Critical Hermeneutics

Cover

C H — 2024-04-06

Cover

Editors' Introduction

Silvano Tagliagambe — 2024-04-06

The thought of P.A. Florensky is a peculiar expression of Russian philosophy and, more generally, of Russian cultural identity. At the same time, it can nevertheless be regarded as a legitimate heir to the cultural tradition which from its powerful Ionian roots unfolds through the peaks and abysses of Western philosophy stricto sensu, up to the ultimate crises of contemporary thought...

Editoriale

Silvano Tagliagambe — 2024-04-06

Il pensiero di P.A. Florenskij è peculiare espressione della filosofia e dell’identità culturale russa; nel contempo, esso è viva e autentica eredità di una tradizione culturale che dalla potente radice ionica si dispiega attraverso le vette e gli abissi della filosofia stricto sensu occidentale, fino alle crisi ultime del pensiero contemporaneo...

The Destiny of Science

Silvano Tagliagambe — 2024-04-06

The paper investigates the salient features of Florensky's "concrete metaphysics" and the interpretative and forecasting framework he draws from it to prefigure the features of future science. The intent is to reconstruct, through a documented analysis based on the texts, his attitude towards Europe and the western world, certainly characterised by a critical confrontation, based on the perception and denunciation of the crisis of the hegemonic models of rationality and civilisation in their cultures, but anything hostile and antagonistic, and never evaluated by him as foreign realities, neither as regards their destiny, nor that of Russia, Christianity and philosophical and scientific thought in general.

Florensky and Future Science

Francesco Vitali Rosati — 2024-04-06

This paper analyses the main concepts of Florensky's technical works – namely his studies on topology and his engineering work at Glavelektro and at the Technical Encyclopedia – within the framework of an allegedly 'new and future' conception of the world. The aim is to show that not only is Florensky's technical-scientific work detachable from his metaphysics, but that it is possible to identify the theoretical and methodological features of an original scientific approach and a transversal model of rationality capable of overcoming the rigid demarcations between nature and culture. Such science shall contain both an Ars inveniendi and a morphology of particularities.

The Religious Value of Language between the Sacred and the Holy

Domenico Burzo — 2024-04-06

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, language undoubtedly constituted a strong topic of philosophical interest both in Eastern Europe and in the West. Following in particular Florensky’s conception of speech and language as living organisms structured in an antinomic way, we come to grasp their fundamental symbolic meaning. According to a gradual development of increasing semantic depth, the symbolism rises from a common word to a poetic-religious word, which sings of the splendour of the Saint. Likewise, language and poetry are for Heidegger fundamental forms of the event of being and of his truth, which manifests itself as sacred. Here then is the need for a basic decision to emerge, between the inevitable uncertainty due to the concealment of the sacred, and a possible apophaticism which, without exhausting its Essence, knows it can name the Saint.

The Spiritual Roots of Western Culture

Lubomir Jozef Žak — 2024-04-06

The Russian thinker Florensky and the French philosopher Weil devoted much space in their writings to the crisis of the West. The article highlights the many convergences that exist between their explanations of the reasons for this state of things, but also between their proposals for a solution based on the analysis of what they both consider to be the foundation stone of Western culture: ancient Greece, specifically its culture and thought imbued with an arcane religious-mystical tradition, the best representative of which is Plato. Florensky and Weil agree that the renewal of Western culture should consist in rediscovering its ancient roots and, simultaneously, in reappropriating that which founds the culture and thought of ancient Greece: the gaze on the transcendent, that is, on that reality of which the real (the world, life, etc.) is an ontological symbol.

“The Noblest of all Things is Water”

Andrea Dezi — 2024-04-06

In a series of lectures delivered in 1909 at the Moscow Theological Academy, Florensky presented an audacious thesis: philosophy – he claimed – was born of the worship of the god Poseidon. Significant aspects of Russian and European culture converge in the fervent scientific, philosophical, artistic, and religious terrain from which the thesis stems. Among them, certainly the varied, yet consistent, already ‘solid tradition of Russian Schellingianism’ – as Florensky calls it. This essay studies the connection of Schelling's thought with Florensky's ideas on the Milesian origin of Western philosophy, attempting to illuminate, on the borderline between the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of mythology, the powerful antinomian structure of Florensky’s thesis.

Purity of Heart and Perception of Reality in Pavel Florensky

Marisa Mosto — 2024-04-06

In The pillar and ground of the truth, Pavel Florensky meditates on the anthropological potential of the mysticism of the heart as opposed to false mysticisms that generate a fragmented and distorted experience of life. The mysticism of the heart in one of its highest figures that arises in the sphere of christian asceticism points instead to the integration of the person, to a transfiguration of his perception by which he enters into relationship with a frequency of the real that resembles a sort of entrance to Paradise. Florensky's thought is a challenge to the lifestyle imposed on us by contemporary culture, which is related to those false mysticisms because of its logic centered on the will to control, the maximization of instrumental efficiency, dispersion, consumption, which causes the degradation of human life in isolation and the loss of enthusiasm for existence.

Florensky’s Epistemological and Ethical Position

Gilberto Safra — 2024-04-06

In this paper, I propose a hermeneutic reading of the beginning of the first letter entitled Los dos mundos in the book La Columna y el Fundamento de la Verdad. I consider this text important,as it offers us the epistemological principles that will guide Florensky's investigation. I understand that Florensky proposes a phenomenology, in which the phenomenological reduction is the Cross of Christ. A perspective that brings it closer to the hesychast tradition, which considers the purification of the heart through the Cross, the path to the visit of the Uncreated Light, as a path towards theosis. In the case of Florensky, we have a similar path to achieving a mystical modality of knowledge, in which the intuitive and discursive register are combined in a fertile and rigorous way.

Of a Removal

Roberto Masiero — 2024-04-06

A book written in 1938 by a German jurist, philosopher and essayist, Walter Schubart, emerges from a tragic past that we deem distant, and forces us, more than eighty years later, to question problematically our present day. The profound contradictions of that time have not been resolved, and the same spectres for the same and new nightmares play on the scene. The text is reread and interpreted to bring out what were for Schubart the crucial junctures of the conflict not only between Russia and Europe but also between West and East, in search of a possible synthesis glimpsed by the author himself when in the conclusion he uses a metaphor: Europe is the vat, Russia the wine, each needs the other. The current geopolitical context is certainly not moving in that direction. But have other perspectives or other ways of interpreting such conflicts and thus other implicit solutions presented themselves between those two worlds? Poignant from this point of view may be the intense work of Pavel Florensky – considered only very marginally by Schubart. In the interweavings of theology, philosophy, science, linguistics and art, Florensky opens up to a profound reworking of both Western and Eastern culture, showing that the conflict can be recomposed on the scene by getting rid of spectres.

“Justice is Dead”

Martín González Fernández — 2024-04-06

Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries was characterized by extreme violence. In his course at the Collège de France, Il faut défendre la société (1974/1975), M. Foucault has argued that the birth of the modern state, through the juridico-political theory of sovereignty, and Hobbes-style contractualism and Leviathan, falsely closed the problem. He offers an alternative based on counter-history, but disdains many of Montaigne 's materials that could reinforce his thesis.

Florensky

Gaspare Mura — 2024-04-06

This article traces Florensky’s intellectual biography. The author underlines that, more than his numerous scientific, philosophical, theological, mystical works, his most important and imperishable message is the heroic elevation of his Christian testimony in the gulag. Florensky transfigures the “night” with the achievement of a higher spiritual dimension, which he calls “the art of gratuitousness”, of the pure disinterested gift of oneself to God and others, that gratuitousness which is synonymous with grace and beauty.

The Brief Philosophy

Enrico Palma — 2024-04-06

The essay intends to propose a reflection on the philosophical writing and style discussing Emil Cioran's thought, based mainly on the conversations and interviews in which the Franco-Romanian philosopher offered notable interpretative keys on this theme. With this contribution we attempt to articulate philosophical writing as a lógos which, starting from sensation, from life in the most direct way in which it is perceived, expresses existence, with the aim of freeing it from the evils that grip it.

From the Necessary to the Useless

Elena Gigante — 2024-04-06

Starting from the impossible question “what is music?”, the paper attempts to circumscribe its meaning through different epistemological strategies: historical, empirical, objective. An attempt is made to reflect on the character of intangibility and sensoriality of musical experience that reveals its antinomic essence. Musical experience appears stretched between ineffable and exact, useless and necessary. The second part of the work is dedicated to the observation of the music phenomenon through the neuroscientific perspective.

"Ermeneutica. Scritti e conferenze 2" (Ricoeur)

Angela Monica Recupero — 2024-04-06

book review

C H — 2024-04-06

Contents