This essay explores the relationship between boredom, leisure, selfhood, and education in Kevin Hood Gary’s book, Why Boredom Matters, paying particular attention to connections between Aristotelian and existentialist approaches to the subject. Following Gary, the essay argues that schools force students to endure boredom or try to stimulate them with distractions, rather than helping them focus on enduring sources of meaning or cultivate stronger senses of self.

This monograph discusses the question of what it is to be a reason – mainly in practical ethics – and proposes an original contribution to metaethics.It critically examines theories of metaethical realism, constructivism and error theory and identifies several misunderstandings or unclarities in contemporary debates. Based on this examination, the book suggests a distinction between a conceptual question, that can be answered by pure first-personal thinking, and a material question, that targets responses to reasons as a natural phenomenon in space (...) and time and that can be answered by help of the sciences. While this book defends a sharp distinction between these approaches, it also argues that the insights gained by the distinct approaches can be fruitfully integrated into a comprehensive picture.The comprehensive picture promoted in this book, based on both philosophical analysis and resources from psychology and cognitive science, is a picture of reasons as items in a collective archive of mind – reconfiguring the “domain of reasons” as a collectively established and socially cultivated fund of considerations with normative weight. The developed Collective Archive View combines Reasons Fundamentalism as an answer to the conceptual question, with a social ontological proposal, similar to Haslanger’s critical realism, as an answer to the material question.Thereby, it introduces central ideas from the field of social metaphysics into metaethics. At the same time, it offers a way of settling some controversies within metaethics, going on between proponents of Reasons Fundamentalism and Constitutivism, realism and constructivism, as well as proponents of mind-dependence and mind-independence of normative facts. Finally, the proposal enables us to envision and conceptualize genuine normative change within a metaethical theory. (shrink)

The author claims that the will to translation from foreign languages is an intrinsic tendency of development of any language. The article deals with the following problems of Ukrainian translation of the work «The Dawn of Day» by Friedrich Nietzsche: (1) Reproduction of the poetic style of Nietzsche’s writing. (2) Translation of Nietzsche’s neologisms that are not adopted in modern German language. (3) Interpretation of the influence of Nietzsche’s life experience on his thinking. -/- The author analyses his own experience (...) of translation of this work. He describes his strategy of translation which is based on the assumption that Nietzsche’s text should be translated not only as philosophical but also as a poetical one. The style of Nietzsche’s writing is deeply rooted in his life experience, and first of all in his illness. His main concepts express the fundamental aspects of existence. That is why Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s thinking can be used as methodological basis for translation of Nietzsche’s works. From this point of view we can understand and translate Nietzsche not only as a philosopher but also as a poet. -/- So the strategy of translation is based on the following principles: (a) The text should be interpreted in the context of Nietzsche’s life experience. (b) The principal words of Nietzsche should be understood not as rigorous notions but as «existentials». (c) The Ukrainian translation should reproduce not only the meaning of the original text but also the poetical style of Nietzsche’s writing. (shrink)

This article responds to Johan Dahlbeck’s ‘Towards a pure ontology: Children’s bodies and morality’, 2014, pp. 8–23). His arguments from Nietzsche and Spinoza do not carry the weight he supposes, and the conclusions he draws from them about pedagogy would be ill-advised in practice.

In the 80s of the XX century some philosophical and artistic events marked the irruption of what can be defined as a late-twentieth-century version of ‘divergent subjectivity’. Such subjectivity experimented new forms of life that express political and artistic projects different from those of the revolutionary 70s. These new modes of existence, accelerated by the scandal of truth, became autonomous and radical expressions in the research of an authentic self-organized form of life: “an existence that seeks a physiognomy to reveal (...) itself”. Through works like A Thousand Plateaus, Foucault and The Courage of Truth where the Deleuzian concept of “artistic will” lies, it will be possible to re-read chaos-operas1 like Learning to Cope With Cowardice, In the Beginning There Was Rhythm, and the musical pictography Piano Piece for David Tudor 4, the last one parodistically ushering in the new decade on the front page of Deleuze and Guattari’s plateau entitled Rhizome. (shrink)

This paper investigates forms of metaphysical vertigo that can appear when contrasts between humans and animals are challenged. Distinguishing three forms of vertigo and four ways of differentiating humans and animals, the paper attempts to achieve a perspicuous representation of what could be termed “the difficulty of being humans when we are animals”; or alternatively, “the difficulty of being animals when we are humans”.

. The present study applies results and methods of psychobiology to intellectual history. Pascal's syndrome is a depressive neurosis associated with morbid effects of scientific certainty. The syndrome is characterized by self‐mortification and conversion experience that represses distressing certainties. The dynamics of the syndrome are assessed from Blake Pascal's psychosis. The ideation of the syndrome is evaluated by reference to the neurology of altered states of consciousness and the biogenic amine hypothesis of depression and mania. The evaluation yields a description (...) of the relation between psychogenic and biogenic factors in the syndrome's etiology. (shrink)

The article takes critiques of the entanglement of law with violence as a point of departure for exploring the possibility of a ‘tertium of law’. It thereby seeks to overcome the dichotomous basic assumptions that see law as always oscillating between an apology for violence on the one hand, and a utopia of reason on the other. The text analyses the possibility of this ‘tertium’, a ‘legal force’ beyond legal violence and legal reason, in four steps, drawing on the work (...) of Jacques Derrida and authors of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, in particular on Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. It argues that in a first step law needs to be dissociated from the State. The violence of law, however, does not stem solely from law’s ties with State power. Law itself is violent even where it is not State law. The second step of legal critique thus needs to consist in the commemoration of legal violence, followed by a third that demands the transformation of violence to force. These three instances of critique are the precondition for a last and essential step according to which a critique of law must facilitate the transcendence of legal violence by taking law and its promise of justice at its word in order to turn this promise against law itself. (shrink)