Abstract: This essay explicates the position of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment on the problem of drugs. At the focus of my analysis are the passages in “Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment” which interpret the Homeric myth of the Lotus-eaters in terms of the modern phenomenon of substance abuse. Since the Dialectic reads…
Abstract: The article discusses satisfaction with self-presentation as the way of functioning (modus vivendi) of a magnanimous man in relation to Aristotelian ethics. Even though self-presentation is usually considered as a kind of biologically determined instinct, it may be argued that self-presentation is also an aspect of the actions of a magnanimous man. Naturalist social theories concerning moral…
Abstract: We are at a moment in history where the mimetic system of attraction and repulsion, which René Girard considers the foundation of all pathologies of resentment, has reached the point of undifferentiation, both in culture and in an individual sense of agency. Describing the “explosion” associated with the “formation of organized collectives,” Jurij Lotman locates…
Abstract: This paper aims to provide a comprehensive examination of the development of Lithuanian philosophical thought and philosophy of culture in Lithuania, focusing specifically on the concept of integral democracy. The emergence of Lithuanian philosophy in the Lithuanian language, which dates back to the early twentieth century, coincided with the formation of the modern Lithuanian state…
Abstract: This paper compares Dilthey’s efforts to confront cultural friction with Nietzsche’s philosophy as it impacts such conflicts. Both authors recognize various legitimate claims on behalf of the Romantics, while also admiring certain Enlightenment doctrines as well. While Dilthey recommends cross-cultural understanding, Nietzsche puts forth his Zarathustrian ideal as a general solution to mankind’s problems, cultural and…
Abstract: The article delves into the question of Freud’s concept of reading, and the fear of being photographed based on an analysis of the article “A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psychoanalytic Theory of That Disease” (1915). Freud explicitly guides readers on how to read and not read this text. In alignment with…
Abstract: The paper analyses the traditional concept of teleology, as well as its modern descendant, the concept of function (as used in the context of so-called functional explanations), against the background of such notions as purposive action, concepts, causality, time, and space-time. The author distinguishes several meanings of teleology and shows that their dialectics reveal…
Abstract: Hannah Arendt notably remarked that thinking, understood as the non-conclusive inner dialogue of “me” with “myself,” is most indispensable in those historical moments when “things fall apart.” War often occasions such moments, not just because of the moral and political turmoil that accompanies it or the physical damage it inflicts upon people…
Abstract: Hannah Arendt is one of the twentieth century’s foremost thinkers on totalitarian regimes. For her, such a political development becomes possible particularly because people abrogate their faculty of thinking. Totalitarianism, in turn, breeds conformity, engenders an ethics of alienation. Moreover, language, too, loses its hermeneutical ability to conjure up other possible, alternative, imaginative…
Abstract: There is a genuine and profound problem about what it consists in for anything to be yourself. Once (perhaps per impossibile) all the empirical and modal facts about a particular human being are in, it still remains unexplained both what being you is, and why that human being is yourself. Being you seems an…