In Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare examines the relationship of the political realm to the things that are outside or beyond politics: family, society, religion, friendship, and love. The play is thus a work of political philosophy, and no less so because it is a work of art in which these things are portrayed concretely through the relationships of the play's characters. The difficulties of interpreting the play are due in part to its aesthetic particularity, but more to the familiarity (...) of its plot, the common understanding of which has been shaped by misleading statements made by the Chorus. The Chorus is persuasive, but wrong: the Capulets and Montagues are not "both alike in dignity" ;1 Romeo... (shrink)

The Eleatic Stranger plays a central role in all reconstructions of Plato’s “Platonism.” This paper is a study of the literary form of the Sophist and Statesman and its significance for interpreting the Eleatic’s account of the nature of philosophy. I argue that the Eleatic dialogues are best understood through a comparison with the source-texts in the Odyssey that Plato used in their composition. I show that the literary form of the Sophist is a straightforward reworking of the encounter of (...) Odysseus and his crewmen with Polyphemus the Cyclops; and that the form of the Statesman is a somewhat more complex reworking of the narrative in which Odysseus and those loyal to him oppose Antinoös, leader of the Ithacan suitors. The comparison reveals that the Eleatic Stranger is no way Plato’s spokesman. On the contrary: by casting the Stranger in the role of Polyphemus and the Cyclopean Antinoös, Plato intends the Sophist and Statesman to be read as an explicit critique of the metaphysical and political doctrines that have since come to be identified as Platonism. In Plato’s characterization, the Eleatic Stranger is neither a philosopher nor a sophist. He is an intellectual—the sort of person who professes to be a philosopher and is often mistaken for one. (shrink)

In memoriam: Mira Balija PlanincEuripides's Hecuba is not one of the best-known tragedies. The story is vividly memorable, however. Troy has fallen. The Greeks have finished their killing and plundering and have begun their homeward journey. As soon as they cross the Hellespont and make camp on what some might call the European side, in Thrace, they bury Achilles. The Trojan queen, Hecuba, is enslaved, as are the only two of her daughters who remain alive, Polyxena and Cassandra, the latter (...) to Agamemnon himself. Her husband Priam was killed at Troy, and so too were all of their many sons—except one: the youngest, Polydorus, who years before had been sent for his protection, along with a substantial amount of Trojan... (shrink)

This new study challenges traditional ways of reading Plato by showing that his philosophy and political theory cannot be understood apart from a consideration of the literary or aesthetic features of his writing. More specifically, it shows how Plato’s well-known cosmological dialogues—the _Phaedrus, Timaeus, _and _Critias_—are structured using several books of the _Odyssey _as their shared source text. While there has recently been much scholarly discussion of the relation between poetry and philosophy in Plato’s dialogues, little of it addresses questions (...) central to thoroughgoing literary criticism. Planinc’s work is unique in that it shows the significance of Plato’s extensive refiguring of key episodes in the _Odyssey_ for an interpretation of his political philosophy. Plato’s cosmological dialogues are almost always discussed topically. The _Timaeus _is picked through for its theological or scientific doctrines; the _Critias _is reduced to its Atlantis story, or puzzled over because of its ostensible incompleteness; and the _Phaedrus_ is read for its parallels to modern understandings of erotics or rhetoric. The dialogues are not usually considered in relation to one another, and then only in the context of developmental schemes primarily concerned with distinguishing periods in Plato’s metaphysical doctrines. Planinc argues that the main literary features of the _Phaedrus,_ _Timaeus,_ and _Critias _are taken from books 6 to 9 of the _Odyssey,_ the largest part of the story of Odysseus’s stay with the Phaeacians, from the time he swims to shore and encounters Nausicaa to the time he reveals his identity and begins recounting his earlier travels after hearing Demodocus’s songs. By exploring the full range of the many charming and intriguing things the dialogues present in this literary context, he shows that they are a coherent, unified part of Plato’s corpus. _Plato through Homer_ takes a radically new approach to Plato’s texts that illuminates their literary and philosophic significance and highlights their enduring appeal. (shrink)

The leading scholars represented in _Politics, Philosophy, Writing_ examine six key Platonic dialogues and the most important of the epistles, moving from Plato's most public or political writings to his most philosophical. The collection is intended to demonstrate the unity of Plato's concerns, the literary quality of his writing, and the integral relation of form and content in his work. Taken together, these essays show the consistency of Plato's understanding of the political art, the art of writing, and the philosophical (...) life. Studies emphasizing the unity of Plato's lifework have given way in recent scholarship to specialized and overspecialized examinations of individual dialogues. While each of the contributors to _Politics, Philosophy, Writing_ studies one text, his or her work is oriented toward illuminating the whole of Plato's project. Each of the essays is an innovative contribution to scholarship on its topic; as a collection, they constitute a unique reading of Plato's political philosophy. Plato scholars have generally divided themselves into two camps: those who concentrate on the analytic or logical aspects of the dialogues, and those who concentrate on the literary-critical features. In one camp are the philologists and classicists, and in the other, the writers of inventive interpretive commentaries. By avoiding distinctions between Plato the poet and Plato the philosopher, _Politics, Philosophy, Writing_ allows a deeper exploration of the comprehensiveness of Plato's theoretical vision and illuminates the lasting challenge of his understanding of the human condition. (shrink)

Zdravko Planinc’s Odyssean reading of the Sophist and Statesman presents a radical critique of claims that these dialogues present developments of Plato’s thought. His claim that Plato intends us to see the Stranger as no more than an outrageous sophist, however, is undermined by the quality of at least some of Stranger’s arguments and insights.

ABSTRACT A division in scholarship on Rousseau’s Second Discourse turns on the issue of division itself. Some see Rousseau’s natural man collapsing the division between man and beast through suggesting that our origins might be in orangutans, while others see Rousseau depicting a rupture of the human being from the rest of the animal kingdom through the separation of the physical and the metaphysical. I argue that in looking to the natural scientific culture of Rousseau’s own time, one can see (...) that he is employing a uniquely informed vision of the human being that itself straddles this divide of interpretation through presenting man as both a naturally and mythically hybrid creature. To conclude, I claim that illuminating this hybrid identity of the human being also sheds new light on the kind of narrative Rousseau employs. His ‘hypothetical history’ is itself a hybrid of two distinct origin stories, mirroring the very argument Rousseau is making: that man is always a duplex of the animal and the spiritual. This moves beyond presenting Rousseau as a thinker of irresolvable paradoxes to seeing the Second Discourse as a resolved presentation of what it means to be a natural duplex. (shrink)

Explores the intriguing prospect that, in some situations, a person's hand has a mind of its own.

Posthumanist and New Materialist thought attempts to undo the supremacy and distinction of the human being through accounting for the agential capacities of the animal and material world. New Materialism in particular constructs a vision of a vital natural world in order to turn us away from humanism and toward a more holistic understanding of nature, and political actants. In this article, I argue that there can be a humanist new materialist position that sees the vitalism of the natural world (...) while maintaining the uniqueness of the human being. This position can be found in the natural science of the eighteenth century in the work of Georges-Louis LeClerc de Buffon and Charles Bonnet. Reminding ourselves of this alternative mode of thinking about a vital nature, and its vision of a self-regenerating human being in a vital and regenerative universe, is a path toward regenerating humanism itself in contemporary scholarship. (shrink)

t. 1. Estetika--obshti vŭprosi. Estetika i teorii︠a︡ na arkhitekturata i gradoustroĭstvoto, izobrazitelnoto izkustvo, muzikata, teatŭra i kinoto. --t. 3. Teorii︠a︡, istorii︠a︡ i kritika na literaturata.

H. G. Wells’s The Rights of Man (1940)—which provided the groundwork for the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights—has been re-released with a new Introduction by novelist Ali Smith, who reminds us of Wells’s political prophetic call for “a real federation of mankind,” and of the fact that we have still failed to meet the future he envisioned. If we are to catch up with Wells, we must, however, examine the foundations of Wells’s “cosmopolitan” vision, which requires examining both his (...) scientific non-fiction and his scientific romances. Looking to Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau in particular, and the influence of Wells’s early scientific essays on Moreau’s narrative, we get a picture of Wells as a writer and a man who is anxious about the identity and future of the human species, but who nevertheless puts his faith in the “apparatuses” of “education and moral suggestion,” which are held together by “common faith.” Much like Charles Taylor and Simon Critchley, Wells calls for more than a political reconstitution, or institution, of right: he calls for a new cosmic imaginary, or supreme fiction, that has the potential to redeem and preserve the human species. (shrink)

The article provides a tentative reading of Hegel’s police as a concept that constitutes a crucial test for the rationality of Hegel’s state and that actually played a very important role in the formation of his model of rationality. It starts by considering some significant changes in Hegel’s approach to the subject in the Jena period, especially in reference to Fichte and Spinoza; then, it presents Hegel’s conception of the police as the interface of the universal in his mature political (...) philosophy, together with his treatment of the disturbing problem of poverty and the rabble; and to conclude, it adds some general remarks on Hegel’s police, then and now. (shrink)

Rabble, it is commonly argued, indicates one of the very few places in Hegel's system where he produced an inevitable contradiction that he was, however, unable to “sublate.” In this paper, I purport to prove this narrative wrong. Relying on a close reading of Hegel's reasoning in his book and his lectures on the philosophy of right, I first attempt to determine what the problem of rabble consists in: I demonstrate that Hegel was perfectly aware of the mechanism of necessary (...) impoverishment in (unrestricted) civil society, and that in his view the poor were actually justified in developing a rabble mentality. I then show, on the one hand, that civil society was from the very beginning conceived as self-sublating, and on the other, that Hegel was, at least in principle, able to find a solution for the rabble: the state. (shrink)

This paper will analyse Hegel's discussion of the relation between family and civil society on the basis of Marx's insight into the discrepancy between Hegel's explicitly logical structure of presentation based on �essential relationships� and his implicitly historical structure of presentation based on �external necessities�. It is intended neither to resolve the dispute between Hegel and Marx nor to apply Marx's critique to passages of the Philosophy of Right that he did not have occasion to discuss. The purpose of this (...) paper is more specific. It will attempt to illustrate the conflict between Hegel's characterization of civil society as a moment of ethical life emerging from the family in a non-contradictory manner, and his characterization of civil society's opposition to, and transformation of, the family. (shrink)

This collection of essays represents an interdisciplinary approach to some contemporary issues in the philosophy of science and the theory of knowledge. It is also an attempt to place art in the context of human cognition in general and also to relate it to science and philosophy. Its conception is such that it accords with the view that our creativity is not separable from a humanistic orientation. Within such a humanistic framework, aiming at a stable form of peace becomes the (...) moral responsibility of both the scientist and the philosopher. (shrink)

The paper is an attempt of outlining the mind responsible for moral judgments in a general manner, and according to the investigations done by the neuroscientists, and which challenge some standard philosophical notions. The “measuring” of morality on the part of neuroscience reveals that moral decisions are basically made on an intuitive level that can be emotionally motivated to a greater or lesser extent, what in turn depends on whether the attitude is “personal” or “impersonal”, and not so much on (...) the universal criteria of rightness and wrongness. The cost-benefit moral “calculus” appears to be derivation of some primary intuitive “decision-making”, and a sort of narrative the mind is constantly producing, and we come to believe in. The philosopher’s usual response to the sort of challenge is rightly that it is not the brain that is responsible for moral decisions and deeds, nor is it neuroscience that can provide us with the ultimate explanation of how the “ethical mind” works for moral sense and responsibility is still with persons and not with brains. Yet, the sort of knowledge can significantly enhance our understanding of the mechanisms underlying mental processes involved in solving moral dilemmas. (shrink)

A volume devoted explicitly to the subtle and multidimensional phenomenon of background knowing that has to be recognized as an important element of the triad mind-body-world. The essays are inspired by seminal works on the topic by Searle and Dreyfus, but also make significant contribution in bringing the discussion beyond the classical confines.

The paper provides a modest reading of Hegel?s treatment of self-consciousness in his Phenomenology of Spirit and tries to present it as an integral part of the overall project of the experience of consciousness leading from understanding to reason. Its immediate objective is, it is argued, to think the independence and dependence, that is the pure and empirical I within the same unity of self-consciousness. This implies a double movement of finding a proper existence for the pure I and at (...) the same time a breaking down of the empirical I?s attachment to particularity. It is argued that the Hegelian struggle for recognition intends to show how the access to reason demands the subject?s renunciation of its attachment to particularity, that is to sacrifice not only its bare life but every thing indeed, including its particular identity, and yet, to go on living. nema. (shrink)

Collection with articles of different disciplines on Metaphor as a "Figure of Thought". Summary of contents: 1. A HIstory of Philosophy Perspective 2. A SEmantic Perspective 3. A COgnitive Science Perspective 4. A PHilosphy of Science Perspective 5. A THeological, Sociological and Political Perspective.

Nach einleitender Darstellung der Grundstruktur des Nihilismus-Vorwurfs, den Jacobi an die Philosophie als Unternehmen des reflexiven Erkennens machte, wird in dem Aufsatze die große Bedeutung dieser Diskussion für die Bildung der Hegelschen Philosophie, vor allem in Beziehung auf Schelling dargelegt. Sich an Schelling anlehnend versuchte Hegel in den ersten Jenaer Jahren das Nichts, in dem die Reflexionsphilosophie enden sollte, als notwendige Folge einer willkürlichen Absolutisierung der endlichen Reflexion zu lesen und es durch ihre immanente Selbstvernichtung zu überwinden. Doch fand er (...) dieses Modell schon bald unzureichend, weil das absolute Nichts darin objektiv unbestimmt und subjektiv bloß versichernd bleibt. So stellte er die Aufgabe der Philosophie als Gleichnis des spekulativen Karfreitags, wo der Begriff durch das absolute Leiden beide Forderungen entsprechend erfüllen soll. Anschließend werden einige Folgen angeführt, die die Nihilismus-Problematik in Hegels späteren Werken hinterließ, z. B. in dem Begriffe der absoluten Reflexion, und die auch für heutige philosophische Diskussionen von Belang sein können. (shrink)

Ovim se radom želi prikazati polazna osnova Hobbesovog filozofskog mišljenja. Ona je važna jer je prisutna u svim segmentima njegove filozofije – negdje eksplicitno, a negdje implicitno. Tematizirajući o prvoj filozofiji, Hobbes je pokazao svoja osnovna gledišta kojim želi pokazati znatno razlikovanje od Aristotela i skolastike. Inspiriran dostignućima moderne znanosti svoju filozofiju usmjerava prema mehanicizmu i materijalizmu. Napuštajući tradicionalnu metafiziku, koja je u centar zbivanja stavljala bitak, Hobbes pokazuje privrženost logici i epistemologiji. Taj način filozofiranja omogućuje mu drugačije sagleda realnost (...) od onoga kako je bila poimana kod njegovih prethodnika. Hobbes stvarnost objašnjava kao gibajuću materiju koja se najvjerodostojnije razotkriva proučavajući mehaničke zakone. On nije pokazao samo svoje filozofsko razlikovanje spram prethodnika već i spram suvremenika. Osobitu pažnju plijeni njegova kritika Descartesova dualizma koji razdvaja um i tijelo na dvije metafizičke supstancije.The purpose of this paper is to show the starting point of Hobbes’ philosophy, which is important because it is present in all aspects of his philosophy – sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. In terms of subject of the first philosophy, Hobbes presented his basic views which significantly differ from Aristotle’s and scholasticism. Inspired by the achievements of modern science, he directed his thoughts towards philosophy of mechanicism and materialism. By abandoning traditional metaphysics, which placed the concept of being in the center of attention, he showed great commitment to logic and epistemology. This mode of philosophizing allows him to perceive reality differently than his predecessors. Hobbes explains reality as moving matter which is best disclosed through study of mechanical laws. He not only demonstrated his philosophical distinctions from the predecessors, but also in relation to contemporaries. Particular attention draws his criticism of Descartes’ dualism which separated mind from the body in two metaphysical substances. (shrink)

Široko je rasprostranjeno slaganje da se pozadinska infrastruktura nesvjesno primjenjuje i nije formalno predstavljiva, nego se pogledi razilaze treba li se ta vrsta vještine smatrati znanjem u pravome smislu. U ovome članku pokušavam pokazati da je pozadinska infrastruktura tip stručnog znanja koji služi kao preduvjet umu da bi bio o stvarima u svijetu. Suprotno uobičajenom razumijevanju, da je pozadina prvenstveno mehanička, ovdje predstavljen pogled potvrđuje je kao totalitet znanja preuzet od tijela i pretvoren u implicitno ‘znati-kako’ . On se pojavljuje (...) kao modus umskog ‘posvjetovljenja’, kao i organ potencijalnosti.There is wide agreement that background infrastructure is unconsciously applied and is not formallyrepresentable, but views diverge as to whether this sort of skill should be considered knowledgein the proper sense. In this paper I attempt to show that background infrastructure is a type ofskilled knowledge which serves as a precondition for the mind to be about things in the world. Contraryto the common understanding that background is primarily mechanical, the view presentedhere affirms that it as a totality of knowing taken up by the body and converted into an implicit‘know-how’. It appears as a mode of mind’s ‘enworldment’, as well as an organ of potentiality. (shrink)

Il y a presque unanimité à reconnaître que lesavoir des antécédents est appliquée inconsciemment et qu’elle n’est pas représentable formellement, mais les avis divergent quand il s’agit de décider si ce genre d’aptitude doit être considéré comme un savoir au sens propre du terme. Dans cet article, j’essaie de montrer que l’infrastructure des antécedents est un type de savoir technique constituant une condition préalable pour que la pensée soit sur le monde. Contrairement à la conception habituelle, selon laquelle les antécedents (...) sont principalement mécaniques, le point de vue présenté ici les définit comme totalité de savoirs empruntés au corps et transformés en savoir-faire implicite. Celui-ci se manifeste à la fois comme un mode d’«assimilation au monde» et un organe de potentialité. (shrink)

Modem theories of metaphor seem to be pretty unanimous in taking the "death" of a metaphor literally. By doing so they too easily wipe out sedimented, past meanings and so ignore semantic memory. A further consequence of this stand is that meanings are reduced to a one-dimensional (either metaphoric or literal), static structure. This article, in a procedure that resembles a sort of "archeology of meaning," is critical of such an attitude, for which conventionalization of metaphors means their burial in (...) the graveyard of language. It attempts to provide a ground for the assumption that labeling of metaphors as "dead" is not lethal, for their meanings can be revitalized and recreated, according to our linguistic competence, diachronic perspective, interests, and needs. It contains implicit support for the thesis that semantic mechanisms are flexible, dynamic, and subject to evolutionary growth. Not even the death of a metaphor can be exempt from this overall scheme. (shrink)

The paper deals with some misconceptions concerning ‘privileged’ access to our own experiences from the first-person perspective, points to the limitations of this immediacy, and questions the solipsist privacy of subjectivity. Based on the conviction that the identification of ‘point of view’ with ‘perspective’ proves to be problematic, the author argues that we may take different perspectives from the same point of view. As embodied and embedded cognitive persons we practice the interchange of perspectival attitudes towards our own subjectivity in (...) our daily lives far more easily and frequently than we are prone to admit in our theories. This kind of methodology, part of which is also the objectivist third-person approach, does not have the power to revise the irreducibility between the subjective and the empirical, although it does appeal to the mind open to the intersubjective space, in which the irreducible can still be communicated, compared and complemented. (shrink)