Existential Philosophy of History

In this paper we delineate the conditions and features of what we call an existential philosophy of history in relation to customary trends in the field of the philosophy of history. We do this by circumscribing what a transgenerational temporality and what our entanglement in ethical relations with temporal others ask of us as existential and responsive selves and by explicating what attitude we need to have when trying to responsibly respond to other vulnerable beings in our historical world of life.

Image of the temple in the collection of E.A. Boratynsky “Twilight” and the problem of composition

The image of the temple in the Boratynsky cycle “Twilight”, consisting of 26 lyric miniatures, occurs only once — in the poem “Prejudice! he is a fragment…” (1840–1841). The context in which the word “temple” appears is such that it creates amphibole, the ambiguity of its reading: on the one hand, we are talking about a certain temple as a religious building destroyed by time; on the other, about the “temple” of the “old truth” lying in the “ruins”, lost by the descendants of the ancient truth. In addition to the function of creating a lyrical chronotope (the temple as a metaphor for the lost past connects the figurative system of the poem and cycle with historical, world and biblical times, the “language of the ruins” and “the old truth” are opposed to the “modern truth”, as “ancestor” and “descendant”), the image of the temple is involved in the unfolding of the author’s compositional plan and cycling. The image of the temple in the structure of Boratynsky’s book of poems creates left- and right-directed intertextual implicit, allusive associative connections with many works of the Twilight cycle.

La noción de ciencia de la cultura en Alfred Schutz según la visión de Lester Embree

El artículo expone la interpretación y ampliación realizada por Embree respecto de las ideas de Schutz sobre las ciencias de la cultura. Se ocupa en primer lugar de las características generales de todas las ciencias de la cultura en su tarea de analizar el mundo de la vida como un mundo intersubjetivo e histórico estructurado de acuerdo con coasociados, contemporáneos, predecesores y sucesores. Luego examina los tres partes constituyentes principales que Embree destaca en cada una de ellas: la definición de la disciplina, sus conceptos básicos y sus reglas de procedimiento. Por último, se consideran los puntos de vista de Embree sobre la relación entre metodología y filosofía. Su tesis es que científicos y filósofos pueden encontrarse en una interacción mutua en el ámbito de la teoría de la ciencia que puede ser a la vez filosófica y científica.The article is a presentation of Embree’s interpretation and development of Alfred ideas on the cultural sciences. It deals first with the general characteristics of all cultural sciences in their task of analyzing the lifeworld as an intersubjective and historical world structured according to consociates, contemporaries, predecessors, and successors. Then it examines the three main constituent parts that Embree highlights in each of them: the definition of the discipline, its basic concepts, and its rules of procedure. Finally, Embree’s views on the relationship between methodology and philosophy are considered. His thesis is that scientists and philosophers can meet in a mutual interplay in the realm of a theory of science that can be both philosophic and scientific.

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.

Immersion and Empathy

The aim of this chapter is to investigate histospheres as multi-immersive perceptual spaces that not only model a historical world but also profoundly influence our conceptions and interpretations of history. In this context, the first section examines the role of aesthetically modeled atmospheres and the moods they evoke. The second section builds on this examination by considering filmic space. Filmic atmospheres and spatial figurations of movement bring us physically and mentally closer to the action of the film. Another potent mechanism of perspectivation is film characters, and so the third section focuses on imaginative empathy with the characters who inhabit a film’s historical world. In combination with film experience as a mode of embodied perception, this inner perspective provokes interpretations and evaluations that we can extend to the filmic depiction’s historical references.

Audiovisual History

The aim of this chapter is to consider relevant theories of visual and audio history whose ontologies a histosphere absorbs and elaborates. The first section surveys the relatively new field of visual history. It argues that a histosphere creates not just disparate images but a visual sphere in which history is brought to life. Research into audio history is an even newer and less developed field. The second section therefore sketches the outlines of an audio history of film and examines the aesthetics and function of film sound, understood as an equally important expressive dimension of histospheres. The two aspects are brought together in the third section: The fusion of sound and vision makes the historical film not just a model of a historical world, but a form of perception in its own right.