Reperele filosofice ale unui filosof fără filosofie.Cazul Nae Ionescu
The Romanian philosopher’s Nae Ionescu thinking within the philosophic trends of his time in Romania and worldwide make the topic of this article.
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The Romanian philosopher’s Nae Ionescu thinking within the philosophic trends of his time in Romania and worldwide make the topic of this article.
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The essay explicates the formation of inter-subjective awareness which is a necessary ground of any lifeworld. It discloses the temporally and spatially non-positional awareness which comprises the continuously extensioning and deepening polycentric field of perceptions. The field is accessible to anyone and anytime and thus provides an ahistorical background for any historical time and location of events in such a time. This non-positional awareness is transcendental and is inadequate for the understanding of the presence of individual differentiations. As universal, it consists of eidetic structures that are common to everyone. Hence the essay shows that while history is accessible at this level, it also shows another dimension of awareness – the corporeal – at which history is made, built in concrete projects. The making is premised on the awareness of the primacy of “I can” which consists of acquired abilities, in distinction to those of others providing the differentiation among individuals engaged in concrete tasks. The analyses, at this level, show the ways the engaged activities comprise “inter-corporeal” commonalities and individuating differentiations.
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What means “being Lithuanian” today? How do Lithuanian and European identities relate to each other? What happened to Lithuanian identity historically? What transformations, mutations and challenges are waiting for it now? What if we are already in the process of loosing our national specificity and finally will be simply dissolved? – A significant part of Lithuanian academic community is worried about this kind of questions. The object of the article, however, is not the problems enumerated, but the reasons that bring them into discourse and, consequently, into being. To put it differently, we ask what optics is necessary to see our national identity as a philosophical problem. The article reconstructs the basic premises without which the very perception of such problems as problems would be impossible and argues that the reasons of this trouble with identity are rather ideological than of philosophical nature. Philosophically, they might be better summarized as “naïve essencialism”, unreflected upon and unrecognized.
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Some critics nowadays are calling for the development of a transracial or “color- -blind” society. They claim that the current focus on multiculturalism is causing undue social conflict. In general, these critics want to promote an absolute culture that provides a universal standard for assimilation. The problem with this approach to maintaining social order is that diversity is undermined, along with key elements of democracy. What is needed, instead, is an image of society that does not require unquestioned assimilation in order to insure solidarity. In this way, the democratization of culture can be promoted.
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The question of identity is one of the most important throughts in the history of human thought. This fundamental notion acquires attention especially in philosophical and theological anthropologies. As is well known, the postulated by Descartes ego cogito initiated the project of modernity. The article deals with the postmodern deconstruction of this absolute subject (I) and the corresponding notion of knowledge (thought). Despite some radical conclusions by these deconstructive critiques which deny the potential to contemplate the ultimate reality, or at least the possibility to comprehend it, various religious thinkers found postmodern strategies very useful for renovating traditional notions of religious discourse. In this case, the critique of the Cartesian subject turns out to be the hermeneutics of the temporal, historical, practically engaged self which becomes the “foundation” of modern theological anthropology. The deconstruction of various aspects of the Western metaphysical tradition was not a taboo for philosophers of religion to express the experience of the Ultimate. On the contrary, it encouraged to look for new ways of detecting ontological implications of hermeneutics of the self and revealing new aspects of the old Christian narratives. Analysis of these processes forms the structure of the paper.
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The article analyses the problem of national and gender identity, using examples from Lithuanian contemporary art. It raises the question of how to speak about national or gender identities and discusses the nature of any identity in general. The article is based on the anti-essentialist assumption that any identity is both contingent and relational in character. Any identity functions as an empty signifier, which has no stable content and is constantly redefined in the symbolic order. So, instead of speaking about identity per se, we should rather focus on the process of identification and ask, “Who is this Other?” for whom the subject is enacting its role. When interpreting national or gender identities we should ask: whose gaze is considered when the subject identifies himself / herself with a certain image? Slavoj Žižek makes a distinction between imaginary identification, i. e. identification with the image in which we appear likeable to ourselves, and symbolic identification, i. e. identification with the very place from where we look at ourselves so that we appear to ourselves likeable. According to this definition, national identity as well as gender identity can be interpreted as a masquerade played for the gaze of “the Other”. This means that not only national, but also gender identity is constantly redefined by different regimes of power.
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The author asks what place is occupied by advertising and popular culture in our living space. The article deals with the role of these phenomena of culture in the narrative identity. The author follows the attitude that a narrative has the aspects of both event and language. The thesis of this article is as follows: the identity develops as a narrative, i. e. with the help of language and narrative events. The narrative is being treated as existential, allowing to emplotment of an event-phenomenon. The latter expands the existential whole. The existential-phenomenological approach does not allow separating the elite culture from the mass culture. According to the author, phenomena of any culture may become part of our existential narrative if they withstand the competition with other phenomena. The phenomena are in this context things or persons that may be included in our existential whole and may expand it.
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The paper concentrates on R. Barthes’ texts on photographic experience, in the context of which the problem of identity is examined. The photographic experience is examined from the double perspective: from the position of the interpretive subject (of the connoisseur of photography) and as an object modeled by the photographic eye (the experience of being photographed). These two modes of photographic experience mark a wide diapason of situations in which the triple structure of “photographic identity” crystallizes: 1) the dynamic uniqueness, 2) the somatic experience of the uniqueness, which appears to demonstrate family likeness and corresponds to the representational canons of the concrete historical period, and 3) the image, the further interpretations and use of which could not be controlled.
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The article analyses the social problems of consumer society and culture. With reference to well-known authorities in culture studies, anthropology and sociology, author discusses the pecularities of the identity construction in the consumer society. Lifestyle is considered as one of the instruments for postmodern identity construction. Marketing and advertising persuasion technologies are using lifestyle as identity construction. Lifestyle marketing offers consumers different commodity-sign constelations, which can be used as instruments for identity construction. In post-socialist societies, consumerist lifestyles are increasingly becoming used for identity construction.
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The aim of the first text entitled “Hermeneutics and praxis” is to show the network of the most relevant concepts of philosophic hermeneutics and to present their inner essential interconnectedness with Aristotle's concept of practical philosophy. The elaboration of fundamental notions of prejudice, hermeneutical circle of tradition, situation, effective-historical consciousness, fusion of horizons and application can be found in the text. The explanation of the above mentioned notions intends to legitimize Gadamer's central thesis that our understanding is never mere subject-oriented behaviour. On the contrary, it is always historically limited. In this context, the notion of prejudice loses its negative connotation and represents not only the link with our tradition, but also the original source of all our judgements. Taking into consideration this notion as highly relevant, Gadamer intends to show that we can never fully escape from all of our prejudices, although it does not mean that we cannot encounter them critically. The ground for their understanding is exactly within our very historical being and union with our tradition. We cannot erase our own horizon when approaching someone else; we should rather find a common ground with them. Therefore, the process of understanding always has a dialogical character. The second text deals with the universal requirement of the method of natural sciences. Experiences of art, philosophy and social sciences (die Geisteswissenschaften) counterstrike it. One cannot recognize the meaning of social sciences once they are excluded from the horizon of praxis. Moreover, social sciences are moral sciences and the concept of progress, so common in the terminology of natural sciences, cannot be applied to them. Their very purpose is human self-understanding. At this point some possible consequences are being introduced, resulting from the standpoint of philosophic hermeneutics. Namely, the question of the possibility of rehabilitation of the practical phenomenon, as opposed to the methodological truth of natural sciences, is being problematised. Furthermore, an outline of some other crucial problems is given, such as revival of self-understanding of social sciences, universal competence of scientific experts and domain and objectives of contemporary education.
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The most relevant conceptions of philosophy (philosophy as metaphysical interpretation of the world, philosophy as social critique and philosophy as epistemological framework and general synthesis of positive sciences) were unified by two different and opposite theses. The first thesis assumes that philosophy has reached in the times of total scientification of the human world its own end and that it is now something obsolete and meaningless. The opposite thesis assumes that philosophy is necessary today as a meaningful defense of the human world against the danger of irrationality. Only by overcoming the one-sidedness of these three conceptions can philosophy avoid its own obsolescence and the world can have a chance to avoid the threat of irrationality.
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The paper opens with the outline of its context, including identification of the methodological axis for the analysis of "The Human Condition" and two lines of inquiry, the main one and the collateral one. What follows is a short presentation of the first two parts of the axis, human condition and practical activities, and then the paper focuses on the third part of the axis, fields of human life. The study of fields of human life comprises defining the notion of fields, scanning the process of their constitution, their relations to practical activities and their mutual relations, their development and characteristics of each field. The goal of the study is to discover why the mapping of the fields takes place in the concrete case of "The Human Condition" and the answer reached at the end is that the reason lies in the evaluation of human body. However, this evaluation is to some extent self-conscious.
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Petrić’s attempt at dehellenizing philosophy and Christian theology was motivated by the fact that about four centuries after the “ancient theologians”, who were influenced by Plato’s philosophy, scholastic theologians began to introduce Aristotle’s philosophy into theology and adopt his “impieties” as the foundations of faith. He justifies their ignorance and inability to learn about the ancient wise men by the fact that they had no knowledge of Greek and were thus not familiar with the original texts of Plato and Aristotle in which the wise men were mentioned. He does not forgive them, however, for trying to “support piety by impiety”. Thus Petrić attempts to demonstrate how Aristotle found all the problem motives of his metaphysics, physics and ethics in the wise men, drawing mostly upon Plato. He also attempts to show how Aristotle reformulated the mentioned problems, reinterpreted them in the spirit of the old Greek language and thought, but also ignored some of them. Heidegger’s more recent similar attempt at dehellenizing philosophy and Christian theology is grounded on a thesis of the “neglect of the question of being” – that is, the “meaning of being”. This “neglect” is the result of traditional metaphysics which treated being as “the most general” and thus “the most understandable” notion, and in such a way dispensed philosophy to reconsider the question of being. The question of being was blocked by metaphysics in that it treated being as an “entity”, prompting theology to treat God as an “entity” as well, though “the supreme” but still an entity. This led to the understanding of theology as a “positive” science and its eventual classification among the “positive” sciences. Heidegger’s motive to “destroy” traditional metaphysics is to stream thought towards his forgotten major goal, and thus prompt theology, once freed from traditional metaphysics, to seek new strands. The most recent attempt at critical thematization of dehellenization of Christian faith and European spirit in general has been made by the theologian and present pope, Joseph Ratzinger, particularly in his lecture delivered at the University in Regensburg in which he repeatedly criticized dehellenization. Three stages of dehellenization program (Enthelenisierungsprogramm) in Christian theology are the subject of his criticism: from the banishment of metaphysics from theology in the Reformation, through historization in liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth century to the erasing of the traces of Hellenization of Christian faith in the idea of inculturation. He also argues against mind limitation (Vernunftbeschrankung) started by mathematization of European science in Renaissance Platonism and canonized by Kant. The consequences of mind limitation are not only relevant to Christianity which strives towards the very opposite – broadening of the mind (Vernunfterweiterung), but to the Western spirit on the whole.
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The article aims to tackle the following problem: why was Petrić the only philosopher who, within sixteenth-century discussion on ars historica, decided to employ the myth? The answer to this problem is being sought through the analysis of the myth of history (una lunga historia… de’corrompimenti del mondo, & de’suoi rinascimenti), comprised in the dialogue “Il Contarino, overo che, sia l’historia” (15a–18a) in Petrić’s work Della historia diece dialoghi (1560). viewed formally, mythological account places Petrić in the tradition of poetical theology, in which, through ingenuity and inspiration, a poet lays the foundations of human history and knowledge as a whole. Given the contents, this myth owes greatly to Petrić’s leaning on diverse traditions of the antiquity and the Renaissance. In the manner of a poet theologian, Petrić endeavours to combine different traditions into a unique picture and from the chaotic res gestae to create the first prerequisite for the history: the past as its subject-matter.
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Thorough research on finding Petrić’s grave, conducted in the Church of St. Onophrio and the Torquato Tasso Museum in Rome, as well as in literature, has resulted in the knowledge about the nature of relationship between Franjo Petrić and Cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini during Petrić’s Roman period: Petrić was the official court philosopher of Cardinal Aldobrandini, the secretary of State of His Holiness the Pope, and the nephew of Pope Clement VIII. Cardinal Aldobrandini, closely connected with Torquato Tasso, most likely chose Tasso’s grave in the Church of St. Onophrio in Rome as the place of Petrić’s burial, in order that his court poet and philosopher rest together.
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The article attempts to examine Petrić’s motives for publishing Oracula Chaldaica, attributed to Zoroaster, and relate them primarily with the question of whether the teachings from the Oracles are present, and if so, in what way are they present in Petrić’s philosophy laid out in his Nova de universis philosophia. Petrić introduces his basic position on how Oracles function in his philosophy in the sixth book of “Panarchia” in Nova de universis philosophia, where he says: “But we philosophise by appealing to the authorities [by which he primarily means Zoroaster] more in the sense of an ornament than in the sense a foundation. Let us therefore deal with proofs!” Although, in fact, Petrić recognizes Zoroaster as an authority, he does not regard his sayings as philosophical proofs! Through the analysis of Nova de universis philosophia the article tries to answer the question whether the claim of appealing to the authorities merely as an ornament is justified. At the same time, it tries to expound the particularity of his interpretation of Chaldean Oracles, especially the interpretation of the notion of substance found in Oracles. Finally, the features of Petrić’s reception of these writings are summarized in one of his statements, although connected to the issue of reason, but which can be applied to all of the teachings of Oracula Chaldaica. He indicatively states: “However, this [sc. Zoroaster’s] history of reason does not seem to concern our philosophy very much, nor does it greatly differ from it.”
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U članku se analizira Petrićeva usporedba Aristotelove podjele na supralunarni i sublunarni svijet s morskim bićem koje Petrić naziva Marinus Glaucus. Tu usporedbu, s bićem koje je dijelom riba, a dijelom kamen, rabi Petrić kako bi eksplicirao neprirodnost, monstruoznost spomenute Aristotelove podjele. Postavlja se pitanje što je ili tko je Marinus Glaucus. U članku se izlaže da Petrićev Marinus Glaucus najvjerojatnije u sebi ujedinjava i svojstva grčko-rimskog morskog polubožanstva koje se zove Glauko i osobine jedne vrste otrovnih riba koje se u nekim europskim jezicima zovu kamene ribe, a svojstvena im je mimikrija, prilagodba okolišu u kojem žive, kamenu.
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Aristotel je strogo lučio tri bitna načina života: bios poietikos, bios praktikos i bios theoretikos, te je smatrao da samo dva posljednja načina života ozbiljuju najviše dobro pomoću savršenih oblika znanja, i to najviše dobro kao ljudsko dobro pomoću razboritosti praktičnoga uma (phronesis) i kao božansko dobro pomoću mudrosti teoretskoga uma (sophia). Oba ta načina postizanja sreće (eudaimonia) ozbiljuju najviše dobro na svoj vlastiti način, i to praktični um etičko-političkim djelovanjem građana u državi, a teoretski um kontemplacijom kao težnjom za vječnim životom bogova i promatranjem prvih principa i uzroka svih bića u pogledu njihova bitka. Poietički način života Aristotel, pak, rangira niže od praktičnog i teoretskog. Pa ipak, katkada i poietički način života proizvodi sretan život. Na primjeru Gadamerova razumijevanja mnogolikosti iskustva bitnih načina života i mnogolikosti znanja već u okviru poietičkog znanja, u ovom se radu nastoji pokazati da poiesis kao treći bitni oblik života obuhvaća ukupnost proizvodnog znanja, dakle kako znanje na kojemu počiva umjetničko stvaranje tako i znanje koje sve više tehnizira globalni svijet i vodi sudbonosnom razaranju i kobnoj uniformiranosti samoga svijeta. Posebna je Gadamerova zasluga što je u okviru fenomenološke i hermeneutičke filozofije obnovio vlastitost umjetnosti kao oblik znanja koje kao ljudsko razumijevanje čovjeku omogućuje da pomoću povijesnog mišljenja razvije povijesnom bitku i svijetu života primjereno znanje i na njemu utemeljeno življenje i djelovanje.
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The second book of Pancosmia provides full insight into Petrić’s view of the continuum or de divisibilitate quantitatis, offering us many details on Petrić’s futile strategy in refuting Aristotle’s notions of the continuum and the potential infinite. In his objections to Aristotle, Petrić implicitly points the major contributions of Aristotle’s doctrine of continuum, but also submits his own solutions such as the idea of the minimal indivisible line. Although his solutions failed to bring him the results as brilliant as those of Aristotle with the notion of the continuum in the interpretation of nature and mathematics, within his polemic with Aristotle, Petrić comes forward with new questions dealing with the calculus of infinite quantities and genealogy of science.
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The third volume of the authoritative Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon (1750–1751), compiled by Christian Gottlieb Jöcher, contains an entry on the philosopher Frane Petrić. Apart from Petrić’s obscure place of birth, Jöcher’s data, if scarce, are correct. In order to establish the information that had been or may have been available to the German lexicographer, Jöcher’s sources have been traced. Out of the nine sources Jöcher listed at the end of his entry on Petrić, the German lexicographer consulted only the work Les Eloges des hommes savans (1683) by Antoine Teissier and the second edition of the Dictionaire historique et critique (1702) by Pierre Bayle. The oldest and most recent among Jöcher’s sources, Elogia illustrium Belgii scriptorum by Aubert Le Mire and Mémoires by Jean-Pierre Niceron, make no reference to Petrić. Although the remaining five sources contain valuable information on Petrić, Jöcher failed to consult them.
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