Conatus, the Will to Persist: An Introduction

The papers collected in this issue address a variety of aspects of the concept of conatus ranging from the explorations of its roots in early ancient Greek thought to its application on modern theories of democratic education. The conatus is a special relation between the parts of a monad and their subparts and the subparts of the subparts to infinity, which ensures that each part and subpart is a part of this monad and not of any other. As a fundamental trait of monadic existence, the conatus is manifested in a multiplicity of facets that sustain the persistence of any real existence. It is thus obvious that there is still a vast field of such manifestations of conatus that awaits philosophical exploration, especially in the realms of Social Ontology and of the Philosophy of Nature.

Time and Technology: The Temporalities of Care

By focusing the temporalities of care, the chapter analyzes a special relation between time and technology that underlies the making and persisting of media and infrastructures. I propose to differentiate between four types of care practices with corresponding different temporal patterns that are highly relevant for the functioning of technological systems in the past and present. First, the retrospective response to unforeseen interruptions (repair); second, the prospective routine procedure to prevent all forms of disorder (maintenance); third, a neglect of care that leads to devaluating infrastructure (abandonment) as well as—fourth—forms of revaluation in changing contexts (repurposing). Taking the new Berlin airport BER as an example, it will be shown that infrastructures exhibit different layers of temporality formed by these cyclic and repetitive processes of care and their transforming effects. Thus, even the performance of the most “hardwired,” late modern technology systems is crisscrossed by temporal regimes that stem from older, non-modern temporalities of care.

The ‘Better Marks’ of Jonson’s To Penshurst

This chapter analyses To Penshurst, which first appeared in print in 1612 as the second poem of Ben Jonson’s The Forest. To Penshurst established an emergent English genre: the country-house poem. In To Penshurst, as in Jonson’s poetry generally, many readers are aware of a special relation between the ideal and the real. Penshurst, a house that had developed through the accretions of centuries, could offer no ideal significances; and that is why Jonson credits it instead with ‘better marks’, or symbols. These he finds in the beauties and advantages of its estate: most of the poem goes to show that the estate of Penshurst possesses as much order and symbolism as the prodigy houses, but in land and use rather than in architectural display. The chapter then looks at Jonson’s arrangement of the items in Penshurst, which he has ordered according to several independent organizational ideas: spatial, temporal, hierarchical, numerical, and rhetorical. The moral character of this well-ordered structure is displayed both in direct examples and in emblems.

Ulam-Hyers stability and exponentially stable evolution equations in Banach spaces

We show that uniformly exponentially stable abstract linear evolution equations are Ulam-Hyers stable on [a,\infty). Moreover, we prove that this property is maintained when perturbing this type of equations with a nonlinear term having a small Lipschitz constant. These results complement the literature on Ulam-Hyers stability, a special relation having with some works of I. A. Rus.

GENERATIVE CREATING OF SACRAL SPACE: MYTHOLOGY, COSMOLOGY AND PLACES FOR CULT RITUALS

Signs are an integral part of the existence of humanity. The Latvians have one of the most complicated symbolic sign system in the world—the Lielvārde belt which includes symbols of strong energy and encodes ancient information that characterizes the special relation to nature and the Universe. God is the basis of moral values and the origin of all events. The understanding of Latvian deities is based on creative thought, and each sign of the deity image is a structural whole with a certain informative value. The Balts’ tribes for cult rituals chose energetically powerful places. Generative creating of sacral space and religious ritual is connected by concepts the Place, the Way and the Symbol. Research object: Latvian wisdom and spiritual traditions, sacral space for the worship of God. Research goal: analysis of the influence of the Latvian wisdom on traditions of the establishment of early places of worship. Research problem: common and different features of the sacral space of the Latvians and other nations have been little studied. Research novelty: detailed studies of generative creating of early places of worship based on Latvian mythology and cult ritual traditions of other nations. Research methods: analysis of archive documents and cartographic materials, study of published literature and inspection of sacral places in nature.

How Vice Can Motivate Distrust in Elites and Trust in Fake News

This chapter discusses the vices of epistemic insensitivity and epistemic obstruction in special relation to contemporary political divides and contemporary habits of media consumption. It argues that both vices threaten to worsen political and social divisions between self-identified conservatives on the one hand, and those that the said self-identified conservatives themselves identify as “elites,” “liberal elites,” “experts,” “progressives,” or, “the left.” In turn, this worsening divide worsens distrust in news sources associated with “the wrong” political perspective. Partisans can become increasingly suspect of all news sources outside of their own political bubble; the entrenchment of the aforementioned vices makes persons more and more likely to deem any source outside their bubble “fake news.”

'He understands me in a different way than others do'

In this paper a group of young people from Torshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands, share their personal reflections and views on the ‘Faroese father’ in present-day society. The material from this qualitative study is used to examine and analyse the role and position of the father in relation to his family and working life, his masculinity and identity, and his general historic status in society. The main aim of the paper is to outline and illustrate a pattern of transition in Faroese fatherhood resonating new gender and family values, but also a social shift towards a (late) modern and diversified labour market with emerging female-dominated professions. Seen from the son’s and the daughter’s perspective, this paper suggests, the father’s place in the life of his children mirrors a very special relation associated with feelings of affection, safety, and guidance. Drawing on theoretical scholarship from fatherhood research in the tradition of critical men’s studies, as well as from anthropological family studies, this paper contributes to scientific reviews of fatherhood and masculinity in small island communities in shift. This study is part of the larger research project called Faroese Fatherhood in Transition (2018-2021) financed by Research Council Faroe Islands. Keywords: fatherhood, masculinity, family life, fishermen, small islands, young people

Modeling and Perceiving

The aim of this chapter is to develop a theory of how filmic figurations are already fused with conceptions of history during the mise-en-scène process, and thereby enable historical experiences. The first section will therefore examine the theoretical concept of figuration and the special relation between cinematic illusion and historical reference. The second section analyzes the strategies used by historical films to create filmic spaces and model an internally consistent, temporally arranged historical world. Building on this, the third section proposes that, for historical films, the film theory concept of mise-en-scène should be supplemented by a concept of mise-en-histoire: the imaginative referentialization of the historical worlds constructed by a film.

Obszary (nie)pewności w pracy współczesnego nauczyciela

The books attempts to show the changeable and ambiguous notion of professional certainty of teachers, from the building experience gained from personal self-efficacy, which gives confidence in professional activity, to the state of ambivalence caused by the duality of their own experiences and conflicts in pedagogical work. The authors pay heed to the special relation of the described competence to COVID-19 pandemic and new challenges for teachers in this connection.