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„Cine gândește abstract? Omul fără cultură, nu cel instruit. Buna societate nu gândește abstract întrucât este prea facil, prea vulgar – însă fără legătură cu poziția socială –, nu dintr-o vană pretenție de noblețe care ar plasa-o deasupra a ceea ce nu poate făptui, ci datorită micimii inerente a acestui lucru.” (Hegel, Wer denkt abstrakt?)
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The first pandemic texts, published in the book Where Have We Gone? Epidemic as Politics (“A che punto siamo? L'epidemia come politica”, Quodlibet, 2020), link Agamben's central notion of ”bare life” to fear, placing it at the center of his predictions for the sunset of bourgeois democracies and the rise of despotism based on the notion of ”biosecurity”. The theme culminates in the essay ”What is Fear?” presented here. Unlike the previous ones, it originally appeared on the website of the Italian Institute for Philosophical Research. Being the most philosophically saturated text of the series, it rethinks the key categories of Heideggerian existential analytics, fear and fearing, in the horizon of the pandemic situation, problematizing the ontological priority given by Heidegger to anxiety over fearing, in order to derive fearing as the mood through which power is established and justified.
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Simone Weil's ideas proved fundamental for Iris Murdoch, opening up a difficult path of thought for one rooted in the British philosophical tradition in the 1950s (Sim 1985, Bok 2005, Lovibond 2011a, Panizza 2022a, Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman 2022). Grasping the Weilian-inspired moral theory of attention sketched by Iris Murdoch is a prerequisite for comprehending the development of her moral ideas (Panizza 2015, Broackes 2012) and the form they may take in her literary writings (Griffin 1993, Morgan 2006). This paper argues that we can read an expression of Simone Weil in Iris Murdoch's novels which articulate her notions of grace and gravity, but also convey the Weilian insights that shape Murdoch's moral perfectionism. It investigates three of Murdoch's well-known male protagonists, i.e., Bradley Pearson, Charles Arrowby and Hilary Burde, so as to comprehend how their moral failures relate to a defective implementation of the concepts of love and attention as theorised by Simone Weil as leading to goodness. Hence, it offers a new examination of the way in which the Murdochian literary staging of inattention as a cause of moral deficiency reveals its Weilian-based ethics of attention.
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Too often associated with suspicion rather than trust, Ricoeur's hermeneutics is understoodby many primarily as a critical endeavor. In this way, the fragile balance that he is tryingto maintain between the two approaches is ignored. The objective of the following studyis, by means of Ricoeur's "dialectical game of suspicion and trust", to elucidate the complexity of his hermeneutics and to demonstrate that trust is as pivotal as suspicion. At thedifference of some authors who maintain that trust and suspicion are opposed, even mutuallyexclusive approaches of two kinds of hermeneutics, it will be shown that Ricoeur hasdeveloped a single hermeneutics which encompasses both approaches and explores themon different levels (epistemological, anthropological, ethical, sociopolitical). In the limitednumber of contributions dedicated to Ricoeur's concept of trust, these different levels arefrequently conflated, whereby the relationship between religious belief and trust/mistrustis completely ignored. Consequently, the divergent perspectives of his early and late philosophical work, as well as certain discontinuities, are overlooked. Therefore, this studyplaces a central emphasis on the neglected religious level of suspicion and trust.
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Professor Ryszard Panasiuk has been one of the leading Polish philosophers for the last few decades. His books on Hegel, the Young Hegelian movement and Marx belong in the history of ideas canon. This extensive interview with the Professor published here may be a valuable and original source in the history of the intelligentsia and humanities in “People’s Poland”. Professor Panasiuk narrates about his academic career, at the same time drawing a picture of the general changes in the academic philosophy in postwar Poland. He also devotes much attention to his relationship with Bronisław Baczko and other outstanding representatives of the famous Warsaw School of the History of Ideas. Moreover, the Professor examines the history of dissenting tendencies within Polish Marxism after October ’56 and explains the final decay of post-Stalinist orthodoxy in Polish intellectual life of that period. Marx constitutes an important, still worth studying, chapter in the history of European philosophy, but, as Professor Panasiuk argues, because of its concept of “radical community”, Marxism is essentially a utopian ideology.
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This article addresses two major issues. First, the reception of Schelling’s philosophy in Poland after World War II. Second, how Schelling’s philosophical abstractions should be understood. The contextual understanding of philosophy relied on by Ryszard Panasiuk in his research was taken as the basis for interpretation. The structure of the article is derived from these two basic assumptions: the first part – German Idealism in the Context of Marxist-Leninist Ideology – deals with the way in which Marxist-Leninist ideology, starting from a class-dialectical and “party” understanding of philosophy, regarded philosophical Idealism as the enemy. The point of reference will be Georg Lukács’ concept of “Die Zerstörung der Vernunft” and the interpretation of Schelling’s philosophy as Irrationalism. Part Two – The Origins of Schelling Research – deals with the problem of why research on Schelling and Idealism ceased after World War II. And consecutively, under what conditions and when the first monographic studies appeared. The third part – How to understand nature? – is a historical-critical and contextual interpretation of Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature. Schelling’s philosophy can be understood as a new anthropology, integrally linking Man and Nature. In this sense, it is the antithesis of rationalist reductionism.
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The article considers the development of international cooperation in the field of environmental protection in the historical aspect. The genesis of the emergence of environmental problems and their assessment by the scientific community are analyzed. The historical stages of the formation of the system of international legal environmental protection, its goals, principles and main tasks are examined. Particular attention is paid to international, regional and bilateral treaties that regulate international cooperation in the field of environmental protection. The role of the United Nations in this process is focused. The place of international organizations in solving environmental problems is shown.
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The article analyzes Kantian ethics in the context of the Enlightenment from three points of view: with regard to its semantic foundations, its principles, and in the light of its social applicability. The text explores the ontological considerations of faith and morality in the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. It leads to the conclusion that, in his philosophical system, creativity is the main criterion for both faith and truth. Achieving them lies in using criticism as a main method and morality as a guiding principle. The paper concludes that eudemonism is inherent in Kant’s ideas and examines the meaning of liberty in the Kantian doctrine of morality. The Kantian understanding of the enlightening role of philosophy for change and improvement is systematically derived. The analysis is based on the texts of Immanuel Kant.
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Constructing a tenable theory of Ubuntu is urgent and needed for an indigenous ethical perspective on African social and political development. The theoretical analysis and practical application of Ubuntu seems to have become emotive, restrictive, politicized, and not inclusive enough due to grandstanding about ownership, poor conceptual and theoretical articulation, as well as antagonism from other related dominating foreign worldviews that wish to become the development paradigm for human society. This raises relational and dialogical issues about meaning from an African perspective. A native African paradigm for development is urgent due to the dominant neocolonial paradigms of alienation, exploitation, and marginalization. Ubuntu ethics is defined by a set of positive human values for ensuring stable and viable development worldwide, specifically in Africa.
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The article presents the critical grounds for philosophizing in the Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhist schools in relation to Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy. We develop the thesis that, in all three cases, the philosophical reflection takes place through the integration of the theory of the psyche and the theories of objects. Kant’s antinomies are compared with the metaphysical questions that Buddha has left unanswered. Against this background, the question of the transcendental subject as pure consciousness is discussed in Kant’s perspective and in Buddhism. Three models of transcendental philosophy are formulated: classical, non-classical, and post-classical.
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The paper argues the ethical code/standards of religion as the core of its anthropological essence. The main aspects of contemporary global crisis, among them consumerism, ecological problems, and conflicts/wars are described in the light of the main religious values: humility, poverty, love of one’s neighbor and compassion. A conclusion is drawn that the majority of the societies and peoples of Late Modernity, and especially its political and economic elites, do not accept the ethical messages and the values of religion as respectable forms of regulation of spiritual and practical attitudes. The results of sociological surveys are applied to support the thesis.
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Philosophy of memory is a hot topic in the cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind. This work examines the dispute between simulations and causal theories of memory by means of an examination of the feeling of familiarity and its relation to memory traces, more specifically how they increase the fluency of reconstruction of past episodes. Understanding the relationship between familiarity and memory traces and, furthermore, the relation between a fully-fledged phenomenology of memory and a sense of subjective certainty of the episode has occurred in the past, lead to a different interpretation of the rivalry between the CTM and the simulationist account.
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In the paper, I offer a phenomenological analysis of the lived experience of intersexuality, which I view from the perspective of indeterminacy concerning the horizon of the givenness of the homeworld founded on the broader basis of the pregivenness of the lifeworld. These horizons define the structure of the sedimentation of subjective experience, as well as the layers of cultural meanings sedimented in the lifeworld. The sedimented layers of self-experience and of the shared lifeworld function as a sphere of indeterminacy, that is, the horizons of constituted phenomena. In this sense, all intentional acts have the nature of horizontal indeterminacy, the layers of which are revealed in the genetic question (Rückfrage) directed toward them. Horizontal indeterminacy also accounts for the distinction between the homeworld and the alienworld, which appears as something unobvious and unexpected against the obviousness of the homeworld, at the same time thematizing the latter. The notion of human corporeality as given in the sex/gender binary is one element of the sedimented conceptual system, which operates as the horizon of indeterminacy of both self-experience and the pre-reflective life-world. A unique opportunity for phenomenological insight into the constitution of the phenomenon of sex/gender is provided by Hida Viloria’s account of her lived experience of intersexuality. Her lived body, first experienced pre-reflectively as a transparent medium and a perfectly handy tool of undisturbed intentionality and unproblematized in sexual activities, gradually underwent alienation under the objectifying gaze determined by the binary pattern of sex/gender. Becoming an alienated object, Viloria’s body lost its transparency. She began to experience her corporeality and identity in a way determined by the sedimented “ideology” of sex and gender. Having “tried on” the constructs of masculine and feminine identities, Viloria eventually overcame alienation and, in the process of secondary self-identification, reclaimed her lived body in its intersexuality and her identity in its non-binary gender fluidity
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The subject of this paper is the relationship between religion and sport. The aim of my considerations is to criticize the position presented by the American philosopher Eric Bain-Selbo, according to which sporting experiences may quite rightly be described as religious experiences. In the first part of the article, I reconstruct Wayne Proudfoot’s concept of religious experience that underlies Bain-Selbo’s analysis. I then discuss the research conducted by Bain-Selbo and the conclusions he draws from it. In the next part of the article, referring to Charles Taylor’s hermeneutical approach, I show that Proudfoot’s and Bain-Selbo’s methodology leads to a theoretically unjustified reductionism. I argue that an in-depth articulation of individual self-interpretation allows for an insight into the dynamics of sporting and religious experiences, and thus to see the differences that separate them. In the last part of the article, I invoke the considerations of William James, John Hick and Robert Roberts and try to show that, given the moral consequences of our experiences and their phenomenological description (intentionality), the experiences evoked by sport and religion can by no means be identified with each other.
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The purpose of the present paper is to analyse the problem of cost generated by the performance of a duty to rescue. The authors consider three distinct views of this problem by confronting a scenario in which one party decides to rescue another, where providing such assistance seems to involve an infringement upon the property rights of the third party. For example, A rescues drowning B but in the process of doing so A apparently trespasses upon C’s land. The question that the authors pose is: Assuming that there is a duty to rescue, who should be charged with the cost of what seems to be an infringement upon the third party’s property rights? The paper analyses the following possibilities: the cost should be borne by (a) the victim of the emergency, (b) the rescuer, (c) the third party whose rights seem to have been encroached upon. Even though the authors begin with a pronouncedly libertarian assumption about the third party’s absolute property rights, in the course of the discussion they come to the conclusion that it is exactly this assumption that should be further probed and ultimately relaxed in order to reach the most plausible solution to the present dilemma.
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This article aims to illustrate Schmitt’s theories as extensions of Niccolò Machiavelli’s political concepts to sustain order within the state. The author aims to explicate the complex nature of Carl Schmitt’s concepts as a continuation of Machiavelli’s thoughts, aimed at upholding the idea of state authority. In the text, the author tries to show that the proper context for reading Schmitt is the decaying form of the state established in the seventeenth century, whose form, as a continuation of Catholic theology, Carl Schmitt fiercely defends against the liberal hegemony. Schmitt’s ideological and political choices suggest that he consciously aligns with the intellectual themes that Machiavelli navigated, while at the same time Schmitt struggled against the effects of the secularization of politics, a process of which Machiavelli was a precursor.
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According to Aristotle, democracy and oligarchy are empirically the most widespread and analytically fundamental ‘constitutions’. I analyse how in different places in his Aristotle ‘positively’ defines and differentiates between democracy and oligarchy. At the same time, I substantiate in detail a new interpretation of Aristotle‘s view that significantly differs from the current interpretation. ‘Combining’ the elements, procedures, and principles of democracy and oligarchy gives rise to mixed 'constitutions', a special place among which is occupied by the politeia or republic, which is the best regime ‘for most states and for most people’. I show the ways in which it is possible, according to Aristotle, to form such a regime. Carl Schmitt and, later somewhat differently, Bernard Manin draw a link between Aristotle’s mixed regime and the representative democracies of today.
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This paper aims to examine what is called “diasporic identity.” The complexity related to this research arises due to the inherent uncertainty and indefinability of identity itself, which is further compounded by the additional layer of uncertainty introduced by the concept of diaspora. The diaspora is not a ready-made, indisputable reality; establishing its existence demands substantiating the claim that it possesses a distinct identity. However, merely demonstrating a shared geographical distance from the homeland raises pertinent questions: Why should the negative circumstance of being distanced from one’s homeland serve as a unifying factor, and does this dispersion give rise to an identity transcending national boundaries? Answering these questions involves looking at the historical context of identity and diaspora and introducing concepts that help understand them. The central thesis posited herein asserts that the manifestation of diasporic identity primarily assumes a narrative form, elucidated through both disciplinary discourse and literary works. With specific reference to the Armenian Diaspora, this exposition contends that, in certain instances, reliance solely on academic discourse proves insufficient in establishing a comprehensive comprehension of diasporic identity. It is asserted that literature, with its metaphoric language, emerges as an essential instrument, providing access to the profound layers inherent to the domain, thereby facilitating a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of diasporic identity.
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