The sociobiological and socio-political aspects of human existence have been the subject of techno-rationalistic control and manipulation. The investigation of the mutual complementarity of anthropological and ontological paradigms under these circumstances is the main purpose of present publication. The comparative conceptual analysis of the bio-power and bio-politics in the mentality of the modern technological civilization is a main method of the research. The methodological and philosophical analogy of biological and social engineering allows combining them in the nature and social implications (...) as part of a High Hume technologies class. As result of the transformation of somatic foundations of the human being and his behavior, stereotypes in the object of control and management the technogenic risk reached the existential level. The rapidly growing status of biopower and biopolitics in the conceptual field of contemporary political science becomes by phenomenological expression of these processes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 142-154 [Access article in PDF] Critical Discussions The Fortunes of Avant-Garde Poetry Mary Anne O'Neil Invisible Fences. Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and American Literature, by Steven Monte; xii & 298 pp. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, $50.00. Modern Visual Poetry, by Willard Bohn; 321 pp. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000, $47.00. The situation of French poetry at the turn (...) of the twenty-first century is far different from what it was during the last fin de siècle. In 1900, poetry was a booming art, and France was home to numerous poets of varied inspiration and expression. The religious verse of Claudel and Péguy shared the attention of the reading public with the philosophical poetry of Valéry and the futuristic celebrations of Paris and modern life found in Apollinaire's Alcools and Calligrammes. Long poems, short poems, poems written in standard verse, free verse, prose, and even published as drawings, suggested that the golden age of poetry begun in the early nineteenth century by the Romantics and continued after 1850 by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, would not soon come to an end. This indeed proved to be the case, for the heirs of the Symbolist tradition of the first decade of the twentieth century were soon followed by the Surrealist revolutionaries of the 1920s and 1930s, many of whom directed their talents to the composition of political verse at the time of the Second World War. Political poetry by and large disappeared from France after 1950, only to be [End Page 142] succeeded over the next two decades by two very different types of verse. On the one hand, writers like St. John Perse and Pierre Jean Jouve produced difficult works whose appeal was limited to a sophisticated audience, while lyricists, such as Jacques Prévert and even the songwriter Georges Brassens, made poetry more accessible to the general public, often through popular songs. The fact that, during the days of May 1968, students scrawled verses of the Surrealist-Communist poet Paul Eluard on the walls of the Sorbonne to encourage efforts to bring down the social order attests to the power exerted by poetry on the intellectual life of France well into the second half of the twentieth century. Such, however, is no longer the case today. There are only two well-known living French poets, Francis Ponge and Yves Bonnefoy. While reviews dedicated to original poetry do still exist, especially in the south of France where the poetic arm of the French Resistance was most active in the 1940s, poetry attracts many fewer readers--and fewer writers--than it did even fifty years ago.Such a radical change merits some reflection. What has happened to French poetry since the mid-twentieth century? In a sense, all good things must come to an end sometime, and a century and a half of inventiveness and poetic energy may simply have run its natural course. French publishing houses, well aware that prose sells better than verse, have done little to encourage young poets. However, certain trends in the subject matter and form of contemporary French poetry have probably contributed to the current lack of interest. Since the end of the Second World War, French poets have concerned themselves almost uniquely with everyday life--common objects, geographical locales, and ordinary people. This obsession with the ordinary has produced some excellent poetry, especially René Char's evocations of Provençal landscapes and Yves Bonnefoy's treatments of childhood. Yet, this concentration on everyday life has severed poetry from the traditional subjects that have sustained it ever since classical antiquity, such as the celebration of heroic figures and heroic deeds, philosophical and religious inquiry, love, loss, prophetic vision. This very narrow range of subject risks consigning poetry to the status of a minor art. At the turn of the twenty-first century, French poetry also finds itself at the end of a very long period of formal experimentation that began in the second half of the nineteenth century and which includes... (shrink)

Psychology of religion as a branch of religious studies, in contrast to the philosophy and sociology of religion, focuses attention mainly on the problems of individual religiosity - the phenomena of religious experience, religious beliefs, mechanisms of the emergence and development of religious experience. The psychology of religion studies the experience of the supernatural person, the psychological roots of this experience and its significance for the subjective. Since a person is formed and operates in a society, the study of religious (...) experience must include its social sources. (shrink)

Анализируя основные идеи представителей феноменологической психиатрии и экзистенциального анализа и выстраивая панораму их формирования и развития, автор включает рассматриваемую традицию в философский контекст XX века.

The beginning of the twenty-first century was marked by a series of crisis phenomena in the field of social life, humanity and nature. These crises, quite naturally, require a worldview of their development and the development of prerequisites for overcoming. The mass consciousness remains the ideological and ideological stereotypes that were characteristic of the century that passed before our eyes. Along with this, the development of a new vision of the present and the future - the process is very complicated (...) and painful. Losing the usual stereotypes, people sometimes come to the thought that with them the world perishes, the collapse of social communities may seem apocalypse of the universe in general. (shrink)

Groundless assumption in scholarship is generally soon swept away. Seldom does an interpretation which has little to commend it survive as long as that which I here propose to refute.

Today in Ukraine there is an acute problem of the spiritual alienation of a certain part of the younger generation from their people, their faith and traditions, which have developed over the centuries, from established moral principles, in particular, regarding personal self-determination in the social world. In turn, such confusion and disorientation in the social space leads to an aggravation of the relationship between the same outside world and the system of inner values ​​of the young man. Moreover, a hypertrophied (...) and distorted understanding of reality entails a number of problems that often take the form of a pronounced social evil. For example, today our country is one of the leading places in Europe for the spread of AIDS. According to the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, every week, several dozen Ukrainians turn out to be HIV-positive when submitting appropriate tests. It is also hard to say about the spread of such social ills as drug addiction, drunkenness. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Going Beyond Theory: Constructivism and Empirical Phenomenology” by Urban Kordeš. Upshot: The naturalistic paradigm, which relies on the third-person perspective and the exclusion of the observer, cannot accommodate human experience in its scientific enterprise. I present a critical overview of Kordeš’s proposal to merge the constructivist epistemological framework and empirical phenomenology. I doubt whether constructivism actually requires empirical grounding, but I do see constructivism with instrumentalism as a possible framework in which researchers will be (...) able to make sense of the phenomenal data. (shrink)

Narrowing the focus of his Soundings in St. Augustine's Imagination (1994) O'Connell (philosophy, Fordham U.) analyzes three decisive conversions portrayed in the Confessions: the youthful reading of Cicero, that sparked by the platonist books, and the final capitulation in the Milanese garden. He also compares the conversion imagery with that in the Dialogues of Cassicciacum to shed light on the question of two Augustines. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Ned O'Gorman's Politics for Everybody is, at its core, a defense of politics for our polarized times. In an accessible and impassioned style, O'Gorman argues for a political middle ground, which is not aligned with any particular party or ideology, but which embraces the worth, value, and importance of politics itself. Inspired by Hannah Arendt, O'Gorman shows how political thinking is rooted in common sense and everyday experiences, and is rooted in all of us, even and especially when politics is (...) the last thing we want to talk about. Resisting the deadening of political experience by the bombast of contemporary media, the impoverishment of public discourse, and the low-minded violence of smear campaigns, O'Gorman calls for a purer, simpler relation to politics, one that does justice to the virtues of open, honest exchange, which can be critical without being hateful. Politics for Everybody is, in short, a defense of the dignity of politics in the age of its infamy, and a plea for the notion that to give politics a thinking chance, we must take it more seriously, not write it off. (shrink)

O'Loughlin, Frank In this article I want to look at the priesthood specifically as a sacrament of the church. Much of what is presented here would also apply, mutatis mutandis, to the episcopate and some of it to the diaconate, the other two forms of the sacrament of orders.

The paper is based on the analysis of G. Simmel's book The Philosophy of Money . It focuses on Simmel's interpretation of economical and macrosociological issues based on the philosophical conception of money, which symbolizes the whole value world of modern culture. It sheds light first of all on Simmel's aesthetical perspective and his apllying aestheitical cathegories of detachment and analogy to show the parallels between the economical and spiritual spheres, especially between the development of monetary economy and the tendency (...) to individualization, intellectualization, and to opposing the objective and the subjective in mo_dern culture. In conclusion it shows how Simmel's fundamental ideas and attitudes combine in his reconstruction of modern way of life. (shrink)

In this disarmingly witty look at the disrepair of the divine, George Dennis O'Brien offers a guide for finding the sacred in the everyday. Christopher Lasch called the book, first published over twenty years ago, "an astute analysis of our spiritual malaise." God and the New Haven Railway, with a new preface by the author, speaks to us still with humor and hope because neither God nor the railroad seems to be running much better today. The book is an excellent (...) introductory text for Religion 101 courses. Adult education classes in various denominations will also profit from reading it. (shrink)