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

Reconcilierea dintre sacru și profan în viziunea lui Paul Tillich

Mihai Androne — 2026-01-28

The philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich’s writings were
concerned with the connection between Christianity and secular culture. Thus, the
human person is a religious being, people’s activity has a religious significance,
religion is actually identified with their spiritual life, and people’s spiritual concerns
have a religious importance. But paradoxically, religion has found itself in the
strange situation of being confined to its own specific realm, different from the
secular one. But this weird split between the sacred and the profane will be
removed in the future that the Book of Revelation tells us about. Tillich highlights
the idea that the rupture between the sacred and the profane is neither possible nor
acceptable from a biblical point of view, the two realms being in a relationship of
harmonious interpenetration, and not of juxtaposition or opposition. Any attempt
to separate the secular from the sacred realm is the consequence and salient proof
of the deplorable situation in which the fallen man finds himself. This state of
division and conflict that we are currently witnessing is completely unnatural, as he
further argues: Paul Tillich disassociates himself equally from the extremist
positions of secularism and ecclesiastic imperialism. Just as he is not a supporter of
the divorce between the divine and the mundane, Paul Tillich also tries to find the
coordinates of a just relationship between religion and culture.

Suntem pregătiți pentru persoanele non-umane? Omul, animalul și robotul

Viorel Rotilă — 2026-01-28

The essay investigates the premises of the broadening of the notion of
“person” beyond the human species, in two converging directions: (a) the approach
of some animals to the “person zone” through relevant behaviors and cognitive
capacities; (b) the emergence of artificial entities capable of cognitive performances
that can rival those of humans. The argument is built around three landmarks: (1)
the world/Umwelt as its own mode of emergence; (2) “world” as a dynamic that
establishes meanings and relations; (3) the distance (historical and ontological)
between the meanings that animals and humans have in the world. On this basis, I
discuss to what extent a legal fiction of the “as if” type (in the spirit of the
“intentional stance”) can support the recognition of gradual forms of non-human
personhood. I conclude that the responsible expansion of the framework of the
person is possible without trivializing essential differences and without dissolving
humanism, although it modifies its traditional hierarchies.

Aparența care spune adevărul (O analiză a raportului dintre frumos, spirit și adevăr în gândirea estetică a lui Hegel)

Elena Grigoriu — 2026-01-28

Starting from Hegel’s idea that art is the place where truth takes on a sensible form, this article traces how beauty becomes the appearance through which essence becomes visible. Beauty is understood as an ontological expression of spirit, a space of reconciliation between the universal and the particular, between thought and the sensible. Art is viewed both as a means of knowledge and as an experience of lived truth, a free activity of imagination through which reality is transfigured and reveals its inner meaning. In poetry, this tension between form and content, between the finite and the infinite, finds its most authentic fulfillment. The appearance that tells the truth is, ultimately, the way in which spirit comes to recognize itself through the beauty of the world it creates.

Fundamente filosofice ale artei ca joc și existență întru mister

Codrin Vasiloancă Smirnov — 2026-01-28

The study examines the philosophical foundations of art as play and
existence-in-mystery, as these are articulated in the philosophical work of Lucian
Blaga, who, in an age dominated by positivist and phenomenological thought,
possessed both the strength to offer the last major synthesis in universal
philosophy and the originality to create a metaphysical system in which poeticity
and aesthetics constitute decisive arguments. We attempt to show that, among
human experiences, art is the one in which becoming-into-being is most clearly
illustrated, insofar as, as processuality, beyond what it expresses as an outcome of
the psycho-historical reality from which it arises, it has always expressed the
demiurgic dimension of the human being. In other words, if the human
distinguishes itself from other living creatures by anything, it is precisely through
its demiurgic aspect, through its compulsive desire to possess everything.
The first part of the study reviews the concepts of existence-in-mystery,
plasticizing and revelatory knowledge, as well as their corresponding notions, the
plasticizing and revelatory metaphor, proposing—together with Plato’s theory of
recollection and with Noica’s reflections—a theory of the imagination–memory
relation.
Finally, we place the play–art analogy within the perspective of aesthetics
and within the Blagian theoretical framework thus obtained, in which art appears
as a space of tension between the ludic freedom of form and the structural
inaccessibility of being, producing a specific mode of existence that coincides
neither with conceptual knowledge nor with purely subjective expression, but
establishes, as an epiphany of being, an objectification of mystery. Art, as existence into mystery, is a paradoxical object of knowledge: although it belongs to this world, it concerns the metaphysical one, but from the threshold of this one.

Orice filosofie este o poetică (II) Principiul relativității în metapoetică

Iulian Grigoriu — 2026-01-28

The article argues that the major forms of knowledge-science,
philosophy, the sacred, and the arts-are constitute forms of poetics, that is,
language games that possess ontological status, whose identity is preserved
through conceptual deformation and regeneration. The starting point is the
distinction between stable and unstable thinking: science and the sacred produce
stability (through verification and revelation, respectively), philosophy seeks
stability through intellectual intuition, and poetry cultivates creative instability.
This architecture is connected to a formulation of the "principle of relativity in
thought" which is responsible for preserving the identity of the rational approach at
the cost of conceptual deformation and transformation, but also for diversification
of poetics, in any creative and instituting act, language and reality are mutually
born. To apply the metapoetic principle, a classical lineage of the Logos is
reconstructed (Parmenides, Gorgias, Heraclitus, Platonism, and Stoicism), then it
is shown how in modernity, the same poetics emerges as polarized around the
problem of nature and the preservation of the ego, of the individual.

Timon din Atena, caz clasic de maladie axiologică

Ivan Ivlampie — 2026-01-28

In the article Illnesses and Deficiencies of Axiological Consciousness
from issue 13 of this journal, I presented arguments in favor of developing
philosophy along the lines of a medical theory that identifies and treats axiological
diseases—those illnesses that originate in our deviant desiderative acts and lead us
to behaviors that plunge us below the threshold of human dignity. Within that
framework, I also emphasized that this medical objective has been sporadically and
intuitively pursued, among others, by moralizing artists. In the present case, we
seek to identify one of the axiological diseases, misanthropy, and to illustrate it
through the figure of Timon of Athens.