Die „consolatio Philosophiae“ in Byzanz
Die griechische Übersetzung der Consolatio Philosophiae durch Maximos Planudes
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Die griechische Übersetzung der Consolatio Philosophiae durch Maximos Planudes
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The purpose of this study is to examine Ibn Miskawayh's concept of soul in general terms; more specifically, to analyze the sensory and intellectual perception problems. He deals with the soul in two main lines. The soul as the basis of moral principles; as the subject of sensual and intellectual perception. These two fields can not be separated by sharp lines, however, in this study, the soul concept is studied on the basis of sensory and intellectual problems. Ibn Miskawayh follows Peripatetic philosophers and uses the word ‘soul’ for both the terrestrial region and the celestial region, in the same sense. Ibn Miskawayh's theory of soul is basically based on the Aristotelian tradition. He defines the soul must be the first actuality of a naturally organised body. Soul is the basis of life, vitality and immortality. Soul determines the hierarchical chain of existence, not matter. The soul has different powers for plants, animals and humans, but this does not contrast with the unity and integrity of the soul. Man shares some faculty with plants and animals, but he is separated from other creatures by having intelligence. The sensation, imagination and fantasy are the stages of the material perception level, in man. The mind perceives universal forms. The mind has two tendencies; towards sensation and intelligible world. The mind can only perceives the supreme intelligible forms by turning to its own self. The human soul which is able to obtain intelligible forms and independent of the body is eternal essence and its source is divine.
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This lecture addresses how “bearing witness to genocide” became a central trope of contemporary Western moral culture. The 1960/61 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem put victims of genocide centre-stage and affirmed the pre-eminence of the Jewish Holocaust survivor in European and especially American politics and culture. The lecture revisits the Eichmann trial to understand its contribution not simply to bringing the world’s attention to the Jewish dimension of the Holocaust, but also to understanding how the trial shaped the pervasive figure of the Jewish “witness” who marked the Holocaust as a caesura in human history. The Holocaust survivor remained the iconic witness even when, after the 1990s, the witness to genocide became a more generic symbol of suffering humanity in the shadow of all state-sponsored mass violence against persons and cultures. The lecture suggests that only by placing the witness to genocide in a longer historical trajectory can we understand why the Holocaust remains iconic in spite of the occurrence of many other genocides since.
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The movie Shoah from the intellectual, filmmaker, editor of «Les Temps Modernes» and former Résistance-fighter Claude Lanzmann, who recently passed away, presented for important parts of my generation in Germany a radical turning point. For the first time we had been able to conceive that the destruction of the European Jews took place almost in immediate geographic and historical neighborhood. In one shot it got clear to us –who understood ourselves as student activists with a critical posture towards capitalism and domination– that in reality we hadn't known nothing about the Shoah.
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The text presents the figure of an extraordinary scholar, Ignacy S. Fiut. It shows him not only as a great scientist, but also a sensitive and good man, whose multifaceted personality is reflected in scientific works as well as poetry.
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The eastern and western philosophies have elaborated greatly on the issue of conflict, conflict resolution, development, war, peace, etc. The common axis in many of the theories is the human factor, the way the individual perceives and is affected by these phenomena. In these theories there is an attempt to establish a working connection between the practical and the ideal. While conflict can be either a basis for societal development or non development, it also substantiates a perspective for the existence of values which are eventually intrinsic to political and moral improvements. Such values aim at the direction of prosperity and wellbeing, which remains an ecumenical and diachronic problem, not only under economic terms. Human societies are still faced with the dilemma, whether material progress is the fast track to the resolution on conflict. However, what is still disregarded, as shown in comparative philosophical literature, is that development has to take into consideration a richer notion of the human being; one concerned with elements of his inner reality. In that sense, development is the aftermath not only of the avoidance of war or conflict but of the enrichment of human life and action with certain advancements in individual and collective virtues, advancements that offer macroscopically benefit to the political.
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Naša filozofska kultura dugo je trajala u znaku nedostatka brojnih neophodnih elemenata. Nedostajala su sistematska istraživanja nacionalne filozofske baštine. Malo je knjiga, studija, ogleda, prevoda i bibliografija koji bi u svom misaonom i istraživačkom središtu imale problematiku filozofske propedeutike, metodike i didaktike filozofije, kao i same istorije filozofije. Objašnjenje za takvo stanje delom se može naći u odsustvu volje među filozofskim delatnicima za „podelom rada”. Ona je iznova ohrabrivana uveravanjima da ti elementi filozofske kulture spadaju u rubna područja filozofske „infrastrukture”. [...]
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The presentation deals with the issue of media imperialism and racism in the novel Americanah (2013) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigerian novelist and writer. The paper starts from the position of electronic colonialism theory about danger of seductive media content. Violent media propaganda and transcription of western media content in Nigerian mass media affects the abandonment of African cultural patterns and forcibly changing behaviors of domicile population. Characters in the Adichie’s novel are great example of the mind colonization and westernization that is followed through the media. In the presentation we will show how media imperialism led to racial fetishism and losing pre-colonial values in african society.
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The phenomenon of fake news and unverified information represents a serious challenge to modern media, especially online media where ethical relativism has become the accepted norm, and truth is often suppressed under commercial values. In 2016 the political establishment of the United States and the EU for the first time had to face the fact that the communication revolution has been speeding up the spread of lies and misinformation, and the dominant liberal system of social values uncritically supported by mainstream media has actually been losing supporters. Are fake news merely part of Russian propaganda and hybrid wars started with the aim of undermining the values of western democracies or are the most influential liberal media the main sources of fake and biased news? This work analyses the reasons why traditional media, even in their online form, have lost their crucial impact on creating public opinion and consequently on directing social processes.
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The Ch’un-ch’iu (Chunqiu) or Annals of the Spring-Autumn Period had been indited according to the textual pattern of a Court chronicle which describes the autocratic regime of the twelve dukes who governed the State of Lu from the Shan-tung (Shandong) region, a vassal-state of the Eastern Chou (Zhou) dynasty (770-256 B. C. E.), during the period 722-481 B. C. E.. The syntagm “Spring-Autumn” is a standard synecdoche which designates an entire calendarial year, or, through a semantic extension, a chronicle the textual continuity of which is structured according to the calendarial continuity of the yearly intervals which include diplomatic dialogues, political intrigues and feudal wars, in the framework of the relationships developed by the State of Lu with the neighboring states, as well as testimonies concerning eclipses, floods, earthquakes and wonders of nature.The decadence of the Chu-hsia (Zhu Xia) civilization, under the Eastern Chou (Zhou) dynasty (770-256 B. C. E.), could have been prevented only through the establishment of a new political order, conformably to the Confucianist ritual ideal, capable to mirror the celestial will in the rigors of an ascetical monarchic regime and in the necessity of the rectification of names (cheng-ming; zhengming).In spite of the fact that he defended the political-moral order of the Eastern Chou (Zhou) dynasty, Confucius traversed the experience of the disintegration of this order and of the transition towards an unknown epoch. Even if he was a loyal subject of the State of Lu, Confucius was forced to to admit that Lu “has only the name, not the substance of a great State”, and the ideal of the rectification of names (cheng-ming; zhengming) did not mold in a lasting manner the immediate historical time. The purity of the unicorn did not preserve his liberty as against the violence of the hunters, its wonderful nature did not preserve his existence as against the ignorance and brutality of human beings. The coming of the unicorn presaged, simultaneously, Confucius’ unfulfilment as a statesman, his imminent death and his investiture as an “uncrowned monarch” (su-wang; suwang).
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Recently, a peculiar narrative configuration has developed and is spreading through the internet culture and new media. Characterised by a specific representation of the individual growth process, Apeiron narratives find their origin in pen & paper role-playing games, but it is only after the development of digital games and the diffusion of the Japanese cultural codex through the contemporary mediascape that they have become a coherent, autonomous and viral phenomenon. In the following pages, this narrative configuration will be described through a series of paradigmatic examples; its roots will be traced back to the peculiar traits of role-playing games, and the importance of recent digital adaptation will be highlighted. Finally, I will describe its diffusion beyond the domain of fictional text, hinting at possible environments for its diffusion.
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The relation between the humanities and information technologies has become so strong in recent decades that it is no longer possible to see this relationship as a mere temporary phenomenon. Together with massive digitalization of books, journals and other texts, collected into extensive electronic libraries and hypertextual databases, it is now necessary to rethink and redefine not only the concept of reading, but to specify new possibilities for analysing literary and specialized texts. The aim of this study is to point at new approaches to reading large text collections in the light of Moretti’s method of distant reading. This paper uses the methodological issues of relation between distant reading and Russian formalism as background for this consideration.
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Facebook offers great opportunities for brands to connect with customers and build relationships with them in order to increase their loyalty and the company’s sales. In regards to these goals, one of the most important key performance indicators is the customers’ activity – liking, commenting, sharing, recommending, expressing love, etc. On one hand, there is a lot of research on customers’ engagement, behavior and motivation. These studies provide valuable information for marketers to understand the way in which individuals use the social network and interact with others as well as the reasons behind their actions. Based on this knowledge they can develop their communication strategies and create content which has impact on the target audience. On the other, there are still some research gaps which can be further explored. One of them is related to the impact of one of the most important company assets – the brand culture, on the customer’s behavior and willingness to become part of the digital brand story. This paper presents a Facebook brand page users typology, developed by using a semiotic approach, which is based on their brand culture adoption and brand narrative engagement.
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Today the world is connected more than ever before and expectation is ½ of the global population to be digitalized till 2020 year. This remarkable development of internet technologies defines the way people live, including our work experiences, shopping attitudes and entertainment modes. Internet has defined corporate culture, as well. By tracking development of past, dominant and emerging codes and in the search-reach of proper consumer, companies nowadays have adopted digital marketing and trade strategies as one of the efficient ways for doing business. But does digital marketing work for all industries? There are sectors like pharmacy, alcohol and tobacco that are regulated and subjected to control due to implied business specifics. This article aims to review the digital culture of the regulated industries. Particular concentration is given on tobacco – cigarette sector. The paper will show a content analysis of the internet environment, by reviewing pro-smoking and anti-smoking activities, players, communication channels, level of marketing and most of all, the narrative and discourse across social medias, official web sites of enterprise, institutions and etc.
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Social media are a new phenomenon attracting the interest of researchers from different fields–marketing experts, sociologists, anthropologists, even philosophers and semioticians. The problems related to them vary and many remain unanswered. The current paper analyzes the level of social media habituation, taking Charles Peirce`s evolutionary cosmology, and more specifically the concept of effete mind, as its milestones. Other important studies considered here are from the fields of anthropology and media studies. Communication and the transfer of information have always been vital for living creatures, not only humans but animals, plants and even microorganisms. During the centuries of our existence and evolution we have developed complicated sign systems to satisfy the need for knowledge transfer among the members of our social groups. In the digital era many questions about the new forms of communication arise. Here I will analyze one of them: are these new media something totally new or do they follow some kind of universal tendency and predisposition? To answer this question I will consider Charles Peirce`s ideas of habit and habit-taking tendency, his concepts of living and effete mind, together with the studies of Robin Dunbar and Tom Standage. In his book Writing on the wall. Social media–the first 2, 000 years (2013) Standage examines the question of writing on the walls as one of the oldest methods of communication and knowledge transfer. It dates back to the age of cavemen, long before any of societyЎЇs modern tools were even considered possible. Over the centuries these methods evolved and became more sophisticated but it kept their essence and main function–to transfer information for the well-being of the group and its members. Centuries ago at the dawn of human kind, the necessity of survival shaped our predisposition for communication. Since then, the tools have changed but the necessity and the reasons for it remain the same. As such, the current state of well-developed digital social media could be considered a manifestation of the Peircean concept of habit-taking tendency, combined with human natural need of communication and information sharing stated by Standage and also by the evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar.
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For those of you who are not familiar with Leonidas Donskis and his work, I would like to start with a brief introduction to his life. Mr. Donskis was born in 1962, in the Lithuanian port city Klaipėda. He graduated from the present-day Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, majoring in philology and theatre, and continued his studies in Vilnius University, where he received his first doctorate in philosophy. He earned his second doctorate in social and moral philosophy from the University of Helsinki, Finland, and later was awarded with an honorary doctorate in the Bradford University in Great Britain and, of course, Valahia University of Târgovişte.
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The text presented here illustrates the work and deep worldview that Academician Alexandru Boboc promoted his entire life: rationalism; and this means all the way. Why rationalism and what does it mean? It is, first, the substantiation of humans’ positions about what is constant and generally efficient in their relationships with and in the world. The basis of what is constant and generally efficient is not the idea/the world of ideas as such, but the “true judgement with an account”, as Plato said long before (Theaetetus, 201c): the logically correct judgement based on semantically correct information. The reasoned judgement is always about concrete things, but since these things are transient, how can the human rationality – that takes its power from its ability to unite in abstract schemes what it has discriminated before – be lasting? It can, just because it does not end with its abstract designs, but ascends to the comprehension of the many facets of the concrete. Thus, the correct information as such is never the simple one-sided content eventually implied in the premises: on the contrary, it supposes the reciprocal confrontation of the different aspects of the concrete and their analysis. Alexandru Boboc’s passion, in the frame of his larger specialisation in history of philosophy, is the modern thinking. From the always contradictory phenomena arisen in the modern intellectual vortex, he alwaysinsisted on what the modern philosophy has demonstrated in such a way that, on the basis of judgements, the return to irrational stances to no longer be possible. In this respect, he has as poles Kant and Hegel. Human knowledge starts from the human experience and no one can avoid this empirical origin, but human knowledge is more than a collection of data about transient things: it is, certainly, even more than the first abstract schemes of the intellect; it is the living picture of the never ended complex of connections and viewpoints. The order put by human thinking in the world as it is conceived is not opposed to its openness: it suggests pluralism but, at the same time, this is not drowned in relativism. The human rationality – judging and measuring the causes, the necessary and the contingency, and the consequences – is the only one that prevents the incidents from turning maleficent for human life. The human rationality is thus the only one that foresees its results from the nunc – since the judgements are already models of/for the future, the humans do not judge only after the outcomes turned out – and also that anticipates, starting from the models of the future in order to avoid present bad individual, isolated and short-termed reckonings. The text points just the epistemological logic of the modern rationalism. This logic was called “criticism” by Kant, while Hegel has used and developed both the meanings of criticism and of dialectic, beyond the ancient origins of this last word and method. From an epistemological point of view, the greatness of Kant and Hegel stands in the reciprocal rationale of rationalism and criticism: rationalism means the decomposition of ideas and their multiple judgements, not the alignment to the argument from authority, and thus it puts the premises of every idea under question; criticism is just the rejection of the appeal to authority and thus it arrives to question the premises themselves, and this entire process becomes an inherent movement of the human spirit in front of the world. This methodological contribution of the modern rationalism is cardinal. The dialectical understanding of nature involves both formal models – mathematical, as they were exploded in modernity – subordinated to focused demonstrations and reproductions of sequential causality, and also holistic interpretations, search for correlations and meanings from a more and more multilateral standpoint. Thus, the dialectical understanding is the reason for integrating science and philosophy. The Kant and Hegel’s use of metaphysics and their insistence on it were not their simple reflex of old denominations but, on the contrary, the suggestion that by focusing on the “last causes”, philosophy questions the premises of every reasonable and non-reasonable argumentation. But if so, the modern rationalism is the ground of a critical humanism. Alexandru Boboc has inferred from the modern rationalist principles just the search for the meaning of the human life. And if the quiddity of rationalism is its (concrete) universalism, it emphasises the importance of every individual, rejecting the selfishness. The meaning of life is for every human being, the universalism of rationalism does not send to selective treatment of humans in the name of apparently clever abstract ideas. By searching the meanings of the world, of the ideas and of human life, the human rationality proves to be “spirit”, namely, the self-conscious and self-determining, rational capacity to be both negation – critique, from banter to cold dissolution – and positive construction full of fantasy but conducted by values. Therefore, though 14Alexandru BobocNOEMA XVIII, 2019 the autonomy of the object – namely, of all kinds of objects, including the means to create objects and the reactive and creative attitudes and processes – from the human subject might induce the idea that there would be regions of existence marked only by the specificity of tackling them, in fact the “types” of rationality never exclude the common features of the reason and, thus, of the good and the beautiful. They are types of experience, but the beacon is rationalism. This avoids reductionism, related to either the enthusiastic optimism concerning science (and technology) or to a pessimistic stance towards them. And rationalism never simplifies the world and the human representations, but allows very different and even falsifiable theories: these theories and their premises are valuable even when they are falsified, but only if the method outlining them is scientific (rationalist) and suggests the value of scientific honesty. For this reason, the model is for Alexandru Boboc that of the nascent modernity, never excluding from rationality the human values: because the reason and its creation – the world 3, in Popper’s formula – are never autonomous from the human society. Truth, together with reason, method and value, are paradigm-concepts of philosophy, reminded us Alexandru Boboc. The theoretical model of Alexandru Boboc, taken over from Kant and Hegel, is opposed to the “spiritualist” pseudo-philosophy erected on premises never put under question, and as if philosophy and science would not have any other answer since the world flows outside them. No: both the Kant and Hegel’s rationalism and the theoretical model of Alexandru Boboc involve the responsibility of philosophy, since first and foremost philosophy is the conscience of science/reasonable knowledge, substantiating its process of awareness. This function and peculiarity of philosophy – i.e. of rationalism – was the reason why Alexandru Bobochas done and is doing his enquiries in the history of philosophy. This means the description of the history of arguments related to the understanding of the world. He quotes very often from the past philosophers, emphasising the core of their thinking: from a didactic standpoint, so that the readers do not retain words about them, but just that core; from a methodological standpoint, so that the readers do not repeat the historical form of the past thinkers, but go forward. Philosophy and science means to going forward. This is their responsibility. We are not allowed to abstain from rationalism and to do as if we would say something new. Indeed, we must say something new with the help of rationalism! Only in this manner may the present European spirit develop. And certainly: not only European. This spirit is, obviously, different from its traditions but, Alexandru Boboc accentuates, we have to treat them with the means of rationalism, and thus never forget their modern source, since only in this way we can understand that, in front of so many confusions tending to annul these means, what is important and unique is the human – rational – quest for the meanings of human life. Rationalism all the way doesn’t mean “scientism”, a viewpoint never shared by scientists and only caricatured by those thinkers who were either opposed to science or did not understand it and the relations between science and philosophy. Alexandru Boboc has long before insisted on the difference between thescientific spirit and “scientism”, advancing at the same time the rationalist principles consisting of and leading to coherence, criteria and disclosing of contradictions. Only in this way, not fearing contradictions, both the universalistic view about our appurtenance to the same and unique species and the value we give to the unique and unrepeatable individual existence are possible.Noema celebrates Academician Alexandru Boboc before the 20th of February 2020 when he will be 90 years old. He is an example of generosity: he works and publishes even nowadays, in order to better disclose the history of philosophical ideas; he translates from the modern German and Italian thinkers even nowadays; he emits professional and educational messages during conferences and his relations with researchers. Hispersonality lights here the necessity of rationalism, of self-reflexivity in science and all human activities, and the necessity of self-scrutiny for all the researchers and human beings.
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Book review: Tomasz Kwarciński, Agnieszka Wincewicz-Price (red.), Metaekonomia II. Zagadnienia z filozofii makroekonomii, Kraków, Copernicus Center Press 2019.
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