“Heidegger and Ethics” remains a controversial topic among Heidegger scholars. What appears particularly troublesome is the conjunction itself, [which hints on a link between] Heidegger and ethics. Heidegger proposes to consider ethics in its original source, distinguishing it from morality and from “ethics” as a “philosophical discipline,” which often concerns with social or political issues. Heidegger distinguishes ἔuο6 from ἦ?uο6, preferring to discuss “ethos” instead of “ethics.” Heidegger's main “hero” here is Aristotle. When referring to Aristotelian texts, Heidegger attempts nothing (...) less but to rethink the “first” part of first philosophy. The leading question in interpretation of Aristotle is the question of the objectness of Being, in which both Being of human and Being of life are interpreted. Heidegger asks himself what the phenomenological foundation for explicating the [meaning] of man is, and what categories evolve from this foundation. This article focuses on the same question. It begins wi... (shrink)

What could be meant by «trauma»? Trauma can be regarded as a single event which has actually occurred and has fundamentally changed life of society, has shifted self-perception people had and greatly changed the potential future for these people. Trauma can also stand for some process which started to unfold after a catastrophic event and remains ongoing. Assuming a fact that that trauma can be regarded in various ways, it can also stand for some situation of deprivation, when people realize (...) that they were deprived of something, trying to find or regain what was lost through the present. At the same time, trauma can be regarded as a story line, when we realize that something has happened and try to tell about it in different ways in various genres, using the same or very similar images. By trauma we can also mean something which is called a unifying event, i.e. that something which creates us. Trauma is not something naturally existing, but on the contrary it is constructed by the society; individual and social traumas are very different. There is also a gap between the event and its representation: this gap is the trauma process. All of us, regardless of specifics of history of the nation we belong to, exist in a post-catastrophic time and bear the burden of responsibility for past but not fully comprehended horrors. Deep experiencing of a catastrophic event, a collapse of all usual human relationships, prearranges a transition to cataleptic consciousness, practicing oblivion and forming a particular subject, i.e. a post-traumatic subject, a subject of time-after, who gets crucified between the ever-lasting pain, i.e. something that never ceases to generate pain, something which remains in memory, and a power of oblivion, functioning as a defense mechanism. The relation between memory and trauma represents a very central focus in the memory and trauma studies and has been analyzed by several scholars. (shrink)

The problem of rationality today means the problem of the inner unreasonableness of reasonableness in the sense of its inner limit. Even the humanistic revolution of the Renaissance gradually led to the replacement of the power of omnipotent faith by faith in the omnipotence of power. It is this general orientation towards power and the cult of power, this new belief in power, that revealed itself more and more sharply in the course of European history and eventually led to extreme (...) forms of expression in the world wars and catastrophes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The activity of free reasonableness has resulted in a host of unreasonable consequences: we have reason to suggest that reasonableness perhaps contains its own negation. Most philosophers of the twentieth century supposed that today it is impossible to think as in former times; it is already impossible to imagine reality as the structure which alone has a basis. The modern pluralistic world cannot be interpreted in a single rationalistic way as the only possible way, which would lead to the world’s being be united on a single principle for the sake of final truth. The philosophical world of the twentieth century “shivers” because of the fluctuation its own foundation, which was recently the symbol of its firmness and absoluteness. The article offers an analysis of a foundation of this kind, viz. evidence. The tradition of this concept leads us to Descartes and back to the three main versions of transcendentalism: Kant’s, Husserl’s and Heidegger’s. The author finally comes to the conclusion that the appearance of overcoming the metaphysical approach in the twentieth century is replaced by a transcendental and dialectical “game” around metaphysical concepts. (shrink)

The aim of our “discussion remark” is not to present a critical review on the book written by S. Geniusas, a brilliant study notable by its extreme painstakingness, historical sensitivity and terminological accuracy, but rather to delve deeply into the origins of phenomenological understanding of productive imagination, i.e., to turn “back to Kant”, given in Saulius Geniusas’ book (the first chapter) for introductory reason. We proceed from S. Geniusas remark that productive imagination establishes a relation between different abilities, reconciles the (...) antagonism between them and, in this respect, exercises a pro-creative function. We reveal that it is this pro-creative element of productive imagination that brings it closer to time (as indicated by Viktor Molchanov, a prominent Russian phenomenologist, in his study of 1988) and serves as the basis for gaining new knowledge. Imagination acts as a limit for reflection, however, it gets revealed only through reflecting, and, thus, it proves to be connected with a fundamental layer of consciousness, which appears both as an object and as a means of describing reflection, i.e., as time. The convergence, or rather, identification, of time with imagination lies in the very fact that both of them exercise an objective function: time – as a possibility for semantic definition of objectivity, imagination – as a basis for a possibility of any knowledge. Moreover, imagination turns out to be a source of a paradox and, ultimately, the only thing that explains self-cognition. (shrink)