Dans ses Essais hérétiques sur la philosophie de l’histoire, Jan Patočka donne de la première guerre mondiale une interprétation située dans le sillage de l’interrogation historiale de Heidegger, dont il marque les limites et propose une radicalisation qui fait surgir la solidarité entre la technique et la guerre. Pour Patočka, qui s’appuie sur les récits de guerre de Jünger et de Teilhard de Chardin, la pensée historiale et les témoignages du front s’éclairent mutuellement : la saisie de la première guerre (...) comme « culmination du règne de la force » permet de rendre visibles un certain nombre d’expériences, dont celle du sacrifice. L’expérience du front contient le ferment d’un renversement, d’un « metanoein colossal et inouï », seul capable de miner les bases du système qui a conduit à la guerre et d’ouvrir ainsi une « paix véritable ». (shrink)

The phenomenological tautology of life in Michel Henry’s works shows us that the radical concept of self-affection, in its own immanence, cannot be described in another way, either by metaphor or analogy for example, but only by that immediate relation like adequacy on itself: “life as life”. The reduplication of the fundamental concept in Henry’s last “theological” turn introduced a new Transcendence: the Self-Affection of the Absolute Life, the Christian God as Revelation. In this way, we can diversify the tautology (...) of life trying to read it using Saint Maximus the Confessor’s theology: “Life as Life” like the Absolute phenomenological Life of Trinity in Unity; “life as Life” for the creation of the human living by the Living God; “life as life” for the existence of the man, ek-sisting in a world affected by the original transgression; “Life as life” for the Incarnation of the Logos of God; “life as Life — 2” for the rebirth of the human living into Christ and His Mystical Body. (shrink)

It is generally claimed that there exist exceptional circumstances when taking human life may be approved and when such actions may be justified on moral grounds. Precise guidelines in the medical field for making such decisions concerning patients who are terminally ill or have irreparable injuries incompatible with a bearable life, are difficult to establish. Recommendations that take the particular logical form of a rule, such as "in dubio pro vita", "when in doubt favour life") have been suggested and in (...) some countries incorporated into legal texts (Germany). We claim here that such a rule is of no value since it is open-ended and always allows for doubt, and a decision to employ measures that would support human life could always be argued to be a valid choice. Preservation of this rule could be encouraged, but giving it the force of law may put physicians at risk, as they may be challenged for choosing to terminate life in otherwise ethically and medically uncontroversial circumstances. (shrink)

Ioan Chirila, Cartea profetului Osea – Breviarum al gnoseologiei Vechiului Testament Editura Limes, 1999.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the hermeneutical method of Theodoret of Cyrus, who was one of the most important Biblical commentators and an influential theologian of the School of Antioch. This paper attempts to point out the fact that in the person of the Blessed Theodoret we find the first attempt of synthesis between the Antioch and Alexandria hermeneutical schools. In his hermeneutical work Theodoret attempted to overcome the contradictions existing up to that point and to follow (...) a middle way, without discarding neither the literal nor the spiritual-allegorical interpretation. It could be argued that Theodoret rejected the extreme hermeneutical trends of both the Alexandrian and Antioch inspirations; he developed his unique methods and tactics, which were rooted in the previous patristic tradition of the Church Fathers. (shrink)

On continue encore largement, en France, à rapporter la pensée d’Eugen Fink aux textes et concepts qu’il élabore dans le cadre de son étroite collaboration avec Husserl, limitant ainsi son originalité à une radicalisation de la pensée du dernier Husserl (à travers des thèmes comme celui du spectateur désintéressé, du méontique ou de l’Entmenschung). Des études récentes, en Italie et surtout en Allemagne, se penchent quant à elles avec une attention soutenue sur les écrits du second Fink, écri...

Il y a du vrai dans la vieille Naturphilosophie dont l’erreur fut essentiellement de prétendre remplacer la physique mécaniste objective, alors que son motif propre était ailleurs, dans le fait qu’il y a d’autres manières d’accéder à la nature, des manières plus originaires que la démarche objectivante et idéalisante des sciences mathématiques de la nature. Le défi majeur qu’une enquête phénoménologique doit relever dès lors qu’elle dirige son regard thématique sur la question de la nature ré...

My paper aims at laying out the main tenets of Patočka’s unusual and highly provocative position with regard to the question of history, drawing essentially on his Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History, while also gathering insights from other works such as Eternity and Historicity and Europe and post-Europe. In the first part, I set in place the overall framework of this analysis, and show that three distinct, yet entwined concepts of history are operative in Patočka’s work: the understanding (...) of history as a specific regime of meaning, as an existential possibility of the human Dasein, and as a “epochal” dynamic. In the second part, I reconstruct the criticism Patočka mounts against the classical philosophies of history and indicate that his rejection of a teleological account of history is compatible with the attempt of establishing an intrinsic correlation between meaning and history. In the final part, I stress the importance acquired by the experience of the “shattering of meaning” for Patočka’s threefold understanding of history and argue for the possibility of crafting a unitary framework which would encompass his analysis. (shrink)

My paper aims to lay out the main tenets of the philosophical project Eugen Fink unfolded in his post-war writings and argues that his enterprise is situated at the crossroads between two compatible yet distinct lines of inquiry: a phenomenology of mediality and a philosophical cosmology. The twofold orientation followed byFink’s radicalization of classical phenomenology can best be grasped if we pay heed to the double critical strategy he put in place in order to overcome what he deemed to be (...) the shortcomings of Husserl’s phenomenology. In the first place, Fink undertakes a “phenomenological” critique of Husserl, showing that the paradigmatic models underlying Husserl’s analysis and, most notably, the preeminence granted to the “individuated thing”, drastically limit the field available for a phenomenological description. On this account, Fink’s critique aims at expanding the domain phenomenology can explore. However, in the second place, Fink points to the limits inherent to phenomenology as such, and advocates for the necessity of supplementing phenomenology’s descriptive analysis with a speculative approach. In this sense, his project of radicalizing phenomenology is tantamount to unveiling the speculative presuppositions undergirding and orienting any descriptive inquiry. (shrink)

I analyze the possibility of free-will in the many-worlds interpretation (MWI), arguing for their compatibility. I use as a starting point Nicolas Gisin’s “The Multiverse Pandemic” (preprint arXiv:2210.05377, 2022, after Gisin, N., “L’épidémie du multivers”, in “Le Plus Grand des Hasards”, Belin, Paris, 2010), in which he makes an interesting case that MWI is contradicted by our hard to deny free-will. The counts he raised are: (1) MWI is deterministic, forcing choices on us, (2) in MWI all our possible choices (...) happen, and (3) MWI limits creativity, because everything is entangled with everything else. I argue that each of these features of MWI is in fact compatible with more freedom than it may seem. In particular, MWI allows compatibilist free-will, but also free-will very much like the libertarian free-will defined by Chisholm. I argue that the position that alternative choices exist as possibilities does not make sense from a physical point of view, but MWI offers a physical ground for alternatives. (shrink)

Cette étude sur la conception henryenne du christianisme prend pour angle d’approche une étude attentive des enjeux philosophiques et anthropologiques de la christologie de M. Henry, singulièrement sur le plan des fondements de la subjectivité absolue. Tout son travail consiste à faire la différence entre un « christianisme transcendantal » et un « christianisme métaphysiquement moniste », pour mettre en évidence la part de l’histoire et celle du transcendantal, mais aussi celle de la culture et celle du point de vue (...) ontologiquement phénoménologique. Ovidiu-Sorin Podar montre aussi que cette portée de la phénoménologie est inaugurée très originairement dans le projet henryen, même si elle s’accomplit phénoménologiquement dans le triptyque final. Cette enquête autour du cogito chrétien, difficile par la technicité du langage utilisé, est utile sur le plan de la compréhension de la progression de l’œuvre henryenne. (shrink)

La question de l’histoire représente une thématique transversale dans l’œuvre de Patočka, le point de convergence d’un ensemble d’interrogations qui irriguent sa recherche philosophique. Dans la matrice théorique articulée autour de ce concept se trouvent imbriquées plusieurs orientations théoriques qui se prêtent difficilement à une lecture unitaire. En se penchant sur la question de l’histoire, Patočka cherche, tour à tour, à tracer la physionomie du présent et à porter à la lumière les ten...

This paper aims to lay out the main tenets of Bernhard Waldenfels’s analyses of the experience of the alien and to confront the philosophical thesis underwriting them with a central insight stemming from Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy. In the first section, I reconstruct the outlines of the experience of the alien, as described by Waldenfels, and show that, on his account, this experience can function as a powerful impetus enabling us to call into question some of the most deeply held commitments (...) of Western philosophical tradition: the sovereignty of the ego, the supremacy of order, the priority of the whole. In the second section, I show how a patient analysis of this experience compels us to undertake an inquiry concerning the “inter-world,” understood as the place of the encounter and the threshold of separation between the own and the alien. Finally, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s alternative description of the “inter-world,” I maintain that Waldenfels’s account is insufficiently radical and show that the in-between realm cannot be assimilated to an interstice lodged between two insulated spheres. Rather, the “inter-world” should be conceived of as a shared dimension, subtending the partition between the spheres of ownness and alienness, as the one inclusive world. (shrink)

Optimization, in general, is regarded as the process of finding optimal values for the variables of a given problem in order to minimize or maximize one or more objective function(s). Brain storm optimization (BSO) algorithm solves a complex optimization problem by mimicking the human idea generating process, in which a group of people solves a problem together. The aim of this paper is to present hybrid BSO algorithm solutions in the past 5 years. This study could be divided into two (...) parts: strategies and applications. In the first part, different strategies for the hybrid BSO algorithms intended to improve the various ability of the original BSO algorithm are displayed. In the second part, the real-world applications in the past five years in optimization, prediction and feature selection processes are presented. (shrink)

Ako je u antičkom polisu Platona brinulo što se građani samodovoljno oslanjaju na vlastita uvjerenja o vrlinama, ne tragajući za znanjem, današnjeg žitelja globalnog pseudopolisa opčinjavaju simulirane informacije, slike i uvjerenja koja nezamislivim bujanjem kreiraju društvenu svijest. U sjenci masmedijskih pećina uočavaju se obrisi transformirane demokracije koja je sve izloženija silovitim naletima megakorporativnih interesa, dominantnih geopolitičkih utjecaja, kulturnog determinizma i redefiniranog vjerskog fundamentalizma. Usamljenom pojedincu na Agori sve je teže formirati i sačuvati vlastito mišljenje, ideje i vrijednosti. Infoprostor je pokriven (...) globalnom mrežom informacija i podataka, dok čin razmjene simboličkih sadržaja od čovjeka preuzimaju strojevi! Sloboda izražavanja medija je kisik otvorenog, javnog komuniciranja, stup demokratskih građevina, ali problem je u činjenici što čuvari informacijskih ulaza i dalje stražare, ovoga puta pred cyberprostorima.If Plato was upset that people leaned on their own convictions about virtues, without seeking knowledge, present resident of global pseudopolis is obsessed by simulated information, pictures and convictions, which create social consciousness with their hyperproduction. In shadow of massmedia’s caves, contours of transformed democracy can be seen. This democracy is more and more exposed to the interests of megacorporations, dominant geopolitical influence, cultural determinism, and redefined fundamentalism. Under such circumstances, to some lonely individual, “in Athena’s Agora”, is even more difficult to form and keep his or her own opinion, ideas and values. Infospace is covered by global network of information and facts; the process of symbolic exchange is taken off humans by machines. Freedom of speech in media is the air of open, public communication, the pillar of democratic structures, but problem is that watchmen of “information gates” still standing guard, but this time in front of cyber spaces. (shrink)

This paper discusses conceptual relations between the position of relativism of values and the basic principle of tolerance, as well as both objections stated against the very conceptual framework – its wrong conclusion and insufficient grounding with regard to the presupposed readiness for tolerance. A detailed argumentation reveals that these objections are not appropriate for the actual conceptual structure of corresponding relativistic theories and their possible forms. In this way the relativistic position can be sustained.Im vorliegenden Aufsatz werden die begrifflichen (...) Verbindungen zwischen dem Standpunkt des W ertrelativismus und dem Toleranzgrundsatz erörtert sowie die beiden im gegebenen Zusammenhang vorgebrachten Einwände des Trugschlusses und der fehlenden Begründung für die vorausgesetzte Toleranzbereitschaft diskutiert. Anhand eingehender Argumentation wird gezeigt, dass jene Einwände der tatsächlichen konzeptionellen Struktur entsprechender relativistischer Lehren und ihren möglichen Ausformungen nicht ganz gerecht werden. Somit kann der relativistische Standpunkt erhalten bleiben.U članku se razmatraju pojmovne veze između stajališta relativizma vrijednosti i osnovnog načela tolerancije te se diskutiraju oba prigovora koja se iznose s obzirom na dotični pojmovni sklop – pogrešan zaključak i nedostatno utemeljenje s obzirom na pretpostavljenu spremnost na toleranciju. Podrobnom argumentacijom pokazuje se da ti prigovori nisu primjereni stvarnoj koncepcijskoj strukturi odgovarajućih relativističkih učenja i njihovih mogućih formi. Time se relativističko stajalište može održati. (shrink)

Review of Ioan-Aurel Pop, Biserică, societate şi cultură în Transilvania secolului al XVI-lea. Între acceptare şi excludere (Church, society and culture in 16 th Century Transylvania. Between acceptance and exclusion) , București: Editura Academiei, 2012.

Uprkos proklamovanim emancipacijskim namerama, mehanizam ideje o jedinstvenoj povesti covecanstva sa Hajdegerovog stanovista delovao je kao zagovornik niveliranja autenticnog tubivstvovanja, sluzeci tako pre njegovom porobljavanju nego njegovom oslobadjanju. Hajdegerova rasprava o povesnosti pociva na odbacivanju pojma povesti, odnosno Hegelovog pojma svetske povesti. Opravdanje te korekcije pronadjeno je u neizbeznoj opoziciji izmedju saznanja povesti i ispitivanja povesnog bivstvovanja, cija vlastita struktura lezi u egzistencijalno-vremenskim mogucnostima dogadjanja. U tvrdnji da izvorno razumevanje ne moze ponuditi opste znanje za sve, otvara se celokupna problematicnost (...) Hajdegerove pozicije. Ona naime pociva na tezi da svet javnosti ne nudi racionalnost i da s obzirom na javnost tubivstvovanje nema nista, na sta bi se moglo osloniti. (shrink)

In this article, the author aims to demonstrate how Agamben’s concept of Homo Sacer is ideally epitomized by a soldier in war. A soldier in war holds a peculiar position, as killing of soldiers is considered neither illegal by laws nor immoral by ethics, and so a soldier is not considered to be legally or morally “guilty” in the usual sense of the word if he or she kills another soldier in war. The author analyzes the notion of Homo Sacer (...) – a figure representing a human that can be killed without the killer being punished, but at the same time someone who cannot be sacrificed – and further demonstrates that a soldier in war can be said to hold precisely such a status. The reason why a soldier cannot be sacrificed resides in the fact that he has already been “sacrificed to war” by his own society, in exchange for the safety of all other members of society. Perceiving a soldier as Homo Sacer provides a novel explanation and an additional argument for the moral symmetry of combatants, one of the pillars of non-revisionist Just War Theory, as all soldiers can be understood as persons sacrificed by their own societies. (shrink)

This paper investigates the Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem (GTSP), which is an extension of the well-known Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), and it searches for an optimal tour in a clustered graph, such that every cluster is visited exactly once. In this paper, we describe a novel Memetic Algorithm (MA) for solving efficiently the GTSP. Our proposed MA has at its core a genetic algorithm (GA), completed by a Chromosome Enhancement Procedure (CEP), which is based on a TSP solver and the (...) Shortest Path (SP) algorithm and for improving the convergence characteristics of the GA, a Local Search (LS) operation is applied for the best chromosomes in each generation. We tested our algorithm on a set of well-known instances from the literature and the achieved results prove that our novel memetic algorithm is highly competitive against the existing solution approaches from the specialized literature. (shrink)

Study in the period of coronavirus disease 2019 lockdown and the effect of different exercise training programs on the quality of life dimension are limited. This randomized control study as a part of which the impact of an 8-week neuromuscular training program on the 90 healthy young individuals’ QoL after COVID-19 lockdown was assessed using a short form of the WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire comprising of four domains. The intervention group took part in a neuromuscular training program consisting of dynamic neuromuscular stabilization (...) and whole-body vibration training. In contrast, the control group did not participate in any programmed physical activity. From pre- to post-intervention test, the NT group significantly and substantially improved [mean change ] all the QoL domains, physical for 12.78 scores, psychological for 13.12 scores, social relationships for 20.57 scores, and environmental for 24.40 scores. These results suggest that the NT program could enhance QoL in young and healthy participants following COVID-19 lockdown. (shrink)