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Machiavelli’s Revolution and Koselleck’s Sattelzeit

Author(s): Gonzalo Bustamante Kuschel / Language(s): English Issue: 97/2020

This article suggests that human action in Machiavelli is both materialistic and temporalized. It further argues that Reinhart Koselleck’s view of Machiavelli’s understanding of time as historical circularity is misleading. The author is making the case that Machiavelli drew from Lucretian materialism to strip political concepts of content via an animal-materialist anthropology and ontology holding that man, as any animal, is material reality acting under an atomic arrangement wherein no time, whether linear or circular, can exist. The conclusion is that Koselleck’s interpretation of the circularity of time in Machiavelli kept him from seeing his role as an antecedent of the conceptual and temporal revolution underlying the Sattelzeit.

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Ernst Bloch as a Philosopher of Praxis

Author(s): Jan Rehmann / Language(s): English Issue: 35/2020

Contrary to the widespread portrayal of Bloch’s philosophy as “mystical,” “eschatological,” “idealistic” etc., the essay shows that it is best interpreted through the framework of a Marxist philosophy of praxis. Similarly, to Labriola and Gramsci, Bloch develops his concept of materialism from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach. His concepts of the “highest good” and of an “alliance technique” take up young Marx’s perspective of a reconciliation between humans and nature; his theory of anticipation and hope is centered on the development of collective capacities to act; even his “ontology of the not yet,” which is often criticized for its teleology, is actually based on the concept of “open possibilities” and can thus be interpreted in terms of the “weak teleological force of open possibilities.” However, from a praxis-philosophical perspective, Bloch’s philosophy is also in need of a rethinking that overcomes its essentialist presumptions and pluralizes its teleology.

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Anticipation as Critique: Objective Phantasy from Ernst Bloch to Günther Anders

Author(s): Felipe Catalani / Language(s): English Issue: 35/2020

This paper aims to interpret the role of “objective phantasy” in the utopian tradition of critical theory, with an emphasis on Bloch, but also the evolution of its usage with authors such as Marcuse and Adorno. The main function of phantasy taken into consideration is its capacity to go beyond present facts (what is made possible by an anti-positivist concept of truth in critical theory) and to anticipate. This anticipatory element of phantasy is dependent, as we try to demonstrate, on a reflection of affects around expectation. Ultimately, we oppose two models of anticipatory imagination (while showing their inner relation): a utopian one (primarily conceptualized by Bloch) and its counterpoint, catastrophist anticipation, which assumes its most radical form in Günther Anders’ reflections on the atomic age, and whose actuality and urgency we seek to emphasize.

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Историографията на Ренесанса и културологичният обрат съветската философска култура

Author(s): Iva Manova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 27/2021

The article is devoted to the new approaches to the study of Renaissance philosophy, which appeared in the 1960s and 1970s within the context of the so-called cultural turn in the Soviet humanities. The author argues that in the same period in which official Soviet historiography on the Renaissance attained maturity and began to reap its fruits, there appeared the first significant alternative interpretations of Renaissance philosophy. The two most important interpretations of this kind were published in the same year, 1978. Those were the books Renaissance Aesthetics by Aleksei Losev and Italian Humanists: Style of Life and Style of Thinking by Leonid Batkin. However, as Losev and Batkin belonged to different generations and had very different educational backgrounds, interests and styles of research, their ‘dissident’ interpretations of Renaissance philosophy and culture had almost nothing in common. If they are similar in any way, it is in that both of the works pursued metahistoriographical aims. Losev devoted the last decades of his life to an unparalleled undertaking in which he sought to give voice to his Christian philosophy, and ultimately, to his religious belief. Unlike Losev, Batkin was not a believer and did not feel the need to use scholarly discourse as a means of conveying religious messages. He also had aims that went beyond the immediate aims of historiography, but they were more personal. The author’s conclusion is that the additional mission Batkin assigned to historiography is not proselytism but self-cognition.

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Telling histories or accounting for aspects of the past: A historiographical choice in a European historical perspective

Author(s): Rolf Torstendahl / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2021

The article departs from the difference between two types of historical writings, one narrating stories about actors and the other trying to bring about evidence that justify claims to know certain things about specific aspects of the past. From the Iliad and the Odyssey, telling stories have been a common way of presenting past events. Inscriptions and annals, as well as graves and monuments, urged to present posterity with evidence for acts and occurrences. Storytelling was always more popular than searching for evidence. In the 19th century, historians began to systematise their doubts about the truth of many stories. This source criticism has been refuted by many “historical theorists” in the late 20th and the early 21st centuries with the argument that claims that it is impossible to bring truth about the past and that all history is to be regarded as a kind of literature with, at best, symbolic “truth”. I want to reject this standpoint as based only on an internal “theory of history”-discourse and ask for analyses of actual historical research, which claims to produce new historical knowledge.

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Śmieciowa codzienność konsumenta. Powieść Wiktora Pielewina Generation „Π” w świetle teorii płynnej ponowoczesności Zygmunta Baumana

Author(s): Bożena Żejmo / Language(s): Polish Issue: 170/2020

The purpose of the article is to analyze the novel by Victor Pelevin Generation “P” in the context of the theory of “fluid modernity” of the Polish philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Both the Russian writer and the Polish scholar point out the negative effects of the modern — unusually flexible, fluid, free from borders and conditions — commercial civilization on a person’s daily life, his mentality, value system, self-identification and self-esteem.

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Demokracja na burzliwe czasy

Author(s): Erazim Kohák / Language(s): Polish Issue: 17/2021

This article is a translation comprising the last chapter and summary of the book Průvodce po demokracii [A Guide Through Democracy], first published in 1997, in which Erazim Kohák shares the experiences of his life in the US and compares it with challenges faced by the new Central-European democracies. This essay describes three fundamental threats the world faces at the turn of the 21st century: demographic, ecological and moral crises. The author underlines the importance of an open dialogue and voluntary involvement of citizens in shaping the social life in a democratic system.

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Universal Principles in Political Philosophy of Dante Alighieri and Immanuel Kant (Part II)

Author(s): Emiliano Mettini / Language(s): English Issue: 36/2021

Ideals of universal power able to manage and solve social and ethical (religious) questions as many ways to reach the highest wisdom, and consequently, fullest well-being of humankind to reach a perpetual peace are present throughout human history so that we can find these ideals in Plato’s Republic, in Aristotle’s Politeia and other works concerning the establishment of more or less utopic “states” and commonwealth since our days. In the present essay we shall scrutinize the universalistic vision of Italian thinker Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and the cosmopolitan idea of German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). We decided to analyze the political philosophy of those thinkers on the following grounds: on one hand, D. Alighieri took as the basis of his rumination Roman Empire that having as solid basis of its universalistic ideology Right of every Roman citizen (lying on the observance of religious and civil obligations), and the so-called pax romana , a theoretical ground on which D. Alighieri would create a communitas a secular led by Reason commonwealth, which might have replaced the so-called humanitas (in Augustinian understanding of such idea); and, on the other hand, I. Kant tried to explain how human self-improvement under the right use of Reason (that we understand like ethical ruling principle of humankind) can be achieved to lead human beings from the state of nature (a semi-brutal one) to the state of reason, which would have as final end a perpetual peace in a universal republic. On those bases we shall try to detect common theoretical and ideal features between D. Alighieri and I. Kant’s vision, so to prove that universalistic power is not a despotic power, but a unifying power under ethical and spiritual principles of the whole humankind.

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CRISIS, JUSTICE, MESSIANISM: WALTER BENJAMIN’S “CRITIQUE OF VIOLENCE”

Author(s): Iryna Hlazkova,Oksana Chervenko,Yulia Anatoliyivna Rybinska / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2020

This essay dwells on Walter Benjamin’s early and important essay “Critique of Violence” (1921). I begin by examining the significance and multivalence of crisis for Benjamin’s work. I proceed by outlining the significance Weimar crisis not only for Benjamin’s essay, but for Carl Schmitt’s work. Further, I outline the significance of an internalization of crisis by the “Critique of Violence”, particularly as regards its method of exposition. I subsequently examine Benjamin’s analysis of the significance for justice of the proletarian general strike, especially as regards its similarities and differences from Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence (1909). In the last section of the essay, which focuses on Messianism, I dwell on one of the key differences between Benjamin and Sorel, namely the importance of the theological for the former. I conclude with a brief reflection on the surprising affinities between Benjamin’s Messianism and Lenin’s uncharacteristic lapse into utopianism in State and Revolution (1917).

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DIMITRIE CANTEMIR ON THE PROJECT OF UNIVERSAL PEACE

Author(s): Gabriela Pohoață,Ionuț Tatu / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2021

The 17th and 18th centuries were considered as being really "centuries of project makers." In the current text, we propose to analyze the Cantemiriran project drawn up by the Moldavian Prince at Peter the Great’s suggestion. Cantemir's project is an Eastern correlation of the great Western projects. By means of his project exposed in the famous work "Monarchiarum Psihica Examinatio" he extracts the prediction from a legitimacy and a quadrilinear theory of the empire. In Cantemir's vision order cannot be imposed, it stems from the law of the four great imperial stages. In his century, Cantemir prophesied the entry into the fourth "imperial stage." We appreciate that the essence of his project resides in the idea of the concept of order which the Romanian thinker claims, with scientific arguments, that it spreads from East to West and encompasses the whole world. Cantemir records, in his theory, the four great imperial stages which he calls "monarchies" (monarchatus) and which have historically asserted themselves as huge formations, with a sense of empire. Was the idea of a world empire the condition for achieving universal peace?! Time has shown that it was a utopian project, impossible to achieve in such a diverse world dominated by irreconcilable contradictions.

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CERCETARILE LUI VASILE PĂRVAN DE LA HISTRIA

Author(s): Alexandru Suceveanu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: XXIV/1993

Numele lui Vasile Pârvan a intrat în legenda neamului nostru de foarte multă vreme.

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Жанровата теория на Валтер Бенямин и понятието за живот

Author(s): Bogdana Paskaleva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 3/2022

The text focuses on several of the manifestations of the concept of life in the work of Walter Benjamin, mainly in the famous study “Towards the Critique of Violence” (1921) and in the later monograph “Origin of the German Baroque Drama” (1928). The central research question regards the place of the concept of life in the general framework of genre theory, which Benjamin develops in his monograph. On the one hand, the concept of life proves to be internally double and heterogeneous, and on the other – to be one of the key genre markers that distinguish the genre of tragedy from that of the baroque drama.

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Rusia lui Voltaire

Author(s): Irina Vlăşcianu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2009

La Russie a commencé à exister en tant qu`Etat sur la carte philosophique et politique de l`Europe, à l’époque de l’affirmation des principes des Lumières Françaises. L’Occident a découvert la Russie grâce aux oeuvres historiques de Voltaire, L’Histoire de Charles XII, L’Histoire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand, et grâce à la correspondence du roi philosophe avec Catherine la Grande. Chacune des oeuvres historiques de Voltaire représente un tableau des réalités de la société russe au XVIII-ème siècle. En fait, il s’agit aussi d’une illustration de la théorie voltairienne sur Le Grand Homme, l’homme qui crée des nations comme l’ont fait Pierre le Grand et Catherine la Grande. Voltaire n’a jamais voyagé en Russie et c’est pourquoi il n’a pas connu la vraie Russie: la Russie de l’illettrisme, du servage et de l’autocratie. La Russie des Lumières françaises est une Russie européenne, une Russie qui n’appartient plus aux moeurs barbares, une Russie qui se trouve sur la voie du progrès et de la civilisation. La Russie voltairienne est le royaume des plus grands réformateurs et monarques que l’Europe a jamais connus: Pierre le Grand et Catherine la Grande.

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Between Historiographies of Finitude and Appropriation of the Annales School: The “National Question” in Post-1945 Croatian Intellectual History

Author(s): Lucija Balikić / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

The present article outlines the main trends in post-1945 Croatian intellectual history writing, with special attention paid to the unique dynamics of the reception and influence of the Annales school, plus other external historiographical trends dominant in “Western” historiographies of the time. Moreover, the intellectual history was oftentimes written from a teleological perspective, culminating in either the people’s liberation struggle (narodnooslobodilačka borba) and socialist revolution, or in the making of an independent Croatian nation-state, whereby numerous ideologies were fashioned to fit these two goals. In contrast, a more self-reflexive and open-ended intellectual history inspired by the Annales School opposed these type of schemes. Nevertheless, both historiographical traditions of the period primarily grappled with the so-called national question and the historical interplay between the Yugoslav and Croatian national movements and ideologies, debating the intellectual and social origins of the former from a zero-sum perspective, while attempting to alienate the latter from the projects of Yugoslavism and socialism in the period after the wars of the 1990s. Using primarily the example of Mirjana Gross and her treatment of the ideology of rightism (pravaštvo) together with the polemics she developed with other historians about its morphology and relevance for the development and content of Croatian nationalism, the article demonstrates the aforementioned argument about historiographical trends and debates, as well as their notable transformations in the given period.

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Will There Rather Be Nothing Than Something? On Modern Pantheism and Its Aporias in Ernst Bloch

Author(s): Agata Bielik-Robson / Language(s): English Issue: 29/2021

The purpose of this essay is to put Ernst Bloch’s philosophy to a test suggested by Hans Blumenberg in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. According to Blumenberg, modernity constitutes the second, successful, attempt at overcoming Gnosticism, after the first attempt, undertaken by Christianity, had failed. However – Blumenberg argues – it was not modern philosophy, but only science which had managed to escape Gnosticism’s ontological trap of viewing the world as an illusion bordering on nothing. Modern metaphysics had proved unable to liberate itself from the powerful pull of the Gnostic rejection of being, in spite of all philosophical efforts to affirm the existence of material reality. Even when claiming to be materialist, it had remained, in its core, suspicious about matter as an imperfect and privative mode of being. Ernst Bloch, one of the strongest proponents of panthestic vitalism in late modernity, seems to be trapped in a similar aporia: while he attempts to use – and simultaneously overcome – his early apocalyptic Gnosticism, fully manifest in The Spirit of Utopia, for the sake of the material reality and speculative materialism which combines Marx, the Aristotelian Left, and Schelling, he still remains a thinker of the apocalypse, who wishes the world to end in a violent destruction of all matter.

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Философия и религиозная политика в «Философской истории» Дамаския

Author(s): Eugene Afonasin / Language(s): Russian Issue: 2/2022

In the paper, I consider some aspects of religious politics in late antiquity on the basis of select fragments from Damascius’ “Philosophical History,” translated into Russian for the first time. I also observe that the archeological finds, often better than the biased literary evidences, show both the different strategies of interaction between the adherents of pagan cults and official Christianity in late antiquity and, more importantly, the non-linearity of the paths by which Christians advanced towards their goal, without ever reaching it. We see that the church authorities often permitted the total destruction of pagan sanctuaries, as happened in 392 with the Serapeum, by initiating the full-scale persecution of pagans and their physical elimination, as Damascus testifies in many sections of his history. On the contrary, in some cases they sought only to "neutralize" the pagan cult, depicting crosses on statues and using ancient temples as churches and, accordingly, to attract the pagan intellectual elite to their side. All in all, this material allows us to take a more comprehensive view of history, reconstructing a complex cultural context.

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Viziunile lui Crainic, mistica germană și cinematograful lui Herzog

Author(s): Florin Alexandru Iordache / Language(s): Romanian Issue: LXI/2022

The article will explore the similarities between the mystical theory of the soul, as revealed in a volume of memoirs by the academic Nichifor Crainic (1889–1972), the philosophical current of German mysticism manifested in the 15th century by Meister Eckart and the filmic discourse of the contemporary filmmaker Werner Herzog. By analyzing the large number of common elements (symbols, motifs and metaphors) it will be shown that the phenomenon of mysticism, part of a Christian identity discourse spread throughout Europe, manifests itself in various periods of history as a transhistorical and transcultural pattern.

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Предисловие к переводу статьи Ал. Кожева "Заметка о Гегеле и Хайдеггере". Заметка Кожева в себе и для себя

Author(s): Ivan Kurilovich / Language(s): Russian Issue: 2/2022

This article aims to contextualize and problematize Alexandre Kojève’s Note on Hegel and Heidegger, written in 1936 and unpublished during his lifetime, which is being introduced into Russian-language scholarship. A translation of the Note is published in the same issue with the permission of the copyright holders. This paper provides a general introduction to Kojève’s philosophy, illustrates possible reading strategies for Kojève and the place of the translated Note in his corpus of the philosopher’s texts, and describes the philosophical and historical circumstances of the text, namely that it was composed as an extension of a review on Tragische Existenz. Zur Philosophie Martin Heidegger by Alfred Delp written and published by Kojève that same year in Recherches philosophique. The article reconstructs the lines of reference that are essential to understanding Alexandre Kojève and provides a critique of certain statements. Finally, on the basis of an analysis of Kojève’s language, it offers a broader thesis on the epistemological problems of Kojève’s philosophy, the discovery of which led him to make a series of debatable statements in the philosophy of history (on the necessity for the philosopher to participate in the realization of the end of history), in anthropology (on the difference between people in their capacity to be philosophers or sages depending on a philosophical and religious attitude that is not entirely dependent on them), and in his decision to leave academia and turn to the ideological and diplomatic provision of economic integration of European states during the Cold War.

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Заметка о Гегеле и Хайдеггере

Author(s): Alexandre Kojève / Language(s): Russian Issue: 2/2022

Дельп действительно сравнивает Хайдеггера и Гегеля. И он даже говорит: «В значительной степени хайдеггеровское Dasein является лишь переносом (verendlichte Parallele) Гегеля в конечное» (Delp, 1935, 56, n. 41). К сожалению, Гегель продолжает быть для Дельпа «панлогистом», этой коварной выдумкой Шеллинга, которому почти удалось искоренить из истории философии подлинную гегелевскую мысль.

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Онтологическата база на историята в теорията на Асен Игнатов

Author(s): Georgi Belogashev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2023

This article aims to point out Ignatov's heuristic approach in revealing the ontological status of history, the metaphysical factors and conditions for it to be as it is, as well as the specific position of man as an individual among these essential circumstances forming socio-historical reality and her history.Ignatov indicates these initial circumstances as material, spiritual and ideal, placed in a time-space discourse, and in relations with each other. The essence of history as such, and the history of social communities, is revealed through the oppositions individual/common, nature/history, spirit/history, man/genus, which, as interrelationships, reveal changes in social existence at a deeper ontological level.

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