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Već na prvoj stranici svog remek-djela o Nietzscheu Gilles Deleuze ubada Kanta tamo gdje se čini da je ovaj najtvrđi: Kant ≫nije proveo istinsku kritiku, jer problem nije znao postaviti u terminima vrijednosti≪. Drugim riječima, Kant nije postavio pitanje vrijednosti samih vrijednosti.
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In the text, which consists of the first two parts of the second chapter of Descartes Politico, Antonio Negri defines the change in the thought of René Descartes which took place at the end of the third decade of the 17th century. A crucial category in Descartes’ thought –conjuncture — is connected closely with the economic downturn and deep crisis of the Renaissance project. Negri tries to capture the moment of birth of the “baroque” Descartes and points to a dynamic tension between Descartes’ philosophy (at that particular moment) and a libertine worldview. This ambiguous relation with libertinism (which is the answer to the decline of Renaissance hopes and aspirations) is, according to Negri, the starting point for the Cartesian search for a way to overcome the crisis.
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The dialogue “Xenedemos, or Voices” is a little-known philosophical work by Theodoros Prodromos, an outstanding 12th century Byzantine writer. The objective of the paper is to reveal, who of Byzantine intellectuals of the time could serve as prototypes of the main protagonists of the dialogue. The historical and logical content of “Xenedemos” is analysed. It is argued that its main character, named Theokles, encompasses crucial features of Michael Psellos and John Italos.
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The following text is the first chapter of Jacques Derrida’s book Politiques de l’amitié [The Politics of Friendship], being the exemplary and standard case of deconstruction, in this particular case, of philosophical texts (Cicero, Plato and, notably, Aristotle). The starting point for the discussion is the performative contradiction inscribed in the wellknown fragment On friendship from Essays by Michel de Montaigne: “O mes amis, il n’y a nul amy” (O my friends, there is no friend). Apparently, everything here is well-known and obvious, even the very notion of friendship, but as we proceed in the argument provided by Derrida, the obvious becomes less obvious to us and takes on new shades and hues in meaning, acquires new values. What is objective mixes in this fascinating argument with what is subjective. What is friendship? What is friendship today? Is friendship limited to just private sphere of interpersonal relations? The answer to the latter question is, according to Derrida, clearly negative. In the course of his argument he states: “There is no democracy without a community of friends”. This argument provides clues to understand a particular archeology of the notion, revealing oblique senses and contexts of the word “friendship”, its history shown from the antiquity to the present day.
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Nietzsche’s philosophy of politics and power is acquainted with Machiavellian principles in the distinction between the ruler type and ruled type, elite and masses, master and slave, discourse on the necessity of social ranking and subordination, subordination of morality to politics, the emphasis on power in political analysis, need for regional spaces with the foundation of the state in imperialism and violence. Machiavelli and Nietzsche political philosophy are based on a conception that life or nature is immoral and life is the will to power. Politics as one important sphere of life, has aimed at expansion of power, at growth, at superiority and operate in its basic functions throughout injury, assault, exploitation, destruction. Napoleon, as a late representative of the Renaissance, is for Nietzsche higher man because he embodied power and spiritual strength. Napoleon is a political actor as the artist and another possible realm of creativity. As the artist he is using the public arena as the medium on which practices his art for selfovercoming and spiritual growth, but also a space which ruin him because in the end he did not succeed to cross over the dangers of the political realm. Human greatness offers a way out of the closed circle of Christian morality and a new path for human evaluation. In the case of Napoleon, Nietzsche’s conception of higher man and some sort of hero is not only abstract ideal. Higher man’ s soul is a chapter of richness of artist, philosopher and tyrant. His failure deprives us of something extraordinary, but his mixed characters are always accompanied by danger and failure which are only steps away of success. He is frightening because he can bring pain and he is terrible because of his dedication to his own project of selfovercoming. Nietzsche is showing how suffering and hope go together in higher man creation. Nietzsche offers a different perspective than traditional political philosophy because almost all political thought is goal oriented in using politics as achievement. Nietzsche’s intention was to challenging the way about politics because the value of political action is not determined by the action, only by the deeds. The power is the basis of all rights, not a social contract affirming the rule of the person over law. By examining politics through an existential philosophy of life, Machiavelli goes to the core of politics. Cesare is expert deceivers, skilled in use weapons and words who desires power for himself and this desire is in the heart of man of politics. He is kind of heroes who suffers in the name of others. The hero’s agonistic experience can be reduced to 3 principles: independence, acquisition, appearance which are closely connected with virtue exercised on directed his power toward crowed or making one’s own laws. He is a hero because of the implication of his action beyond morality and because he knows how to eliminate enemies by skillfull dissembler. For achieving political power he will do anything necessary, because politics is a realm onto it. Because all humans are in a perpetual act of exercising power in order to achieve their particular purposes, successful political man is the highest form of human achievement because he is able to bring order in a world of discord and chaos. In the cases of Cesare Borgia and Napoleon it can be seen that is possible for higher person or ruler to show their immoral power without barriers in the realm of politics and if they have enough strength state is essentially an instrument of power, because the will to power is the philosophy of politics.
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The present article is an attempt to redefine the meaning of Renaissance in Europe as an artful process of seeing life as a manipulable autonomy through the eyes of those who decided to build their ‘selves’ upon the intellectual ruins of human history. All human cultures and societies go through their renaissances but the level of their impact on human mind and its development depends upon the power of ‹the mechanism of stagnancy›. The stagnancy mechanism should be kept in mind while interpreting the meaning of ‘European Renaissance’, since Renaissance did not happen simultaneously throughout Europe and Europe never existed as one integral cultural unit the stagnancy mechanism gave various participant nations different outlook and varying formative outlines. In England for instance, this stagnancy created havoc in 14th century when the issue of vernacular was raised. By the end of the 16th / beginning of 17th century, in a similar way, Shakespeare’s concept of womanhood as opposed to patriarchal system lead to Shakespeare’s early retirement from London’s theatrical life and later his sudden death. The mechanism of stagnancy remained dominant throughout high renaissance and reflected into, perhaps the greatest crime ever committed against humanity - ‘witchburning’. It is also observed in the article if Renaissance is a logically justified term to describe the movement as a Euro-wide phenomenon or does it have different scale of reception and impact for instance, in Italy and the one happening with lesser intensity in, let’s say, Croatia. Theterm ‘Genessance’ (from ‘genesis’, beginning and ‘ssance’ knowledge) introduced as a parallel movement with distinguished features to describe regions which were not part of the classical age of learning is introduced. Genessance was simply ignored by the historians in their desire to see Renaissance as the only way to observe the phenomenon of redefining identity, self and autonomy in their oversimplified understanding of Europe as ‘European life of 15th and 16th century’. Genessance, however, was not the only thing they bypassed. They also ignored that in a vast territory of East and South East Europe another set of intellectual, social, aesthetic structures prospered under the Ottomans until as late as 1860’s. Primussance (Latin, ‘primus’, first and French ‘ssance’). Primussance regions of Europe were well acquainted with the meaning of primordial wisdom and the masses with more confidence and faith in the sciences and various branches of philosophy as it was all reaching them from a long line of spiritual ancestry that they took pride in were leading a lot more balanced social and intellectual life than anywhere else in Western Europe. Regions like Bosnia and Herzegovina were not in need to have any renaissance, they had their own spiritually mature, socially deep rooted academic system and a highly evolved manner of approaching life and nature as coexisting harmony. This region though encountered its own specific kind of mechanism of stagnancy and remained locked within up to the present day.
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Essay writing by Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626) are analysed in this article. The hypothesis raised is that the essay writing by F. Bacon is formal whereas that by M. de Montaigne is informal. F.Bacon regards the form of the essay as an alternative to the language of the natural sciences. He provides a reader with Essays or Counsels: Civil and Moral. The initiator of the personal essay is M. de Montaigne. He creates narrative identity and considers his own “I” as an inseparable part of the Essay. This article deals with the approach of philosophy towards literature following an analysis on the issue of truth making. Certain aspects of stylistics are discussed - applying the principle of irony and the meaning of quotations. The examination reveals how the process occurs while the author creates his/her identity and what conditions are required to consider the essay form as an alternative to philosophical discourse. Additionally this work emphasizes the origin of the essay genre which links artistic and scientific discourse.
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The article analyzes the Latin treatise by Petrarch “De remediis utriusque fortunae” (1354—1366) in which the Roman past and its representatives are designated as “ours” / “yours”, national and cultural meanings of these concepts are understood. The definition of “ours” — “yours” as “Romans” for modern to Petrarch readers obviously moved apart “chronotope” of the treatise if to understand it as the interrelation of historical “parameters” based on unity. The appeal to Cicero played special role in updating the Roman past. The past comes back to collective memory as not lost communications with the present. Petrarch, the outstanding intellectual of the time, did not just stay ahead of the century in search of the idea of the nation, but also set the directions of its search.
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The Assayer of Galileo Galilei is a classical text of the Italian literature. It was written in the context of discussions on comets and is a response, word by word, to the Libra astronomica ac philosophica signed by Lotario Sarsi but in fact written by Orazio Grassi. From the formal (i.e. rhetorical) point of view the Assayer is an example of the judicial, defensive speech. However, in the book one can also see the presence of the epideictic speech. The epideictic speech praises the methodological values of the Copernican vision of the universe, and blames those involved in the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic approaches. In the sixth section of the Assayerthere is a famous group of four rhetorical periods in which one can notice the presence of the new interpretation of the antique metaphor of the book. The rhetorical exercise developed in this essay tries to disentangle the complex node of this metaphor and gives its new interpretation. It seems that for Galileo the metaphor is not a trope but passes to the topica. At the end some considerations on dialectics of Galileo are also proposed.
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The article is devoted to the Latin poem De spledidissimo Christi Jesu triumpho carmen by Martin Kromer who was one of the biggest writers of the Polish Renaissance. A theme of the work is time when Jesus Christ became alive again three days after his death. The theme are also miraculous events which took place after his Resurrection. The poet is supplementing records of the Gospel, introducing into his poem the action which isn’t complicated. He is talking about guards who stood by the grave. He is also describing the reaction of the nature which expressed its sadness because of the death of the Saviour. In the context of the report on the Resurrection, the poet is referring to the figures of ancient world belonging both to mythology, as well to history. In his artistic work Kromer isn’t presenting typical Apocrypha, he proposes a different perspective, having only character of the Apocrypha.
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Giordano Bruno has been described as a philosopher, a mathematician, a poet and a mage: all of these terms depict a different aspect of the multi-faceted thinker he was. The development of his original and anti-dogmatic views is partly due to a constant confrontation with different philosophical, scientific and religious doctrines that Scholasticism did not share. Our aim in this article is to clarify the role of the Islamic tradition and its figures in relation to the thought of Giordano Bruno. There is no comprehensive study about this topic, though academics found a consistent connection between the philosophy of Bruno and Latin Averroism.Other topics concerning the Nolan philosopher and the Arabic sources deserve our attention: for example, aspects regarding the Western reception of Islamic science and pseudoscience (astronomy, astrology and alchemy in particular). Philological investigations establish that Bruno read Latin translations of Arabic works and found theories of medieval Muslim thinkers on secondary sources: in fact, he was familiar with authors like al-Ghazali, Avempace and Averroes, as he mentioned them in his works. In order to understand to what extent the Islamic tradition influenced Bruno, we analyzed and contextualized his references concerning the Arabs and the Persians. We concluded that he had an interest in the scientific and philosophical theories of the Muslims, but his overall view on Islam was vague and conditioned by the beliefs of his historical period. Moreover,we highlighted that Averroes was the only Islamic thinker who significantly influenced Bruno; though, the thought of the Nolan has more points in common with Averroism, rather than with the actual philosophy of Averroes.
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Albert Krantz was a clergyman from Lubeck, a German humanist and author of several works on the history of the peoples of “Germaniae magnae” - in his opinion, an existing ethnoterritorial community of Germans and Slavs. The object of the study is his work Wandalia. Wandalia is permeated by the spirit of pre-Reformation German humanism and displays the classic for the late Middle Ages idea of the “own” antiquity. The author thinks that consideration of Russian subjects of Vandalia is particularly important, because this work was published even before the “Notes on Muscovy” of Sigismund von Herberstein and to this day remains almost unknown within the Russian-speaking readership.
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This paper traces several lines by which Spinoza emerges primarily as an anti-Hobbes, in the theoretical-political sense. Crucial lines which proves so are: level of the immanence and transcendence, level of the relationship between affect of fear and freedom, level of relation between individuality and collectivity and, in particular, level which relates concepts of the people and multitude. While Hobbes’s thought demonstrates itself as crucial for ideas of individualism and liberal traditions, Spinoza emerges as a thinker of the collectivity, of multitude, and thus as inspiration for materialistic readings.
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Most of the historians of philosophy know about the correspondence between Elizabeth and Descartes only due to the problem which princess had suggested to philosopher, regarding the relation of body and soul. Not that many people, however, know that their letters also concerned manifold of subjects: those of geometry, physics and medicine, as much as ethical and political questions. Undoubtedly, their correspondence testifies about origination and alteration of some of the Descartes‘ philosophical thoughts, but by far it reveals how educated and talented his correspondent was, and we can only regret because woman of such profile, besides these letters, did not leave a philosophical work.
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The work Irene, overo della bellezza (Venice, 1599), written by the Renaissance philosopher and poet Michele Monaldi (1540–1592) from Dubrovnik, is considered to be the first aesthetic treatise that originates from Croatia. In that dialogue, Monaldi devoted a whole chapter to music and presented his version of the general theory of it. Monaldi’s thoughts on beauty and music originate primarily from the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. He was mainly theoretically oriented, thus his ideas on music are primarily based on Plato’s philosophical thoughts, and only partially on Aristotle’s. In the greater part of this chapter, Monaldi does not consider the changes that occurred in the field of music in the second half of the 16th century and on the turn of the 17th century. Thus, his ideas on music and art, in general, can be interpreted almost as a purely theoretical model, without any indications of its possible use in practice. Monaldi’s Platonic orientation is also evident in the form of his work, which is the dialogue form modelled after similar dialogues written by Plato. In some aspects of his discussion on music, though not numerous, Monaldi still relies on Aristotle, especially when it comes to functions of music. In his chapter devoted to music (Dialogo ottavo, fol. 135–153) Monaldi rather thoroughly discusses several aspects of music: the divisions of music into different branches, the intervals, the meaning in music, the functions of music, the modes and the instruments, the relationship between music and politics, the relationship between music and other “objects of hearing”, as well as criteria necessary to achieve “proper music”. Given the fact that Monaldi treated quite a large number of music issues, his work Irene, overo della bellezza is considered to be the most valuable contribution to the reflection on music from Croatia in the Renaissance period. This paper presents Monaldi’s understanding of music, based on the example of his classifications of it into different categories.
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In dialogue De natura caelestium spirituum quos angelos vocamus, published in 1499 in Florence, Juraj Dragišić mentioned different philosophical and theological authors and their works. Croatian scientists in their papers dedicated to Juraj Dragišić mention these authors and their work (Martinović, Banić-Pajnić, Ćurko i dr.). This paper intends to commit the majority of its attention to Christian authors mentioned by Dragišić in his dialogue, to list most of the referred names and show who does he mention the most. Thus, in this paper in the context of Dragišićʼs discussion on angels, the following authors are cited primarily: Albertus Magnus, Ambrose, Anselm of Canterbury, Augustine of Hippo, Bede, Boethius, Bonaventure, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Duns Scotus, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory the Great, Henry of Ghent, John of Damascus, John Chrysostom, Hieronymus, Origen and Thomas Aquinas. These authors can be divided into two groups: patristic writers and medieval Church writers.
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The topic of the paper is the notion of intuition in Descartes’ philosophy and its epistemic functions. Descartes introduces his notion of intuition in the context of a description of his method and process of knowing and doing science. Intuition is a significant component of this process. I intend to show that the main epistemic functions of intuition in Descartes’ philosophy are differentiated. Intuition is essential not only in the context of justification (the Cartesian synthetic method of proof) but also and especially in the context of discovery (the Cartesian analytic method of discovery). It plays not only a role in the foundation of the cogito but also on different stages of constructing the system of knowledge. Intuition has important functions in grasping simple natures, forming primary concepts, comprehending complex natures, forming primary propositions (including primary principles), and capturing relationships between them and building deductive reasoning (the role of intuition in deduction). Hence, intuition is the foundation for all primary stages of producing knowledge. It is active and important element of pure thinking (a priori) in human knowledge, and science. It fulfils these functions due to its specific epistemic properties. I also argue that intuition is not an autonomous and complete type of knowledge. Nor is it an intuitive thesis, but rather the basis of a justification for theses (including the cogito).
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In this article, I discuss the epistemic role that Descartes believed was played in knowledge construction by current clear and distinct perceptions (the ideas or propositions which appear most evident to us when we are attending to them). In recent literature, we can find two interpretations about the epistemic status and function of current clear and distinct perceptions in Descartes’ epistemology. The first may be called the psychological, the second normative. The latter states that current clear and distinct perceptions are utterly immune to all doubt, even before God’s existence is proven and the general rule of truth is established. Thus, their certainty is for Descartes not merely psychological, but normative. I endorse the normative interpretation for a number of what I believe to be cogent reasons. However, there are also some difficulties with it. Therefore, after presenting positive arguments for the interpretation (sections I–IV) I discuss the difficulties of textual and substantive nature that the normative interpretation needs to address if it is to be upheld (sections V–VI).
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We offer a novel interpretation of the argumentative role that Meditation IV plays within the whole of the Meditations. This new interpretation clarifies several otherwise head-scratching claims that Descartes makes about Meditation IV, and it fully exonerates the Fourth Meditation from either raising or exacerbating Descartes’ circularity problems.
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