![Технохуманизмът и дейтъизмът – новите религии на бъдещето](/api/image/getissuecoverimage?id=picture_2017_33039.jpg)
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This paper analyzes the theory of provocative pessimism, as displayed by the Finnish philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright, which concerns, among many other issues, the justification of what he defines as environmental hysteria. By exploring the genealogy of the ‘tragic contradiction’ between knowledge and acting in von Wright’s sense, I outline how some of the problems regarding the negative consequences of sustainable development find their similar interpretation in the works of some of the most prominent Norwegian philosophers and environmental activists such as Hartvig Sætra, Arne Næss, Sigmund Kvaløy and Gunnar Skirbekk. Regarding the impact of sustainable development on environmental politics, some concerns about the need of improving quality of life, as represented by von Wright, Kvaløy and Skirbekk are explored. Last but not least, I investigate how von Wright, Sætra, Næss, Kvaløy and Skirbekk find the roots of (provocative) pessimism in the increasing challenges to our human condition
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Тhe text aims to analyze some of the main themes of Bachelard’s work and to present Jean Libis to the Bulgarian audience – a French writer, philosopher and essayist.
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Bielik-Robson proposes a critical analysis of the New Humanities. Despite the seeming continuity of emancipatory approaches, she argues, the New Humanities are not founded on enlightenment philosophy but on Heidegger and his unconditional critique of modern subjectivity and its Machenschaft, i.e. its calculating attitude to the world, to which it does not feel connected. The lack of connection also signifies a lack of ties: the unbridled subject of calculating rationality turns out to be the source of unlimited violence towards being. The New Humanities oppose the hubris of such a notion of subjective freedom by trying to identify its limits: to link it with existence once again, and in this way to tie it up, to entrap and tether it. The goal is to experience the ‘blessing of limits’: not to make a progressive or transgressive move towards the exit, but to make a regressive move, somewhat like the prodigal son – a manoeuvre that the tragic Greeks described as nostos or ‘return home’.
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The paper analyzes the religious and the secular dimensions of the “God’s elect nation” myth, outlining that associating religion and mythology is one of the social-psychological mechanisms used to create and maintain the nation. The cultural mechanisms of the paradoxical reduction of religious universality to the local/national, the transformation of that which binds into that which separates are explained. The thesis is elaborated that the “nationalization” of God, whereby his transcendence is replaced by historical immanence, holds a potential to engender conflicts even between communities of the same religious confession. A sufficient number of historical instances indicate that most nations and peoples have each their own specific religious or secular myth of divine election or messianic myth of some exclusive mission or value; these myths are activated under conducive conditions. The situations that provoke feelings of ethnic or national unity and activate messianic mythologies are outlined. The religious radicalization is analyzed either as resulting from political and ethnic radicalization, from war, or as involved in these processes. The functions of intellectuals, of rationality and reason are discussed.
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The Polish exegesis of Mircea Eliade's work has grown after 1989 through monographs and studies devoted entirely to hermeneutics that the historian and phenomenologist of religions imposes on the sciences dealing with the study of sacredness, of religious phenomena and related symbolism. The book Man in the Symbol World. Philosophical Anthropology of Mircea Eliade by Artur Rega is among them.
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Big Data technologies are about how to extract information from the rough data. The intermediate stage is represented by preprocessed data. But, even from preprocessed data to information the way is long and complex. First of all, we must understand what information means. There is no widely accepted definition for information. By proposing and using a working definition for the concept of information, we present the main techniques involved on the way from the rough data to the useful information. How the information is generated, extracted and how it emerges is shortly introduced. The role played by information in the knowledge process leads to the way information, as structure acting by its meaning, must reconsider the philosophical approach of existence.
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The growth of scientific knowledge should be investigated from the perspective of the philosophy of science and not merely from the perspective of the concrete results, registered by the history of science. From this hypothesis, the paper identifies key ideas and arguments (selected mainly from Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper) for a more accurate description and understanding of the growth of scientific knowledge starting from a distinction of the perspectives brought about by philosophy of science and, respectively, by history of science in what concerns the growth of scientific knowledge. The role of theory and practice in the growth of knowledge is also evaluated. Implicitly, this distinction involves also a distinction of the abstract, conceptual and qualitative aspects, different from the quantitative ones, (intuitively) associated with the specific of scientific knowledge and with that of the growth of scientific knowledge.
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In this paper it is not so much about the epistemology of waste, but about the epistemology of science from the standpoint of the system theory. Although science meant from its beginning the search for causes and correlations –thus necessarily considering the systems it has focused on – its modern history presents rather a kind of dialectic of holistic and fragmentary approach. In other words, the inherent analytical approach in the construction of scientific theories, the deepening of the professional character of science and special disciplines have seemed to leading to the separation of the main results from the aggregate of results and phenomena. No one has aimed at discussing the residual/secondary phenomena, because what seemed to be respectable in the scientific research was the correlation between the laws or regularities, emphasised through difficult measuring and arguments, and the main phenomena “reflecting” the laws or regularities and targeted and pursued by the scientists. As we know, the accumulation of data, information and aimed theories emphasises the shortcomings and contradictions in the given corpus of science. At the same time, the coherence of theories is confronted with the real phenomena, irrespective here of the definitions we forge for “reality”. In the middle of the last century, the current of the integrationof fragmentary theories related to the sub-systems targeted by scientists into a general system theory has appeared and, obviously, has shaped the scientific outlook on the world, with all the inertial continuation of fragmentary research.Nevertheless, the systemic tackling had –and still has –a serious deficiency: the much weaker attention to the residual/”unintentional”results. But the thesis of the paper is that this deficiency is not so much generated by the internal logic of science than by the extra science logic of decision-makers who control science. Illustrating this thesis, the scientific view of Aristotle-Ludwig von Bertalanffy line is counter-posed to the present distortion of the real world full of all kinds of waste.The epistemological conclusion is that the problem of waste/consequences imposes the re-thinking and transformation of the whole model of input-processing-output system.
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My paper relates Bachelard’s main epistemological thesis –the new scientific spirit–in the 30s and some present tendencies in science. In its “Noumène et microphysique”, from 1931, Bachelard reveals a revolutionary change in the 20th century natural science: the definite proof of insufficiency of the traditional pattern of experimental physics of macro-bodies and searching for observable causes – where the starting point of the research was the empirical observation, where the end was to measure the material elements and the values of movements, where the pattern of decomposition were the object and at the same time the aim of researchers –to a complex “intellectualist” model where the most important moments of the research are the (new) theories/new conjectures which no longer assume the logic of isolating the phenomena from their context, where these phenomena are rather relations and effects than material particles, and where the scientific theory follows just the relations and effects which constitute the new objects, and not so much the material objects as such as in the Newtonian science.And: where the understanding of this relational reality is the result of mathematical forms which are not a simple calculus of visible phenomena, but expressions of the internal deep constitution and laws of existence. In this new type of research, the empirical observation is only a starting point and a moment between the theoretical construction and its mathematical clearer manifestation and proof back and forth.All these elements are developed by Bachelard and are considered here as a mirror (or, rather, a beacon, or, not in a metaphorical language, a criterion) for the present epistemology as this one is visible in some aspects focused on by the present sciences.Indeed, nowadays – and in the trail of Bachelard – and though there is an inertial tendency to put only physics at the origin of the scientific knowledge of the world (and in this sense, to confront the classical model of Newton and Einstein physics), epistemology considers at least three aspects configuring the scientific outlook and, perhaps, world-view: the sciences of the living,givingusnew ways of understanding, including the inanimate material logic, as well as its qualitative progress; the inter and trans-disciplinary relations of the scientific steps,givingnew realms of the world; the holistic approach as methodology and (practical/technological) representation of the world. Therefore, the evolutionary epistemology – whose early representative was Bachelard –allows us to use the same comparative pattern, but concerning a broader space and leading to more refined perspectives about the world.
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The essay focuses on love as a characteristic marker of a finite existence and its inherent relationship with others. Against the thanatophilic thought of Martin Heidegger, who defined human life as being-towards-death, the author would like to develop a philosophy of love which is, at the same time, an alternative philosophy of finitude. In order to do so, she evokes the Jewish concept of ahava which cannot be reduced either to the Greek sublimatory eros or the Christian agape. The author understands ahava as a way in which finite contingent life says yes to itself as a life, and not as a short-lasting moment of being, dead the very moment it gets born (as in Schopenhauer.s famous pun: natus est denatus). She also claims that there is a specifically Jewish conception of the love of the neighbour, which cannot be conflated with the Christian one and which implies its own rendering of both ‘love’, constituting an alternative to death, and ‘the neighbour’, constituting the truly singular other.
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Even though it is difficult to imagine a phenomenon more closely intertwined with the processes of colonization and decolonization than secularism, there are scant references to it in the postcolonial writing and accompanying critical theory. The critics’ reticence seems hardly justifiable considering the fact that secularization processes have been in the centre of the hottest political and ideological debate for more than a decade now, while their critical examination and evaluation appears inevitable due to the ongoing process of undermining the historical view of the religious vs secular divide by alternative ways of ordering the public space in non-Western societies, especially as the latter have also become, on the immigrants’ arrival and vocal presence, a powerful factor in the political game played out within Western countries. As the violent course of events after 9/11 has prompted most of the postcolonial critics to perceive Western democracy and secularism in the black-and-white mode by inscribing it in the Eurocentric and colonial framework, the secular-religious opposition has become one of the postcolonial studies’ fundamental dichotomies that it seeks to transgress and overcome, even though the attempt may well be in vain. Consequently, the term “postsecular,” despite all the subtlety with which it was introduced into the fields of philosophy, theology, sociology and literature, has come to indicate a posture of critical aversion to the secularist order as quintessential for the Western modernity and Enlightenment project and opting for the radical division between the public reason and the need for faith. The aim of the article is thus to examine the meanings ascribed to the terms such as “postsecularism” and “postsecular spirituality” in postcolonial theory, as well as to evaluate the attempts at their application to the field of literary studies.
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This study will examine the role of morpho-syntactic structures in the creation of metaphor from a contrastive point of view and in relation to Romance and Germanic languages. Within the framework of cognitive linguistics, the analysis suggests that morpho-syntax, as a part of the linguistic component largely neglected in cognitive research concerning metaphor creation, plays an important role in literary innovations. This appears to be the case in the formation of composite adjectives. In line with the impact of physiological and sensory conceptualization proposed by Cognitive Metaphor Theory, it seems that morphologies related to the Romance and Germanic languages also contribute to the creation of a literary style arising from the morphology concerned. Stylistic effects thereby appear to vary between these two language groups. Additional constraints may arise within one language group, however, due to semantic features in morphemic order and collocations.
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This article examines the development of the definition of autonomy in the context of contemporary bioethics without claiming to be covering all of the concepts. Its principal goal is to stress on the difficulties which follow from the breach in the connection between autonomy and moral. The enrichment of the knowledge of this particular problem and the questions that follow from it, will undoubtedly give publicity to problems connected to the solution of contemporary medical conflicts which ought not to be treated simply as formal procedures but to be considered in the context of interpersonal relations.
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The paper analyses some new contemporary approaches, notions and discussions in the study of religion within the “phenomenology – scientific “reductionism” dilemma. The “comprehension” and the “religious experience” approaches were the direction taken by the phenomenology of religion, which proceeded from the idea of the “absolute autonomy” of religion (Otto, Eliade). Religion was perceived as being an autonomous, unique sphere, which cannot be explained and defined through factors lying outside it. As an expression of the opposite trend, the analysis gives attention to some new scientific and explicatory “reductionist”, “functionalist” approaches, and especially to the research program called Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) – a trend of naturalization of religion as a result of the development of contemporary evolutional biology and psychology.
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The article attempts to reveal the dialogue as an immanent characteristic of the learning process, which formed the culture of communication and personal development of learners. A realization is needed that it is time to overcome the still dominant in pedagogical practice authoritarian monologue logic and a new pedagogical paradigm oriented towards subject-subjective interactions is being built. The arguments in support of this thesis are based on the ideas in the works of M. Bahtin and H. Batistev.
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In the following article different problems of the biopolitics are investigated. The biopolitics is a power which decides on the questions of life and death. The biotechnologies and their development, the solving of questions in which cases and under what conditions they to be used set up new and new biopolitical questions. The J. Habermas position on the role of the biotechnologies in solving the questions of life and death is presented and analysed.
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The paper discusses issues related to the development of society in our time and the place of “the Оther“ in interpersonal relationships. M. Buber’s views on the relationship with “the Оther“ and the relation between „I“ and „You“ are followed.
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The paper surveys the main events of Frege’s life and explains why he is considered to be the father of Modern logic and Philosophy of language. Special emphasis is put on Frege’s first work Begriffsschrift and its importance for logical thinking. Frege’s failed attempt to ground Arithmetic entirely on Logic is considered in the light of Russell’s efforts to develop and eventually complete the logicist programme. The most famous concepts of Frege’s philosophy of language – Sinn and Bedeutung – are sketched in the end of the article.
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The aim of the paper is epistemological resemblances and differences to be outlined between the views of the Bulgarian philosopher in the near past Ivan Sarailiev, and the specialist in quantum physics and popularizer of science, the Italian Carlo Rovelli. Both thinkers are interested in the principal knowability of the “ocean of the unknown”, in front of which human knowledge is standing. Both of them start from the premise that I call “Hamlet’s thesis”: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”.
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