The origins and crisis of Continental philosophy

When contemporary continental philosophy dismisses, with the discourse of post-modernism, the role of origin, teleology, foundation, etc., it is forsaking its own style of thinking and as a consequence is no longer able to discern crises of lived-meaning or to engage in the transformation of historical life. I address this crisis by characterizing continental philosophy as a particular style of thinking, generative thinking. I then examine the meaning and origins of philosophical thinking by drawing, for strategic reasons, on Jacques Derrida's essay Cogito et histoire de la folie. For not only has the very question of origins come under fire through various post-modern readings of Derrida, but Derrida's own point of critique concerning Western Metaphysics depends upon a specific understanding of origin that I call origin-originating. In the final section of this paper. I interpret the crisis within continental philosophy as a forgetting the point of origin-originating within the generative structure of experience.     

Die Rechtsansichten der Eurasier -- Rechtsordnung oder Wertordnung?

In their juridical doctrines, the members of the Evrazijstvo movement advocated the idea of a Russian special path criticizing at the same time the formalism and coldness of the western conception of law, based principally on Roman law. Their views are characterized by an evident priority accorded to justice over law, to the order of values over legal order.     

Critique of the unconscious: Kantian influences in the works of Lucian Blaga

Lucian Blaga was the creator of a speculative and metaphoric philosophical system that placed mystery at its very core. Mystery, according to Blaga, veils existence and represents both a stimulus and a brake for human knowledge. His articulation of this view is strongly indebted to Kant, whose transcendental philosophy he sought to extend by critically examining the forms of sensibility and categories of the understanding, not so much in relation to consciousness, but as they are duplicated, or doubled, in the unconscious. The result is Blaga's stylistic apriorism, according to which the unconscious always manages consciousness through abyssal categories in terms of which different regions and peoples at once reveal and remain isolated from mystery.     

The "Natural" and the "Formal"

The paper presents an argument against a metaphysical conception of logic according to which logic spells out a specific kind of mathematical structure that is somehow inherently related to our factual reasoning. In contrast, it is argued that it is always an empirical question as to whether a given mathematical structure really does captures a principle of reasoning. (More generally, it is argued that it is not meaningful to replace an empirical investigation of a thing by an investigation of its a priori analyzable structure without paying due attention to the question of whether it really is the structure of the thing in question.) It is proposed to elucidate the situation by distinguishing two essentially different realms with which our reason must deal: the realm of the natural, constituted by the things of our empirical world, and the realm of the formal, constituted by the structures that we use as prisms to view, to make sense of, and to reconstruct the world. It is suggested that this vantage point may throw light on many foundational problems of logic.     

Moral Philosophy and the Ontology of Relations

The essay undertakes to explore the possibilities of mutually fruitful dialogue between moral philosophy and ontology, in particular, the ontology of relations. The latter copes with the question of how relations relate, whereas moral philosophy often ignores the ontological implications of such crucial relations as love and interpersonality. The paper proceeds as follows. First, the ontology of relations is discussed. Second, various examples are analysed. From this, a conception of relation instantiation emerges, according to which to determine which relation actually obtains, one has to take into account (a) the context, (b) the specific content or meaning of the relation, and (c) some action or decision or mode of existence of the relata. This conception suggests that relation instantiation cannot be explained by a single formula. By the help of this conception, Hume's thesis of the identity of killing relations between human and nonhuman beings is questioned. Then, the relation of love is analysed. It is shown that love as a moral relation is perfectly explicable in terms of ontology. Moreover, its essence is best captured by the interrelation of the particulars, the relation of love as a universal, and by the relating action of the particulars. Finally, the alleged relation of universal fraternity (interpersonality as such), linking up each human being to all other human beings, is discussed.     

The analysis of experience: John Dewey and Elsie Ripley Clapp on desire and thinking, 1911

Unpublished correspondence with Elsie Ripley Clapp, along with extensive notes for a 1911 course, The Analysis of Experience, provide the context for a consideration of John Dewey's discussion of the relation between desire and thinking. Dewey's philosophic point of view is portrayed as it was developing in his own mind. The unity of thought and desire, the necessity of making objects of inquiry, the identification of thinking and acting, are themes in these materials which would appear in their published form in such works as Essays in Experimental Logic, Democracy and Education, and Human Nature and Conduct. In the unpublished materials, Dewey is seen as a naturalist at work in his laboratory, reworking his ideas and acknowledging Clapp's assistance in getting Dewey to connect practical situations in life with the philosophic distinctions under development. The 1911 materials are an excellent connection between problematics in Dewey's earlier writings on ethics, epistemology, and logic, and his later writings, on the same subjects in the 1920's and 1930's.     

‘Why not Lukács?’ or: on Non-Bourgeois Bourgeois Being

The Lukács Circle in Szeged, a spontaneous, unofficial organization of young Hungarian scholars and philosophy teachers, characteristically represented Georg Lukács' influence on young Hungarian intelligentsia in the period of late socialism. In this paper, the author recalls and critically analyses the intellectual milieu and motives that led a considerable part of young Hungarian intelligentsia of that time to make a cult of Lukács' philosophy. The key to the analysis is the ambiguous character of the political feelings and philosophical orientation of many young people in the period of late socialism and the paradoxical non-bourgeois bourgeois character of Lukács' philosophy. Lukács' young followers were dissatisfied with the political conditions of real socialism and with official Marxism. However, they considered themselves Marxists and were convinced by the anti-capitalist, romantic idea of democratic socialism. In the eyes of his young followers, Lukács was a genuine philosopher whose teaching was interwoven by his wide-ranging bourgeois middle-class education, promising both a real philosophical alternative to official Marxism and a high-level philosophical foundation for a non-capitalist but democratic future human history. The author argues that Lukács' philosophy did not satisfy these expectations. In his political philosophy, the philosopher could not move away from the mythological idea concerning the leading role of the communist party and therefore could not elaborate a genuine philosophical foundation for the idea of democratic socialism. Despite the superiority of his philosophy, his methodology and approach to the history of philosophy failed to provide a real philosophical alternative to the Bolshevik tradition of Marxism.     

Die philosophisch-theologische Begründung des Eurasismus bei L. P. Karsavin

The Evrazijstvo movement was an intellectual current which recognized the Revolution of 1917 as a fateful event and conceived itself as a third way for Russia between individualism and Soviet Communism. At the philosophical level Evrazijstvo was an extension of the Russian Idea. Basing himself on the principle of All-Unity Karsavin put his concept of the symphonic personality to work in critically referring to the philosophical concepts and methodological approaches then current in Europe. The Evrazijstvo idea was later to be reduced to the idea of the political power of ideocracy, an ideology of dictatorship and power, which raised sympathies for the strong state of the Soviet dictatorship, thus failing to provide a real alternative to the latter.     

Rhetoric and “doing philosophy”

By drawing new distinctions labelled appeal and response to replace traditional rhetorical modes of written discourse, the essay sketches a new perspective about what philosophers are doing rhetorically in doing philosophy. To think of philosophers as simply engaged in argument is an oversimplification and a distortion of what philosophers do. Crucial to doing philosophy are four activities: (1) definition and redefinition of problems and issues that form both the focus of the canonical historical literature of philosophy and what goes on in contemporary philosophy as a discipline, (2) the development and use of formal languages and technical vocabularies to abbreviate and label complexity and to disambiguate and precise distinctions necessary to deal with problems and issues, (3) the development and exploration of argumentative appeals for acceptance or refutation of answers to questions raised by the philosophical problematic, and (4) the development and exploration of explanatory responses to questions raised by the problematic. In so far as these four activities are driven and sanctioned by the current, self-defining philosophical problematic, contemporary philosophy as a body of knowledge is historical, cumulative, and marked by progress, and the doing of philosophy is fundamentally the making of written appeals and responses about its problematic.     

On objectivity

The following definition of objective is proposed: A statement S is objective if and only if in S all parameters that are relevant to its truth value are made explicit. The objectivity of predicates and relations can be defined in a similar manner. This simple conception of objectivity-which could be called explicitness conception of objectivity-can be found in Hermann Weyl and plays a central part in the natural sciences. There are grades of objectivity depending on the quality and the number of parameters our predicates are relativized to A relativistic Ockham principle has to be recognized: Relativization parameters are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. The explicitness conception of objectivity is accessible to mathematical specifications, is the core of the idea of invariance, has a lot of philosophical applications and leads to precise notions of subjectivity and a precise formulation of the problem of the limits of objectivity.I am grateful to Andreas Bartels, Ulrich Gähde, Mark Helme, Andreas Kamlah, Andreas Kemmerling, Winfred Klink, Toni Koch, Hilary Putnam and Matthias Varga von Kibéd who have, in one way or another, contributed to the present content and form of this paper.     

Theory of philosophy as a science of the symbolic

This study tries to put the foundations of a theory of reasoning on the ground of philosophy as philosophy: what are the presupposed terms of the philosophical research, and what they are meaning. It intends to separate words from their evident meaning and to receive them as symbolic items. Symbolization is the most important way of proceeding in philosophy. Philosophers are usually not aware of this symbolical process. Thus, the structure of knowing in philosophy is presented as a way of symbolizing. This perspective is open in referring to the traditional problems.     

Logic and Sin: Wittgenstein's Philosophical Education at the Limits of Language

Unfortunately, Wittgenstein has entered the philosophical canon, an entrance that has served to reify interpretations of his work. In this essay I refer to recent books by Richard Eldridge (1997) and Phillip Shields (1998) which allow us again to see The Philosophical Investigations as something more than a stultifying relic. Specifically, these authors, by reading Wittgenstein's work not merely as text but also as performance, allow us to enact our own liberating performances of that work. To engage in such enactments of freedom is the essence of philosophical education in the sense established by extra-canonical writers such as Socrates and the Stoics, on the one hand, and Emerson and James, on the other. At least this is so if my use of the work of classicist Pierre Hadot, on the one hand, and brief reference to literary critic Richard Poirier, on the other, is at all successful in illuminating theses from Eldridge and Shields on the nature of Wittgensteinian philosophy.     

The Origin of the Concept of “Allgemeinbildung” in 18th Century Germany

The German theory of education refers mainly to what is called Bildung. The historical sense of Bildung is not cultivaion, but cultivation for inwardness. This concept has two sources, the neo-platonic inner soul on one hand, pietistic piety on the other hand. The article shows that these sources had been part of European discussions before the development of national cultures after 1750. So the German concept of Bildung, famous for the German Sonderweg in culture and politics, had been composed out of non-German sources. The nationalizaiton of inwardness began at the end of the 18th century and was established in 19th century German Higher Education.     

The endorsement of irrational beliefs in a general clinical population

Burgess' Attitude and Belief Scale, a measure of Ellis' irrational beliefs, was administered to a large sample of outpatients. All 13 subscales demonstrate very adequate internal consistency. A factor analysis yielded one factor accounting for 83% of the variance, which was labeled irrationality. Clients endorsed focused items more than overgeneralized items, self-referential items more than non-self-referential items, and preferential items more than irrational items. Clients also received higher scores on the irrational process of demandingness than they did on the irrational process of awfulizing, self-worth and low frustration tolerance. The results were consistent with new formulations in Rational-Emotive theory. Suggestions were made for the construction of measures of irrational beliefs.     

Variations in use of the term “or”

Two studies showed that adults' responses to questions involving the term or varied markedly depending upon the type of question presented. When presented with various objects (A's and B's) and asked to circle all things which are A or B subjects tended to circle A's as well as B's, whereas when asked to circle all the A's or B's subjects showed a relatively stronger tendency to circle one or the other. Moreover the nature of the sets of objects (As and Bs) influenced behavior as well. There was also evidence that the effects due to question wording or set type transferred.     

Logical pragmatism and dialectical materialism: The beginning of dialogue

A philosophical movement, correctly called logical pragmatism, is growing up around the philosophy of W. V. O. Quine, Soviet scholars follow this development with clear and well-grounded understanding of the origins and tenets of the system. This essay continues the dialogue between contemporary Marxism-Leninism and logical pragmatism recommended by Soviet scholars.A Russian translation of this article is being published inFilosofskie nauki (Moscow).     

Nohl, Durkheim, and Mead: Three Different Types of "History of Education"

Historiography of education is not only a question of construction but also of selection. In 19th century history of education was typically a genre of great educators, mostly male and only marginally female. This construct is influential up to now, at least in popular contexts of educational reasoning. The article discusses in the introductory section problems of selection of names and meanings within history of education, and then three types of historiographical writing that are not only concerned with great educators but have larger Philosophical impact. The first type is Herman Nohls history of German progressive education, the second one is Emile Durkheims history of Higher Education in France, and the third one is George Herbert Meads Movements of Thought in 19th Century. The article compares them and discusses their implications for further development of historical writing in education.     

Some aspects of eloquence in Descartes's works

In Descartes's philosophy, communicating scientific and philosophical truth does not represent a problem that can be traced back to humanistic rhetoric, meant as the art of persuasion. Descartes states his belief in the eloquence of reason: a clear, precise, and adequately expressed thought cannot fail to convince the listener. This is the measure of the distance between the level of truth and the level of opinion. However, the moment of confrontation with the public is also the very moment when the truth of the new knowledge enters into conflict with other, different conceptions. Education and history influence communication with the result that the distinction between intellectual conviction and persuasion becomes less straightforward. Rational eloquence, as Descartes is well aware, must be articulated in such a way as to avoid any possible language equivocation and to adopt exposition strategies ensuring effective access to readers. The aim of this paper is to illustrate some aspects of this tension as expressed by the writer Descartes with reference to a number of texts (from the Regulae to the Meditationes) that were essential for the elaboration and dissemination of his philosophy.     

Maturing Religious Experience and the Postmodern Self

Past attempts to define mature religion have been rooted in a modernist theological anthropology which assumes an atomistic, universal, rational, and stable human self. Yet postmodernists resist universal statements about humanity and understand the self as an ever-changing social construct. This paper suggests a theological anthropology more adequate to the postmodern world, examines maturing religious experience from this perspective, and considers ways pastoral care/counseling can nurture healthy, integrative, and maturing Christian faith in postmodern culture.     

O pojęciu zdania analitycznego

Rezultaty przedstawione w pracy niniejszej pokrywaj si czciowo z wynikami osignitymi przezR. Wójcickiego w pracy:Analityczne komponenty definicji arbitralnych. Studia Logica, t. XIV. Dotyczy to gównie rezultatów zawartych w czci pierwszej. Chciabym podkreli, i wyniki R. Wójcickiego uzyskane zostay cakowicie niezalenie od rezultatów przedstawionych w pracy obecnej.Allatum est die 16 Aprilis 1962