History of Philosophy as a Memory

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 129-142
Author(s):  
Stanisław Buda

In the first part I focus on the issue of progress, in particular progress in philosophy. Philosophical progress has a special property that it shares with the process of becoming a better person. It is constantly finding yourself “on the way”. This path is not only anchored in the Absolutely Perfect but it conditions and stimulates the reflection towards the truth about the relationship between Him and us. We can assume that the core of this reflection is philosophy. The second part is devoted to the paradoxical nature of the most generally understood memory. I assume that the condition of awareness of a certain content is its outdatedness, that is, its transfer to the sphere of memory. Memory is a constantly updated and constantly re-ordered picture of everything that the subject has ever relegated from being, so that it can be replaced by something else. The foundation of this order is a certain axiology. In the third part I show how the sketched concept of memory is used to describe the mechanism of the evolution of philosophical thought. The “on the way” philosophy would consist of two constantly repeated activities: on reconstructing what is to be denied, and thus on the recognition of the previous philosophical achievements in its totality, and on its negation. This denial would concern the whole of this achievement as an axiologically reconstructed unity. The new system is only realized as a series of consequences of the negation of the current state. The vast majority of philosophical reflection focuses on the constitution of this current state, its supposed unity. In the short part of the fourth, I draw up prospects for further deliberations.

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marek Tamm

The question of truth stands at the core of Foucault's philosophy. He was interested in how different pieces of knowledge had attained truth status over the course of history, how power had legitimated itself through truth, how people had shaped themselves via producing truth. The multivolume History of Sexuality, conceived in the 1970s, was originally intended as a study of the relationship between sex and truth. This project that spread over almost ten years constituted Foucault's main laboratory of the history of truth, where he could test new concepts, ideas, and materials. The project went through a very important transformation in time: while in 1970s, Foucault was primarily interested in the relations between truth, sex and power, in the 1980s he mainly studies the relations between truth, sex and the subject. Looking back at the evolution of his thought in the second volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault admits to realising that all of his work has in fact been dealing with the history of truth: “I seem to have gained a better perspective on the way I worked – gropingly, and by means of different or successive fragments – on this project, whose goal is a history of truth.”


1997 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 413-436
Author(s):  
Chris H. Knights

AbstractThis article is the third in a series of studies on The History of the Rechabites. The first, "The Story of Zosimus or The History of the Rechabites?,"1 established the independent identity of this text within the Christian monastic work, The Story of Zosimus, and was a sort of prolegomena to the study of this text. The second, "Towards a Critical-Introduction to The History of the Rechabites,"2 sought to address the standard introductory issues, such as date, original language, provenance and purpose. The present paper seeks to examine the text verse-by-verse, and to offer a commentary on it. Or, rather, an initial commentary. No commentary of any sort has ever been offered on the Greek text of HistRech before, and it would be foolhardy to claim that any one scholar could perceive all the allusions and meanings in a particular text at a first attempt. This commentary, then, is offered in the same spirit as my two previous studies on HistRech: as a step along the way towards unravelling the meaning of this pseudepigraphon about the Rechabites, not as the last word on the subject.


1970 ◽  
pp. 273-284
Author(s):  
Maciej Pietrzak

Pietrzak Maciej, O-bi, o-ba: Koniec cywilizacji – postpiśmienny świat Piotra Szulkina [O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization – The Postliterate World of Piotr Szulkin]. „Przestrzenie Teorii” nr 32. Poznań 2019, Adam Mickiewicz University Press, pp. 273–284. ISSN 1644-6763. DOI 10.14746/pt.2019.32.14. Piotr Szulkin made his mark in the history of cinema primarily as the author of disturbing visions of the future. His four films made between 1979 and 1985 comprised the science-fiction tetralogy, which is still one of the greatest artistic achievements of this genre in Polish cinema. The subject of the article is the third production of Szulkin’s series – the post-apocalyptic film O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization from 1984. In the film, the director creates a suggestive vision of a world destroyed as a result of nuclear conflict, in which the original functions of literature and the written word are forgotten. The author article analyzes the way in which forsaken literary artifacts are used in the post-literary reality of the film. An important element of his considerations is also the post-apocalyptic reception of the biblical text, on whose elements the mythology of the film’s world is based.


1969 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vernon F. Snow

This is the third in a series of studies dealing with the history of the proxy system in the House of Lords. The first, after tracing the origin of proxies to the Roman law of agency, dealt with the emergence and spread of representation by proctors in the ecclesiastical and political assemblies of medieval England. The second study demonstrated how the proxy system was perfected in the upper house during the reign of Henry VIII and how the Crown benefited from that system. The ensuing article concerns proctorial representation during the crucial years of the Edwardian Reformation. Because of the brief period under consideration — only six years — it seemed best to cast the study in an analytical rather than a chronological framework. The first section deals with the general characteristics of proctorial representation in mid-Tudor times; the second and third sections cover the spiritual and temporal lords, respectively; and the fourth section treats the relationship between the proxy system and conciliar government.IKnowledge of the proxy system in the mid-sixteenth-century House of Lords remains somewhat fragmentary and limited in scope. A satisfactory treatment of the subject does not exist. Constitutional and legal historians have paid little attention to proxies and less to the procedure governing their use in the upper house. As one might expect, Bishop Stubbs dealt with proxies in medieval Parliaments and correctly associated them with parliamentary privileges, but at the same time he concluded that “its history has not yet been minutely traced.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-54
Author(s):  
Mads Peter Karlsen

This article examines the relationship between materialism, dialectics, and theology in Alain Badiou's work. The first three sections of the article focus on Badiou's reading of Hegelian dialectics in his 1982 work, Theory of the Subject. The first section accounts for Badiou's splitting of Hegel into an idealist and materialist dialectic, and presents an exposition of the latter. The second section outlines Badiou's critical analysis of the theological model implicit in Hegel's dialectics. The third section investigates the core of this criticism through a discussion of Badiou's reading of the “negation of the negation.” The remaining four sections examine the anti-dialectical interpretation of the Christ-event that Badiou presents in his book Saint Paul. Here the article illustrates how Badiou's insistence on separating the death of Christ from the resurrection is linked to his rejection of the doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation, and how this drives Badiou towards idealism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 100 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-119
Author(s):  
Rosita D’Amora

Abstract In 1683 Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsili volunteered for the troops that Leopold I of Habsburg was recruiting against the army of Mehmet IV, who was about to besiege Vienna. Marsili, though, during the skirmishes preceding the siege, was wounded, captured and brought as a slave to the Ottoman camp where he learned how to prepare coffee and served as a kahveci (coffee maker). After his ransom, in 1685, he sent to press in Vienna a short treatise entitled Historia medica del cavé (‘Medical history of coffee’). In this work, entirely dedicated to coffee, he combined, according to the empirical spirit of his time, the knowledge of scholarship, with his own personal observations and firsthand experience he had gained during his slavery. In the central part of his work, Marsili entrusts the task of scientifically explaining the origins, the characteristics and the virtues of the coffee to the Ottoman man of letters Ḥusayn Efendi (Hezārfenn) who Marsili had meet during his stay in Constantinople in 1679. In the Historia Medica, Marsili not only recognizes the authority of Hezārfenn on coffee, but also includes in his text the entire treatise that Hezārfenn had wrote on the subject with a parallel Italian translation. This paper will compare the multiple contexts of interaction between these two texts and their authors. In particular, it will analyze the way through which Marsili presents and uses the authority of the Ottoman text and inserts it, in its original script, into the core his treatise. By examining Marsili’s interest in Hezārfenn’s works, this paper will also emphasize his role as a cross-boundary mediator who moving back and forth from one culture to the other, as a diplomat as well as a slave, contributed significantly to building those cultural bridges through which the Muslim and the Christian world never stopped learning from each other, even in a setting of constant conflict.


Author(s):  
Marco Barcaro

Esta contribución presenta como el concepto filosófico de “donación” es reinterpretado en la reflexión de Patočka. Partiendo de la lección husserliana, gracias a la cual las cosas son dadas en la pura inmanencia de la consciencia, él critica esta orientación “subjetivista” porque no desarrolla adecuadamente el tema del aparecer en el campo fenomenal. La segunda sección analiza tres desplazamientos metódicos que abarcan: el rol del sujeto, su relación con la trascendencia, el darse a sí mismo del mundo en su totalidad. La tercera sección compara la reflexión de Patočka con dos referencias cruzadas a algunos intentos similares en la historia de la fenomenología. El tema de “la donación”, por tanto, nos traslada al mayor problema con el que ha trabajado siempre la filosofía: la manifestación del mundo. Patočka intentó esclarecer este problema mediante dos metáforas (el espejo y la pintura), pero también subrayó cómo concierne el modo en el que el hombreinterpreta la propia existencia.This paper presents how the philosophical key concept of givenness is reinter-preted in Patočka's reflection. Starting from the Husserlian idea, according to which things are given in the pure immanence of consciousness, Patočka criticized this "subjectivist" orientation because it doesn’t adequately develop the appearing in the phenomenal field. The second section analyzes three main methodical shifts concerning: the nature and the role of the subject, its relationship with the transcendence, the self-giving of the world as a whole. The third section compares Patočka's reflection and two cross-references to similar undertaking in the history of phenomenology. The theme of givenness brings us back in the end to the biggest problem within which philosophy has always worked: world manifestation. Patočka tried to clarify this issue through two metaphors (the mirror and the painting), but he also highlighted as it concerns the way in which man interprets his existence. 


AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-165
Author(s):  
Jonathan Klawans

Ithamar Gruenwald's recent book brings together various essays the author has published over the last few years, each seeking to rethink aspects of ritual theory, especially as applied to the rituals of ancient Israel. After introducing his themes and approach in the first chapter, Gruenwald addresses (in Chapter 2) what he calls the “economic ethos” of ancient Israel, speculating that “in the history of ancient Israel, the transition from ethos to religion is connected to the passage from nomadic lifestyle to an urban one” (p. 67). The third chapter reexamines the relationship between myth and ritual. The last three chapters are devoted to ritual theory as it pertains, respectively, to rabbinic halakhah (Chapter 4), biblical sacrifice (Chapter 5), and the “Lord's Supper,” as related primarily in the writings of Paul. Throughout the book, Gruenwald emerges as an emphatic spokesperson for the non-symbolic nature of rituals in general, and of biblical sacrifice in particular. While this book is wide-ranging in scope, a significant portion of chapters 2 and 6 are devoted to the stated theme of chapter 5: biblical sacrifice. Because Gruenwald himself believes that “sacrifices constitute the core of religion” (p. 189), perhaps the best way to review his complicated book briefly is to examine his approach to this particular ritual structure.


Paleobiology ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 6 (02) ◽  
pp. 146-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Oliver

The Mesozoic-Cenozoic coral Order Scleractinia has been suggested to have originated or evolved (1) by direct descent from the Paleozoic Order Rugosa or (2) by the development of a skeleton in members of one of the anemone groups that probably have existed throughout Phanerozoic time. In spite of much work on the subject, advocates of the direct descent hypothesis have failed to find convincing evidence of this relationship. Critical points are:(1) Rugosan septal insertion is serial; Scleractinian insertion is cyclic; no intermediate stages have been demonstrated. Apparent intermediates are Scleractinia having bilateral cyclic insertion or teratological Rugosa.(2) There is convincing evidence that the skeletons of many Rugosa were calcitic and none are known to be or to have been aragonitic. In contrast, the skeletons of all living Scleractinia are aragonitic and there is evidence that fossil Scleractinia were aragonitic also. The mineralogic difference is almost certainly due to intrinsic biologic factors.(3) No early Triassic corals of either group are known. This fact is not compelling (by itself) but is important in connection with points 1 and 2, because, given direct descent, both changes took place during this only stage in the history of the two groups in which there are no known corals.


This volume is an interdisciplinary assessment of the relationship between religion and the FBI. We recount the history of the FBI’s engagement with multiple religious communities and with aspects of public or “civic” religion such as morality and respectability. The book presents new research to explain roughly the history of the FBI’s interaction with religion over approximately one century, from the pre-Hoover period to the post-9/11 era. Along the way, the book explores vexed issues that go beyond the particulars of the FBI’s history—the juxtaposition of “religion” and “cult,” the ways in which race can shape the public’s perceptions of religion (and vica versa), the challenges of mediating between a religious orientation and a secular one, and the role and limits of academic scholarship as a way of addressing the differing worldviews of the FBI and some of the religious communities it encounters.


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