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…
Abstract: In this article, I analyze Charles Crittenden’s account of fictional objects in his Unreality: The Metaphysics of Fictional Objects (1991). I argue that Crittenden’s sketchy ontology of fictional objects does not support his weak eliminativism. Going along the lines of Amie Thomasson (1999), I stress that the problem of fictional objects is a strictly ontological…
Abstract: This paper explores two primary propositions: a) philosophical mediation is a vital component of cultural diplomacy, historically evolving from a practice based on cultural sensitivity, critical analysis, and public discourse; b) in the realm of diplomacy, philosophical mediation delineates the principles of cultural “adaptability,” addressing local social dynamics and epistemologies where the art…
Abstract: This essay explores Jacques Lacan’s theory of desire as functioning according to the logic of tragedy and compares it with Alenka Zupančič’s concept of love as comedy, demonstrating however that the latter remains too caught up in the Lacanian worldview to truly capture the active side of love. The essay argues that Zupančič’s interpretation…
Abstract: Philosophical hermeneutics has become an unavoidable reference in the field throughout the twentieth century but has seldom been extended to draw conclusions in the area of political theory. Two intellectuals that have contributed to such a project are Charles Taylor and Gianni Vattimo, although they exhibit some important differences in key aspects of this enterprise,…
Abstract: At the foundation of systematic thinking lie decisive assumptions that cannot be articulated and treated in a theoretical manner. Nonetheless, they are settled practically and metaphorically to orient and provoke the systematic attempts of philosophy. This field of non-theoretical assumptions is the theme of this paper. In the following, I articulate one specific metaphorical and practical…
Abstract: The paper examines a central question in the philosophy of dance from the vantage point of a specific choreographic practice: Movenglish. Movenglish attempts to establish a one-to-one mapping between English words and dance movement equivalents in the body in a way that maximally captures both the connotative and denotative aspects of the words in question. The paper argues…
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…