This essay analyzes Karl Jaspers’ conception of the Axial Age and the comparative idea of paradigmatic individuals among other relevant ideas in the light of post-secularity. The special focus is laid on the post-war situation in Western Europe which was one of the main factors of the formation of the aforementioned conceptions and ideas. The disaster which was brought by uncontrolled nationalism in Germany forced Jaspers to rethink the crisis of humanism after World War II. Using a comparative method Jaspers (...) seeks a unity of human spirit and with this gesture his thinking appears to be a desire to have a foundation for the common being of contemporary society. Jaspers’ interpretation of paradigmatic individuals stimulated future research on comparative civilizational philosophies. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the metaphor of existence as a way of philosophical talking about life. Metaphorology was introduced by Hans Blumenberg (1920–1996), one of the most important and innovative thinkers of the 20th century. The works of Blumenberg fall generally within the category of the hermeneutics of metaphor. It is, for him, the question of substituting the study of the more hidden work of metaphors, symbols, and myths for the traditional history of concepts and doctrines. One can say there (...) are two inextricable elements of Blumenberg’s thought: (1) a theory of nonceptuality as essential to philosophizing and (2) an exploration of culture understood as humanity’s unceasing attempts to relieve itself of the weight of the absolutism of reality. Metaphors play an important role in the philosophical language: they are not impediments to clear thinking and clear expression, but rather they are images, iconic constants used by philosophers. Metaphors are able to grasp the reality better than philosophical concepts. According to Blumenberg, metaphors are a kind of reality models, the work of human imagination. One of such models is the metaphor of seafaring/shipwreck and the present article focuses on multiple actualisations of the metaphor in Blumenberg’s philosophy. (shrink)

Using the ideas of early German Romantics and their modern interpretation in the thinking of the philosopher Richard Rorty, the article analyses conspiracy theories regarding them as irony and language games. Through the prism of these analogies, conspiracy theorists and their followers are treated as workers of the imagination (i.e. poets), even though they do not fit properly within the framework of the concept of a liberal or poetic society, developed by Rorty. The concept of poetic culture, initially proposed by (...) the German romantic Friedrich Schlegel, describes a culture in which the poetic element prevails, strongly complemented by the mystery element. The mystery in conspiracy theories would correspond to a distrust of rationality that drew criticism from the Romantics as well. Rorty’s emphasis on the contingency of language is a good argument to see that conspiracy theorists also do not rely on transcendence. In this way, the aspect of truth as creation rather than discovery is also expressed. Irony in the article appears as an appropriate way to understand history and reality. (shrink)

The article aims to shed light on the connection between rhetoric and politics, and its dissemination in the sophistic and philosophical tradition. The argumentation is based on the conceptions of two contemporary philosophers – Barbara Cassin and Hans Blumenberg, who appear as the protagonists of positions according to which rhetoric takes up a significant place in political life. Since Plato, the sophists were treated as other pre-Socratics, as demagogs, who do not hold the truth but spread a false opinion. The (...) philosophers share a conviction that speech immediately expresses reality, and they also prohibited following the way of non-Being (Parmenides). The sophists (Gorgias, Protagoras) shared the position that speech expresses only itself, but not reality. Two opposite (but related) ways of thinking are best seen in M. Heidegger’s and H. Arendt’s philosophies. Keeping in mind the main theme, Blumenberg’s philosophical position includes logos as the mean of distancing, the art of politics is determined by the ability to delay decisions and soften conflicts by rhetorical means, while Cassins’ logology is understood as the ontology. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is a critical evaluation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival laughter’s theory, and along the analysis of Walter Benjamin’s notion of laughter, and its relation to modernity. While Bakhtin concentrates his attention on a few medieval festivities, this paper focuses on the “feast of fools” (festa stultorum) as a metaphor for carnival laughter. For Bakhtin, clown, joker, etc. represents Medieval and Renaissance carnival spirit, while an animated Mickey Mouse, alongside with Charlie Chaplin’s movie character, appears in Benjamin’s (...) texts as a figure of modernity. Carnival laughter can be cruel, and it was cruel indeed, participated in violence during the festivities. The same cruelty Benjamin had found in a few fairy tales collected by the Brother Grimm. How cruelty and laughter are connected? The lack of common experiences in modernity was the reason why Bakhtin wanted to find a counterbalance to modern atomistic bourgeois society, and laughter could have given it. According to Bakhtin, the spirit of carnival as a collective laughter gradually dried up and in the 16th century it has self-transformed into a novel and became a genre of grotesque realism. For Benjamin, only epic, architecture and cinematograph are able to create the collective experience. (shrink)