Publications

This article is about the conception of the tyranny in the European Political Thought of the Middle Ages. The author begins with the traditional distinction between a good and a bad governor.  Within this dichotomy, the king is a good and fair ruler, whose thoughts are about a commonweal and a public good; in turn, the tyrant is a governor whose thoughts and acts are towards his personal good and interests. But - the author stresses this point - this conception in effect appeared late enough, at 12th or 13th cent.

The author analyses this fact, stressing that within the European Political thought of the Middle Ages it seems possible to define two principal modes of speaking on the Political: the theological and the juridical one. In turn, within the theological mode, we find two main branches, which are the political Augustinism and the political Thomism. The first one is a direct successor of the Roman Republican tradition developed by Cicero and, later, by the Roman jurists. Within this tradition, the main hero of the political theory is a people, which is considered as an autonomous subject, able to legislate and to define his proper public good. The other, Thomistic paradigm, interprets a people as a multitude united by a common area, laws and mode of life, a pure object of the political action, exercised by kings and other rulers. The author stresses, including on the ground of the Siete Partidas, that the real theory of the tyranny is possible only within the frames of the Thomistic paradigm.

In this chapter we are going to examine the logical connections between various descriptions of the Scientific Revolution proposed by Alexandre Koyré. We are going to propose an attentive and detailed reading of texts written by Koyré in different periods of his life in order to identify various aspects of his interpretation of the revolution in thought that occurred in early modern Europe. His most famous description of the Scientific Revolution (the dual characterization) indicates two aspects of the process that led to the emergence of classical physics: “destruction of the Cosmos” and “geometrization of space”. However, Koyré frequently used other expressions for characterization of the period, such as “mathematization of Nature”, or transition “from the world of more-or-less to the universe of precision” and “from the closed world to the open universe”. We could expect that Koyré would try to reduce his initial dual characterization to one single formula. I argue here that, on the contrary, the duality of description had a special meaning which permits us to keep in focus the complexity of the intellectual change that occurred during 17th century, when new science was rising from a new conception of reality, and a new world-view was emerging from the new science

The article "Die flimmernde Natur der Doxa: zwischen dem Durchbruch der Befangenheit und der Gefangenschaft" deals with problems of dogmatical thinking and doxa as they are presented in philosophy of Eugen Fink (1905-1975).

This article is an analysis of the interpretations of the sermons Gautama Buddha's in manuscripts of german philosopher Edmund Husserl. The article treates a posthumously published manuscript Husserl's "Socrates-Buddha".

German-Italian dictionary of philosophical terms. New edition

We examine the parallels between the theory of pleasure ascribed by Plato to the ‘enemies of Philebus’, in the homonymous dialogue, and that of the ‘wise men’, in the Republic 9. Though some of these parallels were noticed by G. Grote in 1865 and by J. Adam in 1907, their observations did not receive further elaboration. First, because the ‘wise’ of the Republic 9 admit at least one ‘real’ pleasure, whereas the ‘enemies of Philebus’ hold that pleasures do not exist at all (Hackforth 1945). Second, because the ‘enemies of Philebus’ came to be identified with Speusippus: indeed, Plato could not possibly refer to his nephew as ‘the wise’ in the Republic. Against this, we seek to reestablish the connection between the ‘the wise’ and ‘the enemies’, and thereby to shed some light on Plato’s literary and philosophical strategies, as well as on the making of his own theory of pleasure.

The book "Erde – Wohnen – Natur. Eugen Fink über die physis des Menschen als ens cosmologicum" is an output of a research project „Life and Environment. Phenomenological Relations between Subjectivity and Natural World“ (GAČR) as well as of the conference held in on 5.-th and 6.-th of november 2015

The article “'Estrangement' as a Phenomenological Practice: from Russian Formalism to Husserlian Method,” (co-authored with A.V. Yampolskaya) deals with the motiv of "estrangement" in Russian Formalism and phenomenological philosophy.

This paper investigates the epistemological import of Johann Friedrich Herbart’s contribution to a post-Kantian theory of knowledge and the mind. The investigation highlights the advantages of Herbart’s pluralism, which promotes a methodologically informed realism with a holistic structure. The paper argues that Herbart’s psychologico-mathematical approach to the mind allows for a new understanding of the subject-object relation in functionalist terms, which overcomes pre-Kantian abstract associationist models. As a function of representational series, the Self is for Herbart only a blank position: it changes continuously, depends upon the dynamics of contents, and dispenses with all substantial substrata. This is one of Herbart’s most notable contributions in the wake of Kant’s critical philosophy. 

This paper analyses different retrospective links between the scientia generalis by Leibniz and the philosophical, rhetorical and encyclopaedic traditions of the Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, emphasising the influence of Aristotle’s’ “Metaphysics” on the genesis of  the concept of universal science in 17th century philosophy.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of his passing (in 2014), this special book features studies on Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964), one of the most influential historians of science of the 20th century, who re-evaluated prevalent thinking on the history and philosophy of science. In particular, it explores Koyré’s intellectual matrix and heritage within interdisciplinary fields of historical, epistemological and scientific thought. Koyré is rightly noted as both a versatile historian on the birth and development of modern science and for his interest in philosophical questions on the nature of scientific knowledge. In the 1940s and 1950s, his activities in the United States established a crucial bridge between the European historical tradition of science studies and the American academic environments, and an entire generation of historians of science grew up under his direct influence. The book brings together contributions from leading experts in the field and offers much-needed insights into the subject from historical, nature of science, and philosophical perspectives. It provides an absorbing and revealing read for historians, philosophers and scientists alike.

The paper examines the Latin textbook “Institutiones Metaphysicae”(1821) by Irodion Yakovlevich Vetrinskii, professor at St. Petersburg Theological academy: the “Institutiones”, almost entirely ignored by philosophical historiography so far, turned out to be a crucial source for the reconstruction of the early reception and spread of Kantianism in Russia. The textbook is examined on the basis of a historico-philosophical methodology. On the one hand – in connection with the first part of the textbook, “Prolegomena to Metaphysics” – an analysis of Vetrinskii’s conception of Metaphysics is provided; on the other hand, the paper deals with Vetrinskii’s philosophical sources – and namely: J.G. Daries’s “Elementa Mataphysices”, F.S. Karpe’s «Institutiones philosophiae dogmaticae», G.I. Wenzel “Elementa metaphysices et anthropologiae”. Especially the latter meant a great deal to Vetrinskii, being at the same time the closest to Kantian philosophy. 

This study takes as its departing point the famous medical metaphor, used by Vcio in De mente heroica – that of the university as a hospital. Vico analyzes the medical dimension of heroism not only in De mente: it is discussed in detail in his funeral oration for Angela Cimmino and the preface to Pietro Belli's translation of the Fracastoro's Sifilide, but medical arguments are also spread all through his major works, De constantia and Scienza nuova. It is not a chance that Vico used medical arguments, dealing with a highly aporetical type of a hero – a virtuous woman. This perspective made it appropriate to compare two types of feminine heroes in Vico: Angela Cimmino as a Christian-Platonic hero of the third age of the history of mankind and «Lugrezia romana» as an extraordinary hero of the second. It has been shown, that Vico used opposite rhetorical strategies dealing with these two protagonists: while effacing and glossing over the Livian «Lucretia story», he mobilizes all the resources of his oratory in order to demonstrate the anthropological impossibility of the feminine hero in the age of the mente spiegata.

The problem of how signs acquire their meaning is longstanding in philosophy of language of the analytical tradition (Quine, Frege, Peirce, Wittgeinstein), as well the continental one (Saussure, Hjelmslev, Jacobson, Bloomfield). At present, most scholars are inclined either to point to the priority of objects over the system of signs, or to the system over the objects. However, neither version solves the task satisfactorily. On the one hand, we believe that the language and the world are external to each other and are independent from each other; but on the other hand, we cannot construct a model of language independent from the world (what does language denote, in that case?) and the world independent from language (how is a world is possible if it is not referenced?). This situation poses a problem. The Eigenform model can help shed the light on this problem and suggests coherent solution; this model shows how it is possible to overcome the ‘dilemma of preceding’ (of language to the world or the world to language). Similar to the dilemma of the preceding of observation (observer) to the world or observation (observer) to the world, the Eigenform model shows that neither referencing nor signified precede the other, but rather inter-condition each other. Thus, language creates the world of objects but is shaped by the world in turn. Unlike similar language model developed by L. Wittgenstein, Eigenform model stipulates the principle of the world-language generation in a complex system of involved and \ or mutual interpretations. The interpreter generates a meaning in the world, but itself, thereby forming an interpretation (in particular self-interpretation).

The aim of the paper is, firstly, to reconstruct the nature of logic as a formal, normative discipline within Herbart’s system and, secondly, to question the extent to which Herbart could consistently define logic as the “organon of knowing from a formal point of view”. This discussion should not only contribute to the problematic historiography 19th-century logic, but also explore the relevance of formalistic stances and challenge the received distinction of form and matter.

In this study, we set ourselves the goal of examining the figure of the female protagonist of Pieter Conlelisz. Hooft's historical tragedy Geeraerdt van Velsen (1613), Machtelt van Velsen, in its connection with the classical “archetypical rape victim” – Lucretia, transformed by Livy into an exemplum of republican virtus, feminine gloria, conjugal modestia and castitas.

In order to reconstruct the genealogy of Machiavelli’s Mandragola, this work was considered against the background of the Quattrocento dialogue and Renaissance novel, singling out common discursive elements and rhetorical strategies.