31 papers
This paper was completed after I wrote the four parts seen below and intended both to discuss Kant in an engaged way, and not neutral – as is the fashion between the professional philosophers, and to popularize him in a blog, in order to show to non-philosophers that he is not incomprehensible and far from their everyday concerns but, on the contrary, helps them. Now, at the advice of a colleague from the board of Revolutionary Marxism, I grouped the parts in a single article. They signal the ac...
ABSTRACT. I men�on the main, technophile and technophobe, posi�ons towards technology in the Western 18th century, as the criterion of this paper. Then I show that, however unexpected would this be, the concept of technics – opening the problem of technics – was explicitly present within the transcendental philosophy. From its mul�ple meanings outlined in the logic of this philosophy, I focus on the technical instruments of science. Kant considered them op�mis�cally, but insisted that they are o...
Abstract. This paper is intended to be a popularisation of Kant practical philosophy’s core and climax, the categorical imperative. In the end, every scientific article is one of popularisation, because science means communication and transparency, and the professional articles do this to and between the professionals of a domain. The present offer is a professional article of philosophy. But its purpose is to be understood by more than the colleagues, because the topic is of utmost importance f...
Abstract. The paper tries to demonstrate the hypothesis that the Enlightenment epistemology, synthetically represented by Kant, is the unity between the epistemological criticism or more precisely the epistemological (and not mathematical) constructivist approach of knowledge as mental processing of the tools of mind and the ethical maximalism of the categorical imperative. Actually, the ethical maximalism was conceived of and is conceivable only in tandem with and as a result of the epistemolog...
Despre tertium non datur Athanase JOJA INTRODUCTION IN 2021 We publish a relevant paper of Academician Athanase Joja (1904-1972) who subordinated the inherent passion of philosophers, the history of philosophy, to his main professional passion, logic. Athanase Joja has many relevant papers. We chose the present one, about tertium non datur1, not only because it explains clearly the topic – at the level of the 60s of the 20th century – but also because the topic itself is important in the present...
Abstract. The paper is written in order to demonstrate the lack of soundness of the present counter- Enlightenment attacks against reason and science. The characterisation of Enlightenment cannot only refer to the logical consequences of the universally manifested reason – (the wishful thoughts about) the humans‘ education and educability and thus the changing the world for the better – without substantiating them. Kant has substantiated the Enlightenment epistemology that supports even today th...
Translation (into Romanian) by Rodica Croitoru, 2019 This is only a note about the translation into Romanian of Kant’s magnum opus: Immanuel Kant, Critica rațiunii pure, Traducere, Studiu introductiv, Studiu asupra traducerii, Note, Bibliografie selectivă, Index de concepte german-român, Index de concepte român-german de Rodica Croitoru, București, Editura Paideia, 2019, 1061 p. [Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Translation (into Romanian), Introductory Study, Study about Translation, Not...
Cultura e una: dar cum? Cultura e ceea ce creşte pe fundalul vieţii, desigur, dar este ceea ce este tot ce are viaţa mai „generos”1: Nu este vorba deloc la Noica nici despre „două” fecreaţia exterioară mersului naturii. Faţă de aceasta, culluri de culturi şi nici despre „două” caracteristici ale cultura pare un „exces”. De ce? Deoarece este nu doar turii, de tip geometric sau istoric. (Așa cum nici la Pascal ceva în plus faţă de „conţinutul imediat al vieţii”, ci şi nu există decât un singur spi...
Abstract. My hypothesis is not that phenomenology would generate an explicit philosophy of recognition of man by man, but that the junction of phenomenology and existentialism – or rather the insertion of phenomenology into existentialism, as it was the case with Merleau-Ponty – could lead to this philosophy. My paper desires to discuss the philosophical motivation of Merleau-Ponty’s conception about communism as “recognition of man by man”. Based on the presumption that the work is a whole, eve...
Abstract. The paper has three parts and a conclusion. The first part icant aspects of John Rawls’ theory about the religious emphasises signif pluralism in the liberal state. In the second part, some concrete relationships between the State and the Church are sowed, and concretely which are the opinions about the problem of icons in schools, as they were expressed by the participants to Romanian sites, and especially of a liberal site. In the third part, the results of a poll among students conc...
ABSTRACT My paper relates Bachelard’s main epistemological thesis – the new scientific spirit – in the 30s and some present tendencies in science. In its “Noumène et microphysique”, from 1931, Bachelard reveals a revolutionary change in the 20th century natural science: the definite proof of insufficiency of the traditional pattern of experimental physics of macro-bodies and searching for observable causes – where the starting point of the research was the empirical observation, where the end wa...
Abstract. This paper is both an expanded review and an article insisting on some problems of the philosophical methods and the treatment of the human subjectivity. Thus, it starts from the book of Tibor Szabó, Le sujet et sa morale: Essais de philosophie morale et politique, Szeged, Centre Universitaire Francophone, 2016, and, first, highlights how the description of the human subject in the world may stay within the frame of the metaphysical suppositions or may divert from it. This position tow...
ABSTRACT. Because philosophy /the scientific knowledge searches for the ‘why’ of things – as Aristotle has said –, and because it is about the reason of the existence of all things (and not only about the different causes giving impetus to their generation, movement and change), it is worth to understand the raison d’être of man, obviously living in society. Is there a basis for discussing together the reason of things and the reason of man? The paper answers by uniting Aristotle’s theory of the...
ABSTRACT. The paper analyses Aristotle’s technological determinism as it is related to his theory of slavery. The sketch of technological determinism: 1) is part not only from Aristotle’s theory of economy and of politics, but also from his ontology of the human being; 2) it is not a reductive standpoint, but the result of a deductive manner – illustration of his rationalism all the way – which spotlights both a basic ontological relation (of man with technique/the means of production) and a bas...
ABSTRACT. It is a gleaning within the history of ideas, starting from the focus on the concept of daimon. But the goal is to understand why the unconscious was considered – at the end of Classicism and realism, as well as in Romanticism, and also in the post WWI – as being more important than the consciousness, and which would be the significances of this standpoint. The paper emphasises the history and power of the metaphor of daimon, the difference people made between consciousness and the dem...
Abstract. The paper emphasises some philosophical standpoints (phenomenology, ethics, ontology and social philosophy) concerning suicide: the modern times being the most fruitful just because they facilitate the constitution of the ontological arguments. After discussing Heidegger and Sartre’s images about death as the genus proximum of suicide, the differentia specifica is analysed through the ethical formalism of Kant and the ontological inquiries of Spinoza, Bergson and Camus. Indeed, the lat...
ABSTRACT. This is not a review of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, but only a focus on the problem of the emergence of ontological theory. KEYWORDS. Alain Badiou, ontology, Being and Event, counting, situation. I consider Badiou’s book an illustration of the constructivist and epistemological approach of ontology: approach that puts consciously that the ontological interest of man as well as the ontological concepts realise through historical processes which counter man, as both an individual and...
ABSTRACT. In the light of Aristotle’s theory of the telos, my paper presents an epistemological analysis of the direct support by some scientists of some precise harmful civil technologies. There is a social determination of this behaviour. But its transposition into the logic of these scholars is all the more interesting. The specific of technology: the know-how, the focus on technical feasibility, suggests to scholars to refrain from the interference within an exterior realm to their own exper...
ABSTRACT. It is about an analysis of Auguste Comte’s philosophy of science and knowledge, made by a Romanian philosopher in 1928. It was a singular endeavour in the Romanian spiritualist atmosphere of the time and, at the same time, interesting because it pointed out the origin and continuity of a relativistic approach in Comte. However, the criticism made by the Romanian author teaches us that sometimes the old philosophical intuitions are more valuable than their interpretations in the key of...
ABSTRACT. From the well‑known Koyré’s book, these notes select the problem of the place of God in the logic of the philosophical and scientific debates of the 17th century concerning matter and its physical laws, space and time. KEYWORDS: 17th century, Descartes, Henry More, Newton, Spinoza, Richard Bentley, Malebranche, Samuel Clarke, Leibniz, matter, spirit, space, time, God. Dezvoltarea ştiinţei moderne a fost foarte strâns legată de filosofie: deoarece terenul acesteia presupune exercitarea...
posing Plato’s Abstract: The paper starts by counterrepresentation of the soul and Aristotle’s view concerning the unity of the body and the soul, and the nature of the soul as form. The second chapter continues the comparison, by showing that in Aristotle the definition of virtue and happiness as rationally controlled activities sends to a higher sense of responsibility, the more so as the virtue does not result only from the activity of the intellect (thus it is not only dianoetic), but it is...
Abstract. The paper remembers Spiru Haret’s work Social mechanics, published in 1910, and emphasises some significances of its presumptions in a history of the modern European social thinking, as well as for the Romanian social research of the time. Indeed, the book goes in for the philosophical positivist current, constituted on the ground of the modern scientific revolution and the first industrial revolution. In this framework, some attempts to transfer concepts and theoretical instruments (l...
Abstract. The paper presents in mirror Lucian Blaga’s philosophical theory about the stages of knowledge and the significances of dogma, and Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific change, paradigms and dogma. The similarities and differences emphasized by this comparison are used as basis of some epistemological observations concerning the scientific knowledge. Keywords. Lucian Blaga, Thomas Kuhn, epistemology, dogma, science, mystery, unknown, knowledge. INTRODUCTION In 1931, the young Romanian phi...
ABSTRACT. The paper highlights the directions and problems of public importance posed by the mathematician Simion Stoilow between 1936 and the fifties. The first, within which Professor Stoilow was directly involved, is the organisation of the univer‑ sity and its internal democracy. But these aspects are related to the general situation of the Romanian society. Second, the mathematician has supported indirectly the principles and the democratic and progressive politics by promoting rationalism...