Meditating on the Meditations

A common thread runs through Descartes’ First Meditation, the opening part of Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle, and al-Ghazālī’s intellectual autobiography The Deliverer from Error. For spiritual and intellectual progress to occur, each of these authors concurs, one must first divest oneself of previously held certainties, even though evil deceivers will try to assault and halt this process. But what could explain the similarities between the three presentations? And are there philosophical lessons to draw from such comparisons, or are al-Ghazālī’s and Teresa’s meditations destined to remain curiosities and marginal as compared to Descartes’? In this article, I show how al-Ghazālī’s use of the same trope twice can point to a fresh consideration of the relation between Teresa and Descartes.

ПРОПОВЕДНИЧЕСКОЕ И ИСПОВЕДАЛЬНОЕ В ПУБЛИЦИСТИКЕ Д. МЕРЕЖКОВСКОГО 1905-1908 ГГ.

The article attempts to discover elements of the predicant and confessional dimensions in D. Merezhkovsky’s social publications of 1905—1908. The predicant intention surfaces when the author strives to establish the idea of the Third Testament or the Kingdom of the Holy Spirit, finding its implementation in tendentious perception of biblical verses, interpretation and resolution of contradictions, as well as the construction of an optimistic perspective. His open letter to N. Berdiaev clearly exhibits a confessional streak, combining elements of a confessional letter, an intellectual autobiography, as well as a socially oriented sermon and article.

Returning to the Heavens: Plato’s Socrates on Anaxagoras and Natural Philosophy

Readers of Plato since antiquity have generally taken Socrates’ intellectual autobiography in the Phaedo as a signal of his turn away from the study of natural philosophy. They have turned instead to characters such as Timaeus for evidence of Plato’s pursuit of physics. This article argues that Plato’s Socrates himself developed a philosophy of nature in his criticism of Anaxagoras and his subsequent philosophic pursuits. Socrates’ autobiography places the study of nature in a foundational position within the development of his philosophic method. In the Apology, Socrates further elaborated his investigation into nature through his understanding of theology. Finally, in the Phaedrus, Socrates connects the study of nature with the study of rhetoric as tools for virtue. Therefore, Plato’s Socrates does not reject or abandon physics, as has often been suggested, but rather, he incorporates it into his own philosophic project and challenges its practitioners to connect their own inquiries with human affairs.

Healing the Rift

In the introductory “Intellectual Autobiography” of the Georg Henrik von Wright volume of the Library of Living Philosophers series, von Wright mentions the discrepancy he always felt between his narrow logical-analytical professional work and a drive to make philosophy relevant to his life, calling it a rift in his philosophical personality. This article examines the nature of the rift and the various stages the problem went through during von Wright’s career. It is argued that the initial impression that his books The Varieties of Goodness and Explanation and Understanding had contributed to healing the rift, was subdued by a gradual shift in existential focus from individualistic ethics towards a critical concern for destructive ways of thinking inherent in the Western culture, connected with von Wright’s “political awakening” at the end of the 1960s. The most urgent questions of our times called for novel, non-analytical, ways of doing philosophy, employed in von Wright’s later works on science and reason, and the myth of progress. Eventually von Wright’s earlier methodological concerns were also alleviated by his belief that logical-analytical philosophy was inherently unsuitable for exposing the cultural structures it was very much a part of.

Rola tłumacza pisemnych tekstów specjalistycznych na podstawie własnych doświadczeń traduktologicznych

The goal of this paper is to determine a translator’s role in the process of translation of a scientific text. The analysis centres on philosophical texts translated from French into Polish by the author of the paper: Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision by Pierre Hadot, Philosophizing ad Infinitum by Marcel Conche, Intellectual Autobiography by Paul Ricœur, Speech and Action in Heraclitus. On the Theoretical Foundations of Moral Action by Michel Fattal, and Le Logos dans le Sophiste de Platon by Michel Fattal. A requirement is usually imposed on the translator of a specialist text to be invisible, transparent, and neutral. However, this analysis shows that this requirement cannot be met in translations of scientific texts.