AVERROES, AKVINSKI I PONOVNO OTKRIĆE ARISTOTELA U ZAPADNOJ EVROPI

Author(s): Majid Fakhry / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 03/2003

Despite the enthusiasm with which Aristotle, as interpreted by Averroes, was received in learned circles in Paris in the second half of the thirteenth century, serious questions began to be asked concerning the degree to which Aristotle’s teachings on metaphysics and cosmology could be reconciled with Christian doctrine. The pivotal point was the tendency of the new Aristotelian-Averroist current to consecrate the primacy of reason at the expense of the primacy of faith. Averroes himself never really subscribed to such a theory (according to which a proposition may be true in philosophy but not true in theology and vice versa), and it is doubtful, according to Gilson and other mediaevalists, whether Siger of Braban and Boethius of Dacia, headed by some other Latin Averroist, themselves did so; but what is certain that St Thomas Aquinas was referring to some Latin Averroist in Paris whose name he did not wish to disclose. In fact, Averroes maintains a position which may be called the “parity” of truth, philosophical and religious. In this view, as Dr Majid Fakhry tries to explain in this very important essay, philosophical truth, although superior to religious truth, is not really incompatible with, or even different from it. In Dr Majid Fakhry’s view, it is noteworthy that in grappling with God’s knowledge of particulars St Thomas arrives at a similar conclusion: in knowing Himself as the Cause of First Principle of created entities, God knows all things. Therein lay the response of both Averroes and Aquinas to Aristotle’s claim in Metaphysics XII.1074b 26, that it does not become the Unmoved Mover to think of anything inferior to itself. Dr Majid Fakhry wrote this paper as visiting professor at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding in Washington in the academic year 1996-1997. Prior to this he was a lecturer at the prestige SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) of the University of London, and chair and professor of philosophy at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon, associate professor at Georgetown University, Washington, visiting professor at universities such as the Lebanese National University, University of California in Los Angeles, Princeton University, University of Kuwait, and Fellow of St Anthony’s College, Oxford, UK. His works include A History of Islamic Philosophy; Studies in Arabic Thought; Kitab al-Burhan; Ethical Theories in Islam; Greek Philosophy from Tales to Proclus; Philosophy, Dogma and the Impact of Greek Thought in Islam; Introduction to Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Mysticism; The Qur’an, a Modern English Version. Majid Fakhry, Averroes, Aquinas and the Rediscovery of Aristotle in Western Europe, Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding: History and International Affairs – Edmund A Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Occasional Papers Series, Washington, D.C. 1997, pp.43.

INTELEKTUALNA TIRANO/PHILIA

Author(s): Abdulah Šarčević / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 03/2003

The practices of tyranny are evidence of the extent to which “unfeeling intellectual rationalism,” which has repeatedly offended everyone, perverted everything, and ridden roughshod over everything that stood in its way, is responsible for these practices. The role of the idolized nation, a flawed concept of nation or people, blood and soil; hysterical and obsessive thinking on the categories of “nation” or “race,” the deification of revolutionary forces on the part of highly significant philosophers and intellectuals, and of their epigones among us, was later to be helped by ghouls, the cult of personality, “orgiastic mass assemblies” – all of these are features of the barbarism of our civilization. It is plain to see that “reason under pressure” collaborated, under the pressure of irrational passions transferred from religion to politics. The polarization of intellectuals began long ago. From the Dreyfus affair to the Russian Revolution, to Sartre’s existential Marxism, which was the romanticism of engagement, to Raymond Aron and his 1955 Opium of the Intellectuals, the quest for a world view. We reflect on how incompetent and naïve as a class modern intellectuals have been at various times. Aron has in mind the responsibility of intellectuals, European intellectuals, after World War II, who brought experience and competence, along liberal democratic political lines, who were competent – particularly in France and Germany – to reflect on moral issues, the sense of moral proportion in forming judgments on the “relative injustice of various political systems.” Sartre and his like-minded associates accepted responsibility for social and political processes not only in France but also in Europe as a whole. To this day, German historians are trying to understand the reasons for the absence of political commitment in Germany. These lie in history and culture, in tradition, with their related tradition of political decentralization, the absence of a cultural capital, the ideal of spiritual “interiority,” the autonomy of the university system, innate conservatism, respect for military authority. In France, as in the USA today, the issue of political commitment is not posed in the same way. We are concerned to feel ourselves as “inner,” that we are occupied with science for eternity, that in producing their works writers follow their own “education,” that only journalists dare to write about politics – this brings to mind the situation in Germany after World War I. What is at stake here is mythos. In Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918) Thomas Mann attacks the pretensions of French “literati of civilization” and their infantile propensity for democracy and the enlightenment of the people. This is a kind of monstrous love that strangles what it embraces. Thomas Mann, and later Adorno and Horkheimer, defend the tradition of German “interiority,” which Sören Kierkegaard, that wistful Dane, exalted.

S DRUGIM

Author(s): Rusmir Mahmutćehajić / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 03/2003

The paper “With the Other” is the basis for a lecture given by the author in Vienna on 18-20 October 2002 at the invitation of the European Academic of Science and the Arts. The paper covers various views of alterity in traditional and modern, secular understandings. As the author indicates, languages, meanings and symbols, as the central elements of culture, do not have the same standing in these two outlooks. In the traditional teachings, they are wholly and always translatable in the light of the transcendental absolute or utter alterity. None of their manifestations is the same as their transcendent archetype. As a result, alterity is evidence of the transcendental absolute: to be in a relationship with the other and different means to bear witness that utter alterity, or human openness to perfection, is always present in that relation. This standpoint is the essence of every sacred tradition. The exclusion of that higher reality that is unknowable and indefinable, but without which there is neither knowledge nor definition, compels human beings to isolate themselves within the world, themselves and their understandings. Modern outlooks that can be described as non-traditional in the intellectual sense postulate human freedom and sufficiency in an onto-topological orientation as the measure of influence on the social order and the advancement of the self, society and the world through that mutuality. Heteronymous or transcendent authority in the direction of the self is here excluded. The way these differing understandings are reflected in contemporary political, cultural and economic disruptions and tensions is the subject of discussion in the sections of the paper reproduced here. In particular, the relations between individual and group identities are considered, and the reflection of these various views on understandings of confidence and tolerance. The fundamental traditional doctrine of humankind’s ontological poverty and debt to the Absolute is set out; a doctrine that has many resonances in contemporary philosophical views of human rights and human dignity. Emphasizing and defining differences of understanding, in the author’s view, enables one to deconstruct the lack of discrimination between these two utterly differently based outlooks. Differentiating between them would make it possible to establish and conduct a discussion in which the recollection and awareness of the need and potential for translating everything that the speakers utter in those two languages would become more powerful. And this, the author believes, would promote the cruciality and inviolability of difference in every relationship of human beings with themselves, others and the world.

Kísérlet a messzeségrõl Kant és a megismerés határai

Author(s): Ákos Cseke / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 1/2009

Climatic Literary Geoinformatics: Radical Empiricism, Region, and Seasonal Phenomena in John Kinsella’s Jam Tree Gully Poems

Author(s): Tom Bristow / Language(s): English Issue: Vol.5/1/2013

John Kinsella’s twentieth volume of poetry is laden with a poetics of attention to time, water and heat. Climate inheres in simplified topographical sketches, surveys and encounters with animals; water is ambiguous: a solid presence that is also fluid, subject to evaporation and often modelled as multi-dimensional motion; universalised western seasons are used rhetorically and symbolically to bring into relief little seasons within seasons, the more spatially and temporally localised markers of change. All these speak directly to the function of the image and terrestrial matter (“Matter is dreamed and not perceived” Bachelard), and how poetry is alert to such conditions. Kinsella has conceived of this as a “clash between linguistic anomaly and environmental exactness.”

Looking Back at the International Map of the World

Author(s): Peter Nekola / Language(s): English Issue: Vol.5/1/2013

This article takes a look back at the historical and philosophical context of the International Map of the World, humans’ first attempt at mapping the entire surface of the earth in detail on a uniform scale. Albrect Penck’s initial idea for a thoroughly detailed topographic map of the world, proposed at Fifth International Geographical Conference in 1891 and securing the support, both symbolic and financial, of many of the world's governments by the first decades of the twentieth century, consisted of a uniform series of hypsometrically-colored topographical maps overlaid with human data (urbanized areas, railroads, and other infrastructure, primarily) and dividing the world into consistently-scaled quadrangles. Envisioned by some geographers and cartographers as a component of the peace, both following both the First and then the Second World War, the project would come to be administered by international and non-governmental organizations by midcentury, as primary governmental support for cartography at that time increasingly reflected territorial interests and claims over and above those in favor of employing concepts of geographical knowledge that were not explicitly political or territorial. The slow demise of the project can be understood to signify the ultimate difficulty of a project that disacknowledged the fundamentality of politically constructed boundaries by employing another scale, in this case, a geometric scale with systematically geographical content, in order to frame its maps.

Special Topic: The Seasons Guest

Author(s): David Macauley,Luke FIscher / Language(s): English Issue: Vol.5/1/2013

Th e seasons have been a perennial but subtending theme in art and literature for centuries. And yet they remain relatively unexamined and underappreciated within philosophy, environmental thought, and geographical thinking about space and place. Th is issue begins an exploration of the seasons, focusing in particular on contributions that engage poetry, religion, and literary or philosophical texts in relation to subjects such as climate, locality, natural change, and time. Th rough an initial consideration of the topic here as well as in a subsequent issue of the journal, we hope to generate interest in and attention to a range of ideas and questions that are relevant to philosophers, geographers, and environmental thinkers. What exactly is a season, and how might it be understood ontologically, metaphysically or historically? Are the seasons the same as they were in former eras given rapid rates of ecological and climatic change? How do they play a role in our cultural imaginations, everyday life, and creative pursuits? In what ways do the seasons relate to or infl uence our senses of time, geographical place, and the body? What might they reveal about the elemental world or notions of the cold, the hot, the wet, and the dry? How do winter, spring, summer, and fall aff ect our use of language, views of the land, and social or political practices?

Profane Experience and Sacred Encounter: Journeys to Disney and the Camino de Santiago

Author(s): Kip Redick / Language(s): English Issue: Vol.5/1/2013

This essay explores the contrast of pilgrimage and tourism as sacred and profane journeys using Disney World and the Camino de Santiago as exemplars of such destinations. An entanglement of place structures reveals Disney World as a quasi-religious journey site for some whose tourist actions implicate a ritual centered on capitalist mythology. Disentangling sacred encounters and profane experiences demonstrates the role such places play in elevating community versus self-indulgence.

Wild Seasons and the Justice of Country: Dreaming the Weathers Anew in Hebraic Midrash

Author(s): Bettina B. GREAVES / Language(s): English Issue: Vol.5/1/2013

Employing the rabbinical practice of midrashic reading in order to unfold a passage from The Song of Songs, the manner in which a European/colonial affirmation of the seasons, particularly the season of spring, might become a mode of injustice in a non-temperate climate is explored. The wilding of seasons imposed by colonial usurpation of country finds a particular case study in the invasion of Arrente lands in Australia by buffel grass even as the effects of climate change are being felt. In conclusion, an argument is made for recasting the practice of midrashic reading in order to render the seasons as they are found in The Song of Songs vulnerable to unanticipated intonations of the seasons as they emerge in Arrente country.

Table of Contents

Author(s): Gary Backhaus / Language(s): English Issue: Vol.5/1/2013

David Macauley. Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas

Author(s): Richard WILSON / Language(s): English Issue: Vol.5/1/2013

Book review

An Examination of the Burgeoning Green Schools Movement in the United States: Part One: Historical and Contemporary Relevance

Author(s): Sean S. MILLER / Language(s): English Issue: Vol.5/1/2013

This article seeks to introduce the topics of green schools and sustainability education to the reader as the first article in a series of pieces on such subject matters. With respect to the first essay, the modern historical development of sustainability related education is assessed through the lens of its roots in both the U.S. educational system and the environmental movement. Furthermore, many of the purported benefits of green school construction practices are examined subsequently given their relative importance and popularity with respect to the topic. Finally, a brief but important examination is proffered per several of the philosophical ramifications of these efforts in an effort to further develop the understanding and discussion of such topics and the related series of articles.

Toward a Phen(omen)ology of the Seasons: The Emergence of the Indigenous Weather Knowledge Project (IWKP)

Author(s): John Charles Ryan / Language(s): English Issue: Vol.5/1/2013

Since European settlement, the Western calendar has insufficiently accounted for the seasonal nuances and multiple temporalities of Australia. Beginning with Tim Entwistle’s recent proposal to revise the four-season Australian norm, this article traces the emergence of the Western calendar in Europe and its institutionalization ‘Down Under.’ With its emphasis on land-based calendars, the Indigenous Weather Knowledge Project (IWKP) is a partnership between Aboriginal communities and the Bureau of Meteorology aimed at preserving and promoting knowledge of the endemic seasons of Australian regions. As the most recent addition to the IWKP, the six-season Nyoongar calendar of the South-West of Western Australia is based on meteorological conditions (ecological time), such as wind directions and temperatures, but also on the procurement of food, maintenance of cultural knowledge, and performance of ceremonies (structural time). Through the fusion of phenomenological (experiential, sensory, place-based, actual) and phenological (cognitive, visual, enumerative, digital) approaches, the endemic seasons of Australia can be appreciated in their depth and extent.

“No Man’s Land”: Forbidden and Subversive Space in War

Author(s): Troy R. E. PADDOCK / Language(s): English Issue: Vol.5/1/2013

This article explores one of the iconic spaces of the Western Front of the Great War: ‘No Man’s Land.’ It offers an explanation of why one of the most extraordinary events of the First World War, the Christmas Truce of 1914, was only possible in that space. The paper suggests that the subversive nature of the truce required undermined the legitimacy of the state and thus forced state authorities to suppress further similar occurrences. One of the enduring images of World War I is that of trench warfare, featuring two dug-in-sides firing at each other across a space than spanned anywhere from sixty to two hundred yards. The space that was fired across, dubbed ‘No Man’s Land,’ became an iconic symbol representing the destructive nature of the Great War. This article explores why one of the most extraordinary events of the First World War was only possible in that space and why the event could never be duplicated.

Habermas vs. Fest

Author(s): Mile Lasić / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 109-110/2007

O životnom značaju filozofije

Author(s): Jovan Aranđelović / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 01+04/2004

In this article the author thematizes the relation between philosophy as knowledge of reason and its decisive influence on the field of practice and politics through analysis of Plato, Aristotle and Kant. Investigation of inner interconnectedness of the question of crisis of philosophy and crisis of contemporary world is simultaneous with pointing out to the lack of foundation of interpretations that make fun of the speech about life significance of philosophy and “philosophers-rulers” and attempt to oppose it to the concept of rule of the law. The author demonstrates that, on this issue, their is no great difference between Plato’s and Aristotle’s standpoint and that both, as well as Kant, plead for the rule of the law. Also, according to the author, it is exactly the refutation of the significance of theory for the life world that hides actual sources of the crisis of the epoch, disables its analysis and the potential for finding possible ways to overcome it. In the second part of the article, the author reminds of the relation between philosophy and Europe and paradoxical fact that philosophy today gains more and more importance outside of the European cultural circle, especially in China and Japan, while in Europe itself it is too often forgotten and regarded as mere anachronism.

HEIDEGGER UND DIE ETHIK: DIE VOLLBRINGUNG DES ANDEREN

Author(s): Bogdan Mincă / Language(s): German Issue: 1/2014

Heidegger and Ethics: the Pro-ducing of the Other. Heidegger’s occasional approaches to ethics are always connected to ontology. We investigate two of his writings (Being and Time, §59, and Letter on Humanism), which belong to the earlier and to the later Heidegger, respectively. Our aim is to show that Heidegger alters, throughout his writings, very little of his opinion concerning the secondary role of ethics by comparison with ontology. Whereas in Being and Time the necessity of ethics is rapidly placed in the realm of fundamental ontology of the Dasein (the most urgent task), in the Letter ethics is called “originary” if it is understood from the ēthos, the living of mankind. But according to Heidegger mankind defines itself by its Ek-sistenz, i.e. its being-open to the call of being through thinking. The keyword of our text is the German Handlung, normally translated as “action”, but which Heidegger understands as “pro-ducing”, i.e. Vollbringen, “bringing to the full” the essence of the Other. The primary action of man is thinking the essence of being as of the primary Other.

STATE OF NATURE AND OTHER SAVAGERIES OF PAGANISM IN BRITISH AND AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE

Author(s): Francisc-Norbert Ormeny / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2014

This study analyses the social and ideological causes that lead to the general adoption by the British and American cultural worlds of a “pagan” etiquette and of an exuberantly savage (tribal) imaginary when it came to relate its political visions to events and to the ideas agitating France in the 18th century. Hume and Burke, as well as their American continuators – Rawls and Nozick – interpreted the obsessive use of the concept of slavery by the French theorists as a forced “conceptual delusion” (our term), as an excessive rhetoric of dramatization of some social roles and statuses within a stable societal order. They dismissed both the French idea of social slavery and of the possibility of a return to a “state of nature”, constantly defending the need for a balanced judicial system. Explicitly or implicitly, they all considered the 18th century’s dream about a pagan revival a problematic philosophical fiction with no real support in the effective dynamics of the social world and preferred to use the methodology of the “thought experiment” in order to try to deconstruct, from a political point of view the over-romantic impetuses of the French philosophers of the time. In so doing they gave the final confirmation to one of the greatest methodologies in anthropology and in political philosophy – that of reading past minds by means of thought experiments – a radical form of theoretical hypostatization.

ASPECTS OF LIFE IN C.G. JUNG: ITS FIRST AND SECOND HALVES

Author(s): Zeno Gozo / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2014

As Carl Gustav Jung emphasized, our life course allows us to perform a bi-partition with regard to it in a first and a second half; these segments are different from a physiological and psychological point of view by having distinct orientations, aspirations, ways of functioning and telos. Next to the “physics” (etymologic) of living there can be also emphasized its psychological aspects and we can conceptualise some meta-physical guidelines pointing to an existential-philosophical analyze of the anthropologic issue. In this paper we propose to debate and to nuance the aspects concerning the Jungian bipartition of human life, to detach some perspectives in a philosophical manner, to clarify some differentiation mainlines for the so different paradigms of existence’s first and second half. The result and the implications of this approach provide some statements and some enlightenment regarding our own existential course and which are fitted for a possible implementation towards self-realisation. Thus, is observed that the anthropos issue is continuously rewritable, being based on the heuristic feature of the interrogative process, on its openings and on its limitations as well. Accepting the limits and exploration of the openings is certainly a part of a process of inner maturation, both psychological and spiritual, that allows the deepening of the existential given, its elaboration, its grounding on rational bases that can substantiate the second part of life.

L’IDENTITE DANS LES DISCOURS AFRICAINS CONTEMPORAINS

Author(s): Emboussi Nyano / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2014

Identity in African Contemporary Writings. This paper focuses on the idea that identity is a key question for any one interested in understanding African twentieth century writings or further, even when they are not directly related on it. For, if we observe problems like tradition and modernity, relations to West, African future or utopia, it appears that answers vary with the approach of African identity directly or indirectly developed by authors. What will specify this research is that, contrary to the ordinary discourses on the question, the paper shows that the main concern of African thinkers is not the differentiation with West but the relation of Africa to Africa. It will highlight the two main attitudes in stressing that before the independences, Africa was for Africans a model of identity, and it became a counter-model after. In both, the relation with Europe was positive in that the former tried to promote co-existence with the West, and the latter took Europe as an ambivalent model of identification.