Robert Saudek, a Czech graphologist, journalist, diplomat, playwright, and novelist, was heavily influenced in his youth by Fritz Mauthner’s critique of language. Saudek later became a pioneer in the field of psychological graphology. In this article, I examine the impact of Mauthner’s critique on Saudek’s work and evaluate whether Saudek’s approach to graphology aligns with Mauthner’s ideas. I argue that, although Saudek’s graphology is rooted in Mauthner’s critique of experimental psychology, there remains room for further development in the field of (...) psychological graphology, centering on the analysis of language. With this in mind, I compare Saudek’s method and contemporary conceptual metaphor theory. I further suggest that Saudek’s extensive use of the autographs of well-known figures follows a method of working from examples, or specimens, which is not uncommon in the philosophy of science. Based on these findings, I propose a way of understanding Saudek’s graphology that challenges its characterization as a pseudoscience. (shrink)

This article examines the special features of the atmosphere in Habsburg’s Vienna, which led to the formation of such a direction in philosophical thought as a critique of language (Sprachkritik) and the influence its representatives such as Karl Kraus and Fritz Mauthner on the later Ludwig Wittgenstein’s views on language. I argue that Sprachkritik was inextricably connected with Sprachkrise (crisis of language), Sprachkrise was a strongly Austrian phenomenon due to special socio-cultural-political reasons and which led to the consideration of the (...) very phenomenon of language from a new point of view. Here I claim that Ludwig Wittgenstein, a ‘product’ of Habsburg’s Vienna, was strongly influenced by the intellectual atmosphere of the critique of language reigning in it. In Roberto Poli’s (1997: 16), scholar in sociology and philosophy, words, the “language-world relationship was a central element of the intellectual debate of those years: suffice it to mention Rainer Maria Rilke and Hugo von Hofmannsthal among writers, and Fritz Mauthner and Ludwig Wittgenstein among philosophers.” . (shrink)

'Reason, Causation and Compatibility with the Phenomena' strives to give answers to the philosophical problem of the interplay between realism, explanation and experience. This book is a compilation of essays that recollect significant conceptions of rival terms such as determinism and freedom, reason and appearance, power and knowledge. This title discusses the progress made in epistemology and natural philosophy, especially the steps that led from the ancient theory of atomism to the modern quantum theory, and from mathematization to analytic philosophy. (...) Moreover, it provides possible gateways from modern deadlocks of theory either through approaches to consciousness or through historical critique of intellectual authorities. This work will be of interest to those either researching or studying in colleges and universities, especially in the departments of philosophy, history of science, philosophy of science, philosophy of physics and quantum mechanics, history of ideas and culture. Greek and Latin Literature students and instructors may also find this book to be both a fascinating and valuable point of reference. (shrink)

Luuletajad Jaan Kaplinski ja Tomas Tranströmer, keda lahutas raudne eesriie, kasvasid üles väga erinevates maailmades. Ent siiski said neist hingesugulased. Artiklis osutan, kuidas nende läheduse tuuma iseloomustas sügavalt juurdunud hoiak, mis põhines ökoloogiast inspireeritud maailmatunnetusel. Tugevasti lihtsustades võiks öelda, et oma egosse investeerimise asemel nägid mõlemad luuletajad end millegi suurema teenritena. Nad hindasid mõlemad kõrgelt avatuks jäävat vaadet enestele, oma tööle ja maailmale, millesse nad kuulusid. Kui nende egod viibisid pidevas taandumises, avardus nende vastuvõtlikkus maailma suhtes ning köitvus luuletajatena. --- (...) Separated by the Iron Curtain, Jaan Kaplinski and Tomas Tranströmer grew up in very different worlds. And yet, they became soulmates. What then informed the core of their kinship? This article aims to show that it was above all a deeply rooted sentiment grounded in an ecologically inspired view that brought the two poets together. To put a complex matter all too simply, Jaan Kaplinski and Tomas Tranströmer saw themselves as servants of something bigger: they shared a profoundly felt sense of “openness,” something which also lies at the heart of their success as poets. In Jaan Kaplinski’s and Tomas Tranströmer’s work and habits of thought, this core sentiment left easily overlooked but nevertheless telling traces. They include, as this article points out, their conversation concerning the translation of an essential term in Eastern thought, namely śūnyatā. Tranströmer followed Kaplinski’s unique suggestion, which was meant to capture more of the essence and spirit inherent in the term śūnyatā. As a consequence, in the final version of one of his best-known poems, entitled “Vermeer”, Tranströmer changed to “openness” what in Buddhism is commonly referred to as “emptiness”. Yet probably more significantly, what above all held Kaplinski and Tranströmer captive, as this article also aims to show, is a reversal in our understanding of the ego. Collectively, both poets agreed, we, as human beings, would be well advised to embrace a less intrusive role in the world to which we belong. Importantly, what Kaplinski and Tranströmer advocated does not amount to an impoverishing stance. On the contrary: only when we step away from our previous deeply entrenched positions of human dominance, both poets agreed, a richer world and more sustainable sense of self can come into view. To at least gain a glimpse of the fuller complexity of what brought both poets together, the observations offered in this article are meant to help us understand how, for Kaplinski and Tranströmer, changes in our view of the ego embody “openness”. Instead of increased ego noise, they urged the merit of a more modest ego. Not preoccupied with themselves, their goals and desire to intervene, both poets wrote poems focussed on the diminished ego as a key value. The more we step into the background – Kaplinski and, together with him, Tranströmer believed – the more the world opens up and the more we ultimately flourish. In addition to seeing “openness” surface in their self-effacing view of themselves, and, associated with it, their concentration on a vision of a world beyond human design, this article furthermore draws attention to another equally prominent manifestation of “openness” that brought both poets together: how can language make “openness” appear, they asked? We are invited to consider several intertwined answers Tranströmer and Kaplinski offered. They include embracing the untamed and stepping away from any decorative use of language – “all rhetoric must be left behind,” Tranströmer, echoing Kaplinski, categorically insisted; evoking the self-cancelling of language itself; or moving altogether beyond language: seeking to transcend it by employing a theme, introducing a practice, or setting up a signpost, all meant to point away from language. And finally, in league with “openness”, “silence” also constitutes a shared recurring theme in Kaplinski’s and Tranströmer’s work, as this article suggests. In order to better explain the importance of “silence”, the article draws attention to American composer John Cage. Informed by the altogether different logic of “openness” Cage employed, for him “silence” became the performance, as it were, and the ambient sounds of the concert hall its music. Acting as a particularly compelling embodiment of “openness” – not unlike the blank page of the poet, the unpublished manuscript of the writer, or the white canvas of the painter – “silence” too united Jaan Kaplinski and Tomas Tranströmer, as servants in their masterful quest for “openness”. (shrink)

The short section included in this issue of Flusser Studies is an excerpt from my dissertation. It is part of the first chapter, a biography of Flusser. The text attempts to sketch a few of the countless influences Prague and Central European cultural traditions have exerted on the young Vilém Flusser. It is preceded by a section on his Prague origins. The dissertation also includes a second, related, excursus titled “Currents of Media History II. – The Prague Flusser Left behind.” (...) The dissertation was conceived as a general view on Flusser’s work and life that could also serve as an introduction to his thought. From my point of view, Flusser should be considered, above all, a phenomenologist of different forms of communication. The dissertation begins with a biographical introduction followed by a study of various aspects central to his thinking: media, code, apparatus, and dialogue. Furthermore, the history of his reception is dealt with extensively. The phenomenology of media, the philosophy of communication, and questions of cultural anthropology are reinterpreted within a Czech-German and Jewish Habsburg-Austrian environment that proved to be a fertile ground for the development of Flusser’s interests. In fact, Flusser can be regarded as one of the last representatives of the short but amazingly rich intellectual blossoming of the Jewish-Czech-German culture that was abruptly truncated by the German invasion of Prague in the spring of 1939. Taking into account the massive impact these cultural traditions of Old Central Europe had on Flusser, I argue that, in the development of Flusser’s thinking, a projection of Prague’s past onto the Brazilian future is recognizable. The source of this projection also sheds light on the consequences Flusser drew from the failure of the “Brazil Project” in the early 1970s. (shrink)

In order to understand Hegel’s form of philosophical reflection in general, we must read his ‘speculative’ sentences about spirit and nature, rationality and reason, the mind and its embodiment as general remarks about conceptual topics in topographical overviews about our ways of talking about ourselves in the world. The resulting attitude to traditional metaphysics gets ambivalent in view of the insight that Aristotle’s prima philosophia is knowledge of human knowledge, developed in meta-scientific reflections on notions like ‘nature’ and ‘essence’, ‘reality’ (...) and ‘truth’, about ‘powers’ and ‘faculties’ – and does not lead by itself to an object-level theory about spiritual things like the soul. We therefore cannot just replace critical metaphysics of the human mind by empirical investigation of human behaviour as empiricist approaches to human cognition in naturalized epistemologies do and neuro-physiological explanations propose. Making transcendental forms and material presuppositions of conceptually informed perception and experience explicit needs some understanding of figurative forms of speech in our logical reflections and leads to other forms of knowledge than empirical observation and theory formation. (shrink)