The Annals of “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati. Fascicle XVIII: Philosophy

Wolfhart Pannenberg și antropologia filosofică a secolului 20

2025-05-22T12:13:40+03:00

Wolfhart Pannenberg is one of the most prominent Protestant theologians of the past century, whose vast work is at the crossroads of theology and philosophy. Concerned with the field of philosophical anthropology and interdisciplinary research, Pannenberg tried to capture in his writings the specifics of human existence by means of the notion of “openness to the world”: this concept acquires in his work a religious meaning, since by world-openness Pannenberg really means God-openness. Only man, as a rational and personal being, is able to transcend his environment and thus himself; man is an open being through his very ontological structure, and all the resources at his disposal. The study of Wolfhart Pannenberg’s doctrine may constitute an introduction to the past century’s philosophical anthropology. In his book Anthropology in Theological
Perspective he presents man from a multiple perspective, “in nature” “as social being”, as a cultural and religious being, thus debating the anthropological theories of important representatives of philosophic anthropology in the modern era and our own time, such as J. G. Herder, Max Scheler, Arnold Gehlen, Helmuth
Plessner, Adolf Portmann, Martin Heidegger. This work by Wolfhart Pannenberg is worth studying in all philosophy schools, especially by those who believe in the virtues of the dialogue between philosophy and theology, and in the beneficial character of interconfessional dialogue.

Orice filosofie este o poetică (I) Asemănări de familie. Filosofie şi poezie

2025-05-22T12:14:10+03:00

This article is part of a broader study examining the relationship between philosophy and poetry, focusing on the fact that both disciplines create language and employ natural language in a creative manner. The relationship between poetry and philosophy—specifically, between language and knowledge—is
explored within a discussion of poetic ontology and gnoseology. Poetry is deconstructed here along two dimensions, ontological and gnoseological, into the Poetic and Poetics, and is regarded as a source of philosophy, science, art, and the sacred. The article advances the following key ideas:
-The nature of the Poetic is to bring forth both reality and possibility.
-Metaphysics serves as the medium for the transition and understanding of the shift from the Poetic to Poetics, between Being and Non-Being, Materiality and Immateriality.
-The mystical is viewed as a poetic factor in the relationship between the Poetic and Poeticity, between ontology and gnoseology, between the manifestation of Being and its expression.
-The meaning of any philosophy, science, art, or sacred discipline is inherently poetic.
-The multiplicity of Poetics arises from the need for reality, coherence, certainty, and continuity within our existential given.
-The need for reality is absolute, serving as the determinant of all existential givens and acts. However, the fulfillment of this need is constrained by our existential and cognitive dimensions. Therefore, our reality is poetic in nature, limited and mediated categorically.

Two types of disjunctions underpin the poetic and the poeticity of the world: the gap between the need for Reality and Reality itself, and the disjunction between the Reality obtained and its knowledge, expression, and
representation.
-Everything we can conceive, think, articulate, act upon, begin, or conclude belongs to the Poetic and its poetic expression.
-A Poetics is an apparent representation of the world, a conceptual game that may be contradicted but cannot be entirely dismissed or denied. The article revisits and expands on the theme of the Unifying Principle of Relativity in philosophy, offering various formulations of this principle as explanatory syntheses of a metaphilosophical nature, underlining the idea that all philosophy, science, art, and approaches to the sacred are forms of Poetics.

Critica structuralistă a conceptului marxist de alienare

2025-05-22T12:14:41+03:00

Any debate on alienation almost inevitably involves reference to Karl Marx’s theories. Inherited from Hegel and Feuerbach, the concept of alienation reached a true philosophical elevation in Marx’s writings, being constantly reworked from his early philosophical and political writings to his mature works. One of the weaknesses—if not the greatest weakness—of the concept of alienation is undoubtedly its almost necessary reliance on the (at least implicit) determination of a human essence from which individuals are presumed to have become estranged. The essentialism underlying the concept of alienation, challenged by the
structuralist movement in France, led to its progressive abandonment within the conceptual framework of political and social philosophy starting in the 1960s and 1970s. The aim of this article is to highlight what a non-essentialist concept of alienation might look like. Our research is based on the model of (epistemological)
rupture between an ideological perspective (that of the actors) and a scientific perspective (that of the social critic), a position particularly strong in France, where it was notably supported by Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu.

Democrația – regimul politic al compromisului

2025-05-22T12:15:17+03:00

My paper will describe and explore the concept of compromise as it was analyzed by the Romanian politologist Alin Fumurescu and then, apply this concept on democracy, as a political regime. Furthermore, I will present the specific aspects of democracy as a regime of compromise in Romania, trying to figure out the real impact of social media on the democratic behaviour of citizens. Thus, compromise will be discussed both from the perspective of the government, as well as from the perspective of relations between citizens in the public sphere. Is compromise still possible in the technological era of social media or are we in a crisis of identity, as Fumurescu states in his book „Compromise: A Political and Philosophical History”?

Unitatea funcțional-organică (a conștiinței) ca alternativă la unitatea substanțială, în budhismul Yogācāra

2025-05-22T12:15:51+03:00

Yogācāra Buddhism, the idealistic branch of Mahāyāna, features a moderate ontology, more inclined to realism, which gives a certain degree of reality to manifestation. According to this ontology, Yogācāra's view of universal unity is organic-functional rather than substantial. The cosmos is unitary not because of an
alleged ontological reduction to a single substance, as in primary Mahāyāna or Brahmanism, but rather because of a unitary functioning, in close inter-relation, of all its components. The approach to universal unity in Yogācāra is cosmological rather than metaphysical, with unity residing in the manifesting pattern of
plurality. For Yogācāra, the entire manifestation represents the ideation of a cosmic consciousness, known as the „store-house consciousness” (layavijna). The main aspect of the store-house consciousness is to unify in a single causal flow the whole experience, be it in an actual, manifested form, of factors (dharma), or
only in a potential form, of karmic seeds (bja). The continuity and stability provided by the store-house consciousness is not a substantial continuity or stability, but only one consisting in the regularity of
succession. The store-house consciousness is, in respect of its content, substance, nothing more than the elements that compose it. Since all factors are momentary flashes, the store-house consciousness equally shares their momentary character. The ontological status of the store-house consciousness represents a middle way between the extreme of permanence (vata) and the nihilistic one, of „destruction” (uccheda). The nature of the store-house consciousness provides continuity, regular succession to manifestation, but without introducing any persistent entity. Its function is the one ascribed by Mahyna to the series of
conditioned coproduction (prattyasamutpda), that is to represent a middle way between non-existence and reality.

Le Concept de Jeu Dans L’Anthropologie Nietzschéenne: Spiritualité et Dépassement

2025-05-22T12:16:19+03:00

This research aims to retrace the different phases that the artistic creation of the artist Paolo Sistilli progresses through the foundation of Nietzschean thought. We will define the main metamorphoses of the central character of Nietzsche's book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. What are these concepts?
Why does Nietzsche refer to the Persian fire prophet Zoroaster as the prophet of eternal return? What is the relationship between the two? Is it calling the status of man into question? I refer to the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze: “Dialectics is this art which invites us to recover alienated properties. Everything returns to the
Spirit, as the engine and product of the dialectic; or self-awareness; or even to man as generic.” First, isn’t man a creative artist? We ask ourselves; we try to seek and understand this desire to create. Man has a power within him that requires his liberation. So, can we not say that the human mind is like a child creating meaning? We can understand that Nietzsche reveals the hidden face of man. His identity is hidden through his childish soul. So, can we say that art is a game? Are art and play a way of acting on the world? Can we affirm that the artist is seeking this return to the past? This childish freshness that radiates within him? Is the artist trying to reverse time?

Etica legii în viziunea lui Nikolai Berdiaev

2025-05-22T12:16:58+03:00

Nikolai Berdiaev interprets human destiny also from the perspective of moral behavior, focusing on how humans relate to the values of good and evil. His interpretive criterion goes beyond the classical standards of ethical treatises. Thus, by identifying the origins of human moral nature in the biblical myth of the Fall, he
distinguishes three historical categories of ethics: that of law, salvation, and creation. Our interest in this study is focused on the ethics of law, which is privileged in philosophical theories. The aim of the investigation is to capture the limits of this category of ethics and determine the status of classical moral theories.

Alcibiade, ca apărare a lui Socrate

2025-05-22T12:17:26+03:00

In books on the history of philosophy, the ideas expressed by thinkers as they arise out of the events of everyday life are totally neglected in the university teaching of philosophy. These events largely provide explanations, like tectonic forces, for one kind of creation or another. Ideas are not usually born from ideas,
but from the lived experiences and feelings of their promoters. These deep states of mind form convictions of equal depth. It is what slips off the scenario of history of philosophy treatises. Perhaps that is why a work like Diogenes Laertius’ The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers has survived. The attempt in this article is
an invitation to imagine the time when a dramatic event in history gave birth to an opus. For the "neglect" to which I have drawn attention above, we submit the following for observation: how many of us realize that Socrates was in magnificent dialog with the City in its times of war? In times of plague, famine, bad news from
the warfront, low hopes for peace, cruelties and decimation of populations, all between 431-404 BC.