Volume XIX (2014), no. 2

Contents

Studies

Mihai Stelian RUSU
Email:
mihai.rusu@ubbcluj.ro
Abstract

Building upon the twin premises of the historicity and mediality of memory – individual and collective alike –, this study makes an analytic incursion in the history of memory in terms of the technological media of storing knowledge about the past, i.e. a media-history of memory. The paper aims, in the opening act, at shedding light on the inextricable relationship between memory and the bio-cultural technology available for preserving knowledge, and thus saving the past from oblivion. The study moves on to trace out the succession of the different “technological regimes of memory” emerged in human history, examining how the technology of memory influenced both the formal structure and the modus operandi of collective memory, that is to say, both its structural framework and its regime of functioning.

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Răzvan IONESCU-TUGUI
Institution:
National School of Political Science and Public Administration, Bucharest
Email:
razescu@yahoo.com
Abstract

The article tracks the use of the idea of “community” in the context of a multinational corporation. With the community at the intersection of personal and impersonal relationships, of market economy and gift economy, of instrumental rationality and value-based rationality, this article is trying to describe the powers at play for a particular configuration of these elements in the attempt of the company to better control the consumers.

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Augusta Costiuc RADOSAV
Institution:
Faculty of History and Philosophy Babeş-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca
Email:
radosav.costiuc@mail.ubbcluj.ro
Abstract

Transylvanianism, interculturality and cultural dialogue have been some of the recurrent topics of multilingual cultural reviews in Transylvania at the beginning of the 20th century, as reflections on the formation of consciousness of the self, diversity and difference. The paper proposes to offer certain perspectives on the self-discourse of multicultural Transylvanian society by the analysis of the vocabulary of interculturality and Transylvanianism in the reviews Cultura (Culture, Cluj, 1924), Aurora (Aurora, Oradea, 1922–1923), Culisele – A kulissza (Backstage, 1923), Banatul (The Banat, Timişoara, 1926), and Klingsor (Braşov, 1924–1939).

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Anca-Gabriela GHIMPU
Institution:
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj
Email:
ancaxxghimpu@yahoo.com
Abstract

Encyclopaedism exists since ancient times as an important human activity that materializes in the attempt of gathering and preserving human knowledge in its totality. This article aims at analyzing one of the most important encyclopaedic projects of our modern times, Wikipedia, a free user-generated content internet site, constantly edited and updated by anonymous users forming a virtual community, based on the shared value of free access to knowledge. We focus on describing the Wikipedia’s new media context and its main challenges in order to draw a conclusion about the philosophical importance of such projects as a creative alternative to the corporate media.

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Zsuzsa PLAINER
Institution:
Romanian Institute for the Research of National Minorities
Email:
pzsuzsa_2000@yahoo.com
Abstract

The aim of this paper is to understand how sophisticatedly linked factors are responsible for the making of a “Gypsy school” with low educational performance and bad fame in a Romanian town. In doing so, the notion of audit culture is introduced, understood as a set of culturally mediated norms and practices of ranking. As this approach comes into sight, despite the commitment shown by the Romanian policy-makers to increase school integration of the Roma, a series of regulations – accepted or overlooked by them – unwittingly obstruct this aim. The framing of national financing policies may involuntarily lead to tracking the Roma children into certain schools, where – in lack of a variety of teaching materials, refined testing and a clear system of rewarding the teacher’s performance – quality education becomes a hard-to-reach target. The contextuality of the bad label of a “Gypsy school” is also relevant in this research as it may act either as a resource, or as a stigma on different situations. Audit culture, too, highlights what contexts engender its negative aspects.

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Anamaria Carolina BODEA HAŢEGAN, Dorina Anca TALAŞ, Ana BUT
Institution:
Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca; “Corneliu Coposu” School,
Email:
carolina.bodea.hategan@gmail.com; tdorina@yahoo.com
Abstract

The aim of this research is to test the utility of an assessment and intervention instrument addressed to children with language related learning difficulties, focussed on improving reading fluency. This instrument was elaborated based on Romanian language structure specificity and the latest assessment and intervention strategies regarding reading fluency in the field. Thus, the main aspects taken into consideration when elaborating the instrument were: language structure, the nature of the linguistic material, timing, and repetition. The findings proved the fact that this instrument can be considered valuable, opening new research perspectives in the field of Romanian reading fluency.

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Stefan-Sebastian MAFTEI
Institution:
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
stmaftei@yahoo.com
Abstract

It is a well-known fact today that work, as an economical, rational, social, and political attitude survives by being supported by its own ideology. Our study will try to find some answers to some questions addressed by different authors: What is there so peculiar to Romanians and their way of life that makes them so conspicuous in their “work ethics?” What are the potential causes behind their peculiar mindset towards work? And, finally, is there a link between facts and words, or is their alleged “work ethics” a mere rumor, hearsay? Is there a gap between the representation of work and work itself in Romanian society?

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Edit SZEGEDI
Institution:
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj
Email:
edit.corona@yahoo.com
Abstract

The paper deals with the medical-historical-statistical writings of Eduard Gusbeth, who worked as physician in Braşov, at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. This kind of writing can be seen as a chronicle of a modern city, of its coming into being, its consolidation, its successes and problems, not only from a medical point of view (state of physical health, health care, hygiene), but also from other perspectives, some of them with no connection to medicine (like the theatre or inauguration of monuments). Gusbeth’s chronicle of urban modernization is seen in the context of the birth of the modern city in Europe and in the context of the struggle between a multi-ethnic community, which defines itself as a trilingual urban community, and the state-sponsored nation-building with its obsession of linguistic and cultural conformity.

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Artur LAKATOS
Institution:
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj
Email:
lakatos_artur_lorand@yahoo.com
Abstract

This paper is dealing with the issue of the land reform adopted in 1945 in Romania under certain specific circumstances, generated by the post-war turmoil, the need of rural population for land property, and the political ambitions of the coalition government. In the mirror of press sources and unpublished archival documents, we analyze the political background of the land reform process, its social environment and through relevant case-studies, its consequences on a local level. The role of this current article is to present through a large variety of representative case-studies a general, yet comprehensive image of the reform, and its immediate consequences on local, regional and national level. Most of the sources are unpublished materials from the Archives, which were consulted for the first time by the author of this article. The paper proves that the most important winner of the whole reform process, adopted in a moment of turmoil, based on social considerations rather than economic ones, was the Romanian Communist Party, which through the work of its allies obtained a certain level of popularity. Even so, this conjuncture gain was not enough to assure majority in elections for the parties of the political left, which led to electoral fraud in 1946.

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Adrian BODA
Institution:
Researcher, Lucian Blaga Central University Library, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
adiboda@gmail.com
Abstract

The article presents a fragment from the manuscript of R.A.F pilot officer Bertrand Whitley, focusing on his experience as prisoner of war and S.O.E. agent in Romania. This part of the memoirs is especially relevant for Romanian readers, as it presents the conditions of 1944 Romania, perceived by an Englishman. The author’s experiences placed him in the position to know both rural Romania and the elite of Bucharest, as he witnessed the events of 23 August and the ensuing Soviet occupation. Apart from this, Whitley proved to be a fine observer of the period’s moral standards, as well as a good portrait writer: the manuscript contains portraits of personalities of the time, like King Mihai I of Romania or Major Ivor Porter.

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Maria GROSU
Institution:
Iuliu Haţieganu University of Medicine and Pharmacy Cluj-Napoca
Email:
mariacandale2005@yahoo.com
Abstract

This study carries out an analysis, from a reflexive perspective, of the folklore archives established in Romania over the course of the twentieth century, archived documents representing the object of research. This approach interrogates the intended objective character of the information collected in the field and archived thereafter. The research shows that the archived fieldnotes are subjective constructions, shaped by the epistemological context in which they were drafted. The cultural memory built through the archival project in Romania, in the second half of the twentieth century, was referential, as it attempted a literal representation of the cultural reality. This manner of constructing cultural identity is based on the theoretical premises of the positivist paradigm and of national ethnology.

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

It is an issue important for the continuity of Hungarian philosophy how it is possible to understand and thematically explain the deficiencies and fullness of being experienced in Central and Eastern Europe “here and now”. The interpretations and applied philosophical investigations of István Király V.[1] shed new light on the issues of the mortal historicity and existential ontology of deficiency and secret, deficiency and Dasein, with illness and the experience of death having outstanding importance within it. The physical illness means not only physical suffering, but the deficiency and privation which engages and permeates the possibilities of the sufferer’s modes of being and the qualities of these modes of being in their entirety. Király’s argumentation is compared to the problem of possibilities of being as defined by Béla Hamvas. It is clear that, while Hamvas does not name the possibilities of being, but considers them as available for any concrete individual existence that the self does or can achieve, in Király’s understanding illness has a privileged position within the entirety of possibilities of being, and as such, it means not the absence of health, but pertains to the essence of it. Meaning that the human Dasein cannot be defined – among other things – without the assumption of illness. The concluding part of the paper deals with the problem of the co-original relationship of “sum”, of death and freedom seen by Király as a metaphysical fact.

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[1] See: https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kir%C3%A1ly_Istv%C3%A1n_(filoz%C3%B3fus), accessed January 2013

István M. FEHÉR
Institution:
Eötvös Loránd University/ Andrassy German Speaking University Budapest
Email:
h9142feh@ella.hu
Abstract

Philosophical theories concerning the arts have undergone significant changes in the past few centuries. These changes ran parallel to the reconception of philosophy itself. As is known, the beginning of the 20th century bore witness to the “linguistic” turn, and there has also been a second, no less significant event: the “hermeneutical turn,” enacted by Heidegger and Gadamer. In an essay written in 1990 with the title “The Multiplicity of Languages and the Understanding of the World”, Gadamer summed up the philosophical developments of the 20th century as follows: “In this century we have performed, as is known, a kind of »linguistic turn«, that is, a turn to linguisticality. [...] A second development, of equal import, has taken place in our German tradition. Thereby I mean the transition from Neo-Kantianism to phenomenology and, in particular, the further development of phenomenology to the hermeneutic turn which Heidegger has initiated” (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8, p. 343). In the aftermath of Heidegger’s thinking, and due especially to Gadamer’s major contributions, hermeneutic philosophy has come to be one of the main philosophical trends of 20th century philosophy. It has transformed traditional ways of approaching philosophical problems, of looking upon and dealing with them. Indeed, it modified to a great extent our understanding of philosophy itself. “To speak of a revolution in the history of thought is perhaps too grand,” an interpreter wrote, “but certainly there has been a general movement that can be called the ’hermeneutic turn’” (David C. Hoy, “Heidegger and the Hermeneutic Turn,” in: The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Ch. Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), p. 170). Central to the hermeneutical perspective of viewing things is a new attitude to the history of philosophy and to the philosophical disciplines themselves. What Heidegger called “destruction” means going back to the original experiences of factical life and legitimizing philosophical concepts and theories originating from, and with reference to, them. Hermeneutics is reluctant to recognize the traditional splitting of philosophical disciplines into fields separate and isolated from each other, such as, e.g., theory of knowledge, morals, aesthetics. In their effort to go back to the fundaments of human experience, Heidegger and Gadamer undertook a radical re-thinking of the theoretical fundaments of the discipline destined to account for, and to do justice to, the arts – that is, aesthetics as well. What they achieved is a veritable “destruction” of aesthetics. Heidegger’s decisive step in the thirties lay in his attempt to connect arts with truth, thereby questioning the traditional view according to which truth is a character of knowledge, and a work of art can be “beautiful” but not “true.” Heidegger’s hints have then been elaborated in detail by Gadamer in his Truth and Method.

The present paper proposes to show the essential steps taken by Heidegger and Gadamer in their re-examination of the autonomy of the realm called “aesthetics” and their efforts to replace it by a hermeneutical arts theory.

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Teodora COSMAN
Institution:
Université Libre de Bruxelles Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres/ Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles
Email:
teocosman@yahoo.com
Abstract

This article proposes, from the perspective of photographic reception, a parallel reading of two fundamental texts on photography, Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida and Walter Benjamin’s Little History of Photography, pointing out the importance of the gaze in the narrative construction of an (imaginary) encounter between the viewer and the “subject” of the image. Our analysis focuses on the visual vocabulary employed by both authors in the construction of their narratives, which is not without resemblance with the traditional hierophanic scenarios such as the Transfiguration or the Resurrection. The supposed “reality” of the referent – which is thought as the core of analogue (vernacular) photography – breaks the unreality of the image, surpassing representation with its perceived presence, whose visual expression is (excessive) light. Thus, the discourse on photography paradoxically becomes a discourse without image(s), the sacralization of the latter being at stake.

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Miscellanea

Petru POANTĂ
Reviewed by
Adriana TEODORESCU
Institution:
„1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia
Email:
adriana.teodorescu@gmail.com
Abstract
Peter COLEMAN, Daniela KOLEVA and Joanna BORNAT, eds.
Reviewed by
Ionela Florina IACOB
Email:
freyatudor@yahoo.com
Abstract
Ştefan BORBÉLY
Reviewed by
Călina BORA
Institution:
Babeş-Bolyai University
Email:
calinabora@gmail.com
Abstract
Elena UNGUREANU
Reviewed by
Tatiana CARTALEANU, Irina COJOCARU
Institution:
State Pedagogical University “Ion Creangă”, Information Society Development Institute
Email:
philobib@bcucluj.ro
Abstract