The Immediacy of Mystical Experience in the European Tradition
Vassányi M. – Sepsi E. – Daróczi A., eds., The Immediacy of Mystical Experience in the European Tradition. Springer International Publishing, 2017, XIX+274.
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Vassányi M. – Sepsi E. – Daróczi A., eds., The Immediacy of Mystical Experience in the European Tradition. Springer International Publishing, 2017, XIX+274.
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This paper presents the meaning of the concept of love in philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Love in its proper form is a kind of intoxication (Rausch), therefore it is an expression of feeling of power. Besides there are also distorted types of love. There are love of the herd, which is one of the modest virtue, and Christian love as manifestation of the greatness weakness. The main aim of this paper is to demonstrate, that despite of relatively few fragments of Nietzsche’s works about love, love in his philosophy is an important component of reality. This applies especially to perfect love, which is manifestation of the being itself in its greatest fullness.
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Among contemporary philosophers of mind prevails a view that the representatives of Classical Emergentism such as Samuel Alexander sought to create a comprehensive metaphysical system which frequently allowed existence of non-physical elements or forces. Such view, classified British Emergentism as a position contrary to commonly accepted thesis of the Completeness of Physics, contributes to discrediting it in mind-body problem debates. The main aim of this paper is to present Samuel Alexander’s metaphysics of mind and analyze its present interpretations. The primary thesis is the claim, that solution of the mind-body problem proposed by Alexander is applicable on the ground of contemporary considerations within the framework of so called Non-reductive Physicalism.
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Gottlob Frege abandoned his logicist program after Bertrand Russell had discovered that some assumptions of Frege’s system lead to contradiction (so called Russell’s paradox). Nevertheless, he proposed a new attempt for the foundations of mathematics in two last years of his life. According to this new program, the whole of mathematics is based on the geometrical source of knowledge. By the geometrical source of cognition Frege meant intuition which is the source of an infinite number of objects in arithmetic. In this article, I describe this final attempt of Frege to provide the foundations of mathematics. Furthermore, I compare Frege’s views of intuition from The Foundations of Arithmetic (and his later views) with the Kantian conception of pure intuition as the source of geometrical axioms. In the conclusion of the essay, I examine some implications for the debate between Hans Sluga and Michael Dummett concerning the realistic and idealistic interpretations of Frege’s philosophy.
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Ukrainian philosophical thought has been developing under the influence of several philosophical streams. Being influences by Orthodox tradition mainly, Church has always been at the forefront of any political campaign conducted on Ukrainian terrain. The level of education plays a key role in the process of cultural development of any country. Western part of Ukraine, comparing to its Eastern counterpart, had better access to education and information due to Catholic Church predominance in the region. The article intends to investigate the scholastic and patristic thought and its reproduction by Ukrainian cultural environment via various European teaching systems. Ukraine has been developing in a broad European context and this is why it could not have been deprived of influential teachings. But Russian imperialistic, and later communist ideology was hindering constantly the deployment and development of many ideas that were important for European philosophy. Together with Eastern theology, which was based mainly on works of Damascenus, Aristotelian traditions were introduced in Ukrainian schools gradually, and based on Aristotle’s works, theology of St. Thomas was taught. Prominent Ukrainian thinkers were influenced by many scholastic philosophers, including St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas’ influence is apparent in later thinkers.
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The moral choices made both in the context of everyday life and in the reality of war fascinate psychologists and philosophers focused on experimental research on intuition. In particular, in many psychological articles, the decisions made by the subjects in different variations of the trolley problem are analyzed. Most often, complex stories are presented for respondents and they can choose between two or three options to solve the problem, but it is required to indicate the option that respondent would choose if he/she found himself in the described situation. However, technological development allows the use of increasingly emotionally engaging methods of putting subjects in such dilemmas, including computer games such as This War of Mine, by 11 bit studios. In this paper selected moral choices that players in This War of Mine are facing are considered together with the decisions that were most often made in response to them, based on pilot study. The results of these analyses will be combined with data from psychological research on moral intuitions in various dilemma situations. The aim of the proposed considerations will be to answer the question whether the context of everyday life versus the reality of war affects the change of intuition regarding just action. The significance of this kind of research for philosophical inquiry into the ethics of war will also be discussed.
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This research study focuses on the problem of populistic propaganda online. In particular, this research study provides three case studies gathered in a Facebook Group of the Italian populistic movement Movimento 5 Stelle. On the one hand, the three case studies provide three powerful counterexamples to the thesis that online media are purposeful aggregator of people. In fact, this research study finds that online media are the perfect environment for populism to thrive. For online media seem to foster the aggregation of people into groups whose main common denominator is the total refusal of anything that opposes the groups’ views. On this basis, this paper provides evidence that online media may impoverish democratic confrontation. On the other hand, this paper finds that the one of the causes of the rapid rise of populistic movements in Western countries might also be related to the problem of cognitive biases. Indeed, the case studies presented in the paper posit the existence of something that is addressed as the trigger effect, i.e. agents’ tendency to react impulsively to any kind of content that fits agent’s views about current events. Specifically, this research study finds that the activation of the trigger effect might be a direct consequence of the activation of the narrow framing bias and of the anchoring heuristic in presence of fake news.
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The aim of this paper is to present various answers to the skeptical argument and propose an alternative solution. Suggested solution refers to the results of empirical research which lead to abandonment of entailment thesis concerning knowledge. My answer is contextualist inasmuch as it recognizes the existence of different concepts of knowledge. The applicability of these concepts depends on the situation; in a skeptical context the concept of knowledge is not accompanied by appropriate belief, and in ordinary contexts knowledge requires a belief of specific content.
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In Polish legal theory there is a generally accepted distinction between legal norms (normative standards) and legal provisions (independent editorial units of a legal text). One of the most developed theories of the interpretation of law, the derivative theory of M. Zieliński, however, also includes the postulate of the reconstruction of the entire legal system as one comprehensive norm (the so-called holistic approach) in the process of applying the law. This postulate stems mainly from assumptions regarding the adopted methods of interpretation. The holistic approach has often been criticized as inadequate in pragmatic terms, but the derivative theory has not yet been thoroughly modified in this respect. In this paper, I propose to apply Wittgenstein's concept of aspect perception as providing adequate conceptual framework to describe the mechanism of identifying relevant parts of the legal norm that deals with the pragmatic inadequacy of the holistic approach, but does not affect the core of the derivative theory of interpretation.
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The aim of this article is to answer the questions about the essence and continuity of the video games’ worlds. In order to achieve that Roman Ingarden’s formal ontological tools are used. The article consists of four main parts. First two clarify the basic concepts used in the article such as a world and an essence. Next, the conditions of world continuity de- duced from three aspects of identity, namely ‘selfness’, ‘wholeness’ and ‘identity’, are discussed. The last part applies these conditions to chosen instances of video game types.
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In the paper I try to reconstruct and investigate the reasons which inclined Patočka to strongly expose the problem of sacrifice in his philosophical thought. To do so, I highlight the relationship between sacrifice, the meaning of life and three platonic ideas of goodness, beauty and truth, assuming sacrifice to be a perfect instrument of incorporating them. Finally, I argue that the nature of sacrifice is inherently equivocal and all studies concerning it should include its negative aspects.
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The objective of this article is to present the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, seen from the point of view of two contemporary authors, namely: Maurizio Lazzarato and Bernard Stiegler. The main assumption here is that its main revolutionary potential boils down to the value that is attributed to the notion of “desire”. The very power of this notion consists in counteracting the processes of reduction of human experience to the level of symbolic and affective misery. The degrading power of media and capitalist societies’ technologies as described by Lazzarato and Stiegler may give an insight into the dangers of being a disaffected individual.
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The Real is one of the most interesting and at the same time most „philosophical” among Lacan’s concepts. Even, if it is rather clinical question, there is no doubt that theory of three registers has almost metaphysical consequences. In this paper, author describes history of the concept of the Real in Lacan’s teaching and tries to find an answer to question concerning possibility of lacanian (para-)ontology. It turns out that, what is specific to lacanianins is movement from transcendence to immanence.
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Marc Richir’s phenomenological work proposes a new type of phenomenology, a non-standard one. To him, a non-standard phenomenology is, first of all, a phenomenology that is “crossing the barrier of intentionality” (Richir, 2015). In this context, perception has a special role. Firstly, it involves phantasia, and not the imaginary. Secondly, it is a perception of non-intentional objects. Because of these two reasons, the other becomes the Other, namely a non-intentional object that cannot be pinpointed in a definite time / space frame. In this paper, I will try to demonstrate that, starting from this lack of conceptualization that the Other represents, a sense is constructed. It is a sense in the making (sens se faisant), as Richir puts it (Richir 1988, 2015); a sense whose never-ending development gives meaning to someone’s life. In order for this to take place, the effective presence of the Other is crucial. Otherwise, sense stands still and meaning is aborted.
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Michel Henry questions the opposition body - flesh as indebted to the opposition between what appears / the appearing, under the light of what he calls "The reversal of phenomenology", i.e. "the substitution of the phenomenology of the world for a phenomenology of life". This question raises another question: the constitution of intersubjectivity, which this article is trying to answer by developing a schema of intersubjectivity through a critical rereading of the theory of Nietzsche about active force and reactive force.
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Does contemporary phenomenology envision movement in space as a displacement from a point A to a point B? Is there something more at stake in the movement of our bodies, that cannot be reduced to this type of displacement ? What happens when several bodies move together, like in dance practices of all kinds ? The paper questions the role of repetitive movements in the institution of places we inhabit and the importance of the places we find ourselves to be for the way we move in space. Starting from the philosophical reflections on the Museum of Dance initiated by the French choreograph Boris Charmatz and through analysis of the American choreograph Wendy Woodson's work, the paper aims to shed light on the double dimension of repetitive movements, as they install us in space and as they alienate us from ourselves. The purpose of the paper is to reflect on a phenomenology of rhythm that helps articulate an aesthetic perspective on movement entailing social and political incidences.
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The writings of Marcus Tullius Cicero are often referred to by natural law theorists. But how do various points of Cicero’s philosophy of law—and of religion, justice, and the state—compare with similar themes from Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas? In this paper, I suggest a Thomistic-Aristotelian reading of Cicero as a way to contextualize and supplement the Roman philosopher’s work with more robust insights from Aristotle and St. Thomas, and especially from Aristotle as interpreted by St. Thomas in the later light of the Incarnation. I also show that Cicero’s natural law philosophy is inconsistent when taken on its own terms. Therefore, Cicero’s natural law philosophy—as well as his philosophy of religion, justice, and the state—should be subjected to a more critical examination by natural law scholars today.
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The chief aim of this article is to show that St. Thomas Aquinas’s Fourth Way of demonstrating God’s existence can only be made precisely intelligible by comprehending it as a real, generic whole in light of its specific organizational principles. Considered as a real, generic whole, this argument is one from effect to cause (from a real order of more or less perfectly existing generic, specific, and individual beings [habens esse] more or less perfectly possessing generic, specific, and individual ways of being within qualitatively different, hierarchical, orders of existence to a first cause of this order of perfections). In addition, this article maintains that, to comprehend this complicated argument, readers mush be familiar with philosophical principles that St. Thomas repeatedly uses throughout his major works, but with which most of his contemporary students tend to be unfamiliar. Consequently, a secondary aim of this paper is to introduce readers unfamiliar with them to some of these principle so that they may be able better to comprehend what St. Thomas is saying in this demonstration and in other teachings of his as well.
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The subjective faith, in Kant’s approach, is a way of recognizing truth. This method is justified by subjective reasons, with the simultaneous lack of objective ones. What is recognized in the way of faith as truths are the postulates of practical reason regarding the existence of God and the immortality of man. The subjectivity of faith is expressed in the fact that it is a disposition, state, principle of mind (habitus) in recognizing truth in what is to be assumed as a necessary condition of the highest good which is the object of the will. Since faith belongs to the moral order, it is sometimes called a moral faith. Its task is to determine the will on the basis of moral law. As a way of recognizing the postulates of practical reason as true, faith takes a form of judgments stating the existence of these postulates. For this reason, the subjective faith is an act of the intellect, because it is the intellect that is entitled to state truths. Kant calls the subjective faith a pure practical rational faith. This faith is the principle of the intellect whereby it states that one should accept the conditions of the highest good in view of the practical imperative to realize this good. The structure of the subjective faith, according to Kant, corresponds to its object. However, in order to recognize its object, the faith does not require any additional conditions in the form of, for example, grace, but it is entirely actualized by virtue of human natural abilities. Therefore, Kant’s rational faith is totally a natural faith.
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The author addresses the problem of education which, as never before, is nowadays so widespread and valued but, at the same time, so ideological and instrumental. In order to resolve this problem, he makes an attempt to build a synthesis of the following: (1) Leonardo Polo’s conception of education and his conception of the person as having capacity for unrestricted growth, which seem to open up a new way of studying. (2) The educational interest of teachers and students which, though fundamental in the educational process, is easily exposed to be lost or diverted toward becoming “something,” rather than “someone.” (3) Ivan Illich’s concept of “hidden curriculum.” The author concludes that the “hidden curriculum,” when purified of its ideological content, can effectively contribute in students’ development as persons.
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