AI can identify images, but cannot understand them as man does. The problem of understanding the iconic signs is the analogy, which cannot be clearly operationalized. Nothing guarantees signification by analogy, because it is neither the necessary effect of a cause, as in the indicative signs, nor the obligatory consequence of a rule, as of symbols. But the analogy is also fundamental to the human condition because our Ego implies the presence of Other. Or, just as the images, the understanding (...) of Other implies the analogy: he is a self like me, but another self than myself, that is, an analogous self. That is, you can understand the behavior of the other's activities and actions, even what he communicates as messages because you interpret them as if it were about yourself. Different from the human being who is an existent, in AI the essence precedes existence. Even if the algorithms of the analogy process will be infinitely perfected, that analogy will miss the interpretation that comes from the life of the existing one. AI knows digital, man understands analog; AI understands from knowledge, man knows from understanding. (shrink)

Review of Nicu Gavriluţă’s The Fools’ Mother is Always Pregnant. A Sociology of Everyday Pathologies. (Mama proştilor e mereu gravidă. Sociologia patologiilor cotidiene.) Foreword by Ştefan Afloroaei (Iaşi: European Institute, 2010).

The pandemic seems to have reversed the relationship between Knowledge and Communication: communication prevails and determines the significance and meaning of events, just as it happened in premodern times. Public knowledge is being eroded. Post-modern scientific knowledge, already unfathomably complex and technical, is both evolving and becoming obsolete at such great speed that it unveils, paradoxically, the vulnerability and relativity of the truth it claims to grasp. Alongside truth-correspondence and truth-coherence, the older truth-significance also makes itself known. Amplified by the (...) resonance chamber of new media and social networks, the latter can emerge as the “post-truth” and “fake-news” that transform Public Communication into Public Relations. (shrink)

In the conference, the author approaches the manipulation, the persuasion and the seduction through the lenses of the anthropology of communication. Beginning with the Palo Alto school of thinking, communication started to be regarded not as much as a process of transmitting information, but rather as contributing to the construction of human relations. The author proposes a model in which argumentation is situated as a “zero level” of pure transmission of information. While persuasion is seen as the effect of the (...) individual’s status (or prestige) over a group, manipulation and seduction manifest theirs consequences at a mass level: manipulation being more elitist, and seduction realizing a re-naturalization of the sign, at the level of unconsciousness. Manipulation and especially seduction are explained as the elements of an “ostensive ideology”, that is the contemporary ideology of advertisement. (shrink)

Gal Laszlo, Societate si Logicitate Ed. Cartimpex, Cluj, 2004.

Eero Tarasti, Existential Semiotics Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2001.

This text will focus on the transformations of the practices and ideas of communication in recent history and in the context of the globalization. The lecture will examine first persuasion and then manipulation and seduction. These second issues are explained through the fact that in the context of the rise of mass as historical subject, conscience, and thus persuasion become obsolete. The approach examines the theoretical model of communication in this two historical contexts and concludes that a partial sector of (...) communication, "therapeutic communication", tends to model nowadays the process of communication as such. Based on the new practices and theoretical models of communication a new type of ideology appears, an ostensive one. (shrink)

Aurel Codoban, Filosofia ca gen literar (Philosophy as a literary genre) Ed. Idea Design&Print, Cluj- Napoca, 2006.

Peter Sloterdijk, În aceeasi barca, Eseu despre hiperpolitica (traducere de Ovidiu Tichindeleanu si Konrad Petrovsyky) Idea, Cluj, 2002 Dispretuirea maselor, Eseu asupra luptelor culturale în societatea moderna (traducere de Aurel Codoban), Idea, Cluj, 2002.

In the following pages I intend to bring to attention the way in which the concrete effort of comprehension (as sensitive yet lucid grasping of a state of affairs) becomes critical reflection. I am constantly referring to several of Aurel Codoban’swritings, using as a departure point his 2001 book, Sign and intepretation. A postmodern introduction in semiotics and hermeneutics, whose pages might serve as a good guide for such a discussion. I remark than that criticalreflection manifests in several (...) ways: as a reflexive philosophical exercise (when the conscience of the self is assuming her actual philosophical condition), as a careful examination of the phenomenon of communication and of our world of signs and, lastly, as hermeneutical ontology. This is a type of reflections that leaves space to critical judgement, sharp irony and free, relaxed meditation, in equal proportion. Such an effort is always laudable in a philosophical community and, consequently, worthy of appreciation. (shrink)

Aurel Codoban, Sacru si ontofanie. Pentru o nouã filosofie a religiilor (The Sacred and Ontophany. For a New Philosophy of Religions) Ed. Polirom, Iasi, 1998.

As in religious traditions, the soul organizes entirely the human condition horizon; postmodern culture sets the body as the organizing centre of its sacralizing mechanisms. Some even speak about a cult and about ritual mechanisms having a religious charge. On the one hand, the body is attributed a symbolic dimension surfacing in the fight against the finite and life’s lack of meaning. On the other, turning the body into a centre of the existential universe triggers a better delineation of the (...) functions it may fulfill. An important role belongs to the networking function that crosses over the human inhabited worlds, from the physical one to the spiritual and religious one. To highlight these aspects, I called on the reflections in Aurel Codoban’s communication philosophy. The new view on corporality brings the image of body as language, as communication instrument and as significant surface. Against this background, the body sets a self-concern whose consequence, symbolically, is a dialectic movement of body and soul nourishing one other and improving one another in light of authenticity. (shrink)

Codoban, Aurel. Imperiul comunicării: corp, imagine şi relaţionare (The Empire of Communication: Body, Image and Relation). Cluj-Napoca: Idea, 2011.

Aurel Codobon, Amurgul iubirii, Editura Idea, Cluj, 2004.

Review of Aurel Codoban, Imperiul comunicării: corp, imagine și relaționare (The Empire of Communication: Body, Image and Relation), (Cluj-Napoca: Idea Design &Print, 2011).

Aurel Kolnai was born in Budapest, in 1900 and died in London, in 1973. He was, according to Karl Popper and the late Bernard Williams, one of the most original, provocative, and sensitive philosophers of the twentieth century. Kolnai's moral philosophy is best described in his own words as intrinsicalist, non-naturalist, non-reductionist", which took its original impetus from Scheler's value ethics, and was developed by using a natural phenomenologist method. The unique combination of linguistic analysis and phenomenology yields highly (...) original ideas on classical fields of moral theory, such as responsibility and free will, the meaning of right and wrong, the universalisability of ethical norms, the role of moral emotions, internalism vs externalism, to mention a few. The volume presents a selection of essays by Kolnai, including his main political theoretical work, "What is Politics About", available in English here for the first time. The second half of the book Kolnai's work is analyzed in a series of essays by eminent scholars. (shrink)

Aurel Kolnai; VI*—Forgiveness, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 74, Issue 1, 1 June 1974, Pages 91–106, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/74.1.

Based on narrative, iconographical, and liturgical sources, this is the first systematic study to trace the story of the ritual of royal self-coronations from Ancient Persia to the present. Exposing as myth the idea that Napoleon's act of self-coronation in 1804 was the first extraordinary event to break the secular tradition of kings being crowned by bishops, Jaume Aurell vividly demonstrates that self-coronations were not as transgressive or unconventional as has been imagined. Drawing on numerous examples of royal self-coronations, with (...) a particular focus on European Kings of the Middle Ages, including Frederic II of Germany, Alphonse XI of Castile, Peter IV of Aragon and Charles III of Navarra, Aurell draws on history, anthropology, ritual studies, liturgy and art history to explore royal self-coronations as privileged sites at which the frontiers and limits between the temporal and spiritual, politics and religion, tradition and innovation are encountered. (shrink)

This article offers an analysis of dialectical materialism. The author, being a supporter of this theory, offers a self-critical assessment of its foundations. He argues that the predecessors of Marxism constructed their systems with the confidence that they were building the true and only true philosophy. This utopian idea shared by Marx, Engels, and their successors was refuted by subsequent developments in philosophy. Indeed, philosophy by its very nature is pluralistic and interminable. Self-critical Marxism must recognize the legitimacy not only (...) of dialectical materialism, but also of other philosophies no matter how much they may differ in their content. This is supported by analysis of the main categories and problems of dialectical materialism—the laws of dialectics, matter, evolution, consciousness, and truth. (shrink)

Aurel Kolnai; XI—Deliberation is of Ends, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 62, Issue 1, 1 June 1962, Pages 195–218, https://doi.org/10.1093/arist.

In this study we present some contributions of the logician and philosopher Petre Botezatu (27.02.1911-01.12.1981), who turned the idea of complementarity,formulated by Niels Bohr for the interpretation of the wave-particle structure of the quantum world, into an ordering principle of his work. Thus, he understood general logic as a synthesis in which the style of classical logic is complementary to the style of the 20th century logic. He didn’t give up either the mathematical modelling of logical language or the conceptual (...) description through natural language. Thus, natural operational logic was created. Then Petre Botezatu assessed the achievements and failures of deduction in order to build the notion of methodological antinomy, and formulated five antinomies of axiomatization and five antinomies of formalization. The main purpose of this study is to present and interpret them. (shrink)

The living world is an exciting and inexhaustible source of high performance solutions to the multitude of biological problems, which were attained as a result of a natural selection, during the millions and millions years evolution of life on Earth. This work presents and comments some examples of high performances of living beings, in the light of the universal principle governing the realm of living matter: Optimal Design Principle. At the same time, the transfer of these optimal solutions, from living (...) matter to the technologies, is also discussed. This transfer is offering new and fertile perspectives to future technologies, which must be more efficient, cheaper and in perfect harmony with the biosphere. (shrink)