of anticipation and hope is centered on the development of collective capacities to act; even his “ontology of the not yet,” which is often criticized for its teleology, is actually based on the concept of “open possibilities” and can thus be interpreted in terms of the “weak teleological force of open possibilities.” However, from a praxis-philosophical perspective, Bloch’s philosophy is also in need of a rethinking that overcomes its essentialist presumptions and pluralizes its teleology.
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This paper aims to interpret the role of “objective phantasy” in the utopian tradition of critical theory, with an emphasis on Bloch, but also the evolution of its usage with authors such as Marcuse and Adorno. The main function of phantasy taken into consideration is its capacity to go beyond present facts (what is made possible by an anti-positivist concept of truth in critical theory) and to anticipate. This anticipatory element of phantasy is dependent, as we try to demonstrate, on a reflection of affects around expectation. Ultimately, we oppose two models of anticipatory imagination (while showing their inner relation): a utopian one (primarily conceptualized by Bloch) and its counterpoint, catastrophist anticipation, which assumes its most radical form in Günther Anders’ reflections on the atomic age, and whose actuality and urgency we seek to emphasize.
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The article is devoted to the new approaches to the study of Renaissance philosophy, which appeared in the 1960s and 1970s within the context of the so-called cultural turn in the Soviet humanities. The author argues that in the same period in which official Soviet historiography on the Renaissance attained maturity and began to reap its fruits, there appeared the first significant alternative interpretations of Renaissance philosophy. The two most important interpretations of this kind were published in the same year, 1978. Those were the books Renaissance Aesthetics by Aleksei Losev and Italian Humanists: Style of Life and Style of Thinking by Leonid Batkin. However, as Losev and Batkin belonged to different generations and had very different educational backgrounds, interests and styles of research, their ‘dissident’ interpretations of Renaissance philosophy and culture had almost nothing in common. If they are similar in any way, it is in that both of the works pursued metahistoriographical aims. Losev devoted the last decades of his life to an unparalleled undertaking in which he sought to give voice to his Christian philosophy, and ultimately, to his religious belief. Unlike Losev, Batkin was not a believer and did not feel the need to use scholarly discourse as a means of conveying religious messages. He also had aims that went beyond the immediate aims of historiography, but they were more personal. The author’s conclusion is that the additional mission Batkin assigned to historiography is not proselytism but self-cognition.
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The article departs from the difference between two types of historical writings, one narrating stories about actors and the other trying to bring about evidence that justify claims to know certain things about specific aspects of the past. From the Iliad and the Odyssey, telling stories have been a common way of presenting past events. Inscriptions and annals, as well as graves and monuments, urged to present posterity with evidence for acts and occurrences. Storytelling was always more popular than searching for evidence. In the 19th century, historians began to systematise their doubts about the truth of many stories. This source criticism has been refuted by many “historical theorists” in the late 20th and the early 21st centuries with the argument that claims that it is impossible to bring truth about the past and that all history is to be regarded as a kind of literature with, at best, symbolic “truth”. I want to reject this standpoint as based only on an internal “theory of history”-discourse and ask for analyses of actual historical research, which claims to produce new historical knowledge.
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The purpose of the article is to analyze the novel by Victor Pelevin Generation “P” in the context of the theory of “fluid modernity” of the Polish philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Both the Russian writer and the Polish scholar point out the negative effects of the modern — unusually flexible, fluid, free from borders and conditions — commercial civilization on a person’s daily life, his mentality, value system, self-identification and self-esteem.
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This article is a translation comprising the last chapter and summary of the book Průvodce po demokracii [A Guide Through Democracy], first published in 1997, in which Erazim Kohák shares the experiences of his life in the US and compares it with challenges faced by the new Central-European democracies. This essay describes three fundamental threats the world faces at the turn of the 21st century: demographic, ecological and moral crises. The author underlines the importance of an open dialogue and voluntary involvement of citizens in shaping the social life in a democratic system.
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