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This comparative study will thus serve the scholarly purposes of articulating a multifaceted critique of Smith’s work while offering a corrective to his theory of religion through a turn to Bataille. More broadly, it commends further attention to Bataille by students of religion, for the field of religious studies stands to be invigorated by Bataille’s provocative, deliriously lucid writings. Following the example of Bataille, I will formulate grounds for resisting the rationalist mode in religious studies as exemplified by Smith, inquiring into the possibilities presented by shifting the register of religious studies from Smith’s privileged ratio-scientific concepts - for example, objectivity, distance, reason, conservation, accumulation, knowledge, and futurity - to those that Bataille puts forward in his theory religion: excess, experience, eroticism, expenditure, destruction, violence, and the present moment. I will argue that the (usually implicit) values connected with these respective approaches must be discerned and considered in thinking about how to theorize religion. There is, I believe, much to commend thinking more frequently and intensely in a Bataillean experimental register.
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The academic discipline of the history of religions is intrinsically interdisciplinary, and perhaps in a position to contribute particularly useful insights to the dialogue across academic boundaries. This essay is intended to present a very thin slice of cultural responses to our contemporary condition, and to suggest a few possible resources for analysis of them.
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Why then should we be interested in the Jaina tradition and its relations with the West? First, the numbers do not give an accurate picture of the importance of Jainism. Jains like Anju Jain, former co-CEO of Deutsche Bank, are influential in the world of business and trade. In India, Jains both male and female are much more likely to be literate than their Hindu compatriots. The Jain tradition is rich and beautiful, both in the historical and contemporary perspective. Jains have made central contributions to Indian culture. In Indian philosophy they sought to position themselves in the middle ground between the “one-sided” views of other schools.
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We often wonder: What are the limits of religious tolerance? Why can we be very open to the idea of tolerance, as a principle, and still, when it comes about our own family/actions, to be, in many cases, intolerant?1 What is the difference between the idea of tolerance and its particular application? And why, so many times, we are tolerant in words, and intolerant in practice? Why does this difference occur? And why are we showing indifference when we should implicate ourselves and make a difference? Yes, we play with notions, but we actually do this in everyday life.
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Schopenhauer’s concept of the will-to-life was transformed by one of his main disciples, Philipp Mainländer, in his Philosophy of Redemption (1876) into the will-to-death, preceding Freud’s investigations regarding the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). The post-Schopenhauerian conception that non-being is preferable to being anticipates Cioran’s discussion of suicide from A Short History of Decay (1949) and his vision of the “catastrophe” of birth from The Trouble with Being Born (1973). If, from a Nietzschean perspective, Cioran’s obsession with death is a symptom of passive nihilism, from an extreme-contemporary perspective, his pessimistic thanatophilia may resonate with our anxious crepuscular mentality, prefiguring contemporary Antinatalism.
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The substance of the secularization theory, as formulated by most sociologists in the 1960s and 1970s, presupposed that modernity would implicitly lead to the decline of religion in society, ultimately to its elimination. Secularization, as a separation of the sacred-profane spheres, was the direct result of modernization. Today's reality contradicts this religious skepticism.
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After 1990, the Romanian political philosophy freed from the compulsory official Marxist dogma had to choose between a range of inadequate options from the viewpoint of current reality: reconnecting with the interwar tradition but in a different historical context; replaying the cold war ideological clash this time from the anti-Marxist perspective, that seemed redundant given the political and economic failure of Marxism or embracing the western post modern discourse, that didn’t reflect in any way the current Romanian political and social realities. Faced with these alternatives it was necessary to regain a philosophical experience of the transition from modernity to post-modernity that will enable the adequate approach to the realities of the transition from communism to post-modern capitalism. Given this context, from a certain philosophical perspective, the study of Rawls from A theory of Justice to Political Liberalism provided a unique opportunity to escape tradition without canceling it, to overcome the socialist-capitalist dichotomy and to connect to contemporary philosophical debates without losing the local perspective.
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Since his work of youth (On the Inner Dialogue) Mihai Şora proposes the act of dialogue as an essential, self-producing state of the human being. Dialogue involves equality in dignity and alterity and the discovery of alterity as a revelation of the world as a structure of potentialities or openings of the me-you type, characterized by reciprocity. The me-you dialogue and the inner dialogue, the communion or the generalized dialogue, are at the same time an ethical commitment of the partners practicing openness and reciprocity, the foundations for freedom and for the awareness of our position in relation to the world. Dialogue produces the occupation of the inner space of the being as voice of the being and at the same time assuming of the outer space as discursiveness, as permanence of acts of being and acting together. Communion as an emotion thus edifies not only the subject participating in the dialogue but also a new entity, the communion itself, an affective perhaps agapic composition. Starting from here, we aim to explore the philosophy of dialogue of Mihai Şora as a theoretical background for a structuring the methodology of a dialogical counselling or philosophical practice aimed at elucidating and relating the subject to the outside world as an autonomous act of the self that is exercised in communion as co-author and giver of meaning.
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Considering as premise the playwriting of William Shakespeare being one of the touchstones of humanities, in this study we will rise the question about the method through which the work of the classic writer became a way of the contemporary society to reflect some of its most polemized, keen, difficult or challenging topics. Going on, a necessary answer will be given regarding the fact that the plays of the English author get today rather the utilitarian aspect in the scenic approach or if, in fact, there are more nuanced positioning. And there are, as we can not put aside the way that artists are often perceiving the message in a whole, not only on the edge of social, documentary or politic theatre. Therefore, what is it transmitted to us and what do we transmit to history when Shakespearean plays are staged in refuges camps or when debating the veteran’s status. In our approach we will focus on some main artistic directions or forum theatre examples: Love’s Labour’s Lost directed by Corinne Jabel at Kaboul in 2005, the Hamlet Globe Théâtre's production directed on refuges camp in Calais, in 2016, and also Macbeth directed by Peter Callender or the one directed by Amy Attaway from 2019, both talking about the veteran’s or vulnerable groups status. But we believe that each of those visions are simply emphasizing the idea that the great literature fights for fundamental humanist and moral principles.
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Professor Surendranath Dasgupta (1887-1952) is probably best remembered as a Philosopher and for his contributions to the historiography of Indian Philosophy. This spirit of philosophical enquiry can also be discovered in his famous works on Yoga and Tantra – knowledge systems which are based in praxis. However, as a thinker, Professor Dasgupta defied all disciplinary boundaries and wrote and lectured on the sciences, literature, art history, aesthetics and so on. Even a cursory look at his teaching career establishes the essentially interdisciplinary nature of his calling: among other things, Dasgupta served as a Professor of Sanskrit and Bengali in Rajshahi and Chittagong College; then taught Bengali at Oxford University; became Professor of Philosophy at Presidency College; then Principal of Sanskrit College; afterwards Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calcutta. He was deeply influenced by poetry, especially Rabindranath Tagore, and many of his essays on philosophy would include Tagore’s poetry as an instance to prove his point or as a moment of epiphany in an otherwise structured argument. Besides these scholarly pursuits, he has also authored poetry collections and novels in Bangla. Dasgupta liked to keep himself informed about the latest developments in World Literature and at times, he even participated in the literary debates that were taking place in the public sphere at that period. Perhaps, his initial training as a student of Sanskrit served as the foundation for this lifelong engagement with languages and literatures. My presentation seeks to locate this literary persona of Professor Dasgupta through a reading of some of his works including Sāhitya Paricay and The History of Sanskrit Literature – in which he worked as an editor and as one of the two contributors. Supplementing these with texts on art and aesthetics by Dasgupta, we seek to understand his way of approaching literature – characteristically comparative; looking for patterns of relationships and connections across time, space, cultures
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Born into a socially conservative but intellectually liberal family, Maitreyi was the daughter of scholar-philosopher Surendranath Dasgupta and Himani Madhuri Rai ( sister of Himanshu Rai, owner/ founder of Bombay Talkies). Her early childhood corresponded with the trying years of the First World War while in her youth she was exposed to the political lessons of the Second World War — to fascist Italy, to the Hitlerite regime in Germany, to Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia, to Republican and communist China — when Maitreyi, was perceived as a left-wing sympathiser. This was the era of the emergence of nation-states, of obsessive nationalism and revolts against hegemonic and capitalist forces. As an intimate protégée of Rabindranath Tagore, wherever she travelled, to China, Russia, Eastern and Western Europe, she practised the transnationalism that marked out the travelogues of Tagore. This meant that both colonial perceptions and the nation-state centric approach were disrupted by discourses of inter-connectedness that in turn challenged conceptual boundaries of difference and ethnicity
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Maitreyi wrote books of philosophy and also travel books. For Na Hanyate (It Does not Die), the reply-novel to Mircea Eliade’s story, Maitreyi Devi received, in 1976, the Sahitya Akademi Award, the most important distinction from the Academy of Indian Letters. She was invited to give lectures on life and works of her dear friend and mentor, the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, or on Indian philosophy and culture, all over the world. She also had a special role in the emancipation of Indian women. Marked by the drama of children left on the roads as a result of territorial divisions and political struggles, Maitreyi Devi set up an orphanage and attracted significant funds for educating and empowering young people in disadvantaged environments.
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The article treats the means of expression of hesychastic apophaticism, used by Old Bulgarian writers of the 14th – 15th centuries, and the author tries to show that these means are very old, and were characteristic even for the mind of primitive people. He pays attention to the synonymy of ‘aphophatic’ negative pronouns and ‘cataphatic’ summative pronouns; to the pleonastic use of the negative particle не; to the syntactic but- constructions; and to necessative constructions.
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Common trends of Balkan painting as basic cultural locus of old Byzantine culture influenced Medieval iconographic models of wall-painting heritage of Christian temples in Tarnovo and its region dating from XV – XVIII century. Iconography was developed and enriched by symbolic images and interpretations of motives and events fundamental in Christian philosophy, Bible and hymnography. Artistic tradition of Christianity, strongly apparent in theocentric compositions of church vaults of that period revealed the ideas of Protoimage of God and its realization in cognizable world.
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This paper presents four socio-political conceptions of the Renaissance and the Modern Era: Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and Hume. Machiavelli analyzes two forms of government, the principality and the republic, corresponding to the absolute monarchy and the current democracy. He also speaks of the separation of powers in the state, in a platonic sense, with reference to the three existing social classes: the sovereign, the nobility and the common people. Hobbes introduces the notion of a social pact that makes the transition from the natural state to the social state of humanity. It is signed between citizens and the state and is seen as a transfer of rights from the citizen to the sovereign. The risk of the social state is that the State, endowed with too many rights, becomes the Leviathan monster that swallows individuals. Locke lays the foundations of the modern state on two fundamental ideas: human rights and the separation of powers in the state. He argues that every person benefits from a series of natural rights: life, health, liberty and property. Within the state, power should not fall on the shoulders of a single person, that is why he speaks of the separation of powers in the state: legislative, executive and federative (army). Hume argues that society is that socio-political organization that must solve the problem of satisfying human needs. For it to work, a series of operating conditions (private property, free market) and a series of rules (laws of justice) are needed.
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