Social Histrionism: a Historical- Materialist Explanation of Theatricality

Author(s): Maja Breznik / Language(s): English Issue: 08/2015

The article examines theatricality which ‘escaped’ from the theatrical institution: what Octave Mannoni referred to as histrionism, with the focus on collective histrionism. Thorough research into festivals in Early Modern Europe, the ideal place for such an undertaking, has led to several conclusions. 1. The festival is a “formative whole” of the theatre. 2. Festivals were much more than entertaining idleness with no purpose in itself – they figured as an ordal (i.e. God’s verdict) or the enactment of otherwise suppressed social issues which habitually could not be addressed and were to be normalized through “social histrionism”. 3. Contrary to common beliefs, due to works by Bakhtin and Bataille, the study shows that the carnival transgression was an enjoyment for the popular classes as much as it was for the affluent classes, but on a strictly divided basis. 4. The historical examination indicates the progressive evolution of festivals from bloodshed to the culturalization of festivals, although in terms of content the former may display as much class violence as the latter.

За берила

Author(s): Nicolaus Cusanus / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 21/2015

Bulgarian translation of the brief epistemological treatise "De beryllo" (On the Beryl) (1458) by Nicolas of Cusa. Translated from Latin by Bogdana Paskaleva.

Metafizyczne założenia koncepcji prawdy w "Logice" Marcina Śmigleckiego

Author(s): Tomasz Pawlikowski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2015

The central element of the concept of truth in Smiglecki’s Logica (1618) is his approach to formulating definitions. Where the establishing of the truth is concerned, he always points to compliance at the level of the community (conformitas) in respect of whether the intellectual recognition of a thing or things is in accordance with its intellectual equivalent, or the principles behind the latter, where these are understood as designating the corresponding idea inherent in the intellect of God. This is a form of the classical definition of truth --- similar to that used by St. Thomas Aquinas --- with a wide scope of applicability: to the field of existence (transcendental truth), to cognition and language (logical truth), and even to moral beliefs (moral rightness). Smiglecki distinguishes three types of truth: truth assigned to being, truth assigned to cognition, and truth assigned to moral convictions. Of these, the first is identified with transcendental truth, while the second is attributed not only to propositions and sentences, but also to concepts. The truth of concepts results from compliance with things by way of representation, while the truth of propositions and sentences issues from a compliance with things involving the implementation of some form of expression or other. Logical truth pertains to propositions rather than concepts. The kind of moral truth he writes about is what we would now be more likely to call “truthfulness”. With the exception of moral truth, which he defined as compliance of a statement with someone’s internal thoughts, Smiglecki considers every kind of truth to be a conditioned state of the object of knowledge. He says (a) that the ultimate object of reference of human cognitive functioning is a real being, absolutely true by virtue of compliance with its internal principles and their idea as present in the intellect of God, and (b) that the compatibility of human cognition with a real being is the ultimate basis for the truth of human cognition itself. Just knowing the real truth of a being furnishes us with an absolute form of truth, whereas merely knowing the default character of purely fictional objects can be true at most in relative terms. This pattern certainly also holds for sentences about what does not exist, and for sentences about future events whose truth or falsity is a contingent affair. Truth is of particular importance in science (scientia), although its scope covers a wider area than the area of scientific knowledge itself. It thus reaches to the very essence of scientific excellence. On the other hand, scientific knowledge is by its very nature always true. Therefore, truth is derived from our possession of its essence.

Civilization and barbarism

Author(s): Carlo Ginzburg / Language(s): English Issue: 3-4/2017

The reflections on civilization, barbarism, and their intricate relationship, which were put forward in ancient Greece, from Herodotus to Aristotle, had a longterm impact. In the mid-16th century debate which took place in Valladolid, between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de Las Casas, about the status of the native populations of the New World, the Latin translations of Aristotle’s Politics, and its comment by St. Thomas Aquinas, proved to be especially relevant for both opponents. Were Indian natives comparable to Aristotle’s “natural slaves”? Was the war against them comparable to hunting wild beasts? The paper focuses on the debate and its contemporary implications.

Machiavelli versus Machiavelianism : Psychology, Ethics, Politics

Author(s): Ludmila Anţibor / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2018

The article describes the main aspects of the great thinker of the Renaissance, Nicolo Machiavelli, who approached the role played by the personality of the governor. Starting from the realities of his time in feudal Italy with a fragmented territory, he considers that it is better to have a powerful prince in a unified sovereign country, even if he has no remorse than some competing rival rulers. From a historical perspective, Machiavelli is shown as a cynical refined man, who considers the basis of the political conduct to be the advantage (interest) and force, and that in politics one should rely on force not on morality, which can be ignored when aiming at a noble goal. However, it is to be mentioned that Machiavelli was not the first to speak about the fact that social contradictions represent one of the basic elements of society life. Before him, Plato and Aristotle dealt with this, but Machiavelli was the first after the thinkers of Antiquity who tried to establish a connection between the processes taking place in society and those of the political system.

MACHIAVELLI’O VALDOVAS: DORYBIŲ GALVOSŪKIS

Author(s): Mindaugas Stoškus / Language(s): Lithuanian Issue: 94/2018

The article deals with the attitude of Nicollò Machiavelli towards virtues and its political meaning explained in his famous work The Prince. Philosopher discusses the meaning of virtues in different stages of his reasoning. He makes partial conclusions at each stage and leads to the final conclusion, which states that virtues are harmfull for the prince, while the deceptive appearance of virtues is most useful. The context of classical political philosophy allows to demonstrate that Machiavelli’s proposal to use deception of virtues equates to a perfect injustice. It can be concluded that Machiavelli breaks radically with the Platonic tradition of political philosophy and starts creating a new tradition on the grounds of ideas of ancient sophists about human nature and politics.

Hegel i “lukavstvo uma”. Geneza i implikacije za suvremeni politički diskurs

Author(s): Pavle Mijović / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 01+02/2021

A work entitled Hegel and “the cunning of reason”. The genesis and implications for contemporary political discourse is divided into two parts. The first part aims to contextualize Hegel’s syntagm “the cunning of reason” in his Science of Logic, Philosophy of Law and Philosophy of History, as well as in the epistolary corpus of the German philosopher. Our intention is to bring the genesis, context of the origin and use of this syntagm based on Hegel’s original works, first in works of a speculative character and then in those of a more practical orientation. In the context of a teleological discussion of the objective concept, Hegel introduces the syntagm “cunning of reason” which acquires much more plastic contours in his other works. It is related to world-historical individuals who actualize the “substantial act of the world spirit”. The second part of the paper aims to bring a contemporary reading of Hegel based on previous textual and content analysis. Hegel’s “cunning of reason” will be linked to Machiavelli’s ideas from the Prince, implicating deep separation between ethics and politics. The irrelevance of objective content in contemporary political discourse is a topic that synthesizes current political challenges.

ODRODZENIE W PRAWDZIE MIŁOŚCI

Author(s): Stanisław Grygiel / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2021

In his philosophical and, at the same time, poetic essay, the author describes the crisis of contemporary culture and reflects on its causes, while looking for the sources of hope for the future and indicating possible paths leading to a renaissance. The main inspiration for the considerations presented in the essay is the output of Karol Wojtyła—John Paul II, but the author draws also on works by such thinkers and poets as Plato, Dante Alighieri, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and Thomas Stearns Eliot.

Dwa wymiary filozofii politycznej. Na marginesie debaty dwóch polskich filozofów XVII w.

Author(s): Bogdan Szlachta / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2022

Studies conducted by political philosophers focus typically on the normative dimension. Grounded in decisions concerning the understanding of the world, sometimes with the participation of a personal God, and of man as a part of it, they lay the foundations of the order constituting an analogue of the cosmos, or the result of God’s will or evolution, or the effect of decisions made consciously by the ruling or those who legitimize them. The second dimension is of less interest to philosophers, as opposed to lawyers and political scientists who are interested also in political philosophy. This dimension has an institutional value and is connected with the investigation of “mechanisms” enabling the achievement of normative order. My considerations will involve various propositions in the two dimensions, made by two Polish authors from the 17th century.

David Hume Düşüncesinde Duygu-Düşünce İlişkisinin İnsan Doğasında Temellendirilmesi

Author(s): Emrullah Kılıç / Language(s): Turkish Issue: 2/2022

The 17th century caused significant changes and transformations in science and philosophy, as in many other fields. In this context, the God-centered dominant understanding in medieval thought was replaced by the science of man and human nature. This situation characterizes the Enlightenment period, and all aspects of existence are connected to the cause-effect relationship. In this direction, unlike current rationalists, David Hume placed the science of human nature as the initiating cause of human actions at the center of all sciences. Based on his works, A Treatise of Human Nature and An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, this study aims to address and examine Hume's emotion-thought relationship based on human nature/science within the framework of the mind's function and experience. This idea of ​​Hume, which moves from empirical judgments, is based on the assumption that the future will be compatible with the past. This attitude of Hume, who establishes the essence of his entire philosophical approach to human science or human nature, can be read as a result of giving a high authority to experience, which would significantly affect his successors later on. Hume, who tried to produce his thoughts from human nature instead of objective reason, has an important place in the history of philosophy by connecting science and morality to emotions with his critical attitude. Hume, who puts the human being at the center, turned to the research of human nature and even connected mathematics, natural philosophy, and natural religion to humans in this direction. Combining the acquisition of more predictable information about the past, present, and future to the science of human nature, Hume's thoughts are based on two basic assumptions: First, there is a fixed, unchanging, one-sided nature in man; secondly, if a science of human nature is to be constructed, it must be based on experience as content and method. Hume stated that his philosophy aims to "abandon the distracting and tedious methods pursued until now" and "to walk directly to the capital instead of capturing a castle or village on the border," that is, "to the center of the sciences, to the very human nature that was once superior to all." According to Hume, who described the philosophies before him as fruitless discussions, it is necessary to turn to human nature and discover the potential and power of human understanding. The effects of Hume's approach, which grounded the limits and source of the causality relationship between the human mind and habits, deeply affected the debates on the truth that continue today.

Scholastinė logika Lietuvoje: eklektizmas ir santykis su Renesanso ir naujųjų amžių filosofija ir logika

Author(s): Vytis Valatka / Language(s): Lithuanian Issue: 112/2022

This text continues a cycle of articles devoted to general topics of scholastic logic in Lithuania. The first article of the cycle (Valatka 2020) investigated the beginning of the above mentioned logic as well as its method and argumentation technique. The second article (Valatka 2021) looked into structure, object and form of this logic. This article is devoted to one of the essential features of that logic, namely, to its eclectic nature. The author of the article focuses on the causes and content of this eclecticism. The article comes to conclusion that such an eclecticism was characteristic of all the disciplines of the Second Scholasticism, including logic, the inseparable part of which was scholastic logic in Lithuania. The main reasons for this eclecticism were the crisis of classical scholasticism and the philosophical, theological, and ideological front of the reformation/counter-reformation battle. However, the eclecticism of scholastic logic was of a rather limited, even isolationist nature. Namely, it did not go beyond the frames of scholastic knowledge – while combining and integrating separate views of various trends of classical scholasticism, this logic completely ignored the ideas and concepts of Renaissance and New Ages’ philosophy and logic.

Обсценната поезия на трубадурите и простолюдната култура на средновековието

Author(s): Tsocho Boyadzhiev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 12/2022

Medieval Europe cultivates a specific behavioural model based on the ideology of vassalage. This model challenges the mysogyny typical for this period of history. The phenomenon under scrutiny is the so called “courtly love”: a relationship between a man and a woman traditionally characterised as an “elegant” and “cultivated” (fine) or a “true” (vraie) form of love. The present writing investigates the peculiar way in which works of high culture and such of overtly obscene character are reconciled in the oeuvre of the gloriefiers of courtly love. By behaving in a certain manner (serving unconditionally, observing chastity, restraing oneself, composing eulogies etc.) the knight strives to attain the heights of his immaculate beloved. But the same could be achieved in another way too: through а denial of elevated discourse, a demystification of the ends of courtly love, an “incarn- ation” of her who is being celebrated as the one and only. It is an undeniable truth that masters of the most unadulterated intimate lyric have also composed obscene verses and even engaged in poetic “tournaments” quite far from plain decency. Our argument is that troubadours, trouvères and Minnesänger have created thesekinds of poems neither because they fancied blasphemy, nor in order to indulge in an infantile pleasure of uttering indecent words, nor to scandalize traditional morality, let alone critisize the structure of society. It was rather their honest attempt, whether conscious or intuitive, to restore love to its more humane dimensions, to rehabilitate it in its imperfections, in its ironic or overtly cynical expressions. Elitist culture requires vernacular culture not only as its antithesis but also as its legitimate complement.

Cusanus’ta İkinci Tanrı Olarak İnsan ve Ölçme Edimi

Author(s): İhsan Berk Özcangiller / Language(s): Turkish Issue: 48/2023

Nicolaus Cusanus, considered one of the most important German thinkers by many historians of philosophy, has yet to receive the recognition he deserves in the philosophical circles in Turkey. However, the philosophical writings of Cusanus contain the seeds of the thoughts of many modern philosophers such as Descartes, Berkeley, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel. For this reason, studies on Cusanus are an essential stopping point in the history of philosophy, especially for the Renaissance period and the transition to modern philosophy. Despite this, texts examining Cusanus' thoughts are limited in foreign languages and Turkish. Towards the end of the 19th century, studies on Cusanus started and recently the worldwide interest in Cusanus has increased. Although there are different theses about the original aspect of Cusanus’ thoughts in these sources, his theory of knowledge and the rela-tionship of this theory with the contemporary subject of philosophy of subjectivity attract attention. The reason for this is that Cusanus, unlike his contemporaries, as a result of his views on the human mind, makes the human center in the act of knowing and puts everything else into the mind's mediation. That is why people can know things not as they are in themselves, but only in so far, they are part of the conceptual world, that their own mind constructs that. This is a system of thought that on the one hand puts the human mind at the center through its act of knowing on the other hand, limits its knowledge. This centrality of the human mind led Cusanus to characterize man as the second god on earth. The main reason for characterizing man as the second god is the activity of knowing and the act of measuring that lies at the core of this activity. Despite its significance, there is no study focusing on man’s creativity in this world through the relationship between Cusanus’s conception of man as the second god and the human mind’s activity of measurement, which reveals the originality of Cusanus’ thought. This study aims to fill this gap in the literature. To achieve this aim, this study examines the act of measurement of man as the second god, which reveals the originality of Cusanus’ theory of knowledge associated with modern and contemporary philosophy.

In memoriam: Ханс Герхард Зенгер

Author(s): Georgi Kapriev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 29/2023

За трилогията на Владимир Градев „Прочити на Данте”

Author(s): Nonka Bogomilova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 13/2023

MAKIJAVELI I PROBLEM POČETKA

Author(s): Ivan Milenković / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 1/2018

What a state would be like – strong or weak, solid or prone to collapse – depends on the manner in which it begins. Likewise, once a state is constituted, a periodical return to the beginning seems to be a remedy against the deterioration of an order. For Machiavelli, however, beginning not only isn’t a self-explanatory notion, but has multiple meaning and is, moreover, paradoxical. Considering primarily two Machiavelli’s main works, The Prince and Discourses on Livi, this article tends to point out different beginnings in Machiavelli’s opus (beginning in time and beginning out of time, beginning of history and beginning of writing, beginning of monarchy and beginning of republic), as well as the constitutive instability of the beginning (what or who establishes the beginning: the mind, the ruler, a random event, a foundational gesture or an outcome?).

OD POLITIKE DO UMEĆA VLADANJA

Author(s): Nedžib M. Prašević / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 2/2017

Machiavelli’s theoretical work was mainly focused on researching the art of the state. However, contrary to dominant and common definitions of the art of government in classic political theory, Machiavelli used an unconventional phrase – arte dello stato – to define the main subject of his research. This article analyzes intellectual and historical context of Machiavelli’s time to explain the reasons behind introduction of the new term in political theory.

Middle Ages and Renaissance Reconciled in the Philosophical Thought of Nicolaus Copernicus

Author(s): Marcin Karas / Language(s): English Issue: 12/2023

Within the area of historical studies, a reflection on the history of science takes place undoubtedly among these domains which particularly inspire and stimulate imagination. There are noble figures, famous for changing the course of the world who catch special attention. Nicolaus Copernicus (Mikołaj Kopernik 1473-1543), a Polish scholar, the founder of a novel view of the worldthe heliocentric model of the Cosmosserves as an example1 . Both, in scientific literature and various popular publications, for two hundred years there has been shaped a common picture of Copernicus as a Renaissance thinker, who reactivated the forgotten ancient concepts of heliocentrism (including a cult of the Sun), to the world and who, at the same time, overcame Scholasticism and Christian Aristotelianism2 . Nevertheless, even a sketchy analysis of the texts of Copernicus undermines such interpretations, as in his works there are numerous references to the medieval philosophy of science, physics, and philosophy3 . The aim of this paper is therefore an answer to the question: to what extent was Copernicus a Scholastic, and to what extent we might classify his philosophy as the Renaissance one4 ? Justification of a statement included in the title we find in the source materials (writings of Copernicus himself, and his only student at Varmia [Polish: Warmia, German: Ermland], Georg Joachim Rheticus), also, in numerous analyses available. We notice that a significant part of the literature of the subject contains a one-sided approach, therefore, to some extent our analysis will be of polemical character.

Fausto Sozzini in Poland (1579–1604)

Author(s): Joanna Frydrych,Lech Szczucki / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2024

This translation is based on “Faust Socyn w Polsce,” in Humaniści, heretycy, inkwizytorzy (Kraków: PAU, 2006), 175–88, with the permission of the Publisher and the legal successors.

The Renaissance Conceptions of Human Dignity

Author(s): Jan Czerkawski,Joanna Frydrych / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2024

This translation is based on “Renesansowe koncepcje godności człowieka,” Roczniki Filozoficzne 35, no. 1 (1987): 251–81, with the Publisher’s permission.