Book chapter
Способность суждения и ее связь с политической ответственностью
Thompson Clarke’s paper marked the beginning of the revival of the interest to the problems of philosophical skepticism in the early 70’s. In his paper Clarke raises the issue of skepticism’s relevance to the philosophical inquiry and provides a new interpretation of the traditional skeptical problems. Also Clarke points out the significance of G. E. Moore’s defense of common sense. Particularly, he shows that the lack of ordinary contexts does not make skeptical questions and Moore’s attempts to answer these questions are meaningless, as philosophers of ordinary language claimed. However, skeptics and their opponents usually share a theoretical presupposition - the idea of standard human-conceptual constitution. As Clarke points out, this constitution supposedly determines the limits and content of the human knowledge about the world. The notion of objective knowledge and the conception of philosophy itself are based on the idea of such a constitution. However, Clarke, by applying the concepts of dream and hallucination, illustrates that this idea contradicts the functioning of the concepts we use to learn about and understand the world.
We tend to define terrorism as an action or practice that leads us to the moral assessment of terrorism. However, moral interpretation of terrorism appears to be incomplete because terrorism exceeds the moral boundaries and reveals itself primarily as a political issue. Terrorism as a phenomenon of political life should be understood in terms of political philosophy. In this context, the question of participants and accomplices of terrorism becomes fundamentally important. The article focuses on this problem, solving which we would be able to construct a more complete notion of terrorism and answer the question of responsibility, which arises in connection with terrorism.
The philosophical essay “What is Freedom” by Hannah Arendt though modest in extent, serves as a kind of a key deciphering and elucidating the underlying import of her major works written both before and after this essay, namely “The origins of totalitarianism”, “Vita activa”, “On revolution”, “On violence” etc. Arendt analyses such concepts as “freedom of the mind”, “freedom of the will”, showing that the roots of the very phenomenon of freedom lie in the political realm. Freedom is a faculty of man to begin something new, non-existent in this world. It is a capacity to interrupt “automatic” processes in natural as well as political sphere. In the Preface the translator places the questions raised in essay in a wider framework of Hannah Arendt’s work.