"Food for Peace": The Vegan Religion of the Hebrews of Jerusalem

Author(s): Shelley Elkayam / Language(s): English / Issue: XXVI/2014

A debate over the morality of Kosher slaughter [Shechita (Hebrew: שחיטה)] has raged in Poland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Denmark, where the Jewish ritual slaughter was outlawed. The more the debate goes on, the more awareness arises to Shechita as a basic Jewish religious practice. Yet veganism is a Hebrew religious operation too. This article discusses Hebrew vegan belief in terms meaningful to Jews, yet considering its utopian nature, in terms applicable to others as well. Both Shechita and veganism have universal Hebrew claims. Yet both claims are to be studied. Within this vast theme, I will analyze here veganism only, with respect to its utopian role and as a theological structure of one, yet global, community: the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem. They believe themselves to be the descendants of Judah, the fourth son of Jacob Israel. They are Jewish by their cultural nature: they observe Shabbat, Torah and a weekly fast. In 70 A.D. after the Romans destroyed the second temple they escaped and fled southward and westward to various nations in Africa two millennia ago where they were sold as slaves and were enslaved in America. They left America in 1967 led by their spiritual leader Ben Ammi, defined their departure as an exodus from America. Via Liberia – where they became vegans – they arrived in Israel in 1969, established an urban kibbutz, a collective communal living which is located in a desert region. Like most Jews, their diet has tremendous importance, but unlike most Jews they are vegan. The African Hebrews have very specific vegan dietary practices. Their tradition includes teaching and studying a special diet, which is vegetarian, organic and self-produced. They observe Shabbat strictly. On Shabbat, they fast and cleanse. This mirrors their spiritual outlook that eating is a hard labor of which they are obliged to rest from by the Ten Commandments. This article presents a breakthrough idea that fasting on Shabbat indeed reflects an ancient Israelite religious tradition. “Food for Peace” s a metaphor for the theology of the Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem unfolding their messianic utopia through which they believe people may achieve inner peace and even world peace, encompassing decades of powerful hopes, realities and nutritious lifestyle.

"Homo non est intellectus". Aquinas about relation between soul and intellect

Author(s): Michał Zembrzuski / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/2017

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.

"Istotna tożsamość physis i techne" - Heidegger i problem artefaktu w ekofilozofii

Author(s): Magdalena Hoły-Łuczaj / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 20/2014

Celem artykułu jest pokazanie, że nowy trend w ekofilozofii, jakim jest próba włączenia artefaktów w zakres jej rozważań etycznych, może znaleźć wsparcie w filozofii Martina Heideggera. Artykuł skupia się na następujących założeniach ontologicznych filozofii Heideggera: odrzuceniu idei „drabiny bytu” (koncepcji hierarchii metafizycznej oraz rozszerzeniu jej spektrum), jedności physis i techne oraz nieodłączności jednostkowości i współzależności bytów. Te założenia prowadzą Heideggera do stworzenia koncepcji „właściwego używania”, która może stanowić podstawę dla ekologicznego ethosu obejmującego byty naturalne oraz artefakty.

"Projekt matematyczny" a idea "przewrotu kopernikańskiego" w filozofii Immanuela Kanta

Author(s): Tomasz Kupś / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 20/2014

Jose Ortega y Gasset (w eseju Wokół Galileusza) oraz Martin Heidegger (w rozprawie Pytanie o rzecz) sformułowali wykładnię źródeł nowożytnej nauki i nowej postawy badawczej. Obu filozofów odkrycie nowej metody w przyrodoznawstwie przypisało Galileuszowi. Uzyskiwanie wiedzy naukowej o przyrodzie przybiera w nowożytności (w XVII i XVIII w.) charakterystyczną formę „projektu matematycznego”. Nowy sposób „tworzenia” praw, zastępujący dotychczasowy „opis” faktów, jest wyraźnie podkreślany przez obu współczesnych filozofów. Analogiczny sposób rozumienia przyrodoznawstwa został jednak sformułowany wcześniej przez Immanuela Kanta i po praz pierwszy wyrażony w postaci metafory „przewrotu kopernikańskiego” w przedmowie do drugiego wydania Krytyki czystego rozumu. Artykuł jest próba zestawienia tych dwóch spojrzeń na istotę nowożytnego przewrotu w przyrodoznawstwie.

"Prolegomena filozofii pracy" Stanisława Brzozowskiego w kontekście naszych morderczych zmagań dla przyszłych pokoleń

Author(s): Katarzyna Popek / Language(s): Polish / Issue: XXVI/2014

Without doubt “Prolegomena filozofii pracy” by Stanislaw Brzozowski sets in a historical perspective the trail which we can go through not only thanks to our serious effort, but also to the intangible internal gesture. According to this philosopher, the work irreversibly determines the shape of our lives; it creates a world of culture. What is more, life is its purpose in the sense that it makes permanent transformations in the world that protects human life – not necessarily our own! According to this new logic, man creates his life and the cognition of himself. Reconstruction of murderous mental rite of work is impossible, because living matter wears just down through the work. However, according to Brzozowski, we cannot know anything except our own life. We constantly think about it, we give it some shape. The author passionately draws from Hegel’s philosophy of process, but he arrives at his own implications. Brzozowski has made a specific identification of consciousness with a deep philosophy. In his opinion, our fear of the future would not be justified if we could rely on the work of our ancestors. However, work remains our constant challenge. In general, a person is very weak and fragile in the face of the world of nature. We are weak when we are subordinated to the objective rules. If a human develops in the work – he and she protects and cares for their truly human dignity. Brzozowski was a rebelious thinker. He believed in the cause of the working class even more than their own strength. I would like to dedicate my article to Stanislaw Brzozowski to demonstrate what a piercing philosopher and a theorist of social thought he was.

"Wtedy zaczął się mój upadek...". Egzystencjalne dylematy bohaterów Józefa Conrada i Alberta Camusa

Author(s): Irena Jokiel / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 3/2014

The article uses the notion of 'border' in the interpretation of psychological and ethical themes in "Lord Jim" by J. Conrad and "The Fall" by A. Camus. The heroes of these novels realise that they had made bad use of their freedom , and the moment in which this happened had marked their lives irrevocably, and divided it into zones of rise and fall. After this moment nothing would be as it used to. Throughout the centuries literature has developed language to express the fundamental experience of this kind; it tells the stories of people experiencing the traumatic force of a demarcation moment, which after passing, leaves no posibility of returning to the life before; it creates alternative worlds inhabited by people who seek the truth about their "I", it constructs situations that embodies our anxiety resulting from the fact that man is not "redy and finished", and in the flowing "here and now" he does deeds which shape his destiny. "The Fall" indirectly includes the question of attitude of modern world towards Condrad's ethos.

(Post)sekularna filozofia negatywna, media wizualne i ekstasis (dekonstrukcja jako wariant neofenomenologii)

Author(s): Joanna Sarbiewska / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 2/2016

The author proposes a neophenomenological interpretation of the late Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, by bringing it into the light of (post)secular negative philosophy and indicating the application of its mystic/ecstatic implications on a media techno-vision basis. In this conceptualization, deconstruction/negation, as an ,epoche strategy, not only denudes (kenosis) cognition of the idolatry, characteristic of the traditional methaphysics of presence and the dogmatic religion, but also suspends “the source” itself (the Offenberkeit register), and thus, causes the experience of radical emptiness (chora) as a condition of an opening to the Impossible. The author, by presenting the concept of negative image, demonstrates that technology visual media provide a suitable space (groundlessness) for Impossible to manifest itself in post-industrial culture.

(rec.) Dawid Lipski, Jan Peckham i Tomasz z Akwinu. Spór o jedność formy substancjalnej w człowieku, seria: Opera philosophorum medii aevi (textus et studia), tom 15, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Kardynała Stefana Wyszyńskiego, Warszawa 2015

Author(s): Jacek Grzybowski / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 2/2016

(Une Rencontre) entre Misch et Heidegger

D. Ginev, Die Mehrdimensionalität geisteswissenschaftlicher Erfahrung

Author(s): Antoinette Koleva / Language(s): French / Issue: 05/1997

1984

Author(s): Gergana Dineva / Language(s): Bulgarian / Issue: 21/2015

The text celebrates the 30th anniversary of the Summer school in medieval philosophy and culture, established by Tzotcho Boiadjiev in the summer of 1984, and traces the development of the workshop alongside the growth of the Bulgarian school in medieval philosophy. The article traces the historical development of the only academic seminar, started during the time of totalitarian regime in Bulgaria, which is still very much alive, gives opportunity tomany students and young scholarsdevelop research skills and to participate in the academic life of the international studies on the thought of the Middle ages.

20 години специалност Философия във ВТУ „Св. св. Кирил и Методий”

Author(s): Vihren Bouzov / Language(s): Bulgarian / Issue: 2/2014

The course of training in philosophy has been opened in 1992–93 year. Now it has full term accreditation for 6 years and it is on the 2th place in the national ranking of specialties. 14 young doctors in Philosophy graduated in Veliko Turnovo. Our Faculty has been accepted as national and international center of philosophical researches and education.

32-ри международен Хегелов конгрес – „Хегеловата енциклопедична система и нейното наследство“

Author(s): Silviya Kristeva / Language(s): Bulgarian / Issue: 3/2018

32nd Hegel Congress gave birth to a new direction in front of Hegelian studies – the turn to the systematic thinking and system-making. This general discourse rises the most basic question: how to develop “the pure philosophical science” as metaphysics, the own region of philosophical knowledge. Thinking in system, which is Hegel’s legacy, is one of the possible ways in front of the contemporary metaphysics and as a specific of philosophical method as “pure thinking“ of absolute.

A Contextual Concept of Science

Author(s): Sumei Cheng / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2016

The contextual concept of science regards a scientific theory as a whole simulation for the mechanism of natural world under the given context. It argues that a scientific theory is to understand the reality only in the sense of intentionality in the process of reality simulation, rather than to describe reality in the sense of one-to-one correspondence. This concept of understanding reality is totally different from that of describing reality.Compared with the realist approaches and the anti-realist approach, the contextual approach has the following advantages: (1) it contributes to bridge the communication between the preachers of scientism and the humanists;(2) it has helped to solve the problem of underdetermination faced by scientific realism; (3) it is relatively easy to understand the correction about the concept and theory; (4) it could reflect the true process of science more properly. Therefore, it is a more promising and convincing new perspective to understand science.

A Cosmos Without a Creator: Cesare Cremonini’s Interpretation of Aristotle’s Heaven

Author(s): Pietro Daniel Omodeo / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2019

In the years after the first circulation of Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo’s Padua anti-Copernican colleague, the staunch Aristotelian philosopher, Cesare Cremonini, published a book on ‘traditional’ cosmology, Disputatio de coelo in tres partes divisa (Venice, 1613) which puzzled the Roman authorities of the Inquisition and the Index much more than any works on celestial novelties and ‘neo-Pythagorean’ astronomy. Cremonini’s disputation on the heavens has the form of an over-intricate comment of Aristotle’s conceptions, in the typically argumentative style of Scholasticism. Nonetheless, it immediately raised the concern of Cardinal Bellarmin, the Pope and other Inquisitors. At a close reading, Cremonini’s interpretation of Aristotle’s cosmos proved radically anti-Christian. It represented a radicalization of Pomponazzian Alexandrism. In fact, Cremonini did not only circulate Aristotelian principles used by Pomponazzi to argue for the soul’s mortality (first, no thought is possible without imagination and the latter faculty is dependent on the body; secondly, all that is generated will eventually perish). He also wiped away all transcendence from the Aristotelian cosmos. In fact, he marginalized the function of the motive Intelligences by explaining heavenly motions through the action of animallike inseparable souls although he did not erase nor reduced all Intelligences to only one, in accordance with Alexander. Also, he put at the center of Aristotle’s cosmos the idea of its eternity, a thesis which he explicitly connected with the rejection of the idea of God the Creator. Cremonini assumed that the universal efficiens, that is the efficient cause of all motion and change in the world, is nothing but the first heaven. As a result of this radically naturalist reading of Aristotle, he banned God from the cosmos, reduced Him to the final cause of the world, and deprived Him of any efficiency and will. This essay on less explored sources of Renaissance astronomical debates considers the institutional, cultural and religious setting of Cremonini’s teaching and conceptions. It assesses the reasons for his troubles with the religious authorities, and the political support he was granted by the Serenissima Republic of Venice in spite of the scandalous opinions he circulated as a university professor. My reconstruction of his views is based on the Disputatio de coelo of 1613 and later works, which are directly connected with cosmo-theological polemics with the religious authorities: his Apologia dictorum Aristotelis de quinta coeli substantia (1616) and the unpublished book De coeli efficientia, two manuscript copies of which are preserved in the libraries of Padua and Venice.

A fenomenológia és az analitikus filozófia metszéspontjain

Author(s): Lajos András Kiss / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 09/2012

Szigeti Attila: A testet öltött másik. Kortárs fenomenológiai tanulmányok, Pro Philosophia Kiadó, Kvár, 2011.

A fenomenológiával való megismerkedésem

Author(s): László Tengelyi / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 06/2015

In this interview, László Tengelyi answers the question of the Hungarian Phenomenological Society: “how did you arrive to the phenomenological tradition and to phenomenological thinking?” The form of the answer is an essay which was written in 2006. Tengelyi describes his first encounter with Husserl and Heidegger through Nicolai Hartmann’s aesthetics and ontology. This attraction was deepened during his 1988-89 stay in Leuven with the support of the Soros Foundation. Rudolf Bernet and other prominent phenomenologists (Klaus Held, Bernhard Waldenfels, Marc Richir) convinced him that phenomenology is one of the possible ways of original thinking. What distinguishes phenomenology from other contemporary schools of thought (structuralism, analytical philosophy, critical social philosophy) is its inner relation to the whole tradition of Western philosophy. That is why phenomenology, “with its historical saturation”, is able to maintain a kind of spiritual vigilance in the philosophical practice.

A filozófia mint önismereti tudomány

Author(s): Péter Egyed / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 02/2015

A filozófiai vita természetrajza. Leo Strauss és Kojève vitája a zsarnokságról és filozófiáról

Author(s): András Lánczi / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 05/2021

There are a number of writings dedicated to the analysis of the controversy between Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève on tyranny and the aim of philosophy. This essay makes an attempt to focus not so much on the contents of their particular debate, but on the character of their exchange. The gist of the argument is that philosophy as such is based on various forms of debates including hidden dialogues, discussions or exchanges of ideas. Methodologically the Strauss-Kojève debate is a blueprint for the quarrel between ancients and moderns in the 20th century. One has to take a side of either historicism or the classical view of politics and the nature of philosophy on the whole.

A Foreword to Eriugena’s Periphyseon

Author(s): Gerd Van Riel / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/2014

A görög filozófus és az élet

Author(s): György Geréby / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 02/2015

The encounter between the Christian philosopher Justin Martyr, of Samaritan background, and Tryphon the Jew (around 150 AD) offers essential pointers to understand more precisely what “Greek”, or rather Hellenistic, philosophy meant. First, Greek was not a nationality, but a culture, a langue axiale in which Greeks and non-Greeks could exchange and debate ideas. Again, as educated persons, they shared a literary canon (in artificial Greek) and methods of conceptualisation. Consequently, they shared a common framework in terms of the rationality of discussion, which also extended to theology. Rational theology was a legitimate branch of philosophy as the third theoretical discipline according to Aristotle. The inclusion of theology in philosophy shows that the ultimate subject for philosophy was not sterile speculation, or pure theory, but the principles which, in forms of practical syllogisms (Aristotle, NE 1144a 31-2), would lead to action, thereby answering the fundamental problem “how to live”. Greek philosophy was supposed to prepare a “way of life” (P. Hadot). More than that, it was not without reason that successive Roman emperors invited the advice of philosophy in the complexities of the imperial polity.