Ontological Meaning Research Articles

At the Crossroads of Law and Ideology: The Ideology of Law as a Reflection of Social Ontology?

The paper examines the link between ideology in law and social ontology. Whereas academic enquiries have thus far mainly concentrated on the link between law per se and social reality, the question of the relationship of the ideology of law and social ontology is by and large an academic terra incognita . The paper proceeds by examining a number of matters in furtherance of its analytical goals. Accordingly, there are three (3) lines of enquiry in the paper’s analysis: first, the author proceeds with the question as to whether ideology ought to inform legal doctrine in the first place. Should law be free from ideology? Can law be wholly free from ideology? Do the positivist credentials of much of modern law, e.g. in the context of liberal political theory, create a de facto ideology for our law? Is it not true that the very notion of constitutionalism also creates a sui generis ideology for our law? Is law just another way of transforming predominant ideology and collective practices into norms? Effectively, can there be law which is wholly disconnected from leading or predominant economic theory? In other words, are jurists expected to show compliance with economic theory inter alia or should law be more of a Kelsenian island of epistemic purity, devoid of ideology, sociology and the like? Secondly, more importantly, if law ought to be characterised by a certain limited degree of ideology, should that ideology be driven by the social? Thus, if law should not be free from ideology, should the ideology, which characterises it, at any rate and at any point, reflect the ontologically social? If so, is that reflection just another way of promoting democracy? Naturally, whilst democracy is an ideal, it often becomes burdensome as to what the precise definition of democracy is or ought to be. So too, it becomes necessary to ensure that democracy, in its practical manifestation, does not hinder the application of law as a means which enables. For instance, the constitutional crises between 2012-2015, in significant parts of Europe, alert us to the fact that the socially ontological might not always lead to ideal results e.g. when it comes to respecting the established notion of the Rule of Law in the European legal sphere or, more widely, in Western legal space. Thirdly, what ought to be the social ontology’s input in the ideology of law? Whereas recognition is given to the democratic credentials of modern social ontology in many jurisdictions these days, it goes without saying that democracy ought not to deteriorate into populist understandings of the social. This being the case, it is also understood that there can be no one meaning or interpretation of social ontology throughout systems and regions or, indeed, any universal understandings thereof. What might be an ideal for the social ontology of the French Republic might not necessarily be an ideal for the social ontology of the State of Texas. Thus, the meaning of ‘ideal’ is rather relative in social ontological terms and cannot be and should not be the same from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Nonetheless, this differentiation of the social ontology between different jurisdictional spaces is one which does not automatically provide moral legitimacy to electorates and legislatures around the world, when it comes to them infiltrating domestic law with their own social ideology, especially when such ideology is devoid of value and essence. Thus, the ontologically social is not a synonym to the ontologically abusive, in case social ideology informs the law. Keywords: ideology, law, social ontology

Moods as Groundlessness of the Human Experience. Heidegger and Wittgenstein on Stimmung

The paper analyzes the ontological meaning of mood (Stimmung) in Heidegger’s conception of Attunement (Befindlichkeit), in order to relate this notion of Stimmung specifically to our “attunement” (Ubereinstimmung) to a form of life, as conceived in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. It claims that moods spell out the constitutive impossibility to grasp and found the human experience as such. However, this impossibility is not a lack of human knowledge, but rather corresponds to the necessary opacity, indeterminability and groundlessness of every human experience, which make it possible as such. The paper argues that the ontological mood of anxiety in Heidegger’s thought cannot be understood as a dark feeling, since it points to a constitutive sense of disorientation, which involves the impossibility to found and ensure the very familiarity of our ordinary experience. Moreover, the paper claims that the same impossibility is also involved in our “attunement” to language and to a form of life, as described by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. By analyzing the mood of trust sketched out by Wittgenstein in On Certainty, the paper suggests that the ontological mood of trust, as the groundless certainty of our praxis, points to the very impossibility to found and ensure every human experience. From this perspective, moods reveal the groundlessness of human experience and make us acknowledge it.

Social structures, power and resistance in monist sociology: (New) materialist insights.

Though mainstream sociological theory has been founded within dualisms such as structure/agency, nature/culture, and mind/matter, a thread within sociology dating back to Spencer and Tarde favoured a monist ontology that cut across such dualistic categories. This thread has been reinvigorated by recent developments in social theory, including the new materialisms, posthumanism and affect theories. Here we assess what a monist or ‘flat’ ontology means for sociological understanding of key concepts such as structures and systems, power and resistance. We examine two monistic sociologies: Bruno Latour’s ‘sociology of associations’ and DeLanda’s ontology of assemblages. Understandings of social processes in terms of structures, systems or mechanisms are replaced with a focus upon the micropolitics of events and interactions. Power is a flux of forces or ‘affects’ fully immanent within events, while resistance is similarly an affective flow in events producing micropolitical effects contrary to power or control.

Images and Performative Vision in the Middle Ages

During the Middle Ages, images had to be tied to the truth. Otherwise, they were considered idols. And the idols are always dangerous and, therefore, banned. So, to be justified, the imago had to be true or really refer to truth. It follows that the images were not considered just objects ‘to see’, but were perceived as almost ‘alive bodies’, real bodies: they could act as if were actually present. This essay studies the image concept in Christian thought, with particular attention to Eastern Europe, in connection to the patristic and conciliar sources. The result is the shift of its ontological meaning: contrary to the mimetic idea of greek-hellenistic culture, the christian image is an ‘impression of similarity’. This conceptual revolution implies change of visualization strategies, which are specifically performative: ‘seeing the icon’ is doing something which involves ‘physically’ the viewer, as if he came into a scene and became an actor.

Patočka’s Care of the Soul Reconsidered: Performing the Soul Through Movement

Care of the soul is arguably the core concept in Patocka’s phenomenology. However, what is the soul? In this paper I seek to determine its ontological meaning, connecting the concept of caring for the soul with that of the movement of existence. Starting from Patocka’s affirmative presentation of Aristotle’s criticism of Plato, I interrogate the “orthodox” Platonic concept of caring for the soul and develop an alternative notion, putting emphasis on action in the world. I demonstrate the impossibility of identifying the third movement with true existence, or with the care for the soul, whether conceived as the performance of philosophy or as political action. Finally, I outline a reinterpreted concept of care for the soul in which the (active) self-moving of the soul is not ontologically prior to (passive) responding. The soul is inherent in action; and it is free only as responding to the world and responsible only in being free.

Revisiting the Continuing Bonds Theory: The Cultural Uniqueness of the Bei Dao Phenomenon in Taiwanese Widows/Widowers.

In the present study, we used the phenomenological approach to rediscover the ontological meaning of relationships with the deceased in Taiwanese widows/widowers. We first revised the original Western definitions of grief, bereavement, and mourning to fit Taiwanese culture. We used the word bei dao to indicate the mixed nature of grief and mourning in the Taiwanese bereavement process. Then we reanalyzed data from a previous study, which was conducted in 2006. In the previous qualitative research, each subject was interviewed 3 to 4 times in the mourning state over an 18-month interval that began at the point of the spouse's death. Results showed that two main themes emerged in the present analysis: (a) a blurred boundary of life and death and (b) a transformation of ethical bonds. The present study reveals the culturally unique aspects of the Taiwanese bei dao process. Limitations of the present study and future directions are discussed and reflected.

Anthropological Foundations of the Family and the Common Good

The family and the common good are often related to each other in contemporarydiscourse and debate, generally in a functionalistic sense: the family is taken to be either necessary or not for the civil common good. However, the family is not itself considered a common good. In fact, however, the family is the paradigmatic example of an “integral common good” because it is the family in which the members are most obviously integrated and related in a community which is in itself a good. Western liberal thought, on the other hand, is unable to conceive the family except in its own image, as a fundamentally constructed reality composed of self-initiating and autonomous individuals. Yet in reality, the family shows us the ontological foundations and meaning of natural human communities, ontological foundations that must be respected and promoted by civil society if it is to be authentically human.

The Body as Capital: Masculinities in Contemporary Latin American Fiction by Vinodh Venkatesh

Reviewed by: The Body as Capital: Masculinities in Contemporary Latin American Fiction by Vinodh Venkatesh Joseph M. Pierce Venkatesh, Vinodh. The Body as Capital: Masculinities in Contemporary Latin American Fiction. Tucson: The U of Arizona P, 2015. 200 pp. ISBN: 978-08-1650-069-7. Recent shifts toward austerity and isolationism, the renegotiation of global hierarchies, and ongoing conflicts over territories, markets, and ideologies make the neoliberal era one of material and symbolic uncertainty. In The Body as Capital, Venkatesh interrogates neoliberalism's pervasive (and often pernicious) influence on Latin American cultural production, focusing on literary works that reimagine the gendered dynamics of labor and desire since the 1990s. In particular, Venkatesh theorizes the male body as capitalize-able within a neoliberal episteme that encompasses not just market-based economic policies, but also regimes of sexuality, gender, and aesthetics. Eleven chapters divided into three parts provide a comprehensive overview of the ideological, discursive, and corporal reconfigurations that characterize the work of authors Venkatesh refers to as Generation Alfaguara. A far-reaching monograph, The Body as Capital serves as a prime example of how Latin American Studies is producing work that grapples with the cultural and political shifts of contemporary life and which pushes humanistic scholarship to respond to calcified methods of critical inquiry. [End Page 213] Moving beyond the framework of the nation, yet responsive to the local pressures of (and resistances to) neoliberalism, Venkatesh takes as his point of departure two interrelated suppositions. First, the masculine is not a monolithic subject position, but rather culturally and historically contingent. Second, the neoliberal age inaugurates a restructuring of family and gender dynamics in which masculinity is no longer representable through an aesthetics focused on individual rationality, phallic symbolism, and virile gender performance. This approach draws on literary and cultural studies, feminism, and queer studies in order to locate a range of critiques of the masculine emerging from Latin America. In doing so, Venkatesh pushes masculinity studies – typically housed in Anglophone academic institutions – to confront its lacunae, the product of a propensity to situate middle-class whiteness at the center of its analytic framework. Likewise, by situating Latin American masculinities as responsive to market forces in today's globalized economic theater, the author also manages to challenge queer scholarship anchored in Butlerian performativity by demonstrating the categorical flexibility of material bodies in new Latin American fiction. As Venkatesh points out, while neoliberalism is often viewed as a totalizing epistemic regime, recent Latin American cultural production sheds light on how the site of the masculine body provides a tangible counterpoint to global narratives of gender and its representational possibilities. This book is a welcome corrective to both the universalizing tendencies of masculinity studies and the uncertainty with which critiques of neoliberalism have portrayed market-based phenomena such as the circulation of art, bodies, and knowledge. Venkatesh puts this methodology to use in Part One by interrogating a Latin American archetype, the dictator, in new historical fiction. This section demonstrates how authors have reimagined Latin American masculinities as responsive to relations of power and proximity to power, rather than as conforming to the stereo-type/countertype model frequently applied to the dictator. Venkatesh moves beyond this dichotomy and toward the more fertile terrain of assemblage, plurality, and dialectics. In this way he links the neoliberal symbolic economy to corporal manifestations of gendered bodies such that masculinity is no longer understood as upholding or failing to live up to a specific set of tropes, but rather fluctuates as part of a dynamic matrix of interpersonal relations. A second contribution of this section is that it questions the distinction between symbolic and ontological meanings of the masculine. Identifying key bodily sites such as the anus, penis, and testes, Venkatesh proposes that since the masculine body has become necessarily commoditized in the neoliberal age, it circulates as a site of material inscription rather than a series of performative gestures and is thus better described as dialogical and diachronic, transhistorical and transterritorial. Part Two expands on this theorization by analyzing the intertextual resonances between literature and popular music. The forces of globalization, in this case heard as well as seen, provide a soundtrack that links the geopolitics of...

Summits Where Souls Gather

Rituals have played a vital role in the wake of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disasters that struck northeastern Japan on 11 March 2011 (subsequently referred to as “3.11”). Rituals have enabled survivors to differentiate social order from the immediate chaos of disaster, to mourn, to overcome grief, and to exorcise the spirits of the disaster dead. Yet, much remains to be learned about the transformative potential of ritual after 3.11. The significance of pilgrimage, for instance, which is a prominent aspect of religious practice in Japan, has received minimal attention. In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Dewa Sanzan, a sacred mountain range in Yamagata Prefecture, to discuss mountain pilgrimage for post-disaster memorialization. I argue that the event of 3.11 expanded the ontological meaning of the summit of Gassan 月山 (Mount Moon), thought to be an axis between the world of the living and that of the ancestral dead. Pilgrimage to the peak of Gassan has become a path of remembrance and overcoming, a formula for posthumous care, and an act of hope in post-disaster Japan.

SKOS concepts and natural language concepts: An analysis of latent relationships in KOSs

The vehicle to represent Knowledge Organisation Systems (KOSs) in the environment of the Semantic Web and linked data is the Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS). SKOS provides a way to assign a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) to each concept, and this URI functions as a surrogate for the concept. This fact makes of main concern the need to clarify the URIs’ ontological meaning. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between the ontological substance of KOS concepts and concepts revealed through the grammatical and syntactic formalisms of natural language. For this purpose, we examined the dividableness of concepts in specific KOSs (i.e. a thesaurus, a subject headings system and a classification scheme) by applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques (i.e. morphosyntactic analysis) to the lexical representations (i.e. RDF literals) of SKOS concepts. The results of the comparative analysis reveal that, despite the use of multi-word units, thesauri tend to represent concepts in a way that can hardly be further divided conceptually, while subject headings and classification schemes – to a certain extent – comprise terms that can be decomposed into more conceptual constituents. Consequently, SKOS concepts deriving from thesauri are more likely to represent atomic conceptual units and thus be more appropriate tools for inference and reasoning. Since identifiers represent the meaning of a concept, complex concepts are neither the most appropriate nor the most efficient way of modelling a KOS for the Semantic Web.

The process of constructing ontological meaning based on criminal law verbs

This study intends to account for the process involved in the construction of the conceptual meaning of verbs (#EVENTS) directly related to legal aspects of terrorism and organized crime based on the evidence provided by the Globalcrimeterm Corpus and the consistent application of specific criteria for term extraction. The selected 49 concepts have eventually been integrated in the Core Ontology of FunGramKB (Functional Grammar Knowledge Base), a knowledge base which is founded on the principles of deep semantics and is also aimed at the computational development of the Lexical Constructional Model (www.fungramkb.com). To achieve this purpose, key phases of the COHERENT methodology (Periñán Pascual & Mairal Usón 2011) are followed, particularly those which involve the modelling, subsumption and hierarchisation of the aforementioned verbal concepts. The final outcome of this research shows that most of the apparently specialised conceptual units should eventually be included in the Core Ontology instead of the specific Globalcrimeterm Subontology, due to the fact that the semantic content of their corresponding lexical units can be found in widely used learner`s dictionaries and, consequently, this conceptual information is not only shared by the experts in the field but also by the layperson and the average speaker of the language.

건축 작품에 대한 사회학적 해석의 존재론적 의미 - 상징적 상호작용론과 아비투스를 기초로 -

Interpretation on architectural works and design thinking, and architectural critics could be an approach for social sustainable architecture. In the perspective, the paper explores the characteristics of two architectural works and architectural design thinking of Louis I. Kahn's Richards Medical Research Laboratory(1975-60) and Peter Eisenman's House VI(1972-75) and a sociologist Robert Gutman's reviews on two architectural works. The interpretation based on sociological being derived from two theories, Symbolic Interactionism and Habitus, approaches to the architecture as the world of experience and existence of human being. Sociological being based on the definitions of symbolic interaction, habitus, circumstance, social action and practice, reflective ego, and etc. is participated in to interpret two architectural works, design thinking, and architectural reviews. The findings describe the negatives of architectural philosophy(Louis I. Khan) and conceptual architecture(Peter Eisenman) and the ontological meaning of interpretations on architectural works.

Privacy Enhanced Personalization in Content, Semantic and Location Approach

Personalized web search improves the quality of various internet search services. Personalized mobile search engine plays a vital role in retrieving relevant information from online server to improve privacy in web search. It provides search results to user by capturing user search interests. Interests are classified based on user profile dynamically and search is categorized according to content, semantic and location. User preferred facet is extracted using ontology meaning whose click through data are saved to personalize results and perform re-ranking based on mine words. Semantic search provides relevant search results by applying porter stemmer algorithm with eliminate stop-words. Privacy issue is addressed by restricting user details available at client site, not maintained in server. This assures good ranking and controls privacy information. By enabling delete history function, the user can view general search. The proposed work aimed to enhance the approach of personalized mobile search mining with all the facets of the user. The work uses a client-server architecture which is prototyped on Android Platform.

Hermeneutic Communism and/or Hermeneutic Anarchism

1.INTRODUCTIONThe position I will advocate in what follows can be summarized thusly: In problematizing the prejudices of modern (and the project of modernity), hermeneutic philosophy does not engage in championing a leftist or rightist standpoint. Nonetheless, hermeneutic philosophy has a post-political agenda which consists in diagnosing the retreat of the political and figuring out the ways of overcoming (in the sense of Vattimo's Verwindung) the distortions caused by modern politics-which, by now, is postideological and freed from a commitment to meta-narratives. The post-political agenda of hermeneutics is a of politics that should take into consideration all connotations involved in critique This formulation presupposes a difference between (lapolitique) and the (lepolitique) that-in line with Jean-Luc Nancy, Claude Lefort, and several other authors-might be interpreted in two main (more or less Heideggerian) ways.On the one hand, the is that whole of which ontologically constitutes the latter's factual reality without having a factual existence of its own. The talk of politics' factual reality admits that the empirical facts, events, and processes of can be epistemically conceptualized within the frameworks of politological theorizing. Yet what ontologically constitutes the factuality of (being conceptualized in this manner) resists conceptualization within such frameworks. In the perspective of politological theorizing, the political-the ontological totality of politics-is completely absent from the factual reality of politics. However, it is totally present in all particular facts, events, and processes as providing their ontological meaning. Consequently, the has a totally absent presence in politics. On the other hand, since the reality of is always projected upon possibilities, the is a horizon of revealing and concealing possibilities in politics. The two ways of interpreting the difference between the and complement each other. Though not discussing this difference explicitly, I will employ it, trying to make the conflicting cooperation between and the instrumental in my critical analysis of hermeneutic communism.In admiring Vattimo's post-metaphysical recasting of hermeneutics within a horizon, I will try to extend the ontological context of his discussion. My preoccupation in what follows will be with the kind of being-with assumed by the doctrine of hermeneutic communism. It is my contention that the postmetaphysical debates about the communist idea would have profited from taking into account the forms of solicitude Heidegger addresses in Being and Time. Paying special attention to these forms would additionally allow one to specify the ontological conditions of being-with for having a communist mode of being-inthe-world. Yet extending the debate's scope in this way is not a neutral undertaking. In spelling out the extension, I will transform it into a criticism: Communism in general rests on a kind of being-with-one-another that forecloses interesting possibilities for being-with. These possibilities are to be disclosed within a social ontology (or more correctly, a hermeneutic ontology of sociality) that is at odds with the regulative ideals of communism.The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, my efforts will be devoted to that logic of diremption and emergencies in thinking historically which enables one to advocate a leftist-Heideggerian position. The post-metaphysical weakening of metaphysical grounds opens a horizon ofactive non-participation in the framed democracies' life that characterizes hermeneutics-qua-leftist-politics. The next section probes the extent to which Benjamin's re-translation into theological language of what Marx had secularized might complement the Heideggerian profile of hermeneutic communism. …

To Play, To Imitate, To Embody. On Acting in a Biographical Film

Kolos Sylwia, To Play, To Imitate, To Embody. On Acting in a Biographical Film What does an actor do in a biographical film? This question may seem inane, or at least less than serious; however, the terms frequently used to describe and assess the actors work in general - to embody a character, to play them, to play a role - suggests the existence of a certain designatum, which is the point of reference for the role. In the case of a fictional story, we may ignore the semantic multivalence of such terms. In a biographical film, however, the existence of a real originator of the role gives additional, almost ontological meaning to phrases such as “embodying a character” or “playing a role”. In my reflections, I use as my starting point the assumption that the actors performance in a biographical film and the “conception of a character” result from two basic components: 1. Interpretation of the role - constituting a proposal to analyse the heros character. It is usually supposed to extract more profound meanings and senses out of the biography. To put it more simply, the interpretation of the role is supposed above all to help the viewer to answer the question of who the hero was (what they were like) and why? 2. Adaptation - this includes the physicality of the character: their appearance, body language, facial expressions, voice (the tone, modulation, accent, phrasing, dialect - if the authentic person used one, etc.) In my article I try to answer the questions: Where should we seek the essence of biographic acting? How can we avoid exaggeration and falsehood, which could kill the role?

Scythe and the City: A Social History of Death in Shanghai by Christian Henriot

Reviewed by: Scythe and the City: A Social History of Death in Shanghai by Christian Henriot Lei Ping (bio) Christian Henriot. Scythe and the City: A Social History of Death in Shanghai. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. xi, 484 pp. Hardcover $65.00, ISBN 978-0-8047-9746-7. [End Page 366] Based on extensive archival research, Christian Henriot's groundbreaking book Scythe and the City: A Social History of Death in Shanghai offers an original perspective on the subject of death—a previously overlooked aspect by which Shanghai modernity deems to be re-defined. Henriot meticulously investigates the relation between the ordinary Chinese and death in the city of Shanghai during the semicolonial, Republican, and early socialist eras. The elaborated chapters examine the urban history of death by focusing not only on the temporal and spatial development of funeral practices and death management in the modern period of Shanghai but also on sociopolitical meaning of ordinary death of the underprivileged "social nobodies" in the city of migration against the backdrop of war and revolution. It is in this context that death as a provocative medium through which the question of Shanghai modernity is challenged. As the author himself states, "From the relative laissez-faire posture of the late Qing to the prescriptive regulations of the Communist regime, the dead body became a central object of concern and a constant source of tension between state and society" (p. 6). For Henriot, a century of death (1865-1965) therefore becomes a key to understanding the evolving tension-charged relations between tradition and modernity, and between state authorities and the nameless masses in a distinctively modernizing Chinese metropolis. What is established as a focal point in the book directly relates to Henriot's initial research interests in the forms and expressions of death in a major urban setting. As a renowned scholar who specializes in Shanghai Studies, Henriot again delves into the lives and mortality of the marginalized social groups. This time, he searches for answers to the questions as to how Shanghai became a city of an inconceivable scythe that cut short the lives and hopes of its migrants and laborers under the tumultuous circumstances as well as what was behind the glaring neon lights of the Shanghai modern that rendered sociopolitical paradoxes embedded in the unknown lives and undiscovered stories. Henriot sees death as the final and ultimate evidence of the paradoxical vice of modernity. He states that, excluding war violence and suicides, ordinary deaths caused by poverty, epidemic, and public health embody both civic progress and institutional failure as well as both urban advancement and social inequity. While exploring how the dead were treated by the living in Shanghai, Henriot is aware of the controversy and delicacy of the topic of death in Chinese culture. He reminds the readers that customs and beliefs such as "ensuring all dead were accounted for" (p. 362) can be traced back to Confucianism and other popular religions in China. The intellectual soul searching is firmly grounded in the carefully researched historiography structured in the book. Introducing Shanghai as a port city forced open to foreign trade and industry in the mid-nineteenth century to the readers, [End Page 367] Henriot recognizes the particular spatial, administrative, and judicial separations within the city that gave rise to uniquely different funeral practices and death management before the 1949 socialist revolution. He argues that social organizations played a quintessential role in managing death especially in the walled Chinese city, including benevolent societies and native-place associations such as guilds and corporations for the sojourners. Meanwhile, the Chinese state authorities established a longstanding managerial interest in and relation with the dead population in the city during the studied century. The Nationalist government, for example, intended to redefine urban death practices in the 1920s and 1930s only to encounter a new devastating historical circumstance overwhelmed by the accumulation of the dead bodies during wartime between the late 1930s and 1940s. The role of foreign concessions (i.e., the International Settlement) in this case became that of host to a huge "refugee coffin" population. Henriot points out that the ontological meaning of properly returning home upon death in traditional...

On Gnoseological and Ontological Meaning of Thought Experiment

On Gnoseological and Ontological Meaning of Thought Experiment

Overproximity. L’inconsistance de la frontière entre protagoniste et prochain dans les romans d’Amélie Nothomb

The paper focus on the ‘scénario-type’ of Amélie Nothomb’s novels, which consists in a dialectic confrontation between the Protagonist and the Neighbor. This confrontation dramatizes what Slavoj Zizek calls overproximity which is the effect and the sign of the inconsistency of the symbolic order in contemporary societies. In Nothomb’s novels, the Protagonist has to handle the massive and unbearable presence of the Neighbor threatening its subjective structure. With Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek and René Girard, we propose an interpretation of the ontological and ethical meanings of the necessary border between the Protagonist and the Neighbor in the novels of the most popular Belgian writer. The suppression and the resurgence of the border are understood in the larger framework of the antinomic tension between desire and enjoyment (jouisance), which affects the stability of the subjective and social structures.

Peculiarities of the methodological innovations in the philosophical and religious sphere: spiritual and cultural context

For the first time on the basis of the heritage of Ukrainian philosophers of 1860s-1930s specifics of the function of philosophical and religious ideas in the interaction with methodology is analyzed. In the article the author considers the idea of God thought the system of His names, using etymological and semantically approaches. Also the author analyzes the idea of God in anthropological and ontological meanings. With the help of structural approach the author clarifies the harmonization of the inner world of ideas. The functional approach helps to find the multidimensionalness of thinking process when the elements of synthesis and the symphony are established. The author stresses: Ukrainian thinkers as Novytski, Gogotski, Linytski, Kozlov, Berdyaev, Kostelnyk and others were introduced the new approaches to comprehending of the idea of God on the border of interreligious communications and interdisciplinary space. Their specifics of methodological thinking is the attention for different manifestation of the temporal rhythm as one of the most effective constructs in the exploration of given idea. The second peculiarity is inclusiveness of the isolated elements from the different branches of knowledge (psychophysics, moral philosophy, the history of religion etc.) in order to penetrate in the inner worlds of Pagans and Christians. Since those thinkers consider the possibility of typification of the common and the different in the spiritual life of the representatives of those religions. Their typification attests the continuous improvement of the confessional systems of Paganism and Christianity. The author comes to the conclusion that the methodology of the exploration of the idea of God is the polyvariant.

“Weak Thought” and Christianity: Some Aspects of Vattimo’s Philosophy of Religion, Confrontation with Otakar Funda

The article expresses the philosophical thoughts of an Italian philosopher, G.Vattimo and his development of the philosophy of M. Heidegger and essential aspects of Vattimo’s philosophy of religion. In the first part, we clarify Vattimo’s interpretation of Heidegger’s destruction of traditional metaphysics, the occurrence of ontological difference and the historical process of the oblivion of Being. According to Vattimo, the oblivion of Being is Heidegger’s reaction to European nihilism. It brings with it his philosophical questions on metaphysics, the substance of technology and course of technical civilisation. For Vattimo, it was only secularisation which enables one to pose questions about God, sense, and meaning. In a postmodern world, the world of technology and science has an ontological meaning for human beings and awakens them to who they are. In the article, we also focus our attention on some problematic points in his philosophy of religion. The first problem is a conflict among differentiated interpretations. Vattimo claims that kenosis has neither anything in common with “indefinite negation of God”, nor does it apologise for any interpretation of the Holy Scripture. In addition, he refuses radical demythologisation. In his opinion, there are no necessary reasons to follow this step. There are some authors who have serious reasons for it and the interpretation of kenosis leads to atheism. We will confront Vattimo’s philosophy with the thinking of the current Czech atheistic philosopher Otakar Funda. The next problem is a reduction of soteriology on the process of human being’s emancipation. There is no place for metaphysical evil here.