Sententiae

The study of the peculiarities of the reception of such an essential concept of the philosoph-ical Corpus Dionysiacum Areopagiticum as ὑπερούσιος in ancient Slavic translations has is promising. It allows not only to understand better the internal perspective of the development of philosophical terminology in Rus’-Ukraine, where in the 15th–17th centuries, there existed a sig-nificant number of manuscripts of the corpus, but also to strengthen the argument in favor of its dating precisely in the 5th century. According to the conceptual features that are present in the Greek text of De divinis nominibus and are confirmed in the studies of Slavic translations of the Corpus Areopagiticum, this work, preserved also in other languages, could belong to an author, who uniquely combined his Christian views and a philosophical vision of the world that was inspired by his Neoplatonic education at the Alexandrian School of Philosophy under the guidance of the eminent Neoplatonic thinker and mathematician Hypatia, who was well acquainted with the ideas of Plotinus and the whole Alexandrian intellectual tradition. It is possible that this author, who used the ideas of Plotinus and Porphyry and for the first time unfolded the idea of the Christian God as the Hyperousios in the aspect of the Christian Triad in his philosophical hymns and treatises, could be Synesius of Cyrene, Bishop of Ptolemais.

The paper aims to prove the hypothesis that Sextus Empiricus’ Neo-Pyrrhonism is significantly influenced by the Cartesian meditation as a genre of philosophizing. It refutes theses about (1) the non-predicativity of Sextus’ language and about (2) Sextus’ epochê as an automatic result of the action of opposite things or statements, and it argues that both Sextus and Descartes distinguish between (a) internal (forced) agreement with clarity and (b) the personal acceptance of this agreement which depends on a volitional decision. Sextus’ recognition of the clarity of appearance as appearance gives Descartes the only chance to refute the skepticism of Sextus, which is invulnerable to external criticism. Therefore, Descartes developed meditation as a special model of purely immanent criticism (the very word “skepticism” is never mentioned in the Meditations), focused on dealing with states of clarity and evidence. The author’s hypothesis is that the key elements to which this model appeals are the “history of a skeptic” set out in Outlines of Pyrrhonism and the conception of skeptical expressions. This hypothesis can be tested further by proving or disproving the thesis that the discourse of I, II, and at least partially of III Meditations is based on the pattern of skeptical expressions, focused on the internal states of the speaker, and not on clarifying the “objective” state of affairs (i.e. not on dogmatic inferences).

The purpose of this article is to give a critical assessment of the methodological, epistemological and philosophical principles of the “rhetorical turn” as a historico-philosophical phenomenon in contemporary philosophy. The first part offers a reconstruction and a critical assessment of the methodological and epistemological foundations of Eugène Dupréel's critique of the key features of “classical philosophy”, namely, the concept of necessary knowledge and the concept of progress. These are supplemented by a brief analysis of Chaїm Perelman’s reception of Dupréel's theses in his works of the so-called “turning point” period (1947–1949). It is shown that Dupréel's critique is “axiological” in nature and consists in his reassessment of the principles of classical methodology and epistemology. In his critique of the doctrine of necessary knowledge from the standpoint of humanism, Dupréel wittingly vindicates the methodological and epistemological principles of sophistry (critical realism, subjectivism, pragmatism, pluralism, relativism, conventionalism, etc.), but endows these, as well as other concepts of classical epistemology, with a new, humanistic, meaning. Perelman generally supports the main points of Dupréel's criticism, strengthening their social and humanistic orientation. This article demonstrates that the criticism of classical philosophy offered by both thinkers is limited in terms of both its subject and its principles. After all, it (1) provides a simplified image of “classical philosophy”, (2) is based on a misunderstanding of the fundamentally conceptual and constructive nature of philosophical knowledge, (3) is carried out from the standpoint of “socially oriented realism”, and, therefore, (4) has no bearing on the epistemological principles of idealistic and religious movements,(5) leading to the separation of philosophy from scientific and religious knowledge.

Arina Orіekhova's interview with Professor Sergii Secundant, devoted to Leibniz's concepts of time and space, the peculiarities of Michael Fatch's interpretation of those concepts, and various historico-philosophical approaches to understanding Leibniz's philosophy as a whole.

Review of Smith, P. (2022). Sextus Empiricus’ Neo-Pyrrhonism: Skepticism as a Rationally Ordered Experience. Cham: Springer.

Review of Lampert, L. (2021). How Socrates Became Socrates. A Study of Plato's Phaedo, Parmenides, and Symposium. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Review of Chiappero-Martinetti, E., Osmani, S., & Qizilbash, M. (Eds.). (2020). The Cambridge Handbook of the Capability Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Review of Boldyrev, I., Stein, S. et al. (2021). Interpreting Hegel's Phenomenology of spirit: expositions and critique of contemporary readings. London: Routledge.

Review of Vassallo, C. (2021). The Presocratics at Herculaneum. A Study of Early Greek Philosophy in the Epicurean Tradition. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Review of Ahmed Malik, S. (2021). Islam and Evolution: Al-Ghazālī and the Modern Evolutionary Paradigm. London: Routledge.

Interview of Vsevolod Khoma, Illia Davidenko and Kseniia Myroshnyk with Anatoliy Yermolenko.

Interview of Illia Davidenko, Vlada Anuchina and Daria Popil with Svitlana Ivashchenko.

Interview of Vlada Anuchina, Yana Dziuba and Yana Gorobenko with Yevhen Prychepii.

Report on the main discussions that took place during the online roundtable “The Oral History of Philosophy: Outlining its Subject” (July 6, 2022).