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

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; 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.

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.

What is the classic in history? What is a classic in historical writing? Very few historians and critics have addressed these questions, and when they have done so, it has been only in a cursory manner. These are queries that require some explanation regarding historical texts because of their peculiar ambivalence between science and art, content and form, sources and imagination, scientific and narrative language. Based on some examples of the Western historiographical tradition, I discuss in this article to what (...) extent historians should engage the concept of the classic – as has been done for literary texts. If one assumes that the historical text is not only a referential account but also a narrative analogous to literary texts, then the concept of the classic becomes one of the keys for understanding the historical text – and may improve our understanding not only of historiography, but of history itself. I will argue in this article that it is possible to identify a category of the classic text in some historical writings, precisely because of the literarity they possess without losing their specific historical condition. Because of their narrative condition, historical texts share some of the features assigned to literary texts – that is, endurance, timelessness, universal meaningfulness, resistance to historical criticism, susceptibility to multiple interpretations, and ability to function as models. Yet, since historical texts do not construct imaginary worlds but reflect external realities, they also have to achieve some specific features according to this referential content – that is, surplus of meaning, historical use of metaphors, effect of contemporaneity without damaging the pastness of the past, and a certain appropriation of literariness. Without seeking to be normative or systematic, this article focuses on some specific features of the historical classic, offering a series of reflections to open rather than try to close a debate on this complex topic. (shrink)

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)

Why, however, should it be necessarily wrong to discuss the nebulous in a businesslike manner?

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)

Aurel Kolnai; X—Games and Aims, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 66, Issue 1, 1 June 1966, Pages 103–128, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/66.

We are currently witnessing an increasingly influential counterrevolution in political theory, evident in the dialectical return to classical political science pioneered most prominently by Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin. In this context, the work of the relatively unknown Aurel Kolnai is of great importance. Kolnai was one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century to place the restoration of common-sense evaluation and philosophical realism at the center of his philosophical and political itinerary. In this volume, Daniel J. Mahoney (...) presents Kolnai's major writings in political philosophy, writings that explore - in ways that are diverse but complementary - Kolnai's critique of progressive or egalitarian democracy. The title essay contains Kolnai's fullest account of the limits of liberty understood as emancipation from traditional, natural, or divine restraints. 'The Utopian Mind, ' a pr, cis of Kolnai's critique of utopianism in a posthumous book of the same title, appears here for the first time. 'Conservative and Revolutionary Ethos, ' Kolnai's remarkable 1972 essay comparing conservative and revolutionary approaches to political life, appears for the first time in English translation. The volume also includes a critically sympathetic evaluation of Michael Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics and an incisive criticism of Jacques Maritain's efforts to synthesize Christian orthodoxy and progressive politics. Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy is a searching critique of political utopianism, as well as a pathbreaking articulation of conservative constitutionalism as the true support for human liberty properly understood. It is a major contribution to Christian and conservative political reflection in our ti. (shrink)

The problem of disgust has until recently been neglected in the scientific literature. In comparison to the scientific (psychological and metaphysical) interest that has been applied to hatred, anxiety, and similar phenomena, disgust — although a common and important factor in our emotional life — has been unexplored, or it has been viewed as a “higher degree of dislike,” as “nausea,” or as a phenomenon of the “repression of urges.” We here show how the feeling of disgust possesses a unique (...) and characteristic quality on the basis of a phenomenological investigation. (shrink)

Western historiography experienced an important shift in the seventies due to the emergence of the theories associated with the linguistic turn, postmodernism and postestructuralism. Hayden White was one of the historians who led this transformation in the historical discipline. He argued that a historical text could be compared to a literary artifact on the leven of the form, since both use the same instrument —narrative— to representation the truth —whose content is factual events in history and fiction in literature. This (...) idea revolutionized contemporary approaches to the interpretation of historical texts. This paper analyzes White’s theories and its effects on contemporary historical writing. (shrink)

Aurel Kolnai; VI—Moral Consensus, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 70, Issue 1, 1 June 1970, Pages 93–118, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/7.

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

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)

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)

In this paper, I am trying to show that antithetic political positions appear to imply different moral attitudes not only accidentally but essentially, yet in a peculiar, limited and ambiguous fashion; and that political relativism or pluralism is far from implying moral relativism or pluralism in a corresponding and co-extensive sense. In other words, the gist of my contention is that men may be agreed about the basic universal laws of morality and none the less differ in their response to (...) various moral requirements and points of view as emerging in specified contexts of human practice. Political positions are not as such derived from moral demands, nor consequent upon moral errors; nor do they, as such, determine the moral convictions of those who hold them; but they tend to be associated with distinct kinds of dominant moral emphases rather than simply to respect or to disregard morality. (shrink)

Cells mitigate the detrimental consequences of DNA damage on genome stability by attempting high fidelity repair. Homologous recombination templates DNA double‐strand break (DSB) repair on an identical or near identical donor sequence in a process that can in principle access the entire genome. Other physiological processes, such as homolog recognition and pairing during meiosis, also harness the HR machinery using programmed DSBs to physically link homologs and generate crossovers. A consequence of the homology search process by a long nucleoprotein filament (...) is the formation of multi‐invasions (MI), a joint molecule in which the damaged ssDNA has invaded more than one donor molecule. Processing of MI joint molecules can compromise the integrity of both donor sites and lead to their rearrangement. Here, two mechanisms for the generation of rearrangements as a pathological consequence of MI processing are detailed and the potential relevance for non‐allelic homologous recombination discussed. Finally, it is proposed that MI‐induced crossover formation may be a feature of physiological recombination. (shrink)