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".

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

European armed forces have frequently had to participate in counterterrorist operations while abroad. For many, however, counter-terrorist operations in their home country are a relatively new phenomenon. Armed and uniformed soldiers can now be seen doing work which is, in some respects, comparable to that of the civilian security forces. What are the ethical implications of this phenomenon? To what extent does it change the relationship between the soldier and the democratic state? Do emerging technologies encroach on democratic freedoms? Does the phenomenon redefine the relationship between the police and the military? Under what conditions can soldiers be trained to achieve victory by force of arms, be used effectively in crowded city centres? Conversely, do we also risk overmilitarising our police?

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.

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.

The nature of co-evolutionary complexity of society and the ways of its management are under consideration. Co-evolutionary complexity emerges in the process of joint and concordant development of structures and organizations. Management of complexity is possible as ensuring its innovative self-management. The role of external control actions increases under conditions of uncertainty and crisis in society. Co-evolution means the art to live together and to co-exist in one and the same tempo-world. It is substantiated that an extended ecological discourse based on the notion of Umwelt is useful in the modern management activity.

Methodological remarks on the connection of music and language in Johann Friedrich Herbart's philosophical psychology.

Everything real joins together in the unity of the world”—so begins the Ideas. And with this, it seems that Husserl provides the clearest example of how to think our world, not just within the phenomenological tradition (as a modification and reestablishment of Greek metaphysics, as truly universal ontology), but in the history of philosophy—the total unity of history—our history, that animated Greek philosophy from its beginnings. But what is this world? And what is its unity? Or more precisely, how can unity join everything real—humans and animals, plants and stones, indeed the whole of nature, the entire cosmos—together in the world? Or is there not another way of thinking unity, of going to the unity of the world itself? And one that has implications (intentional or not) for phenomenology, for our thinking of unity, perhaps even for the crisis of an entirely “unquestioned” philosophical tradition?

This article outlines the possibility of phenomenology of religion as a strictly cognitive, non-theological and namely phenomenological discipline in the structure of the study of religion, based on the cognitive-value demarcation, for which the Russian variant of phenomenology of religion has been criticized. The irreducible difference between cognition and value is grounded in the specificity of thought and feeling; possible attempts to represent cognition and value as a mixture are rejected. Phenomenology of religion as recomprehended is characterized by a prevailing cognitive tendency and is thus separated as a discipline from theology, which features a prevailing orientation towards value (the theological part of the phenomenology of religion can clearly be included in theology itself). By specifying the phenomenological quality of phenomenology of religion, this article shows how religion can be represented in pure consciousness, reducing it to the effects of interactions within structures of consciousness. These disciplinary clarifications are founded on the general distinction between the study of religion and theology – cognitive and non-cognitive (valuable) and, thus, incomparable disciplines.