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The paper issue is theoretical and methodological basis of studies in suicide terrorism motivation and rationality, legitimized by radical Islam. Two methodological ideas are identified as dominant and defining paradigmal features of Western researches of suicide terrorism - the concept of rational actor and multi-causal approach. Concept of rational actor in most cases is interpreted through the sociological point of view: it takes into account a social group, not an individual. When individual motivation is view...

Style is a fundamental category of aesthetics and the study of art: it is easily defined but hardly lends itself to theoretical research. Alexey Losev (1893–1988), a Russian philologist, philosopher and musicologist, presented some examples of the most comprehensive consideration of style as an aesthetic category within the broadest notional context in his main work on this topic “The Theory of Art Style.” However, Losev's idea about an aspect of style that is not divided by any components requires some spec...

The paper deals with the epistemological topic of rationality. Are there any general principles of rationality? How is the concept of common sense connected to rationality and scientific cognition? The aim of this article is to answer these questions. Firstly, the author defines the main principles of rationality. We distinguish two main groups of such principles: the principles concerning the system of beliefs and the principles concerning inferential mechanisms. The members of the first group are for instance on...

Paper is based on the understanding of globalization as a complex phenomenon and focuses on detecting of cultural contours of globalization process. Globalization is studied today in many contexts: global civilization and its risks in current stage of historical development, pitfalls of multiculturalism, cultural plurality and cultural difference both as set of values, nature of the differences among cultures, their influence on international relations and on addressing of global problems, global cultural gap, cul...

The existence of a philosophy in Christianity was regarded as unfounded even by some of the writers of the first Christian centuries. More precisely, the idea presented in some patristic texts was that the Logos the Greeks had been looking for became incarnate and proved His truthfulness to the people. Even though the Greek philosophy may be regarded as a gift from God, namely as a manifestation of the eternal Logos - which manifestation gained a philosophic expression through Heraclitus and Plato - Christianity h...

In the center of our attention is the Slovak cultural tradition in the period of post-modernism, focused on some selected issues associated with the imaging of the human body in the visual arts. The Slovak culture in the postmodern context takes the elements characteristic for the whole postmodernism : unifying world views fall apart and individual, group or regional perspectives are preferred; universalism (the ideas on universal human values and theories) is being desintegrated; logocentrism as well as the belie...

John Dewey (1859-1952) was an American pragmatist under the influence of Charles Darwin's evolutionism. In 1934 he published his aesthetic summa Art as Experience. In the book he promoted a new approach to art and introduced understanding of it as an indispensable part of human life in the contrast to regarding art as an exclusive activity reserved for the chosen. Art for Art's Sake slogan was something he found harmful and openly criticized. For Dewey art is born out of daily experiences of a human being interact...

This article examines theoretical background of interreligious dialogue from the perspective of “the kingdom message” that is to be understood, either explicitly or implicitly, the core reference point of all Christian philosophy and theology. The main objective of the article is to point out the significance of hermeneutics of “the kingdom message” for interreligious dialogue. The question “What is the relevance of the kingdom message to the interreligious dialogue today?” may be, therefore, considere...

Even at the dawn of human civilization, there was a cult of death, which depending on the worldview of a people, called and represented death differently. With the appearance of religion this phenomenon was interpreted with theological positions. Dispute about the nature of death and its meaning as philosophers and thinkers. The phenomenon of "death" was depicted in the literature, arts, theater, cinema. The death is depicted in recently appeared japan cultural phenomenon of anime. In this paper we consider the ph...

Due to the end of a stage of formation and a bioethics institutionalization in Russia and need of a philosophical and methodological reflection of this phenomenon for the general course of world researches of a bioethical perspective and practice of permission of the difficult equations "eras of biotechnologies", the explication of interrelation of "eternal" problems of freedom and responsibility, sense of life and the immortality, comprehended by the Russian "ethics of life", and "biotechnological decisions", fun...

The intention of this paper is to bring the possibility of escaping from the time according to Mircea Eliade. It aims to bring options how the archaic man trying to escape from the profane time to sacred time. At the same time we try to apply knowledge about the escaping from the time and for today's man and reflect them in the light of postmodernism. Through selected examples from the arts and the media we would point out escape time in postmodernism and its relevance for humans. Possibility of escaping from time...

The paper deals with the problem of the “scientific” view of morality, especially its results for philosophy, ethics, and a sense of education. The author considers implications of the thesis about the selfish and determined character of human behaviour and tries to show that these implications follow from a particular kind of interpretation, not from evolutionary and scientific views generally.

The term technical image (according to the media theorist Vilem Flusser, its first form was photography, and the last form by now have been images projected in all possible forms of screens, monitors and displays, including holograms) can be understood as a term referring to the beginning of a new age, which is coming after the age of linear writing. Historically as well as ontologically, compared to the previous tradition, these technical images mean rupture, a breakthrough. Creating technical images was the nece...

The concept of freedom has been understood differently in antiquity. Thus, in the classical Greek world, freedom belongs only to a few individuals. In Athens, only free citizens were considered truly free and not slaves and foreigners. Linguistic history of the word "freedom" demonstrates its origin in the society of slave owners. In such society only the master is free, slaves, women and children, over which he reigns are without freedom. Over time, every ideology claimed that defends and promotes freedom, which,...

Illness and suffering are closely related to post-Adamic human existence. Orthodox spirituality teaches us that God never allows suffering beyond endurance. Present suffering is also proportional with one's personal sins or virtues. So that the most afflicted ones either the most sinful or the most righteous. Thus man discovers that meaning of suffering is that of partaking of the passions of Christ and then suffering becomes a ladder ascending towards heaven. The Mystery of the Holy Unction shares grace healing o...

Nowadays many versions of ontology are loosing their meaning completely or partial. It happens because of various reasons. First of all, the development of information technologies and human sciences, which are influence more and more on the life on the contemporary man, and make him to rethink about the problems of being, and contact with it. Secondary, the process of aesthetisation is getting stronger, and that's why increase the role of the being of the things in the everyday structures. In these case, we pay a...

The time - when people lived fixed within their traditional local communities; with a great complex of plentiful values, norms, believes of different types, superstitions and mythology, so meaningful for them, dominantly controlling their lives and reflecting the profound human-nature connection and local specifics; - has gone for most of us until the present time. There are very few traditionally organised and traditions-driven communities left, untouched by the fast-running process of progress and globalisation....

This paper critically analyses the theory of a French cultural critic, city planner and philosopher Paul Virilio. Virilio's texts deal with the impact of speed on the contemporary world. The development of means of transport used by people for the purpose of movement – from horse carts, railways and cars to planes, culminated by the arrival of digitalized audio visual hypertext, the last “vehicle” that replaces its drivers' physical movement by total inertia. How does that historical succession starting with...

This paper focuses on A Lover's Divination Book (1774) by A. Sumarokov, examining its combinatorial nature and its implicit connections with Leibniz's ars combinatoria. The Russian poet-classicist denied Leibniz's philosophical principles but Sumarokov demonstrated combinatorial theory in his literary practice and confirmed the universality of ars combinatoria. Sumarokov's combinatorial method is based on two levels: formal and substantive. The first one includes mathematic combinations which build the composition...

The paper is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the subject of anti-metaphysical tendencies of modern philosophy while in the second part we try to demonstrate how this idea has been transformed by early analytical philosophy, specifically by L. Wittgenstein in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In the third part we will demonstrate that Wittgenstein's later work Philosophical Investigations leads to the negation of the idea that serves as the grounds for the rejection of metaphysics by both...

The world was created very good (Genesis 1: 31), since it no evil affected its existence, reality due to God alone, who wanted that world to be a place of communion between Himself and human being. Perfection heavenly of man gave it the opportunity to join with God, because in his nature were present all virtues as natural attributes of his primordial nature. The problem of human being constitutes focus of theologians and scientists who exhibit an intense concern about the human constitution to determine the statu...

Deleuze and Guattari, in What is philosophy? (1991), expose their Image of Thought; they consider that it is possible to think through three disciplines: Philosophy, Science and Art. In all this structure there is no trace of Politics: why is it absent? We cannot try here to make a "Marxist" distinction between theory and practice, thinking that Philosophy, Art and Science are part of the thought and therefore of the theory, while Politics is placed on a different level, which would be that of action and practice....

Nihilism, through its “disturbing presence” (Friedrich Nietzsche), provokes the basic philosophical question of inner justification of existence. The question of being will be deepened and radicalised so that complete clarity of being will make way for the awareness of one`s dark and mysterious traits. Secularisation can be understood as an opportunity for reinterpretation of religion in a situation where nihilism, through its diagnosis, indicates the therapy of the world. In the research a basis question was ...

The article highlights philosophy of moral conflicts that occur within such civilizational processes as globalization, transformation of information and communication environment, and under the influence of life's contradictions, a man's value system and motivations. Based on the analysis of social thinking development and investigation of the moral core of personality, various interpretations of the problem of freedom and its manifestations in the modern youth's consciousness are discussed. It is stated that the ...

Christian teaching is a doctrine of salvation, rescue and love brought along by Christ, not by a philosophical, abstract and theoretical system. Thus, Christianity is a religion revealed in a different manner as compared to the philosophical currents from the period of Christ and His Apostles, because they were seen as converting people and bringing them on God's path and not as issuing a new philosophy that might compete with the already existing ones. The influence on the development of Christian philosophy apol...

Secularization is a phenomenon that generates the desecration of the society and of man. In time, the western culture has disseminated an autonomous conception regarding the world, which has eliminated God from the visible creation, isolating Him in an inaccessible transcendence. The most painful consequence of secularization is the minimization of the human person and of interpersonal communion. In this state of the secularized man one can see the result of an unbalanced conception regarding God, the world and ma...

This article will present the shift in Religious Studies methodology of two Romanian-born scholars (also philosophers and fiction writers): Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) and Ioan Petru Culianu (1950-1991); specifically from Eliade's point of view – namely morphology – to Culianu's morphodynamics (in the terms of D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, one of Culianu's favorite authors). Both scholars activated in the field of the scientific study of religion but their theories are equally philosophical. Unfortunately Culianu's...

The purpose of this article is to discuss the three distinct - but by no means exclusive or even necessarily contradictory – fields from which it is always possible to contemplate, analyze, formulate and try to understand what images are. Johannes Hessen will accompany us quite freely here with his germinal Theory of Knowledge, which served to mark the concepts and define the relationships between the sets of questions we wish to raise. This initial option indicates we are treading an open path through a philoso...

The purpose of the article is to analyse the translation of poetry in reference with the notion of poeticity regarded as the essential property of the poetic text subject to representation in the target text and target culture. Basing on the comparative analysis of source and target texts in English and Russian we have come to the conclusion that the source text essence may be represented in the target culture in high, medium or low degrees which correlate with consonant, consonant-dissonant and dissonant kinds of...

This essay deals with the ideas of the Czech phenomenological philosopher Jan Patocka. In particular, I investigate Patocka's conception of the relation of art to †deep' and †superficial' history, which he sketches in his essays from the 1930s and the 1940s. Patocka sketches this conception in the context of his considerations of the various types of education. Patocka shows that art, philosophy, historiography, politics, economy and science represent various †educational powers,' which shape human history. ...

This article will delineate a set of aspects of Ioan Petru Culianu (1950-1991) philosophical viewpoint – what will be called here Culianu's model. Culianu was a Romanian-born historian of Religions, a Literary Theory scholar, and also a fiction author. Culianu's model is an original way of researching Religion (at first), with the intention of extending on Humanities in general, Science and even Literature. It was started by Culianu in several books and articles, but unfortunately it remained unfinished because ...

The article deals with the problem of language influence on the formation of national images of the world in the conditions of globalization and the Internet space expanded potentialities. Since a language as a system of symbols and a communication code preserves and transmits the accumulated experience of generations, it serves to determine the borders of ethnocultural identity, to ensure the reproduction of national images of the world and the historical and cultural succession. Under the influence of globalizat...