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Anthropos 1-2 (205-206) 2007
ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHY
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The author tackles the well-known issue of Plato’s understanding of art and reality, and tries to show how the notion of mimesis in Plato cannot be read solely within the context of artistic expressivity but rather in the broader sense of the question concerning the being of man. In doing so, the author opens new, polysemantic readings of Plato’s notions, trying to elucidate certain contradictory aspects of specific passages in Plato’s dialogues, which have already been emphasized in more recent interpretations. In his existential openness, man is always mimetic, abolishing his or her own mimetics through philosophy as reflection of the very mimesis. Actually, the true and real philosopher as an actually existing individual is subjected to mimesis as the manner of being in the world, the difference being in that mimesis is reflected, recognized and experienced. Philosophical discourse is a dialectical process, the mode of the differentiating and distinguishing discourse, which provides the qualitative and quantitative measure for that which reveals itself as one and the same. This provides us with the basic insight that, due to its similarity, it is subjected to seeming equality and oneness, whereas in truth it essentially and basically differs as the image from that which it imitates. The philosophical insight reveals mimesis in its mimetic truth; mimesis is revealed as self-differentiation. And it is only and exactly because of the very possibility of gaining insight into difference and self-differentiation that the philosopher is capable of realizing that which lies beyond the mimetic manner of being in the world, which is realized in its oneness beyond his or her own ontological openness. By gaining insight into differentiation, mimesis is abolished through anamnesis (recollection). From this perspective, Plato’s philosophical language does not posit itself as the absolute truth but rather as the manner of providing the measure for the things of the world – from the basic insight into the very fundamental openness of man’s existence in the world. And it is exactly because of this openness – since it cannot given in the manner of conviction but rather as that which us to reflecting on ourselves and the world – that Plato’s language still addresses us today with its power.
Key words: ancient philosophy, Plato, art, poetry, mimesis, imitation, anamnesis, play, ontological openness
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Das Hauptthema des vorliegenden Beitrags ist das Verhältnis zwischen Empedokles’Lehre der Wanderung der Daimonen und der eshatologischen Doktrin, wie siein der hermetischen Schrift Korē kosmou bezeugt ist. In diesem Rahmen sind imersten Teil die archaischen griechischen Vorstellungen von der Metempsychose, mitbesonderer Hervorhebung der Denkart Empedokles’, kurz dargestellt. Im zweitenTeil hebt der Author einige allgemeine Parallelen zwischen der frühgriechischen Philosophie und dem Hermetismus hervor. Die wesentliche Analogie sieht der Author in zweifacher Konzeptualisierung des Kosmos, der einerseits als Gefängnisder göttlichen Seele und deshalb als negativ verstanden wird, anderseits aber alsein gelungenes Schöpfungswerk, das von Schönheit und Ordnung geziert ist, erfasst wird. Im dritten Teil versucht der Verfasser mit Hilfe des Abschnitts § 42des Korē kosmou einige Aspekte der Daimonen-Lehre Empedokles’ rückläufig zurekonstruiren, wobei ausführlicher die Kriterien ihres Aufstiegs und die Frageder ersten Inkarnation behandelt werden. Aufgrund der vergleichenden Analysestellt sich heraus, dass die Grundkriterien, die das weitere Geschick der Daimonenbestimmen, ausgesprochen moralischer Natur sind und man sie nicht nur auf Menschen, sondern auch auf Tiere und vielleicht sogar Pflanzen applizieren kann. In Hinsicht auf die Frage der ersten Inkarnation, neigt der Autor zur Meinung, dass den Ausgangspunkt, an dem die Kette der Wiedergeburten beginnt, nicht die Pflanzen als die niedrigste Form der Lebewesen darstellen, sondern die höchstedavon – der Mensch.
Stichwörter: frühgriechische Philosophie, Metempsychose, Empedokles, Wanderungder Daimonen, Hermetismus, hermetisches Traktat Korē kosmou
ASIAN PHILOSOPHY
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We will here describe the main methods of salvation of Indian non-theistic soteriologies. Ascesis, i.e. mortification of the flesh, is Jainism’s chosen method and logically related to its ontology, where activity is understood as something material. Cessation of activity, including refusal to satisfy basic biological needs, leads to salvation. Other theories claim that activity is a mental act, but also equate cessation of activity with salvation, here the cessation of psychomental activity. In Yoga e.g. salvation comes about with the ‘cessation of modifications of consciousness.’ Here the chosen method is meditation, systematic effort to concentrate attention in a single object, until all mental functions are pacified. Others see salvation as a cognitive act – an insight into the nature of the universe. Some reach this insight by metaphysical contemplation, and Buddhists, on the other hand, practice an introspective and analytic activity, which we for this purpose call contemplation. Finally, while theistic soteriologies, since they presuppose a superhuman principle, the highest good understand as a complete surrender to such being, soteriologies that we investigate stress independence and self-control in the effort to reach salvation.
Key words: soteriology, asceticism, stopping psychomental activity, meditation, understanding things as they are, contemplation, self-control
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The basic aim of the article is to present the basic features of the radical bhuddist negation of the Absolute, Being, “God” or any other thinkable principle, which is supposed to transcend the world (or consciousness) here and now, particularly on the basis of the earliest texts of Buddhist philosophy as found in Buddha’s canonical speeches under the title Sutta pitaka within the framework of the early Buddhist canon Tipitaka (“Three Baskets”).
Key words: Buddhism, negation, the Absolute, Sutta pitaka
PHILOSOPHICAL SYMPOSIUM "PHILOSOPHY AND CHALLENGES OF SLOVENE SOCIETY"
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Both the old philosopher Plato as the modern sociologist Bauman stress the social role of thinkers respectively philosophers. Plato in the Republic is convinced that philosophers have to be on the top of the social level because they have the leading role in the republic. Bauman stressing the role of sociologists ascertains that sociologists and other intellectuals have missed their critical duty. It seems that in the changes occurred in Slovenia the whole intellectual community together with the Slovenian philosophers has neglected this critical role. Obvious the change of the system, the foundation of the own state and especially establishing of the new economical and social order occupied all so much that everybody watched out only how to survive, thinking that time for philosophizing will come later. There is analogy to the process of globalization: economists take more and more the leading role and they govern politicians, critical thinkers have less and less to say. Theologians in Slovenia and around the World express the same uncertainty because of the problematic situation. To summarize: There are no bearers of critical thinking who could give the rails of the long-term development of the mankind.
Key words: philosophy, intellectuals, transition, (ir)responsibility, life, practice
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While the increasing variety of philosophical schools bears witness to the postmodern, hermeneutic age of reason and to its basic pluralism, religion still remains confronted with the prejudgment of promoting the (pre)modern ideal of a single rationality with its hidden potential of fundamentalism. The real situation however seems often to be the opposite: philosophy in relation to Christianity sticks to the modern positions of the Enlightenment, while the Christianity opens itself increasingly to the hermeneutical challenge. The article discusses some postmodern consequences both for philosophy and Christianity with special regard to the situation in Slovenia.
Key words: postmodern, philosophy, religion, Christianity, Slovenia
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The starting point of the concept of the present Slovene educational system has been the thesis that in contemporaneous pluralistic societies, where several different world views and value systems exist, public schools, which must be accessible to all, cannot be based on this or that particular value system, but only on the values that are almost universally accepted (such as human rights, tolerance and justice), and for this reason can be common almost to all citizens regardless of differences of their value preferences and religious or philosophical convictions. But the question is whether such values (as a base for public schools) are sufficient for providing and maintaining social unity. The problem of education in public schools is also in the fact that some of these values (for example, parents’ right to educate their children in conformity with their own religious or philosophical convictions and the right of children to freedom of religion) are in collision.
Key words: pluralism of values, education, indoctrination, human rights, tolerance
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Der Beitrag widmet sich dem Problem des Fehlens einer Dialogkultur in der slowenischen Gesellschaft, das aufs Engste mit der für diesen Raum typischen ideologischen Bipolarität in der Frage der Grundwerte und der politischen, ideologischen und weltanschaulichen Überzeugungen verbunden ist. Es handeltsich dabei in erster Linie um die Polarisierung zwischen dem sog. liberalen undklerikalen Block. Bei der kritischen Beurteilung der möglichen Gründe für diesen Tatbestand ist der Großteil der Aufmerksamkeit auf den liberalen Block gerichtet; einerseits deshalb, weil er dafür – wie gezeigt werden soll – größere objective Verantwortung trägt und andererseits, weil sein philosophischer Hintergrundbesser artikuliert ist. Es wird die These vertreten, dass der richtige Beitrag deskritischen Denkens innerhalb der behandelten Bipolarität nicht darin besteht, bipolarnostmit argumentativen Mitteln eine von beiden Positionen zu verteidigen unddie andere zu verwerfen, sondern zu zeigen, warum beide in anthropologischer Hinsicht überhaupt möglich und letztendlich auch sinnvoll sind. Aufgrund derkurzen Analyse des negativen und des positiven Freiheitsbegriff es werden im letzten Teil einige Kriterien behandelt, die die regulativen Bedingungen des Dialogs und damit den Übergang der stark politisierten slowenischen Gesellschaft in Richtungihrer Humanisierung ermöglichen sollten.
Schlüsselwörter: Dialog, negative Freiheit, Ideologie, positive Freiheit, Humanität
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In the paper I open some questions about the role of moral theory and intuitions. I briefly defend intuitions as a way of attaining knowledge and then I deal with characteristics of moral intuition. In the second part I question the epistemic value and dynamics of ordinary intuitions that accompany judgments of particular cases. It is this sort of intuitions or beliefs that moral philosophers often appeal to when arguing for or against a particular moral theory. I discuss the so-called counter examples and thought experiments as “intuitions pumps” and related problems for philosophical discussion. Using these starting points I try to provide an answer to the question about the relationship between moral theory and practice. In the end I defend moral intuition as a constituent of reflective equilibrium method that lies in between moral theory and practice.
Key words: moral theory, intuition, common sense moral beliefs, moral dilemmas, hard cases, practical ethics, moral experts, reflective equilibrium.
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If philosophy isn’t interested in politics, then politics is interested in philosophy and vice versa. Therefore, it is difficult to ignore all circumstances, in which philosophy happened to be in the times, when once again freedom attempted to become real. Freedom is in everlasting contradiction with the unavoidability of the necessity to be itself an object of a definition. In the meantime the Subject in philosophy turned out to be missing. This absence of Subject inscribed itself into the realm of the notion of event. What would be, what is not the closed society anymore? What is, then, what should be an emerging society, the society in crisis, which, according to Deleuze from the end of eighties, overwhelmed all closed milieus? Deleuze’s answer isn’t optimistic and it opposes some sociological eulogies to the information society. It also sharply opposes administrative visions of a society of an open organisation and, finally, it emphatically opposes economic and educational projections of so called “knowledge society.” As much as the level, on which Deleuze wrote, might be compared with the level of an articulation of not entirely different topic in the book by Christopher Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, we observe the same critical spirit in the diagnosis: they both ascertain mechanisms, which don’t operate through an external compulsion. They do it with the invisible compulsion, or else, with the compulsion of visibility. Is this, after all, that freedom, which motivated citizens of socialism to awake from decades of lethargy. We don’t believe anymore to the old journalistic euphoria concerning the revolution against socialism in 1989, in the name of freedom – not in the urban fields and much less in philosophy. Apparitions of the Weimar symptom call our attention to the fact that these recently “liberated societies” face the problem of making a genuine social contract. This one will have to be – unlike the only presumed bourgeois one – much more real to function. Following Deleuze, the question of freedom on this level is already obsolete. It is not explicitly put since it perhaps lost its relevance as the society of control is identified with freedom itself. We talk about a system of control, under which free movements from one area to another are taken as self-evident and they are properly coded. Interdiction makes place to a request for literacy in code systems on the frontiers of openness – chip card along with still useful magnetic card is becoming the metaphor of freedom in the society of control. However, wasn’t it obvious from a long time ago that a logical completion of system of freedom, which is limited by law (containing the illusion of autonomous Subject) would be a possible voluntary slavery in a dominion of smiles and self-evident happiness as the supreme law? Finally, it will seem that we left behind a great transformation, when the law doesn’t restrict the freedom but the freedom restricts the law.
Key words: freedom, society, Subject, politics, control
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The contemporary Catholic theologian of Swiss origin Hans Küng (born in 1928), whose principled heretic stance even amounted to his eventual loss of venia legendi at the Catholic Faculty in Tübingen, is a creator of a new world ethos. According to him, world ethos does not imply a new world religion but rather an all-abiding ethical coordinate system. Ethics which the world ethos propones is universal, holding good for every human being from common men to politicians, scientists, artists, i.e. for all people in their various professions regardless of their race, culture, religion, worldview, for the believers and nonbelievers, the religious and non-religious. The article pays special attention to the meaning of basic trust – saying yes to the world, reality – since, according to Hans Küng, it is from this trust that autonomy of man, self-lawfulness and the feeling of self-responsibility stem from, bringing about man’s self-realization and the formation of the world. Basic trust, which proves contrary to nihilism or the nihilation of the world – the one who does not trust the world can even say no to it – is the basis of fundamental ethos, life ethos, and taken globally, world ethos. In his more recent works, Hans Küng’s views challenge globalization, which spreads to all areas of life, which is why the present paper emphasizes his determined demand: “Globalization takes for granted also the globalization of world ethos: in view of the problems of the world politics and world economy it calls for world ethos, which is acceptable for both the world religions and the nonbelievers, humanists, worldlings.” Of course, there remain open all the dilemmas – in our Slovene environment as well – as to the effectiveness of universal ethics in general and the issues concerning the possibility of an ethics as such regarding the nature and nurture of man; however, the need for ethics is there to remain, and is becoming more and more pressing.
Key words: Hans Küng, world ethos, basic trust, globalization, world peace
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We have to know how science and technology enter into modern society if we want to understand a possible transformation of modern societies in the knowledge societies. We have to consider how science and technology change in this process and how they at the same time change the society. These changes do not happen in a historically and societally empty space but in the given socio-economical conditions which are determined by many system conflicts and contrarieties. We cannot arbitrary change these conditions. In order to understand the phenomenon and the concept of knowledge society we need further, yet not developed concept of science as mutually intertwined social and economical process. We assume that the knowledge society tends to a similar organization as the modern sciences, that is, to a non-hierarchical, parallel-distributed way of functioning. It develops the specific forms of rationality. I believe it is a special form of socially distributed rationality which is realizing mostly by implicit rules of collective and individual agency which support the growing of epistemic culture in society. I discuss the role and possibility of philosophy in the development of epistemic culture in Slovenia.
Key words: modern science, knowledge society, epistemic culture, distributed knowledge, rules of rationality
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In Slovenia we are experiencing an interesting combination of the impact of philosophical concepts on concrete political circumstances. The “relaxed Slovenia”, the main ideologem of new political government from the elections in 2004, hides in itself prominently philosophical roots. After the support of right political option by intellectuals around Nova revija and the so-called Zbor za republiko, it was the philosophical program of “relaxedness” or releasment, which was delivered to the politicians for their usage. “Relaxedness” iz basically taken from Heidegger andis a Slovenian translation of his concept of Gelassenheit. What followed was that purely economic, educational, political and other issues started to be explained to us as something which has to be formed by “relaxedness”: economy, education, media et cetera, were supposed to achieve relaxedness (or Releasement). Such very general and imperative usage of the philosophical concept of Gelassenheit is here obviously essentially transformed and shows as an interesting contact between a philosopheme and (political) reality. It also opens an old discussion about the role of the philosophers in the political arena, which goes back to Plato. Are we allowed to claim that a part of philosophy in Slovenia is somehow not only thinking politics, but also creating it?
Key words: philosophy, relaxedness, Gelassenheit, Slovenian politics, Heidegger
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In a society where experience is increasingly emphasized, and where according to Schulz a man is positioned onto a social ladder according to what experience he can afford, in Philosophy lessons it is difficult to insist only on teaching about certain thinkers and their ideas. Such reaction of the youth is merely the indication of a general state of society, where experience is an essential moment. The demands for increasing role of education for common social values in a whole process of education will hardly achieve their goal, unless we together, in the so called ‘thrill-seeking society’, (Erlebnisgesellschaft) find a way of how to present to the youth the virtues of citizenship as meaningful. L. Ferry, by making a new sense of evaluation tries to solve the inability of modern society by overcoming its sheer focus onto satisfying its narrow individual present needs for experience. His way will lead us to a new form of lessons. The experience in Philosophy lessons should continually lead to a consideration about meaningfulness of the essential contemporary values. In this way we help the youth to outgrow the level of critique per se and direct them towards the search for a common good appropriate for themselves, which can be a good foundation for citizenship culture of the future.
Key words: Philosophy lessons, thrill-seeking society, evaluation, criticalness, social commitment
INTERNATIONAL PHILOSOPHICAL SYMPOSIUM "PERSON AND THE GOOD"
PSYCHOLOGY
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The systematic research of positive aspects of human life has not been accomplished in psychology until recent times. In the recent rise of positive psychology we can already find important scientific contributions including some theoretical models. They have been focused around theoretical constructs like subjective and psychological well-being (WB), satisfaction with life, positive affect, optimism, happiness, flow, hope etc. Nevertheless, the entire universe of numerous variables adhering to domains of so-called positive psychology has never been thoroughly and comprehensively explained. The aim of the present theoretical review is to examine the leading models of positive psychology, namely the model of subjective well-being (SWB), psychological well-being (PB) and others. In the study, we discussed the definitions and conceptions of well-being, the measurement of WB, the structure and components of WB, the relationship between WB and other dimensions in the models of positive psychology and the relationship between WB and other psychological and psychosocial variables including personality, cognitive dimensions, goals and values and demographic variables (age, sex, income, education, marital status, religiosity etc.). A special attention is devoted to the cultural and international aspects of WB, to the connections to psychological health or adjustment and to various explanatory models of WB. Finally, the results of our empirical studies concerning WB are briefly reviewed.
Key words: positive psychology, psychological health, psychological well-being, subjective emotional well-being, life satisfaction, positive affect, negative affect, happiness, optimism
ANTHROPOLOGY
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The position of the delinquent is explicitly determined by formal and legal categories rather than solely by socio-cultural imagination, as is the case with the position of the artist. The latter attempts to “separate” himself from his or her own practice and artwork by being an author. A remarkable artwork is therefore not a sufficient guarantee for a remarkable personality and the individual’s way of life. Can the same be said, does the same hold true for the delict and delinquent? Is this practice a direct expression of their own personality? Or rather only of their situation and socio-cultural moments? Even though the delinquent and the artist in this way or another supposedly enter the field of “marginality”, they are more and more decisively situated in the centre of social reality. Nonetheless, they arouse fear and fascination, opening up the untenable. They can set up new rules and establish new orders.
Key words: prohibition, transgression, the holy and profane, delict and delinquent, artist
TOPICAL
REVIEW
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