Part Of My Paper Research Articles

Civil Disobedience: A Phenomenological Approach

ABSTRACT In this paper, I discuss three objections against climate activism often voiced in the public, namely that their practices of civil disobedience are ultimately insincere, illegal, and ineffective. The main part of my paper focuses on this last point. This is because this objection points us to a deeper conceptual problem of political protest: if one of the conditions for the success of civil disobedience is that political demands must have been first voiced via democratic channels of opinion-formation, then why should we assume that a re-articulation of these demands in the course of civil disobedience leads to a different result? To answer this question, I propose a phenomenological approach to civil disobedience. Drawing on the protest practices of activist group Act Up, I argue that climate activism can escape the charge of ineffectiveness if it resorts to what I call the “aesthetic rationality of phenomenological demonstration.”

A kultúripartól a tudatiparig – és azon túl

"In this paper, I will focus primarily on the cultural criticism of Theodor W. Adorno. Based on the works On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening and The Culture Industry, a chapter of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, I outline Adorno’s aesthetic views and the social-critical conclusions that emerge from them. In the second part of my paper, I examine an essay by Hans Magnus Enzensberger titled The Consciousness Industry, which essentially seeks to develop Adorno’s concept of the “culture industry” employing various shifts of emphasis and conceptual innovations. Finally, the conclusion points out that the shaping of social consciousness should be understood as a critical-aesthetic practice that, through the denial of the established, the expansion of the limits of the imaginable, the suspension of the evidences of the present, and the perception of everyday, natural experiences as peculiar or outstanding phenomena, is capable of the cultural-political emancipation of the individual."

Revolution, Transformation and the Role of the Subject

Abstract In order to understand today’s social and political situation in East-Central Europe, one should particularly examine the consequences of post-socialist transformation. The negative and often very painful effects of the social changes that affected Central and Eastern Europe over the past three decades have not been overcome until today. This makes it all the more important to be better prepared philosophically for future social changes. François Jullien offers a number of solutions. In the first part of my paper, taking Jullien’s book The Silent Transformations as a point of departure, I show that many of the problems that still exist in East-Central Europe largely result from placing too much emphasis on the event of the revolution and too little on the transformation experienced by the region’s populations. In the second and third parts, I indicate, pace Jullien, a way towards a moderate, “sober”, but nevertheless creative and productive understanding of the active agent by appealing to the works of Hans-Herbert Kögler and Fabian Heubel.

Challenging adult-centrism: speaking speech and the possibility of intergenerational dialogue

This paper reflects on the role of philosophy in the school environment, paying special attention to the promise of intergenerational dialogue carried forward by philosophy programmes associated with Lipman’s Philosophy for Children (P4C) curriculum and its current transformation into Philosophy with Children (PwC). There are two basic ideas that constitute the guiding thread of my reflections. Firstly, that philosophical interventions of that kind challenge adult-centric views of education and philosophy. Secondly, that such initiatives carry with them the promise of acknowledging children as equal participants in the process of philosophical questioning and meaning creation. In the first part of the paper, I argue for the importance of understanding the act of philosophizing with children as a disruption of adult-centrism.First, I reflect on a narrow future-directedness that seems to characterize the temporality of school. I suggest that Philosophy for/with Children (P4wC) interventions interrupt such a future-directedness inviting the students to immerse themselves into a dilated ‘now’ of multiple possibilities. Then, I reflect on the ways in which P4wC interventions challenge the assumption that philosophy is an adult preoccupation. Special attention is paid to the work of scholars who challenge our restrictive assumptions about what qualifies as philosophical thinking.In the second part of my paper, I turn to the work of Merleau-Ponty with the aim of sketching out some requirements for the possibility of a dialogue between childhood and adulthood. I suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on childhood and expressive speech are invaluable in the context of P4wC because they invite us 1) to appreciate the alterity of children without reducing them to inferior ‘others’ and 2) to remain alert to the expressivity of children’s speech.

Examining the “normal” in Relation to Mental Illness: The Case of Jane Eyre

How do we understand what is normal social behavior outside the parameters that are used to define “mental illness”? Terminological clarity is important in ensuring that our perception of mental illness is not just a theoretical exercise but is invariably connected to our day-to-day lives. A person could appear completely normal while displaying abnormal traits in his or her character. Something like that does not necessarily make them social misfits because they could still be perceived as “normal” for all practical purposes. For an instance of the normalization of the abnormal, I selected the novel Jane Eyre. Far from being a simple, captivating romance, Jane Eyre is not just about a girl struggling for self-respect but also someone who is trapped in a struggle for “normalcy” in the face of potential mental illness. The latter part of my paper revolves around two aspects: one is that we cannot conceive of the Realist novel without seeing that the genre of the novel itself is a product of class and gender-based contradictions. Another factor, specific to Jane Eyre, is that in their desperation to be “normal,” the characters display morbid symptoms of a controlled and by extension deceptive behavior that would qualify for an argument that the novel is a study of mental illness, rather than a picture of a society at harmony with itself. The paper is a critique of normalcy in the face of the fear of falling mentally ill – a fear experienced by the narrator and communicated to the reader. In the process, the paper uses some of the literary aspects of the text to talk about characters in a manner that brings them as close as possible to reality. The characters are not just imaginary beings in the author’s mind, but individuals who could be situated in a social and a historical context. In attempting to examine mental illness in relation to Jane Eyre, the paper pays attention to some of the other characters in the novel such as Helen Burns, Brocklehurst, and St. John Rivers. The colonial dimension of mental illness in the colonizer’s world is also explored.

The Structure of Ideas: Problems for Thinking about the Pure Ego

Abstract In the first part of my paper, we will journey through the general structure of the first volume of Ideas, from which we will be able to deduce the position of Volume II. After carrying out a general analysis of the noesis/noema correlation structure in Section III and having provided, in Section IV, the basics of a phenomenology of reason, the second volume of Ideas should study the general fields in which the objects of transcendental experience appear: the world, the animal being, and the spiritual or cultural being. The third, unwritten volume should have been devoted to the study of the superior products of culture, and science. Thus, the second part of this paper will show the place of Ideas’ second volume. The third part, the decisive one, will inquire into the position of the world and the place of the body and culture. Specifically, it will ask whether the experience of the body is understood to be an objective genitive or whether it is also understood, necessarily, as a subjective genitive. The same question will be asked about culture. An understanding of one as objective or subjective genitive radically alters the meaning of the pure ego.

Questioning Authority: Anthony Collins’ Challenge to Orthodox Anglican Authority Figures and George Berkeley’s Reply

Abstract In this paper I argue that the English freethinker Anthony Collins (1676–1729) is making use of ‘conglobation’ to develop an argument across the Vindication of the Divine Attributes (1710) and the Discourse on Free-Thinking (1713), which aims to challenge the religious authority of orthodox representatives of the Anglican church. That is, Colins makes use of a rhetorical (piecemeal) strategy that serves to insinuate one’s proper position to create, what I will call, the ‘authority-challenge’. I reconstruct this challenge in three steps. First, I analyse Collins’ criticism of William King (1650–1729), the Archbishop of Dublin, who according to Collins’ Vindication advances a conception of the divine attributes and of the nature of God that is compatible with atheism. Second, I introduce Collins’ argument from disagreement, which he develops in his Discourse. This argument aims to establish that whenever there is meaningful disagreement, e. g., about the (philosophical) content and not merely about the best terminology, between the supposed experts, we have the right to think on our own about the issue at hand. In the third step, I present the ‘authority-challenge’. In a nutshell, this challenge requires orthodox representatives of the Anglican church either (i) to open the door to atheism by not substantively disagreeing with William King (thereby undermining everything they stand for and presenting themselves as hypocrites) or (ii) to substantively disagree with King to contain atheism (thereby undermining their status as experts for religious issues). Since (i) cannot be an option, they have no choice but to undermine their own authority by impairing their expert status, which, in turn, has ramifications for their political power as well. In the second part of my paper, I argue that §§ 16–22 of the fourth dialogue of George Berkeley’s Alciphron (1732/52) are designed to meet Collins’ ‘authority-challenge’. This will allow me to resolve the puzzle that these sections so far have posed for commentators. In particular, many have been puzzled by Berkeley’s argumentative strategy and in particular his references to the Scholastics. As I argue, however, if §§ 16–22 are read in the light of Collins’ authority challenge, it becomes evident that Berkeley uses these references in his attempt to refute King without failing to meet Collins’ challenge.

Narrative: Event, Temporality, Sequence

A narrative is traditionally defined as a sequences of events. While narratologists may disagree on what a relevant narrative event would be, no one argues about what a sequence is. Sequence is taken to be a fundamental notion that is self-explanatory and directly given to our intuition. I suggest, however, that it is interesting to look more closely at sequence in order to understand narrative temporality, because there is a distinct sense that it is somewhere “within” sequence that temporality resides. In order to do this, I first try to isolate the concept of pure sequence with the help of John McTaggart’s analysis of temporal and atemporal series and apply it to narratives. I then take a close look at an experimental film, Happy End by Oldřich Lipský from 1966, that runs backwards and thus reverses the normal sequence. By tracing how moments of confusion and disorientation on the part of the viewers arise in connection to this reversal, I speculate, firstly, that our grasp of sequentiality is deeply embodied, rooted in the phenomenology of movement with its predictive cognitive component; and secondly, that the phenomenological aspect is intrinsically bound up with the symbolic aspect of thinking in patterns, which is also predictive. In the last part of my paper, I introduce the theory of Generative Anthropology, which hypothesizes about the origin of language, and situate the phenomenological and symbolic components of sequentiality in the originary anthropological structure of deferral. Thus I show that sequence is not some a priori mathematical category of pure reason, but a concept that is inherent in language and symbolic thinking.

At the Crossroad of Confessions

The focus of my study is a mid-seventeenth-century Latin manuscript prayer book. Its most basic characteristics should attract the attention of scholars of the period since it was compiled by a Lutheran married couple from Prešov for their individual religious practice. In examining the prayer book, I was able to identify the basic source of the manuscript, which was previously unknown to researchers: the compendium of the German Lutheran author Philipp Kegel. The manuscript follows the structure of Kegel’s volume and also extracts a number of texts from the German author’s work, which mainly collects the writings of medieval church fathers. In addition to Kegel, I have also been able to identify a few other sources; mainly the writings of Lutheran authors from Germany (Johann Arndt, Johann Gerhardt, Johann Rist, and Johann Michael Dilherr). I give a description of the physical characteristics of the manuscript, its illustrations, the hymns that accompany the prayers, and the copying hands. I will also attempt to identify the latter more precisely. The first compilers of the manuscript were Andreas Glosius and his wife Catharina Musoniana from Prešov. I also organize the biographical data we have about their life and will correct the certainly erroneous provenance of Andreas Glosius, whose name appears in the context of several important contemporary manuscripts, including the gradual of Prešov. In the last part of my paper, I will also show how well known and popular Philipp Kegel’s work was in the early modern Kingdom of Hungary. This is necessary because, although the data show that there was a very lively reception of Philipp Kegel’s work in Hungary, previous scholars have only tangentially dealt with the Hungarian presence of his work.

Entgrenzte Figuren – bewegte Erinnerungen.Migration im Spannungsfeld von Literatur und Begriff

AbstractMy paper discusses the controversial relationship between literature and literary studies by using the example of the term ›migration literature‹. It demonstrates in the first part that ›migration literature‹ as a term in literary studies does not expose explications of rational reconstructions of a conceptual content in Harald Fricke’s and Klaus Weimar’s understanding. In its history (Adelson 1991; 2004), ›migration literature‹ goes back to a chain of different terms and definitions asGastarbeiter-orAusländerliteraturand reflects strategies of homogenization and exclusion. From the 1980s forward, those terms produce in cultural contexts a semantic field that propagates culture based on a definition ofex negativo(Tafazoli 2019). The first part of my paper describes an outline of influences of homogenization and reductionism on the discourses of migration in literary studies and explains in the second part an asymmetrical relationship between motive on the one hand and terminology on the other. The term ›migration literature‹ seems to dominate this relationship by determination of a source of ›accepted truths‹ related to the life and background – specifically to the place of birth and the origin – of the author (Bay 2017). By prioritization of criteria beyond narrative reality, literary studies led in the 1980s and 1990s discourses on migration on the sidelines of canon of German speaking literature (Weigel 1991; Wilpert 2001). With regard to terminological determination in order to produce interpretative sovereignty (Foucault 1994), my paper exemplifies in the second part that the term ›migration literature‹ collects selected and limited fields of social, historical and political knowledge in perspective adjustment and in order to classify literature beyond aesthetic criteria. By this means, inductive standards (Müller 2010a; 2010b) classify the literary object ›migration‹ ontologically and regardless of factuality of the author’s life on the one hand and fictionality of narrative text on the other. The ontological classification has been used, for example, in contexts that replace the figure of stranger (Fremder) by the figure of migrant and determines the latter as figuration of external space of culture. The replacement suggests a perspective rigidity in the cultural production of knowledge that flows into a terminological classification and claims with the term ›migration literature‹ sovereignty over culture. From this point of view, the author and his work should be located in the external space of canonized literature. The second part of my paper comes to the conclusion that the term ›migration literature‹ has been developed in politicized frames of external-textual ›accepted truths‹ and bases its stability on cultural essentialism and exclusion regardless of heterogenetic appearance (Bhatti 2015).With regard to theories of »literature on the move« (Ette 2001), my paper understands that migration has always formed a considerable part of literary production. Therefore, migration could be understood as a literary motive. This meaning would undermine an ontological understanding of culture. Narrative texts develop poetics of migration and create by figurations of migration a poly-perspectivity in which migration advances to a polysemantic motive. My paper discusses these thoughts in the context of cultural memory in the third part and understands varied and multifaceted constructions of cultural memory on all sides of cultural borders. This part confronts the asymmetrical relationship between motive and terminology with discussions on migration as narrative of cultural memory that belongs to cultural majority and minority equally, at the same time and in the same space. Based on this understanding, my paper argues that migration as a motive construct shapes and leads discourses of culture under the conditions of global re-formation. The shift of the perspective from conceptual classification to close-readings of literary constructions should lead us to considerations about the openness of the narrative in distinction to terminological unity and should also initiate a paradigm shift in locating migration in discourses of literary studies. The theoretical considerations will be exemplified in the fourth section by Mohammad Hossein AllafisFrankfurter Trilogiethat is a collection of the novelsDie Nächte am Main(1998),Die letzte Nacht mit Gabriela(2000) andGabriela findet einen Stapel Papier(2012). The fourth part of my paper examines inFrankfurter Trilogiea reading that integrates migration as a motive into the discourse of cultural memory of global challenges. Using the example of theTrilogie, this part of my paper demonstrates that discussions on migration in the context of cultural memory could initiate a shift in the perspective of reception from conceptual homogenization to narrative openness. The shift of perspective shows that literature translates the questions of community into the aesthetic perception of the form of culture and civilization in which the community actually articulates and appears itself and shows also that reading of migration as a statement aboutonenation has lost its explanatory power. The last part of my paper resumes my thoughts and takes position in the current fields of research in literary studies.

Loop Structures in Film (and Literature): Experiments with Time Between the Poles of Classical and Complex Narration

Among the many innovations complex or “puzzle” films have brought about in the last three decades, experiments with narrative time feature prominently. And within the category of nonlinear plots, the loop structure – exemplified by films such as Repeaters (Canada 2010), Source Code (USA/France 2011), Looper (USA/China 2012) or the TV-Series Day Break (USA 2006) – has established itself as an interesting variant defying certain norms of storytelling while at the same time conforming in most cases to the needs of genre and mass audience comprehension. In the first part of my paper, I will map out different kinds of repeated action plots, paying special attention to constraints and potentialities pertaining to this particular form. In the second part, I will address the issue of narrative complexity, showing that loop films cover a wide range from “excessively obvious” mainstream (e.g. Groundhog Day, USA 1992; 12:01, USA 1993; Edge of Tomorrow, USA/Canada 2014) to disturbing narrative experiments such as Los Cronocrimenes (Spain 2007) or Triangle (Great Britain/Australia 2009). Finally, a look at two early examples (Repeat Performance, USA 1947 and Twilight Zone: Judgement Day, USA 1959) will raise the question how singular the recent wave of loop films are from a historical perspective.

Some reflections on the legend of the Marathon runner (hdt. 6.105, Aristoph. nub. 63–67, Plut. de glor. ath. 347c, Lucian. laps. 3 and the Roman Tradition)

A well-known tradition has it that after the victory of the Greeks over the Persian army at the battle of Marathon (490 B.C.E.) one of the Athenians ran forty kilometres from Marathon to Athens and died soon after his arrival in the city, after giving the good news. However, the story is more complicated than it seems, and several issues have claimed the attention of scholars, such as what the Marathon runner’s name was, what form of greeting he used and whether the episode really happened or not. The first part of my paper offers a reconsideration of the extant sources in order to express my point of view on the abovementioned issues. The second part aims at showing a selection of parallel passages which could possibly prove useful in trying to illustrate how the legend of the Marathon runner evolved into the shape it assumed in the Lucianean account, which is still considered as the ‘official’ version of the story.

Мир или событие? К онтологии войны

This paper is an attempt to rethink the ontology of war. Its main object is to determine the ontological status of war and the connection between strategies of armed conflict prevention and the way this status is understood. If to overcome metaphysics we need to reconsider its basis then maybe a similar strategy should be applied in order to overcome war. The source of war is understood here not only in temporal terms, but also as its essence – the ontological basis. The first part of the article invokes several conceptions from the twentieth century (that, of course, refer to much older texts), according to which, war was to be overcome by variously understood progress. In those conceptions, as well as in the critical approaches from the beginning of the 21st century, war is treated as an event, a state of affairs. In the next part of my paper, based on Margaret Mead's anthropological diagnosis, I propound a conception of war as an invention, and therefore – technology. The issue of war is further considered in the context of the twentieth century philosophy of technology. A thesis is put forward according to which understanding the influence of techne of war over episteme should be the essence of thinking of war prevention. In this study, war is treated as a technology that determines perception. For critical reflection upon war, I use twentieth century philosophical conceptions linking technology with cognitive processes, especially those formulated by Martin Heidegger and Marshall McLuhan. Woniak A. wiat czy wydarzenie? W stron ontologii wojny // Argument. 2020. Vol. 1/10. Pp. 133-150.

Functional logical semiotics of natural language

Abstract In the first part of my paper I briefly present Jerzy Pelc’s functional approach to logical semiotics of natural language. This approach focuses on the use of natural language expressions and on its dependence on context and conversational situation. One of the important goals of this analysis is to appreciate the role of sentences in natural language and stress that it is by means of sentences that language fulfills its main roles. However, for Pelc almost any expression can be used as a sentence, despite not being a grammatical sentence. In the second part I try to place Pelc’s standpoint within the framework of contemporary semantic minimalism – contextualism debate. I pay special attention to his treatment of subsentential expressions used to express propositions and argue that his view belongs to pragmatics-oriented approaches to subsentential speech acts.

Per una fenomenologia critica della gravidanza

In this paper, I outline some key epistemic premises for a critical phenomenology of gestational experience, working through the analysis of pregnant embodiment in Merleau-Ponty’s Psychologie et pédagogie de l’enfant. The first part of my paper introduces Merleau-Ponty’s anti-essentialist position; in the second part, I focus on pregnant embodiment, and I highlight Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the gestating subject as a self in the world and of the gestational body as lived body. In the third and final part, I suggest how critical phenomenology might account philosophically for the situated experience of the gestating self by considering the intersection of pregnancy and disability as a case study. These findings may suggest a path for fruitful further analysis of pregnant lived experience, taking into account the axes of oppression and marginalisation which shape one’s subjectivity.

Świat czy wydarzenie? W stronę ontologii wojny


 
 
 The world or an event? Towards an ontology of war: This paper is an attempt to rethink the ontology of war. Its main object is to determine the ontological status of war and the connection between strategies of armed conflict prevention and the way this status is understood. If to overcome metaphysics we need to reconsider its basis then maybe a similar strategy should be applied in order to overcome war. The source of war is understood here not only in temporal terms, but also as its essence — the ontological basis. The first part of the article invokes several conceptions from the twentieth century (that, of course, refer to much older texts), according to which, war was to be overcome by variously understood progress. In those conceptions, as well as in the critical approaches from the beginning of the 21st century, war is treated as an event, a state of affairs. In the next part of my paper, based on Margaret Mead’s anthropological diagnosis, I propound a conception of war as an invention, and therefore — technology. The issue of war is further considered in the context of the twentieth-century philosophy of technology. A thesis is put forward according to which understanding the influence of techne of war over episteme should be the essence of thinking of war prevention. In this study, war is treated as a technology that determines perception. For critical reflection upon war, I use twentieth-century philosophical conceptions linking technology with cognitive processes, especially those formulated by Martin Heidegger and Marshall McLuhan.
 
 

The Consequence of the Consequence Argument

Abstract The aim of my paper is to compare three alternative formal reconstructions of van Inwagen's famous argument for incompatibilism. In the first part of my paper, I examine van Inwagen's own reconstruction within a propositional modal logic. I point out that, due to the expressive limitations of his propositional modal logic, van Inwagen is unable to argue directly (that is, within his formal framework) for incompatibilism. In the second part of my paper, I suggest to reconstruct van Inwagen's argument within a first-order predicate logic. I show, however, that even though this reconstruction is not susceptible to the same objection, this reconstruction can be shown to be inconsistent (given van Inwagen's own assumptions). At the end of my paper, I suggest to reconstruct van Inwagen's argument within a quantified counterfactual logic with propositional quantifiers. I show that within this formal framework van Inwagen would not only be able to argue directly for incompatibilism, he would also be able to argue for crucial assumptions of his argument.

“From Moses to Moses”: Late Medieval Jewish and Christian Interpretation of Moses’s Prophecy

The paper examines how the figure of the biblical Moses was philosophically interpreted in medieval Jewish and Christian writings. It highlights a turning point in a new concept of prophecy and scriptural authority and suggests that this transformation was made complicated for both Jewish and Christian intellectuals by the appearance of Moses Maimonides, who was most influential in promoting the Muslim model of philosophic interpretation of prophecy, and at the same time confusingly emerged as a living manifestation of semi-biblical authority. Against Jewish exclusivist interpretation of Mosaic law as the leading polemical argument to encounter competing revelations, the first part of my paper points out a mechanism of “Jewish successionism”, i.e., the re-interpretation of the biblical Moses as an instrument for rationalizing normative paradigmatic shift. The second, main part of the paper turns to the Latin translation of Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed, placing it in the midst of a crucial western Latin turn into a new phase of engagement with Old Testament concept of prophecy. A short comparison between some prominent twelfth century figures and later Scholastic thought demonstrates the central role of the new Arab Aristotelianism in general, and that of Maimonides in particular. Maimonides reception among the schoolman will culminate in the writings of Meister Eckhart, exposing the full potentiality of the double appearance of the Egyptian (Rabbi) Moses.

Počátky variolace proti neštovicím v Evropě (1713-1721)

Smallpox epidemics ravaged the European population during the early modern period, with the number of victims being estimated in hundreds of thousands per year. This trend started to change at the beginning of the 18th century, when the earliest protective treatment (variolation) was introduced to Europe from the East. In the first part of my paper, I sum up major topics from the current historiography of variolation (e.g. relation to gender or politics), which until now have not been available to a Czech readership.After that I focus on the propagation of knowledge about variolation. For this purpose, I present a collection of lesser-known sources from Central Europe, particularly those relating to the journal of the German academy Leopoldina and the Slovak (Hungarian) physician Jan Adam Reiman, which are often either ignored or misquoted. Finally, I come to the conclusion that the spread of variolation in Europe was not mediated exclusively through British sources, as it resulted from complex knowledge-sharing across various groups of individuals.

Expanding hermeneutics to the world of technology.

In this essay, I first analyze the extension of hermeneutical interpretation in the Heideggerian sense to products of contemporary technology which are components of our “lifeworld”. Products of technology, such as airplanes, laptops, cellular phones, washing machines, or vacuum cleaners might be compared with what Heidegger calls the “Ready-to-hand” (das Zuhandene) with regard to utilitarian objects such as a hammer, planer, needle and door handle in Being and Time. Our life with our equipment, which represents the “Ready-to-hand” in Heidegger's sense of the word, is determined by temporalization (Zeitigung) which cannot be separated and isolated from the wholeness of things in the world. In the second part of my paper, I explore the positive achievement of material hermeneutics (Don Ihde) with regard to its extension to technoscience and the discussion of how such hermeneutics can contribute to the preservation of our threatened lifeworld, but also to explore the possibilities of how technical inventions, medical innovations could improve our way of life.