Preview: The category of Eastern Europe is deeply problematic. It is so on many levels. To better realize that, it suffices to ask a citizen of any country once belonging to the “Eastern bloc” if they consider themselves Eastern European. In most cases they will do whatever possible to slip away from such a categorization, considering it deeply shameful….
Abstract: The aim of this essay is a philosophical reconstruction of the category of Eastern Europe (as topographical and ethical, and only by implication a geographical one). This will proceed in three steps. First, deconstruction of the category in question by exposing its colonialist and post-colonialist origins. Second, projection of a new cultural geography of Eastern Europe. The main criteria…
Preview: Words have weight and power; and so do narratives and ideas. They can shape and re-shape realities. They can reveal unheard and unthought of before aspects and dimensions of the world we live in, and in this sense, constitute truth for us; however, they can also, by means of the very same gravity…
Preview: Culture, one can say, is the process of projecting, creating, and setting limitations. It begins with such acts as much as it lives and sustains itself through them. Culture not only sets its outward, external limits serving as a demarcation between itself and an outward sphere – a realm not belonging to it, a dark zone…
Preview: The status of philosophy of culture seems to be notoriously unclear. Since its birth as a methodologically self-aware discipline, it constantly provokes controversies and questions concerning its nature, scope, and objective field of cognitive interests. Is it to be conceived – as it was intended by Wilhelm Dilthey – as a kind of philosophical foundation for Geisteswissenschaften and even…
Preview: Culture is the relentless, never-ending process of symbolic formations, transformations and reconfigurations. This statement, as trivial as it is, means that culture is a certain ontological excess whose nature lies in its arti- and trans-factuality, in the modes of its self-differentiation, in the inherent indeterminacy of its meanings, as well as in its historicality. Culture arises out of…
Preview: What is language? This question seems to be as fundamental and inescapable for philosophical reflection as it is paradoxical, if not abysmal. It is fundamental since philosophy cannot and should not escape questions concerning its own basic medium, the element of its self-realization or the means of expression of its conceptualized claims and propositions….
Preview: The contemporary culture is marked by an essential heterodoxicality, where opposing cultural factors are constantly and effectively at play. For what we experience is unprecedented dynamics of social-cultural reality contrasted with a paradoxical form of stagnation (if not of regression). As if all changes were only meaningless variations on the same theme. What we experience are…
Preview: /Review: Edward S. Casey, The World on Edge, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 385 pages./ For the most part, we live our everyday lives surrounded by solid, substantial, reliable things fitting into, and supporting, our practical projects. We live our lives believing in the stable and, more or less, unified nature of our selves and the…
Preview: In the path of his – most brilliantly described – way to himself St. Augustine arrived at the point in which he could only state: “…and I have become a problem to myself, and this is the ailment from which I suffer.” It is well known how and at what price (both intellectual and metaphysical) he found the way out…