History begins in a struggle producing two figures, Master and Slave. It ends in a “universal and homogeneous state”, an Empire. Revolution with its inevitable terror is the central point in this history. Kojève himself had experienced the Russian revolution and Civil War; in 1920 he left Russia for Germany, where till the end of 1923 he had witnessed the same strife between the “left” and the “right”. This experience is the basis of his view of history, his interpretation (...) of the path from Mastery and Slavery to the figure of the Citizen, to universal recognition. The French revolution with the Jacobins’ terror and Napoleon’s Empire represent for him the model by which to understand not only the revolutions of the twentieth century, but of the entire course of history. (shrink)

The subject of this paper is the comparison of the master-slave dialectic with the Marxist concept of class struggle. The master-slave dialectic is presented not only in its source – Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit – but also in its reception by later authors: Alexander Kojève and Jacques Lacan. Alexandre Kojève focuses on the resolution of the antago­nism between slave and master in Empire, the society of the Citizen, by which history ends. Lacan proposes considering this theoretical construct (...) from the position of the “death of the master” and in the situation of the “sophisticated domination” (which the slave possesses and through which an immanent break is made in the structure of the master’s absolute knowledge). One of the sources of the concept of class struggle in classical Marxism is the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, which is reconceptualized in a more rev­olutionary, practice-oriented way. Concept of class struggle opposes to the speculative Hegelian construction, which is trying to describe self-consciousness in a more abstract way. Marx also borrows Hegelian terminology from The Science of Logic, because he wants to describe the structure of class as a research object (consciousness that has not come to self-consciousness, the class-in-itself) and as an active, revolutionary subject (consciousness that has entered the struggle for recognition – and thereby has gained self-consciousness, the class-in-itself). A comparative analysis of these concepts allows us to see the sources of the Marxist doctrine of class and class struggle and to open the way of a synthesis between the Marxist and “post-Hegelian” reading of the master-slave dialectic. (shrink)

This is a translation of Alexandre Koyré’s important, but overlooked essay “Hegel à Iéna.” The essay originally appeared in Alexandre Koyré, Etudes d’histoire de la pensée philosophique. A contribution to the philosophy of time, this essay had a profound but generally unrecognized influence on Alexander Kojève, Jean Hyppolite and Jacques Derrida.

El libro recientemente publicado por Nuria Sánchez Madrid sobre Hannah Arendt destaca tanto por el elevado nivel teórico que presenta como por la original aproximación a su pensamiento. La obra de Arendt es ciertamente una de las de mayor repercusión en el contexto del pensamiento político contemporáneo, lo cual ha dado lugar a una amplísima bibliografía en torno a ella. Por lo que constituye una tarea verdaderamente meritoria presentar un ensayo novedoso sobre su obra, que transcienda los lugares comunes que (...) caracterizan a muchos de los ensayos que se publican sobre ella y abra nuevas perspectivas sobre su pensamiento. Esto lo consigue el libro de Nuria Sánchez Madrid a través de dos expedientes fundamentales. En primer lugar, sacando a luz toda una serie de presencias latentes en el pensamiento arendtiano, autores como Max Weber, Georg Jellinek, Ernst Cassirer o Alexander Kojève, que no aparecen explícitamente tematizados en la obra de Arendt y sobre los que las investigaciones prácticamente no han centrado la atención, pero que como se pone de manifiesto a lo largo del libro dejaron una huella en su pensamiento. En segundo lugar, confrontando a Arendt con algunas de las principales figuras del pensamiento político contemporáneo, como Judith Butler o Judith Shklar, lo que arroja nueva luz sobre determinados aspectos fundamentales de su obra, que normalmente son tratados desde la inmanencia del marco teórico que impone la categorización arendtiana y no se logra captar el carácter problemático de los mismos. (shrink)

The author of these two complementary essays, neither of which he lived to see in final published form, was one of the most distinguished Jesuit scholars of his generation. Alexander Kojève, whose seminar on Hegel he attended from 1934 to 1939, once remarked that he could have been "easily and by far" France's best Marxist theorist if he had so desired. Partly because of the topical nature of his works, but perhaps even more because of his philosophic depth, (...) he was never read as widely outside of France as are his illustrious confrères, Henri de Lubac and Jean Daniélou. Of the one hundred and twenty-odd items listed in his bibliography only three articles have thus far been translated into English. Yet this impressive literary production could well become one of the landmarks of contemporary French Catholicism. (shrink)

The annual Kronos Philosophical Journal was established in Warsaw in 2012. The papers presented in the annual might be of interest to the readers from outside Poland, allowing them to familiarize themselves with the dynamic thought of contemporary Polish authors, as well as entirely new topics, rarely discussed by English speaking authors. Volume V/2016 comprises articles problematizing Russian phlosophy and literature as well as Ancient Greek philosophy and culture.

Aims to show that the brain is not responsible for consciousness, and uses this assertion to explore profound love and human connection.

We prove existence of mixed strategy equilibria for a class of discontinuous two-player games with non-compact strategy sets. As a corollary of our main results, we obtain a continuum of mixed strategy equilibria for the first- and second-price two-bidder auctions with toeholds. We also find Klemperer’s (2000) result about the existence of mixed strategy equilibria in the classical Bertrand duopoly.

Walter Benjamin's influence on Theodor Adorno centers on the former's early philosophy of language, which drew on manifold sources, including importantly the theological writings of Johann Georg Hamann. Adorno adapts this “expressivist” philosophy of language as part of a critique of Hegel's dialectic that forms the basis for Adorno's understanding of epistemology and social criticism. The result of this tempered influence is that Benjamin's and Adorno's projects share a great deal of common ground and vocabulary, but diverge in fundamental ways. (...) These tensions come to the fore in Adorno's 1930s criticisms of Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project. Of particular import are their respective understandings of Benjamin's notion of a constellation. For Adorno the constellation is a response to the dialectical tension in the relation between subject and object, while for Benjamin it transcends that relation. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Necessity and Essence Naming and Reference Rules and Meaning Conclusion References.

Can we have a posteriori knowledge of modal facts? And if so, is that knowledge fundamentally a posteriori, or does a priori intuition provide the modal component of what is known? Though the latter view seems more straightforward, there are also reasons for taking the first option seriously.

Metaphors involve immense explanatory power and positive impact predominantly in the scientific education and popularization. Still the use of metaphors in science might be a double-edged sword. Introduction of the computer metaphor to many scientific fields in the last century resulted in reductionist approaches, oversimplifications and mechanistic explanations in science as well as in humanities. In this short commentary we developed further the computer metaphor by prof. Noble and the illusions this metaphor led to in genetics, linguistics and consequently DNA (...) linguistics. (shrink)

Theocritus' twenty-second idyll is cast in the form of a hymn to the Dioscuri, who are addressed in the proem as saviours of men, horses, and ships. This opening section of the idyll is modelled loosely on the short thirty-third Homeric hymn, and like that hymn contains an expanded account of the twins' rescue of ships about to be lost in a storm. As is hardly surprising, Theocritus in reworking the Homeric hymn draws on other literary antecedents as well, and (...) like other Alexandrian poets makes prominent use of diction borrowed and adapted from the Homeric epics. At the same time, the proem also shares several points of contact, largely overlooked or disputed by previous scholarship, with the poetry of Theocritus' own contemporaries. In the present paper, I shall suggest that in the storm scene of the proem references to Aratus' Phaenomena and Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica occur in a carefully arranged pattern with potentially significant implications for our understanding of the proem and the idyll as a whole. (shrink)

In view of the posthumous Nietzschean writings, written between the years 1872 and 73, the scope of this paper is to investigate the place and function of philosopher in culture. We will analyze to what extent Nietzsche thought the nature of philosophical framework and the complex relation that philosophy establishes with science and with art. Regarding its edifying purposes, philosophy departs from the aims of science, which is the production of pure knowledge, and goes towards the uplifting goal of art.

Gleichzeitig reformuliert er die Erbsundenlehre der christlichen Tradition, wenn er den Menschen als radikal bose bezeichnet. Heit zeigt, dass Kant die Spannung zwischen Freiheit und Sunde nur durch religiosen Vollzug fur uberwindbar halt.

When learners self-explain, they try to make sense of new information. Although research has shown that bodily actions and written notes are an important part of learning, previous analyses of self-explanations rarely take into account written and non-verbal data produced spontaneously. In this paper, the extent to which interpretations of self-explanations are influenced by the systematic consideration of such data is investigated. The video recordings of 33 undergraduate students, who learned with worked-out examples dealing with complex numbers, were categorized successively (...) including three different data bases: verbal data, verbal and written data, and verbal, written and non-verbal data. Results reveal that including written data and non-verbal data leads to a more accurate analysis of self-explanations than an analysis solely based on verbal data. This influence is even stronger for the categorization of self-explanations as adequate or inadequate. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the rule-following problem and its impact on the sociology of science as K.A. Rodin presents them in his article. It is known that L. Wittgenstein in “Philosophical Studies”, using the rule of arithmetic addition as an example, formulated the rule-following problem, which has acquired the ultimate form of skepticism thanks to S. Kripke. This problem was transferred to the sociology of science by D. Bloor, where it received the following sociological explanation: rule-amenably activity can be (...) understood only by incorporating rules into social institutions. P. Winch rejected a skeptical interpretation of this problem, and as K.A. Rodin shows in the article, most adequately showed the consequences of Wittgenstein’s ideas for sociology. In his answer, A.A. Sanzhenakov draws attention to two circumstances. Firstly, sociology was influenced not only by late but also early ideas of Wittgenstein. Secondly, the rule-following problem as an important factor in the sociological turn can also be found in the phenomenology of E. Husserl. The author concludes about the need for additional research, which will draw a line between the influence of Wittgenstein and Husserl on sociology. (shrink)