On World Philosophy Day, November 15, 2018, the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences organized the international conference on the Russian classic writer I.S. Turgenev. During the plenary and two breakout sessions, speeches were given by philosophers, cultural researchers, historians ofRussia,USA,Germany,Austria. The conference’s attitude to the consideration of the multifaceted heritage of the great Russian writer made it possible to highlight in the modern historical and cultural context many aspects of Turgenev’s work, to rethink stereotypes (...) existing among researchers and in the mass consciousness regarding Turgenev. At the conference, Turgenev was presented as a political thinker, a liberal who embodied spiritual asceticism, a supporter of the dialogue of cultures, a “Russian European” who does not accept “new barbarism” in all its manifestations from radicalism to Russian exclusivity idea. In the reports and speeches, attention was drawn to the cultural bilingualism inherent in Turgenev, his ability of non-biased artistic and philosophical observation, which enabled him to analyze the then state of minds in Russian society, to foresee many collisions inherent in the national historical process in the 20th – early 21st centuries and world cultural trends engendered by the “uprising of the masses,” to anticipate the drama of the absurd. At the conference, among the discussed topics were the themes of nihilism and loneliness, viewed through the prism of the existential experience of the writer and world literary characters. (shrink)

The article devotes to the initial stage of I.S. Turgenev’s creativity path, when he intended to devote himself to philosophy. The first part of the historical and philosophical research covers the studentship stage of his life, Turgenev’s involvement to the University course of philosophy primarily in Moscow, then in St. Petersburg universities. Everything happened at Moscow University due to Professor M.G. Pavlov, Shelling’s philosophy follower, who was teaching physics in a philosophical format. He listened course of lectures on (...) metaphysics at St.-Petersburg University, given by A. A. Fisher, who was one of the first who started to teach philosophy in accordance with Uvarov’s ideological triade “Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality”. The second part touches upon the period of education abroad. After he had finished the philological faculty of St.-Petersburg University in 1837, he became convinced that Russian universities could provide only preliminary education and real source of knowledge could be found only abroad; that is why he goes “to finish his education” in Berlin. There he studied ancient languages, history and Hegel’s philosophy under the guidance of Professor Werder. Turgenev also prepared different parts of Shelling’s teaching for publishing in Russian periodic, after famous philosopher had given lectures in University of Berlin. The last part of this article gives a picture of Turgenev attempts to receive masters’ degree and tries to take place at the Department of Philosophy. At the beginning of 1842, after presenting the diploma of candidate, granted by St.-Petersburg University, he asked Moscow University Council to give him a permission to receive the masters’ degree; his utter motive was to occupy the place at the Department of Philosophy, which was vacant for a long time. But he failed to do so in Moscow and moved to St.-Petersburg, where he tried to pass exams needed to get degree again. However, he failed again due to not giving the dissertation work; as the result, he didn’t receive masters’ degree and, furthermore, he dedicated himself entirely to literature. However, Turgenev saved his interest to philosophical problems, which he tried to solve in prose format. (shrink)

The article deals with the little-studied but actual problem of loneliness of an outstanding creative personality as a consequence of stereotypical understanding of his works and activity. The cultural and philosophical meaning of Ivan Turgenev’s motif of loneliness is that he was a lone creator, recognized by Russian critics and historians of literature only in the context of the activities of other recognized great writers: Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov. The problem of loneliness is revealed through the paradoxical statement (...) by Turgenev on the question about strange loners and aggressive crowd. The paper presents the loneliness of I.S. Turgenev as a rejection of the understandable and normality among the non-understandable and weirdness. In Russian literatury critical and historico-cultural tradition, during the discussion of Russian classics, the general opinion has been formed: Turgenev is apparently non-Russian author, moreover he is not a classic writer indeed. (shrink)

Russian classic writer Ivan Turgenev, analyzing the Russian reality of the second half of the 19th century, presented inside one work – novel Smoke – an anthropological review of society, showing a change in the speech styles of different layers of the population. The novel is dominated by the idea of a dialogue of cultures – an obvious dialogue of Western European and Russian culture, and no less obvious dialogue that took place within the multitude of Russian cultures: gentry’s (...) and common people’s, merchants’, raznochintsys’, and philistines’ cultures. In Turgenev’s novel, the sign of a new time is freely discussed opportunities of solving the problems that have arisen, fnding solutions not in a rational way but in the hope for suddenness and fortune. However, the ways of solving problems, regardless of the possibilities for their implementation, must be discussed, argued, and analyzed. Therefore, the novel intuitively shows the way of the birth of a parliament, which was absent inRussia at that time. The article demonstrates the importance of a rational, philosophical way of reasoning, which can become a life principle when words and deeds correspond with each other. Turgenev in some way – through different speech instances – stratifed the new generation, showing a new face of unstableRussia. The main driving force of many, if not all, of Turgenev’s novels is freedom and the words and deeds born by it. A previously unseen fgure of a revolutionary appears, expressing a new attitude to society and to power. Turgenev’s modernity and timeliness consists in fxing such a mentality in which the emphasis is placed on the metaphysical idea of the beginning: it exists, it receives an impetus – and there is almost no movement, everything is only projected, only utopized, turning the thinker into an odd man. And although not only the idea of freedom, but thefree state of a person is recognized as a historical fact, he emphasizes that Russian freedom was born without waking up. (shrink)

The question of the Russian man – his past, present and future – is the central one in the philosophy of history. Unfortunately, at present this area of philosophy is not suffciently developed in Russia. Partly the reason for this situation is the lack of understanding by researchers of the role played by Russian classical literature and its philosophizing writers in historiosophy. The Hunting Sketches, a collection of short stories by I.S. Turgenev, is a work still undervalued, not fully (...) considered not only in details but also in general meanings. And this is understandable because it is the frst systematic encyclopedia of Russian worldview, which is not envisaged by the literary genre. To a certain extent, Turgenev’s line is continued by I. Goncharov, L. Tolstoy, F. Dostoevsky, A. Chekhov. This article examines the philosophical nature of The Hunting Sketches, its structure and content. According to author’s opinion, stories can be divided into ten groups according to their dominant meanings. Thus, in The Hunting Sketches the main Russian types are depicted: “natural man,” rational, submissive, cunning, honest, sensitive, passionate, poetic, homeless, suffering, calmly accepting death, imbued with the immensity of the world. In the image and the comments of the wandering protagonist, Ivan Turgenev reveals his own philosophical credo, which he defnes as a moderate liberalism – freedom of thought and action, without prejudice to others. (shrink)

I argue that the Nineteenth Century phenomenon of Russian nihilism, rather than belonging to the spiritual crisis that threatened Europe, was an independent and historically specific attitude of the Russian intelligentsia in their wholesale and utopian rejection of the prevailing values of their parents’ generation. Turgenev’s novel, Fathers and Sons, exemplifies this revolt in the literary character Bazarov, who embodies an archetypical account of the conflict between generations, social values, and traditions in Russian—but not just Russian—culture.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Against Ethical CriticismRichard A. PosnerOscar Wilde famously remarked that “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” He was echoed by Auden, who said in his poem in memory of William Butler Yeats that poetry makes nothing happen (though the poem as a whole qualifies this overstatement), by Croce, and by formalist critics such as (...) Cleanth Brooks, a doyen of the New Critics, who insisted that edification was the function of religion but not of poetry. 1 George Orwell, though himself a didactic novelist, was of this view as well, 2 and it is one that most critics adopt when the issue is censorship. I accept Wilde’s thesis—the creed of aestheticism, of art for art’s sake—if understood to mean that the moral content and consequences of a work of literature are irrelevant to its value as literature; or as the critic Helen Vendler has put it, that “treating fictions as moral pep-pills or moral emetics is repugnant to anyone who realizes the complex psychological and moral motives of a work of art.” 3 This is not to deny that reading can have consequences, including moral and political ones. Information affects people’s outlook and behavior, and reading is a source of information. Imaginative literature conveys ideas, opinions, and information, often with great power. Think of the role that novels by Turgenev (Fathers and Sons), Dostoevsky (The Possessed), Conrad (The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes), Koestler (Darkness at Noon), Orwell (Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four), and, of course, Solzhenitsyn played in exposing the horrors of anarchism and communism. Of A Passage to India it has been said that “as an account of the social conditions of British India it was powerful enough to have influenced events.” 4 Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle is thought to have incited federal regulation of food processing; and few doubt the effect of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) on the abolitionist cause. [End Page 1]At the core of the aesthetic tradition, which I shall be defending in this essay particularly against its opponents in the “law and literature” movement, are three theses. First, immersion in literature does not make us better citizens or better people. One might be able to pick out some works of literature that would have such an effect because of the information they convey or the emotional state they induce, but they would constitute a skewed sample of literary works. Second, we should not be put off by morally offensive views encountered in literature even when the author appears to share them. A work of literature is not to be considered maimed or even marred by expressing unacceptable moral views; by the same token, a mediocre work of literature is not redeemed by expressing moral views of which we approve. The proper criteria for evaluating literature are aesthetic rather than ethical. Third, authors’ moral qualities or opinions should not affect our valuations of their works.The insistence, in short, is on the separation of the moral from the aesthetic—but with two qualifications. Some literature has little interest or value apart from the didactic and for it the proper criticism is didactic. And the separation of moral from aesthetic values is not a rejection of the former. The aesthetic outlook is a moral outlook, one that stresses the values of openness, detachment, hedonism, curiosity, tolerance, the cultivation of the self, and the preservation of a private sphere—in short, the values of liberal individualism.The counter tradition in literary criticism to the aesthetic originates with Plato and insists upon the importance, in some versions to the near or even total exclusion of anything else, of the ethical or political content and effects of works of literature, and less commonly of the author’s own morality. Martha Nussbaum, for example, deems Greek tragedies and Anglo-American realistic novels a part of moral philosophy. 5 Reading novels, she argues, “develops moral capacities without which citizens will not succeed in making reality out of the normative conclusions of any moral or political theory, however excellent.” 6 Wayne Booth, disagreeing with his illustrious... (shrink)

In The Gay Science (1882), Nietzsche heralded the problem of nihilism with his famous declaration “God is dead,” which signalled the collapse of a transcendent basis for the underpinning morality of European civilization. He associated this collapse with the rise of the natural sciences whose methods and pervasive outlook he was concerned would progressively shape “an essentially mechanistic [and hence meaningless] world.” The Russian novelist Turgenev had also associated a scientific outlook with nihilism through the scientism of Yevgeny Bazarov, (...) a character in Fathers and Sons. A century or so later, can we correlate relevant scientific results and the nihilistic consequences that worried these and other nineteenth-century authors? The aversion of empirical disciplines to such non-empirical concepts as personhood and agency, and their methodological exclusion of the very idea of value would make this a difficult task. Recent neuroscientific (MRI) investigations into free will might provide a useful starting point for anyone interested in this sociological question, as might the research results of experimental or evolutionary psychologists studying what they take human beings to be. In this paper, I turn instead to a more basic issue of science. I will question the universality of a principle of identity assumed by a scientific understanding of what it means for anything to exist. I will argue that the essential features of human existence present an exception to this principle of identity and thereby fall outside the grasp of scientific inquiry. The basis of this argument will be an explanation of why it is nonetheless rational for us to affirm personhood, agency, moral values, and many more concepts that disappear under the scrutiny of the sciences. (shrink)

Futabatei Shimei (1864-1909) was an early modern Japanese novelist, translator, and critic. He wrote what is now generally conceived of as the first Japanese ‘modern’ novel, Drifting Clouds (1887-89). He translated works by Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Garshin, Gorky, and others. He also published a number of critical essays, treatises on literary theory, political papers, and so forth. His early translation of Turgenev’s short stories: Aibiki (Rendevous, 1888) and Meguriai (Three Trysts, 1889) were extremely influential on the contemporary literati, (...) who were amazed at the fresh, poetic prose used in stark contrast to the traditional Japanese fiction in the pre-Reformation period. These translations, seen in the light of the present-day readers, were unique in what we might term today ‘foreignizing translation’. Lawrence Venuti in Invisibility of the Translator argues that the ideal of (English) translation has been to conceal itself as a translation, i.e. to present itself as an original text (chap I and passim). In that sense, Futabatei’s translations, scandalously presenting itself as a translation, that is to say, as an alien text, is extremely ‘foreignizing’. (shrink)

Voyage is the first part of The Coast of Utopia , Tom Stoppard's long-awaited and monumental trilogy that explores a group of friends who came of age under the Tsarist autocracy of Nicholas I, and for whom the term intelligentsia was coined. Among them are the anarchist Michael Bakunin, who was to challenge Marx for the soul of the masses; Ivan Turgenev, author of some of the most enduring works in Russian literature; the brilliant, erratic young critic Vissarion Belinsky; (...) and Alexander Herzen, a nobleman's son and the first self-proclaimed socialist in Russia, who becomes the main focus of this drama of politics, love, loss, and betrayal. In The Coast of Utopia , Stoppard presents an inspired examination of the struggle between romantic anarchy, utopian idealism, and practical reformation. (shrink)

Se accettiamo l’ipotesi di Nietzsche, ampiamente sviluppata da Heidegger, che prevede l’affermarsi planetario di un’epoca in cui il senso della vita sarà completamente assente, un solo compito si offre alla filosofia e, nella sua accezione più larga, alla cultura: “DARE UN SENSO – questo il compito che resta assolutamente da assolvere”. Di là dal nichilismo, scrisse Nietzsche, la creazione di un senso permette al caos, nascosto in fondo all’uomo così come ai confini dell’universo, di trasformarsi in stella. In un testo (...) del marzo 1888, il pensatore chiede all’uomo di “costringere il suo caos a diventare forma; a diventare logico, semplice, univoco, matematica, legge. È questa qui la grande ambizione”. Il canto poetico di Zarathustra annuncerà, analogamente, l’imperativo di una cultura che dà all’esistenza la sua legge: “Riesci a costringere le stelle a ruotare intorno a te?”. E tale insegnamento è così precisato: “Bisogna che ancora si porti dentro di sé un caos per potere far nascere una stella danzante”. L’immagine della stella evoca per Nietzsche l’origine del mondo e l’esplosione della vita: ma allora, è l’oblio della stella a fondare il nichilismo. Questo termine, reso popolare da Turgenev e Paul Bourget prima di Nietzsche, deriva dal latino ne hilum, l’assenza di “ilo”, la cicatrice lasciata sul seme dalla rottura del funicolo. Questa giuntura, attraverso cui scorrono i succhi nutritivi della pianta, è fonte di vita e, metaforicamente, donazione di senso. Quando il condotto della vita è chiuso o nascosto, non è possibile nessun orientamento e la fine scompare insieme con il senso che ad essa conduceva. Se applichiamo questo termine al nostro presente malessere, possiamo vedere che il significato di una cultura è legato costantemente alla sua comparsa e al suo scopo. L’epoca della completa assenza di senso è dunque quella in cui l’origine di una cultura, nel suo abbrivio o nella sua genealogia, è sistematicamente negata, al punto da occultare il suo fine, inteso come punto d’arrivo e, insieme, come destinazione. Che si tratti di scienza, di filosofia, di politica o di arte, le attività umane e i prodotti che ne risultano abdicano, così, ad ogni pretesa di senso e si limitano, a costo di rinunciare a costruire un mondo, alla immersione nel circolo del consumo. Nel presente lavoro si tenta di definire una direzione del pensiero che consenta alla filosofia di uscire dal nichilismo. In questo senso, si vi si pone a tema quel capitolo della filosofia che va sotto il nome di “post-nichilismo”, che non è, però, da intendere come una semplice e, probabilmente, perdente avversione empirica o sentimentale al clima generale dell’“insensata” nostra epoca. Kant aveva riconosciuto a David Hume il merito di averlo risvegliato dal “sonno dogmatico”; pare necessario cogliere nel nichilismo teoretico un’occasione analoga. Il “sonno” che ha colto l’Occidente risiede nella volontaria chiusura dello sguardo di fronte alla “catastrofe” che si annuncia e che non investe solo il pensiero. La filosofia, in un ultimo risveglio, non può che tentare di mostrare il panorama che si aprirebbe alla nostra vista, se solo si avesse l’ardire di orientare lo sguardo verso la nostra originaria destinazione per illuminare il nostro apparentemente ineluttabile futuro. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Lermontov And The Omniscience Of NarratorsDavid A. GoldfarbGod and fictional narrators are the only beings who are sometimes considered omniscient. God, who is sometimes regarded as not fictional, is frequently also regarded as omnipotent. Narrators, who normally seem to have no sphere of action save for conveying information to readers, particularly when they speak omnisciently in the third person, are not considered to have “power” in any way, because (...) they are supposed to function outside the story. God always speaks in the first person, and is regarded as an all-powerful agent.But what happens when the narrator gets in on the action? First-person narrators can enter the plot, speaking in the voice of personal narrative, and sometimes “know” as much or more than some third-person narrators who are supposedly “omniscient.” The positivistic “third-person omniscient” narrator of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, for instance, knows only what he sees, and though his omnipresence allows him to see quite a bit, he has virtually no access to the minds of the characters, as do the psychologically omniscient third-person narrators of Tolstoy or Henry James. If knowledge were thus limited in the context of a novel to observables, a first-person narrator who gets around enough could appear much like an omniscient narrator, while also appearing to present a particular point of view. Conversely, the third-person narrator’s seeming objectivity is similarly illusory. Any narrator “chooses” what information to relay, and when and how to relay it. In a sense, third-person omniscient narrators fictionally determine what counts as “the story,” creating the fictional world with their godlike voice. Some overbearing narrators, like Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s anonymous first-person narrator in What Is To Be Done, adopt not only an omniscient and objective standpoint with regard to the actions and [End Page 61] thoughts of the characters, but even presume to tell readers how to interpret the events in the novel. Therefore, all narrators have varying amounts of both knowledge and power, and in some cases they may approach, within variously circumscribed spheres of knowledge and agency, omniscience and omnipotence.In this essay, I would like to explore the range of constraints and effects of the narrator’s fictional power and knowledge. As a test case, I have chosen Mikhail Lermontov’s novel, A Hero of Our Time (Geroi nashego vremeni). Writing between 1837 and 1840, Lermontov was one of the first Russian writers to experiment with the form of the novel, influenced primarily by contemporary English, French, and German examples, as well as the classical epic, making this work, like many of the early Russian novels of the 1820s and 1830s, a jumble of narrative styles interestingly layered on each other. It is a particularly fecund work for studies of narrative subjectivity, because characters shift from narrator to narratee across a variety of genres, all in one text.A Hero of Our Time is composed of five major chapters: “Bela,” “Maksim Maksimich,” “Taman,” “Princess Mary,” and “The Fatalist,” the last three of which comprise the journal of the main character, the officer Grigory Pechorin. The “journal” chapters are preceded by a brief section, set in 1838 or 1839, sometime after Pechorin’s death, called the “Introduction to Pechorin’s Journal.” In “Bela” an unnamed traveler gathering stories in the Caucasus during the year 1837 meets an older officer, Maksim Maksimich, who tells a yarn about the Byronic adventures of Pechorin in the spring of 1833 involving his abduction of a Circassian woman after whom the chapter is named. The second chapter is an interlude, which takes place in 1837, where Maksim and the first narrator actually meet Pechorin, whom Maksim has not seen for about five years, and Pechorin gives his diaries to the first narrator. “Taman” recounts, in the form of a diary, a strange incident in which Pechorin, around 1830, meets smugglers while stranded in the Crimea and is nearly drowned by a young girl. “Princess Mary,” the longest tale, takes place in May 1832—a love story modeled after Aleksander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, culminating in a duel in which Pechorin prevails over a certain Grushnitskij, his friend earlier in the... (shrink)

The paper raises the theoretical question of the cultural mediational nature of literary intertexts from the point of view of generic and transformational dynamics. The intertextual complex as mediational operator is examined at two levels – (1) in the context of cultural diachrony by observing how the literary work establishes its place in the history of literature closely connected to the metapoiesis of the text; (2) at various kinds of intratextual interlevel movements regulating the evolution of a whole intertextual system (...) within the work. Differentiating the ontological, generative and transformational conceptualization of intertextual poetics, an attempt is made to define the basic textual modes of the pretext, the intext and the intertext by describing their functionality in the building of an intersemiotic literary system. The relevant functions are grasped by shedding light upon the types of the sign of which the given signifying structures consist (here a terminological clarification and re-evaluation are added) and their textual semantics in terms of referential and relational quality (cf. the different versions of referential and relational semantics). In the first place, however, the paper aims at outlining the structure and content of the generic-transformational semiotic processes in which the dynamic aspects of intertextual semiosis are revealed. Within this framework, the processuality of the development of the intertextual signifying structure iselucidated, shown as a chain of reciprocal sign activities resulting in constantly evolving semantic shifts within the intra- and intertextual semiosis processes, all relying on mediational operations. Text examples are taken from and references made to works by A. S. Pushkin, I. S. Turgenev, F. M. Dostoevsky and J. M. Coetzee. (shrink)

Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837) occupies a special place in the development of Russian culture. He was at the same time a great poet, the reformer of Russian literary language, a historian and a political thinker. In the enormous mass of work devoted to Pushkin, a certain number of articles are concerned with his ideas on economics and the reflection of socio-economic problems in his writing. Until now, however, this theme has been studied in only a fragmentary way and less from the (...) point of view of the professional economist than from that of a literary historian. In an attempt to enlarge and complete the idea we may have of Pushkin's economic views, I propose also to show the importance the politico-economic thought of Western Europe had for his work. One person comes to the fore when we study the subject from this angle: Nikolai Turgenev, a Decembrist, one of the “masters” of the poet's youth, who played an important role in the rapprochement of Russian and Western European cultures. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on Raphael PAUL BAROLSKY The essence of all appreciation and analysis of art is the translation of visual perceptions into compelling verbal form. —Ralph Lieberman cultural unity Horace Walpole, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Eugène Delacroix, Honoré Balzac, Friedrich Hegel, Charles Baudelaire, Friedrich Nietzsche, Pierre Renoir, Nathaniel Hawthorne, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Heinrich von Kleist, Franz Grillparzer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, George Eliot, (...) Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, Roger Fry, Bernard Berenson, Theodor Hetzer, Roberto Longhi, Heinrich Wölfflin, and Stendhal are among the many essayists, critics, novelists, poets, painters and art historians who have responded to Raphael’s work as painter, architect or archeologist over the centuries. I can well imagine all of those listed above, among many others, united in an imaginary painting similar to the School of Athens—in other words, a vision that reconciles their various views of the world in a harmony analogous to the unity of philosophers in Raphael’s great fresco. Raphael is a towering figure in the history of European culture. The year 2020 was the 500th anniversary of the death of the great painter in Rome at the age of thirty-seven. In the wake of recent exhibitions that commemorated the artist’s achievement, I propose to touch briefly and lightly on a few aspects arion 28.2 fall 2020 100 reflections on raphael of Raphael’s life and works. Please think of these remarks as a series of suggestions, not attempts at definitive interpretation. I think of this essay as a rather experimental piece. THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS i should like to begin with a few brief remarks on what must be Raphael’s most famous work of art. I mean his School of Athens (fig. 1), which is, like Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Last Supper or like Michelangelo’s David and Creation of Adam, an image widely known and admired. What more is there to say about The School Of Athens, one of the central images in the Stanza della Segnatura? You might spend the rest of your life reading about this great work and never understand it fully. Nevertheless, I want to focus for a moment on a central detail of the work and, on the basis of my description, point to a significant aspect of the fresco that has been universally overlooked. First the description, then the aperçu. Fig. 1. School of Athens. Ca. 1510–1512. Photo Credit : Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. Paul Barolsky 101 At the center of the School of Athens we behold the two great philosophers of classical antiquity: Plato and Aristotle. Plato holds a copy of his Timaeus, a dialogue that concerns the harmony of the heavens; Aristotle holds a copy of his Ethics, a work that pertains to human relations in this world. It was the goal of Renaissance thinkers to create a harmony or concord of the thought of these philosophers: a Concordia Platonis et Aristotelis. Raphael’s fresco, as is well known, presents the visual ideal of such harmony. Whereas Aristotle gestures downward, alluding to this world, in which his Ethics matter, Plato points heavenward, evoking the order of the cosmic realm described in Timaeus. Raphael makes visible the ideal of concordia when he movingly pictures the way in which the two philosophers gaze into each other’s eyes, as if to suggest this harmony. Borrowing from the language of Raphael ’s friend, Baldassare Castiglione, Raphael renders “the joining” of their souls. The monumental architecture of the scene, which echoes Bramante and has taproots in Piero della Francesca and Perugino, consists of three barrel-vaults beyond which we see patches of blue sky and puffs of cloud (fig. 2). The grandiose architecture of the image magnifies Raphael’s philosophers. Within this architectural framework, Plato’s gesture is deeply meaningful, since it prompts the viewer to look up and thus ascend toward the perfection of the celestial realm, beyond the imperfections of the physical world. Above the first barrel vault in the fresco we behold a section of the drum of a dome which is open to the sky. Within this section of drum there are two columns that are lined up directly... (shrink)

The paper raises the theoretical question of the cultural mediational nature of literary intertexts from the point of view of generic and transformational dynamics. The intertextual complex as mediational operator is examined at two levels – (1) in the context of cultural diachrony by observing how the literary work establishes its place in the history of literature closely connected to the metapoiesis of the text; (2) at various kinds of intratextual interlevel movements regulating the evolution of a whole intertextual system (...) within the work. Differentiating the ontological, generative and transformational conceptualization of intertextual poetics, an attempt is made to define the basic textual modes of the pretext, the intext and the intertext by describing their functionality in the building of an intersemiotic literary system. The relevant functions are grasped by shedding light upon the types of the sign of which the given signifying structures consist (here a terminological clarification and re-evaluation are added) and their textual semantics in terms of referential and relational quality (cf. the different versions of referential and relational semantics). In the first place, however, the paper aims at outlining the structure and content of the generic-transformational semiotic processes in which the dynamic aspects of intertextual semiosis are revealed. Within this framework, the processuality of the development of the intertextual signifying structure iselucidated, shown as a chain of reciprocal sign activities resulting in constantly evolving semantic shifts within the intra- and intertextual semiosis processes, all relying on mediational operations. Text examples are taken from and references made to works by A. S. Pushkin, I. S. Turgenev, F. M. Dostoevsky and J. M. Coetzee. (shrink)

The paper raises the theoretical question of the cultural mediational nature of literary intertexts from the point of view of generic and transformational dynamics. The intertextual complex as mediational operator is examined at two levels – in the context of cultural diachrony by observing how the literary work establishes its place in the history of literature closely connected to the metapoiesis of the text; at various kinds of intratextual interlevel movements regulating the evolution of a whole intertextual system within the (...) work. Differentiating the ontological, generative and transformational conceptualization of intertextual poetics, an attempt is made to define the basic textual modes of the pretext, the intext and the intertext by describing their functionality in the building of an intersemiotic literary system. The relevant functions are grasped by shedding light upon the types of the sign of which the given signifying structures consist and their textual semantics in terms of referential and relational quality. In the first place, however, the paper aims at outlining the structure and content of the generic-transformational semiotic processes in which the dynamic aspects of intertextual semiosis are revealed. Within this framework, the processuality of the development of the intertextual signifying structure is elucidated, shown as a chain of reciprocal sign activities resulting in constantly evolving semantic shifts within the intra- and intertextual semiosis processes, all relying on mediational operations. Text examples are taken from and references made to works by A. S. Pushkin, I. S. Turgenev, F. M. Dostoevsky and J. M. Coetzee. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian ModernismJohn GoodliffeCreating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, edited by Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman; x & 288 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, $39.95.In describing the history of a country’s literature, one may well be tempted to divide it into separate compartments and so lose sight of the continuity which is, in the final analysis, more worthy of (...) attention. Historians of Russian literature have often succumbed to this temptation and it became almost commonplace to read that in Russia the Realism of the nineteenth century gave way to the Symbolism which began in the twentieth; that Symbolism gave way to Futurism; and that in due course all the earlier “-isms” were swept aside by the Socialist Realism of the Soviet period. For Marxist-oriented Soviet [End Page 371] historians such preoccupation with compartmentalization was obsessive. This makes more than welcome a series of essays which is at pains to emphasize the essential connections and kinship between these various “-isms.”Four of the seven essays are intended to demonstrate how the Symbolists, while ostensibly breaking with the earlier tradition of positivism (the idea that art’s essential purpose is to help build a better world), were, in a number of important respects, continuing and even reinforcing what they claimed to despise. Thus, regarding art and life as indissolubly linked, they attempted to turn life into art and art into life. Their endeavors frequently led them into behavior that now appears “eccentric, at times even ridiculous” (p. 166). Olga Matich describes how Blok, Bely, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, and Zinaida Gippius attempted to model their sexual relationships on the pattern of the “erotic utopia” described by Vladimir Solov’ev in his seminal The Meaning of Love (1892–94). Joan Delaney Grossman discusses Nina Petrovskaia’s relationships with Bely and Valery Briusov. Michael Wachtel shows how Viacheslav Ivanov attempted to overcome his grief at the death of his first wife by using his creative powers to make contact with her “beyond the grave.”Irene Masing-Delic traces the Pygmalion myth through Pushkin, Baratynsky, Turgenev, and Chernyshevsky to the Symbolists who were especially attracted by a myth which showed how an artist could create life and even conquer death. In “Andrei Bely and the Argonauts’ mythmaking,” Alexander Lavrov considers the role of the “Argonaut” circle in establishing a Russian Symbolist culture in the first years of the twentieth century. The Argonauts’ credo was “life-creation” rather than “art-creation,” and they claimed to make no distinction between “talent for living” and “talent for writing.” Lavrov argues that the failure of the relationship between Bely and Nina Petrovskaia marked the disintegration of “Argonautism” and the culture they sought to create. It is left to Irina Gutkin in the concluding essay to guide us through the grotesqueries of Futurism into the apparently diametrically opposed, sanitized world of Socialist Realism, by way of Constructivism, Marxism, and Meyerholdian bio-mechanics, leaving us in little doubt that, appearances to the contrary, each of these movements was concerned with turning art into life and using it to create a better world. So ultimately, as she neatly sums up the thesis of the whole collection, “The aesthetic utopian ideal of art creating life, which took shape at the beginning of the twentieth century, was fused with the utilitarian tradition of the 1860s” (p. 181).I have deliberately reserved for the end comment on Irina Paperno’s introduction and opening article (“The Meaning of Art: Symbolist Theories”) in order to emphasize the manifest contribution she and her co-editor, Joan Delaney Grossman, have made to ensuring the coherence of this admirable collection. Professor Paperno’s clear and concise coverage of her topics makes it evident that she was determined that the book should not turn into the kind of bits-and-pieces patchwork that too many publications of this sort tend to [End Page 372] become without a firm editorial hand at the helm. Her earlier book on Chernyshevsky (Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, 1988) and Irene Masing-Delic’s Abolishing Death; a Salvation Myth of Russian Twentieth-Century Literature (1992), form the first two parts of... (shrink)

In our papers on the rationality of magic, we distinghuished, for purposes of analysis, three levels of rationality. First and lowest (rationalitYl) the goal directed action of an agent with given aims and circumstances, where among his circumstances we included his knowledge and opinions. On this level the magician's treatment of illness by incantation is as rational as any traditional doctor's blood-letting or any modern one's use of anti-biotics. At the second level (rationalitY2) we add the element of rational thinking (...) or thinking which obeys some set of explicit rules, a level which is not found in magic in general, though it is sometimes given to specific details of magical thinking within the magical thought-system. It was the late Sir Edward E. Evans-Pritchard who observed that when considering magic in detail the magician may be as consistent or critical as anyone else; but when considering magic in general, or any system of thought in general, the magician could not be critical or even comprehend the criticism. Evans-Pritchard went even further: he was sceptical as to whether it could be done in a truly consistent manner: one cannot be critical of one's own system, he thought. On this level (rationalitY2) of discussion we have explained (earlier) why we prefer to wed Evans Pritchard's view of the magician's capacity for piece-meal rationality to Sir James Frazer's view that magic in general is pseudo-rational because it lacks standards of rational thinking. (shrink)

Analysis of various Buddhist philosophical views.

Introduction : La philosophie en Égypte -- La philosophie chretienne arabe contemporaine : Kanawati et Youssef Karam -- Le discours éthique en Égypte -- Naguib Mahfouz et la philosophie -- La philosophie et la revolution en Égypte.

Verse work, with autocommentary, on Jain metaphysics and onthology.

This article utilises Gadamerian hermeneutics method and Freirean theory of the purpose of Religious Education to explore how Religious Education can contribute to achieving United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4, emphasising education for sustainable development. The study contends that Religious Education in Lesotho occupies a distinctive position in the education system, surpassing other countries in its extensive integration. Due to historical factors, Religious Education is taught in nearly all religiously affiliated schools, comprising about 90% of all educational institutions in (...) Lesotho, and even in certain public schools. The curriculum of Religious Education in Lesotho aligns directly with the educational objectives of SDG 4. Additionally, Lesotho’s Religious Education corresponds to three levels of school education for sustainable development: whole school approach, classroom approach, and community approach. Nevertheless, the study asserts that for Religious Education in Lesotho to better align with education for sustainable development, various enhancements are required. Firstly, inclusivity across all religious traditions is essential, moving beyond a sole focus on Christianity. Secondly, there is a need for wider dissemination and implementation of Religious Education in all schools, irrespective of their affiliation. Lastly, a shift from traditional pedagogies to transformative approaches is recommended to boost the effectiveness of Religious Education in advancing sustainable development.Contribution: This article contributes by analysing Lesotho’s case and its implications for enhancing Religious Education teaching to effectively address SDGs. It broadens existing knowledge on Religious Education’s potential as a platform for sustainable development and provides recommendations for its improved implementation in a specific context. (shrink)

Ser modern és ser racionalista. Aquest llibre repassa amb detall les tesis de Descartes, la seva relació amb els contemporanis i les conseqüències de les seves teories.

L'utilitarisme té com a criteri bàsic aconseguir el màxim bé per al màxim nombre possible de persones. L'utilitarisme dóna molta importància a la recerca de la felicitat personal. Aquest llibre en descriu les tesis bàsiques i respon a les principals acusacions que ha rebut.