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The text examines ethical and legal issues eristikata. Freedom, rights, responsibility, social communication, social network. Eristikata autistic. Eristikata as polemical practice. legal and political eristika.
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Human life is an endless sequence of problem situations and ways to overcome them. Friedrich Nietzsche proclaims doubt and nihilism as forms of existence in problem situation. They are the foundation of the reassessment of all values. This reassessment is oriented to traditional, approved and wide spread principles and norms in society. The skepticism is an initial position and a transitional stage of denial. If someone denies something without thinking of it, he acts emotionally. Friedrich Nietzsche is a nihilist because his attitude is based on doubts, which are rationally motivated. In this paper the arguments are derived from his books” Human, All Too Human”, and “The Gay Science”. There are a lot of similar arguments in other Nietzsche’s books that will be discussed in next papers
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The article offers a discussion of the (im)possibility to apply the categories of transcendental analytics to objects beyond the possible experience as things in themselves, God and freedom.
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In recent decades Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism has been dominating the imagological research of representations of the East. Although his theoretical model has long been almost unanimously accepted, it should not be applied uncritically – both because of the enormous diversity of the texts dealing with the Orient and because of the presence of a few debatable elements in the theoretical structure itself. This article examines some of these elements, focusing on the absence of certain orientalist research traditions from Said’s model and on his assertion that everything that people can know has in fact been constructed in their own mind.
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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.
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This article first outlines some of the basic lines of recent Catholic social ethics, as developed in Pope Francis’ encyclical letter Laudato si’ (2015). In his letter which is less fundamental but more prophetic with a strong Franciscan background, Pope Francis continues the thoughts of his predecessor Benedict XVI and Benedict’s encyclical letter Caritas in veritate (2007). In the course of criticizing a misguided reliance on a market economy (and so-called capitalism without adjectives), it is emphasized in this paper that these alone are not sufficient to promote the Common Good or understood as integral to human development and social inclusion in a global world. With a view to the challenges of our time outlined by the encyclicals, the article then wants to focus on an approach to political theology that draws on the tradition of Augustinian thought and offers a solution for the promotion of the Common Good under the circumstances of modernity. The core tenet of so-called Augustinian Liberalism is the demonstration that the central liberal principles of individual freedom and universal equality are not sufficient enough to ensure human flourishing in this world. Despite the eminent importance of democratic constitutional principles, they ultimately fail to comprehensively promote the fulfilment of human life in its individual and social dimensions. They shorten the concept of rational autonomy to self-centred freedom that absolves itself of its responsibility and value-relativist tendencies, the thinkers of Augustinian Liberalism then profile a concept of love based on the thought of St. Augustine as a normative. Their position promotes principles for the political practice of individuals and guidelines for institutions in the liberal constitutional state.
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In the Laws, Plato presents an educational program for all members of the projected city of Magnesia, which concerns not only various kinds of specific knowledge, but also, and more importantly, the application of ethical and political virtues, in view of becoming excellent citizens and achieving a “good life” in the long run, at the private and public level. These objectives are realized in many ways, as for example, by the people’s participating in the legislation and the city’s administration, by receiving a common fundamental education, including lessons of reading, writing, mathematics and astronomy; practicing sports; playing music; singing; dancing and also by taking an active role in religious festivals. The population is then divided in three groups, according to age, and they form “choirs” dedicated to different divinities (the children to the Muses, the young people to Apollo, the elderly to Dionysus). Thus, we may deduce that Plato was one of the ancient Greek philosophers who supported the concept of “lifelong learning,” expanded through various kinds of knowledge, skills and qualities. In my paper I examine the objectives, different contents of Plato’s pedagogical project destined to all the Magnetes, the various methods he proposed to use in order to arrive at its attainment, as well as the eventual reasons for these choices, related to his philosophical theories. I conclude by making a comparison with the notion of “lifelong learning” as we understand it today.
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The article “The Home and the Robot: An Onto-topological Attempt” views the idea of proliferation of hybrids within contemporary domestic spaces due to technological innovations such as Alexa, Siri, home robots, etc. It focuses onMusk’s symptomatic project called “Optimus” which is a home robot developed for helping with boring and tiresome everyday chores around the house and thus a key example for exploring the paradoxes within the ideas of homeliness and atmosphere considered as kernels in creating a private and intimate space, i.e., a home. Drawing on Luce Irigaray’s critique of Heideggerian ontology, Sloterdijk’sonto-topological project, and Latour’s hybrids, the article sees the proliferation of hybrids as a way for tackling these paradoxes and how they influence contemporary subjectivity and one of its key spaces of articulation – the home. The basic problem which the article tries to elucidate is the forgetting of atmosphere in the creation and care for contemporary dwellings. А forgetting expressed precisely by the “becoming smart” of contemporary homes through apps and robots. However, the article’s problem does not come from technological paranoia, but from a need to articulate certain limits of technology and to mark conceptual trajectories that must be accounted for when innovating the spaces of subjectivity.
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The paper enters into a polemical dialogue with the American theorist Jodi Dean and her attempts to critically examine the blogosphere through the prism of psychoanalysis. To this end, the text analyses whether user-generatedcontent on the internet can produce meaningful and epistemologically sustainable“social enclaves”, informal communities and institutions, or whether it operatesmore as a series of recursive and increasingly meaningless quasi-messages. Whileattempting to consider blogging as both a constructive practice and a pathology,the text develops the hypothesis that in special cases one can conceptually speakof “epistemic inflation”, a phenomenon that can manifest itself at the personal aswell as the social, economic and/or political level. Furthermore, the paper brieflyintroduces the ideas, history and one of the key concepts of the influential britishtheory-fiction collective, CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit).
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The article analyzes the results of an author's survey among students from UNSS, Sofia, and the University of Economics – Varna about the opinions, attitudes, and perceptions of tolerance in the context of basic democratic values. The authors seek verification of three main hypotheses: (1) a high degree of tolerance among students regarding differences related to ethnicity, religion, race, political preferences, sexual orientation, regardless of their gender and university where they study; (2) supporting tolerance as a core democratic value, along with freedom, equality, and justice, and (3) understanding tolerance is tied to the content students put into the other three values – freedom, equality, and justice. The results related to the understanding of tolerance, freedom, justice, equality are subject to interpretation; the self-assessment of tolerance; the assessment of the importance of tolerance in democracy. The authors offer assessments and conclusions related to student attitudes and views on the need for further research.
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The review examines the trilogy about time of VBV, which includes poetic editions „Th:is.” (2000), “Will:” (2011) and “:was...” (2022), with the emphasis being the last volume, which appeared at the end of the past year.VBV's poetic texts are read through his ideas about “realliteratur” and the media-market “normalization” of modern culture, unfolded in a number of his theoretical observations. At the border between the poetic and the philosophical, at the point of coincidence and exchange between the two projects of the VBV, a new toolkit appears for revising the status quo, both literary and political. The meta-poeticresource of VBV's “:was...”, as well as his trilogy as a whole, allows to see in a new and heuristic way the problems of performative societies at the height of the 21st century.
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Since the end of the 20th century, museum institutions have been adopting the logic of communication, promotion, and administration typical of cultural industries, mainly Cinema. In 1994, Andreas Huyssen argued that the museum, as an elitist place of preservation of canon and high culture, gave way to the museum as a mass medium. Cinema became the paradigm of contemporary cultural activities whose new exhibition practices respond to the changing expectations of the public and their constant search for stellar events.This process is evident in the increasing use of banners, marquees, and all manner of resources aimed at promoting the temporary exhibitions gaining their place as the main attractions of art museums. Moreover, with the advent of social media, the phenomenon of cinefication of the museum has accelerated. Exhibitions are now titled, conceived, promoted, and distributed as films, while artists, adorned by the figure of the genius, are presented as parts of the art history star system.In order to highlight this phenomenon, we present an analysis of the programming and promotion of temporary exhibitions at Tate Modern, the paradigm of 21st-century museums. This institution not only titles its exhibitions in a cinematographic manner but also produces trailers and posts them on its website and social media. Our work focuses on one exhibition in particular: Picasso 1932, Love, Fame, Tragedy. To this end we observed both the curatorial discourse and the communication strategies applied by Tate. This paper is part of a research project that includes MoMA, Malba, Centre Pompidou, and Reina Sofia. The study of this phenomenon will provide an overview of the epochal style of modern art museums in the conception and communication of modern and contemporary art exhibitions.
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The phenomenon of fantasy transmediality (Rebora 2016) has been discussed by many researchers and scholars during the last decade. The need for the creation of alluring cultural products in the highly competitive new media environment has led to synergies between many cultural industries and/or cultural producers, such as film, music, literature and videogame industries, etc. Many well-known and fan-developing narratives have been remediated – repackaged and redistributed – through the various media, answering to the contemporary nostalgia of pastness (Williams 2016), the cherishing of the familiar and intimate, as well as the need to further popularize “a pre-conceived merchandising industry” (Ball 2002), create new side-products for a fan community or even offer escapelands, which fantasy narratives succeed in creating. This paper will examine the translation and adaptation of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (LOTR) to different media and cultural industries, such as:- Peter Jackson’s films,- role-playing games (RPGs),- the music industry – with reference to well-known songs and bands.Through comparative analysis of certain segments of the LOTR industry market and comments made by fans on digital platforms, the paper underlines the basic story elements of the Tolkien universe, as adapted to each above-mentioned variant and examines the role of fans in the digital semiosphere.
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Rats have accompanied human habitats for millennia. This complicated coexistence has led to the development of culture-laden narratives that excluded these creatures from the sphere of human moral care. Currently, the existential standing of the genus Rattus appears paradoxical. Contemporary free-living rats are among animals that are widely despised and subject to the most intense extermination. At the same time, due to their social nature and neural structure that is homologous to a large extent to Homo sapiens, they serve as models for research into human psychological properties. Recently, the accumulation of discoveries regarding many nonhuman species’ cognitive abilities has reignited ethical debate about the welfare and even the rights of “higher” animals. However, rats remain outside its mainstream focus. Meanwhile, based on research on rodents one may arrive at the image which is contrary to common beliefs about rats. The article presents the stereotypical views of rats’ social status obtained from research on the perception of social groups in accordance with the warmth and competence dimensions of Susan Fiske’s Stereotype Content Model. Then, Mark Rowlands’ concept of a moral subject is presented. Against this backdrop, a review of the latest findings of cognitive sciences regarding the properties of the Rattus species is carried out, in order to confront those research findings with Rowlands’ concept. The article aims to underscore the contradiction between the tereotypical perception of the rat and the empirical data, to finally indicate fundamental ethical implications of such a state of affairs.
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In his writings, Eric Baratay advances that the chronicles of people should be supplemented with animal histories as he stands by the side of non-human animals and supports attempts to free history from its solely anthropocentric perspective. Animals are not capable of speaking any human language, they cannot record their experiences in writing / words, which makes them unable to create the great animal history. However, they have human friends. Therefore, the indirect approach, meeting to the goal intended by Baratay halfway, may rely on the stories about animals, their biographies written in the personal notes. The article presents the stories of pigs recorded in the autobiographies and memoirs of Antonina Żabińska, Dorota Sumińska, and Sy Montgomery, which are contributions to the history of animals.
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Art creates a specific relation to time and especially to the present moment. It opens the experience of the present towards its indeterminacy and emergence. On the contrary, AI does not know the present. It recognizes only the past and future. We could even say that artificial neural networks do not “know” time at all. Instead, they know only logical functions which process patterns of information. Yet, what makes time “time” is genuine transformation, which happens outside of the abstract realm of logic. I support these observations by analysing two works of art: Bill Viola’s The Raft (2004) and Hito Steyerl’s This Is the Future (2019). While artistic creation opens up the intervals “in-between seconds” for an unpredictable and transformative event to occur (The Raft), AI closes these intervals and fastens the future into predictability calculated on the basis of past data (This Is the Future). Although this machinic operation makes the present even more unpredictable and prone to catastrophes, its potential for transformation seems to be withdrawn.
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This paper questions the notion of creativity found in certain artworks produced with A.I. technologies. The artistic examples concerned are: The Giver of names by David Rokeby, Oscar by Catherine Ikam and Louis Fléri, and Emotion Vending Machine by Maurice Benayoun. These artworks were selected because they stand out for their autonomous behavior in front of the human public. In this context, creativity is revealed as a consequence of the functional autonomy, which is very typical of these pieces of art. The intention is to establish a relationship between the notion of autonomy and that of creativity, reviewing their meanings and applications in philosophy and in the field of life science. For this, the notion of autonomy is approached from Kant’s definition as a decisive value indicating the moral principle that defines the individual and his free conduct, and then approached as a property of life from Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana’s research. Autonomy is also a tendency that characterizes a general process of technical lineages according to Chapoutier and Kaplan. In all these studies, autonomy presents complementary meanings that help us to draw parallels with the notion of creativity. The analyzed artworks allow us to visualize some ways of simulating creativity, while offering unique aesthetic experiences. From a broader perspective, this paper promotes the vision that some computer artworks open up as multi-sensory and multi-conceptual universes, projecting original ideas, and making us feel the very human substance of these technologies. Interacting with these artworks, we are placed at the heart of the aesthetic metamorphosis provoked by the phenomenon of the computer revolution.
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The author discusses the problem of what AI is and how we can understand the “anthropocentrism” of AI from a philosophical point of view. Three interpretations of the relationship between humans and technology are presented: 1) AI-aided human intelligence, based on the extension theory of technology (Stiegler, 1998); 2) human-aided AI intelligence, based on ideas related to political economy (Crawford, 2021); and 3) the relativity of the anthropocentric frame of reference (AFR), based on the taxonomy of species. The purpose of the article is to provide considerations of the three different interpretations of the relation-ship between humans and technology and how they lead to different opportunities to answer the question of how we can understand AI’s creativity.
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The review emphasizes the main topics and ideas in Nonka Bogomilova’s book, The Balkans: Marked Roads (1991-2016), and especially the humanist message of the book, which demolishes stereotypes and prejudices about our living space. Special attention is paid to the author’s contribution to Balkan Religious Studies as a personal, experience-based insight into the culture and characterology of the Balkans and the Balkan people.
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Book review. After Thomas Kuhn. The Structure of Aesthetic Revolutions, by Oana Șerban (Boston, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022)
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