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Based on the reading of the Encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, this article contends that the health of the Earth and human well-being are closely related to one another. That is why the ecological crisis is a serious threat not only to the health of the Earth but also to humans. Facing an ecological crisis that threatens the health of the Earth and humankind, how does Catholicism respond, especially through the Encyclical Laudato Si'? Using content analysis and interpretive methods of the texts in the Encyclical Laudato Si’, this essay concludes and suggests the importance of ecological conversion to overcoming the ecological crisis to care for the health of the Earth and its people. For this reason, it is important to change the exploitative paradigm into a paradigm that is friendly and caring for the Earth in humans themselves. This shifting paradigm must also be manifested in shared behavior through the Earth care movement and human health concerns as a realization of ecological conversion.
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Duga povijest tihog života (»mrtve prirode«, Stilleben) - umjetničkog žanra - traži promišljanje, ne samo umjetničkog izraza, metode, stilskih sredstava, slikarskih teza i iskustava. Više od toga: pjesnik i predmeti, slikar i predmeti, čovjek i svijet stvari kao odnos duhovnog stanja, način viđenja svijeta, spoznaje, doživljaja duše stvari, najposlije sama osobnost i osobitost umjetnika, iznad i izvan medija u kojem se izražava. Onoga što u umjetnosti zadobiva svoj izraz, a umjetnik ima sliku, riječ, ton za svoju filozofiju.
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The article offers general reflections on artificial languages of the type of Esperanto, discussing them from a linguistic-typological and philosophical point of view, tracing the history of the idea of creating such languages and making some recommendations as to what the ideal artificial language should be.
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This paper examines two general approaches to language system. First, the traditional approach is based on the langue - parole dichotomy and assumes that real communication is centered around the system (langue) which exists “behind” all speech acts and that only the system makes communication possible. However, there is no direct method how to observe the system. Second, the empirical approach rejects the langue - parole dichotomy because of the impossibility of direct observation of language system (in the sense of langue). According to this approach the system is only a testable theoretical construct.
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The article is focused on Fool’s Night, a play directed by Alexa Visarion at Radu Stanca National Theatre in Sibiu, in 2015. Starting from a theoretical approach of A. P. Chekhov and William Shakespeare’s plays, Alexa Visarion, together with his interlocutors (Constantin Chiriac and Ilie Gheorghe) are emphasizing the importance and the place of this production in the contemporary performing arts landscape. According to the director, Fool’s Night was a project that took many years of meditation research and its success is related to the excellent collaboration with two of the most important actors in Romania – Ilie Gheorghe and Marian Râlea.
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In the two-volume work Theism and the Analytical Philosophy (1985; 1988a) Joseph Życiński took up the challenge of renewing Christian metaphysics so that it could appear as a full-fledged partner in the dialogue with other streams of contemporary philosophy. This renewal should use two sources: the methodological principles of analytic philosophy, especially its philosophy of language, and certain elements of Whitehead’s process philosophy. This study presents a critical reconstruction of Życiński’s arguments contained in the first two chapters of (1985), which are devoted to the problem of language. Main results of this part of Życiński’s work are negative, that is, they refute the arguments and interpretations of those analytical philosophers who show the meaninglessness of the theistic language or try to assimilate it to other standard languages, depriving it of a reference to the transcendent reality.How can a positive part of the Życiński program be developed? It seems that only by formulating specific problems in the field of philosophy of God, or even theology, and choosing the right linguistic tools to drill down on a given problem and seek its solution. This is in line with Wittgenstein’s concept of language games. Życiński tries to do this in (1988a). Życiński turned out to be a precursor of nowadays increasingly developing analytical theology.
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Leibniz’s principium identitatis indiscernibilium excludes the existence of two different objects possessing all properties identical. Although perfectly acceptable for macroscopic systems, it becomes questionable in quantum mechanics, where the concept of identical particles is quite natural and has measurable consequences. On the other hand, Leibniz’s principle seems to be indispensable when we want to individuate an item and ascribe to it particular property (e.g. value of the projection of spin on a chosen axis). We may thus abandon the principle on the quantum level, claiming it falsity here, or (better) try to find other ways of individuation of objects, possibly by adopting appropriately the very concept of it. All these problems, and many other connected with identity and indiscernibility of quantum objects, are thoroughly discussed in the book of Tomasz Bigaj, unique in the world literature due to its comprehensiveness.
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Stuart Richie’s book discusses social, political, and cultural influences on science. In a series of well documented cases Richie shows how many of top scientific journals publish poorly executed studies with dubious conclusions. Such publications distort a public image of science as an unbiased search for truth. The roots of such practices, Richie traces to the way science enterprise is done in academia and in private research centers, where only positive and “expected” results are valued. While according to Richie there is a small chance to cure scientific practices from these ills, science itself is and remains the search for truth, even if our social moors make it so much harder.
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The original view of Joseph Życiński, presented in his book The Structure of the Metascientific Revolution (1988), boils down to the observation that almost before our eyes a great revolution took place, not in science, but in the philosophy of science, that is the meta-scientific revolution. His concept of the meta-scientific revolution grew out of his fascination with the revolution that took place in the foundations of mathematics in the first decades of the twentieth century. Whether a change in science deserves to be called a revolution is determined by whether the transformations it underwent also reached the meta-level. The set of presuppositions underlying transformations on the meta-level Życiński calls ideata. One of the aims of this article is to critically reconstruct the meaning of this term.The action of Życiński’s book takes place mainly on meta-level, but the meta-level constantly interacts with what is happening in science itself. The book sometimes makes an impression as if it were a study of the history of science, but history of science in a specific sense – something like a “sampling” of history with numerous examples. Among the creations of human thought, it is difficult to point to an area that changes more dynamically than science itself, but looking at it from a meta-perspective allows us to grasp those of its features that operate on a much broader scale.
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Scholars have claimed that Isidore of Pelusium’s Epistle 1217 forms a contribution to biblical exegesis. This seems inaccurate, for a closer examination of the text shows that what Isidore states is that certain things in the world (not in the Bible) are patently knowable, other things are not but nevertheless can be known by drawing conclusions from evident knowledge, whereas some things simply are beyond our reach. Actually, this insurmountable limit is, in the last resort, a positive element, because it gives us a moral lesson, teaching us humility. The true meaning of the Epistle is revealed mainly through its direct textual sources, which include passages from Sextus Empiricus, Philo of Alexandria, Basil of Caesarea, and John Chrysostom. In addition, the main point of Epistle 1217 is contextualised in Isidore’s thought by comparing it to certain other letters he wrote, primarily Epistle 773 (II, 273), which, as shown, is a development of Epistle 1217.
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This essay intends to reveal the fundamental difference between Dionysius Areopagita and Thomas Aquinas in the principle of nomenclature strategies of Negative Theology. Aquinas is one of the most famous interpreters of Denys, but due to historical reasons, he cannot reach the historical Denys, so his interpretations are not a reliable resource to modern scholars. Since the linguistical revolution happened in the 19th century, the historical research project of Dionysian writings has been running for a long time. However, some modern scholars are still unable to escape the shadow of Aquinas. This essay reveals the limitations and deficiencies of the Dionysian nomenclature system in Aquinas’ view, particularly the oversimplified structure of the Negativity and Positivity. With the reference to the Neoplatonic concepts from Denys’ time, we can rebuild the original Dionysian nomenclature which contains a more subtle consideration of “negativity” than Aquinas. Denys inherited the Neoplatonic interpretation of Aphairesis and he distinguished this concept from Apophasis, and the ignorance of the historical background induced Aquinas to misunderstand Denys in many details. At the end of this essay, I will present a new system to deal with the Dionysian writings, much more reasonable than the legacy of Aquinas.
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The present article is dedicated to Question XXXIX of William Ockham’s Ordinatio: whether God can know more (or fewer) truths than he does. However, Occam’s solution to the question of the specificity of knowledge, including God’s knowledge regarding the validity of true and false propositions about things, is not so much prompted by the attempt to prove the truth or falsity of the question. It seems that it was more important for him to answer whether it was possible to substantiate a theory of «objective» or «eternal» truths by means of propositions formed by the human intellect. The important question here is about the status of all that is in the mind: the difficulty of definition comes from the ambiguity of whether it is subjective (i.e. real) in the intellect, is only objective in the intellect and is subjective in the thing, or is objective only in the intellect and is not subjective anywhere else. In this situation, for him, an understanding of the status of true propositions that have a universal character and how they are formed is essential.
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The main aim of this article is to provoke research interest in a rather undeveloped part of Cusan symbolic theology, namely – the mirror metaphor. Its persistent reappearance, together with its compatibility with the broad philosophical context of his system, allows us to assume that for the Cardinal himself this symbol functioned as an additional “key” to the final goal of the learned ignorance – the mystical ascent to the infinite. In order to elucidate this alternative approach, the article examines the images of the mirror, the living mirror, and the perfect living mirror as metaphor’s manifestations on the three general ontological levels – respectively, nature, human, and God. The following comparison of Cusan and Leibnizian uses of the metaphor allows us to conclude that, while the Cardinal’s symbols often “tempt” into drawing parallels between him and the Early Modern philosophy, his views are better understood as independent and should be freed from the prejudices of his protomodernity. This final claim is argued not in terms of the symbol used, but in terms of the motivation behind it.
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The following text is an attempt to trace the relationship between the dialectics of Plato and Nicholas of Cusa with their specific understanding of the importance of the process in which something becomes unknown. In Plato, we find the aforementioned elements in the dialogues in which Socrates helps explicate confusions and incompatibilities in the “certain” and “undoubtable” beliefs of the people with which he communicates and discusses, and for Nicholas of Cusa – in the specific impossibility to understand the nature of God and the importance of a proper conceptualization of this impossibility and “beyondness”. We argue that this process of “becoming-unknown” is a key feature of their respective philosophies and, more specifically, in their dialectical endeavours. This processuality of knowledge through the unknown (and sometimes unknowable) is a certain staple of dialectics which can be seen as one of its essential features in the philosophical tradition. It strives to show the positivity in the negativity in which the unknown presents itself – thus negating the idea of a clear-cut difference between positivity and negativity, but rather demonstrating them as complementary to one another, as crucial moments of the same process. We make an analysis of the ways in which their dialectics are similar and the aspects in which they differ, presenting a line of change within the “nature” of the dialectic. This can serve as an example of its transformations within the historical context of the age in which it is conceptualized or used, forming a certain philosophical tradition that leads to Hegel and beyond.
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Following the main line of Byzantine philosophical thought, the early authors already redefine almost all the concepts they inherited from the Hellenic tradition. An important place in this line is taken by the terms “nature” and “essence”, which were considered synonyms at least since the 4th century. In the text that has become known as Letter 38, Basil the Great introduces “nature” as a name referring to the universal nature (κοινὴ φύσις) and not to a specific being. The Cappadocians do not question the reality of being of the general nature also in the created world. But also according to them, it is not existing otherwise than in the individuals containing the respective nature. On the way, by which the difference between the common nature and the individual bearer of this nature is drawn, they put especially great emphasis. In the line of thought between the Cappadocians and John Damascene, the rule is established that the “essence” is predicated only with respect to self-subsisting beings. Maximus the Confessor summarizes in his definitions what has been achieved up to him and extends it. Damascene defines the nature as the common logos of the being of the things having the same essence, while “hypostasis” marks the independent existence of each nature. Already in the 6th century, in the work of Leontius of Byzantium, the essential difference between nature simply (or at all) and in itself on the one hand, and nature in the individual subject, on the other hand, is asserted. This position can be met almost literally in John Damascene, though he clarifies it further. Nature/essence is primarily conceived as a certain constitutive dynamic, which realizes itself through its own forces and energies. The essence or nature of a thing is primarily a source of energetic manifestations.
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Rev. Stefan Ewertowski, the professor emeritus of theology is one of the most original researchers of the thoughts of John Paul II. He is characterized by an interdisciplinary approach, linking philosophical, theological, cultural, historical and political aspects. His works focus mainly on vision of Europe of Karol Wojtyła – John Paul II. Thanks to the interdisciplinary approach, Wojtyła’s image of Europe appears as a universal project in which the Christian axiology and the vision of man is centre.
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The article presents the problem of the natural and supernatural transformation of the human body according to Hans-Eduard Hengstenberg. This problem was considered in the following aspects: what is this transformation and what is it, what is its basis and sources, to what extent it is possible and how it is realized. The specificity of the supernatural transformation of the body is emphasized, resulting from its qualitative difference and superiority in relation to the natural transformation and from its further existence after death in the body as a manifestation of the spirit. Some analogies between the natural and supernatural transformation of the body are presented. The subject matter presented (especially the supernatural transformation) touches upon the field of theology, but Hengstenberg analyzed it philosophically, using the phenomenological-metaphysical method. At the end, specific areas of further research on the issue of corporeality in the works of this outstanding thinker are outlined.
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