World Of Ideas Research Articles

The Cave and Service-Learning: Developing a Sense of Belonging in Summer Bridge

This article focused on findings of case study that explored the use of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” to supplement a service-learning project. The project was initiated in an academic orientation course as a part of a summer bridge program in order to foster a sense of belonging. Data from written reflections and a focus group centered around (a) belonging, (b) socio-academic integration, and (c) finding one’s self. Findings suggest that helping students transition into their new environment by using their strengths to help others through a service-learning project connects the students to the university, thus, reinforcing their sense of belonging.

A Lacanian supplementation to love in L\u2019Immanence des v\xe9rit\xe9s

In L’Immanence des vérités, Alain Badiou rewrites the Platonic allegory of the cave. As the book’s structure reveals, Badiou’s central claim is that truths are absolute, for they are constituted by the dialectic between finitude and infinity, the consequence of which lies in the creation of the œuvre. Although love is often affected by individual difference, family, money, and social norms, philosophy calls for a rupture with these instances of finitude, awakening us to the truth that love is open to the possibility of infinity embodied by contingent encounter, amorous declaration, and the faithful construction of the Two. Badiou calls for subjectivization of this possibility in the form of the amorous œuvre, through and beyond the Lacanian impasse of the sexual non-relationship. This article supplements Badiouian love with Lacanian psychoanalysis by developing five points. First, the binary framework “Lacanian finitude vs Badiouian infinity” can be misleading. Second, Badiou himself regards the unconscious and the analytic discourse as inscribed by the dialectic between finitude and infinity. Third, Lacan allows us to recognize that the œuvre and the waste are not opposed, but rather supplementary to each other. Fourth, for both Lacan and Badiou, love constitutes the interlacing of the non-relationship and the Two. Fifth, the Badiouian amorous absolute must deal with the real of the absolute as the fusional One and thus, can be supplemented by the Lacanian problematic of the sexual relationship in its fantasmatic form of the One. Based on these points, this article elaborates such concepts as the amorous labor, the dialectic between œuvre and waste, and the artisan of love.

Projection and Reception of Film: A Reciprocal Ethics

Filmmakers begin their work with an empty screen in the same way that artists approach a blank canvas. The implied intention is to create a work that will evoke emotion, thought and reflection. As both film and art have developed, so have the ways in which the screen or canvas is populated. As technology has developed so have methods of transferring the intention. Likewise, there have been adaptations in the way viewers, absorbed in moving images on the screen, interpret the images from moment to moment, ultimately, as a composite work, and from their particular point of view. This article examines certain ethical aspects of watching film with regard to three relevant film innovations, namely: classical Hollywood narrative, modern auteur film, and a comparison between the experience of contemporary viewing, with its access to new technological platforms on the one hand, and viewers’ experience of the very earliest film on the other. The discussion incorporates some thoughts on the Greek philosopher Plato's Allegory of The Cave, which is presented in his work The Republic, where he interrogates how reality and knowledge are mediated according to the point of view from which the images projected onto the wall of the cave are viewed and interpreted. With reference to watching images in film, the article proposes three points of viewer interpretation that affect their experience of reality and knowledge which include the ethics of familiarity (routine viewer), the ethics of expectation (customised viewer), and the ethics of the medium (novel viewer).

STRUKTUR RASA ADORASI

The true religious feeling is rooted in adoration. The taste of adoration is derived from the experience of God which indeed shake one’s soul. On one side, the experience of God leads to the recognition of God as the Great Creator of the universe. In this case, God is experienced as the everything. On the other side, it causes that human being encounters the self-recognition as a helpless creature. One feels as a nothingness of creature here. The feeling of adoration, therefore, has a religious structure in human soul that has a direction to God. As the structure of soul, the adoration is likely to be subjective which means that the subject experiences God (the world of ideas) and at the same time, it is objective that God is experienced by the subject (the real world). The object of the experience of adoration is, particularly, transcendent. Finally, the sense of adoration is needed to revive the living of faith for the believers.

Jean Piaget’s Genetic Epistemology as a Theory of Knowledge Based on Epigenesis

This article aims to highlight Jean Piaget’s theory of knowledge and situate it in this context since its beginnings in Ancient Greece where, in Plato, we already find this seminal idea: knowledge is acquired in successive and upward moments (dialektikê), starting from an opinion on the sensible world (doxa) towards the épistêmê of the intelligible world, the world of Ideas or concepts. Piaget’s Theory of Knowledge, we believe, was determined by four moments: 1) his research as a malacologist under the guidance of Godet and Raymond, 2) the acquaintance with Kant’s philosophy at age of 21, 3) his internship at the Binet/Simon laboratory, 4) his studies on the Limnaea Stagnalis. His core idea: it is possible for human beings to attain the necessary and universal knowledge due to the exchange processes of their organisms with the environment, which give rise to the epigenetic ontogenesis of their specific organic mental structures, framed for the specific act of knowing. Epigenetic ontogenesis begins with the infans first actions in the world, from the very moment of birth. Around two years of age, these actions will be represented and organized in groups linked to empirical experience, until the brain be able to perform the operations of the Abelian Group. The physiological development ends here, and the logico-mathematical knowledge becomes possible.

“But Could You Persuade Us, If We Won't Listen?”

“But Could You Persuade Us, If We Won't Listen?”

ATHENA PASHKO. UNUSUAL THOUGHTS ABOUT UNUSUAL WORLDVIEW AND POETRY OF PASSIONARY PERSONALITY

The proposed article outlines the multifold semiosphere of understanding the worldview and poetics of the bright creator of the figurative word of the second half of the 20th – early 21st century – Athena Pashko. In the universe of her personality, the deep rootedness in the whole worldview-aesthetic discourse is organically combined with the specific need and ability to actualize this discourse in the Ukrainian semiosphere. The images and poetic visions created by the poetess pave a unique bridge from the «past to the future» (D. Humenna’s statement). The actual dominant of the proposed study is the study in the phenomenon of Athena Pashko specific ancient union of artistic image-meaning with the universe of the author’s personality. This dichotomous unity is recorded in the reflections and memories of contemporaries about her extraordinary personality. Attention is paid to the musicality of A. Pashko’s works and their agreement with the musicality of P. Tychyna’s poetics. Such harmony is based on the medieval-baroque aesthetics of Ukrainian music by D. Bortnyanskyi, A. Wedel and large-scale perspectives in the 21st century. A special dominant of the article, which determines the worldview-poetic universals relevant for the present and prospects, is the discourse of concordances between spiritual-intellectual phenomena of V. Svidzinskyi, P. Tychyna, V. Stus and A. Pashko. The outlined multidimensional discourse is still terra incognita in philosophical-Ukrainian studies and in particular literary studies. The article notes that the world of ideas and actions of A. Pashko as a passionary person is an unknown perspective field in the context of understanding the prospects for the revival of the Ukrainian state and the semiosphere of state formation as its ideological basis. In conceptual connection, the ideological world of A. Pashko is studied, which appears in correspondence with her husband V. Chornovil, analytical memoirs of M. Kotsiubynska, S. Kyrychenko, where philosophical and state-building dominants of the «Sixtiers» are interpreted as sources of poetics of their work and worldview.

Richard Wright’s Anagrammatical Allegory of Liturgical Reading, or Inhabiting the Black Messianic in “The Man Who Lived Underground”

ABSTRACT This essay reads Richard Wright’s speculative novella, “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1940/1996), as an anagrammatical allegory of liturgical reading. By anagrammatical, I invoke Christina Sharpe’s understanding of how Blackness singularly “exists as an index of violability and also potentiality” in its foreclosure from the World’s grammar of anti-Blackness. With allegory (of reading), I draw attention to both (1) how Wright recasts Plato’s allegory of the cave in modern America and, following Paul de Man, (2) how Wright’s text is an allegory of un/readability. Finally, with liturgy, I draw on Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of mystery as a performance that (re-)enacts the text. This leads me to theorize that Wright’s anagrammatical allegory of liturgical reading brings the reader into speculative attunement to the Black messianic, which is a radical mode of fidelity to the Black’s singular positionality in aspiring to the un-veiling [apo-kalyptein] of the katechontic anti-Black World – toward gratuitous messianic freedom.

Høj Stene – en monumental skibssætning ved Gudenåen

Høj Stene – en monumental skibssætning ved Gudenåen

Plato's Gestalt. About the only book by Heinrich Friedemann translated into Russian

The paper contains a review of the book by Heinrich Friedemann “Plato. His gestalt”, published in Russian translation by the publishing house “Vladimir Dal”. The only book by Friedemann, who was part of the circle of the German poet Stefan Gheorghe, is devoted to identifying the essence of the philosophical path — gestalt, which consists in overcoming the crisis of philosophical knowledge through the acquisition of its true subject — the world of ideas. Gestalt is a living knowledge of the essence of being, opposed to empirical observation and schematic abstraction carried out on the basis of such observations. The Gestalt of philosophy is concrete and living knowledge, because it represents the action and path of a philosopher. This path, once implemented by Plato, is interpreted by Friedemann as the path of humanity to perfection, associated with the unity of truth, goodness and beauty. Plato's Gestalt, recreated by Friedemann, is not only the task of philosophy, but also the goal of European and world culture.

The Quest for Covert Consciousness: Bringing Neuroethics to the Bedside.

Plato, in his Allegory of the Cave, contemplates a group of people who have lived their entire lives facing a wall of a cave and whose impressions of the world are constrained to perceptual experiences of shadows cast on the wall by entities that are never directly observed. Since time immemorial, conscious states of others have been like Platonic shadows, inferred only imperfectly and indirectly through close observation of behaviors. Although for centuries philosophers and neuroscientists have sought to bring us closer to understanding consciousness, an influx of neurotechnologies now enables clinicians and researchers to potentially improve detection of consciousness and prediction of its recovery.1 Innovations in neuroimaging and electrophysiologic techniques now may permit detection of states of consciousness not readily discernible by bedside examination, known as covert consciousness or cognitive motor dissociation.2 The discovery of covert consciousness raises distinctive issues surrounding both the diagnosis and prognosis of persons with disorders of consciousness (DoC), highlighting the need for caution during the acute phase of neuroprognostication and exposing gaps in knowledge about the epidemiology and phenomenology of covert consciousness. These innovations represent a possible step forward from philosophical and scientific traditions that relied on behavioral observations to detect consciousness. In turn, these breakthroughs prompt reconsideration of standard approaches to the evaluation of persons with DoC and necessitate appraisal of how clinicians should communicate results of novel techniques with indeterminate meanings to surrogates. Proactive integration of neuroethical insights in clarifying responsible ends to which these technologies should be directed is essential for addressing these timely challenges. This article proposes an ethical framework to help the clinical and research community consider how to use these emerging neurotechnologies responsibly, calls for careful consideration of the consequences of searching for covert consciousness in practice, and highlights critical avenues for further study of how the finding of covert consciousness might help predict goal-concordant functional recovery.

Doing sociology in Africa: notes towards advancing the Akìwọwọ project

ABSTRACT In the closing decades of the last century, Professor Akínsolá Akìwowo, in a series of seminal papers, inaugurated what Jìmí Adésíná later dubbed ‘the Akíwowo project’. This project involved (1) showing that there are resources in an African culture – Yorùbá – for doing sociology in ways that are as good as the dominant tradition to be found in Western sociology; and (2) offering some original ideas regarding some explanatory framework that could enable us to make sense of social phenomena. In this essay, I advance the Akìwọwọ project by showing how, despite previous criticisms, Akìwọwọ remains a keen identifier of theoretical possibilities lurking in his Yorùbá heritage for doing not only sociology, but also philosophy and other theories with African idioms. I show how those criticisms enhance the practice of sociology in Africa that will be a powerful presence in the discipline and in the world of ideas.

Ideology in the Time of Pandemic: A Filipino Experience

This paper attempts to hermeneutically explore and understand Filipino moral ideologies in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study frames its ideology from the conceptual tradition of Karl Marx and other philosophers who shared the common idea that ideology has material existence. As Althusser put it, ideology does not exist in the ‘world of ideas’ conceived as a ‘spiritual world,’ but “ideology exists in institutions and the practices specific to them.” This paper discusses first the concept of moral ideology. The discussion focuses morality as ideology that causes a gap between the rich and the poor. Next, it discusses certain Filipino moral ideologies: Utang na Loob (debt of gratitude), Sakop (group)-oriented and Bahala Na. At the same time, it presents how some politicians and high public officials have taken advantage of these ideologies to promote self-interest. Lastly, the relation between Filipino moral ideologies and politics are manifested in the current situation. As a whole, this paper intends to address the question: “what is wrong with the Filipino system that it seems caught unprepared?”

Концепция образования у Платона и Клайва Стейплза Льюиса

Plato and Lewis have similar views on education. They are based on a philosophical idea common to many thinkers who regard education as a tool and process of finding the truth. Plato’s views on education are reflected in the Allegory of the Cave where he compares education with an ascent from the cave to the sun. Lewis’ vision on education is a mirror allegory of the descent into the dungeon. These images emphasise a different ontological status of empirical and spiritual reality. Philosophers believe that spiritual reality determines the meaning and norm of empirical reality. They claim that receptivity to the spiritual is formed during upbringing which defines the direction of a person’s education. At this stage, the right feelings and ideas are formed, and the desire for knowledge is awoken. Teaching is the next step of education. For Plato, this step is associated with the study of various subjects: the science of numbers, geometry, astronomy, and music through which one learns to progress from the sensual to the intelligible, to the discovery of ideas behind things. For Lewis, the main thing at this stage is the harmonious movement of the soul to its main goal, to the acquisition of man’s true essence — the development of a holistic personality that seeks to learn and discover the reality. Both thinkers also agree on the main goal of education as the formation of a holistic personality, where the ideas of beauty, justice, order, Good, and other significant ideas reveal themselves through the contact with the sensual and become part of the human soul shaping a true image of a person.

Шеллинг как предтеча эстетики символизма

The aesthetics of early Schelling constitutes the philosophical foundation of the po­etic consciousness of German Romantics and becomes one of the theoretical sources for symbolist aesthetics. The article accentuates proto-symbolist elements in Schelling’s aesthetics. It shows that the spiritual cosmos in Schelling – which is a world of ideas and gods that connects to the material world, in particular, through art – develops out of the Absolute. The universe itself is manifested in God as an absolute work of art. At the same time, art in its formation is based on mythol­ogy and realises itself as the unity of the “infinite and finite in the finite”, as an identity of the conscious and the unconscious, as a lack of distinction between the ideal and the real, as a depiction of the absolute in a particular. This accounts for a polysemantic understanding of a work of art. Schelling focuses attention on the aesthetic essence of art, which is founded on the principles of the beautiful and the sublime. He values beauty in art – as something that ascends from visible forms to prototypes – higher than natural beauty. He associates the sublime with size, “formlessness”, and chaos, and he classifies its expression in art (“the finite”) as symbolic. Schelling is interested in chaos as a potential for every kind of form, because the contemplation of the infinite – i.e., the Absolute as the highest “form in formlessness”, which can only be manifested to the world symbolically – is rooted in chaos. The notion of symbol occupies one of the central places in Schelling’s aesthetics, because it deals with the expression of the infinite in the finite, of the ideal in the real, and of the universal in the particular. The symbol marks and manifests an idea, and this is why the main point of artisticity lies within the symbol. Schelling understands language (speech) as a work of art, and for this reason he sees more symbolic potential in verbal than in pictorial arts. All these ideas in many ways form the foundation of symbolist aesthetics.

Mapping the journey: A study of maturing femininity in Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women

Opposed to the anxiety of influence supposedly suffered by male writers with regard to their predecessors, Gilbert and Gubar (2000) propounded the concept of anxiety of authorship to hold true for female writers. According to this theory, women joined in a sorority with their literary foremothers in their efforts to prove their worthiness in taking up the male vocation of writing. In Alice Munro’s short story collection Lives of Girls and Women, the mother is ever-present in her daughter’s mind, and their relationship is instrumental in her maturation as a woman and a writer. In this paper, the relationship between the two women is explained in terms of some of the notions put forth in Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, namely the angel/monster dichotomy, the anxiety of authorship, female double consciousness, infection in the sentence, and the parable of the cave. Using these concepts, it is aimed to show that although these notions were proposed as a model for 19th century woman writers, the modern-day Del is yet to come to terms with the anxiety of authorship and its accompanying problems.

Farewell to Law and Philosophy: Some Preliminary Explications Abstract.

The modern intellectual situation is characterized by the exhaustion of the possibilities of human existence, and its replacement by technological algorithms. The closest connection of law with the essence of human existence causes the corresponding exhaustion of the possibilities of law and its completion as a discursive form of arrangement of the world. The project of European metaphysics is contradiction between the plurality of the world of things and the meanings of words and the unity and universality of the intangible that exists outside of things – the world of ideas. Dichotomy is localized in the essence of human: the material corresponds to the body, the ideal – the soul. A consequence of this opposition is to assert the metaphysic to eliminate material from the realm of meanings, to deny its significance for human existence. The non-metaphysical position regarding human existence is represented by the sophisticated (poetic) principle of the closest connection of human to things. There is no mechanism for unification and preventing the ambiguity of word meanings. The connection of a particular person with a particular thing always hides the possibility of creating new meaning. Contrary to marginalization of sophistry within the limits of general philosophical discourse, the sophisticated (poetic) principle of connection between human and things became the basis of law. The origin of the latter was ownership right – the closest connection a person has with a thing that constitutes personality and the space of free and equal communication with others. The true meaning of ownership right can be revealed through the concepts of ontological distinction, being-in-theworld, and being appropriated by being human by appropriating things and opening a unique trajectory of personal design. The modern technological picture of the world is a complete and final realization of the metaphysical project of replaces discourse with mathematical algorithms. Human actions are emanating from both the sphere of things and the relations with people. The integrity of the property and the enforceability of the contracts become mathematically secure. The inability to violate a right means its disappearance. The world is no longer a matter of human concern and risk. Things are replaced by objects, and man is destined to become one of them.

Social origins of risk semiotics

The article examines the structure of the inter-relationship between society and its inherent risks, the main components of which are society’s accumulated experience in predicting and mitigating risks, the continuous complication of modern society and the new social risks it generates. The reasons for the formation of these components, the positive and negative results of their use by society are analyzed. The reactions of managers and scientists to existing social risks are described. The main difference between these reactions is the diametrically opposite attitude of managers and scientists to the phenomenon of reductionism in solving complex social problems. The article defines the role of interdisciplinary research areas (synergetics, systemology, the combined social analysis, science of science, etc.) in solving problems related to social risks. The proposed by A. G. Teslinov’s classification of existing worlds (the material world, the world of ideas, the social world and the world of signs) correlates with traditional disciplinary classifications. The place of a new scientific direction (risk semiotics) in the system of existing risk sciences, as well as among other artificial semiotics is established. The conclusion about the need for interrelated development of social semiotics and risk semiotics is substantiated.

O Mágico de Oz, o Mito da Caverna e os currículos de matemática

A partir da apresentação de dois cenários fictícios — O Mágico de Oz e o Mito da Caverna —, o objetivo é argumentar que os currículos de Matemática, os currículos, a Educação Matemática, a Educação, a Pedagogia, entre outros campos de pesquisa, são fortemente inspirados na metáfora do desejo pela falta. No caso do “Mágico de Oz” e das idealidades do “Mito da Caverna”, nos prendendo ao que é desejável, sempre apontando para um futuro que nunca chega. Com isso, talvez pudéssemos pensar na possibilidade de agir molecularmente, nas nossas salas de aula, nas nossas pesquisas, nas nossas falas e nos nossos textos para que possamos não buscar o desejável ideal de estudante, de professor, de aula de matemática, de escola, de currículo; mas que façamos o que é possível fazer, a partir de um posicionamento político que nos dê clareza de que é possível construir uma outra ética da existência.

IRONIA IN PLATO’S PHAEDRUS

The subject of the article is an interpretation of the Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus in terms of irony. Irony is understood as a definite relation to the dialogue subject from knowledge of the true state of things. Some existing interpretations of this dialogue and the difficulties that it causes for researchers are briefly outlined. The author of the article points to the coexistence of several dimensions of the narrative in the text. Firstly, the content of the speeches (love and seduction) finds a congruence in the setting (secluded place outside the city walls, two interlocutors, a semblance of a love date). The dialogue describes the seduction of Phaedrus by Socrates, but true love, striving to the world of Forms. A reader follows the same path as the personage of Phaedrus. Secondly, the theme of rhetoric also unfolds in several dimensions: rhetoric as an abduction of the soul by words turns out to be a parallel to love, love and rhetoric open up as different projections of the existence of the soul. Thirdly, dialogue can be seen as a projection of Plato’s perception of Socrates: the first phase is acquaintance, the second phase is aðo admiration (the Great Speech), the third phase is the comprehension of the past (recollection). The dialogue is constituted by the principle of the counterpoint, like the musical symphonies of the classical period were built, several themes sound in it, sometimes connecting, sometimes diverging, occasionally merging into a single sound. The irony of the author is present in the work at the level of compositional organization of the text. The themes of love, rhetoric, the soul of man, the world of ideas, the body, and Forms forms a complex unity. Dialogue can be considered as Plato’s understanding of his life and Socrates’ place in it.