Teesid: Selles artiklis vaatlen uuesti Jaan Oksa kurikuulsat kolmeosalist proosaluuletust „Emased“, „Ihu“, ja „Nimetu Elajas“ (1908–1909). Tuginedes arhiiviallikatele, keskendun „meeleolu“ ja „maastiku“ (paysage) kujunemisele nii poeetiliste vormide kui kujundite tasandil. Väidan, et meeleolu kirjutamine väljendab rahvusluse küsimust, haarates kaasa Vene impeeriumi soolise ja seksuaalse kriisi. Maastik toimib ka ema(maa) ähvardava kujuna. Oks põimib seega oma eksperimentaalses loomingus dekadentsi rahvuslusega ning hilise keisririigi seksuaalkriisi pärandiga, kehastades hullumeelse geeniuse kuju väljasureva ja ohustatud „soo“ – maa-eestlaste – nimel.
This article reconsiders the prose poetry of Jaan Oks—“Females” (Emased), “Body-Flesh” (Ihu) and “The Nameless Beast” (Nimetu Elajas) (1908–09) which have been collated under the title “Breed-Sex” (Sugu) (2004). Drawing on postcolonial and gender studies, I argue that Oks was not only a rural, but also a “provincial” decadent, whose prose poems enacted the decay of the Estonian language and the crisis of race within the decline of the Russian empire. Oks performed the role of a mad genius to the dying, endangered “species” of rural, peasant Estonians. The prose-poems are centred around a symbolist essence of differentiation and the word for gender (sugu), translated as breed-sex, which I read as a conjunction of race and sexuality, subjugation and objectification as colonial subjects and “enfleshment” as serfs. In the prose-poetry’s auto-erotic descriptions, the spectres of a matriarchy repressed under oppressive Christian patriarchies return as the motherly “Females” to engulf the narrator as a viraginous, fatally feminine nature.
Drawing on the analytic language of prior analyses (Luks 2024; Haljak 2024) I argue that Oks’s heretical metaphysics, with its dualistic poles of masculine and feminine, was informed by the colonial history of modernizing Estonia. This analysis follows the thinking of Amber Musser, Heather McClintock, and other post-colonial scholars who address how racialized regulations of gender and sexuality constitute social relations: Oks’s transgressions of sexuality express racial formation and the regulations of nationalism. Though Baltic Germans affected the enculturation of Estonians, and serfdom was ended in 1816 in the Governorate of Estonia, class differences between peasants and elite remained enormous, especially in Saaremaa. In the prose-poems, Oks describes the “flesh” (ihu) of this ethnically charged difference exacerbated by Russian imperialism and cultural aggression.
In the second part of this essay, I argue that the genre of “mood” (meele-olu) figures at two levels in the prose-poems: first within the text—following Schopenhauer’s philosophy—as elliptical descriptions of cyclical desire. Secondly, “moods” operate as the text itself, and represent the author’s attempt to revive Estonian literature through decadence and the prose poem. This second innovation follows Taine’s theory of art, according to which any work of art conveys the inherited “temperament” of a race. Similar to Yeats in his 1903 essay, “The Autumn of the Body” and his attempts to forge an “aristocratic esoteric Irish literature,” for both noble and low-class person, Oks linguistically innovated the Estonian language (Dowling 1986, 247–8). As I demonstrate through his criticism, Oks had not lost the revolutionary fervour of 1905 but rather taken on the self-sacrificial challenge of the “folk” or the incipient Estonian nation. In order to do so, his poetics underwent the “decay of literature,” following the organic metaphor which late Victorians gave nations and languages in their cycles of growth and decay (Dowling 1986, 46).
In the third part, I address the intersection of sex and race in the prose-poem’s poetics of landscape or paysage. I read the aggressive masculinity of Oks’ processual narrator and his preoccupation with the maternal function as expressions of racialized oppression. The third text “Nimetu Elajas” (1.7.1909) Oks labelled with the French term for landscape, paysage, a testament to the recurrence of rural milieu and the countryside throughout the cycle. I refer to the “mother(land)scape” as the description of landscape and mood by way of masochistic sensations of “female” submission. The motifs of domestic animals, livestock and the autumnal countryside repeat themselves within “mother(land)scapes.” The boundary between the body and landscape depended on the “mood” of present experience, which included the pornographic gaze and the affects of racialized difference, both threats to the homogenous ‘nation’ of the Russian empire and symptoms of a degenerate breed (Hearne 2021, 216).
In the final section, I turn to the third part of the cycle, “The Nameless Beast,” and further philosophical interpretations. Oks’s prose-poetry represents desiring-production as a pornographic transgression, what I call “porno-theology,” while his metaphysics may also be compared with Indian and Buddhist cosmological descriptions of the madness of the afflictions, disturbances in the mind of all living beings. In contrast to a Christian metaphysics, I follow the Schopenhauerian influence and suggest that the affective labour of the moods also can be read as the practice of viewing all beings as mothers in potentially infinite cycles of rebirth. Read as a compassionate act, the ecstatic self-immolation of the author-narrator becomes an autumn of the body on fire.
Pedro Antônio Viana Vazata, Paula Malcum Trein, Nathan Willig Lima
et al.
Given the ontological plurality associated with Quantum Theory (i.e., the multiplicity of interpretations of the theory), we investigated the approaches of 22 undergraduate textbooks in the process of composing a possible common world about electromagnetic radiation. In the work, we align ourselves, on the one hand, with the proposals of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, arguing that reality occurs through a cosmopolitical process in which non-transcendental multinatures negotiate to achieve common stabilization. These perspectives collide with a central metaphysics of modernism: a reality grounded in a unique and innate nature (called cosmopolitan). On the other hand, we started from Bakhtin’s Philosophy of Language to analyze the style of speech cited in the books. The main analysis of the text is to identify whether the books are cosmopolitan or cosmopolitical, and whether the boundaries of the cited discourse are explicit or erased. The results found in our analysis indicate that there is no ontologically stabilized electromagnetic radiation proposition when we consider all textbooks. However, as most of these same books hide the limits between propositions, it is evident that the authors simulate that there is a consensus in the scientific community regarding their ontology.
Special aspects of education, Theory and practice of education
The essential proposal of this text is that psychedelic-induced metaphysical experiences should be integrated and evaluated with recourse to metaphysics. It will be argued that there is a potential extra benefit to patients in psychedelic-assisted therapy if they are provided with an optional, additional, and intelligible schema and discussion of metaphysical options at the integrative phase of the therapy. This schema (the “Metaphysics Matrix”) and a new Metaphysics Matrix Questionnaire (“MMQ”) stemming therefrom will be presented, the latter of which can also be used as an alternative or additional tool for quantitative measurement of psychedelic experience in trials. Metaphysics is not mysticism, despite some overlap; and certainly not all psychedelic experience is metaphysical or mystical—all three terms will be defined and contrasted. Thereafter psychedelic therapy will be presented and analysed in order to reveal the missing place for metaphysics. Metaphysics, with epistemology (theory of knowledge) and axiology (ethics and aesthetics), is a defining branch of Philosophy. Metaphysics, in contrast to mysticism, is considered to be based on argument rather than pure revelation. Thus, in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy one sees here the potential bridge between reason-based philosophy and practical therapy—or, more broadly, with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy there is the potential and mutually beneficial fusion of philosophy with practical science.
Gunawan Gunawan, Muhammad Adyan Simanjuntak, Amroeni Drajat
et al.
This paper will elaborate on the use of Ibn Sina’s (Avicenna) metaphysics perspective in helping Politeknik Negeri Media Kreatif Medan students to understand Islamic theology and Islamic education axiology. The qualitative (library research) method will further analyze and dissect Avicenna’s metaphysics concept’s relevance to Islamic education. The writer argues that every idea or science that impacts society would have its methodology and objective to ensure its promulgation throughout the years. To achieve an apprehensible understanding, the writer will aim to explain basic knowledge of the idea of “being” and “intellect’’. Furthermore, Avicenna’s “being” and “active intellect” notion has been famous among philosophers and linked to many philosophical and mystical discussions. Therefore, it can be utilized as an essential foundation in understanding Islamic education. His metaphysics concept can explain complex exposition, as religious knowledge has been socially constructed for centuries. Scrutinizing constructed knowledge would require a concept that has the methodology to illustrate the possibilities of higher thinking—making Avicenna’s metaphysics a suitable concept to give profound comprehensive religious study for the student.
The article focuses on the reading of Waldemar Frąc’s film theory in the context of the newest film examples. In the first part, the author presents the most important features of the “possible cinema” and expands it with a philosophical possible worlds theory, and also gives the context of mind-game films. In the second part, the author proposes an interpretation of two films: Annihilation and Arrival, and the Dark series in the face of the presented theoretical solutions. The main point of the analysis is to show how the worlds presented in the given films exist, how the concept of possibility/the possible world is manifested, and what changes occur at the level of the film narrative itself. Interpretation of the film examples leads the author to the conclusion that metaphysical possibilism in the film and series reveals not only ontological themes, but also has significant intercultural value and moves existential reflection.
One of the challenges of religious language is how to reconcile these two theses: the transcendence of the divine realm and conventional reference to that realm. This challenge raised since it seems, at first glance, that ‘if the divine realm is transcendent, i.e., completely separated from the human realm, then one, a human, cannot make a fixed reference to that realm.’ In this paper, extending Putnam’s model-theoretic argument in metaphysics, I argue that this conditional statement could be true, and thereby the transcendence of the divine realm and conventional reference to that realm would be irreconcilable unless we adjust at least one of our presuppositions. I will show just three ways for this adjustment: Internal pluralism that says that the divine realm is mind-dependent; Some versions of apophatic theology according to which one cannot assert a true utterance about the divine realm; Claiming that language is a non-human phenomenon.
Philosophy of religion. Psychology of religion. Religion in relation to other subjects
This short paper is to provide answer to the question what is there outside the Universe? If the Universe is expending, what does it expend into? An answer was provided, the universe is expanding into its complementary universe. If that is so, then what the complementary universe is? A new perception is provided that matter exist as a logical state. What is the logical state creating matter? This question is being answered by the relationship between the universe and its complementary universe satisfying the equilibrium equation that total matter of both universes, the inner universe (our universe) and the complementary universe (everything which is not the inner universe e.g. the outside universe), collapse into zero, i.e. no matter. Furthermore, the existence of matter out of void is a logical state resulted from the void existence.
Recognition of the natural abundance and functional importance of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs), and protein hybrids that contain both intrinsically disordered protein regions (IDPRs) and ordered regions, is changing protein science. IDPs and IDPRs, i.e., functional proteins and protein regions without unique structures, can often be found in all organisms, and typically play vital roles in various biological processes. Disorder-based functionality complements the functions of ordered proteins and domains. However, by virtue of their existence, IDPs/IDPRs, which are characterized by remarkable conformational flexibility and structural plasticity, break multiple rules established over the years to explain structure, folding, and functionality of well-folded proteins with unique structures. Despite the general belief that unique biological functions of proteins require unique 3D-structures (which dominated protein science for more than a century), structure-less IDPs/IDPRs are functional, being able to engage in biological activities and perform impossible tricks that are highly unlikely for ordered proteins. With their exceptional spatio-temporal heterogeneity and high conformational flexibility, IDPs/IDPRs represent complex systems that act at the edge of chaos and are specifically tunable by various means. In this article, some of the wonders of intrinsic disorder are discussed as illustrations of their “mysterious” (meta)physics.
Islamic preaching (dakwah) is pious activity as inspreable part of Muslims life, not merely because of Islam as preaching religion, but also that religion is in fact embraced by the most people of the world, then the Islamic preaching as a kind of science is not rightly questionable. However, a fact that Islamic preaching is a kind of science is debatable yet among experts since the systematic form of Islamic preaching is not really different from the common communication with the communicator, communican, message, and channel. So it is also case for the Islamic preaching with da’i, mad’u, Islamic materials, and preaching media. Furthermore, this article attempts to set the Islamic preaching in the common sciences through an approach to philosophy of science in various perspectives, suchh as positivism, naturalism, phenomenology, and metaphysics, by integration between deductive and inductive theories. Before doing that, I attempt to do through the Islamic ways in the preaching because the Islamic preaching is not merely religious obligation, but also imprortantly a theoretical and praxical activity runnig on the basis of Islamic univeral mission, rahmatan lil al-‘âlamîn.
Rosa Colmenarejo Fernández, Paula Oliveira e Silva
The influence of the work and teaching of Francisco Suárez (Granada, 1548-Lisbon, 1617) in the shaping of modern thought has been widely studied in areas such as political philosophy and law, metaphysics, and epistemology. However, the moral philosophy of Suarez, in particular that which, as he himself explains, was needed as a basis for his moral theology, has yet to be analyzed. In this paper, we propose to elucidate some aspects of Suarez’s theory of human agency final causality. We compare two of his commentaries, from different periods, on the I-IIae of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae: the unpublished manuscript De beatitudine (1579) and Suarez’s treatise De ultimo fine hominis, the first of five treatises on morality posthumously published by Baltasar Álvares (1628). The question analyzed here, the nature of final causality, is assumed as a heuristic instrument to acquaint readers with both the sources studied and the philosophical import of Suárez’ doctrine on morality. The findings suggest the following: i) the closeness, still with doubts, of Suárez’ 1579 commentary to Thomas’ doctrine of human agency final causality; (ii) in the 1628 commentary, his partial assumption of Thomas’ doctrine on the role of intellect in free choice, and his clear determination in the assertion that the locus finis is the will. Working with these nuances, we illustrate some connection points that show both how 16th century scholasticism deals with philosophical tradition to explain a new image of man, and how subsequent moral philosophy is influenced by these theories while rejecting their theological foundation.
Thomistic personalism against modern
and postmodern anthropology
Summary
The article is divided into four parts which discuss the following subjects:
1) Anthropology of the late 19th and mid-19th century – consisting in the evolutionary
understanding of not only the genesis of man but also his personality,
psyche, culture and morality. This approach contrasted with the Thomistic
theory of man as a person, which was developed also at this time. Man understood
as a person can be characterized by the intellectual perception of
the surrounding reality, the freedom to act, and the love for others which goes
beyond purely physical relations. A human being understood in such a way
stands in opposition to every form of reductionism: biological, sociological,
cultural, economic, and legal. Man as a person grows above the physical, also
above his body which – despite being an integral part of human existence –
does not fall within the definition of a person. According to this view, man
cannot be reduced to his body, which is obvious, but also carnality does not
constitute a central theme of anthropology, that being a person. As a consequence,
the problem of the origin of the body becomes secondary and from
this perspective, even the acceptance of the evolutionary origin of the bodily
organs does not constitute a ground for negating the creative role of God in
the formation of man.
2) Anthropology of postmodernism is characterized by the “fluidity” of the
definition of man. This is caused by the “contingency” of man, which points
to individuality, diversity and lack of one metaphysics that could cover all
objects. A postmodern man believes in historicism (looking at phenomena
from the point of view of their historical evolution) and nominalism (there
are only individuals and their conventional names), so he can abandon any
metanarrative attempts to describe the essence of things. He creates his
own language of metaphors which he can use absolutely freely. According
to the theory of man as a person, postmodernism appears as a reaction to the
biological and socio-cultural reductionism that the science of the 19th and
20th century – with its scientism and technocracy – offered to man. It seems
that in this context one can pay attention to the typical characteristics of
a person (constitutiva personae), such as individuality, intellectual character
and freedom of the human being, which all give rise to its subjectivity and
far-reaching autonomy.
3) Anthropology of transhumanism advocates the widespread use of medical
science (including manipulation of the DNA code) and advanced technology
in human development, leading to the transformation of man into the
posthuman and beginning a new epoch of history called posthumanism.
Posthumans will be beings with far greater capabilities than human beings
today. In a discussion with transhumanism, the article referred to the fundamental
paradigms of philosophical thinking – Platonism and Aristotelianism.
It was considered that transhumanism is a form of Platonism with its
dream of making man angelic or divine. It results from the concept of man
as only the set of attributes and relations “mechanically” added to each other.
According to Aristotelianism, the form of human being is immutable in its
essence, and it is only the properties and relationships of a human being that
change. The Thomistic theory of a person belongs to a group of philosophies
originating from the Aristotelian school and – allowing for a great variability
of features and relationships – it does not consider them to be able to change
their subject – a human being into something else.
4) Social philosophers and philosophical sociologists record a number of negative
anthropological phenomena related to the already existing postmodern
and transhumanist “project”. These include primarily nihilism, scientism,
materialism, and identity loss, all of which results in the infantilization of
the human culture, and – in the economic field – in the economy of excess
and lack, i.e. the continuous deepening of financial differences (fortifications
of the rich and ghettos of the poor), while in the area of health it leads to the
deterioration of the mental condition of man. It is suggested that the subjective
and personal approach to man be opposed to extreme scientism, nihilism and
the objective and utilitarian use of man for the benefit and pleasure. Finding
oneself as a person can be a way for people to get to know themselves and
overcome a deepening identity crisis. Emphasizing the dignity of the person
and concern for the common good may be an attempt to leave the civilization
of excess and lack. Establishing personal relationships and caring for others
can inhibit the breakdown of interpersonal relationships, loneliness and the
loss of a sense of security, and it may help improve the deteriorating spiritual
condition of the postmodern human.
The article discusses the personality and legacy of Derek Parfit. He entered the
history of modern metaphysics and moral philosophy as a proponent of radical NeoLockean view on the issues of personal identity. Denying our basic metaphysical
and moral intuitions (identity for the person and moral responsibility), the so-called
«Oxford Buddhist» was a tireless preacher of hyper-rational altruism. His original
ideas and admirable arguments outlined only in few works were and remain at the
center of philosophical discussions
History (General) and history of Europe, Economics as a science
Secondary philosophical intelligibles are general philosophical concepts such as existence, non-existence, cause, effect and accident on which the life of Islamic philosophy depends. Muhammad Husayn Tabataba'I has tried to propose a comprehensive theory about the way through which secondary philosophical intelligibles are originated. He believes that these intelligibles are first understood through relational concepts and then non-relational concepts are abstracted from those relational ones and generalized. This article tries to give a clear formulation of the theory with four phases (in addition to its foundations) using Tabataba'i's works and Motahhari's comments. The resuts of this research study shows that these concepts are not delusion. It also depicts that these concepts are not extracted from internal or external experiences or primordial human nature (fitrah) but are created from perceptive faculty. In addition, some other key issues to which Allameh has not paid enough attention, such as how to generalize the concept of secondary intelligible which has been abstracted from a special mental state to the whole world and the relationship between secondary intelligible obtained in the mind and the object to which the secondary intelligible refers, have been stated and the researcher has tried to find answers for these questions.
The article is an attempt to critically evaluate the manifestations of the philosophical culture sprouting in Rus’. With the baptism in the Byzantine Rite, Rus’ in the 10th century joined the family of Christian nations and defined the future direction of her own cultural development. The Middle Ages in Rus’ were eminently theocentric. Literature (which was mostly translated from the Greek in Bulgarian monasteries) had a religious character. Sacral content, assimilated in Rus’ mainly through the Old Church Slavonic (due to the scarce knowledge of Greek) had a decisive influence on formation of the philosophical worldview of Rus’ intellectual elite. The Bible thus became the main reference framework for the first Rus’ thinkers-philosophers: Ilarion of Kiev († 1055), Kirill of Turov († 1183) and Kliment Smolatič († 1164). Ilarion of Kiev, the first metropolitan of the Kievan Rus’ in his rhetoric work (which postulated the superiority of the New Testament to the Old) expressed a philosophical thesis of the equality of all Christian nations before God. Kliment Smolatič, the second metropolitan of Rus’, in his Letter to Presbyter Foma, defended the allegorical method of interpretating the Bible. Kirill of Turov, in his turn, in his Parable of the human soul and body allegorically tried to answer the question about the relationship of the body and the soul. For the Rus’ thinkers the content of the Bible served as a pretext for philosophical reflection, e.g. on the role of man in the universe, on the nature of reality, on the relation between matter and spirit. In their works we find the beginnings of the theory of knowledge, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics.
Slavic languages. Baltic languages. Albanian languages
Cicero (De natura deorum 1.13.35), Clement of Alexandria (Protrepticus 5.58) as well as Proclus (In Timaeus 35А) inform us that Theophrastus [372–287 BCE] inclined to identify the god and the sky (the stars are animated therefore divine). In the paper we will see that, indeed, the student of Aristotle frequently professes ideas that would surprise the philosopher of Stagira. For instance, he frequently insists that the kosmos is a living and ordered universe (the whole), and its innate movement is something which cannot be explained with the help of hand-made teleological constructions, such as the first mover. The analysis of the Metaphysics is supplemented in the paper by observations based on Theophrastus’ (Syriac) Meteorology and a selection of the fragments of his lost scientific works. The Metaphysics is translated into Russian for the first time.
Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature, Philosophy (General)
The “transformation problem” in Marx’s Capital (how to make compatible the labour theory of value from the first book with “prices of production” from the third book) has been one of the main reasons to refute the marxist theory and, at the same time, a privileged matter in order to analyze the method question. In this paper, we try to analyze the sense and foundation of the labobour theory of value discussing with any attempt of reading Marx Capital as the development of a supposed “dialectic method”. Analyzing the manuscripts and drafts that Marx did not finish, we try to defend that, contrary to what Engels thought (because it had been anounced by Marx himself), it is not possible to find in the third book a trace of the so expected “dialectic solution” to the “transformation problem”. That demands, of course, a different interpretation to explain the sense of the “transformation” of value into “production prices”.
Working with the apartheid archive demands a spectral scholarship - an engagement with the dead and the past, and the unknown of a future-to-be. This "hauntology" poses challenges unlike those of a traditional, evidentiary ontology and epistemology. Indeed, to the extent that it is an ethical metaphysics, as proposed by Emmanuel Levinas, that motivates all knowing, including that of the self and psyche, the manner of the researcher's response is in the order of witnessing and testimony. As particular mode of response, the witness who testifies sees his or her task less in terms of generating totalising thematic knowledge, than in tracing the limits of knowledge in the experience of the other.