Volume XVI (2011), no. 2

MAN - BOOK - KNOWLEDGE - SOCIETY

Contents

Studies

Ildikó VERES
Institution:
Institute of Philosophy, University of Miskolc, Hungary
Email:
bukkszentkereszt@gmail.com
Abstract

In the first half of the 20th century the interpretation of lack was a central problem in the philosophy of Károly Böhm and of the Kolozsvár School’s outstanding members (Sándor Makkai, Béla Varga). Böhm analyzed it mainly from metaphysical and epistemological points of view and then from the perspective of the theory of values and ethics. In his system we shall consider the relationship between these. In Béla Varga’s philosophy we shall analyze the relationship between lack and conscience, the fullness of being, in Sándor Makkai’s theory the connections of infinity and lack. Meanwhile we shall make a digression to discuss the issues of “defective reality” and the lack of good at Béla Brandenstein. Finally, we shall tackle József Révay’s theory regarding moral paradoxes.

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[*] This study has been developed from several of my writings published in this field. The paper was elaborated within OTKA project no. 76865, entitled “A Priori Knowledge and Philosophic Cognition”.

János I. TÓTH
Institution:
Department of Philosophy, University of Szeged, Hungary
Email:
jtoth@philo.u-szeged.hu
Abstract

The notion of crisis was first used in medicine to describe a near death state of a patient where drastic and immediate procedures are needed for survival. Later this concept was extended to other fields as well. At the same time the meaning of crisis was diluted (i.e. serious problem) and modified (i.e. recession or depression in economics). It is an important question whether a social situation can be labelled a crisis in the original sense of the word; and whether this crisis is due to external or internal causes. In this latter case the system is unsustainable and is moving towards extinction. These situations call for immediate and drastic measures in order to secure a sustainable state.

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Rodica FRENTIU
Institution:
Faculty of Letters, Babes-Bolyai University
Email:
rfrentiu@hotmail.com
Abstract

An existentialist type of fiction, the novel A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe, examines the human condition (Ningen to wa nanika.) and the limits of possibility for humans. Privileging the anthropocentric world, subjecting it to insights not only into the past but, also, potentially, into the future, highlighting the crimes that man might commit against himself, the novel outlines a possible “human renaissance” (ningen kaifuku 人間恢) through an extreme personal dilemmatic situation, which is connected to world history. The present study proposes an investigation delving on existentialism and social anthropology, attempting to prove how in the afore-mentioned novel, Kenzaburō Ōe, the humanist, protests against and resists an inhuman world, with a view to defending and protecting fragile values ​​such as humanism and the humaneness of man, the right to life and peace, which are under constant threat in contemporary history. The individual, the society and the universe are all connected on a single tier, despite the crisis of the moment that seems to deconstruct humanism: here is a new myth, a new outlook on human history proposed by Kenzaburō Ōe.

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Ecaterina PĂTRAŞCU
Institution:
Faculty of Philosophy and Social-Political Sciences, Al. I. Cuza University Iaşi
Email:
cati_patrascu@yahoo.com
Abstract

Thomas Pynchon’s novels analyzed in this article – V., The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow – bring in the limelight preoccupations typical for the postmodern American novel: the anomie of history, the maladive reality, sterile imagination, with direct consequences on the construction of identity. The approach to these concerns is interdisciplinary, the postmodern concepts of relativism, arbitrary meaning, subjectivity, constructed reality, (his)story and interchangeable interpretations being identified and delineated both in philosophy and literary theory. Perceived from the perspective of quantum physics, historicism in Pynchon is entirely subjective; the organizing structures of history are only products of one’s imagination, therefore the anomie and the accidental indubitably govern it. The general impression is that of a paranoid state of mind that evolves from a personal (Herbert Stencil and Oedipa Maas) to a cosmic level (Tyrone Slothrop).

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[*] This paper was written in the framework of the project “Reţea transnaţională de management integrat al cercetării postdoctorale în domeniul Comunicarea ştiinţei. Construcţie instituţională (şcoală postdoctorală) şi program de burse (CommScie)” (Transnational integrated management network of postdoctoral research in the field of Communication of Science, Institutional Construction [postdoctoral school] and scholarship programme [CommScie]) – POSDRU/89/1.5/S/63663, financially supported by the Sectorial Operational Programme for Human Resources Development 2007-2013.

Anca Alexandra IFRIM
Institution:
Lucian Blaga Central University Library, Cluj
Email:
ancaifr@yahoo.com
Abstract

The paper is a first case study researching the Formaţiunea 0830 Periprava labour camp in the Danube Delta (1957–1964). The analysis focuses, pertinently and objectively, on the situation of political prisoners sent to this unit of forced labour in the first two decades of communism. The work is based on a wide range of historical sources (published and unpublished archival documents), the legislation of the age, and sources of oral history (testimonies and interviews). This study is the result of a two-year research, including the examination of files connected to the subject from the archives of the Consiliului Naţional de Studiere a Arhivelor Securităţii (National Council for the Study of Security Archives) and field research in the village of Periprava conducted on two occasions. The analysis failed to identify any published materials approaching the subject from the same perspective as the present research. From this point of view, the study can be regarded as an original contribution to the subject discussed.

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Marian PETCU
Institution:
University of Bucharest
Email:
marian_petcu2003@yahoo.com
Abstract

The documents presented in this article have not been previously published and present the journalists’ self-regulation means – the honorary jury. The affiliation to a professional association gives one the right to hold accountable the person/persons guilty of disciplinary offences in violation of the association’s statute and of the profession’s norms. All documents make reference to the activity of the honorary jury of the Bucharest Journalists’ Trade Union and are part of a private collection – the Eugen Filotti Fund.

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István KIRÁLY V.
Institution:
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj, Department of Philosophy
Email:
kiraly_philobib@yahoo.com
Abstract

The study investigates philosophically the issue of human illness and its organic pertinence to the meaning of human life starting from the recognition that the dangerous encounter with the experience of illness is an unavoidable – and as such crucial – experience of the life of any living being. As for us humans, there is probably no mortal man who has never suffered of some – any! – kind of disease from his birth to the end of his life… Illness is therefore an experience or outright a danger of existence and its possibility, as well as a way of being that nobody has ever been and will ever be ontologically or existentially exempted from. So, it may well be “arbitrary” or “accidental” which disease affects which being or person, when and to what degree, in what way, etc., but it is factually unavoidable that in the course of one’s entire life – from its very beginning to its very end – one would never fall ill in some respect. The paper discusses this issue by the ontological investigation of possibility.

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Horia-Vicenţiu PĂTRAŞCU
Institution:
Departamentul de Filosofie şi Ştiinţe Social-Politice, Universitatea Al. I. Cuza, Iaşi
Email:
h_patrascu@yahoo.com
Abstract

The purpose of this article is to follow two perspectives on nostalgia: the medical perspective and the metaphysical one. While the former considers nostalgia a disease, the latter assumes it is a true metaphysical feeling that defines the human condition in itself. The histories of the two approaches are not separate; on the contrary, they are inextricably linked. They, in fact, throw some light on ourselves, on the modality in which we receive or reject, accept or repudiate those unusual emotions, “intimately-strange” that we experience as profoundly ours and simultaneously as coming from somewhere else.

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Ionela Florina IACOB
Institution:
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj, Faculty of European Studies
Email:
freyatudor@yahoo.com
Abstract

This paper aims at presenting the way in which the subjective experience of an illness is transposed and renegociated within the illness narrative. Our case study reveals the hermeneutical travail through which a woman suffering of breast cancer tries to give meaning to the experience of her illness. In the first part of the article I present the main conceptual instruments regarding the relationship between illness and narrativity, as it was theoreticized by specialists in the domain. The second part of the study focuses on the process of deconstructing the life narrative – prior to the disease – and on the attempt to reconfigure the narrative into one that is able to restore the order that was destroyed by the disease.

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Anna Emese VINCZE
Institution:
Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj
Email:
ariel5918@yahoo.com
Abstract

Positive illusions have been explained either through the limited functions of the cognitive system or through the egocentric construction of memory and attention. We argue that the function of positive illusions can be better understood by integrating them in the process responsible for forming the cognitive anthropological architecture and some specific problems to which we have had to find solutions throughout our evolution. The purpose of this study is to offer some original explanations to the question “for what reason and in which way positive illusions occurred” and to analyze illusions from a theoretical perspective in which the anthropological, biological, psychological and social models could be possibly integrated.

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Constantin BĂRBULESCU
Institution:
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj
Email:
barbulescuco@yahoo.fr
Abstract

The paper tries to recompose a few aspects of rural hygiene on the basis of information gathered from oral inquiry. It is about the parasites which once infested the body and household of peasants – lice, fleas, bugs –, to which we added a parasitic illness by excellence – the scab. Finally, we were also interested in data upon body and clothing hygiene. All this was done with the declared aim of comparing the peasant discourse with the medical one on the same topic.

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Elena BĂRBULESCU
Institution:
Romanian Academy, Cluj-Napoca Branch, „Folklore Archive” Institute
Email:
ebarbulescu@yahoo.com
Abstract

The study is based on a field research developed in a few Romanian villages and is focused primarily on what peasants have to say about their relation with the sanitary system during the communist period. One preliminary conclusion of research is that people living in rural communities have a prevalently negative image about the modern sanitary system imposed by the state, consequently resorting to a parallel sanitary system that we may call traditional where all kinds of empirical or magical characters come into action.

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Miscellanea

Alin Mihai GHERMAN
Reviewed by
Ionuţ COSTEA
Institution:
Babeş-Bolyai University, Depertment of History
Email:
costea78@yahoo.co.uk
Abstract
Anthony MORGAN, Maggie DAVIES and Erio ZIGLIO, eds.
Reviewed by
Petru DEREVENCO
Institution:
Member of the Romanian Academy of Medical Sciences
Email:
stela.ramboiu@gmail.com
Abstract
Doina COSMAN
Reviewed by
István KIRÁLY V.
Institution:
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj, Department of Philosophy
Email:
kiraly_philobib@yahoo.com
Abstract
Richard P. BENTALL
Reviewed by
George TUDORIE
Institution:
PhD Student, Department of Philosophy, Central European University, Budapest
Email:
george.tudorie@gmail.com
Abstract
Mihaela FRUNZĂ
Reviewed by
Iulia GRAD
Institution:
Babeş–Bolyai University, Cluj
Email:
iuliagrad@gmail.com
Abstract
László SZELESTEI N.
Reviewed by
Éva FARKAS WELLMANN
Institution:
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj
Email:
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj
Abstract
Claudiu GAIU
Reviewed by
Paula TUDOR
Institution:
Université de Neuchâtel, Faculté de Lettres et Sciences humaines
Email:
tudor.paula@ymail.com
Abstract