Sententiae

Review of materials of the 11th International Congress of the German Society for Analytical Philosophy, as well as the latest trends in the development of analytical research

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).

Linguistic convention (samaya/saṃketa) is one of the central notions of Indian philosophy of language. I present a new classification of traditions of Indian thought based on their view of linguistic convention. This classification is to be verified and expanded in further studies. 1) Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Buddhism, and later classical Yoga of the Tattvavaiśāradī accept samaya/saṃketa as an agreement initiating the relationship between words and their previously unrelated meanings. 2) Bhartṛhari the Grammarian and the continuators of his thought acknowledge samaya/saṃketa as the established usage of words that is rooted in the natural relationship between words and their meanings; the convention manifests (makes known) the relationship. This view was probably also shared by Mīmāṃsakas and Advaitins. 3) Classical Yoga of the Yogasūtrabhāṣya and probably also earlier Grammar thought of the Mahābhāṣya accept linguistic convention as the established usage of words, but this usage, though having neither a beginning nor an end, is not based on any natural and necessary word–meaning relationship. In this view, linguistic convention not only manifests the word–meaning relationship but also keeps it in existence. Finally, I also explain why the same Sanskrit term samaya/saṃketa was applied to the different ways of understanding linguistic convention. I explain this through the common aspects of all three kinds of samaya/saṃketa. The first aspect is the content of all these kinds of samaya/saṃketa. Irrespective of how linguistic convention is understood, its content is the same: “such and such a word has such and such a meaning”. The second aspect is the crucial role of linguistic convention in language acquisition, communication, and transmission.

In this paper the philosophical problematics of the ontological dimension of suffering in the Buddhist philosophy is raised. Many modern scholars are inclined to think that a more adequate translation for the Sanskrit term duḥkha is “unsatisfactoriness”. However, from the material presented in the article it follows that this rendering does not underlie the sense of the notion of duḥkha when it is examined in the ontological plane, and thus the traditional translation “suffering” in this sense remains more adequate. It is also shown that the etymology of the Sanskrit term duḥkha as a «improperly installed» axle of the wheel of a cart has strong connotations with the metaphor of the wheel and the symbol of swastika in the Buddhist cultural tradition (wheel of being, three turnings of the Wheel of Dharma etc.). In this paper the main causes of suffering (self, body, ignorance, desire and other afflictions) exposed in Buddhist texts and scholarship are revised, and on the example of the Cūḷasuññata-sutta it is demonstrated that the real final cause of suffering in the Early Buddhism is our body and not our “self” and ignorance. While in the Mahayana Buddhism based on the philosophy of emptiness and the principle of nonduality, the dichotomy of soul and body is removed, the attainment of nirvana becomes possible in this body and the real cause and source of suffering becomes the ignorance. On the other hand, the paper argues that just the ontological view on the problem of suffering (under the angle of the principle of nonduality) provides us with understanding of the fact that the suffering can be overcome despite its indestructible ontological status.