Jordan McKenzie (2016): Deconstructing Happiness: Critical Sociology and the Good Life
The review of: Jordan McKenzie (2016): Deconstructing Happiness: Critical Sociology and the Good Life (Routledge, 213 str.)
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The review of: Jordan McKenzie (2016): Deconstructing Happiness: Critical Sociology and the Good Life (Routledge, 213 str.)
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Examination of the techniques used for depicting human beings in periodicals of the second half of the 19th century demonstrates how Latvian visual identity was formed at a time when the formation of national identity took place. The article is an attempt to characterise visualisation of the human being in the Latvian magazines “Pagalms” (1881–1882), “Rota” (1884–1887), “Austrums” (1885–1906), and “Mājas Viesa Mēnešraksts” (1895–1905). The development of art dynamics is revealed by characterising the principles of depiction of the human being in connection with the spirit of the time, i.e., national identity. Periodicals were the most accessible medium of the 19th century which formed and in which the concepts of Latvian identity were formed. At the same time the visual material of periodicals provides a general notion not only of the process of identity formation but also helps to reveal how an artist perceives a human being, as well as gives an insight into the use of formal stylistics, art techniques, and the scope of artistic influences.
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H. Ibsen is one of the major authors in the formation of the conception of the human in Antons Austrinš' (1884-1934) prose. Both authors regard the negative aspects of their time, as well as ethical and moral problems. The artistic world of both H. Ibsen and A. Austrinš is focused on the inner world of the human, its development and controversies. The characters and their life-stories illustrate the peculiarities and regularities of their contemporary society; an essential probiem for both authors is the homogeneity of personality, loss of harmony in the development of the human and society. However, the ways of solving these problems for both authors differ: H. Ibsen projects the formation of a harmonious, ethical society into the future, whereas A. Austrinš invokes a return to traditional values.
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Brands have become a vital part of our social reality. They contain cultural and social codes of the contemporary consumer society. Moreover, according to French theoretician Jean Baudrillard, these signs can become the sole reality. This brings forth a question - how to navigate around in this world and how to speak about it. A solution offered by Frederic Jameson is a new social and cognitive cartography that is, putting new, consumption related signs onto our mental maps. As one of the first thinkers who had tried to accomplish such kind of mapping is Walter Benjamin's "The Arcades Project". Fie stresses such important features of consumption as idleness, boredom, perpetual presence, illustrative perception of reality. For him those features represent deeper economical, social and cultural processes. The postmodern theorists both radicalize and subvert them, and even reduce them to empty signs (signifiers without signified). Brand semiotics is the branch of knowledge that deals with brands as the specific language. To disclose possible tasks and work of brand semiotics the author of the present paper offers to start investigation in place where the highest concentration of brands is to be found. In this case it is a shopping mall Alfa. The author invites readers along to three journeys to Alfa - the first, to branded world; the second - to theme and amusement part; and the third - to mythical space. In the first journey the guidebooks are postmodern theories of consumption by J. Baudrillard and F. Jameson, as well as works on semiotics by U. Eco and R. Barthes; in the second - the article by R. Simons on the shopping mall as formal garden of the twentieth century; in the third - R. Barthes's book "Mythologies".
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The article is devoted to a special theoretical consideration of the city that arises from viewing the city as a semiotic phenomenon. The semiotic interpretation of the city allows for, in principle, three possibilities: the city as space, the city as language, and the city as text (within the tradition of borrowing and reevaluating concepts). In this article, preference is given to the spatial consideration of the problem which in feturn is based on the hypothesis that the city is formed as a space and that it is considered, understood and used as a system of parallel functioning of verbal and nonverbal meanings. The time factor is relevant to its perception and use, while the //loss,/ of time is of most importance for understanding space, which shows a certain degree of non-temporality in all space descriptions. The structure of verbal descriptions of the city arises mainly from movements in the space of the city, which they represent, whereas their consequences arise as time-losing abstractions. In this way, the propositions which describe space are gradually reduced to names, thus leading to an explanation of space that often makes the space of the city hard to understand. Since all systems of signs in the city depend on general principles, the systems of describing the city become their objects in the descriptions of the city - leading to a false conception that they belong to the phenomenon (the city).
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Values, that embody and express the common interests of the whole society or of its majority at least, are regarded as social values. Contemporary society recognizes as inalienable the natural human rights to life, health, property, honor and dignity, inviolability of private life, religion and freedom of conscience, and thought, etc. It can be maintained that, in a society where human rights are respected and the interests of every individual are recognized, values such as freedom, honor and dignity become the fundamental values for the society as a whole. The article analyzes the process of value “socialization”: how value becomes the rule of human behavior, how it finds its final confirmation in legal principles and norms. Since the legal principles are based on values, they are flexible and adaptable to the changing society and its value system.
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Human behavior is regulated by many factors. Among them we identify religion, traditions, laws, courts, state institutions, influential individuals, emotions, mind, heart, conscience. Legal regulation of a society, however, is one of the most important legal theory categories. The reasons for legal regulation are different in different systems. For example, in a state dominated by a classical system, the behavior of people is regulated by legal means that pursue to standardize the aggression of one social group against other social groups. On the contrary, in a democratic state, the legal regulation seeks to coordinate the interests of the opposing groups, thereby maintaining social cohesion in the society. As practice shows, the democratic form of legal regulation is more effective when legal means are aimed at regulating human relations to make them fair and consolidating the rights of all social groups. This means that legal regulation can be called the socialization of human behavior for the protection of the society and development of resistance to domination and enslavement.
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This article discusses the concepts of monogamy, nonmonogamy and consensual nonmonogamy (swinging, polyamory and open relationships). The cultural forces questioning the perspectives of the normativity of monogamy are similarly being argued. In addition, issues regarding the mono-normative position of monogamy, its legitimacy and relationship with the concepts of monogamy and nonmonogamy are also explored.
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Book review of Angel Tsvetkov's book - Protosotsiologiya. Blagoevgrad: Universitetsko izdatelstvo „Neofit Rilski“, 2015.
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In the bourgeois families maidservants were obligatory – we could say self–evident. They characterised the bourgeois cultural life and status and played an important role in the bourgeois families. In the bourgeois households they were responsible for domestic and personal chores. A comprehensive analysis of the issue of servant girls cannot avoid the world of contemporary love, sex and morality. Double standards were characteristic of the bourgeois society, and sex drive as a need was only acknowledged as far as men were concerned. Men could seek the satisfaction of their desires outside of what was deemed as socially acceptable. Double standards also flourished behind the closed doors of the bourgeois homes. On the basis of the preserved resources the contribution explores sexual and love affairs of bourgeois fathers and sons involving servant girls. These are the typical patterns of the so–called lower forms of love or ordinary love with the aim of satisfying the sexual needs of bourgeois men. The author also focuses on the issue of illegitimate children, prostitution, and harmful pulp literature. Many girls came to the cities and became maidservants in the hope of getting married. Therefore these girls also pursued their hope for a better life with personal ads. The search for an appropriate husband could also be dangerous, since servant girls could also become victims of con artists or even murderers.
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The review of: Janez Polajnar, "Pfuj! To je gerdo!" K zgodovini morale na Slovenskem v dobi meščanstva. Zgodovinsko društvo Celje, Celje 2008, 180 strani, ilustr.
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As a building, genetic and vital part of the soul and will of our people, morality determines the quality of life and prospects for its happy future and survival. Viewed from this dimension of reality, moral values are stained with their opposites so that they are difficult to discern the true intentions, goals, and means of dealing with certain groups and individuals. Such a state of morality has a devastating effect on the quality and power of the will to create lasting values and lead to general apathy and the feeling of losing trust and reliance on other people, in society institutions and in the state itself. The result is loneliness and alienation at all levels of merit and (or) merging into groups with unchallenged criteria of communion. The principle of termination with the tradition itself, opens the door to the feeling of insecurity, increases authoritarianism, and the uncritical acceptance of new (foreign) values increasingly confuses all structures of our society. Obviously the overwhelming influence of Western cultural values in the form of finished spiritual molds is not evident, which is not a term of true cultural aspirations and the needs of our people. The main role in this is the individual activities of people educated at the most important European and American universities. Certainly, the adoption of positive cultural values and content of foreign cultures and states is necessary and beneficial. However, the problem is in an uncritical attitude and distances towards them. It is necessary to look real and treacherously at our opportunities, to absorb our good strength from the outside and inside, in order to be right in this period of our and world history.
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At the end of the 19th century, the hitherto relatively unified “Science of Society” split into history and sociology. History’s prime objective is the study of individual social phenomena, whereas sociology, by connecting-different realisations, generalises and formulates new theories. Several conflicting theses exist on the mutual relationship between the two. Some sociologists consider history merely as an auxiliary, documentary science while certain historians deny sociology the status of a science. In recent times, however, these extreme positions are receding, acknowledging their interconnection and giving way to a growing cooperation between the disciplines.
More...Иммануил Кант и культурное измерение общества
The paper focuses on Kant’s philosophy of culture. Based on a new reading of Kant, emphasizing the importance of his short writings, the paper tries to update and contextualize Kant’s ideas. Culture, realized in the cosmopolitan world, is for Kant the ultimate purpose of history. The aim of the paper is to define cultural dimension of society in Kant’s philosophy followed by a confrontation with contemporary idea of multiculturalism. The universalist character of Kant’s concept of culture has a potential of a philosophical reflection of our culture. Статия посвесщает свое внимание философии культуры в восприятии Канта. Исходя из так называемового нового чтения Канта, занимается его малыми произведенями чтобы сравнить его наследие с современными контекстами мышления. Основной целей творчества Канта это культура совершена в всемирно-гражданском единстве. Целей нашего розмышления является определение культурного масштаба общества в философии Канта и в дальнейшем ее кон-фронтация с современной идеей космополитизма. Универсалистическое стремление кантянской концепции культуры может являтся исходным пунктом современной оцены нашего восприятия культуры.
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Within contemporary cosmopolitanism one may distinguish two main currents which aim at divergent theoretical aims. One of them may be interpreted as an intellectual conceptualization of the consequences of the economic globalization, characteristic of the late capitalism, while the other is an attempt to overcome conflicts resulting from the resistance to the global uniformization of the variety of social life. The divergent nature of these two aims is responsible for the essential tensions in contemporary cosmopolitan doctrines. In this article, which is a re-reading of selected moments in the history of ancient cosmopolitanism, I stress the internal tensions within various versions of cosmopolitanism which informed the development of this doctrine in the ancient times. My aim is to demonstrate how moral and political radicalism of the Cynic naturalist cosmopolitanism has been superseded, in the late Stoicism, by a moderate gradualist version, formulated by Hierokles on the basis of his idea oikeiôsis.
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The text constitutes a reference to the article on applying social realism discourse in pop-art and modern popular culture (“Ars inter Culturas” 5 (2016): 209-239) and an elab- oration by means of including Ukrainian art. It reminds about Ukrainian artists’ contribu- tion to the development of the avant garde of the first half of 20th century and social realism ideas of involvement, “growing of art into” life as well as its presence in various areas of social practice. It also recalls the mediatory role of Władysław Strzemiński be- tween Russian and Polish avant garde.Furthermore, on the basis of examples the author analyses formal strategies adopted from avant garde by the output of social realism, points to iconographic patterns of Ukrain- ian works from which Polish artists got inspiration according to their programme and critics’ recommendations. Also, differences resulting from the relations between pattern- mutation are important, as well as the duration of the doctrine which was in force from the first half of the 30s to the end of the 80s of the 20th century in Russia while in Poland in the years of 1949/50-1954/55. In both countries, it had important but different conse- quences, which results in different attitudes to realism as a general artistic strategy. Con- temporary communication and globalisation processes have led to standardisation of vis- ual language also in post-soviet countries, and internet memes play a significant role in it. In the world of the Internet, the elements of social realism discourse become memes de- tached from old meanings, lose their historical and political sense, become an element of entertaining exoticism which enhances forgetting about an oppressive character of the doctrine which, especially in Ukraine, has led not only to the exclusion but also to the extermination of artists.
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In this paper, the author considers Fichte’s concept of practice. Firstly, he refers to the ancient understanding of this concept, and its principal feature – separation of theory and practice, subject and object. Then he considers Kant’s awarding of the primacy to the practice. The rest of the text is devoted to the Fichte’s understanding of practice, by analyzing the concepts such as the effective action (fact-act, Tathandlung), the intellectual perception and the relation I – Not-I. Hereafter he discusses the relation between knowledge and action, and the question of humanity. In the last section of the paper the author considers the problem of speculation and its opposition to philosophy (metaphysics), and then relates the speculation to the revolution.
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Western civilization, whose vision of cosmos is still prevailingly anthropocentric, fi nds the origin for its standing points in Judeo-Christian tradition and in the views of ancient Greek philosophers. In searching for antecedents of the vision of man as a being having a special status among other living beings, the focus of the study in this paper will be on the Aristotle’s corpus, i.e. on preserved fragments of Presocratics. There is, primarily, a high level of agreement among historians of philosophy that the Stagirites, with his imperative for a clear distinction between the practical wisdom, i.e. thinking and sensation, crucially contributed to the establishment of modern civil epoch based on logocentrism and anthropocentrism. The authors, then, identified that indications of anthropocentric approaches, despite structural hindrances of their concepts, may be found in Pythagoreans, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras and Democritus. However, the Presocratic who most clearly anticipated the letter anthropocentric views was Alcmaeon from Croton. His opinion that the man is different from other living beings as the only being that is capable of understanding, while other living beings receive sensations but do not understand, represents, the authors concluded, an indication of both Aristotle’s and the statements of numerous subsequent thinkers that logos abilities may be allocated only to humans and that the man has ontological primacy in relation to other living beings.
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Cassirer’s understanding of culture is in this essay analyzed on the basis of his entire philosophy, i.e. concerning its central position in its composition. The concept of culture represents systematic unity of Cassirer’s project of philosophy of symbolic forms, understood as philosophy of culture. In this context concept of culture is analyzed on the basis of its relationship with the concept of symbolic forms, i.e. concerning the possibility of their adequate theoretical understanding, which is given solely as philosophy of culture.
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Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s understanding of the reality of the modern man, and a critical attitude towards the same shows a tendency which brings to the attention the consistency of destructive tendencies of the 20th century, but also finds the causes of such destructiveness much earlier, first in ideas that were viewed by the Enlightenment. The ideas of the Enlightenment, mind, freedom and equality, losing their original goal of human nature, have created a new cultural-historical epoch, based on the enslavement of man and nature, but also dehumanizing ideologies such as National Socialism and Fascism. The key question that Adorno and Horkheimer ask is the question of how the world has ever come to the present condition, if the Enlightenment and tendencies that it brings promised a better world for man. How did it come to the situation that progress in civilization at the same time also means a return to barbarism? The aim of this paper is certainly not only to display the questions and dilemmas that Adorno and Horkheimer set, but also to draw attention to Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s solutions of the crisis, which are based on the critical examination of the Enlightenment and Enlightenment ideas.
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