Note de l’auteur
A writer describes his experience when, after a long period of inactivity, he starts to write again: his doubts, his anguish, his confidence, that he will nevertheless create something valuable.
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A writer describes his experience when, after a long period of inactivity, he starts to write again: his doubts, his anguish, his confidence, that he will nevertheless create something valuable.
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In this study, I am in search of the limits of the Christian definition of the human person. I could have drawn on the ideas of countless authors, but I have drawn intuitively on the ideas of Emmanuel Mounier, Jacques Maritain, Béla Hamvas, Simone Weil, and János Pilinszky. The person is a dynamic being open to the infinite and ultimately to God, who is man’s widest horizon of existence. Being a person inevitably implies the potential possession of the infinite in man.
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Kada govorimo o unutarnjoj strukturi moderne filozofije, filozofija Dietera Henricha predstavlja kontrapunkt Habermasovoj filozofiji. Tu mislim na njegov odnos spram znanosti, filozofije i etike. Pitanja koja u vezi s tim postavlja u isti mah su i svojevrsni odgovori. Promišljeni i dalekosežni. Sežu zapravo od najranijih rasprava pa do 1990, do “Etike u doba nuklearnog mira”. Dieter Henrich sasvim drukčije govori o metafizici nego ostali filozofi, u prvom redu Heidegger, Adorno, Rorty i Habermas.
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Bearing in mind the generally accepted evaluation and meaning of the concepts of humanism and existentialism as humanism, in this paper I compared the philosophy of humanity of Abdulah Šarčević and existentialism as humanism of Jean-Paul Sartre, and we point out both the philosophical and value paradigmatics of the given considerations, as well as separate ethical and epistemic specificities, as well as on the kinship between these humanistic-thinking worldviews realized within the problematic of anthropo-metaphysical and ethical-moral perceptions of Šarčević’s conception of humanism in relation to Sartre’s existentialist humanism.
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In the shadow of reemergent threat of nuclear annihilation of Earth coming from Russian President Putin, philosophical insights of Abdulah Šarčević are suddenly becoming ever more pressing once again. Author focuses on Šarčević’s analyses of ethical perspectives opened by Hans Jonas (‘ethics of responsibility’) and Dieter Henrich (‘nuclear ethics’). In this text author attempts to reconstruct Šarčević’s conceptualizations of what he coined as ‘new topology of metaphysics’ initiated by the possibility of nuclear destruction of life on this planet. Šarčević starts with critique of ‘traditional metaphysics’ to the extent of its ‘timelessness’, confronting it with what is, according to him, the very essence of metaphysical thought – its ‘epochal-making’ ability. Author suggests that for Šarčević, philosophical thought is meaningful only if it is ‘timely’, and not ‘eternal’, thus echoing the famous Hegel’s thought on philosophy as its time conceived by thought. Only by keeping this hermeneutical perspective open, meaning, by acting in time, it is possible to ascribe meaning to the totality itself. In that regard, it becomes possible to talk about ‘the future of metaphysics’ whose ‘topos’, according to Šarčević, is practical-historical centered around the question, not about the ‘first’, but about the ‘last’, that is about the ‘ultimate’, such is the possibility of destruction of life on Earth, as, itself, very empirical possibility. This Šarčević’s metaphysical turn around the issue of the ultimate, according to author, carries with itself a new dimension of freedom.
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Cladism, today the dominant school of systematics in biology, includes a classification component—the view that classification ought to reflect phylogeny only, such that all and only taxa are monophyletic (i.e. consist of an ancestor and all its descendants)—and a metaphysical component—the view that all and only real groups or kinds of organisms are monophyletic. For the most part these are seen as amounting to much the same thing, but I argue they can and should be distinguished, in particular that cladists about classifi cation need not accept the typically cladist view about real groups or kinds. Cladists about classification can and should adopt an explanatory criterion for the reality of groups or kinds, on which being monophyletic is neither necessary nor sufficient for being real or natural. Thus the line of reasoning that has rightly led to cladism becoming dominant within systematics, and the attractive line of reasoning in the philosophical literature that advocates a more liberal approach to natural kinds, are seen to be, contrary to appearances, compatible.
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The paper presents the doctrine of five intellectual virtues: science, understanding, wisdom, art, and prudence, as presented in the works of Aristotle and later in the works of Thomas Aquinas. By analyzing each individual intellectual virtue, we consider their role and importance in times of crises that are an integral part of human life, as shown by the current coronavirus crisis. By explaining the essence and scope of each virtue, it is shown that according to each of them, reason achieves correspondence with a particular aspect of reality and gains the ability to direct action in a way that transforms evil into good. Resolving the crisis requires that the intellect acquires excellence in all five areas, especially in the one that is the least present in current public discourse: the virtue of wisdom.
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The article attempts to rethink the legacy of Kant and Hegel in light of the problematic of law, violence and universality. It is also an explication of this legacy in the context of two contemporary insights into historical fate of our Eurocentric civilization—of Achille Mbembe and of Susan Buck-Morss. First, I consider the Kantian foundation of Rechtstaat in the light of Benjamin’s classic Critique of Violence and Mbembe’s contemporary critique of colonial power. Then I propose a new account of the central concept of Hegel’s Logic—i.e. the transition from necessity to freedom— from the same perspective, supplemented with Derrida’s interpretation of Benjamin, and Žižek’s reading of Hegel. The dialectic of modality from Hegel’s Science of Logic seems to be an unde-rappreciated thread in this respect, insofar as Hegel’s idea of universality or freedom is founded on his ontology and critique of law.
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The article will examine the status of capital and spirit—two conceptual forces, as analysed by Deleuze and Guattari, and Hegel, respectively. Capital, the decoded flow of money and labour, and spirit, the persistent rhythm of negation, will both be considered as embodiments of the universal, which I want to define as material expansiveness of the concept. Contrary to the common conception, Deleuze and Guattari do not renounce the idea of universality but alter and accom-modate it in accordance with their theoretical agenda. The text will explore the idea of history as an arena of the expan-sion of thought. In both the dialectical and schizoanalytical frameworks, history becomes a field in which conceptual energies are distributed. I propose to understand universality precisely as this distribution and its dynamics. I will consider spirit and capital as material processes transforming historical codes. The seemingly paradoxical physical interpretation of meaning will serve to examine its constitution and mecha-nism outside the relation of representation. Representation is a structure of meaning functioning on a molar level. Mean-while, both dialectical and schyzoanalytical methods work with the molecular properties of codes, examining their conceptual density, energetic flows and relational intensities. Deleuze and Guattari, and Hegel approach meaning as a conceptual substance which literally makes history, eliciting material properties of thought as it makes its way into being.
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What role does the body play in the subject’s formation and in interpersonal exchanges? Does the body merely perform an instrumental function, or can it claim to be a subject of freedom? Thinking of the body within the framework of intersubjectivity requires reassessing the bulk of the philoso-phical Western tradition. Form the first-person’s perspective endorsed by this tradition, the exteriority of the body has been reduced to a weakness of human nature. Starting from Hegel’s account of the soul-body relation, as presented in the Anthropology, as well as some interpretations of “Lordship and Bondage” on the role of the body in self-doubling (Butler, Malabou, McDowell, Stekeler-Weithofer), I argue that embodiment is a process of (inter)subjectivation. The-matizing the predicative structure of corporeality, Hegel turns the constitutive exteriority of the human body into a potentiality of openness. Hence, Hegel’s dialectic of immediacy and mediation leads to thinking of the body’s universality in opposition to a monadic conception of subjectivity.
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In this essay I intend to describe how Spinoza’s pantheism represents a consistent development of Descartes’ epistemology. While the fundamental starting point of Descartes’ epistemology is the self-certainty, from which the existence of God is deduced, that eventually guarantees the existence of the world outside of the doubting subject, Spinoza’s epistemology is based on the considerations of certain meanings, primarily of the meaning of ‘substance.’ Nevertheless, Spinoza’s metaphysics, as we are going to see, expands on the main Cartesian notions. The main difference is that Spinoza continues Cartesian reasoning in a univocal manner, while Descartes restrains himself from challenging the tradition by insisting on equivocity of all meanings concerning God.
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What is left as a psychological projection for the viewer when he or she leaves the theatre? There are questions that demand answers regarding how to relate the theatrical image to events in the present or past. The variety of responses, over the years, has a complex socio-cultural relevance. Conventions, proposed for transgression in fictional universes, produce the temporal suspension that together give the feeling of the shared/assumed real. Theatre is a form of recognition and rediscovery of universal human feelings. Human depths cannot be communicated through current technological means of mediation. The art of theatre proposes a rearrangement, a discipline for identifying the dangers that threaten contemporary society. We thus find our human connection with the metaphysical life that exists in ultimate reality.
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Seeing the shortcomings of the philosophical lines of thought up to his time, Mulla Sadra founded a new philosophical teaching which, to distinguish it from others, he called hikmat al-muta‘āliya or, literally translated, sublime wisdom. Although he made a step forward and pointed out the inadequacies of previous philosophical teachings, Mulla Sadra addresses all his predecessors with special respect because of their enormous contribution to the path of uncovering truths. What was crucial for Mulla Sadra to make a Copernican turn and accept it as the basis of his philosophy is the proof of the primacy of existence. Mulla Sadra says very clearly that this knowledge was God’s gift to him. He claims the same for some other issues as well. Before Mulla Sadra, all philosophical edifices were built on the assumption of the primacy of essence, which decisively influenced other philosophical issues. The fact is that the question of the primacy of existence appears in some smaller sequences in his predecessors, but only with Mulla Sadra does it become the cornerstone of all other considerations and gives his philosophy a completely new form. Mulla Sadra’s innovations in philosophy imply that they are analyzed in four areas, which actually represent the basic areas of philosophy: ontology, epistemology, theology, philosophical psychology. The paper discusses some important issues to the extent allowed by a journal article framework. These questions are: the primacy of existence, contingent poverty, the generality and comprehensiveness of knowledge, will, life and consciousness and other perfections of existence, the rule “the simple reality is all things and nothing of them”, substantial movement, the reality of knowledge, the unity of intelligibility and intellect (unity of subject and object), as well as questions that necessarily arose from these basic ones.
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An important topic in the last century in the field of irfanic research is the question of the essence of irfanic revelation. Discussions on this topic can be found in different works by Islamic philosophers and scholars. Mulla Sadra approaches this issue on the basis of his views in the field of egology (cognition of the soul) and cosmology, with an emphasis on principles such as the process of gradual increase in the existential intensity of the soul and its unity with its perceptions, while at the same time he considers the spiritual experience as a reality that increases the knowledge that man acquires through the purification of the soul. In speeches of Mulla Sadra, one can find all the descriptions that some contemporary essentialists and their predecessors have reached about irfanic revelation. Most, if not all, of Mulla Sadra’s personal revelations are spiritual and contain knowledge and insight into the universal realities of creation, as he himself admits that the principles of hikmat al-muta‘āliya, such as the primacy of existence, the individual unity of existence, etc., are the result of divine inspirations. In addition to all that, there are testimonies in his works that speak of common characteristics in terms of experience and gnostic revelations. This is why Mulla Sadra can be included in the group of essentialists.
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This paper analyzes the novel Galapagosby Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. in its thematic and formal dimensions. The author aims, first, to identify the work’sreferences to scientific issues concerning Darwin’s theoryof evolution andso-called “social Darwinism.” Secondly, he identifies the novel’s strictly literary references, the citation of which allows him to draw conclusions about the nature of its intertextuality. Of particular relevance here is the relationship of the Galapagos with the biblical myth of the Flood. As a result, the author of the article substantiates the hypothesis that Vonnegut consistently cultivates, for deeply didactic purposes, postmodern metafiction with a moralistic message.
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In this paper, we examine the meta-ontology of AI systems with human-level intelligence, with us denoting such AI systems as AIE. Meta-ontology in philosophy is a discourse centered on ontology, ontological commitment, and the truth condition of ontological theories. We therefore discuss how meta-ontology is conceptualized for AIE systems. We posit that the meta-ontology of AIE systems is not concerned with computational representations of reality in the form of structures, data constructs, or computational concepts, while the ontological commitment of AIE systems is directed toward what exists in the outside world. Furthermore, the truth condition of the ontology (which is meta-ontological assumption) of AIE systems does not require consistency with closed conceptual schema or ontological theories but rather with reality, or in other words, “what is the world” (Smith, 2019, p.57). In addition, the truth condition of AIE systems is verified through operational success rather than by coherence with theories. This work builds on ontological postulates about AI systems that were formulated by Brian Cantwell Smith (2019).
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This article purposes to shed a mutual light on André Malraux’s humanism on the one hand, and on Romain Gary’s on the other hand. Our approach consists in juxtaposing their views on some of those faculties which, in the interaction of the living with the world, seem specific to mankind: the collective faculties of fraternity, culture, and science, the metaphysical abilities to ponder death, cosmos, and evolution. Malraux views fraternity as a “virile” instinct that best manifests itself during warfare, and Gary makes it feminine and akin to “universal love”. While Malraux, most classically, opposes culture to nature, Gary, in an original perspective, sees culture as a new “nurturing environment”. Malraux does not believe in science as a metaphysical incentive, but Gary finds its results stimulating. Malraux tends to think (somewhat paradoxically) about “man’s fate” (at an ontological level) through the (sole) metamorphosis of the works of art as produced in the historic period up to his days. In a broader perspective, Gary considers the biological evolution of mankind over geological ages, methodically starting with the late Devonian when lungless creatures crept up from sea to land, and hopefully envisioning the end result of the twenty thousand years to come. Malraux’s cosmos is a rival to mankind, while Gary sees humanity at home in the universe. Malraux is obsessed with individual death to the point of concluding that any meaning assigned to human lives is nothing but aleatory. Gary has faith instead in the “joy of being” during one’s lifetime, and in the continuous progress of humanity as a species. In such mutual lights, it appears that Malraux’s humanism, not unlike the most melancholic currents of romanticism, is tragic indeed, as many critics have already noted: desolate (man is alone) and devastated (devoid of meaning). As to Gary’s humanism, it comes out as relatable to Julian Huxley’s evolutionary humanism, and no longer as desperate as a certain, inexplicably vivacious, academic tradition still claims it to be. By contrast with Malraux’s, it appears to be actually full of consideration for a wide variety of human interests, yearnings and dreams. It is tactfully expressed in a way that stimulates hope. And its fictionalized form is masterly, not only in terms of novel-writing (Gary’s books being so unlike thesis novels) but also in terms of analytical thinking and philosophical foundation.
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This article examines the importance of imaginary spaces and places (literary isotopias) in André Malraux’s Les Noyers de l’Altenburg (1943) and Romain Gary’s Education européenne (1945). It analyses the metamorphoses of space and place, together with the relationships between those spaces and the novels’ characters, in order to identify commonality as well as differences between the approaches of the two authors. The roles of nature, art and myth in the two novels are also considered, particularly in the context of war. Moreover, the article takes into account the humanism of both authors against the background of wartime. André Malraux’s crucial concept of metamorphosis finds significant echoes in Romain Gary’s novel Education européenne, particularly in the aspiration to transform the world, change mentalities and remake communities both in the national and international contexts. For both writers, the metaphysical struggle against death is often portrayed as being more important than the military conflict with the enemy. Moreover, the novels of both writers have undergone a number of literary metamorphoses in terms of textual genesis and generation. Although Romain Gary’s work is probably less well known today than that of André Malraux, we may find, in conclusion, that the former’s approach, style and content of thought are actually just as “modern” and appealing to readers nowadays.
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Numerous excellent scholars in the humanities were affiliated to Vilnius University in the first decades of the 19th century. One of them was Józef Jeżowski (1793–1855), an expert in classical languages and literature, a scholar recognised for his edition of Horace’s Odes, an outstanding student of G. E. Grodek in Vilnius, a founding member of the Philomath Society, and a friend of A. Mickiewicz. The aim of this paper is to examine Jeżowski’s classical manifesto as expressed in his critical review of a Russian translation of Plato’s Laws. This work was published by Jeżowski during his years in exile in Russia but was addressed to Polish readers.
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This article will refer to the analysis carried out by Dietrich von Hildebrand about the human person to elaborate on the anthropology of the person. The notion of value and the notion of importance. From the phenomenological method and the influence of philosophical realism, Hildebrand will renew the Aristotelian notion of the person to express its uniqueness and the possibility of capturing value and realizing it as a guideline for the solution to the current crisis of values and humanity as philosophers like Byung Chul Han or Günther Anders have described it.
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