Действителната свобода като възможна чрез Другия

Author(s): Iliya Todorov / Language(s): English,Bulgarian Issue: 5/2016

The article aims to reveal the crucial relationship between the concept of freedom and the figure of the Other (another conscious being) as enshrined in the philosophical reflections of Friedrich Schelling and Jean-Paul Sartre. In studies on the two philosophers conducted in the tradition of conceptual clarification of the subject–object relationship, in the light of transcendental idealism philosophy, we find symptomatic similarities used as keys to understanding the problem of freedom defined in the phenomenological perspective.

„Абсолютна метафорология“ ли е „абсолютната митология“? Мостът между Лосев и Блуменберг

Author(s): Silvia Borisova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2-3/2017

The article seeks to find and highlight the conceptual links between Losev’s “absolute mythology” and Blumenberg’s “absolute metaphorology”, viewed in the context of Blumenberg’s work on myth. For this purpose, the simultaneous affinity and contradistinction of myth and metaphor is taken as a support; the two are seen in their inevitable dialectic and in the ontological impossibility of one existing without the other. This dialectic marked Schelling’s idea of primordial (pre-mythical, pre-metaphorical) monotheism, of consubstantiality with otherness. For it’s part, Schelling’s philosophy of myth produces a kind of “mythology of the lost paradise”, which the author outlines in the article, beyond the formulations given in Schelling’s early and later writings. The author thereby proposes a possible way of consolidating the bridge between Losev’s and Blumenberg’s ideas.

Паметта като проблем пред мисълта (ноематика на забравата)

Author(s): Andrey Leshkov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2-3/2017

Here we attempt to delineate a vanishing point of consciousness, the point where its contents are lost track of. This leads to a phenomenology of forgetting, which impresses an orientation to that which acts preconsciously within consciousness itself. When the vanishing point is reached, that point becomes its own other. This recession marks its flowing-away in time. However, the point is wedged between the limits of horizons. In the reduced world, that which is encountered horizontally is connected by the I can as a mode of access. For an I, all the horizons are modalities of forgetting. Its prevalence testifies to the finitude inherent in the ἔκστασις of consciousness. Here, cognition itself is based on a forgetting: anything known as enduring is pitted against the forgotten. And We have to face the forgotten in order to reveal forgetting’s contemporaneity with reflection. But in forgetting, I must be aware of forgetting: I is ineluctably implicated in cognizance (as illustrated by an approach to Husserľs intertwined themes of finitude and temporality). The phenomenology of forgetting points towards the situation of individuals and puts them vis-a-vis it in a reflective responsiveness, relating them to thinking in such a way that they can know themselves as being present in their thoughts. We should reconsider, then, the conviction that the transcendental ego no longer represents an abiding insight.

Bajki dla deleuzjanistów

Author(s): Adam Lipszyc / Language(s): Polish Issue: 16/2019

Фигурата на гения: варианти на граничност

Author(s): Sylvia Borissova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 5/2020

The word ‘genius’ has a particularly strong aura in the so-called ‘star age of geniuses’ (I. Passy) – during those memorable for modern Western aesthetics three decades from the late eighteenth – early nineteenth century, when in the face of Kant and the early Romanticists both an unprecedented flowering of the creative individuality with its endless labyrinth of inner worlds and attention to it were observed. Over time, the word ‘genius’ enters everyday language, which enriches the layers of its meaning. The pledge of this article is to typologize the basic nuances of the philosophical-aesthetic concept of genius, which means: to outline the main types of borderness of genius as an aesthetic figure.

Ruiny dialektyki

Author(s): Michał Pospiszyl / Language(s): Polish Issue: 18/2020

Неевклидова геометрия в „Критика на чистия разум“?

Author(s): Rosen Lyutskanov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 3/2021

The paper discusses a traditionally construed as problematic aspect of Kant's philosophy of mathematics: the place and importance of non-Euclidean geometry in the structure of mathematics. Kant's conception of pure intuition in mathematics is usually considered incompatible with the existence of mathematics, leaving no place for the latter. In this paper I argue that we can find a place for them, provided we know where to look. Of key importance in this respect is the concept of symbolic construction, which Kant employs in his discussion of algebra. The concept makes it possible to sidestep the limitations related to the requirement of constructibility in pure intuition. The development of Hilbert's formalism in the philosophy of mathematics can be seen as a continuation of this move that makes manifest its full potential, which was not, and even could not, be realized by Kant.

Od Hegela prema antičkom žanru gnoma – dijalektika u Sofoklovoj tragediji Kralj Edip

Author(s): Vladimir Rismondo / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 02/162/2021

Hegel’s viewpoint on Greek tragedy is a valuable way-station in any theoretical as well as practical consideration of dramatic play. Hegel considered Greek tragedy from the perspective of his dialectical system, thereby indirectly influencing dramaturgical practice in the 19th and 20th centuries. This is why the paper explores Sophocle’s tragedy Oedipus Rex from the viewpoint of Hegel’s theoretical perspective, as well as practical perspectives based on an influential textbook on playwriting by Lajos Egri. The paper further explores the different understandings of dialectics in philosophical and dramatic dialogue. Also, it addresses the kind of applied dialecticism in the work of Greek artists of the 5th century BC. Finally, the text explores the early Greek literary form gnome, which is – hypothetically speaking – the source of the later Greek understanding of dialectics.

The Relation Between Work and Thumos. A Critical Interrogation of the Motivation Behind Knowledge Work Compulsion

Author(s): Benda Hofmeyr / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2021

In this paper I attempt to come to a critical understanding of an intriguing phenomenon at the heart of a broader question, i.e. what are we today – as knowledge workers – in relation to our present understood as the globalising neoliberal governmentality in which life is reduced to constant work under conditions of comprehensive control? Previous attempts to interrogate the nature of knowledge work and the knowledge worker have led me to conclude that these workers do not work to live, but live to work. An important reason seems to be that the neoliberal knowledge worker works all the time because s/he paradoxically wants to. This presents a paradox since the overinvestment in knowledge work does not appear to generate proportionate gains for the working subject. In my attempt to arrive at some kind of explication for this phenomenon of compulsive work, I critically interrogate Fukuyama’s contention that work has a thumotic origin. To this end I briefly discuss Plato’s conceptualisation of thumos and Hegel’s understanding of the significance of labour.

За вярата и страданието

Author(s): Anguel S. Stefanov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2022

Nikolay Turlakov published a study in this journal, No. 4, 2021, entitled “Humility and Justification or Rebellion and Struggle: Philosophical Notes on the Attitude to Suffering in Religious Faith and Customary Morality”. The outlined dilemma is whether one must follow a rigorous faith and submissively encounter human sufferings, or one ought to struggle against them. I was impressed by the interesting reflections the author has made in his study, so my paper is presented here as a kind of a letter to him. My aim is directed to strengthening his attempt at resolving the dilemma by finding a way out of it on the base of the introduction of what is called a moderate religious faith.

Феноменология на въображението

Author(s): Silviya Kristeva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2022

The phenomenology of imagination must be built on the becoming of the specific phenomena produced by the creative power of the imagination. Here the imagination is established as an autonomous faculty with its own region, and the constitution of its phenomena aims to build the art image. The genesis of the art image is defined in the conditions of Kant’s productive synthesis, carried out on autonomous procedures and rules, and the steps in the generation of the art image in the pure continuum of intuition are traced. The objective modes in the work of the imagination are subdivided into real, on depiction and generalization of external reality, purely fantastic, on an entirely artistically generated world, and hybrid, which always mixes elements of the real and the fantastic. As a telos of the art phenomenon, the relation towards the Absolute Ideal of Beautiful is stated, which relation is understood by Husserl as “setting the norm” of ideality for the art object.

Pantheismusstreit, natura i dialektyka oświecenia

Author(s): Marek Woszczek / Language(s): Polish Issue: 29/2021

The so-called pantheism controversy was an important philosophical event in the German intellectual landscape in the last two decades of the 18th century, which also provoked the massive Spinoza revival in Germany at that time. There is a vast literature concerning the controversy from both philosophical and purely historiographical point of view, however, despite the widely discussed Enlightenment tetralogy by Jonathan I. Israel, there is still lacking some more comprehensive debate regarding a relation of the Pantheismusstreit to a global dynamics of the late Enlightenment and its internal developmental tensions. I discuss the key ideas formulated by Herder, Goethe, Fichte, Kant, Schleiermacher and Novalis as responses to the pantheistic challenge, and I show that they are closely related in that they make transparent some core ideological tensions typical of the modernity itself. I identify two principal political axes which are centres of gravity in the whole Streit: axis of transcendence/immanence, and axis of autonomy/heteronomy. I claim that the historical ‘pantheism’ phenomenon should not be a priori linked with some emancipatory potential but rather taken as a kind of ‘lens’ or ‘sounding probe’ to study Enlightenment’s internal weak points and neglected problems, which in many cases have been instrumentalized by the anti-Enlightenment current. However, I stress that pantheism as an idea played a quite fundamental role in a rapid process of de-eschatologization, and is, at the same time, a highly significant symptom of political re-orientation within the modernity itself in ways which have nothing to do with the claims of the classical secularization thesis by Löwith, Schmitt or Taubes. I also criticise Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s monolithic picture of Enlightenment, which makes the real internal dynamics of the latter almost completely invisible. Finally, I discuss more closely how the pantheistic ontology, as assimilated in the German Enlightenment, produced a novel concept of autonomy as ontic interdependence or relational ‘transindividuality’, which has been, however, obscured by transcendental reaction inaugurated by Kant. Finally, I identify a crucial source of anti-Enlightenenment sentiments as revealed by the Streit: a distorted, one-dimensional image of nature perceived as a ‘system of determination’.

Философия с кауза

Author(s): Nonka Bogomilova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 5/2022

The paper discusses and analyzes the specificities of the creative interpretation as a reading comprehension. The creative product, especially in philosophy with a cause, is described as a personal projection of the author in the light of his/her professional background, values preferences, existential psychology. A special attention is paid to the value aspect of the creative process and the role of the author’s attitude within it. The studies in the philosophical-anthropological sphere are debated within the same perspective; the intellectual and the social challenges the author usually meets in this process are discussed.

Метафизическото мислене като трансценденция

Author(s): Georgi Donev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 4/2022

The article aims to substantiate the genesis of consciousness and self-consciousness through metaphysical thinking. Metaphysical thinking is explicated as a transcendence that a priori determines every possible object of consciousness. In this sense, metaphysical thinking determines a priori the unity of existence. Existence is explicated as a unity of the interpretive models of consciousness. Thus, metaphysical thinking is seen as a function of the transcendent unity that is the a priori truth of the consciousness’ genesis. The logical relation between metaphysical thinking and consciousness is expressed by asymmetric implication. In this way, existence in the language of consciousness is phenomenologized. Thus arises the ontological understanding of existence. In this sense, metaphysical thinking determines the transcendental form of consciousness and the ontological form of existence.

Statutul creştinismului într-un context religios naturalist-pluralist (la Fr. Schleiermacher)

Author(s): Ovidiu Cristian Nedu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2021

For Fr. Schleiermacher, the founder of the liberal stream of Protestant theology, religion is a natural function of all humans. Being natural and spontaneous, religious life and experiences are prior to any confession. Confessions are nothing but cultural codifications of natural religiosity. Christianity is a mere confessional “option”, as valid as any other confessional choice. Nevertheless, Schleiermacher particularly extols the Christian formulation of religious experience, considering it as a higher form of development of the natural religious conscience. It is only due to this excellency of Christianity that he chose this confession. The traditional Christian exclusivism, which claims validity only for Christianity, is rejected by Schleiermacher, who considers it as an appropriate religious attitude, resulting from a misinterpretation of the religious excellency of this confession.

Философия и въображение

Author(s): Christo Stoev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 12/2022

The article analyzes one of the fundamental spiritual abilities of man – to imagine things that are not here and now. Imagination is a prerequisite for people's ability to have a world as opposed to having only an environment consisting of points of actual sensual or sensory irritation. It refers to things that are not here and now. They represent a great diversity by type and in kind and include the absent things, the lost things, the things not yet discovered, the things invented as well as the not-yet invented ones, these are the fanciful things, the counterfactual things, the impossible things, the only possible but not actual things, fictitious things, probable things, future things and past things. All these things are part of the human world and it is the imagination that makes them accessible to people. Thanks to the applied hermeneutic approach to the imagination six moments have been highlighted that generally constitute the scope of the power of imagination. The reflections on the etymology of the word and the reference to some phenomenological concepts have made it possible to outline those six moments. The second part of the article has a historical and philosophical character and dwells on the role and functions of the ability to imagine in knowledge.

Prisila na slobodu – izlazak iz prirodnog stanja i stupanje u građansko stanje kao pravna dužnost u Kantovoj pravno-političkoj teoriji

Author(s): Katarina Jukić / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 01/2023

This work examines the relationship between Kant’s notion of freedom and‎ the legal duty to leave the state of nature and enter the civil state in his theory‎ of law and politics. As opposed to ethical duties, the fulfilment of legal duties ‎can be forced upon a person. Coercion is important in the context of this paper‎ because, according to Kant, right is always connected with an authorization‎ to use coercion. The right of intelligible possession as an acquired right‎ already existing in the state of nature is the basis of the legal duty to leave the ‎state of nature and enter the civil state. The right of intelligible possession,‎ which refers to the possession of external objects, or possession independent‎ of the empirical conditions, implies the duty of all others to refrain from‎ using the objects we first possess, but also the moral authorization of coercion‎ over those who refuse to do so. However, since in the state of nature there is‎ no public authority which enforces the law through general laws, coercion is‎ arbitrary and depends on particular interpretations of legal situations. The arbitrariness ‎of coercion implies the possibility that the freedom of the individual,‎ which is externally manifested through the right of intelligible possession,‎ will be endangered. For this reason, others can be forced to enter the civil state ‎with me, submitting to the public authority under the same conditions. The ‎public authority makes rights of possession explicit and secures them, and is ‎thus a necessary condition for the fullness of human freedom.‎

SLOBODA U IDEOLOGIJI LIBERALIZMA

Author(s): Mile Babić / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 99/2022

In this paper, I want to show the concept of freedom in the vision of philosophers who advocate liberalism. The German magazine for European opinion Merkur published a double issue under the title Limits of state action. On freedom and paternalism (year 64, volume 9/10, September/October 2010), in which more than thirty important philosophers wrote their works. Among them, I chose texts by authors who dedicated their contributions to prominent philosophers of freedom, namely Baruch de Spinoza, John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Karl Popper, Milton Friedman and Friedrich August von Hayek. I will present the texts about them hermeneutically and give a critical review of each of them, and at the end of the paper a concluding critical review about freedom in the ideology of liberalism.

The Nothing, the Void and the Silence in the Art of Yves Klein. A Phenomenological Interpretation

Author(s): Mihaela Pop / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2023

This paper intends to offer an example of the way philosophy and artistic creativity could be connected. Using philosophical concepts and their profound meanings one can get a deeper and larger image of what art could reveal. We are going to use the already mentioned concepts as they were studied by two of the most relevant philosophers, Hegel and Heidegger. Those concepts prove their utility in the understanding of how the human thought functions and how it is capable to make the human being aware of his condition and also to make possible the human creativity, in art especially. We will discover that this process of creativity is based on the freedom of the human consciousness capable to surpass the nature restrictions imposed by human natural condition. This freedom of consciousness develops during life and experience and generates all the individual diversity. The human being as consciousness gets thus a wider capacity of expression assured by the wide range of determinations the thought gets during life. The artist is one of those capable to express this in various symbolic forms using however simple materials. The artistic works reflect thus exactly the superior consciousness and self-consciousness to which the artist elevates himself proving thus the ontological character of the human thought. We chose the works made by Yves Klein, a French artist of the mid of the 20th century.

Aesthetic Uses of Psychoanalysis in Theodor W. Adorno’s ‘Notes on Kafka’

Author(s): Washington Morales-Maciel / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

This article argues that for Theodor W. Adorno psychoanalysis illuminates the nature of literary interpretation. Particularly, Adorno’s metacriticism defines the interpretative procedures of literature and some affinities between the aims of literary and psychoanalytic interpretations. However, his arguments do not rest on a ‘top-down’ analysis but on a ‘bottom-up’ one. So, this article also argues that Adorno’s interest in Franz Kafka’s oeuvre focuses on literary criticism and defends some theses on metacriticism. Nevertheless, for Adorno, interpreting literature implies switching the reader’s attention from ordinary meaning understanding to aesthetic appreciation. In this respect, my article finally argues that what Adorno called (literary) ‘gestures’ works as the resource for metacriticism, analogous to Freudian slips.