Topic of the Issue: PHENOMENOLOGICAL THINKING
Issue editors: Valentin Kanavrov and Kristiyan Enchev
CONTENTS & Abstracts & Keywords
Abstract: There has been a linguistic turn, and there has been an ontic return, but I shall argue that the ontic return should go much further. I shall first illustrate the kind of philosophical method still prevalent today, and which I believe leads to false results. This is the method of conceptual analysis, paraphrasing, or ontological commitment. I call it the linguistic or the semantic method. To illustrate these methods, I will first present an example where they are at work, and will show how they lead to false results: Roderick Chisholm's theory of agent causation. Contrasting it with these methods, I shall then present a non-linguistic, ontological method for philosophy. After the total rejection of metaphysics in logical positivism, there were, within the movement of linguistic philosophy, some turns towards metaphysics, in particular Gustav Bergmann's reconstructionism and Peter Strawson's descriptive and revisionary metaphysics. I shall criticize these for still being linguistic or conceptual. Finally, I shall consider Frank Jackson's recent defense of conceptual analysis and argue that conceptual analysis cannot fulfill the task he ascribes to it. The motto I shall defend in this article is, in the words of Edmund Husserl, „Back to Things-in-Themselves“ – „Zuruek zu den Sachen selbst!“
Keywords: ontic return, ontological method for philosophy, metaphysics, thing, evidence, Gustav Bergmann, Peter Strawson.
Angel S. Stefanov – On the Paradoxes of Dynamic Time
Abstract: A fact known since ancient times is that the intuitive concept of time, as well as the dynamic concept of time, being a theoretical elaboration of the latter, gives rise to different paradoxes. The aim of the article is to reveal the genesis of the paradoxes concomitant with the dynamic (intuitive) notion of time. The author claims that they appear at the stage of conceptualization of the human mode of phenomenal perception of the world.
Keywords: paradoxes of the passage of time, mind-dependency of time, intuitive time, dynamic time, pure sensuous intuition.
Ivan Kolev – The Bulgarian Pediment. A Study in the Phenomenology of Architecture
Abstract: In this article I defend the productive quality of the phenomenological method. For this purpose, I consider its application to one specific example taken from the phenomenology of an architectural element. I make a phenomenological description and a hermeneutic interpretation of the pediment as an architectural element of Bulgarian Revival houses. The legitimacy of the phenomenological method is derived from the thesis of the metaphysical distinctiveness of the human being as a modal being. I support Professor Milko Bichev's thesis that the distinctive pediment of the Plovdiv-style house is baroque in character.
Keywords: phenomenology, human nature, modality, architecture, baroque.
Ivaylo Dimitrov – Phenomenology and Thinking without Faculties
Abstract: The article sketches an approach to an analysis of the reasons for the contemporary sceptical attitude towards the philosophical relevance of classical thinking in terms of the notions of faculties and forces. This distrust is regarded as one of the subversive points of a newly construed „neo-Kantian consensus“ between the opposite, more or less strict, borders of the contemporary philosophical analytic-continental rift. Husserl's scepticism towards the critical notion of the transcendental function of the power of imagination is analyzed in the context of the strong influence of the psychological and anthropological misinterpretations of Kant's transcendental deduction of the categories. In this context, of particular importance is Wolfgang Carl's elucidation of Kant's ubiquitous term Erkenntnisvermogen, construed as Quelle, in the sense of a source of epistemic justification of both the semantic contents and the objective validity of the concepts; it is thus clearly opposed to its false psychological reading (in the influential 19th century debate between Fries and Herbart) as a generative source of factual cognition.
Keywords: Husserl, Kant, thinking, faculty, force, imagination, neo-Kantianism, psychologism.
Kristiyan Enchev – The Double (Im)possibility of Metaphysical Form as a Virtualist Concept
Abstract: The article discusses a certain type of double impossibility of metaphysical form in the following sense: the impossibility of the form to proceed in a predictable way in terms of self-implementation and implementation towards live experience. The conceptually prominent virtualistic metaphor – the form „to unlock its own use“, holds in a positive way the extensional impossibility of language. In addition, the „unlocking“, as metaphorically connected with the concept of „pure form“, releases potentialities of words and images in such a way that the inconceivability of the pure form evokes, as co-participant, certain aesthetic ideas coming from the side of the image-schema and the relevant metaphorical imagery.
Keywords: double impossibility, virtualistic metaphysics, „to unlock its own use“, pure form, image-schema, metaphorical imagery.
Nevena Krumova – The Erotic Validity of Truth as An Inter-Individual Phenomenon
Abstract: This text attempts to clarify relations between love and truth, and the nature of that which is true – not in the sense of the truth about Being but as „the concept of truth in the intrasubjectivity of the existences“. The study is oriented to the late texts of Sartre and his attempts to deploy his ideas after Being and Nothingness. The article also draws parallels between objectivated and non-objectivated fear and non-objectivated Eros searching for the relation between the non-objectivity of Eros and the erotic validity of the truth. The text goes no further than the interpretative level and is not focused on language prior to the object.
Keywords: truth, eroticism, inter-individual phenomenon, non-objectivity
Abstract:The present article analyses in depth the transcendental specificity of contemplation in Early Buddhism and the functional significance of the Buddhist dharma theory. In addition, it describes the phenomenological procedures of Buddhist reductionism and compares them with the phenomenological paths of Western philosophy – particularly the phenomenological manner of thinking.
Keywords: transcendental philosophy, phenomenology, contemplation, Buddhist dharma theory
Stefan Popov – Perception and Finitude: Phenomenological Dimensions of Descartes's Proof of the Existence of the „Material Things“
Abstract: The critical appraisals of Descartes's proof of the existence of „material things“ commenced with the first readings of the Meditations and have continued ever since. From Hobbes to the contemporary Anglo-American realists, the proof has provoked confusion and numerous reconstructions, which look into its essential logical moves. A number of critiques have declared it unsuccessful and even somehow preposterous. Descartes's interest, however, is not in „material things“ per se or in the fact that they exist. Nor is it in the idea that something like a proof of their existence would guarantee both their own being and the being of what is called the external world. The focus of the proof is not on material things in the sense of an external world. Instead, it has a functional significance in a broader context, where Descartes is interested in the possibility of knowledge under the condition of finitude. Understanding the internal meaning of the proof of the existence of material things requires a phenomenological reading of the Cartesian meditation as a whole. From a phenomenological perspective, it is essential to account for and preserve the condition of perception as finite. In its relation to objects and object schemes, thinking discovers concepts in its own realm, within itself. Both thought and its objects thus carry the features of purity and infinity. Perception, on the other hand, is directly connected to finitude, which in turn is articulated in receptivity. Receptivity needs to have what is perceived as given. Descartes proof provides a procedural and schematic expression of this condition of perception, which requires that something be given outside of it and independently of it.
Keywords: Descartes, existence, phenomenology, external world, material things, perception.
Silvia Krasteva – The Phenomenological Discourse of the Category
Abstract: One of the fundamental results of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is the deduction of the system of the categories of understanding and the defining of the category only as an intellectual mode for producing the objects of knowledge. This poses the categories in active connection with the sensible manifold, but also raises the question as to how the categories participate in constructing an object. Kant formulates the problem of the necessary connection between category and appearance and offers two main approaches for its solution. The first approach, related to the categories, is based on the „combinatorics“ of the categories themselves, which fulfills the conceptual map of all thinking. The second approach uses other ways, which operate by means of the conditions of sensibility.
The aim of this article is to proceed further in the first approach and to deduce a special condition that provides the pure categorical approach to the phenomena. By considering this condition, we formulate the search for the discourse of the categories, the term that Kant uses to define the categorical participation in knowledge. The discourse of a category is the field for formatting the objects as parts of experience, as the totality of all objects. The discourse is directed by the higher conceptual points in the synthesis of the appearances; these are the four general concepts of classes in the system of categories. Each discourse is developed as a model of world-constructing, with its own type of objects, relations, ultimate reason of totality. Through this are outlined the basic conditions in the general project of ontology.
Keywords: Kant, table of categories (Kategorientafel), general concepts of classes: quality, quantity, relation, modality, discourse: range of a category, world-constructing, ontological models/beginnings upon the categories.
Valentin Eanawrow – How Is a Kantian Type of Transcendental Phenomenology Possible?
Abstract: The main intention of this article is to show how a phenomenology of a cognitive metaphysical and schematically constitutive type is possible. The latter is called Kantian phenomenology, in contrast with reductionist phenomenology, called Husserlian phenomenology. The phenomenon in Kantian phenomenology is philosophized as a transcendental form based on schematism, which reveals the transcendental condition of the necessary unity of knowledge.
Keywords: Kant, Husserl, transcendental, critique, transcendental schema, phenomenon, phenomenology, virtualistic transcendentalism.
Maya Georgieva – Genetic Phenomenology and the Problem of Intentionality
Abstract: Genetic phenomenology, according to Husserl, must reach the source of transcendental subjectivity. To accomplish this task, he created a series of concepts such as „passive synthesis“, „pre-reflective consciousness“, „proto-impression“, which change the perception of intentionality and the work of consciousness.
Keywords: genetic phenomenology, passive synthesis, proto-impression, time flow, intentionality
Stefan Dimitrov – Phenomenological Thinking: the Meaning of From. Heidegger's Phenomenology of Being
Abstract: The definition of phenomenon as the showing-itself-from-itself reveals the ontological importance of from for phenomenology. It aims to resolve the problem of the dual split of the foundation of metaphysics by proposing the ontological identity of the phenomenon, whereby it becomes a basis of phenomenological thinking.
There are two conditions for the possibility of phenomenological thinking: the reduction of thought to passivity, and being itself, which is accessible in a transcendence of ontological trust.
As a hermeneutic of being, phenomenology is an ontology of truth.
Keywords: hermeneutics, metaphysics, ontology, phenomenology
Vladimir Radenkov – The Non-Apriori Man Between I (Kant) and Self (Heidegger)
Abstract: The paper counterposes philosophical constructions of Kant and Heidegger in the perspective of the question under what conditions the „empirical“ man is independent and self-identical. A kind of „duality“ of that man is thematized, meaning that he/she exists simultaneously as present-at-hand, subsuming the contents of experience under himself, and as ecstatic, exposed to a transformative eventfulness. It is shown that Kant's I, persisting as one and the same, is rooted as self-relation in Heidegger's Self, which happens again and again by an ecstatic temporality. On the other hand, it is pointed out that the eventful Self needs the „hypostases“ of the present-at-hand I in order to be its own self and to be able to feed the steadiness of this I at all. The proposed thesis is that both sides of the „empirical“ man – the present-at-hand one, in which he/she withholds his/her identity, and the ecstatic one, from which he/she derives his/her own being – are complementary in the structure of sovereignty as developed by Carl Schmitt. In the sense of this thesis, the I is independent and self-identical as standing on the border between the „normal situation“ of one's constancy and the „state of exception“ of one's openness towards an occurring that is shared with others and therefore not subordinate to him, i.e. as „upgrading“ him/herself with the facticity of concrete situations that belongs to the existence that „carries“ the I and that would undermine the I in its quality of being integrated with it.
Keywords: presence-at-hand, representation, ecstatic temporality, horizon, productive imagination, appropriation, sovereignty
Stefan Penov – Encounters of Islam with Modernity
Dimitar Tsatsov – Philosophy of Religion, or The Original Sense of Philosophizing
Kiril Popov – Through the Eyes of the Soul
Ignat S. Minkov – A Philosophic View on Bulgarian History