Razumjeti razgovor strojeva: Heideggerova ontologija prisuća nasuprot Lacanovu antihumanizmu

Author(s): Katarina Peović Vuković / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 2/2015

This paper addresses the question of machine intelligence, a cybernetic problem closely related to the questions of subjectivity, human intelligence and the constitution of human communication. The example of chatterbots and their (movie) representations will be used in order to reexamine their similarities and differences, as well as their relation to subjectivity in the broadest sense. Reversing the thesis on the instrumentalisation of the subject by means of a cybernetic framework, which is, as Martin Heidegger claimed, established as a paradigmatic framework of contemporary sciences, the paper will point to the closest relation between the subject and the mechanical or digital quasi-intelligent machine. Jacques Lacan's applied psychoanalysis provides a theoretical framework for this paper since it is in a position to point out the inadequacies of understanding communication as a means of conveying information. Such critique will prove to be fruitful not only for describing communication and the difference between the machinal and the human, but also for indicating the problems of identity politics. Lacan's anti-humanism and ethics of separation appear as tools of contemporary critique of political economy.

Marcuseova teorija oslobođenja i vizija mogućnosti nerepresivne civilizacije prema teorijskim postavkama Sigmunda Freuda

Author(s): Maroje Višić / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 2/2015

This article tries to demonstrate Marcuse’s reception of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. First, a critique of Marcuse and his key notions by some of his prominent critics will be demonstrated. Author also tries to adequately address this critique by offering arguments for its validity or perhaps its ambiguity. The importance of Marcuse’s reception of Freud is in that he complemented Freud’s theory by adding a dimension of differentiating historical epochs. Freud understood repression as a universal principle for civilization development but Marcuse demonstrated that repression is only one part pertaining to the era of material austerity. Through notions of »performance principle« and »surplus-repression« it is possible to think of non-repressive civilization in which labor would be a free activity of liberated individuals.

The European Legacy in Africa (The African Legacy in Europe)

Author(s): Vlasta Jalušić / Language(s): English Issue: 07/2015

The contribution focuses on selected elements of the European legacy in Africa that frame the twentieth century in a crucial way. They contributed to the perpetration of major atrocities on the African continent on a scale that invites comparison with the Holocaust – that is, the genocide of Namibian Hereros at the beginning of the twentieth century and the genocide of the Rwandan Tutsis at its end. The paper also discusses elements of the African legacy in Europe – particularly the emergence and transfer of a new form of power that depends on the experience of imperialism as central to the ‘Western’ worldview. The Rwandan genocide in 1994 represents a new nature of the atrocity, in which the victims become the killers. A better understanding of it could therefore also shed light on some related, but different, events, such as “humanitarian interventions” and the “war against terror”. The article focuses on the organization of the colonial and postcolonial bureaucratic apparatus of rule, its special form of non-state power, and its connection with “race”, “tribe”, and “tradition” as crucial elements of post-totalitarian forms of government and new forms of identitarian collective violence. It stresses the crucial connectedness of the “African” and “European” structure of this new form of power, which indeed usurped the role of the modern nation-state. The processes that create the conditions for the new forms of domination and for the local and global undermining of politics and (political) responsibility can also be understood in the same way.

From Revolution to Catastrophe

Author(s): Ralph Cintron / Language(s): English Issue: 07/2015

This essay describes catastrophe and revolution as distinctive events and tropes in the modernist imaginary. Revolution in particular has been associated with social change and temporal advancement toward a better future that seems to be constitutive of managerial modernity. Both the political left and economic right have subscribed to revolution, but it is the free marketers through figures such as Joseph Schumpeter and his analyses of creative destruction as revolution that has displaced the Marxist tradition. The result is that the utopianism of a political future has moved offstage, meaning that all politics today (including democracy) is a species of oligarchy. Social change through revolution, then, is no longer a substantive proposition but more of an improvisation within oligarchic rule. Hence, catastrophic events have more potential for social change than revolution, but even these often act more like economic stimulus programs. Nevertheless, there is always a texturing, a braiding, of contrary elements inside any hegemonic rule. Consequently, outcomes and futures cannot be determined.

Ars moriendi kao ars vivendi u svjetlu kršć anske vjere

Author(s): Tomislav Smiljanić / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 43/2015

U današnjem postmodernom i postmetafi zičkom vremenu govor o umiranju i smrti, a s njime nužno povezan govor onda i o trpljenju i patnji, ne samo da je nepoželjan i neprimjeren, nego ga se nastoji pod svaku cijenu izbrisati i iz čovjekove misli i govora, iako je smrt sastavni, svakodnevni dio naše svakodnevnice, i ona se događa na svakom koraku, do te mjere da mediji zabilježe i prenesu svaku nesreću bilo kojeg oblika u kojoj se dogodila smrt. Čovjek znanstveno-tehničke civilizacije ježi se od pomisli na smrt i svaki govor o njoj nastoji eliminirati iz svog svakodnevnog življenja. Dok je srednjovjekovni čovjek, pa i onaj renesanse i humanizma usmjeravao svoj život prema načelu ars vivendi kao ars moriendi, i onda u trenutku smrti doživio ars moriendi kao ars vivendi, čovjek 19. i 20. st. više ne prakticira ovu dijalektičku napetost između umijeća življenja i umiranja. Znatan doprinos promijeni ove svijesti i mentaliteta donijela su otkrića i spoznaje prirodnih i tehničkih znanosti, koje su napredovale nezaustavljivim tijekom od 19. st. pa sve do danas. One su obećavale čovječanstvu spasenje i oslobođenje od svih prirodnih ograničenja, materijalni napredak i odgovore na sva pitanja koja su mučila čovječanstvo od postanka. Svojim lažnim sekularnim soteriologijama i eshatologijama osiromašile su čovjekov tubitak i izbacili ga na još veću moralno-etičku pustoš čijoj se krizi ne nazire kraj. U takvoj ispražnjenoj duhovnoj situaciji na poimanje smrti i završetka ljudskog života gleda se na nešto zastrašujuće i utonuće u apsolutno ništavilo. Zato je bolje za današnjeg čovjeka o fenomenu smrti i ne razmišljati prema staroj antičkoj rečenici fi lozofa Epikura: “Smrt, to najstrašnije zlo, nema nikakvog posla s nama; jer dok mi postojimo, smrti nema, a kad ona stigne, onda nas više nema. Tako, dakle, smrt ništa ne znači ni za žive ni za mrtve, jer se živih ne tiče, a mrtvi više ne postoje”.

Hijerarhija i borbe u mreži književnih kritika: operacionalizacija Bourdieuove teorije književnog polja i simboličkih borbi eksponencijalnim modelima slučajnih grafova

Author(s): Marko Lucić / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 2/2015

Bourdieu’s theory of literary field – an important part of his theoretical and empirical treatment of fields – was founded on the concept of two »spaces«:the space of positions in the distributions of capital (inherited and acquired economic and cultural capital, and social capital) and the space of position-takings,or expressions of actors in a field. By the means of those expressions, actors attempt to influence evaluation of their and others’ positions and products. Hence,Bourdieu referred to these attempts as »symbolic struggles« in the literary field.The thesis central to Bourdieu’s theory is that relations of power in a field, i.e.relations of inequality in possession of different quantities and compositions of capital, determine position-taking of actors in the field. Within the literary field, selection of the objects and content of literary critique should therefore correspond to similarities and differences in the actors’ endowment with capital.Verification of that thesis required conceptualisation and operationalization of the actors’ interactions in literary critiques. Drawing on earlier work in reconstruction of Bourdieu’s theoretical and empirical approach in the framework of social network analysis (SNA), the author aimed to show that exponential random graph models (ERGM) are appropriate for modelling hierarchy and struggles in the literary field. For that purpose, the author conducted secondary analysis of a binary network consisting of inter-individual mentions of 35 Dutch literary authors in literary essays and interviews from 1976 – the only publicly available data set of the sort. ERGM stand out among other inferential SNA techniques by their ability to test simultaneously multiple hypotheses about 1) endogenous regularities in a network of interactions – where local and global hierarchy and struggles are formulated within theories of social networks, but are also relevant for insight into the field – and 2) exogenous covariates of interactions, i.e. similarities and differences between actors according to their attributes. In conclusion, multivariate and longitudinal application of ERGM was indicated to be appropriate fora consistent operationalization of symbolic struggles in the field. Multiple successively measured networks that are diverse in content enable the inclusion of social capital and sub-domains of interactions’ meanings into the analysis, and thus the examination of the mechanisms of reproduction and transformation of the literary as well as other fields.

Kompariranje logosa u kršćanstvu sa savršenim čovjekom Ibn Arebija

Author(s): Mansour Mo'tamedi,Vali Abdi / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 68-69/2015

The notion of pre-Christianity logos is found in an abstract form in ancient Greek philosophy as well as Judaism (ancient times and some works of Philo of Alexandria). In Christianity (Prologue to the Gospel of John), logos is for the first time identified with a historical character (Jesus), and Christians, namely, Church elders, attributed to logos some characteristics very much resembling Islamic Gnostic interpretation of the “perfect man”. In Islamic gnosis, Ibn Arabi gave a detailed treatment of the issue of the perfect man and gave standpoints comparable to Christian standpoints on logncesos. Having processed Ibn Arabi’s standpoint and standpoints of his commentators’ on the perfect man, as well as standpoints of Church elders on logos, we have concluded that, despite noticeable differences between these two terms, the question of embodiment of logos in Christianity still makes a huge difference regarding this issue.

Umijeće komuniciranja u gnostičkome djelu

Author(s): Mubina Moker / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 68-69/2015

Having in mind the manners of their creation and author’s communication with the recipient, the earliest gnostic papers writen in Persian from the first half of the XI century communicate with the recipient in the imperative mood and place him/her in the center of the communication act, thus requesting active participation in the reading process. They allow the recipient to establish and build its unique relation with the text, based on cognitive reading and “eavesdropping” of the essence of meaning, which will “move” him/her from the exoteric to the esoteric plane of reading, and transform him/her from a “passive reader” to an “active listener”. Thus, a gnostic text uses the necessity of its timeless and universal content to demand from the recipient to go back repeatedly, in which every next visit will encourage the recipient to build a new and unique and perceptive-experiential relationship with the text.

Ценка Йорданова: „Музикалната идея І”

Author(s): Kristina Yapova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 3/2015

The reviewed book includes studies representative of the author’s area of research interests, which have been published in Bulgarian academic journals over the last decade. In terms of their contents, three groups of issues are discernible: the first one, which is also the main, is on the twentieth-century New Music. This issue is treated in: On truth and method in the twentieth-century New Music; Ideologemes at the turning point of the twentieth-century New Music; The twentieth-century New Music on the horizon of two leading thematic projects of Modernity: Fragments; Dichotomies and polarizations in Schoenberg’s holistic autonomous and terminological system and The concept Musical Idea (musikalischer Gedanke) in Schoenberg: an attempt for interpretative reading. The second group of issues is outlined through the construction by the author of a new area in musicology: the study The paramusical sphere as a subject field of semiotics. The third group is related to those of the phenomena generated by the post-modern culture that fit into the general term World Music: the study The World Music concept and the ethnocentric model. Being various and even establishing relations of opposing to each other, the phenomena subject to description and exploration in the three categories, are united by Yordanova’s general view and the approach related to it. This view is beyond doubt musicological, in a fundamental sense though. In it, musicology expands its philosophic horizons in order to bring up not only theoretical issues of musicology, but also those of the men of music. Within such horizons, the author goes beyond the boundaries of the aesthetical subject of music, referring to beauty, to study it as a language capable to speak of the truth of existence.

NEVOLJE S IDENTITETOM

Author(s): Jela Sabljić Vujica / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 1/2015

The examination of the origin and the configuration of the subject presents the central problem of the contemporary theoretical praxis. The question of identity formation is, for the first time, postulated in the modern period as a part of the comprehensive project of revaluating the normative notion of rationality. However, this question becomes fundamental in postmodern theory, principally in the structural and the post-structural school of thought. Doing so, the identity formation is deprived from ideological connotations, and it is elaborated exclusively within the psychic or the discursive layout. Considering the insights of the Critical theory and analysing the cardinal components of the above mentioned statements it will be evident that the postmodern concept of identity contains ideological implications.

The Construction of Identity in a Consumerist Society: Delillo’s Jack Gladney

Author(s): Sanja Matković / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

This paper deals with the construction of the postmodern identity of Jack Gladney, the main character in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985). Employing (post)modern, social psychology, and psychoanalytic theories of Zygmunt Bauman, Erich Fromm, Jean Baudrillard, and Gilles Lipovetsky, it analyzes the construction of Gladney’s character through his social roles as professor, husband, and consumer in the narrow sense of the word in order to deduce that his consumerist practices have spread to all aspects of his life. This reading reveals a new interpretation of Gladney’s fear of death; it shows that Gladney’s thanatophobia represents a consequence of his atheistic worldview. Namely, unable to find a haven in religion, he unsuccessfully seeks the meaning of life and death elsewhere, mainly in consumerism, which is identified as the source of his alienation from himself, people, and God. This paper suggests that numerous problems of postmodern life are caused by the lack of faith in God and proposes a conclusion that religion itself could be the answer to the difficulties faced by postmodern individuals with fragmented identities such as Jack Gladney.

Humor: Views, Practices, Techniques [Хуморът: прочити, практики, техники]. Edited by Dafina Stefanova, Stanoy Stanoev. Sofia: Professor Marin Drinov Academic Publishing House, 2013

Author(s): Vihra Baeva / Language(s): English Issue: Special/2016

THE BEGINNINGS OF HISTORY RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Author(s): Eleonora Rodica Iordache / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 40/2025

Human sciences include history as a distinct research domain due to the existence of an object of study, normativity and a methodological research system. These epistemological criteria evolved during time, until the XIX century, when history confirmed itself a distinct place in the science field. The methodology of historical research is composed of a seria of fundamental concepts and techniques which diminishes the subjectivity of the historian in finding the truth. During the Antique period, the research methodology in history had a rather narrative aspect, although Thucydides (460 – 400 î.Hr.) insisted on an accurate chronology. The research method is gaining accuracy during the Roman period, due to a rigorous perspective specific to the roman imperial ideology, and a very keen relationship between the sacred and the profane reality, but still subjective in relation to the importance of the ”pater familias” model, in its succession from the head of the roman family, to the head of the Imperium. Historians such as Lucian de Samosata (120-180) and Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) will do the transition towards accuracy in the methodology of approaching historical facts. The Medieval Eve, tributary to preserving sources, will be headed in late XV century towards a more rational approach on historic events analysis, while the Enlightenment will consolidate the transition towards a methodology of research based on a critic selection of sources on one hand and on a cause-effect relation which constitutes the main issue of the present approach in scientific history domain. A accurate and updated research methodology in history is highly important to consolidate the theoretical background defining history as distinctive science in socio-human science field.

Гражданин Достоевский: идея, концепция, концепт

Author(s): Olga Vladimirovna Zakharova / Language(s): Russian Issue: 3/2024

The concept of “citizen” in Russian has a long history. The dictionary of the Russian language of the 11th — 17th centuries notes the first use of the word in the 11th century: citizens were called townspeople, members of the city community. At the same time, the metaphorical meaning of the word was noted, when the righteous and saints were called “heavenly citizens.” In the 18th century, the word “citizen” acquired a wide range of meanings, including eminent and honorable citizens, merchants, bourgeois, artisans and other city dwellers. By the 1830s, a citizen was perceived as a patriot and defender of the fatherland. In the theological tradition, the concepts of “citizen” and “Christian” emerged as identical. These were the meanings of the word in Russian society. The title became the key to the direction and agenda of V. Meshchersky’s weekly “Grazhdanin” (“The Citizen”). Dostoevsky shared the mission of the publication. The idea of being a citizen was at the root of Dostoevsky’s work. It explained his ideological position during his testimony in the Petrashevites’ case, in his political poems of 1854–1856, in his journalistic works of 1860–1865, 1873–1874, in “The Writer’s Diary” of 1876–1881. The concept of a citizen is based on his recognition of the unity of creativity and journalism. Dostoevsky is characterized by a Christian, not class-based, understanding of citizenship, an understanding of the citizen as a Christian, which was expressed in the ideas of Russian statehood. Citizen Kuz’ma Minin and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky, who overcame the Time of Troubles, Empress Catherine the Great, who gave instructions, writers and poets Gavriil Derzhavin, Alexander Pushkin, Nikolay Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolay Nekrasov expressed the conciliar ideal of the people — the state, political, patriotic, Christian ideas of Russia. The ideal and ideas are expressed in the concept of fellow citizens. This is a special type of community: not people, but citizens, not citizens, but fellow citizens. They were not only just townspeople (urban dwellers), but also peasants, merchants, nobles, priesthood — in a word, representatives of all of Russia’s social classes. Their ideas determined the content of “Grazhdanin” (“The Citizen”).

Звук и текст. Встъпителни думи

Author(s): / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2025

In 2025, the journal Literaturna missal (Literary thought) is going to publish an issue dedicated to the interdisciplinary topic "Sound and Text". The issue will include articles in English and Bulgarian. The complex interrelations between sound and text have a history as long as literature itself, dating back from the primary unstable form of oral poetry, through the secondary writing forms of oral poetry, up till today’s digital audio-visual forms (Paul Zumthor. Oral Poetry: An Introduction). Sound should be considered in the broadest possible sense, and in many literary and cultural forms it is practically inseparable from the text. The interconnected forms of sound and text are positioned in a broad intercultural context, as these forms develop from the verse of Antiquity to the present day. The research could focus on acoustic and textological issues of the Medieval Corpus and Early Modernity to the 20th century. It can adopt historical or theoretical approach. From the perspective of intermediality, the research could analyze the sound-text interaction in the historical avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes. The complex relations between the two are crucial also for many other realms of contemporary cultural studies (electronic audio literature, film, theatre, performance, popular music, video games, digital media, etc.). Their theoretical and historical configurations call for examination from various perspectives.

Personages of the Pastoral Literature: Subject of Songs or Subject of Pictorial Depictions

Author(s): Georgi Iliev / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2025

The article traces the attitude to music in the Hellenistic Greek novels, namely the pastoral novels and tries to outline the significance of music and musical improvisation in the ancient world. It is shown against the backdrop of the representations of visual images. The text follows an excursus from there on and it is aimed at explaining the fate of music within the tradition of the aesthetics of the Enlightenment. With this purpose in mind, it considers the distinguishing between the varying signs and the divergent content of different arts as it is done in Winkelmann, Lessing and Herder. Visual art is privileged in the whole tradition of aesthetics. This is true mostly for aesthetics, which considers itself to be a philosophy of art and not a science of perceptive faculties and intuition. This tendency reaches its peak in Hegel’s “Aesthetics”.

Literary Works Generated by Artificial Intelligence: Methodology, Achievements, Dilemmas

Author(s): Constantina Raveca Buleu / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2024

The literary works written by Artificial Intelligence represent a bet with the future, but there are already a few notorious achievements in the field whose number keeps growing, along with the increasing amount of questions and dilemmas generated by the phenomenon, divided, for the moment, between the utopian belief of those who hope that AI “authorship” will be endowed with limitless creativity and the rational scepticism of those who believe that AI creation is actually predetermined by the intrinsic limitations induced by the programming mathematics or the computing logarithms. The list of the literary works generated by ChatGPT or RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) is constantly diversifying, covering a quite surprising area of topics, from 1 The Road (2017), a computerised rewriting of the famous novel On the Road belonging to Jack Kerouac, to The Serious: A Proven Divorce, a hybrid, nonsensical text generated in 2019 by the linguistic model char-rnn-tensorflow. We even have a Sci-Fi eschatology model about the various ways Artificial Intelligence can finish our lives (50 Ways AI Would End the World), while another intriguing scenario is The Inner Life of an AI: A Memoir (2022), about the subtle way Artificial Intelligence submerges into its subconscious in order to perform a self-analysis. My paper focuses on technicalities, controversies and validations issued by the classical criteria of the famous “Turing Test”, several of them being recalled in The Day a Computer Writes a Novel, a famous Japanese experiment completed in 2015, which summarizes the adventure of asking a system named GhostWriter to write two literary textssubsequently submitted for the Hoshi Sinichi Prize, a competition open for both human and non-human writers.

Filosofia românească între 1950 și 1990. Logica și filosofia științei în marxism-leninismul din România

Author(s): Dragoș Popescu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2/2025

The paper continues the exploration of the Romanian Marxism-Leninism previously initiated by our journal. This time, we follow the Romanian path of materialist dialectics and of the philosophy of science, as they developed from Soviet seeds, after World War II. The evolution knows two distinct stages: one of the late Stalinism, another of the New Scientific Revolution.

Teologhie sau Cuvântare de Dumnezău (De Descoperirea Dumnezăiască, Tomul I, Cartea 2, Cap. 1-3)

Author(s): Samuil Micu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2/2025

This article contains excerpts from the work: Teologhie sau cuvântare de Dumnezău acum întâiu aşezată şI scrisă în limba românească.

THE AUTHORITY OF SERVICE AND THE SOLIDARITY OF SERVICE IN LUKE 22:24-27

Author(s): Christopher Naseri / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2023

Jesus censors the twelve and demands that, ‘the one who leads should become like the one who serves’ (22:26). The text provides a lesson on the essence of apostolic authority in the Christian community. The aim of this work is to identify this essence of apostolic authority as service in Luke 22:24-27. The objective is to illustrate how the exercise of authority as service enhances participation and mission within the Christian community. The method employed is an exegetical/socio historical analysis of vv. 24-27 in the context of ‘the one who serves’. The conclusion is that ‘the one who serves’ ministers as servant to the community and its members. The leader who exercises authority as service is therefore the servant of the community. Such service places members at the position of masters in relation to their leader and accords them a sense of respect and importance. This awareness evokes a sense of responsibility among members, and readiness to offer their best in service to the community. This solidarity of service on the part of both the leader and the led enhances a realized Church as communion and synod in the furtherance of its mission of spreading the Kingdom of God.