Volumul XVII (2012), nr. 2

MAN - BOOK - KNOWLEDGE - SOCIETY

Cuprins

KIRÁLY V. István
Abstract

The current issue of the journal is again not a thematic one. However, it essentially brings into discussion – or rather “operationalizes” – once more the fundamental editorial conception of the publication: to be a particular forum for the exploitation of the senses of our human worlds and lives, tackled by multidisciplinary research in history, philosophy, anthropology, ethics, human communication, linguistics, literary theory and criticism, art theory and criticism, as well as by investigations coming from aspects of sciences which imply perspectives equally philosophical, historical, anthropological, and cultural, including those of medical humanities. These perspectives or approaches are undertaken by our journal together with investigations on documents or records preserved in library or archival collections.

We are speaking here about senses which – because they are human – are, each time, not merely problematic and challenging, but whose problematizations can also ensure us, each time again, certain emancipatory and openingelements in the discussion. For the very clarification and outline of the historical and current mapping of the problems of the senses of our human existence in time is surely something of an emancipatory nature.

Studii

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

The paper attempts to conceptualize the “ancient” issues of human death and human mortality in connection to the timely and vital subject of euthanasia. This subject forces the meditation to actually consider those ideological, ethical, deontological, legal, and metaphysical frameworks which guide from the very beginning any kind of approach to this question. This conception – in dialogue with Heideggerian fundamental ontology and existential analytics – reveals that, on the one hand, the concepts and ethics of death are originally determined by the ontology of death, and, on the other hand, that, on this account, the question of euthanasia can only be authentically discussed in the horizon of this ontology. It is only this that may reveal to whom dying – our dying – pertains, while it also reveals our relationship to euthanasia as a determined human potentiality or final possibility. Thus euthanasia is outlined in the analysis as the possibility of becoming a mortal on the one hand, while on the other hand it appears in relation to the particularities of its existential structure, which essentially differ from the existential and ontological structure of any other possibility of dying. This is why it should not be mixed up with, or mistaken for, any of these.

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Marius ROTAR
Instituția:
1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia, Romania
Email:
mrotar2000@yahoo.com
Abstract

In Romania, the topic of cremation copes with several distinctive issues compared to western states (e.g. existence of a sole crematorium which operates for 20 million inhabitants). On the contrary, the most critical problem of the Romanian Death System is given by the crisis of the resting places in urban area that could be resolved by accepting and developing the cremation as an alternative solution. The article’s goal is to analyze different attitudes towards death in Romanian space, having as a reference point the issue of cremation. The issue of cremation is also analyzed from the historical and social point of view. The main conclusion is that the Orthodox Church’s position and its influence in Romanian society represent the most natural justification of the presented situation. The paper reveals a lesser degree of secularization in Romanian society compared to other European countries, a simple fact that could explain the specificity of the Romanian practice regarding death issues and cremation.

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Adriana TEODORESCU
Instituția:
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj
Email:
adriana.teodorescu@gmail.com
Abstract

This study has two main objectives. First, it aims at reflecting on the status of immortality as a cultural product, and, thus, analysing the mechanisms by which immortality can be seen, given its tight relationship with death, as a symbolic construct as well. Second, it examines the non-religious symbolic construction of the continuation of existence in/through nature. The role of this second section is to deconstruct this myth from a point of view that merges modern thanatology with the sociology of knowledge, searching to discover and investigate the social and cultural issues entailed by immortality-through-nature. More precisely, it deals with the classic model of the continuation-through-nature, as well as with a different construction of immortality through nature – paradoxical and far-fetched – a new form indebted to the scientific discoveries of the last decades: the positivisation of death.

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Radu BANDOL
Instituția:
„Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaşi, Faculty of Philosophy and Political-Social Sciences
Email:
radubandol@gmail.com
Abstract

The present study aims at analyzing several aspects of the concept of will from the perspective of Saint Augustine and Martin Luther. The authors are “classical” sources of the free will issue, the former in asserting it, the latter in coming to doubt it with regard to the “superior” choices. The actuality of the theme resides not only in the fact that it is profoundly transdisciplinary and that it continuously pursues a balance between what depends on the deliberating agent and what influences it in action from the outside, but also in that the authors we are dealing with were frequently investigated, resorted to and quoted in their age about the matter of the assertion and negation of free will. In the case of Augustine we take into consideration the relationship between arbitrium and voluntas, the former as a faculty of judgement and free consent, the latter as a complex of inclinations or dispositions. In the case of Luther three hypostases are identified in which arbitrium is slave (servum): an enslavement due to its impossibility of removing the aversion to God, an enslavement due to its impossibility of responding to God’s grace and the last one towards the sovereignty of God’s governing of the universe. The theological theory of will has the “advantage” of relating to a superior, perfect, modelling Will. Our attempt is to notice the essential anthropological aspect in which Luther distances himself from Augustine and the effect it has on understanding the arbitrium.

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Zeno GOZO
Instituția:
Faculty of Psychology, Tibiscus University of Timişoara
Email:
zenogozo@yahoo.com
Abstract

Bowen’s theory of self-differentiation presents practical steps for reaching a superior human value, for detaching out of the amorphous mass of “the ordinary” that remains in debt to the chronic anxiety. The liberating epistemological leap is to be made by switching from the elements of an emotional system to the elements of an intellectual one. The two systems represent different paradigmatic aspects that are situated at the opposite poles of the human being. The link of the two extremes is the consciousness of the individual that represents the elective and actual action “field” in the same time. For implementing the differentiation, Bowen proposes certain steps that have a pragmatic value and that allow a phenomenological-existential reading which we shall undertake. The Bowenian theory can be applied on at least four levels of different but interconnected readings that will be detailed in the paper. Since the differentiation scale proposed by the American author is not completely elaborated, we propose an interpretation that points to the transcending of the immediate data of the consciousness (given by the emotional and intellectual systems) towards the domain of self-discovery of the human being’s nucleus. Our article explores and develops some philosophical aspects of comprehending self differentiation. Surpassing the strict psychotherapeutic frame, we propose a reading placed beyond the domain of psychology. Self differentiation implies also existential issues along with anthropological aspects which respond to ethical and deontological challenges. The accomplishment of a clearly outlined personality, centred on its own values and criteria, presumes at least four directions of investigation. In conclusion, we can say that we try to operate differentiations on the basis of the self differentiation proposed by Bowen.

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Mihaela URSA
Instituția:
Dept. of Comparative Literature, Babeş-Bolyai University Cluj
Email:
mihaela_ursa@yahoo.com
Abstract

The present paper is part of a larger research on the narrative peculiarities of amorous fiction. This section analyzes a particular metaphor engaged in the explanation of the nature of love in configurative arts and literature: the illness. Seen as a psycho-somatic or only a psychological condition, love is understood as a disease because as such it makes the chaos of being in love comprehensible and it helps the management of what seems unmanageable in passion. From Marsilio Ficino to Thomas Mann and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, world love fiction offers illustrations of the theory of amorous illness.

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Alina PREDA
Instituția:
Faculty of Letters, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj
Email:
alinapreda74@gmail.com
Abstract

The aim of this study is to untangle the web of implications that the various strands of discourse – pertaining to fields as diverse as literature, journalism, sociology, medicine and law – have had on the conception, creation and reception of Radclyffe Hall’s literary works, with a focus on her infamous novel, The Well of Loneliness. Due to the mingling of such discourses this novel took precisely the particular form it did, its publishers first plummeted into agony and then soared to ecstasy, while its author rose from local fame to worldwide notoriety, at the expense of accurate representations of the alternative lifestyle currently known as lesbianism.

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Cristian RADU
Instituția:
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj
Email:
ch_radu@yahoo.com
Abstract

We set forth the hypothesis that the literature of exile is consistently represented in the modern novel, if we understand exile in its philosophical meaning, that of an interior attitude characterized by the irremediable incompatibility between spirit and the order of the world. Taking on the role of the outsider imposes an alternative defined by Karl Jaspers: ultimate situations are experiences that once assumed can show the individual the nothingness or the fullness of being. The first alternative is illustrated by the “literature of the absurd”, with themes that derive from the “revelation of non-being” mentioned by Jaspers. Writers like Camus, Ionesco or Kafka are commented from this perspective. Mircea Eliade and Vintilă Horia are, on the other hand, writers that prove the second alternative, finding the path for knowledge in exile.

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Ioana HOREA
Instituția:
University of Oradea
Email:
ihorea@uoradea.ro
Abstract

Within semiotic analysis the role of the reader is of utmost relevance because the very existence of symbols, the idea of significance is intrinsic to the process of perception, and that leads to the concept of the reader’s participation in the act of creation. With all the threat of getting lost in significances while trying to solve or even find and deepen mysteries, enchanted by the feeling of discovering some very important secrets, literature will no longer be plausible, unless it resorts to this science of words and significations. The idea can be best referred to by using examples provided by the literary work Foucault’s Pendulum belonging to the father of semiotics, Umberto Eco, which the current study undertook to accomplish.

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Ionuţ COSTEA
Instituția:
Babeş–Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
costea78@yahoo.co.uk
Abstract

The article discusses the contributions of literary critic and expert of intellectual history Adrian Marino to the research on censorship in Romania in two major registers. In the first one, the author observes, on the one hand, a remodelling of Adrian Marino’s intellectual biography in the second half of the last decade of the 20th century, by concluding a research project dedicated to the idea of literature and starting a new one on the evolution of the ideas of freedom and censorship in Romanian culture. On the other hand, he emphasizes the theoretical and methodological perspective based on which the new research project is articulated, a history of ideas engaged in the context of a broader cultural program regarding the reconstruction of modern, European and creative Romanian culture which was a necessary step for the formation and strengthening of civil society and democracy after the fall of communism in 1989. In the second register Marino’s biographical incidence with censorship is studied. Imprisoned and being in house arrest in the years of communism (in the 50s), Marino was subject to a series of censorship practices: using a pseudonym, writing chapters of annulled books, passages excluded from articles and books, books within publishing programs postponed sine die, etc. Moreover, Adrian Marino was not relieved of these practices even after the fall of communism. His contribution to the international encyclopedia of censorship published in 2001, the summarizing article on Romania, suffered a series of editorial interventions whithout the author’s “blessing” (e.g. shortening the text, reorganizing the chapters, or introducing different passages). The present study is based on a number of primary sources (correspondence, memoirs, interviews with A. Marino) and on a rich literature on the topic.

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Miscellanea

Eleonora SAVA (ed.)
Recenzie de
Alina COMAN (ANDREICA)
Instituția:
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
alina_coman_s30@yahoo.com
Abstract
Aurel CODOBAN
Recenzie de
Cătălin BOBB
Instituția:
Romanian Academy, Iasi Branch
Email:
catalinbobb@yahoo.com
Abstract
Marius ROTAR
Recenzie de
Adriana TEODORESCU
Instituția:
1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia
Email:
adriana.teodorescu@gmail.com
Abstract
Dimitrie GUSTI et al.
Recenzie de
Ionuţ BUTOI
Instituția:
University of Bucharest, Department of Sociology
Email:
ionutbutoi@yahoo.com
Abstract
Mihaela URSA
Recenzie de
Cristina VIDRUŢIU
Instituția:
Babeş-Bolyai University
Email:
vidrutiucristina@yahoo.com
Abstract
Mihaela FRUNZĂ
Recenzie de
Iulia GRAD
Instituția:
Department of Philosophy Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj
Email:
iuliagrad@gmail.com
Abstract
Petru DEREVENCO
Recenzie de
Ionuţ Isaia JEICAN
Instituția:
Iuliu Haţieganu University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
ionutjeican@yahoo.com
Abstract