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Writing his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, George Berkeley was well aware that his thesis about non–existence of material substance would not be welcomed equally by learned and ordinary people. However, he was prepared for the expected discussion and tried to answer some objections in advance. He continued the fight against his opponents in his second work, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. The controversy embraced many topics and the aim of this paper is to present Berkeley’s attempt at showing his immaterialism as a position being in complete agreement with the world view (and cognition thereof) of so–called plain people. Berkeley considered himself a defender of their common sense, standing in opposition to the views of the learned. Berkeley maintained that the concept of material substance was an abstract idea invented by philosophers to explain the structure of the material world, but in his view the very idea was at the same time simply incomprehensible and redundant. He tried to persuade his readers that a ‘plain man’ neither uses nor needs the abstract idea of substance to understand and know the world he perceives. Berkeley points out some common–sensical beliefs and then puts forward arguments that his immaterialistic thesis is in full agreement with these beliefs. What is more, he argues that the views of his opponents stand in contradiction to these very common–sensical beliefs. To prove this, he identifies some metaphysical consequences of the representationalistic theory of perception. He says that in the world of this theory there exist only some material particles furnished with primary qualities but no objects from our ordinary sensory experience. According to this theory, we cannot trust our senses and that is why we must abandon it and adopt the position of presentationalism and common sense.
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The present paper aims at a reconsideration of the terminological distinction – postulated by eminent contemporary thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Bernard Williams – between “ethics” and “morality”. Although this distinction has not been settled as a standard*, there is no doubt that it incited fruitful debates relating to the contemporary issues of moral philosophy as well as the history of ethics. Julia Annas, to take one considerable example, presented a full-fledged criticism of the distinction and touched upon crucial questions**. In the following pages, we shall take the general argument of Annas as our starting-point, and reevaluate it with reference to a particular moment in the history of ideas, in order to shed light on the proposed distinction. To this end, we shall focus on the philosophy of Augustine, more precisely on his De Libero Arbitrio (On Free Choice), with the aim of comprehending the novelty of his contribution to the history of ethics. We shall show how Augustine, through his original usage of the concept of voluntas (will), reorganized the sphere of ethics and redefined the relationship between happiness (beatitudo) and right action. We will thereby illustrate that the ethics / morality distinction is highly illuminating for getting the real sense of this process of redefinition and reorganization, as well as the broader transformation that it triggered in the way human action will be problematized by later generations.
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The paper deals with the proofs of immortality of soul in Plato’s ‘Phaidon’. It is demonstrated here that in the dialogue, Plato attempts to reconstruct theoretical premises of the Socratic imperative ‘first and chiefly care about the greatest improvement of the soul’. The concern with the quality of soul has no warrants of reward in everyday life, therefore, it is necessary to search for such warrants beyond this life, which implies the prerequisite of the immortality of soul. Four proofs of the immortality of soul are distinguished in the dialogue: dialectical, gnoseological, ontological ant axiological. The logical structure and the premises of every proof are reconstructed. The premises are thematized in the context of Greek thinking, and in this way the direct and indirect intentions of every proof are revealed. The popular Antique concept of the soul as a harmony of the parts of body is analyzed as well. It is pointed out that Plato deals with the concept not because of his own conceptual preoccupations but just paying a debt to the popularity of this concept in the Antique world. However, the focus of the paper centers upon the Platonic concept of knowledge. The author maintains that the essential features of the concept of knowledge as anamnesis are predetermined by the sincretic character of the Greek thinking that in its turn anonimizes the subject of knowledge. The paper begins and ends with ethical accents. It is stated here that ‘Phaidon’ could be treated as the first attempt to produce a theoretical foundation of ethical behavior and that therein the postulates of practical reason, as formulated much more later by I. Kant, are already distinguished.
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source: Вестник Академии наук СССР, Moscow, Nr. 12/19665. Review by V. A. Malinin of Vol IV of the "History of Philosophy", published in Moscow in 1965
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The article focuses on an encounter with Shakespeare in an unusual place, a novel set in medieval India, where Shakespeare is viewed and assessed by an Indian audience, by Indian listeners, through principles of classical Indian art and thought. Such an encounter creates a sense of incongruity, an incongruity that is cultural, philosophical and aesthetic, but at the same time leads to startling perspectives and new and fresh insights. The novel does not privilege one culture over another but the listeners do and we have a brilliant piece of comic writing where the humour derives from the one-sidedness of their perceptions, their “occidentalism”, their easy assumption of the superiority of their belief system over the “other”. The Silver Pilgrimage thus provides not only a stimulating perspective on two Shakespearean tragedies from the point of view of Sanskrit poetics and Indian thought, but also a gentle expose of the limitations of this point of view, and the cultural chauvinism that lies behind it.
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This paper discusses Thomas Aquinas’ stance on the relation between intellect and human soul, where the former is a power and the latter its principle. Due to the fact that Aquinas understands soul as the form of a body, rather than its mover, the problem of how to separate and characterize intellective powers arises. For it is accidental intellectuality that enables cognitive and volitional acts, which are independent of body in their essence. To explain his own position, Aquinas employs the so-called “impediment argument” for the spirituality of the human intellect. He also employs the whole/part distinction when discussing the relation between intellect and soul as whole/part categories. As a result, his account can avoid Averroistic flaws without having to identify intellect with the soul or the whole human being (as argued by Albert the Great). M. Gogacz’s thesis that the intellectual accident of the soul is identical with the possible intellect seems to solve the problem of the accidental and potential character of this particular human power.
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The purpose of this study is to show how the Tunisian writer Yamen Manai, describes, in “L’Amas ardent”, the mechanisms of an environmental crisis coupled with a political crisis. He looks at it both with nostalgia for the “pre-crisis” time, that of a harmonious relationship between man and nature, but also with concern about a world in danger. This ecological concern seems to assert itself, through a magical realism and imagery giving the impression of an atmosphere of general “crisis”. This story, in the form of a tale, subtly mixes ecology and political satire in modern Tunisia. Le Don, a beekeeper living with his bees, far from men and the hustle and bustle of the world, one day sees his hives ransacked and thousands of his bees cut in two. Wondering about this terrible disaster, he goes out searching to understand this mystery in a land upset by the Arab Spring, where God’s fanatics raged. The writing of the crisis, discarding any form of pathos, is based on an ironic wit reminiscent of Voltaire’s philosophical tales and a reflection on environmental issues that leads to an ecological fantasy.
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Today, Bach’s music enjoys a huge interest and popularity in the West. However, this situation is paradoxical – it hides a certain contradiction. The progressive, liberal and secular West is an heir of the ideas of the Enlightenment, while “Bach, in his unswerving religious conservatism, was living and working very much at odds with the progressivist currents of his day, and ours” (Michael Marissen). The author of this paper focuses on Bach’s anti-Enlightenment attitude, presenting it mainly on the basis of the instrumental masterpiece Musikalisches Opfer BWV 1079. Towards the end of his article, with the help of Emil Cioran, John M. Coetzee, Ingmar Bergman and Zuzana Růžičkova, the author suggests an answer to the question why the music of Bach, an enemy of the Enlightenment, not only enjoys such a huge popularity, but is also treated in the Enlightened West as the work of the grandest music genius of the human race – one ranking among its best achievements.
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It is not seldom that some authors try to compare the doctrine of Zen Buddhism with the doctrine of Saint John of the Cross with the intention of finding some parallels. The most striking similarity seems to be the term “emptiness” (nada – John of the Cross and sunyata – Zen Buddhism). The difficulty of the comparison stems from the fact that in both cases this term has an experiential meaning, i.e. it describes subjective feelings one has while following the spiritual path. Therefore, the intent of the paper is to capture the metaphysical and epistemological meaning of this term in order to facilitate the comparison. This effort has led to the conclusion that in both doctrines the essentially different meaning of emptiness reflects their different understanding of the ultimate reality. Consequently, meditational techniques which both forms of spirituality adopted to achieve the ultimate reality exclude each other, and the semantic proximity of Zen Buddhism and John of the Cross is misleading.
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This paper tries to present Pietism as a current and set of ideas linked to the Enlightenment, as a culture focused on individualism and “subjectification”, as well as on the need to dismantle the old authorities and hierarchies. Such a way of thinking is visible in the religious poetry at that time, with the Danish pastor Hans Adolph Brorson. His main work The Rare Jewel of the Faith (Troens rare Klenodie, 1739), a collection of hymns used in the Danish and Norwegian church till today, belongs to the canon of the Danish literature.
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The article "Philosopie als strenge Wissenschaft" ("Philosophy as a Rigorous Science") by Edmund Husserl published in 1911 at the request of the editors of "Logos" is a specific manifesto of phenomenology. The article combines Husserl’s early philosophy, the so–called eidetic phenomenology, with transcendental phenomenology. Also, it presents an outline of the project of philosophical, scientific and cultural revival. This project is a return to the classical ideal of philosophy as theoretical cognition that constitutes the ultimate reason. Philosophy so understood gives priority to the thing itself, and its aim is truth as an absolute value. The project of philosophical revival as outlined by Husserl was born in a particular intellectual situation of the 19th century. This situation was marked by two great philosophical traditions: Kantism and positivism. The former was the formalism a priori, the latter – the empiricism (however it restricted the object of possible experience to the material world). Both of them eventually departed from the thing itself, either considering it unknowable or accepting its depiction proposed by natural sciences. It resulted in agnosticism, scepticism, scientism and psychologism. The remedy for such a state of things lay in building a new philosophy of the absolute beginning. This philosophy was supposed to be a rigorous science in the form of phenomenology as the science of pure consciousness.
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from: "Prawda" (Moscow) 1956-12-26. original title: "For a close relationship between Philosophy and Life. Problems of the historical Materialism in the periodical "Woprosy Filosofii" Nr.1-5/1956"
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O poretcima moći zamišljanja
Dame i gospodo, među svim nazivima koji su se koristili za prošlo stoljeće, formula zvana era neutraliziranja, ima poseban položaj. Nazivi mnogih drugih razdoblja obilježeni su pukim događanjima, izumima ili trendovima, ali ovaj je dotaknuo gramatiku same zbilje. Bez obzira, govorimo li o atomskom dobu, o stoljeću žene ili o eri nepovjerljivosti, stoljeću rendgenskih zraka ili radio valova, kompjutorskom vremenu ili o čemu god drugom , tehnički ili društveni objekt uvijek je glavno obilježje cjelokupne epohe. Onaj koji priča o razdoblju neutraliziranja ima nešto posve drugo na umu. Taj naziv pokreće nemir koji se izdiže iznad prostora u kojemu nastaje zbiljnost zbiljskoga. Neutraliziranje je za prve motritelje i dijagnostičare bila demonsko područje, iz kojega je, kroz neutralizaciju maglu i sivilo zbilje, prodiralo zlo u svijet, kako bi nam oči zaslijepilo pijeskom i neodlučnošću. Nije ni čudo da su prvi teoretičari neutralizma bili i njezini najoštriji denuncijanti. Oni su bili vođe katoličke reakcije za koje se kraj svijeta približavao u obliku varljivog mira između prijatelja i neprijatelja, te između ovdje i tamo. Dame i gospodo, znate i sami da pritom najviše govorim o Carlu Schmittu, posljednjem samuraju odlučnosti pri odabiru jednog naspram drugog. On se bori protiv onoga što smatra propašću staroeuropskog smislenog kozmosa, protiv dijalektičkih i pacifističkih Sandmana i njihovih konfuznih ili polivalentnih poimanja zbilje. Bio je uvjeren da će se rat nastaviti, bez obzira na to što jučerašnji protivnici danas dijele isti krevet. I stoga je svugdje naslućivao skrivenu frontu, tražio skrivene znakove koji otkrivaju partizane koji su, tako kaže legenda, prije spavanja pogledali i ispod kreveta, jer su vjerovali da je njihov protivnik spreman na sve.
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Book Review: Arturo Escobar, "Sentir-penser avec la Terre. Une écologie au-delà de l’Occident", Seuil, coll. Anthropocène, 2018, 240 pp
This book review is about the French translation of a book by the anthropologist Arturo Escobar that, though it has not been translated into English yet, deserves to be known by English readers. This book is quite important since it allows one to understand occidental, capitalist and modern hegemony not only as an economic domination but above all as a cultural, epistemological and ontological colonisation. Indeed, according to Escobar, this domination takes its roots in the Occident’s ontology which translates into hegemonic practices that are concrete threats to the other worlds and their dwellers. Thus, Escobar highlights the deep link between ontologies and practices and argues for a new field of study he calls political ontology or ontological politics. To accompany the proposition of a shift from a universal nature to a pluriverse composed of many worlds, Escobar does not only undermine the prejudices of modernity but also puts forward the relational ontologies from indigenous communities of Latin America that concretely resist colonisation, underlining the ontological dimension of their struggles. Such a framework enables one to overcome or at least minimize the distinction between theory and practice.
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The paper offers a kind of a critical reflection on the discussion about the philosophy of Skolem-Lowenheim’s theorem between J. Życiński and A. Lemańska. This discussion appeared on the pages of "Studia Philosophiae Christianae" between 1986 and 1988 and focused on the question of the limits of extrapolation of the Skolem–Löwenheim’s theorem outside the area of formalised discourse. The author takes an intermediate position between the “extrapolation’s optimism” of J. Życiński and the “extrapolation’s scepticism” of A. Lemańska.
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The article investigates the notion of ‘life’ in Kant’s practical philosophy. This notion is being compared with the notion of ourday life, which we find in the novel of Helen Fielding ‘Bridget Jone’s Diary’. The relation between these two notions is being analyzed as a relation between two paradigms: the paradigm of reason and the paradigm of heart. The image of the ‘killer of dreams’ is requested to show that the duty to state factual truth is not always, what is of cruicial importance to our lives. Factual truth is only part of the concept of truth, not all of it. A dream is also a fact. At the end, life and reason meat each other in the practice of writing.
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