The paper discusses the conception of philosophy and ethics in Seneca’s Letters, as well as in his other writings, which it sets in the broader context of ancient and modern thought. The introduction outlines the Socratic and Stoic foundations of Seneca’s ethics. The next section focuses on the interpretation of passages from the Letters that remind us that the task of philosophy is to teach human to live an active life. The paper points out that, according to Seneca, philosophy resembles (...) art more than knowledge, and Seneca adapts his language and the examples he uses to this effect. In the next section, the paper returns to delineating the relationship between theoretical and practical thought. The specificity of Seneca’s position becomes visible in the background of Aristotle’s problematization of this relationship. The last section asks how we should approach Seneca’s conception of ethics and philosophy. The analyses outlined above show that Seneca’s Letters fully express an approach to philosophy as an art of living, an approach that modern authors such as Nietzsche and Foucault consider determinative for the whole of ancient philosophy. (shrink)

The paper outlines several forms of ethical attitude to good life and good death in the Socratic literature of the fourth century BCE. A model for the Socratic discussions could be found in Herodotus’ story about the meeting between Croesus and Solon. Within their conversation, Solon shows the king of Lydia that death is a place from which the life of each man can be seen as the completed whole. In his Phaedo, Plato depicts Socrates’ last day before his death (...) in a similar spirit, as the completion of his beautiful life. However, there is no consensus regarding opinions on death among the Socratics. The final part of the paper outlines various meanings of death in the writings of the first generation of the Socratic authors, which arise from different attitudes that the individual philosophers hold regarding the soul as well as other topics. This part puts the principal emphasis on Aristippus, who is considered as the most controversial figure of the Socratic movement. Aristippus makes an interesting opposite to Plato concerning death, since he associates the philosopher’s endeavour for a good life solely with that which is here and now. (shrink)

_Care of the Self: Ancient Problematizations of Life and Contemporary Thought_, by Lívia Flachbartová, Pavol Sucharek, and Vladislav Suvák, focus on different manifestations of “taking care of the self” present in ancient and contemporary thought.

ABSTRACTThe paper deals with Jan Patočka’s and Michel Foucault’s influential interpretations of the ancient Greek approach to care. At first sight, it might seem that Foucault’s care of the self is opposed to Patočka’s care of the soul. On closer reading, however, it becomes clear that the two interpretations lead to similar conclusions, as exemplified by the way the two authors interpret Plato’s Laches: both of them see it in relation to the issue of how to live one’s life. Further (...) on, the paper deals with the development of Patočka’s understanding of care of the self and his approach to the philosophy of history. It is revealed that Foucault’s approach to history is opposed to Patočka’s on a number of issues. Despite their diverging opinions, however, the two authors problematize the ancient Greek care of the self as an important issue in Western culture, emphasizing the therapeutic role of contemporary philosophy along the way. (shrink)

The paper deals with the Socratic ethics as developed by Antisthenes and conceived by the doxografical tradition as the basis of Diogenes’ Cynicism. The author tries to show that Antisthenes’ thought as a whole is connected with paideia . Thus Antisthenes’ interpretations of Homer as well as his logical paradoxes have ethical aiming. There is a close connection between Antisthenes’ logic and his ethics of the care of the self. Socratic thought in Antisthenes’ fragments is neither skeptical nor dialectical. Contrary (...) to both “intellectualistic” tendencies Antisthenes puts stress on the wise continually practicing ethics. By using of logical paradoxes Antisthenes probably hoped to demonstrate the anti-Platonic priority of ethics over metaphysics and logic. From this point of view Antisthenes can be seen as the predecessor of practical Cynical bios. (shrink)

The paper gives an outline of Antisthenes’ ethics. The first part questions the accounts of modern historians, who try to include Antisthenes in one or another philosophical schools of that time . In the second part it shows the affiliations between Antisthenes´ thinking and socratic tradition: It comes out, that the interconnection between the former and sophistics and kynicism might have come into existence as late as in the later doxographic accounts of his doctrine. The third part deals in more (...) details with the writings Kyros and Heracles, which exemplify a mimetic depiction of the way of acting of a socratic sapient. The analysis of the preserved fragments shows, that the Antisthenian ethics is practical, differing from the Platonic conception of practice in that in it moral knowledge and moral action became one. Thus it represents a non-theoretical expansion of socratic ethics and as such cannot be grasped by the classical approaches which draw a sharp line between socratics and sophistics. (shrink)

Cieľom článku je nanovo reflektovať činnosť jednej z najslávnejších ženských filozofiek, Hip­parchie z Maróneie. Naším zámerom je ukázať, prečo sa stala v porovnaní s inými ženami antiky taká významná a v mnohom signifikantná pre ďalší vývoj procesu ženskej eman­cipácie. Hlavným svedectvom je pre nás fragment SSR V I 1 od Diogena Laertského, ktorý kladieme do súvislosti s ďalšími antickými správami o Antisthenovi a raných kynikoch. Dve hlavné témy Diogenovho svedectva sú Kratétova svadba s Hipparchiou a spor Hipparchie s Theodórom. Vo (...) výklade poukazujeme na momenty, v ktorých je filozofická osobnosť Hip­parchie nadčasová a inšpiratívna aj pre súčasnosť. (shrink)

Abstrakt: Článok sa zaoberá tým, ako Dión z Prúsy pracuje s figúrou Diogena, respektíve ako prispôsobuje diogenovský kynizmus sociálnej a politickej realite svojej doby. Prvá časť načrtáva okolnosti, ktoré doviedli Dióna k rozhodnutiu, aby si obliekol kynický plášť. Ďalšia časť sa zaoberá tým, ako Dión vytvoril z Diogena príklad filosofického konania. Diónovo chápanie kynizmu sa prejavuje v jeho reinterpretácii príbehu o Diogenovi a Alexandrovi. Nakoniec sa článok zamýšľa nad otázkou, aké črty zdôrazňuje Dión vo svojom portréte Diogena a akú úlohu (...) prisudzuje kynizmu v období cisárskeho Ríma. Kľúčové slová: Dión z Prúsy, Diogenés zo Sinópy, kynizmus, Sókratés – sokratika. (shrink)

Abstrakt: Článok sa zaoberá tým, ako Dión z Prúsy pracuje s figúrou Diogena, respektíve ako prispôsobuje diogenovský kynizmus sociálnej a politickej realite svojej doby. Prvá časť načrtáva okolnosti, ktoré doviedli Dióna k rozhodnutiu, aby si obliekol kynický plášť. Ďalšia časť sa zaoberá tým, ako Dión vytvoril z Diogena príklad filosofického konania. Diónovo chápanie kynizmu sa prejavuje v jeho reinterpretácii príbehu o Diogenovi a Alexandrovi. Nakoniec sa článok zamýšľa nad otázkou, aké črty zdôrazňuje Dión vo svojom portréte Diogena a akú úlohu (...) prisudzuje kynizmu v období cisárskeho Ríma. Kľúčové slová: Dión z Prúsy, Diogenés zo Sinópy, kynizmus, Sókratés – sokratika. (shrink)

This paper deals with Care of the Self under globalization. The first part refers to Johann P. Arnason’s interpretation of Jan Patočka’s work on super-civilization and shows the contradictions facing people in the Modern Era. It suggests that the concept of moderateness is an adequate point of departure for handling the various contradictions of the current epoch. The second part looks at selected aspects of Confucian philosophy in which moderateness, that is, the permanent search for a “middle position” is an (...) integral part of that philosophical tradition. The critical actualisation of Confucianism as proposed for instance by Heiner Roetz is seen as an appropriate way of developing the dialogical characteristics of Confucian philosophy. In the last part it is stressed that critical theory is of relevance when identifying various forms of suffering and because of its ability to understand and critically evaluate diverse cultural and social contexts. (shrink)

Kritická stať: Vladislav Suvák: Kynizmus grécky a moderný I.

Suvák, V. (ed.) Sebapoznanie a/ko starosť o seba. Prešov: ACTA FACULTATIS PHILOSOPHICAE UNIVERSITATIS PREŠOVIENSIS, 2010. ISBN 978-80-555-0230-4.

This book synthesizes the game-theoretic modeling of decision-making processes and an ancient moral requirement, called the Golden Rule of ethics (GR). This rule states, "Behave to others as you would like them to behave to you." The GR is one of the oldest, most widespread and specific moral requirements that appear in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. The book constructs and justifies mathematical models of dynamic socio-economic processes and phenomena that reveal the mechanism of the GR and are based (...) on the concept of Berge equilibrium. The GR can be naturally used for resolving or balancing conflicts, and its "altruistic character" obviously excludes wars, blood-letting, and armed clashes. The previous book of the authors, The Berge Equilibrium: A Game-Theoretic Framework for the Golden Rule of Ethics, covers the static case of the GR. In this book, the dynamic case of the GR is investigated using the altruistic concept of Berge equilibrium and three factors as follows: a) a modification of N.N. Krasovskii's mathematical formalization of differential positional games (DPGs), in view of the counterexamples given by A.I. Subbotin and A.F. Kononenko; b) the method of guiding control, proposed by N.N. Krasovskii; c) the Germeier convolution of the payoff functions of different players. Additionally, the book features exercises, problems, and solution tips collected together in Appendix 1, as well as new approaches to conflict resolution as presented in Appendices 2-4. The book will be of use to undergraduate and graduate students and experts in the field of decision-making in complex control and management systems, as well as anyone interested in game theory and applications. (shrink)

Stakeholder scholars have long explored how stakeholder relationships differ from economic transactions. We contribute to this ongoing inquiry by developing a conceptual framework of relationality in stakeholder theory that encompasses a stakeholder-theoretic extension of Williamson's contracting schema and a new typology of stakeholder relationships. Premised on understanding relationality as the need for informal human relationships beyond formal governance, our framework locates the key difference between transaction cost economics and stakeholder theory in their treatment of informal relationships. While transaction cost economics (...) perceives informal relationships to be shaped by formal governance structures and enforced by contractual safeguards, stakeholder theory is open to the possibility that some informal relationships between stakeholders may be genuinely moral and thus irreducible to formal governance and contractual safeguards. These stakeholder relationships may lead to unique economic effects described by instrumental stakeholder theory. The difference that we identified between the two literatures shows how stakeholder theory's embrace of relationality surpasses that of transaction cost economics. (shrink)

In this paper we present stable and unstable versions of several well-known relations from mereotopology: part-of, overlap, underlap and contact. An intuitive semantics is given for the stable and unstable relations, describing them as dynamic counterparts of the base mereotopo-logical relations. Stable relations are described as ones that always hold, while unstable relations hold sometimes. A set of first-order sentences is provided to serve as axioms for the stable and unstable relations, and representation theory is developed in similar fashion to (...) Stone’s representation theory for Boolean algebras and distributive lattices. Then we present some results about the first-order predicate logic of these relations and about its quantifier-free fragment. Completeness theorems for these logics are proved, the full first-order theory is proved to be hereditary undecidable and the satisfiability problem of the quantifier-free fragment is proved to be NP-complete. (shrink)

In this paper we present stable and unstable versions of several well-known relations from mereotopology: part-of, overlap, underlap and contact. An intuitive semantics is given for the stable and unstable relations, describing them as dynamic counterparts of the base mereotopo-logical relations. Stable relations are described as ones that always hold, while unstable relations hold sometimes. A set of first-order sentences is provided to serve as axioms for the stable and unstable relations, and representation theory is developed in similar fashion to (...) Stone’s representation theory for Boolean algebras and distributive lattices. Then we present some results about the first-order predicate logic of these relations and about its quantifier-free fragment. Completeness theorems for these logics are proved, the full first-order theory is proved to be hereditary undecidable and the satisfiability problem of the quantifier-free fragment is proved to be NP-complete. (shrink)

In this paper we treat humorous situations as a series of events underpinned by topoi, principles of reasoning recognised within a socio-cultural community. We claim that humorous effect in jokes and other discourse is often created by the juxtaposition of topoi evoked. A prerequisite for this is that there is a shift where the interpreter of the discourse updates their information state with regard to a second topos being evoked. This view of humour is consistent with an incremental analysis of (...) dialogue, and we therefore argue that interaction is central both for humour creation and interpretation. We point out some different ways in which topoi are juxtaposed in humorous dialogues as well as in jokes published in social media or in joke books, and take jokes from the coronavirus pandemic as an example because this makes lots of new topoi available and therefore offers the opportunity of creating novel jokes based on the juxtaposition of the new and existing topoi. We explore how the mechanisms of inference in dialogue can be applied to humour through the four elements from our title: old, new, borrowed and taboo. (shrink)

Despite the importance of the variational principles of physics, there have been relatively few attempts to consider them for a realistic framework. In addition to the old teleological question, this paper continues the recent discussion regarding the modal involvement of the principle of least action and its relations with the Humean view of the laws of nature. The reality of possible paths in the principle of least action is examined from the perspectives of the contemporary metaphysics of modality and Leibniz's (...) concept of essences or possibles striving for existence. I elaborate a modal interpretation of the principle of least action that replaces a classical representation of a system's motion along a single history in the actual modality by simultaneous motions along an infinite set of all possible histories in the possible modality. This model is based on an intuition that deep ontological connections exist between the possible paths in the principle of least action and possible quantum histories in the Feynman path integral. I interpret the action as a physical measure of the essence of every possible history. Therefore only one actual history has the highest degree of the essence and minimal action. To address the issue of necessity, I assume that the principle of least action has a general physical necessity and lies between the laws of motion with a limited physical necessity and certain laws with a metaphysical necessity. (shrink)

In this article, we draw on established views of CSR dysfunctionalities to show how and why CSR is regularly observed to be both shaped by and supportive of capitalism. We proceed to show that these dysfunctionalities are maintained by both the pro- and anticapitalist approaches to CSR, both of which imply an ill-defined separation of the economy and society as well an overly strong problem or solution focus on political and economic issues. Finally, we present a post-capitalist approach to CSR (...) that overcomes (1) the ill-defined separation of the economy and society, (2) the capitalist bias towards economic rationalities, and (3) the overidentification of society with its political system; this approach thus helps to manage the abovementioned CSR dysfunctionalities. (shrink)

ExcerptVictor Zaslavsky was a living legend for my Moscow circle friends, young intellectuals who lived and studied in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. He was already an émigré, teaching at the Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's, Canada. One Italian journalist managed to bring to the Soviet Union his book Il Consenso Organizzato, published in 1981 in Bologna (it was later translated into English as The Neo-Stalinist State: Class, Ethnicity, and Consensus in Soviet Society). My university classmate (...) who read it in Italian remembered years later that this book had helped him to understand the nature of…. (shrink)