Article
Блез Паскаль
This article attempts to compare philosophy of Blaise Pascal and the works of Lewis Carroll. Pascalean critique of culture is contrasted with Carroll’s absurd and joyful human world. In Pascal’s “Pensées” as well as in Carroll’s fairytales the culture appears to be a number of nonsenses, pretentious and comic, based on pure arbitrariness. Habit and groundless fantasy rule this world. The culture needs unconditional value guidelines, eternal ideals, the Ideas to gain the reasonable sense but the eternal ideals are disproportionate to a finite human. And the human is torn between an absurd given and the inaccessible ideals, between nothing and the endlessness. In this regard Pascal and Carroll are remarkably similar and one could trace this similarity in details.
The New time philosophy, the philosophy of culture, tries to slay the Pascal’s arguments but in fact it rather avoids a direct fight with him. While in Carroll’s books Pascal is opposed not by the Idea of the culture but by the image of Alice, of a loving and trusting child who can make even the most absurd world the warm and home one. Fragile love of a little child is stronger, more significant than eternal nonsense of the enormous world – the Pascal’s arguments find an equal rival in this love.
The article deals with the architectonic of Blaise Pascal's "Pensees". "Pensees" is the text combined with fragments. Its plot may be found in poetics of "order". The thematical and compositional center is the genre of apology.
The article is devoted to the phenomenon of incompleteness of the book "Thoughts" by B. Pascal
The article considers the Views of L. N. Tolstoy not only as a representative, but also as a accomplisher of the Enlightenment. A comparison of his philosophy with the ideas of Spinoza and Diderot made it possible to clarify some aspects of the transition to the unique Tolstoy’s religious and philosophical doctrine. The comparison of General and specific features of the three philosophers was subjected to a special analysis. Special attention is paid to the way of thinking, the relation to science and the specifics of the worldview by Tolstoy and Diderot. An important aspect is researched the contradiction between the way of thinking and the way of life of the three philosophers.
Tolstoy's transition from rational perception of life to its religious and existential bases is shown. Tolstoy gradually moves away from the idea of a natural man to the idea of a man, who living the commandments of Christ. Starting from the educational worldview, Tolstoy ended by creation of religious and philosophical doctrine, which were relevant for the 20th century.
The article is concerned with the notions of technology in essays of Ernst and Friedrich Georg Jünger. The special problem of the connection between technology and freedom is discussed in the broader context of the criticism of culture and technocracy discussion in the German intellectual history of the first half of the 20th century.
This important new book offers the first full-length interpretation of the thought of Martin Heidegger with respect to irony. In a radical reading of Heidegger's major works (from Being and Time through the ‘Rector's Address' and the ‘Letter on Humanism' to ‘The Origin of the Work of Art' and the Spiegel interview), Andrew Haas does not claim that Heidegger is simply being ironic. Rather he argues that Heidegger's writings make such an interpretation possible - perhaps even necessary.
Heidegger begins Being and Time with a quote from Plato, a thinker famous for his insistence upon Socratic irony. The Irony of Heidegger takes seriously the apparently curious decision to introduce the threat of irony even as philosophy begins in earnest to raise the question of the meaning of being. Through a detailed and thorough reading of Heidegger's major texts and the fundamental questions they raise, Haas reveals that one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century can be read with as much irony as earnestness. The Irony of Heidegger attempts to show that the essence of this irony lies in uncertainty, and that the entire project of onto-heno-chrono-phenomenology, therefore needs to be called into question.