Philosophical Movement Research Articles

Humanizing Childhood in Early Twentieth-Century Spain by Anna Kathryn Kendrick

Reviewed by: Humanizing Childhood in Early Twentieth-Century Spain by Anna Kathryn Kendrick Pamela Beth Radcliff Humanizing Childhood in Early Twentieth-Century Spain. By Anna Kathryn Kendrick. Oxford, UK: Legenda Press, 2020. ix + 305 pp. Cloth $99, paper $12.50. Humanizing Childhood explores the debates and practices surrounding the emerging discipline of the study of childhood in early twentieth-century Spain. Linked to the transnational education reform movement in Europe and the United States, artists, poets, educators, and philosophers in Spain developed new frameworks to understand the "world of the child" in order to guide children to their full human potential. On one hand, children served as an inspiration to avant-garde artists and poets; on the other hand, educators debated how best to intervene in their development. The over-arching theme of "paedology," or child studies, was the focus on the "whole child" and their role in the individual process of "humanization" through their phenomenological interaction with the world. The book provides a welcome addition to the relatively undeveloped field of the Spanish history of childhood and will be of comparative interest to scholars working on the reconfiguration of childhood and education reform movements in the twentieth century. One of Kendrick's main themes is to situate the Spanish case in a transnational context while exploring the national roots of new ideas about childhood and education. Spaniards absorbed the broader scholarship on holistic education through the translation of texts and visits to observe practices in other countries. For example, translated editions of Freud's works appeared in the Revista de Occidente after 1922, while the main text on Gestalt therapy was published in 1926. Maria Montessori's translated work appeared in Spanish in 1916, and the almost three dozen Montessori schools established in Catalonia by the 1930s were crucial to the movement's globalization. Montessori herself was first invited to speak in Barcelona in 1913 and served as director of Spain's Montessori Institute from 1918–21. At the same time, Kendrick does not paint a simplistic portrait of a "peripheral" nation accessing "advanced" Western culture. Spain had its own bifurcated humanistic tradition, a Catholic version and a secular version embodied in the influential Institute for Free Education (ILE), established in the late nineteenth century, as well as in Spain's anarchist philosophical [End Page 165] tradition. The ILE was influenced by the German philosophical movement of the nineteenth century called Krausism, which proposed a holistic approach to human nature that integrated mind, body, and spirit. The ILE tradition of secular humanist education as the key to social reform, modernization, and national development culminated in the Second Republic of the 1930s. Republican leaders ascribed almost mystical powers to education and invested major resources into reforming and expanding the country's educational infrastructure and disseminating culture through the touring theater troupes of the "pedagogical missions." One of the virtues of the book is to demonstrate the broader dissemination of these ideas through tacking back and forth between well-known figures like Ortega y Gasset and unknown individuals like teacher Margarita Aranda, who founded an open-air school in Madrid in the late 1920s. On the other hand, I would have liked to have seen more acknowledgement of the tension between these "universal" theories of childhood development and the deep class, regional, and religious divisions that structured Spanish society in the 1930s. Kendrick employs the Krausist trinity of mind, body, and spirit to structure the three parts of the book, each of which contains two chapters exploring one aspect of these concepts from the perspective of debates about childhood development and education. The first section, on the mind, explores how educators, psychologists, and poets theorized children's mental learning process, drawing on Gestalt therapy and "globalization theory" in the first chapter and on poets' fascination with childhood and children's writings in chapter 2. The poetry chapter provides a good example of the circularity of the debate, in which avant-garde poets sought inspiration from children as "pre-verbal muses" while educators developed poetry, literature and theater adapted for children. Part two, on the body, focuses on how "new" biological concepts of childhood development through tactile interaction with the world were...

80,000 Hours for the Common Good

Effective Altruism is a rapidly growing and influential contemporary philosophical movement committed to updating utilitarianism in both theory and practice. The movement focuses on identifying urgent but neglected causes and inspiring supererogatory giving to meet the need. It also tries to build a broader coalition by adopting a more ecumenical approach to ethics which recognizes a wide range of values and moral constraints. These interesting developments distinguish Effective Altruism from the utilitarianism of the past in ways that invite cooperation and warrant a fresh look from Thomists. Nonetheless Effective Altruism’s fundamentally consequentialist and aggregative model for ethics precludes more foundational agreement with Thomistic ethics in ways that limit the extent of practical cooperation.

GEORGE EDWARD MOORE IN THE HISTORY OF ARISTOTELIAN SOCIETY OF XX CENTURY

George Edward Moore is the brightest philosopher of British neo-realism. During the first half of XX century he remained the undisputed leader of this philosophical movement, which organically and fruitfully combinedele-ments of classical British empiricism with new original tools for the conceptual analysis of ordinary language expressions. By the example of innovative ideas in moral philosophy, outlined by G.E. Moore in Principia Ethica, there is analyzed the intellectual context of the formation of philosophical metaethics in the XX century.

Philosophical Posthumanism

Philosophical Posthumanism

Atasun Optik ‘Görüşürüz’ Reklam Filminin Edimbilim Açısından Değerlendirilmesi

Günümüzde dil olgusuna geleneksel bakıştan daha çok dilbilimsel açıdan bakıldığını söyleyebiliriz. Özelikle sözcelem kuramlarından sonra, gerek dil öğretiminde gerekse dilin kendi yapısıyla ilgili çalışmalarda dilbilimsel bakış açısı daha belirleyici olmuştur. Bu kuramlardan biri olan “edimbilim” dil kullanımını ve algılanmasını farklı açılardan değerlendirmektedir. Ortaya çıktığı ilk zamanlarda felsefi bir hareket olarak görülen edimbilim, zamanla dilbilimin en önemli alanlarından biri olmuştur. Edimbilim, dilin kullanımını tek bir açıdan değil birçok açıdan değerlendirerek yorumlamaya çalışan bir yaklaşımdır. Edimbilimle ilgili günümüzde de birçok çalışma yapılmaktadır. Bu çalışmalardaki temel amaç, dili daha iyi anlayabilmektir. Dilin kim tarafından, nerede, ne zaman ve nasıl kullanıldığına eğilen edimbilim, göstergebilim açısından da oldukça önemli bir alandır. Günümüzde insan algısını yönetmenin birçok yolu olmakla birlikte, gelişen teknik imkânlar sayesinde en çok kullanılan yöntemin; iletişim teknolojileri olduğunu söyleyebiliriz. Tüketim tercihlerimizden siyasi görüşlerimize, tuttuğumuz takımdan beğendiğimiz sanatçılara kadar uzanan çizgide algı yönetimlerinin belirleyici olduğu, hemen herkes tarafından kabul edilmektedir. İletişim ve teknoloji çağı olarak adlandırılan çağımızda, reklamların özellikle tüketim tercihlerimize yön verdiği su götürmez bir gerçektir. Reklamların içinde kullanılan dilin, düz sözden öte derin yapısıyla, edimleriyle birçok algımıza hitap ettiğini söyleyebiliriz. Edimbilime göre dilin kullanımının üç temel edimi vardır: Düzsöz, edimsöz, etkisöz. Bu makalede, 35 saniyelik “ATASUN OPTİK ‘Görüşürüz’ Reklam Filmi”, görselleri ve sözleriyle birlikte edimbilimin düzsöz edimi, edimsöz edimi ve etkisöz edimi açısından değerlendirilmeye çalışıldı.

The Uninhibited Evolution of the Human Persona: A Transhumanistic Study of Anil Menon’s The Beast with Nine Billion Feet

Debates on intuition about transformed humankind in the future have led to the conception of transhumanism. It is a new philosophical movement to express the ideology that humanism will evolve by employing science and technology. Supporters of transhumanism believe that scientific aid in the evolution of humans will take them beyond the bounds of physical and mental limitations; eventually, it will make them immortals. The influence of transhumanism in literature has given birth to seminal works of art, particularly science fiction. Anil Menon’s The Beast with Nine Billion Feet is one such novel which sprang out the moral issues due to the rapid growth of science and technology affecting social, cultural, and political scenarios in India. The story is about genetic engineering and its impact on the socio-political problems. In addition to unfolding the threats and opportunities of transhumanism, the novel also touches on the issues of young adults like acquiring autonomy and finding their true identity. This study attempts to bring out the trepidation and chaos resultant of the period of transition and the multiple challenges and threats to the human race.

Feminismo especulativo nas veredas pós-correlacionistas

RESUMO:Este trabalho discute novas possibilidades do feminismo no movimento filosófico denominado realismo especulativo, na vertente de Quentin Meillassoux, de forma a oxigenar a epistemologia feminista contemporânea, que se encontra em clausura metafísica. Se, pré-Kant, o feminismo se encontrava enclausurado na postura objetivista, com a essencialização da mulher como imperfeita, por outro lado, pós-Kant, a mulher se encontra reduzida à verdade subjetivista da ordem epistêmica, gerando outras essencializações. O artigo propõe nova visão para se pensar o feminismo póscorrelacionista, com a ascensão de outra forma de reflexão ontológica: através da cosmontologia, uma compreensão do sexo, do gênero e da sexualidade nem melhor e nem pior, mas apenas diferente, que provoca a reontologização das ciências humanas pelo reconhecimento de outras grafias e modos de existência.

Philo of Alexandria: An Intellectual Biography

As the Professor of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Maren Niehoff has carefully studied Philo of Alexandria for many years and is well suited to contribute this volume to the Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. At the encouragement of John J. Collins, Niehoff has written this full-length biography of Philo, addressing a significant deficiency in the scholarship. Apart from the present volume, there is very little written by way of biography on Philo because there is such scant evidence (both autobiographical or secondary reports). Consequently, Niehoff starts her biography by reconstructing the chronology of Philo’s life and places his extant works within this timeline (see the excellent summary in Appendix 1 at the end of the book).The book’s introduction sets out the nature of the task and addresses the methodological problems faced in writing such a biography. Niehoff starts with what is known about Philo—his geographical movement from Alexandria to Rome in AD 38, where he acted as the head of a Jewish embassy to Gaius. Then she reads each of Philo’s works, places them within this chronology, and finds in them reflections of the changes that took place in Philo’s life on the basis of his situation.The three main sections of the book, which follow the introduction, apply this method in detail. The first section is a discussion of Philo the ambassador and author in Rome. The second section explores Philo’s biblical exposition while in Rome. The final section is an overview of Philo’s earlier writings while he was in Alexandria. Each of these three sections outlines Philo’s writings of the period but also investigates what can be learned about Philo while he was writing. Niehoff shows how Philo was influenced by, or adapted his writing to, the context in which he found himself. In doing this, Niehoff finds the relevant evidence to support her reconstruction and explains the different tones and methods for writing evident in Philo at different points in his life. The book concludes with an epilogue that draws together Niehoff’s arguments, two appendixes, endnotes, a bibliography, and indexes.This is well-written and thoroughly researched biography. Niehoff displays her magisterial knowledge of Philo’s writings and the historical and philosophical movements of the period. The book is built on a close reading of Philo’s works and as such presents a strong consistent reconstruction of the life of Philo and the Sitz im Leben of his works. Its attention to detail is evident throughout as are its links to Philo’s historical and philosophical milieu. Reading it is a tour of Philo led by an expert, which effects a deeper appreciation of both Philo and Niehoff.However, there is one potentially significant criticism that can be leveled at the work and seen as a weakness—the method Niehoff follows is circular. The absence of explicit evidence about the life of Philo forces Niehoff to look at his works for shards of biographical information, and once these are isolated, the work is then read in light of the reconstructed historical setting. At times, this cuts across the nature of the individual works that were not written to explicate Philo’s historical situation. Consequently, once the reconstruction is posited, all the information in the work is then made to fit this reconstruction. In defense of Niehoff, the absence of evidence necessitates such an approach (and it appears this is a major reason so few have attempted to write a biography of Philo in the past). Given this criticism, the value of the exercise can only be assessed on the ability of Niehoff’s reconstruction to explain the evidence that we do possess while acknowledging the limited nature of such evidence. That is, circularity is a problem if it is unable to explain Philo’s writings and/or its reconstruction fails to be logically consistent. Niehoff’s case would find more support if there were more evidence outside of Philo, but sadly such evidence is wanting. As such, even though this is a potential weakness, Niehoff’s methods seems to be the only option open to us at the present time, and she should be commended for her valuable work.Overall, this is a valuable work built on years of reflective thinking. It fills a significant void in Philonic scholarship.

Educação Filosófica como processo de Libertação

Nosso objetivo neste artigo é discutir a relação entre filosofia – de modo mais incisivo a Filosofia da Libertação – e educação, de modo que propicie, muito mais do que conteúdos dogmatizados, o despertar para descolonização, a emancipação e a política. Portanto, o caminho proposto aqui é o da procura por refletir sobre uma educação filosófico-libertadora. A partir da pergunta geradora de Leopoldo Zea ‘O que é o homem latino-americano? Procuramos refletir sobre o processo de descoberta do ‘rosto’ oprimido do latino-americano, da revelação desse Outro en-coberto pelo si mesmo europeu. Trazemos à cena o método ana-lético de E. Dussel (1986) e o termo Inédito Viável de Freire (2015) para que busquemos um movimento filosófico no sentido de pensar a Filosofia da Libertação como compromisso com a libertação dos oprimidos.

“A New Philosophical Movement from the Twentieth Century and one of its Founders,” Book review of A Philosophy of Struggle: The Leonard Harris Reader (2020)

“A New Philosophical Movement from the Twentieth Century and one of its Founders,” Book review of A Philosophy of Struggle: The Leonard Harris Reader (2020)

The Evolution of Symbolist Ideas in the Zolotoe Runo Magazine

The article treats the role art magazine Zolotoe runo played in history of symbolist’s theoretical ideas. By 1906, symbolism as a philosophical and aesthetic movement enters a crisis stage (and, then, a renaissance) — the pioneering movement has become utterly formal, tendentious, and has even acquired public recognition, which contradicts the modernist spirit. Zolotoe runo turns into a platform for the adversaries of outdated, decadent or individual symbolism, changing the symbolist nature and landscape. V. F. Khodasevich suggests that not only hasn’t symbolism been yet studied, but it also doesn`t seem to have been even read. This phenomenon and its notion deserve proper research. The scientific community’s interest in this movement is growing, as the importance of symbolism comes to light, and it becomes more evident that it was not only a milestone in history, but it also predetermined many trends in the development of culture and art up to the present day. Apart from that, the extreme heterogeneity within the symbolist movement and its paradoxical and unexpected metamorphoses are rarely understood. Nonetheless, through the analysis of such magazines as Zolotoe runo, and by drawing upon the research of cultural scientists, art historians and literary critics, we can clarify the features of symbolism, contradictory and holistic at the same time.

Comics and the Situationist International

ABSTRACT The Situationist International (1957–1972) was one of the most radical intellectual groups of the second half of the 20th century. One of the distinguishing, albeit overlooked, features of the Situationist International was the importance it placed on the medium of comics. The Situationist International was perhaps the first philosophical movement in the history of Western thought to place a value on the production, consumption and overall worth of comics as a medium. Moreover, it was one of the first intellectual movements to propagate its philosophy through comics. This article examines the historical reasons as well as how form and content of comics predisposed the Situationist International towards affinity for the medium. In particular, the popularity of comics in France during the period the Situationist International was active is explored as well as how the form and content of comics at the time lent themselves to the situationist concepts of constructed situation, détournement and the spectacle.

THE DIVINE UNITY IN AND BEYOND NATURE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY IN WALT WHITMAN’S AND JALAL AD-DIN MUHAMMAD RUMI’S ECSTATIC POEMS

As of today, the teachings of Rumi, Ibn al-Arabi and other Sufi mystics are enjoying a considerable revival in the United States. Especially ecstatic poems of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi have sold hundreds of thousands of copies recently, making him a best-selling poet not only in the United States but also in other many countries. The roots of American fascination for Sufism, however, reach as deep as the nineteenth century when American transcendentalism appeared as an expression within Romanticism as a literary movement. This paper aims to compare the concept of the Divine Unity in both seemingly unrelated philosophical movements in terms of how the ecstatic poems of Walt Whitman and Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi transcend physical existence in nature to see the truth of the universe, which means, for all of them, the unity with God. Some studies, albeit clear differences between two traditions, show evidence to commentate that their mystical and transcendental tenets share a basic understanding of human desire leading to the Divine Unity. Two religious and philosophical movements argue about omnipresence and omnipotence of God and in this point nature plays a crucial role as God’s perfect manifestation. The ascetic poems of Rumi, the thirteenth-century Sufi Muslim philosopher born in today’s Afghanistan, and the transcendental poems of Whitman, the nineteenth-century Christian transcendentalist from New York, are bedecked with similar natural elements to see what lays beyond form in compossible nature.

The “Machine of Power” and Aspects of Political Balance

This article explores the historical pattern of the evolution of power technologies. The methodological basis relies on the philosophical movements of the twentieth century (phenomenology, structuralism, etc.) and works by P. Bourdieu, C. Lefort, N. Luhmann, D. Naisbitt, P. Sloterdijk, M. Foucault, O. Spann, F. G. Jünger, N. Elias, and a number of other authors. The creation of technologies for managing society and complex power mechanisms (“power machines”) are a general pattern of social development. The notion of dynamic power balance acts as a mandatory attribute of the management of society and focuses political activity on the constant consideration of numerous phenomena, circumstances, and interests. The state, as the main instrument of political management, seeks to constantly strengthen its power both within and without, and to spread it ever more to new spheres of social relations and territories. But over time, first in the sphere of international law, universal principles are recognised that establish the limits of power and assume the impossibility of strengthening the power of any one state (the idea of political balance of sovereign national states). In domestic politics, the increasing degree of agreement and gradually developing mechanisms of consensus contribute to the reduction of the role played by direct violence and the emergence of a system of institutions that were perceived as legitimate. Previous spontaneous processes and collisions of opposing forces are translated into technical, organisational, normative language – and political dynamics – into static social structures. Chaos and uncertainty are replaced by ideas about the desired ideal and order. The new “power machine” also receives a new justification that is no longer transcendent, but rather rational and technological. Constantly improving and becoming more complex, the “power machine” becomes ever more effective. The “technical” regularities of the organisation and functioning of political power, which determine the new social role of the “power machine”, come to the fore. The state, which is organised into a mechanism with supreme political power and absolute authority, has a decisive influence on the development of society. The transition from a dynastic to a bureaucratic state depersonalises the “power machine”. The figure of a monarch with absolute power dissolves in the hierarchy of numerous officials vested with power. The organisation of power to a large extent separates carriers or subjects of power from their decisions. There is no visible mechanism of power and subordination and the opposite interests of the ruling and the governed. Further, in the twentieth-century industrial revolutions, the “power machine” is forced to adapt to new social realities, i. e. to “network” relations where communication and connections between people and their groups become fundamental. This leads to the creation of new management structures with a plurality of centres.

Transfinite Hope as Paradoxical Hope : A Pastoral Theological Approach to Hope in Transhumanism

In this paper, I critically examine hope in transhumanism through theological perspectives. In relation to this concern, the primary task of pastoral caregivers and pastoral counselors is also explored. Transhumanism is both a philosophical movement and techno-centered science. By operating scientific and technological imagination transhumanists seek to transcend human conditions and limitations with the help of science and technologies. Compared to transhumanism, this article argues that the primary task of pastoral care and pastoral counseling is to embrace paradoxical and ambiguous hope in suffering by practicing theological imagination. By using ironic imagination, death is not separated into life; despair from hope; pain from cure; human limitation from human possibility; past from future From the perspective of Christian faith, hope is always associated with the darkness of suffering, pain, agony, crying, and despair.

Nazariyat yakın tarihinde tümdengelimci izdüşümler:Arel-Ezgi-Uzdilek teorisinde yapısalcılığın izleri

This article claims that, in Arel-Ezgi-Uzdilek theory -which is the most common theory of Turkish music being thought, we can observe some apparent characteristics of structuralism. This article also tries to reason all the indicators caused to make such a claim. At this point, structuralism shouldn’t be seen as a philosophical movement or a thinking discipline, but as a way of criticism and is also a different methodology. As the name indicates, it is mainly about the structure and how it is organized. According to this assumption, each structure consists of sub-structures while the constituted structure is a substructure of a superior structure. According to Piaget, there are different implementations of structuralism in different disciplines; however, all of them contain two common aspects. First, structures are self-contained unknit which don’t need and reference outside. Secondly, each structure possesses some characteristics. Furthermore, Piaget tells that the concept of the structure consists of three key ideas which are wholeness, transformation, and self-regulation. First and the most apparent indicator can be the anti-historical perspective of Arel-Ezgi-Uzdilek theory against Turkish music. Arel-Ezgi-Uzdilek theory treats the Turkish music theory as a timeless set of values. It is a fact that Turkish music has a vast amount of written literature that had been created in centuries. However, in the Arel-Ezgi-Uzdilek theory, instead of using the accumulation of several centuries, their music theory tries to get its legitimacy only from maths, physics, and western music theories. Moreover, all happen in the time being. For example, they make a lot of detailed calculations about intervals nevertheless all these calculations have been made for almost two thousand years since the time of Ancient Greeks, then Islamic philosophers, etc. Furthermore, we can’t see any references to past resources. Ignoring history is an obvious pattern in Arel-Ezgi-Uzdilek theory. However, this doesn’t mean that Arel or other theoreticians are not aware of the history of music or history in general. In contrast, the theoreticians -specifically Arel,- are too much into history . Furthermore, many of the manuscripts we have come from these people’s libraries. However, their understanding of history is way too far from being pragmatic or result-oriented. Instead, they do the refusal of history by using the history. In other words, he makes the history of the music theory something abstract and unreachable to keep it out of a field of researching music.As another indicator which is the outcome of the first one, Arel-Ezgi-Uzdilek theory degrades the whole music theory into an acoustic and a mathematical engagement as we mentioned above. This approach assumes that Turkish music theory is a self-contained structure that can make itself possible. Furthermore, this approach also suggests that this self-contained unit is also capable of proving itself by using scientific disciplines and also Western music theory.Focusing on another structuralist indicator in Arel-Ezgi-Uzdilek theory, we see that they want Turkish music to be a sub-cluster of Western music theory, in other words, as a structure it is sub-structure of a bigger structure in the sociological environment. Even though this is an intention more than being a fact, this is what they want to achieve. In order to change the nature of the music, they inject imported Western music components into Turkish music to “change its DNA”. This effort is also supported by cutting the connection with the history of the music. This theory somehow had become the one and the only system in the teaching and practice of Turkish music for some decades and all its assumptions which are mainly altered by the theoreticians had been regarded as the traditional theory itself. However, its existence is not due to its consistency or scientific provability but because of the necessity to survive in the free public sphere. Furthermore, the literature they created also constitutes a vast amount and it had been more systematic than their counterparts.All in all, this finding makes it clear that today’s standard Turkish music education is not the direct legacy of what had been thought in the tradition itself, but a modified and a structuralized version of it combined with theoreticians’ ideological tendencies, personal world views and also social conditions of the earlier republican era of Turkey.

Crises através dos tempos

O objeto desta análise é compreender o papel da crítica de arte, na visão de Ernesto Sábato, ao elencar sua contribuição ao Simpósio da I Bienal Latino-Americana de 1978. Evidenciamos sua concepção de mundo, ao comparar a vida baseada na idolatria da técnica e na exploração pelo homem. Consideramos as variabilidades ético-morais e a atualidade de seu pensamento, voltada ao questionamento psicossomático do homem, sua eterna busca e transcendência, diante de crises sociopolíticas e morais. Avaliamos seu discurso crítico, os processos míticos evidenciados nas reflexões dialéticas sobre a arte e a identidade dos diversos movimentos filosóficos narrados.

Suffering and Sacrifice in an Unfinished Universe: The Energy of Love

Transhumanism is a cultural and philosophical movement that advocates human enhancement through technological means. Seeking to eradicate suffering and death and transcend the limits of biology, transhumanists celebrate the power of technology to transform human life. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was intrigued by computer technology and its potential to link humankind on a new level of a global mind. He has been labeled a forerunner of transhumanism; however, his theological vision is not about enhancement but transformation. He recognized that suffering and death are invaluable to the emergence of unitive love, exemplified in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Teilhard’s vision helps us realize that suffering in nature may appear as erratic and absurd; however, in light of God’s kenotic love, suffering is oriented toward freedom and the fullness of love.

Skepticism as a Means of “Indirect Exposition”: Boris Pasternak and Gustav Shpet

ABSTRACT When we discuss skepticism, we generally mean a certain philosophical movement with a fundamental basis in doubt. At the same time, the history of philosophy gives us another highly productive, methodologically oriented interpretation of skepticism as a psychological state of mind that forces the author to draw a veil over his thoughts. That said, we consider it important that epistemological skepticism, both in its traditional versions and in its modern epistemological conceptions, is not a self-sufficient position. Doubt acquires methodological effectiveness only when, through verbal-conceptual mediation, it brings with it a semiotic-symbolic interpretation of the reality directly given to us. This philosophical-methodological idea, which our article attempts to substantiate, is by no means a universally accepted one. Nevertheless, it was the center of attention for the philosopher Gustav Shpet, who argued for the semiotic-symbolic nature of humanitarian reality, and for the poet Boris Pasternak, who embodied this method of “indirect exposition” in his work. Pasternak attended Shpet’s seminar on Hume, where he emphasized the idea that the forward momentum of cognition is ensured by the skeptical position of the cognizing subject who subjectivizes knowledge. This idea remains relevant today. We believe this is the situation in science as a whole, including even those areas of natural science most divorced from directly accessible experience. These dynamics of methodological standpoints associated with doubt reveal, in an obvious way, their effectiveness in the field of humanitarian knowledge and creativity. To support this argument, our article uses historical-philosophical argumentation based on archival materials.

2003 Irak İşgali'nin Felsefesi

Toplumu çevreleyen dünya; duyumların, imgelerin ya da düşüncelerin bileşme biçimi hakkındaki -mitik temalarınyasalarıdır. Sembollerin inşa edilişi -söylemlerin otorite statüsünün- bireysel organizmanın sınırları dışında kalankültür kalıplarının gerçekliğine yönelik nesnel bir eylem olmasıdır. Tarihçinin tarihsel bağlama ilişkin fikri, bir toplumsal durumu tanımlayabileceği dil kullanımının farklı düzeyleri arasındaki felsefi akımdan öğrenilecek farkındalıklardır. Bireysel hayat, toplu bilinç hallerinin dile getirdiği simgeler topluluğunun tasarımlarındaki tözde bulunmaktadır. İktidar ile hakikat arasındaki ilişki, insanın kendisinin seçmemiş olabileceği sembolik sistemler ve söylemler çerçevesinde derinleşen bir düşüncedir. Gerçek dünya -hakikatlerin eşliğinde- kendi anlamlarını doğru ile yanlış arasındaki tüm belirtilerin verdiği olguların özünde saklamaktadır. Makalemde; Amerika'nın, İsrail'in güvenliğini ve Ortadoğu'daki istikrarını sağlamak için Irak coğrafyası üzerindeki teolojik yaklaşımları, güç mücadelesi ekseninde ortaya konulacak ve değerlendirilecektir.