Modernity's Consciousness of Time and Its Need for Self- Reassurance In his famous introduction to the collection of his studies on the sociology of ...

The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is a tour de force that has the immediacy and accessibility of the lecture form and the excitement of an encounter across, national cultural boundaries. Habermas takes up the challenge posed by the radical critique of reason in contemporary French poststructuralism.Tracing the odyssey of the philosophical discourse of modernity, Habermas's strategy is to return to those historical "crossroads" at which Hegel and the Young Hegelians, Nietzsche and Heidegger made the fateful decisions (...) that led to this outcome. His aim is to identify and clearly mark out a road indicated but not taken: the determinate negation of subject-centered reason through the concept of communicative rationality. As The Theory of Communicative Action served to place this concept within the history of social theory, these lectures locate it within the history of philosophy. Habermas examines the odyssey of the philosophical discourse of modernity from Hegel through the present and tests his own ideas about the appropriate form of a postmodern discourse through dialogs with a broad range of past and present critics and theorists.The lectures on Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Cornelius Castoriadis are of particular note since they are the first fruits of the recent cross-fertilization between French and German thought. Habermas's dialogue with Foucault - begun in person as the first of these lectures were delivered in Paris in 1983 culminates here in two appreciative yet intensely argumentative lectures. His discussion of the literary-theoretical reception of Derrida in America - launched at Cornell in 1984 - issues here in a long excursus on the genre distinction between philosophy and literature. The lectures were reworked for the final time in seminars at Boston College and first published in Germany in the fall of 1985.Jürgen Habermas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy. (shrink)

Discussion on God's knowledge, awareness of God with people though are different, but still closely related. This article talks about God's knowledge, although knowledge of God and the people, but not for the medieval Shengboerna the so-called "secular knowledge" and "God of knowledge" distinction; this will only be God's own knowledge or wisdom, philosophical discussion. First, the paper will compare the start, mainly related to the so-called Fozhi Buddhism and Western philosophers such as Aristotle,圣多瑪斯, Hegel and others about God, (...) know God, absolute spirit of the discussion, especially圣多瑪斯discussion on knowledge of God, compare, and summarize them are focused on comprehensive and complete self-conscious, and of all things and the universal and the individual's knowledge. Then, this paper will further discuss whether it contains the narrative of God to know the ingredients, that is God for individuals and groups in the body of the story or may occur, actual and imagined the story of building awareness. In short, my book can only be regarded as restricted view up to see. Both for Glimpse, then it is limited, should be able to break the world's big pipe to significantly; both for the discussion, it should be deconstructed in order to display the infinite Creator. The discussion of "Scientia Dei " is very much related to, though still different from, the question "Quomodo Deus a nobis cognoscatur ." This paper deals with Scientia Dei, not in the sense it is distinguished from Scientia Mundi by St Bernard of Clairvaux, but in the sense it is related to all philosophical discourses on the wisdom of God Himself. The first step of this paper is a comparative study with "Buddha's Wisdom" taught by some major Mahayana Buddhist Schools, and the ideas of God, God's Knowledge and Absolute Spirit in Aristotle, St. Thomas and Hegel, in particular St. Thomas' discussion of "Scientia Dei." The result of this comparison is their common emphasis on God's total and complete transparent self-understanding, and His universal and concrete knowledge of all things. After this, we will move on to discuss the narrative component of Scientia Dei, to see whether in God's knowledge there is a place for the historical and imaginative stories of all social groups and individuals, of their inexhaustible possibilities, developments and constructions, both descriptive and imaginative. Anyhow, this essay is limited to a comparative and discursive study, without any ground in the author's religious experience with God's knowledge. Therefore it should be deconstructed once it is pronounced, erased once it is written. (shrink)

The author of the article assumes that any human activity is normative. In the case of philosophical discourse, the normative ground is its indispensable condition, which makes it possible to compare the foundations of philosophy and other scientific disciplines. The norm (law) has, on the one hand, descriptive content related to the description of the noumenal world, and, on the other, prescriptive content related to the counterfactuality of what ought to be. The author emphasizes that the functional aspect (...) of a norm is that it is a means of socially integrating the behavior of people and social groups into a whole. Due to the requirements and requirements of society, social groups are transformed into standards, models, standards of modal and obligatory behavior of the representatives of these groups, performing the function of motivation, orientation and legitimacy. In the second part of the article, the author focuses on a narrower understanding of discourse as speech, dialogue, discussions, which presuppose argumentation based on certain principles, rules, rules and regulations. This interpretation of discourse is peculiar to representatives of the ethics of discourse (K.-O. Apel, Y. Habermas, D. Böhler, V. Kulman, G. Gronke, etc.). Within ethics, principles, imperatives, rules, norms and guidelines both normalize the discourse and substantiate this discourse. Adherence to these principles, rules, norms, and guidelines ensures the normative coherence of discourse as the instance of consensus building on the basis of revealing the performative contradiction of the statement. The normative coherence of discourse is also the basis for its functioning as a meta-institution of justification of social (moral, legal) norms and legitimation of institutions of deliberative democracy in a society of communication and dialogical civilization. Summarizing, the author formulates generalized requirements-guidelines that make it possible to implement the principles, norms and rules of discourse as a meta-institutional instance of society. (shrink)

This first volume of the new Brill series "Ancient Philosophy & Religion" offers analyses of Platonic philosophy and piety, the emergence of a common religio-philosophical discourse in Antiquity, the place of Jesus among ancient philosophers, and responses of pagan philosophers to Christianity from the second century to Late Antiquity.

It is no doubt that philosophy is the important way of discourse of modernity and modernity is the contemporary context of philosophy. By examining the relationship between philosophy and modernity, we will discover that philosophy enables the complete establishment of modernity, and philosophy is theimportant driving force of the gradual evolution of modernity; Contemporary philosophy is the outcome of the crisis of modernity; The important mission of the contemporary Chinese philosophy is to answer the question that how it is (...) possible to adopt modernity in China. (shrink)

One of the main vocations of scientific communication is to find points of fruitful theoretical debate - those features of ideas, argumentation, established ideas that can become the source of new intellectual pursuits and conceptual assets. Acceptance of differences of positions, giving impulse to view too commonplace - that served as an impulse for raising the question of the normativity of philosophical discourse.

The situation of public functioning of philosophy today is being fundamentally changed in comparison with it that even was by the end of last century. The new opportunities of free appeal to philosophical concepts and meanings and their use by every participant of unlimited networks of open communication raise issues of preservation and protection of normative philosophical discourse. The author formulates the need in such normativity as an issue of difference between the context of reproduction and the (...) innovation one or as interdependence of reproduction and elaborating interpretation of normative meanings in philosophy. He takes attention to highlighting the issue of making and recognizing normativity in discourse/communicative practices that could be find out in works of Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas. It helps to clarify a role and place of validity claims in communication actions including their meaning in philosophical discourse. Following Habermas’ theory of both linguistic and contextual depending of discourse’s normative meanings the author pays particular attention to meaning creation role of lifeworld as a cultural context that determines communicators’s understanding. It gives an opportunity to point out a principle role of communicator’s position or his or her self-understanding the lifeworld context they embodied. It also makes it possible to demonstrate clear examples of inconsistency of philosophical discourses depending on the position taken by a philosopher as we can meet radical critical position of Roger Scruton in his assessment of many prominent European philosophers’ works. In conclusion the author stresses on dependence of capacity to get added interpretation value in philosophy not only from a level of theoretical knowledge, but from his or her personal appropriation of own horizon of cultural meanings. Following Habermas's theory of linguistic and contextual dependence of normative values of discourse on context, the author draws attention to the role in the creation of values of the lifeworld as a cultural context that determines the participant's understanding. It gives an opportunity to point out a principle role of communicator’s position or his or her understanding the lifeworld context they embodied. It also allows to demonstrate clear examples of inconsistency of philosophical discourses depending on the position taken by a philosopher as we can meet in radical critical position of Roger Scruton within his assessment of many prominent European philosophers’ works. In conclusion the author stresses capacity to get added interpretation value in philosophy depends not only on a level of theoretical knowledge a person owns, but from his or her personal appropriation of own horizon of cultural meanings. (shrink)

This paper addresses the multiple readings that Foucault offers of Descartes’ Meditations during the whole span of his intellectual career. It thus rejects the (almost) exclusive focus of the literature on the few pages of the History of Madness dedicated to the Meditations and on the so-called Foucault/Derrida debate. First, it reconstructs Foucault’s interpretation of Descartes’ philosophy in a series of unpublished manuscripts written between 1966 and 1968, when Foucault was teaching at the University of Tunis. It then addresses the (...) important shifts that took place in Foucault’s thought at the beginning of the 1970s, which led him to elaborate a new approach to the Meditations in terms of ‘discursive events’. Finally, it argues that those shifts opened up to Foucault the possibility of developing an original reading of Descartes’ philosophy, surprisingly close to his own interest in ancient askē sis and the techniques of the self. (shrink)

This paper addresses the multiple readings that Foucault offers of Descartes’ Meditations during the whole span of his intellectual career. It thus rejects the (almost) exclusive focus of the literature on the few pages of the History of Madness dedicated to the Meditations and on the so-called Foucault/Derrida debate. First, it reconstructs Foucault’s interpretation of Descartes’ philosophy in a series of unpublished manuscripts written between 1966 and 1968, when Foucault was teaching at the University of Tunis. It then addresses the (...) important shifts that took place in Foucault’s thought at the beginning of the 1970s, which led him to elaborate a new approach to the Meditations in terms of ‘discursive events’. Finally, it argues that those shifts opened up to Foucault the possibility of developing an original reading of Descartes’ philosophy, surprisingly close to his own interest in ancient askēsis and the techniques of the self. (shrink)

Uniquely among contemporary philosophies, Roy Bhaskar's system of critical realism and metaReality attempts to sublate (draw out the real strengths of and surpass) the philosophical discourse of modernity considered as a dialectically developing totality. This paper systematically expounds and comments on Bhaskar's metacritique of that discourse and situates it briefly in relation to Jürgen Habermas's earlier critique.

The article is devoted to historico-philosophical investigation of the grounds of universalism of special type. This universalism, inherent in transcendental thinking, was radicalized in quasi-transcendental discourse of Jacques Derrida. It is established that explicit critique of universalism in deconstructive philosophy is aimed at “logo-centric” paradigm of universality which is questioned by (quasi)transcendental philosophy. Constitutive function of difference and otherness in establishment of transcendental and especially quasi-transcendental universality was brought to light. It was shown that in (quasi)transcendental discourse (...) singularity is involved into the sphere of universal, whereas “dogmatic” universalism brought singularity and/or particularity outside, thus questioning its own claims. Tracing transcendentalist tendency to balance status and significance of universal and particular (singular), the author concludes that relation between them makes possible constituting hyper-universality of special type. Universal implications of the Derrida’s notion “quasi-transcendental” are defined. It was determined that one of the main factors constituting universalism of quasi-transcendental type is the deconstruction of binary thinking, accomplished first of all with the help of principles: differance, insolvability (aporia) and trace. Among them insolvability implies universality revealing the overlap and mutual conditioning of alternative (at a glance) elements. Instead, the trace conditions superiority of logo-centric alternatives “primary-secondary” and “presence-absence”. (shrink)

In this paper, a formal theory is presented that describes syntactic and semantic mechanisms of philosophical discourses. They are treated as peculiar language systems possessing deep derivational structures called architectonic forms of philosophical systems, encoded in philosophical mind. Architectonic forms are constituents of more complex structures called architectonic spaces of philosophy. They are understood as formal and algorithmic representations of various philosophical traditions. The formal derivational machinery of a given space determines its class of all possible (...) architectonic forms. Some of them stand under factual historical philosophical systems and they organize processes of doing philosophy within these systems. Many architectonic forms have never been realized in the history of philosophy. The presented theory may be interpreted as falling under Hegel’s paradigm of comprehending cultural texts. This paradigm is enriched and inspired with Propp’s formal, morphological view on texts. The peculiarity of this modification of the Hegel-Propp paradigm consists of the use of algebraic and algorithmic tools of modeling processes of cultural development. To speak metaphorically, the theory is an attempt at the mathematical and logical history of philosophy inspired by the Internet metaphor. And that is why it belongs to the tradition of doing metaphilosophy in The Lvov-Warsaw School, which is continued today mainly by Woleński, Pelc, Perzanowski, and Jadacki. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION ABOUT WHAT DO CONTEMPORARY LITHUANIAN PHILOSOPHERS PHILOSOPHIZE? JURATE BARANOVA This volume follows the volume Lithuanian Philosophy: Persons ...

This book builds on existing work in genre analysis and move analysis in English for Specific Purposes and applies this new framework to academic philosophical discourse, offering new insights into how ESP traditions can elucidate shifts in language conventions across disciplinary contexts. The volume begins by surveying the state-of-the-art in English for Specific Purposes and genre theory, as well as other genre theory paradigms before turning the focus on move analysis. Lucas and Lucas seek to maximize the potential (...) of move analysis to precisely operationalize functional units of discourse by implementing a cognitive theory of genre grounded in frame semantics. Using the case of academic research articles in philosophy, the authors demonstrate how this framework can reveal distinctive dimensions unique to philosophical discourse and in turn, how such an approach might be applied more broadly to examine nuances in language across disciplines and inform ESP research in the future. This book will appeal to students and researchers in English for Specific Purposes, discourse analysis, academic writing, applied linguistics, and rhetoric and composition. (shrink)

Resumen En este trabajo analizo algunos de los argumentos clásicos que la tradición retórica contrapone al discurso filosófico. Para ello, comienzo sobrevolando las características que definen al discurso filosófico de filiación platónico-cartesiana, y que son relevantes para la querella con la retórica. Luego intento elaborar un ataque en dos frentes. Por un lado, me detengo en la rehabilitación de la doxa como elemento vital del discurso práctico, en contra de la depreciación a que se ve sometida bajo el enfoque universalista (...) de la filosofía. Luego, tomando como base la noción de sentido común, analizo la idea de "auditorio", esencial para la retórica, y la consiguiente pluralidad de esferas de validez que conlleva. Dicha pluralidad horizontal contrasta con el monismo verticalista del discurso filosófico. Finalmente, en la conclusión dejo abierto uno de los problemas más urgentes de este movimiento pluralista que propone la retórica.In this paper I analyze some classical arguments used by rhetorical tradition to oppose philosophical discourse. To do this, I give a brief account of the characteristics defining the philosophical discourse of Platonic-Cartesian affiliation that are relevant for the dispute with Rhetoric. Then, on the one hand, I dwell upon the rehabilitation of doxa as a vital element of practical discourse in order to countering the downgrading of doxa by the universalistic approach of philosophy. On the other hand, based on the notion of common sense, I analyze the idea of "audience", essential for Rhetoric, as well as the resulting plurality of spheres of validity. This horizontal plurality contrasts with the vertical monism of philosophical discourse. Finally, in the conclusion I point out one of the most urgent problems of this pluralistic movement that rhetoric has proposed. (shrink)

As both Chinese philosophy and Indian philosophy have been largely marginalized on the world stage of philosophy in contemporary times, there is a pressing need to bring these voices into the discourse of world philosophy. This essay explores the value of taking into account the Confucian idea of harmony for postcolonial solitary and for a more equitable polycentric global academy. I explicate the concept and the value of harmony as exemplified in Confucian philosophy. I examine reasons of the disappearance (...) of harmony in dominant Western philosophical discourse by comparing various conceptions of harmony in the West. Greek philosophers Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Plato presented competing conceptions of harmony; whereas Heraclitian processive harmony presupposes opposites, tension and conflict, Pythagorean harmony and Platonic harmony are founded on a pre-determined order. In the contemporary West, from Karl Popper to Martha Nussbaum, harmony has been treated with disdain while it is taken in a Platonic sense. In East Asia, both Confucianism and Daoism take harmony/harmonization as an effective way to accommodate diversity and difference. I will then focus on the Confucian dynamic notion of “harmony with difference” and argue that such a conception is far from naiveté and it has important implications if it is taken seriously in contemporary philosophical discourse. (shrink)

Husserl’s Idea of Phenomenology is his first systematic attempt to show how phenomenology differs from natural science and in particular psychology. He does this by the phenomenological reduction. One of his achievements is to show that the formal structures of intentionality are more akin to logic than to psychology. I claim that Husserl’s argument can be made more intuitive if we consider phenomenology to be the study of truth rather than knowledge, and if we see the reduction as primarily a (...) modification in our vocabulary and discourse and not as simply a change in attitude. I briefly compare Husserl’s concept of philosophy with those of Plato and Kant. (shrink)

Uniquely among contemporary philosophies, Roy Bhaskar’s system of critical realism attempts to sublate (draw out the real strengths of and surpass) the philosophical discourse of modernity considered as a dialectically developing totality. This paper systematically expounds and comments on Bhaskar’s metacritique of that discourse and situates it briefly in relation to Jürgen Habermas’s earlier critique.

The contributions in our contemporary era have been tremendous: atomic energy for generating electricity, jet travel, near-instant communications, great advancements in medicine and treatment of diseases, and advances in education. For all these advancements, there is still poverty, ignorance, bigotry, and the call for a new religious domination. For all the brilliance demonstrated in our era, there are signs of darkness lurking not far away. These are the factors that will bring our era to a close, and another era--perhaps of (...) the darkness of religious domination and intolerance of the past in the form of another Dark Ages to rise in its place The contributions in our contemporary era have been tremendous: atomic energy for generating electricity, jet travel, near-instant communications, great advancements in medicine and treatment of diseases, and advances in education. For all these advancements, there is still poverty, ignorance, bigotry, and the call for a new religious domination. For all the brilliance demonstrated in our era, there are signs of darkness lurking not far away. These are the factors that will bring our era to a close, and another era--perhaps of the darkness of religious domination and intolerance of the past in the form of another Dark Ages to rise in its place. (shrink)

This article will examine some theses that Badiou developed in the first period of his philosophy, when he was close to the theoretical horizon of Althusserianism. The article traces a route back from the Manifesto for Philosophy to some yet unpublished notes, dating from the late Sixties, on an aborted collective project on materialist philosophy. While, according to the later Badiou – who is also the most well-known – contemporary philosophical discourse should recover the Platonic gesture after Heidegger, (...) it will be shown that the early Badiou, by debating the nature of the Platonic gesture with Macherey, seems to conceptualise philosophical discourse and its function under the inseparable link of dialectical materialism and historical materialism. The article ends with some open questions for a possible theory of discourse that would build on Badiou’s theoretical insights. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.1 (2003) 48-76 [Access article in PDF] Dialogic Characteristics of Philosophical Discourse:The Case of Plato's Dialogues 1 Frédéric Cossutta The dialogic is increasingly acknowledged as a fundamental factor in the study of human language, a factor that transcends its explicit presence in dialogue. Habermas and Apel are examples of philosophers who do not think of the dialogic as subordinate to the monologic, an approach (...) to reflexive consciousness inherited from Cartesianism; they also invest it with a constitutive dimension when they demonstrate its foundational role in knowledge and ethics. In their eyes, dialogue does not so much constitute ordinary human activity as create the conditions of its possibility. Thus with Apel this pragmatic dimension becomes transcendental, a dimension logically independent of the social or historical circumstances within which it is brought to bear, and one that is capable of playing the role of ideal regulator in the establishment of any community that is authentically human.My aim in this paper is to investigate the role that this dialogic dimension plays in philosophical discourse. If it is constitutive, and not derived, as Habermas and Apel claim, then it should be found at work in the history of philosophy. Indeed a number of philosophers and historians of philosophy have recently claimed an implicit dialogicity at the core of Descartes's Meditations, although these are actually presented in the form of a soliloquy (cf. Jacques 1979; Beyssade and Marion 1994; Bouvier 1996). But while it is true that every philosophy exhibits interdiscursive and intertextual dimensions even at the moment that it attempts to efface all traces of this interplay to present itself as a closed system, may we not question this dialogical property as constitutive of philosophical discourse as such? Philosophers who present their doctrines in the form of dialogues often use this form merely for the purposes of polemic, refutation, or instruction. There is, however, one famous exception: Plato, whose philosophy [End Page 48] is developed for the most part through a series of fictional dialogues, to which his talent gives an intrinsic "literary" quality. We thus have a case in which we can justifiably examine the philosophical value of the dialogue form. Historians of philosophy usually claim that the elements of his dialogues are no more than expressions of an underlying and constitutive dialectical dimension, though there is some dissent. 2 But I shall show that all of the elements of the dialogues, even the prologues and the settings, play a role that is intrinsically philosophical. Studying these elements will enable us to reveal the philosophical status of the dialogical dimension.I shall consider three hypotheses: (1) Though Plato's dialogues are literary rather than actual, their form cannot be reduced to the empty shell for an otherwise purely monological thought; there is an effective dialogism at work in both the early and the later Dialogues. This statement can be more easily accepted if it is recalled that philosophical activity for Plato consists of dialegsthai (Dixsaut 1985). 3 (2) In Plato, in effect, dialogue constitutes philosophical speech itself. The link between dialogue as a way of embodying doctrine and dialectics as an expression of the process of thought is intrinsic and necessary. Insofar as this link is necessary, dialogic activity cannot be characterized as an empirical practice of conversation, nor can it be reconstructed as a literary genre; rather, it is informed throughout by a philosophical theory whose explanation it makes generally available. (3) As a consequence, dialogic interplay at work in the Dialogues follows pragmatic rules that are not empirical in nature but possess a transcendental dimension and require ethical presuppositions. A parallel may thus be drawn between the Platonist conception of dialogue and the theory developed by Karl Otto Apel as "transcendental pragmatics" (1987 and 1994). This last point I shall dwell upon at length. Plato's Dialogues: Dialogism or hidden monologism? Paradoxically, the very thinkers who regard language as constitutively dialogic refuse to see this dialogism in Plato. It is true that at first sight the Platonic dialogues seem to turn the... (shrink)

The research is aimed at outlining aspects of the influence of the achievements of the culture of the third information revolution on the formation of the young generation in the philosophical discourse of the French philosopher M. Serres, revealing the features of the achievements of the third information revolution of modern culture, in particular in the spatial, temporal and, in fact, human dimensions, their influence on the formation of personality of the “hopthumb”. The theoretical basis of the study (...) is based on culturological and anthropological aspects of the influence of information and computer technology on the formation of personality, human self-awareness in the modern world. The methodology of M. Serres is used in the work. The scientific novelty of the proposed article is the analysis of the philosophical and pedagogical achievements of the French philosopher M. Serres, in particular, argued the presence in the scientific heritage of a famous contemporary doctrine of special characteristics and features of the modern young man, which the author calls " hopthumb" against the background of the formation of a new space of culture. In addition, the study of the theoretical constants of M. Serres made it possible to outline the signs of the third information revolution, to generalize and actualize the philosophical reflection on the self-identification of the individual in the new conditions. Based on the analysis of the work of the modern philosopher, the connection between the rapid achievements of the information revolution and the culture of younger generations was revealed and understood. (shrink)

Responding to a deep and universal need of philosophizing in the context of intensive intercultural interaction among all philosophical traditions in the process of globalization, this timely book offers a unique collection of excellent papers on inter-translatability, art, and ethics; subjects which are most crucial for intercultural conversations today. Instead of opting for a "comparative philosophy" that suggests the superiority of philosophy in comparison with other forms of thought, this book explores "inter-translatability" between East and West, given that any (...) dialogue between heterogeneous cultures and systems of thought has to start with translation, which constitutes the first part of this book. Art and ethics are the two areas that most obviously link philosophies of the past and the present and constitute a fundamental part of Chinese long-living and practical philosophy. The value of art and aesthetic appreciation, no less than ethics, is at the core of Chinese culture and, indeed, promises a great deal for the future world. Thus, they are dealt with here in the second and third parts. This book is also relevant to inter-culturalism in philosophy itself, as the contributors, firstly, come from several different continents and, secondly, though most of them are philosophers, all contributors are well-versed in other disciplines, such as anthropology, literature, religion, aesthetics, history of art, sinology, cognitive sciences, and social sciences. (shrink)

A DISCUSSION OF: CATHERINE COLLOBERT, PIERRE DESTRÉE, FRANCISCO J. GONZALEZ , PLATO AND MYTH: STUDIES ON THE USE AND STATUS OF PLATONIC MYTHS. MNEMOSYNE. SUPPLEMENTS, 337. LEIDEN/BOSTON: BRILL, 2012. PP. VIII + 476. ISBN 9789004218666. $222.00.

For Max Weber it was still a matter of course to understand the process of rationalization in occidental history as an outcrop of our modern world; and the classical writers of social theory have described the new reflective treatment of tradition and the differentiation of the spheres of life more exactly. In the fifties the “modernization” of societies was presented with neutral detachment, and Arnold Gehlen was able to maintain that rationalization in our “post-history” was proceeding in crystallized forms, but (...) was no longer able to make a creative critical appraisal of its own underlying suppositions. Subversive criticism tried to unmask reason as the will to power and was thus able to proclaim the post-modern age. It is the complicity between these conservative and anarchic forces that Habermas is here opposing, taking the project of modernity as something incomplete that is still waiting for completion. (shrink)

After tracing the historical origin of philosophy cafés, as part of the worldwide philosophical practice movement, this article explains how the Hong Kong Philosophy Café was founded and describes a typical meeting. During its first year of existence, an Executive Committee was formed, which oversaw the setting up of eight different branches over the next ten years. Following sections that describe the work of the Executive Committee and the distinctive features of eight different branches, the article concludes with a (...) summary of the current situation and reflections on how recent developments in social media are likely to affect the way such public meetings are organized, as well as their continued impact on the social and political engagement of Hong Kong citizens. An appendix provides the complete text of the Constitution that was approved by the Hong Kong Philosophy Café’s Executive Committee. (shrink)

The author of the article aims to find out the reasons for the modern rehabilitation of the history of philosophy, as well as to describe the factors that contributed to the negative attitude towards it in the past. The analysis of the factors and presuppositions of the criticism of the importance of the history of philosophy is based on the position of N. Malbranche, who understood historical and philosophical discourse as a useless reading of philosophical texts. The (...) study of the history of philosophy is the opposite of critical comprehension of the content. For Malbranche, there are also problems of the impossibility of mastering all the doctrines of the past, the lack of value in knowing about the reasoning of an individual philosopher, and the criterion for selecting interpretations of philosophical doctrine. The author concludes that the only thing that the history of philosophy can be as a reflection only in the "now" is its constant self-legitimation, because this is the only way to maintain its involvement in philosophy. (shrink)