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The author suggests that the intellectual life of Étienne Gilson constituted a new humanism, that Gilson’s scholarly work was part of a new renaissance, that a new humanism that Gilson thought is demanded by the precarious civilizational crisis of the modern West after World Wars I and II. He also argues that, more than anything else, Gilson was a renaissance humanist scholar who consciously worked in the tradition of renaissance humanists before him, but did so to expand our understanding of the notion of “renaissance” scholarship and to create his own brand of Christian humanism to deal with problems distinctive to his age. The author shows the specificity of the Christian humanism that Gilson developed as part of his distinctive style of doing historical research and of philosophizing.
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The theory of values by Max Scheler became one of the most influential theories in XX century. However, the term 'value’ is insufficient to build a particular moral behavior. Under the Scheler’s concept of 'value’ there is the concept of 'love’ by Saint Augustine of Hippo. Thus, if the Augustinian influence is followed, one may go beyond the lacks of the Scheler’s theory. Through these lines one can trace the way leading from the concept of Christian love to the concepts of value, love and person by Scheler. There is, however, a question whether it is possible to teach values. According to the author if values are to be taught, the education of values is to be preceded by teaching love as a virtue.
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The War of Independence in the years 1877-1878, waged against the Turks, has resulted in international recognition of the independence of Romania. The Romanian state was not prepared to wage this war. He appealed to the spirit of sacrifice of the Romanian people, all citizens being involved in the collection of offerings to support the military. The contribution of the masses across the country and from other Romanian provinces under foreign ownership, has resulted in: collection of offerings for the soldiers, raising funds for the purchase of advanced weapons, support the operation of hospitals, caring for wounded, transport of supplies and equipment for front, housing Russian and Turkish prisoners, organization of cultural activities by charitable societies or individuals to raise funds to support the military effort, etc. Romanian Orthodox Church, bishops, priests and faithful, could not stand aside in those watershed moments for the Romanian nation, but was actively involved in supporting the Romanian army sorely tried. Clergy and faithful of the Dioceses of Roman, Huşi and Lower Danube had an important contribution to collective efforts to support the front. In this article we present in detail the acts and deeds that church ministers in this part of the country have taken for the purpose aforesaid.
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The characteristic of postmodernism as a cultural paradigm is deconstruction. The fact that this concept – deconstruction- allows a hermeneutical adrift, centrifuge and without poles, shows the difficulty of understanding the ways of thinking, supreme tolerance, which accepts any text. No interpretation of Deconstruction, in Derrida's way as the sense of universality of language, it is not possible, because any interpretation goes in same direction as deconstruction. From the deconstructive-reconstructive hermeneutic methodology we can analyze the existential meaning of historical or social phenomena in terms of understanding the socio-historical reality as a construct that was generated by a "reframed" interpretation. Philosophical issue is "a pretext" of the hermeneutical process of creating the significance. Constructionist epistemology is a structure close to postmodernism perspective in manner of the vision of Lyotard, under which our image of reality is a narrative one, a consensus of speech. The legal discourse is a particular form of speech and can be analyzed in constructionist manner as a textual analysis. The analysis of the legal system must take into account the collective character of interpretive construction. Radically changing the interpretation or the context we modify the interpretation of the representation of reality which consciousness substitute for reality itself. In Foucault's view, Power is internal and constitutive to the discourse.
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The crucial concern of advertisers is to make the advertised product (quickly) noticed and (easily) remembered. The use of the image thus becomes the solution, since, as compared to the verbalized expression, our mind can much more easily analyze images, in fractions of a second. It can argue, raise questions and create fictions. Few of the readers of a newspaper or magazine go through the entire text of an advertisement, so that the construction of the advertising text must have special features, preparing for the reader a visual path of reading. This approach implies a visual organization or construction of the statement, which should strengthen the argument. The article reviews the models selected in advertisements (the proper framework, the chromatic code in the advertisement, disposition, graphics, visual metaphors) emphasizing the iconic significations at the first level of image reading, and the connotations at the second level. Finally, some considerations are made regarding the images in perfume ads (which in most cases stress communication via image, rather than the persuasive, linguistic message) and the role of the “letter image” (width, height, type of character).
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The article analyses the problems of the concept of lifestyle in social sciences and lifestyles in consumer society. With reference to well-known authorities in culture studies and sociology, author discusses the pecularities of identity construction via lifestyles. Lifestyle is considered as one of the instruments for social competition in class-based societies and as an identity construction means in post-industrial affluent societies. Changes in lifestyle narratives, based on social changes in economics and values, are analysed as preliminary conditions for identity fragmentation.
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Lifestyle is inseparable from the body: both are formatted under the influence of the mediaindustry. Lifestyle is being thrust on us as consumers of the media. The very lifestyle is to be consumed as well; it is to change like the unfashionable shoes. Therefore, the style is not linked either with the way of inscribing (style in antiquity) nor with hermeneutical wholeness of an epoch (Winckelmann) any more. Today, lifestyle is subordinated to the “fatal strategies” (J. Baudrillard) of consumption. Lifestyle presupposes a life without the dialectics between thought and love, only as realisation of created needs. Culture, instead of caring about existence, corresponds to the creation of consumption needs in the media of TV and IT. Nevertheless, body can be a source of the alternative point of view. The interrelation between the body and its environment presupposes existential creation which changes not only the participant of existence but also his environment. This correspondents to the tension between thought and love as a starting point of philosophising.
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Author explains why empiric and philosophical knowledge is so ineffective in this case, why it does not make us more tolerant when a significant part of people in western civilization are convinced that tolerance in the world of globalization, in the world of moving people and their cultures is a social necessity. She asserts that in modern political philosophy, it is not possible to reach a consensus on the matter of tolerance. This consensus could be helpful in conforming to necessity and in calculating tolerant behaviour. The impossibility to co-ordinate the positions clearly shows that these positions are only partial, almost ethnic truths. Theoretical nihilism leads to practical nihilism. The only way out from that crisis is to try to overcome theoretical nihilism
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The article draws on the relationship between the body and corporeality in the contemporary epoch of postindustrial capitalism and the new media. The traditional notions of body and corporeality are “extended” and assume some metaphorical implications. The author analyses two concepts of thinkers of the contemporary French philosophy – that of the body without organs of G. Deleuze and F. Guattari and that of the body without image of J. Baudrillard. The body is treated as a special body of society or politics and as the place of the processes of the latest capitalism immediately concerned with the modern virtual technologies. Both the body without organs and the body without image become a new model of subjectivity and contemporary life style, which is necessary for philosophical researches and interpretations.
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The article deals with the concept of the body as described by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The main conceptual problem here is that Deleuze and Guattari withdraw from the psychoanalytical notion of the body which interprets it in terms of missing or lost identity and inscribe the body into the flow of economic, technological and political processes. For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari introduce such concepts as desire, machine, production, assemblage, multiplicity, the body without organs, becoming. These concepts enable to interpret the concept of the body not in terms of identity (of organism, signification and subjectification), but in terms of the body without organs (functioning as disarticulation, experimentation, desubjectification). The body without organs functions as a platform for different molecular becomings which traverse molar identities and stratified territories. The article also discusses what political implications follow from this concept of becoming and what questions it raises for postfeminism, multiculturalism and political theory in general.
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The basic thesis of the article is that dishonourable philosopher does not really exist and the idea of “dishonourable philosopher” is a nonsense. According to the author, if we deal with the philosopher who acts dishonourably, we can be certain that he was temporarily blinded by something, or probably we deal with a distinguished expert in philosophy, historian of philosophy or writer of philosophical verve but not with a philosopher. In order to prove it, the author refers to the classic Platonic understanding of philosophy as the love of wisdom and to the phenomenology of Max Scheler who perceives a particular moral attitude of a person as a precondition of the ability to look inside the essence of the matter
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The article deals with TV and IT in the perspective of existential creation. The author asks if the pictures of the media could be the factors of our existential creation. The author opposes the life’s art and the life’s style. The first one is related with the dialectics of thought and existence. The latter one is related with the levelling influence of the media’s scenes. The structure of existence is not only linguistic, but also visual. According to the author, the creative environment is supported by the interconnection of existential pictures which are different in their nature (reminiscences, dreams, aspirations, imaginations). According to the main thesis, our existential project is formed in the fire of pictures’ different planes. This thesis follows from the supposition that both our living world and existence in it are visual. The other theses are as follows: all that we see should be valuated according to their place in the existential picture; the pictures of the screen serve the world-view’s development; the picture on this and the other side of the screen are tested in the environment of existential phenomena.
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The article is devoted to the problem of alternative citizenship in the sphere of policy on the basis of subcultural and community analysis. People without feeling of strong essence haven’t motivation for missionary actions and prefer creative construction of their identities and symbolical worlds. However, they also need to resist unification, routine, total ideologies and permanent national identities. They change their identities and need intercultural communication skills and attitudes, advocate public interests, debate them, compete with other subcultures. Modern Lithuanian philosophers as well as world philosophical movement prepare conditions for social, cultural legitimizing of the Other. First of all it is the ethnic, gender and subcultural Other. Legitimation of subcultural public interests and their needs could be interpreted not only in the horizon of cultural diversity, but also as a plurality of citizenship and policy. Different ideologies, parties, political and local communities, types of interests, NGO, imagined communities, subcultures develop various public demands, identity needs, a diversity of world feelings and interpretations. This means that modern society contributes to alternative civic activities, and modern public intellectuals prepare discourses on it. The Other’s civic expressions destroy the routine, the mainstream discourses. The Other today is the representative of the subculture alternative and independent community or just a transgressive subject. Unfortunately, many of representatives of state government, local municipalities, traditional parties try to neglect or forbid the activities to increase Otherness. However, the modern economic, cultural process of subculturalization presupposes development or even production of Otherness. It is the reason to call the citizenship of the Other as an alternative citizenship.
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The article deals with the problem of the phenomenological concept of corporeality in the context of some texts of E. Husserl and M. Merleau-Ponty. The role of corporeality is shown when we try to understand our ability to conceive the Otherness in our solipsistic experience. The article reveals that the phenomenological description of the body has a central position when we try to understand such concepts as intersubjectivity, empathy, relation between man and the World, ethical responsibility, etc. The author analyses how the phenomenological conception of the body differs from the traditional conception of the body as a simple object. The study opens new perspectives for phenomenological investigations of intercorporeality, the resemblance of bodies, the prolongation of the body. Finally, in the context of the latest book of M. Merleau-Ponty, author asks if corporeality is a primordial givenness of our consciousness, or maybe the body itself is the expression of the Being. Such perspective gives us the possibility to understand the way how we are interwoven into each other through the body, and also the way how we are interwoven into our World.
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Two ways of stating and solving the problem of epistemic fatalism elaborated by Boethius and G. Ryle are compared. It is argued that Boethius and Ryle state the problem in similar ways but the premises they use in solving it substantially differ. It is shown that the doctrine of eternity of God’s knowledge plays a crucial role in the Boethian solution, while the Rylean solution, purified of theological premises, is based on the semantic idea that no proposition about a future object (an object that will exist in the future but does not exist presently) is possible.
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In this article I discuss the Liar Paradox and consider the history of the genesis of this semantic paradox in antiquity and the ways of overcoming of it in the 20th century. Special emphasis is placed on the contemporary discussions around the Liar Paradox. In particular, I analyze the Infinite Liar of Stephen Yablo. The specific characteristic of this version of the paradox consists in the fact that it is not based on the phenomenon of self-reference. I discuss whether this version of paradox can be formulated in a finite number of steps of reasoning and conclude that infinity is an essential feature of this version of the Liar Paradox.
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In this small treatise the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry (234–305) addresses the question, problematic to every Platonic philosopher, this of agency of the preexistent human soul. Are the embryos already in possession of the self-moving descended souls and thus already living beings? In order to answer the question Porphyry first tries to show that embryos are not actually animals and thus can more properly be compared with plants. The second set of arguments is aimed to show that they are not animals even potentially. Finally Porphyry argues that, regardless the time of its entry, the self-moving soul comes from out-side, not from the parents. The final chapter of the treatise is unfortunately not preserved, but the answer given by the philosopher is clear: a particular soul enters an appropriate body immediately after its birth and harmonically attuned to it for the rest of the bodily life. The article discusses new excellent commented editions of the treatise by T. Dorandi and his colleagues (Brisson et al. 2012) and by J. Wilberding (2011) and proposes suggestions for their improvement.
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Vladimir Ern was one of the last pre-Revolution generation’s philosophers who viewed Plato as an effective alternative to contemporary Western philosophy, and was among those who tried to reconstruct Plato’s way of thinking in order to revolutionize philosophy. Ern produced his own interpretation of existential grounds of Plato’s metaphysics, which he discovered in “Sun ekstasis” that presumably had happened to Plato as the ultimate final of his search for the Supreme Truth. Ern develops his perception through close reading of the Parable of the Cave in the Republic and the Phaedrus. He offers his reasons to choose these texts as bearers of a unique experience and strives to establish a new method of philosophizing as reproduction of Plato’s way of philosophical Eros. In the article, Ern’s reading of Plato’s symbolic texts is being reconstructed and his project (unfortunately unfinished due to Ern’s untimely death) is sketched in this essential features.
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Rational determinism and irrational indeterminism meet in Lucretius’ materialism for the first time in the history of western philosophy. Having postulated the concept of clinamen, an unpredictable swerve of atoms in indeterminate space, he in fact explains matter’s ability to move by itself, which, in turn, creates fundamental ontological prerequisites for the concept of free will.
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