Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy

Hegel boldly proclaimed that the time for searching for the truth had come to an end, not because such truth was an illusion and the search was misguided, but because we were at last in a position to grasp the truth in its fullness. What the Hegelian philosophy seems to offer is “the absolute” itself, the ultimate ground of all knowledge, knowledge free from skeptical doubts, knowledge which is underwritten by Hegel’s equally grand claim, in The Philosophy of History, that in Europe of his day, history had “come to an end”. While Hegel’s claims may strike a contemporary reader as naively optimistic, outmoded and quaint, or bombastic and dangerous, I will attempt an interpretation of Hegel’s thesis on the “end of history” which I hope is plausible today. Having done that, I will then argue that even this defense of the Hegelian thesis cannot salvage the “end of history” as a panacea. History might have come to an end and the fullness of truth revealed itself, and yet we have grounds to fear that our relationship to truth is as contested as ever.

The heated and unresolved debate in philosophy of history evoked by Hempel’s suggestion that the deductive-nomological model of explanation is equally applicable to the natural sciences and history, has unintentionally led to a distorted conception of what it is to explain in history. We argue that explanation in history, at its best, is contingent not on general laws, not even on consequentiality, but on labels as frames of meaning. These labels further serve as a basis for eliciting models which help determine the fuller meaning of occurrences and processes in history.

The notion or narrative of “progress” fed with the belief that the history has a reason or an aim has from the very beginning been one of the main constituents of the Enlightenment idea or process which represents ‘the attempt to make known what is mythic’. The main argument of this narrative that was supported with the statements especially in the 18th and 19th centuries tells us that the ‘humanity’ progress, or advance, into a world where a design of a wider scale of equity, justice and freedom will dominate. Functioning sometimes politically/economically and sometimes philosophically/culturally, this narrative has been intensely criticised in academic and intellectual circles today. It can be claimed that, in this process, the reliance on the notion of progress and a historiography based on this notion has been shaken. Among the reasons for the disintegration of modernist progress narrative are the developments that the belief in the Enlightenment project has come completely under question especially after the social disasters encountered in the 20th century, that almost all the constitutive narratives of the modernism ghost have been undermined and invalidated, that the concepts of universality, justice, equity, peace etc. have been discredited after the liberal and democratic systems have transformed, in one sense, with the transition from the organised capitalism into the disorganised capitalism or from the national capital movements into global capital movements, that socialist ideals have been defeated with the fall of real-communist systems and etc. The question which the theoretical extensions of these developments that moved existing political perspectives posed after their attempt for the deconstruction activity about the progress narrative is: “While the view that we haven’t developed a new approach that could take the place of the notion or narrative of progress still exists pretty obviously, what kind of historical consciousness do we need for the realization of a political and philosophical analysis on the ‘present’? How and on which platforms can the possibilities of this new consciousness which could allow the construction of the actuality that could feed a design or utopia about the future? Or is it that today’s consciousness only tells us, as Adorno stressed, that we are in a social reality that will not be able to produce positive utopias? In the study, an answer will be sought to these questions and it will be investigated whether in our time when ‘the progress’ narrative has died away leaving with a peck of anxiety, anger and hopelessness behind, new political and epistemological initiations which could be formed as a result of the disintegration of this ground are possible or not.

Notwithstanding its prominence in the title of Gadamer’s major work, the concept of truth remains implicit and underspecified in Gadamer’s writings (e.g., Bernstein 1983, 151-52). Consequently, it is often assumed that, for Gadamer, as for Heidegger, the emergence of truth is adequately characterised as a sudden flash of enlightening insight, an impression reinforced by the prominence accorded by Gadamer in the first part of Truth and Method to the experience of aesthetic truth and the model of play (Spiel). But in addition to leaving the hermeneutic truth concept open to charges of arbitrariness and subjectivism, this assessment overlooks Gadamer’s emphasis in the second part of TM on the need for investigating a topic dialogically. Accordingly, this paper contends that it is only when these two elements are counterbalanced, as Gadamer intends, that a defensible conception of hermeneutic truth emerges, impervious to charges of arbitrariness and subjectivism. Notably too, this hermeneutic truth concept transcends both coherence and correspondence truth in important respects.

There is the popular interpretation that the Marx’s history theory is considered man being historical subject. Man is constructed as the historical subject and the history is viewed as the identity of the subject-object since Georg Lukacs history theory in his History and Class Consciousness. This paper thinks that although man plays important role in the Marxist history theory, Marx never place man as the historical subject through the observations of the Marx’s relative Works. As matter of fact, we find that the idea of man being historical subject stays away the scientific history theory of Marx and may misunderstand the account of the Marxist history theory even leads it nowhere.

The Holocaust’s extreme character, which differentiates it from other events of modern history, can arguably be associated, with the help of philosophy, with its ‘negative radicality’. This radicality emanates from those elements in the cataclysm that seem to lack any apparent meaning when approached by means of ‘normal’ historical experience and understanding. Hence it is hardly surprising that the Shoah poses some of the biggest challenges to our capacities to comprehend, conceive and represent not only historical events but history and historicity themselves, representing rather a ‘radical counter-testimony’ to traditional philosophy. As philosophy has a lot to do with the historical circumstances in which it is written, we must ask how the Holocaust’s radicalism forces a re-examination of philosophical categories. This does not mean we will find no meaning of the Holocaust: but if we want to deepen our understanding of it, we have to treat is as a philosophical-historical and cultural problem, subject to philosophical-historical and cultural answers.

In this paper I argue that Friedrich Nietzsche and R.G. Collingwood both offer a critique of the positivist mode of historiography. A historical methodology that they each garnish pejoratively, with the image of the eunuch. In the first two sections of the paper I argue that what appears upon first glance as a decorative metaphor contains the seeds out of which can grow a substantial philosophical problem. And the problem identified by both thinkers is one of historical methodology, of history ineffectually and incorrectly practiced. In the final section of the paper I offer a sketch of a mode of historiography that may sidestep such a worry.

This study has the aim of approaching contributions of the philosopher Michel Foucault to the philosophy of history, providing interlocution between this author and the debate about philosophy as investigation and way of living. The basis for discussion is the idea of historical discontinuity, which is present in Foucault’s theorizations, where phenomena of rupture make possible to men to untie from linearity of historical determinism, and to build their existence for beyond aggregations, questioning themselves, and opposing themselves against the wefts of power in its social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions. It is an antagonistic vision to the closed model of immobile structures, of certainties and progressive or linear successions that see the present as a simple unfolding of the past, without taking into account the possibility of present and future being constituted as difference and not as repetition.

Globalization is contradictory: on the one hand it unites people, on the other atomizes them. Marx believed that the world-historical subject would be forming while producing the united world history. But now the world-historical process is dehumanized. People lose the quality of subject and become objects of manipulations especially via Internet. We deal with the elimination of subject. The situation is dangerous because there is no historical subject capable of coping with the ecological and technological problems. The way out of the situation is to build the basis of globalization again from the beginning. Ecological socialism is the real way out. We must think over the world-historical process in the humanistic way and provide the world history with the world-historical subject. Rejection of consumerism and restoration of subjectivity are the main measures.

The purpose of the paper is to briefly confront three different stances towards the modern age: Karl Löwith’s, Hannah Arendt’s and Hans Blumenberg’s. The author shows, how these different attitudes and premises form a conceptual triangle. On the one hand, Arendt and Löwith seem to be closer to each other than to Blumenberg, since they both tend to assess the modern age more or less negatively in comparison to pre-modern times and both treat modernity as a derivative or distortion of pre-modern concepts of the world and history. They both present a sort of attitude that Blumenberg describes as historical substantialism. On the other hand, they differ strongly in their principal points of reference (Christianity and ancient Greece), which leads them to almost contradictory conclusions about the essence of modernity. Blumenberg’s methodology and attitude towards the modern age opposes both thinkers from two different angles. The Author’s analysis focuses on the originality of the latter thinker, whose functional methodology and thorough phenomenological analyses led him to form a genuine estimation and appreciation of novelty and uniqueness of modernity against pre-modern times as well as a dialogical response to them.

В докладе рассмотрены основные исторические этапы становления философии истории как важнейшего раздела философской науки, начиная с эпохи Античности и заканчивая ХХ веком. Обращено внимание на причины, вызывающие у исследователей затруднения в процессе постижения человеческой истории. Дана характеристика некоторых проблем, возникших в постсоветской философской науке, связанных с определением дисциплинарного статуса социальной философии, ее предмета и проблемного поля. Социальная философия, пришедшая на смену историческому материализму, трактуется как составная часть философии, которая представляет собой предельно общую теорию исторического процесса, исследует сущность, направленность, движущие силы, закономерности и методы его познания, т.е. как философия истории.

The most important concept of philosophy of history is con-sidered in connection with the contribution made by Karl Kantor, a well-known Russian philosopher, into solving the problem in his book titled “A Double Spiral of History. Historiosophia of Projectism” (M.: 2002). Three revolutions of spirit which occurred in the history of society correspond to three paradigmatic projects of history. The 1st revolution of spirit was the phenomenon of Christ and the first project of history became Christianity. The 2nd revolution of spirit was Renaissance and the second project of histo-ry was an aesthetical art project. The third revolution of spirit was K. Marx and his scientific project of history which synthesizes, absorbs the religious and the aesthetical projects. The issue of an uncompromising, antagonistic struggle between history and sociocultural evolution is also discussed. The revolution of spirit strives for radical transformation of socium which resists transformation and thus leads to a historical deadlock. A way out of the dead-lock is inevitably connected with the beginning of a new revolution of spirit. The prospects of revolution of spirit continuing in contemporary world in-cluding Russia are also outlined.

Сложность утверждения коэволюции общества и природы обусловлена, во-первых, несовпадением скорости естественной и социальной эволюции, их разнонаправленностью, во-вторых, тем, что общественное сознание и индивидуальное сознание большинства людей консервативно и не спешит признать необходимость такой коэволюции. В-третьих, общество и каждый человек не являются однозначно социальными системами, а представляют собой сложное диалектическое единство естественной и социальной сторон с выраженным, но не абсолютным господством социального начала. Поэтому коэволюция общества и биосферы возможна только при существовании коэволюции естественного и социального внутри общества. Социальное является продуктом природы, результатом самосовершенствования таких свойств естественных образований, как адаптация, передача и переработка информации. Поэтому социальное – явление родственное естественному. И в то же время социальное качественно противостоит естественному, так как подрывает полное господство одного из фундаментальных его свойств – стихийность, заменив её частичной осознанностью. Условием существования общества является господство социального начала, которое обеспечивается в процессе непрерывного снятия естественного содержания своих природных предпосылок. При этом снятие никогда не бывает абсолютным. Наиболее сложным является подчинение социальным отдельного индивида, что осуществляется при помощи суггестии в процессе социализации.