The parable “Before the Law” is a pivotal text in the work of Franz Kafka. It tells of a man who looks for the law as the quintessence of his life. But his quest for meaning comes to a crisis because of a fundamental deception. Instead of interpreting the law as a personal mystery, he somehow objectifies it. His abstract view on life begets the obstacle-character that embodies all those who could bar him from finding the law. In this narrative, (...) the failure of finding the law results in a murder in which human life is reduced to bestial death. In this sense, Kafka’s narrative is a tale of anti-creation. In a close reading we analyze the text with attention for the ternary structure, i.e. the intertwined complex of the I-Thou relation and the I-It relation. The literary text is interpreted for its philosophical relevance. Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas but also Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida have an important role in this way of reading. (shrink)

This paper provides an overview of the authors’ master thesis and addresses the effects of World Heritage Sites and heritage sites which are used as filming locations on visitor perceptions of a site and their decision to visit a site. Film-induced tourism is becoming increasingly popular and it is important to assess its impacts on World Heritage Sites and heritage sites used as locations. The integration of the different aspects of heritage and filming at a site including elements and the (...) communication between all the different parties involved are also addressed. The case study used is the popular television series Game of Thrones focusing on various locations in Northern Ireland and Dubrovnik, Croatia. The paper aims to provide a starting platform for future research on heritage sites used as filming locations and the possible impacts that this may have. (shrink)

This illustrated phenomenological inquiry into storytelling in screen media identifies important media transformations of experience. Viewers embody, or situate their experienced selves, according to screen requirements. A viewer’s compelled perspective on the screen causes fundamental spatio-temporal transformations of narrative experience, including horizontal stretching of screen space and time compression or leakage. Virtual media have the potential, as yet unrealized, to break out of the screen and to restore narrative to its primordial, experiential roots.

In Amsterdam, the phenomenon of overcrowding is increasing, and tourism is one of the causes. Both the public debate and the municipal authorities are pointing to an increasing need for more expertise and knowledge regarding ways of achieving a healthy balance for various stakeholders. This article focuses on the stakeholder role of city residents and discusses their attitudes to tourists and tourism-related developments in their own neighbourhood and in the rest of the city. The term “attitude” can be divided into (...) three components: feeling, behaviour and thinking. The results of this study are based on both quantitative and qualitative fieldwork and on desk research. It can be concluded that, for the most part, residents have a positive attitude to tourists and tourism. Differences in attitude are mostly determined by the city district where respondents live and by personal feelings and thinking. Follow-up research in the coming years will examine the complexity of the issue of overcrowding in more depth. (shrink)

The phenomenon of anti-urbanism has accompanied the process of modernisation since the emergence of modernity. The city, the modern metropolis played a vital role in this transition from premodern world to modern era. The metamorphosis of archaic structures, including the fields of economy, society and thinking, are inevitably associated with tensions engendering aversion against the city. Anti-urbanism appeared sporadically everywhere, as a continuous tradition, it emerged at two remote corners of the world: in United States and Germany. Hungarian anti-urbanism of (...) the interwar period had been motivated by the shock of the disintegration of the “Historical Greater Hungary”. The motif of guilty city emerged in the atmosphere of scapegoating: Budapest appeared as incompatible with Hungarian national character. These ruminations about the role of city were embedded in a special context mixing city-philosophy, cultural criticism, German-origin crisis philosophy, political philosophy and national characterology. It was a peculiar mixture in the Central European region: Hungarian interwar thought, from this respect, follows the regional patterns. (shrink)

This article analyzes contemporary writings on the philosophy of information with special attention to the concept of informational scepticism. The author of the concept, Luciano Floridi, supposes that scepticism that arises as the result of the attempt to differentiate real and virtual objects in modern information society is epistemologically harmless, since the difference between the real and the virtual does not have any specific informative content. This article points out logical and epistemological difficulties of this theoretical viewpoint and proposes a (...) way of overcoming them. (shrink)

The essay is designed to present the phenomena of popular culture, its difference from pop culture, both products of modern West, and their impact on film and advertisement media in India. First, the discussion focuses on the Critical School which proposed the initial thesis of commodification of culture with a resultant “lowering” of standards to appeal to “the masses”, and an appeal to the “average” tastes. In the essay an argument is presented that pop culture is a “critique” of popular (...) culture and is an elitist position attempting to shock popular mores and media content. Given this setting, it is argued that while India has followed both the globalizing popular and pop cultures, neither are adequate to encompass Indian media, specifically their film content. (shrink)

The phenomenon of the sense of distraction and the feature of figurativeness in it are analysed with the help of phenomenological description, the concept of sense of Juozas Mureika and the conception of imagination of Kristupas Sabolius. The position is followed that the acts of sense and the being of those existing found in them cannot be known in a purely rational way. Knowing is reached with intuitive insights. The experiencing of distraction is approached as one of the norms or (...) intentions of consciousness. The sense of distraction is acknowledged to be a basic value becoming more and more important in a modern stressful life. The article indicates that the intentional beings of the sense of distraction are expressed in really various human activities and are distinguished with mono-subjectivity and unrepeatable feeling. Figurativeness is perceived as the result of imaginary, creative activity of the imagination and aesthetical quality. The peculiarities of the formation of figurativeness are revealed through the phenomenological description of imagination by Sabolius. Four features of the act of visualisation, determining the quality of figurativeness, are emphasized: intentionality, power of transformation, relation with emotions and the symbolism of the image. The conclusion is made that figurativeness, being the result of the creative act of imagination, appears as aesthetical quality or the ensemble of qualities. Figurativeness sharpens the sense of distraction and calls the wave of new experiences. (shrink)

Roles and performances created by theatre methods are not just the genre of the stage. Creation of the roles is transforming into to social sphere and in this case it is important to identify, understand and analyse these processes. In this article the definitions of performance are explained. Performance, as the method of expression, is analysed in various contexts: social roles creation in politics, in social markets and marketing tools. It is impossible to avoid the performance in social roles, but (...) it is possible to understand how it is functioning. If person has abilities to notice the manipulations in marketing or politics, he will not be influenced by them. This article analyses cases of performance in various contexts, the mistakes in the roles creation and interpretation are revealed. (shrink)

Victoiria V. Tevlina. From Russia to Norway and to its North. Real and Potential Migration. Children, adults, Families. 2015. Arkhangelsk: IPP “Pravda Severa”.

Author’s collective. Philosophy in the Border Zone. 2015. Orkana Akademisk.

The aim of this essay is to show that the expansion of the electronic communication technologies leads to the appearance of new forms of communities the function of which are to foster communities of interest and equality of status all work to enhance social capital, despite their lack of direct physical orientation. Mediated individuals treat these mediated communities as real. That is, the role of communication as value-based in mediated communities works to create traditional forms of communities as well. To (...) understand why these new forms of communities can be regarded as moral entities, we wish to highlight how communal existence affects our moral decisions and judgements in the information age. (shrink)

This article aims to show that the contribution of Charles Sanders Peirce to communicology is much earlier than the advent of epistemological integration of semiotics in communication studies, being phaneroscopy as a early form of communicology. This reflection is based on the study of the categorical degeneration theorized by Peirce, his influence on communicational thinking (especially on Gilles Deleuze’s cinema theory), as well as the conceptual link between degeneration and phenomenon from the philosophical point of view of quaternions.

This study explores the communication articulations of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. The research method that was used is a mix between the meta-analytic method, comparative method and hermeneutic method. It starts from the assumption that in order to understand the communication universe, this has to be judged in relation with some pre-determined axes. The corpus of analysis is hermeneutical work of Gadamer. We prove that, founder of the philosophical hermeneutics, Gadamer is also one of the founders of communication hermeneutics. The thetic (...) articulation radiography of the Gadamerian work highlights that activities of hermeneutics inevitably occur within communication; communication includes strong interpretive-hermeneutic flows. Gadamer considers the interpretation as an intrinsic process of communication: no communication can exist without interpretation. The work reveals as main elements of Gadamerian hermeneutic conception of communication: universality of interpretation, hermeneutical situation, the principle and the canon of interpretation. (shrink)