In times of current crisis, the voices of women are needed more than ever. The accumulation of war and environmental catastrophes teaches us that exploitation of people and nature through violent appropriation and enrichment for the sake of short-term self-interest exacts its price. This book presents contributions on the currently most relevant and most urgent issues: reshaping the economy, environmental problems, technology and the re-reading of history from the non-western and western tradition. With an outlook into the problems of class, (...) race and gender in its intersectional framing, the collection offers a unique overview of current research in these fields and contributes to the renewal and contemporary presentation of feminist thought from partly concrete perspectives with regard to factual issues. (shrink)

God — as we well know since Nietzsche — is dead. However, it is necessary to correct this sentence that was a sacrilege yesterday and has become common place today. We should be talking of the death of the “gods,” rather than of God; for what has been disappearing from the social space of modernity (I do not speak of the inner conscience of the faithful here), is not just the God who sits enthroned atop altar and dogma. What has (...) disappeared are the “gods” more generally; by this we understand the link with the world that, certainly rooted in religion but transcending it, surrounds things and beings with an aura of wonderful significances; that places them outside of those structures that modern man understands to be the utilitarian, the rational and the functional. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Beitrag argumentiert, dass die mediterrane Mythenwelt, wie sie im philosophischen Werk Albert Camus’ begegnet, eine kritische Theorie sui generis – verstanden als eine rationalitäts- und ideologiekritische Position – in sich birgt. Als solche, so lautet die hier vertretene These, ist sie – zumindest unter bestimmten Gesichtspunkten – der Frankfurter Schule überlegen. Das griechische Denken à la Camus teilt mit jener zwar den wachen Blick für die Schattenseiten der Moderne, vermeidet dabei aber die allzu große Reserviertheit gegenüber Anthropologie, Ästhetik (...) und Mythos, wie sie im Umfeld der Kritischen Theorie häufig anzutreffen ist. Camus’ tragisches Denken, das an der mediterranen Mythologie – unter anderem am griechischen Nemesis-Mythos – geschult ist, erörtert die natürlichen Grenzen, die nicht verletzt werden dürfen, von modernen politischen Heilslehren aber in maßloser und folglich verhängnisvoller Weise überschritten werden. (shrink)

Russian philosophy underwent many phases: Westernism, Slavophilism, nihilism, pre-revolutionary religious philosophy, and dialectical materialism or Soviet philosophy. At first sight, each one of these phases seems antithetical to the preceding one. Yet, they all appear to have in common a certain negative attitude towards the subjectivism of Kantianism and German Idealism. In contrast to the latter, Russian philosophy typically displays a tendency towards ontologism, which is generally defined as the view that there is such a thing as being in itself, (...) i.e., being independent of cognition, and that this being is to some extent knowable. We discern, in these otherwise diametrically opposed movements, an underlying ontologism that constitutes a common thread running in a straight line through the history of Russian philosophy. In this article, I provide an overview of Russian ontologism. (shrink)

Albert Camus’s 1947 novel La Peste and 1948 drama L’État de Siège, allegories of totalitarian power using the figure of the plague, remarkably anticipate Foucault’s celebrated genealogical analyses of modern power. Indeed, reading Foucault after Camus highlights a fact little-remarked in Discipline and Punish: namely, that the famous chapter on the ‘Panopticon’ begins by analysing the measures taken in early modern Vincennes following the advent of plague. Part III argues that, although Camus was cited as an inspiration by the nouveaux (...) philosophes, he does not accept the reactionary motif of the total bankruptcy of the modern cultural and political worlds as hopelessly implicated in the totalitarian crimes. Indeed, Part IV highlights how Camus defends modern, descriptive scientific rationality against its totalitarian appropriations, alongside ‘the power of passion, doubt, happiness, and imaginative invention’ – positions which Part V suggests as Camus’s continuing poignancy and relevance in the period after post-structuralism. (shrink)

Many contemporary conceptualizations of terrorism inadvertently reify political conceptions of terrorism. Mainly because they in the end rely on the intentions of terrorists in defining ‘terrorism’, the process of terrorism, which involves an unfolding dialectic of actions and reactions, is omitted from researchers’ focus. Thus, terrorism becomes simplified to intentional actions by terrorists, and this short-cutting of the causal chain of the process of terrorism facilitates both a political ‘negation of history’ and a ‘rhetoric of response’. In this paper, I (...) put forward a conceptualization of terrorism that transcends existing definitions and conceptualizations by first of all discerning between ‘terrorism’ and ‘terror’, and by subsequently conceptualizing terrorism as a paradox: what terrorism is, is inextricably bound to the reaction to terrorism. It is, in fact, the reaction of some states to terrorism that, in a sense ex post facto, constitutes an act as ‘terrorism’ by ‘refolding’ actions that unfolded subsequent to an event into that event as the root cause of the entire chain of events. (shrink)

A review of the paradigms of social influence – suggestion, imitation, normalization, conformity, compliance, conversion – leads me to diagnose a triple malaise: the shrinkage of paradigms to cognitive dual-processing theories of information; the dominant methodology of laboratory experiments falls short of the reality of (mass) communication; and the focus of social influence on inter-subjectivity is only half of the story. I will suggest two extensions of social influence theory to include mass media communication and the inter-objectivity of artefacts. We (...) need to be able to conceptualize the modalities of why, how and to what effect somebody might put up a wall to influence neighbours instead of contenting themselves with putting up a public note ‘Do not trespass!’. Social influence by fait accompli needs to be within the remit of social psychology, otherwise it loses its relevance in a technological society where artefacts mediate most inter-personal relations. (shrink)

This article posits a number of theoretical pointers towards a conceptual clarification of the concept of non-violence, in particular in relation to notions of conflict, pact, mediation, compromise, strength, benevolence, and truth. It sets them against the concept of violence and the behaviours which are associated with it, and is based on the thought of M. K. Gandhi and E. Weil. Finally it presents some pointers towards a strategy for non-violence and explains the sense of the principle of non-cooperation.

Дослідження присвячено розгляду творчості з урахуванням головних філософських досліджень цього поняття. Діяльність творчого процесу практично доводить присутність свободи в людському бутті. Погляди на творчість віддзеркалюють ставлення конкретного мислителя до питання протистояння свободи та напередвизначеності загалом. Розглянуто полемічні моменти щодо творчості та запропоновано шляхи їх вирішення. Зокрема досліджено два протилежні погляди на творчість – Платона та Аристотеля, де талановитість людини передбачає божественне натхнення (Платон) або, відповідно, лише особистісні зусилля. Полеміку Аристотеля і Платона намагався розв’язати Микола Бердяєв через поєднання їхніх поглядів. Він (...) наділяв людину божественними властивостями і цим вказував на джерело творчості всередині самої людини. Філіп Гефнер надавав особистості статус «співтворця» і висунув теорію про те, що людина покликана удосконалити та завершити Боже творіння. Увагу в дослідженні також приділено змісту та меті творчості. Творчість заради самої творчості, про яку писав Альбер Камю, критикував М. Бердяєв, і пропонував своє бачення цього питання: творчість заради універсальної мети. Погляди Камю загалом поділяв також А. Берґсон. З огляду на згадану полеміку запропоновано актуалізацію вчення Григорія Сковороди про «споріднену працю» та аргументовано доцільність цієї актуалізації. Вітчизняний філософ оригінально врівноважував песимізм творчості Камю та заповзятий підхід Бердяєва. Свої умовиводи Сковорода підкріплював влучними практичними прикладами. (shrink)

L’absurdité du monde et l’inquiétude face au sens de l’existence semblent être des affects négatifs. Par un dialogue entre Albert Camus et Jacques Lavigne, nous tenterons d’explorer le caractère créatif de ces affects. Camus et Lavigne partent d’une critique du matérialisme et de l’idéalisme afin d’ancrer leur théorie dans l’existence , en pensant conjointement les idées et la matérialité. Ils découvrent le rôle précieux de l’absurde et de l’inquiétude. Ces affects agissent comme vecteurs de l’action humaine et permettent d’initier le (...) sujet à la solidarité. Néanmoins, la société est organisée de telle manière que le sujet doit constamment s’opposer à la possibilité d’une neutralisation de ses affects. En ce sens, rester inquiet et conscient de l’absurdité de l’existence appelle une résistance du sujet. (shrink)