Mikis Theodorakis : la rencontre éternelle de la Poésie et de la Musique

This chapter focuses on an international circle of communist poets active during the long 1930s: Nâzim Hikmet (Turkey), Pablo Neruda (Chile), Muriel Rukeyser and Langston Hughes (USA), and Yannis Ritsos (Greece). Described variously as “poetry international” (Aijaz Ahmad) and “radical moderns” (Michael Denning), these poets represent a distinctive moment for left-wing aesthetics and internationalist solidarity. This chapter discusses the common events and experiences that appear across their poems (especially the Spanish Civil War). It analyzes the twin themes of love (as a form of solidarity across distance) and “the people” (the creation of a usable national past). These make up a “1930s structure of feeling,” which the chapter compares with the dominant aesthetic modes, sensibility, and genres of the present day. The chapter discusses the contemporary prospects for a global cultural movement resisting populism and authoritarianism, arguing that the poetry of the 1930s may inspire but cannot serve as the basis for the poetry of today.

Pablo Neruda's Canto general was first published in Mexico in 1950. It is the song of a continent, written to bring a new kind of America into being. Arguably the epitome of the Nerudian oeuvre, the book attempts to produce an exuberant, extraordinary fertility. In Neruda's own words, it is a poem emerges from a secret womband flows, fertilizing and singing. It kindles with its swelling waters, it works at milling flour, tanning hides, cutting wood, giving light to cities. It is useful, and awakens to find banners along its banks: festivals are celebrated beside the singing water.1Neruda's inexhaustible belief in the power of his poetry, in its ability to propose and develop new modes of being, contrasts starkly with Wright's own. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, understanding the difference between the two poets' public receptions is essential to understanding some of the differences between the trajectories of their poetries. In Neruda, we have a poet who feels cherished by his reading public. My contact with the masses makes me think, he was to say in an interview in 1965, that some of the people most receptive to my poetry are the Chilean people [...]. In few countries in the world is a poet listened to with so much attention and dignity as in our small country.2 Indeed, by the 1960s Neruda was a national and international icon. Although he had been famous in Chile from his late teens, now his poems were translated into dozens of languages and received by millions of readers. To this day, he remains one of the most widely translated poets in history. Next to Neruda's, then, Wright's public presence is distinctively paler. A growing scepticism about the power of poetry to affect change in those areas of the world she thought most important led Wright to channel her energy into other projects. Neruda, by contrast, was never forced to confront questions about the necessity of poetry, or about its relevance in particular social contexts. Consequently, his singing could continue unhindered.In this chapter I will discuss what, precisely, is so problematical about Neruda's lack of restraint. For this very bounty of optimistic energy is what pushes the Nerudian voice to roll blindly into places where it otherwise might have travelled with greater caution (or might not have travelled at all). As his career progresses, Neruda will come to believe he, via his language, can touch everything. As a result, where a feature of Wright's poetics is the problematical relationship between language and the wider world, for Neruda this question is absorbed into a broader one having to do with his body 's problematical relationship to Chile, particularly in his constant re-imagining of his location. For Neruda, language is not an abstract visual cipher, but emerges in the corporeality of his being. The nature of Nerudian language precludes the distance art, as considered in Western terms, assumes between speaker and audience, signified and signifier, and even man and nature.3 The poetic word is, above all, the spoken word, which is bom in the blood and takes flight through the lips and mouth, as he writes in La palabra (the word).4 Yet this fleshy, earthy aspect of Nemda is complicated by his disregard for the physical limits imposed by such corporeality. For there are many, many Nemdas: the natural, the erotic, the nationalist, the political, the solitary, and the personal; of his poetic personae he would confess, in his 1958 volume Estravagario: We are many.5 He seemed to encourage this multiplicity internationally, too, allowing various translators to work on the same poem, at times even simultaneously.6 By so readily assuming an organic relationship with the wider world, therefore, we will see Nemda's poetic language actually becomes a kind of invasive species. Writing from so many places at once, Nerudian colonization is often overwhelming.A Residence in the EarthBefore looking at the problems of Neruda's boundless organicism in Canto general, it is necessary to begin by isolating its emergent properties in some of the poems from Residencia en la tierra (? …

This research proposes philosophy as an intellectual immunity and a way to open up to others in order to prevent violence discussed. Therefore, the research is a serious philosophical attempt to discuss one of the dangerous issues that contemporary man suffers from, which is terrorism and violence extremism. The philosophical approach to this issue is analysis and criticism, and then the alternative available to it. Secondly, the research deals with the interpretation of the role of philosophy in how to deal with crises by presenting keyconcepts and ideas stemming from the great philosophers. The new interpretation that the researcher offers to philosophy is that philosophy is an intellectual and preventive deterrent to extremism and terrorism. In other words; Philosophical thinking is tantamount to digging up the wrong intellectual and logical foundations on which extremism and terrorism are based. By presenting the alternative, and the effort is not focused only on denouncing or rhetorically denouncing the issue. The research is an answer to the questions that are often asked: What is the role of philosophy in dealing with the crises that contemporary man is going through? Can critical philosophical thought be an intellectual and mental skill to reduce the effects of extremist thought or weaken the tendency toward extremism? Can the extremist person be intellectually deformed and mentally ill, or are there other things behind him? Through this question, the researcher goes deep into Greek philosophy, especially Stoicism, and defines philosophy through the role or function it plays in dealing with the problem of terrorism and extremism.

The article is dedicated to the problem of relevance of the Classical Greek understanding of philosophy to contemporary philosophy. A distinction is made between the relevance of the Greek philosophy that has already been realized, or made actual, in the sphere of contemporary philosophy and culture, and the relevance of the Greek philosophy which is yet in need of realization, that is, which has a potential of being realized in the future. The author, mainly focusing on this latter kind of relevance, for it is more interesting from the philosophical point of view and suggests new ways to reinvigorate the contemporary field of philosophical thought, discusses the original Greek understanding of philosophy that can be discerned from the ancient Greek philosophical texts and the original Greek term for philosophy, philosophia. The author presents an analysis of the Greek word philosophia from the etymological and conceptual points of view, disclosing its several layers of meaning. It is argued that the Greek philosophical thinking employs a productive combination of pre-methodical and methodical thought, deriving from this combination a specific synergy that might also be useful to contemporary philosophy. A point is made that the original Greek notion of philosophy, understood as the love of divine wisdom, presupposes both modesty, stemming from the acknowledgment of one’s absolute ignorance of the most important philosophical answers, and intellectual passion. The author makes a claim that the original close and deep relation between the Greek philosophy and astronomy was instrumental in the original Greek understanding of the philosopher as a theōros of a special kind, that is, as a theoretic viewer of the entire cosmos who focuses on the whole of the cosmos (or reality in general), not on its individual constituents and details. What was expected of the Greek philosopher was the ability to deeply appreciate the beauty, unity, and underlying divine order of the cosmos, not the capacity to acquire the knowledge of concrete information related to it. The attention is drawn to the circumstance that the Greek philosopher’s aesthetic appreciation of the cosmos that took place at the moments of its theoretical contemplation had also a specific ethical aspect to it – an aspect that cannot be simply explained in terms of the Classical Greek virtue ethics and can be rather viewed in terms of the modern approaches to ethics. The relation between the ability to acknowledge one’s ignorance of the most important matters and the capacity to theoretically contemplate and aesthetically appreciate the cosmos in holistic terms is viewed by the author as potentially relevant to those contemporary thinkers who seek to reassert the unique status of philosophy, its special place among other disciplines, and to rethink the radical difference between philosophy and science. After discussing some other aspects of potential relevance of the Greek understanding of philosophy to contemporary philosophy, the author makes a conclusion that the Classical Greek understanding of the nature of philosophy should be viewed not as having to replace, but as being able to complement the current understanding of the nature and mission of philosophy.

The superiority and honor was granted to the human being due to knowledge and intellect. The branches of knowledge include logic, philosophy, rationale and scholasticism. In the field of philosophy the Greek remained on high rank. It can be said that all the successive philosophers followed Greek philosophy. Socrates laid the foundation of Greek philosophy, after him his pupil Plato not only compiled his works of his teacher but also amended some fine new things and on some places he contradicted with his teacher. Aristotle the pupil of Plato raised the Greek philosophy to the climax. The great Muslim philosopher of the current era Allama Muhammad Iqbal also served a lot in the field of philosophy. In this research article the thoughts of Iqbal are analyzed as to what extent he derived his thoughts from Greek philosophy and which points he differed with it.

7 Franciscan Studies 60 (2002) BEYOND THE PRIME MOVER OF ARISTOTLE: FAITH AND REASON IN THE MEDIEVAL FRANCISCAN TRADITION In his work entitled Metaphysics,1 the great Greek philosopher, Aristotle, leads the reader on a search for the knowledge of first causes. Such knowledge, he argues, transcends all other sciences. It is here that we find a clear statement of his argument for the theory of the four causes. Then, in book twelve of the same work, he leads us beyond the four causes to the Prime Mover. This, argues Aristotle, is pure being, pure actuality, total knowledge which has itself alone as its object.2 It is here that we encounter Aristotle’s God; a God defined as “noesis noeseos;” that is, “thought of thought.” This God is subsistent thought which eternally thinks itself in an eternal act of selfconsciousness .3 This God is not the creator of the world. In fact, Aristotle’s world has no creator, for it exists eternally, without beginning or end. And this God has no loving, providential care for the world or for human beings. But as pure, self-contained, monadic Being it is the transcendent end toward which all movement in the world is directed. In this sense it is “the object of the world’s desire.”4 In what sense would this Aristotelian understanding of God and the metaphysics in which it plays such an important role be seen as compatible with or coherent with the Christian understanding of God and of theology? This was a major question for Christian scholars of the thirteenth century. This was part of the problem involved at that time when, after centuries of familiar engagement with Platonic and neo-Platonic philosophy, Western Christian culture came to a confrontation with this “new philosophy.” How can such a philosophy possibly be related to the tradition of Christian wisdom? Not all 1 Aristotle, The Metaphysics, tr. John H. McMahon (Amherst, N.Y., 1991). 2 Aristotle, op. cit., 12, 6-9. p. 255ff. 3 Werner Jaeger, Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of his Development, tr. R. Robinson (Oxford University Press, 1962) 2nd edition, pbk, p. 346. Jaeger formulates Aristotle’s concept of the divine as follows: “ . . . thought thinks itself, and in this creative act it eternally enjoys its own absolute perfection.” 4 Jaeger, op. cit., p. 222. ZACHARY HAYES 8 scholars of the thirteenth century dealt with this question in the same way. We would like to discuss Bonaventure’s approach to the problem. The issue involves a perennial question of the relation between what is possible to pure, natural human reason on the one hand, and what insight might be possible in the light of the Christian religious experience on the other hand. While it is clear from Bonaventure’s writings that he was a metaphysical thinker, and while it is clear that he was quite familiar with the philosophy of Aristotle, it must also be said that he never took up the cause of the Aristotelian movement in the way that marks the work of his contemporary, Thomas Aquinas. The matter of Bonaventure’s assessment of Aristotle had been the subject of considerable debate among scholars of the twentieth century. At the present time, it is fair to say that Bonaventure related to Aristotle in a way that was respectful yet critical. Already in his early Sentence Commentary he calls Aristotle the “princeps et dux” of the Peripatetics.5 This seems to reflect a genuine respect for the Philosopher. His view involves a positive recognition of what the great philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle were able to accomplish. But respectful as he was, he was also critical, not hesitating to point out problems with the Aristotelian philosophy. In his Sentence Commentary6 Bonaventure expresses his conviction that Aristotle had made some serious mistakes. For example, the idea of the eternity of the world appeared to be in open contradiction with the biblical tradition concerning creation. In Bonaventure’s view, the most serious of these philosophical mistakes was Aristotle’s rejection of the Platonic theory of exemplarity. Bonaventure mentions this already in the Sentence Commentary,7 but the issue becomes even more obvious in the later Collations, both...

Farabi, the great philosopher and founder of Islamic philosophy, has a comprehensive global political system for managing humanity entitled the city of Fazila. The city of Fazila is a city that is perfect in all aspects and contrary to the cities of non-fazila and leads us towards eternal happiness. The people of Fazila are working hand in hand for happiness. Farabi, taking advantage of Islam and ancient Greek philosophy, establishes a strong political system in which he believes that morality and politics bind an inseparable relationship. This means that the essence of politics reaches virtue within the framework of morality and the commitment of the people of Fazila a city to high morals. The ruler and the country's president are very important to Farabi. It is an important source of policy implementation and the high principles of The City of Fazila and provides happiness for its people. The ruler has qualities such as psychological, physical, and wisdom that distinguish him from all the people of the city and provide him with the ability to take responsibility for the country. In this way, Farabi establishes the theory of the Islamic State as a Muslim philosopher, and despite taking advantage of old Greek philosophy, especially philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, it opens the time for the realization and preservation of a set of established Islamic principles, such as believing in God, the messenger and the angels, the existence of inspiration and the revelation of God, and knowing the psyche and the universe in his Islamic state. In terms of education, politics, morality and division of the community classes, and the characteristics of the city's president and ruler (Shahfailasuf), there are common and different points between Farabi and Plato. Comparing the views of the two philosophers helps to understand Farabi's views in Fazila and the theory of his Islamic state in general, and Farabi's view of politics and ethics in particular.

From the volume Editor: Some remarks on sport from its historical-cultural horizon

So as not to leave any loose ends, I believe we have to start this chapter with what came after the founding fathers of contemporary philosophy to understand our present situation. We have seen that Scheler was the last modern philosopher to put an end to the modern world-hypothesis after Nietzsche had begun its crisis. But did our contemporary world suffer a similar crisis that suggests the end of the present era? Before claiming the fate of the last Western “cosmology”, I should say that contemporary philosophy did not end with the founding fathers. Instead, there were two great philosophers who continued doing philosophy after Husserl and Heidegger, namely, Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950) and Herman Dooyeweerd (1894–1977), just like Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) had done in the case of the modern world-hypothesis. Kant agreed with Descartes that the material world was constituted by extended bodies in reciprocal interaction, but there was something missing to explain the change of bodies in space. All possible experience happens in time which is where everything takes place. In other words, it is only by means of the inner sense, time, that we can experience changes in the spatial world. Likewise, Dooyeweerd (1935–1936) and Hartmann (1940) would also develop the new cosmology by extending Heidegger’s temporality of the human world to the entire universe. This new concept of time was absent from Husserl’s original cosmology in which space and time were synchronized, spatial Nature with “time consciousness”, because our perception of the spatial world was mediated by the body constitutive of psychophysical nature. Accordingly, time was a “lived experience” of the transcendental ego (pure consciousness) conditioned by an animal constitution (mind-body unity). This is when Heidegger’s originality was unleashed arguing that the human world is temporal because temporality is the being of Dasein, the human world. Temporality is so fundamental to the foundation of the world that spatiality is grounded on Dasein’s primordial temporality, and, therefore, the being of the human world defines the being of the rest of the universe. This, of course, would not be accepted by Hartmann (1940) because he considered that time was so fundamental that is permeated the entire real world, from the physical to the human world, whereas space was only present in the natural world. In short, time was more fundamental that space because it was more constitutive of the universe. In the case of Dooyeweerd (1935–1936), space was reduced to the minimal expression because it only represented one of the multiple “modalities of cosmic meaning” constituting one single aspect of the temporal cosmos. Moreover, according to him, time must not be “identified with one of its modal aspects or modalities of meaning”, as Heidegger had done by reducing it to the historical aspect. Indeed, Dooyeweerd was the most radical, “the idea of cosmic time constitutes the basis of the philosophical theory of reality in this book. By virtue of its integral character it may be called new” (Ibid [2013]: 28). Therefore, time is the foundation of the cosmos.

Peirce was a great philosopher. His contributions to philosophy concerned almost every subject of philosophy. Hacking commented that “he finished almost nothing, but he began almost everything” (Hacking 1983:61). Perhaps this is why his importance and influence are being rediscovered again and again. Many contemporary philosophers take note of his insights, or, while touching — intentionally or not — upon problems which he had already frequently dealt with, go back to his works to seek instructions.

Should I have the opportunity to travel back in time to converse with great philosophers, Hume would be high on my itinerary. My gratitude for his insights and hospitality would surely tempt me to reciprocate by telling him about my time travels. But I fear he would not believe me. For the reasoning underlying Hume's famous scepticism about miracles dooms my tales of time travel to an incredulous reception. The ensuing paragraphs will be dedicated to an elucidation of this fear. This elucidation is of more than historical interest, since Hume's reasoning about miracles still strikes many contemporary philosophers y as cogent. Thus the scepticism about time travel that I attribute to Hume should also be shared by his followers. It should be noted that the scepticism at issue is epistemological rather than metaphysical. The key question will not be ‘Is time travel possible?’ We shall instead ask whether it is possible to justify a belief in a report of time travel. The metaphysical issue will only be addressed in response to the question of whether one can be an epistemological sceptic about time travel without being a metaphysical sceptic.

Lois Gordon's absorbing biography tells the story of a writer, activist, and cultural icon who embodied the dazzling energy and tumultuous spirit of her age, and whom William Carlos Williams once called "one of the major phenomena of history." Nancy Cunard (1896-1965) led a life that surpasses Hollywood fantasy. The only child of an English baronet (and heir to the Cunard shipping fortune) and an American beauty, Cunard abandoned the world of a celebrated socialite and Jazz Age icon to pursue a lifelong battle against social injustice as a wartime journalist, humanitarian aid worker, and civil rights champion. Cunard fought fascism on the battlefields of Spain and reported firsthand on the atrocities of the French concentration camps. Intelligent and beautiful, she romanced the great writers of her era, including three Nobel Prize winners, and was the inspiration for characters in the works of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Pablo Neruda, Samuel Beckett, and Ernest Hemingway, among others. Cunard was also a prolific poet, publisher, and translator and, after falling in love with a black American jazz pianist, became deeply committed to fighting for black rights. She edited the controversial anthology Negro , the first comprehensive study of the achievement and plight of blacks around the world. Her contributors included Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Zora Neale Hurston, among scores of others. Cunard's personal life was as complex as her public persona. Her involvement with the civil rights movement led her to be ridiculed and rejected by both family and friends. Throughout her life, she was plagued by insecurities and suffered a series of breakdowns, struggling with a sense of guilt over her promiscuous behavior and her ability to survive so much war and tragedy. Yet Cunard's writings also reveal an immense kindness and wit, as well as her renowned, often flamboyant defiance of prejudiced social conventions. Drawing on diaries, correspondence, historical accounts, and the remembrances of others, Lois Gordon revisits the major movements of the first half of the twentieth century through the life of a truly gifted and extraordinary woman. She also returns Nancy Cunard to her rightful place as a major figure in the historical, social, and artistic events of a critical era.

In the course of his remarkable life as an author, diplomat, and government official, David Hume (1711-1776) made noteworthy contributions to many fields of inquiry, including history, economics, political science, anthropology, and psychology. But while his contributions to these fields were noteworthy, his contributions to philosophy were momentous. Indeed, most contemporary philosophers would agree that he was the greatest philosopher yet produced by the English-speaking world.

As the final work by Ye Xiushan, one of the most famous philosophers and philosophy scholars in China, this two-volume title scrutinizes the historical development of both Chinese and Western philosophies, aiming to explore the convergence between the two philosophical traditions.Combining the historical examination and argumentation based on philosophical problematics, the two-volume set expounds the key figures and schools and critical thoughts in both Western and Chinese philosophical histories. In this first volume, the author investigates the intellectual heritage of ancient Greece and Thales of Miletus as the cradle of European philosophy, freedom in Greek philosophy, reason and negation in classical German philosophy, and the relationship between epistemology and ontology in the philosophical history, thereby illuminating the core spirit of Western philosophy and theoretical quandary facing the contemporary European philosophy.This title will appeal to scholars, students, and general readers interested in philosophical history, comparative philosophy, Chinese philosophy, and Western philosophy ranging over Greek philosophy, German classic philosophy, and contemporary continental philosophy.

The term “ontology” has a long history in western philosophy, as it is connected to one of the earliest, most important concepts of ancient Greek thought developed by Parmenides, namely, the on, which means “that which is existing.” In Greek philosophy, the affirmation of existence was also linked to the question of “What is?” If onto-logy consisted in thinking about the on, insofar as one could reflect on what exists, this reflection inevitably led to the question about the meaning of the existing thing. In turn, this reflection became connected to the Latin notion of “essence” or essentia. Ontology, then, also included a study of being or what being is, that is, “essence.” This second formulation is found more frequently in contemporary philosophy, especially in the work of Edmund Husserl.