Giambattista Vico i propast Zapada

Author(s): Nino Raspudić / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 02/138/2015

Since Giambattista Vico was one of the first philosophers of history who has written about the rise and the fall of the civilisation he is commonly referred to as a predecessor of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Joseph Toynbee. In that sense, Vico’s New Science can be seen as, among other, one of the first theories of the decline of the West. This kind of stand point would represent a simplification and a reduction of Vico’s thought if the meaning of the historical course in his philosophy would not be taken into account. There are two key elements of Vico’s philosophy of history. The first one is the thesis that human can absolutely comprehend only what he has created himself. This makes history comprehensible. Even more, history is an exemplary science. The second one is his Christian understanding of the course of history as a result of the cooperation between human action and Divine Providence. If we interpret Vico as one of the thinkers of the decline of the West the question is what the symptoms of this decadence are. As the possible signs of the Western civilisation crises one can outline widely present phenomena such as: nomadic way of life, promiscuity, lonely and anarchic existence. This reminds us of the age of precivilisation as described by Vico. Furthermore, we can observe the violation of the three fundaments of civilisation which Vico emphasises a crucial for the exit from the beastly stage and for the start of history course (corso): religion, marriage, and the burial of the dead. Among other signs there is also an important shift of paradigms which can be seen in pedocentrism in children’s upbringing. If by following Vico’s description of the fall of the civilisation we diagnose the decadent state of the West what are the three possible Vico’s resolutions of this situation in the 21st century? An emperor who abolishes anarchy and introduces order, a “healthier” civilisation which conquers a “decadent” one or the collapse of the civilisation and the fall into the bestial state?

Лайбниц и машините на природата

Author(s): Michel Fichant / Language(s): English,Bulgarian Issue: 6/2016

The concept of the natural machine was introduced by Leibniz in 1695 in his Système nouveau de la nature et de la communication des substances. It provides the real definition of the organic body, and gives a criterion for distinguishing between bodies that are organic and those that are not: the decomposition, to infinity, of the machine into other machines, without end, is not in itself a machine. This nested structure corresponds to what gives form to the materia secunda, as Leibniz calls it. It can also be regarded as an aggregate resulting from an infinity of monads, as well as an aggregate that contains corporeal substances situated each within the other, to infinity. Thus, the natural machine allows supporting the positivity that the concept of corporeal substance always retains in Leibniz’s view, even in the latest developments of the monadological ontology, which cannot be reduced to an idealistic thesis.

Контекстуални и теоретически аспекти на учението за естествената машина на Г. В. Лайбниц

Author(s): Lydia Kondova / Language(s): English,Bulgarian Issue: 1/2017

This article discusses the specific distinction Leibniz drew between natural and artificial machines and aims to clarify the contextual and theoretical particularities associated with this theory, thus serving as a kind of introduction to highly specialized research, particularly that conducted by Michel Fichant. The modern debate on the ideality vs. the reality of the body is typical of this problem field; the aim being to define the place of the body in this debate and to evaluated the role this doctrine plays in resolving the question. For this purpose, the study sets itself the following main tasks: (1) to serve as an introduction to the problem of the relation between body and substance, presenting the specifics of the ontological scheme and the metaphysical proofs of substances; (2) to clarify the historical and philosophical context in which Leibniz’s concept of the organic machine appeared; (3) to analyze the categories of aggregate and organism, of natural and artificial machine; (4) to demonstrate in what sense it may be said the natural machine meets the necessary and sufficient conditions that define a substance – namely, to be united and active; and (5) to define the dividing line between the natural machine and artificial ones. The study concludes with a brief recapitulation of past achievements and, registering the interest provoked among other scholars, defines the significance of Fichant’s contribution to the solving the problems related to Leibniz’s metaphysical system that are of key importance for our times.

Решението на Лайбниц за връзката душа–тяло през философския ракурс на Димитър Михалчев

Author(s): Georgi Belogashev / Language(s): English,Bulgarian Issue: 5/2018

The article is focused on Dimitar Mihalchev’s analysis of the solution to the mind-body relationship proposed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. After analyzing the fundamental ontological and epistemological ideas of Leibniz’s philosophy, the Bulgarian thinker indicates the reasons for his conclusions and assessments in the perspective of his own theory. The fact that a philosopher like Mihalchev was interested in Leibniz’s scientific views indicates the importance of the latter’s theory.

Страници из... Гергана Динева "Раждането на личността" (София: УИ „Св. Климент Охридски“, 2018)

Author(s): Gergana Dineva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 8/2018

Experimenting with Living Nature: Documented Practices of Sixteenth-Century Naturalists and Naturalia Collectors

Author(s): Florike Egmond / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2017

This article discusses experimentation in the context of sixteenth-century natural history, or natural science as I prefer to call it here. It uses predominantly textual sources, many of them manuscript letters, from different European countries, mainly Italy, the Low Countries, France and Germany-Austria. The focus is on the practice of experimentation and its documentation, partly because I proceed from the assumption that the investigation of living nature did not necessarily entail the same type of experimentation as contemporary alchemy, pharmacy, or medicine, although all these domains of knowledge and their practitioners overlapped. The subject matter to some extent imposed its own rules. The first part of this essay analyses experimentation in the garden, which often combined practical purposes with research ones. The second and third parts discuss experimentation with both plants and animals that originated in more general questions or led to more wide-ranging conclusions about natural phenomena. The final section discusses the links with natural philosophy in these different types of experimentation in natural science, and addresses the possible implications for the concept of experimentation itself in the period shortly before the ”new science” of the seventeenth century.

Български философски канон?

Author(s): Kamelia Zhabilova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 4/2019

Мисията на свободните изкуства: една възможна интерпретация

Author(s): Oleg Georgiev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 25/2019

In this paper, I am questioning the opinion that the Liberal Arts are traditionally perceived as a necessary instrument for “shaping culture”. In this context, it is not by accident that in the last two centuries one of the widespread ideas is to link the development of the Liberal Arts with the concept of culture itself. This view clears the path for the interpretation of egkuklios paidea (Εγκύκλιος Παιδεία) as a common culture, which pre-empts the authentic notion of culture. It prompts the development of a point of view on Liberal Arts, which presents them as part of a self-legislating and self-deploying process known as ‘culture’. In my view, though, a different philosophical analysis of the Liberal Arts reveals that during the Antiquity they primarily assisted the individual in contemplating the structure of being and partially in developing a specific mode of knowledge – phronesis, i.e. practical rationality. Practical rationality is both a way and a condition for personal achievement of moral virtues and personal improvement, rather than some sort of a cultural integration. It is therefore of significant importance to open the possibility for examining phronesis as ground for objective interpretation of the Ancient philosophical ethical and political consciousness.

Kendi Dilinden İsmâîl Hakkî Bursevî’nin Hayatı ve Şahsiyeti

Author(s): Necmi Sarı / Language(s): Turkish Issue: 1/2015

One of the greatest sufis in the eigthteenth century, Ismail Hakki Bursevi was born in Aytos, which is today a city of Bulgaria in 1653 and died in Bursa in 1725. He had been impressed by Osman Fazli İlahi (d. 1691), who is a sheikh of the Jalwati order. Bursevi had completed his sufi training under İlahi’s care and had attentively performed the duty of guidance (irshad) which he had taken over from him throughout a half century within the area spanning from Rumelia to Bursa. Bursevi, who had formed his socio-cultural and spiritual character from the teachings of renowned sufis whose ideas had been alive in the Ottoman territories such as Ibn al Arabi (d. 1240), Rumi (d. 1273), Sadr al-Din Konawi (d. 1274), Sheikh Uftada (d. 1580) and Aziz Mahmud Hudai (d. 1628), had been one of the most versatile and productive authors in his time with over a hundred books in various fields, namely sufism, literature, tafsir, hadith and Islamic law. In this study, the story of Bursavi’s seventy-five-year long life is recounted in his own words.

Heda Festini’s Contribution in the Research of Croatian Philosophical Heritage

Author(s): Ivana Skuhala Karasman,Luka Boršić / Language(s): English Issue: 57/2019

In this text we offer an overview of Festini’s works on history of Croatian philosophy. The article is divided in five parts in which we discuss Festini’s attitude towards Croatian Renaissance philosophers, eighteenth and nineteenth century Croatian philosophers, and two philosophers from the twentieth century (Vladimir Filipović and Marija Brida). Majority of Festini’s texts were published in the journal Prilozi za istraživanje hrvatske filozofske baštine.

Конструиране на фантастичния образ. Кант и Шелинг

Author(s): Silviya Kristeva / Language(s): English,Bulgarian Issue: 1/2020

The paper offers a discourse and approach to Kant’s and Schelling’s vision of imagination and fantasy and attempts to illuminate the construction of the fantastic image. Kant separates fantasy as a spontaneous play of productive imagination, even though he admits its ability to create objects that “are not given in the experience”. According to Schelling, the total human activity in art is already a separate research object. This activity unfolds in the universe as a form of the absolute, in which the first images of ideas form the ideal world and determine each specific artistic image. The deduced conditions of the construction of the fantastic image (the pure continuum of intuition and a possible apperception of the image) establish the framework of a new thematic field – the philosophy of the fantastic.

IMPORTANȚA UNEI SCRIERI TEOLOGICE DE LA FINELE SECOLULUI AL XVIII-LEA PENTRU FILOSOFIA ROMÂNEASCĂ DE AZI

Author(s): Dragoș Popescu / Language(s): Romanian,Moldavian Issue: 1/2020

The Three Faces of the Cogito: Descartes (and Aristotle) on Knowledge of First Principles

Author(s): Murray Miles / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

With the systematic aim of clarifying the phenomenon sometimes described as “the intellectual apprehension of first principles,” Descartes’ first principle par excellence is interpreted before the historical backcloth of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. To begin with, three “faces” of the cogito are distinguished: (1) the proto-cogito (“I think”), (2) the cogito proper (“I think, therefore I am”), and (3) the cogito principle (“Whatever thinks, is”). There follows a detailed (though inevitably somewhat conjectural) reconstruction of the transition of the mind from (1) via (3) to (2) and back again to (3). What emerges is, surprisingly, a non-circular, non-logical, and ultimately non-mysterious process by which first principles implicitly contained in a complex intuition are gradually rendered explicit (and, if abstract, grasped in their abstract universality). This process bears a striking family resemblance to that intuitive induction (“grasping the universal in the particular”) which Aristotle scholars have distinguished from empirical forms of induction.

Schmerzlokalisation und Körperraum

Author(s): Mihai Ometiță / Language(s): German Issue: 1/2020

The paper brings a challenge to Cartesian dualism, while introducing some under-explored manuscript remarks from Wittgenstein’s middle period, which are methodologically and thematically akin to some passages from Merleau-Ponty’s early period. Cartesian dualism relegates pain to mental awareness and location to bodily extension, thus rendering common localizations of pain throughout the body as unintelligible ascriptions. Wittgenstein’s and Merleau-Ponty’s attempts at doing justice to common localizations of pain are mutually illuminating. In their light, Cartesian dualism turns out to involve an objectification and a deappropriation of one’s body. Moreover, Wittgenstein’s unveiling a heterogeneous multiplicity of corporeal spaces (e.g. visual-space, tactile-space, feeling-space) rehabilitates the view, reinforced by Merleau-Ponty, that corporeal pain is intimately related to corporeal localization, while corporeal space is not part of the physical space of things.

Über den Schmerz, die Transfiguration und die Fruchtbarkeit des Schöpferischen im Denken Nietzsches

Author(s): Marcel Hosu / Language(s): German Issue: 1/2020

The paper offers an overview of the development of the concept of pain in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche beginning with the musical conception of tragedy in his first major work The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music published 1872 up until the second edition of The Gay Science in 1886. It distinguishes between three periods in his thinking with regard to pain by taking into consideration both his published and unpublished works.

Schmerz, Symptom, Sublimation Von der Phänomenologie zur Psychoanalyse

Author(s): Virgil Ciomoş / Language(s): German Issue: 1/2020

In medicine and psychiatry, pain often falls under the term “comorbid disorder”. We will therefore begin with a brief phenomenological analysis of the term “comorbidity”. The emphasis here will not be so much on “morbidity” but on the prefix “co”, more precisely on the fusion between the various forms of morbidity, including the pain itself. I would like to further state that the real thing that comorbidity is concerned with is essentially the interaction between the organic and the psychic, or, generally speaking, that between “body” and “soul”. The prefix “co” can denote at least three possible situations, depending on the respective context: an organic cause with psychological effects, a psychological cause with organic effects, or, a much deeper source of origin, which is both organic as also affects the psychic and thus leaves behind the mere duality of this pair of terms. As we shall see, this last meaning became the source of inspiration for one of the important working hypotheses of phenomenology, which is the reduction of dualisms as body-soul, inside-outside, etc. from the perspective of their common condition of possibility. This hypothesis is shared by both psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic clinic that emerges from it.

Experimenting with “Garden Discourse”: Cultivating Knowledge in Thomas Browne’s Garden of Cyrus

Author(s): Sarah Cawthorne / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2017

Books were materially and metaphorically botanical in the early modern period. This article uses The Garden of Cyrus (1658), Thomas Browne’s wide-ranging philosophical tract, to illustrate how the often self-conscious links between books and gardens could operate in epistemologically significant ways. It argues that Browne’s repeated positioning of his book as a garden creates a productive model for aesthetic, theological and scientific experimentation and innovation. The framework of the garden constructs a space in which the foremost, apparently contradictory, models of knowledge associated with the seventeenth-century garden—the analogical approach of the doctrine of signatures and the empirical approach associated with the “new science”—can coexist. Extrapolating from the book of nature to suggest the inherently discursive and rhetorical forms of Browne’s knowledge as well as its limitations, the article concludes by proposing a new spatial model for this kind of coterminous literary and experimental approach: the elaboratory.

The Young and Clueless? Wheare, Vossius, and Keckermann on the Study of History

Author(s): Stefan Heßbrüggen-Walter / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

In their debate on whether or not the young should be allowed to study history, Degory Wheare and Gerhardus Vossius quote Bartholomäus Keckermann and state that he wants to exclude the young from studying history, Wheare arguing for Keckermann’s purported position, Vossius opposing it. Their disagreement is part of a larger controversy on the relevance of history for moral instruction in general, contemplating the question whether or not history is best understood as ‘philosophy teaching by example.’ But the interpretation of Keckermann’s position presupposed by bothWheare and Vossius is wrong. Keckermann’s Ramist predecessors argued against a central presupposition of Wheare’s views, i.e., the exclusion of the young from studying moral philosophy. Keckermann’s own position in this regard is not fully clear. But a closer analysis of his distinction between methods for writing and for reading history shows that Keckermann did want the young to study history. If Keckermann had believed that such exclusion were necessary, it could only have been related to reading historical texts, not to writing them: writing texts about historical figures or events does not require moral precepts, but only the application of certain logical tools. A view that implies that writing a historical text should be possible for students, whereas reading such a text would go beyond their capabilities, is absurd. Hence, we can assume that Keckermann expected the young to study both history and moral philosophy.

LAW AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE FACE OF TERRORISM – THE CASUS OF SHOOTING DOWN A HIJACKED PLANE

Author(s): Maciej Para / Language(s): English Issue: 25/2019

The paper discusses the problem of moral responsibility for difficult decisions in the sphere of politics on the example of a former regulation of aviation laws concerning shooting down a hijacked plane. The text analyzes a sentence of the Constitutional Tribunal on the matter, especially the issue of the right to live and the concept of human dignity. A comparison is made between Mill’s utilitarism and Kantian deonthology as two opposing moral philosophies. In the end a hypothesis is made that state authorities should be held morally accountable by the public for their choices, even should that accountability result in their condemnation or the loss of office.

Сънищата на философа

Author(s): Andrey Leshkov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 6/2020

The main objective of this paper is to provide a hermeneutical reading of dreams as these are presented by René Descartes. The choice of the mnemocentric approach plays a crucial role when analyzing the way in which Descartes presents three of his dreams. The three are examined from the perspective of three main corresponding propositions put forward for consideration. The analysis of Descartes’ dreams shows that reaching the path of truth, which concerns both the process of dreaming and what is dreamt, is closely tied not with the return to Paradise, but with the fulfilled prophecy of the Revelation. The author raises the issue whether or not the basic dream that marks the philosophically tinged unconscious, as is displayed by Descartes’ dreams, embodies the hope that one day, when language, with its polysemy, will have disappeared, people will finally succeed in contemplating truth surrounded by unspeakable silence.