Valuing the professional literature, the paper highlights in its first part, the main factors that influence the demographic behaviours, especially birth-rate, meaning the cultural, biological, economic, social and political factors. I have tried to focus on a possible supremacy of the religious and political factor in comparison to other factors which have an influence on demographic evolutions. In the second part we approached the religion and the projections regarding the youngsters’ demographic behaviour. Referring these results to statistical data on this (...) issue, that are to be found in the Statistical Annual of Bihor County, we tried to reveal the trends of the evolution of birth-rate and to make the difference between objective statistical data and subjective echoes of 18 year old high school students way of thinking, regarding the potential impact of religion – nowadays studied in the Romanian schools – on the demographic behaviour. (shrink)

This paper analyses the cluster of aesthetic features involved in the common experience of the weather. Perceptual features (framelessness, chromatics, texture, synaesthesia, ephemerality, proteism) are accompanied by ‘atmospheric’ moods that are irreducible to physiological well-being. Representation and imagination reach their limits due to the more-than-human spatiotemporal scale of the atmosphere. Finally, some ‘transaesthetic’ aspects include the agency of an active matter and the longing for an elemental alterity. The aesthetics of the weather has to account for the interdependence between aesthetic (...) and ethical values, between bodily engagement and appropriate knowledge, individual contemplation and social commitment, in order to develop ecological responsibility. (shrink)

This paper interprets migration as an interplay of external and internal movement, of physical locomotion and becoming. The first part calls for completing Migration Studies with an experience-centred philosophy of migration from the insider’s perspective. A critical examination of phenomenological contributions emphasises how phenomenology has usually prioritised dwelling, emplacement and alterity over moving, displacement and the migrant’s reactions to being considered the “other”. The second part examines migration along its several stages, from the detachment from the home country to “arrival” (...) and integration, including the temporary or definitive return to the former “home”. Finally, the recent phenomenon of trans-migration nourishes the hope in the possibility of a non-traumatic dwelling in-between and on the move. (shrink)

Our paper is an exploratory analysis of the role religion can still have today with respect to directing students’ economic behaviour. We evaluated and grouped the theories dealing with the relationship between religion and economics in three categories: theories that consider the two areas as incompatible, theories that identify mutual determination between them and theories that admit the coexistence or the mutual support between economics and religion. We sought to clarify the degree of religiosity of students and its relationship with (...) the economic behaviour (employment during studies, job seeking, characteristics of the desired job etc.), relying our conclusions on the data of the questionnaire-based survey conducted among students in the Hungary-Romania cross-border area. Our study results indicate a decline regarding the degree of religiosity among students of both countries, but also important differences with respect to the religiosity degree recorded in the case of the students in the two countries, indicating a higher degree of religiosity among the students from Romania. Our research reveals the lack or the little effect concerning the influence that religiosity exerts on the economic behaviour, suggesting the need for other explanatory models of higher education students’ labour market participation. (shrink)

The ecological crisis has long since reached global proportions, so that environmental problems can no longer be tackled solely within national borders. This anthology opens intercultural perspectives on environmental ethics and hightlights the potential of non-European traditions of thought for exploring alternative paths.

Die erste fachübergreifende Ideengeschichte Rumäniens vermittelt anhand von Denkströmungen, Persönlichkeiten und Kulturpublizistik ein besseres Verständnis auch aktueller gesellschaftlicher Entwicklungen. Madalina Diaconu behandelt für den Zeitraum seit dem Beginn der Moderne bis in die Gegenwart die anhaltende Kontroverse zwischen prowestlicher Modernisierung und Traditionalismus, die Mythen der rumänischen Geschichte, Orthodoxie und Nationalismus, die Kulturpolitik während des Kommunismus, die Selbstsuche nach 1989 und dem EU-Beitritt von 2007. Auch andere in Rumänien lebende Ethnien sind berücksichtigt. Klar geschrieben, informativ und basierend auf Quellen aus (...) erster Hand ist der Band unverzichtbar für alle, die an Rumänien im europäischen Kontext interessiert sind. (shrink)

A landscape is commonly conceived as an arrangement of items on solid or liquid surfaces. Despite its entanglement with the landscape, the weather condition tends to be overlooked. The liminal case of a thick fog that suppresses the view of the environment challenges this standard understanding. The paper examines the experience of being lost in fog with respect to perceptual, spatiotemporal and emotional aspects. Fog suspends the everyday scopic regime and the inconspicuous ‘immateriality’ of air as medium of perception, distorting (...) the patterns of perception and temporarily installing an own spatiotemporality. Moreover, fog is an atmospheric phenomenon par excellence, a quasi-thing and a quasi-agent that is usually felt as distressing and maleficent yet may trigger a sense of wonder as well. While it is considered a deficit in epistemic issues, nebulosity has a strong aesthetic expressivity, whose sources range from semantic ambiguity to defamiliarization and the transfiguration of the ordinary. (shrink)

Introduction into a thematic symposium on Olfactory Aesthetics published in ESPES. The Slovak Journal of Aesthetics (Vol. 13 No 1, 2024).

Any attempt to outline a meteorological aesthetics centered on so-called beautiful weather has to overcome several difficulties: In everyday life, the appreciation of the weather is mostly related to practical interests or reduced to the ideal of stereotypical fine weather that is conceived according to blue-sky thinking irrespective of climate diversity. Also, an aesthetics of fine weather seems, strictly speaking, to be impossible given that such weather conditions usually allow humans to focus on aspects other than weather, which contradicts the (...) autotelic character of beauty. The unreflective equation of beautiful weather with moderately sunny weather and a cloudless sky also collides with the psychological need for variation: even living in a “paradisal” climate would be condemned to end in monotony. Finally, whereas fine weather is related in modern realistic literature to cosmic harmony and a universal natural order, contemporary literary examples show that in the age of the climate change, fine weather may be deceitful and its passive contemplation, irresponsible. This implies the necessity of a reflective aesthetic attitude on weather, as influenced by art, literature, and science, which discovers the poetics of bad weather and the wonder that underlies average weather conditions. (shrink)

Mădălina Diaconus Beitrag zum Bild Europas in Rumänien zieht in Betracht hauptsächlich kulturphilosophische Interpretationen seit dem Beginn des Modernisierungsprozesses in Rumänien vor etwa 150 Jahren. Vor dem Krieg überwogen die Spekulationen über eine „rumänische Seele“ und die Forderung der Synchronisierung mit der Entwicklung der westlichen Institutionen und Werte. Diese Diskussionen wurden nach 1989 wieder aufgenommen und beweisen, dass das Selbstbewusstsein der Rumänen, ein integraler Teil Europas zu sein, weiterhin ungebrochen ist.

Arnold Berleant’s enlargement of the scope of aesthetics to environments and social relationships opens the way for associations with approaches from other human and social sciences. One possible term of comparison is Hartmut Rosa’s theory of modernity, which applies the concept of resonance to various fields, including nature and art. At the beginning, their aims appear to be different and their alternatives slightly different: engagement stresses the continuity between the embodied self and the world, whereas resonance is primarily based upon (...) a model of communication. Nevertheless, their relational theories converge in several respects: they focus on experience, defend participatory models against objectifying and merely contemplative relationships, and practise social criticism in their search for a meaningful and good life. (shrink)

Constantin Noica is widely believed to be one of the most original and prominent Romanian thinker of the last fifty years. In 1998, a year after his death, his book De dignitete Europae appeared in German translation. In it Noica tackles the classical philosophy of culture as morphology in Frobensius and Spengler, suggesting an interpretation of European historical cultural epochs from the viewpoint of linguistic-morphological forms: the Middle Ages correspond to the noun, the Renaissance to the adjective, Reformation, Counter-Reformation and (...) Classicism to the adverb, followed by the Pronoun, and the present age to numerals and conjunctions. To what extent can we today, twenty years later, at the time when Romania is entering the European Union, still advocate such philosophical Eurocentrism? (shrink)

Nella filosofia moderna la coscienza e la memoria sono state considerate fattori identitari cruciali. L’articolo analizza il ruolo svolto dagli odori nella costituzione dell’identità personale, distinguendo tre livelli: corporeo , socio-culturale e personale . Da un lato, il proprio odore corporeo funge da principium individuationis. Dall’altro, gli odori costituiscono la base di una comunità chiusa ed estremamente conservatrice. Infine, il sé emerge rammentando le proprie «storie» e i ricordi sugli odori.Consciousness and memory were considered identitary key factors in modern philosophy. (...) The article deals with the role played by smells in constituting the identity of the self, on three levels: corporeal , social-cultural , and personal . On the one hand, own’s body smell acts as a principium individuationis. On the other, smells ground a closed and utmost conservative community. Finally, self emerges by recollecting his/her own «stories» and memories about smells. (shrink)

The volume represents a selection of the articles which were presented at a colloquium on new research topics in aesthetics at the Austrian Library in Pilsen in September 2010. Their authors, Czech and Austrian scholars, address various topics, ranging from the institutional history of aesthetics to the relationship between philosophical aesthetics and psychology, and from the philosophy of literature to the aesthetics of fine arts, dramatic arts, and architecture.

‘Eine weite Wohnung unter freiem Himmel’? On the Aesthetics of Gardens of the Senses Although the common experience of nature and gardens engages all the senses, historical analysis of garden theory shows a clear tendency to reduce green spaces to their imagery and to take the visual arts as the model for garden design. A counter-tendency to this primacy of vision has, however, lately emerged -- namely, gardens of the senses or healing gardens, which accentuate also the tactile and olfactory (...) qualities of vegetation and materials. The literature on gardens of the senses provides useful empirical guidelines for garden designers, but on a rather eclectic theoretical basis that applies mainly to private jardins de plaisir. Nevertheless, the accentuation of tactile and olfactory qualities in gardens constitutes a source of well-being, and contributes to a deceleration of life, a positive experience of the natural order and rhythm, and the habitability of a place. Moreover, they are informal laboratories for the education of the senses, and their empirical taxonomies may be integrated into an aesthetic theory of sensory design. (shrink)

Jeder Wahrnehmung liegen Kinästhesen zugrunde, doch tritt die Bewegung am deutlichsten im Tasten hervor. Untersucht wird hier die phänomenologische Auffassung vom Zusammenhang zwischen Tasten und Kinästhesen bei Husserl und Erwin Straus, im Vergleich zu der Tanzwissenschaft . Diese Interpretation wird teilweise durch andere Perspektiven ergänzt, die aus der pränatalen Anthropologie, Psychiatrie und den Ingenieurwissenschaften stammen. Das Vorbild ist bei Husserl die mechanische Bewegung zu Erkenntniszwecken; Straus entdeckt die Tierwelt und ihre appetitiven Bewegungen. Keine von diesen Analysen entspricht völlig dem Phänomen (...) des Tanzes als Ausdruck der propriozeptiv empfundenen Harmonie zwischen dem Leib und seiner Welt. (shrink)

1. Dimensiunea românească a existenței.

Der Aufsatz von Mâdâlina Diaconu thematisiert in grundsätzlicher Weise die Möglichkeiten und Dimensionen einer interkulturellen Ästhetik auch in methodischer Hinsicht. Sie verbindet ihre Überlegungen mit Reflexionen zum Begriff der Kultur und der Möglichkeit des »Inter« im Rahmen der Inter-kulturalität.

This study evaluated how gender is related to children’s intelligence beliefs, goal orientations and academic achievement and whether there are gender differences in how intelligence beliefs and goal orientations are related to academic achievement. The participants, 362 seventh grade students, completed measures regarding their intelligence beliefs and goal orientations at the beginning of the second semester and the grades were collected at the end of the semester. Girls reported higher scores on incremental belief, mastery goal and higher achievement but lower (...) levels of performance avoidance compared to boys. The relations between intelligence beliefs and academic achievement were fully mediated by both performance goals. Further, there were no gender differences in the associations among intelligence beliefs, goal orientations and achievement. The findings reveal that goal orientations are a mechanism that might explain why intelligence beliefs are l... (shrink)