philosophy and crisis, ioannina 2013-book of abstracts

UNIVERSITY OF IOANNINA

SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology

SECTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Philosophy and Crisis:

Responding to Challenges to Ways of Life in the

Contemporary World

Under the Aegis of the University of Ioannina

B O O K O F A B S T R A C T S

July 28-30, 2013

“Karolos Papoulias” Congress Hall,

Dourouti University Campus

University of Ioannina

Ioannina, Greece

B O O K O F A B S T R A C T S

Edited by G. Maggini

H. Karabatzaki V. Solomou-Papanikolaou

Typeset and designed by P. Sioula © University of Ioannina, Sector of Philosophy, 2013

Honorary Committee

Professor Emeritus George F. McLean, President of the RVP (The

Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., USA)

Professor Emeritus Evanghelos Moutsopoulos, Academician (Academy

of Athens, Research Center for Greek Philosophy, GREECE)

Professor Panagiotis Noutsos, Head of the Sector of Philosophy

(University of Ioannina, GREECE)

Professor Georgia Apostolopoulou (University of Ioannina, GREECE)

Professor Emeritus Abdul Rashid (University of Karachi, PAKISTAN)

Professor Emeritus Thomas Robinson (University of Toronto, CANADA)

Professor Emeritus Antonia Soulez (University of Paris VIII-Saint De-

nis, FRANCE)

Professor Jacob Ale Aigbodioh (Ambrose Alli University, NIGERIA)

Professor Costas Douzinas, Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the

Humanities (Birkbeck College, University of London, UNITED KINGDOM)

Professor Nikolas Kompridis, Research Coordinator of the Institute for

Democracy and Human Rights (University of Western Sydney, AUSTRALIA)

Professor Tatiana Leshkevich (Southern Federal University, RUSSIA)

Professor Tianxiang Ma (Wuhan University, CHINA)

Professor Plamen Makariev (University of Sofia, BULGARIA)

Professor Jānis (John) Ozoliņš (Australian Catholic University, AUSTRALIA)

Professor Neelima Sinha (Magadh University, INDIA)

Local Organizing Committee

Golfo Maggini, Associate Professor (University of Ioannina)

Helen Karabatzaki, Former Associate Professor (University of Ioannina)

Vasiliki Solomou-Papanikolaou, Lecturer (University of Ioannina)

RVP Organizing Committee

Professor Emeritus George F. McLean, President of the RVP (The

Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.)

Dr Hu Yeping, Executive Director of the RVP (The Catholic University

of America, Washington, D.C.)

S e c r e t a r i a t

Assistant to the Local Organizing Committee

Panagiota G. Sioula (MA in Education, Administrative-Financial

Stuff, University of Ioannina)

Student Coordinator

Konstantinos D. Koskeridis (Ph.D Candidate, University of Ioannina,

Sector of Philosophy)

Graduate Students

*Interdepartmental Programme of Graduate Studies on “Greek Philoso-

phy and Philosophy of the Sciences”, University of Ioannina, Sector of

Philosophy]

Chrysoula Anastasiadou (MA Candidate)

Christina-Konstantina Aprili (MA Candidate)

Eleftheria Beza (MA Candidate)

Stella Christoforou (MA Candidate)

Konstantinos Filippakis (MA Candidate)

Eleni-Stamatela Hondrogianni (MA Candidate)

Konstantinos Kotsiaris (Ph.D Candidate)

Paraskevi Papazachopoulou (MA Candidate)

Evgenia Patseli (MA Candidate)

Maria Sozopoulou (Ph.D Candidate)

Charalambos Tabakis (Ph.D Candidate)

Kalliopi Tasloglou (MA Candidate)

Eirini Zachari (MA Candidate)

Paraskevi Zapsa (MA Candidate)

Undergraduate Students

[Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology, University of

Ioannina]

Dimitris Karathanasis

Melandinos Athanasios

Ioannis Petsanis

Anastasia Siatou

Gerasimos Stamatelos

Rafaela Tosiou

Dimitris Vaniotis

Other Volunteers

Antigoni N. Papanikolaou (MA in History, University of Cardiff)

A B S T R A C T S

BOOK OF ABSTRACTS 11

Aguas Jove Jim S.

Crisis and Decision-Making: The Role of Reason and Will in Ethical Crisis

The “crisis” was derived from the Greek term “krisis” which means, choice, de-cision, judgment and “krisis” is derived from the Greek verb “krinein” which means “to decide”. In the legal, medical and rhetorical contexts “krisis” could mean a turning point in a decision, a crucial or decisive stage or state of affairs. In this context, a choice or decision is a critical moment which could lead to something positive, productive meaningful and successful, or it could lead to something negative, tragic, senseless or a failure. Our society constantly faces different “crisis” – political, social, economic and environmental to name a few. Hence we always face critical or crucial moments in our existence. But these “crises” in the society eventually lead us to individual decisions; individ-ual choices are at the foundation of society’s choices. Individual decisions af-fect the greater decisions of the society. From an ethical perspective the mo-ment of decision or choice of an individual is essentially an act of the will, the will however, does not usually act alone, the will acts with the influence of rea-son. The object of the will is a value that which it perceives to be good. Whether the good is truly good or not is beyond the power of the will, it must follow the guidance of reason. Volition which is the act of the will follows rea-son and the proper object of reason is the truth. The will then, when it makes a decision must choose and its choice ought to be based on the truth, that is, the true value of its object.

Ethical crisis involves crucial decision on ethical matters and issues and since the resolution of crisis involves decision that ought to be right, then, it is important to highlight the role of the will and reason in resolving ethical crisis. Reason has a role in volition and consequently in decision making or making a choice. The success or failure of the decision/choice especially in crisis involv-ing ethical issues can be affected by reason. This paper then aims to enunciate the role of the will and reason in dealing with crisis and decision-making on ethical issues.

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INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE: PHILOSOPHY AND CRISIS 12

Aigbodioh Jacob Ale Imafidon Elvis

Philosophical Challenges of Modernity and Moral Degeneration in Contemporary African Societies Modern African societies are currently experiencing a moral crisis apparently owing to a generational gap between persons of the old (traditional) com-munalistic order, on the one hand, and the generation of the new (modern) liberal democratic (individualistic) order on the order hand. The old school al-lege that the present generation suffers from a moral decay to which the new “school” object. In this condition, modern behavioural patterns are viewed as a threat to traditional moral values and conducts. The African philosopher is in-terested in this situation from the following standpoint: (i) ascertaining the alleged difference(s) between the moral core of indigenous African traditions and that of modern African societies; (ii) examining some salient arguments for alleging a moral decay in modern African societies as presented in majority of available literatures; and (iii) locating essential philosophical grounds for im-proving the crisis situation. What becomes obvious in the analysis of the issues involved is that sustaining communal living and solidarity is one essential hall-mark of African indigenous ethics, and this seems to be lacking in the ethics of modern African societies. We conclude that injecting certain elements of Jur-gen Habermas’s discourse ethics into moral discourse in contemporary Africa will help reinvigorate African core moral values in contemporary African socie-ties.

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Ajah Anthony C.

The West and the Rest of Us: From Misconceived Freedom and Valuation,

to Endemic Crises and Madness The civilizing process can get maddened! Marx Weber thought this to be right –that was why he pictured the modern man in a self-constructed ‘iron cage’. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno thought this to be valid. That was why


they abandoned the previous objectives of the Frankfurt School, re-assessed the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Besides, Horkheimer was worried about the Ec-lipse of Reason, and he convinced himself that “Advance in technical facilities for enlightenment is accompanied by a process of dehumanization”. After all is said, is dehumanization not a form of madness? Jürgen Habermas had no doubt that this was correct too: he was not denying that the process had re-coiled on man. He was rather focused on the fact that the harm can be undone: moderni-ty project needs not be abandoned! Even more, the title of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, serves as a good cap-ture of the possibility of this unwanted confluence of madness, reason, and civi-lization. Thus, it is not in doubt, either that crises situations can lead to mad-ness, or that madness can also lead to crises situations. The possibility of this dialectic is the focus of this paper. More specifically, this paper argues that the consistent misconception of human nature, freedom, and valuation, in Western Europe and the United States, is the primary crisis that gradually resulted to the late modern and contemporary political, social, and ethical crises. The philo-sophical and cultural position called Deconstruction (Nietzsche’s Derrida) is, in the views of this paper, a confirmation of the madness called ‘unfettered free-dom to choose on the basis of whatever standard of evaluation’ – a position which Heidegger rightly criticised. While this position has received its boldest expressions in Western Europe and the United States, one would be wrong to hold that the endemic crises that must continue to result from it would destroy ‘them’ alone, leaving the rest of ‘us’ unaffected. Actually, globalization proves this presumption wrong. The aim of this paper is to show both the foundations of this madness, and the weakness in the said presumption. This paper con-cludes that only a concept of man within a transcendental framework (Paul Ri-coeur, Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, John Paul II, and Joseph Ratzinger) can cure this madness and give a new meaning to the different contemporary ma-nifestations of the modernity project.

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Alexakis Dimitris

Dogmatism and Experimentalism in Crisis

According to John Dewey the crisis of the modern society is a kind of cultural lag. The scientific revolution of 17th century gave a great boost to the physical sciences thanks to the development of the experimental method. However, the


traditional, dogmatic ways are still dominant in the field of social sciences, morals and politics. This lag is responsible for the social disorder. A characteris-tic example of the dogmatic policy is the ideology of laissez faire–laissez passé, which impose mechanical laws on economy. It is suggested that we should go beyond the contemporary dogmatism of institutions and deal with them ex-perimentally in order to overcome the crisis. In our paper we consider John Dewey’s instrumentalism as a characteristic case of a functionalist social theory and we approach critically the conception of experimentalism regarding the importance of values in the construction of a critical social theory, which is practically oriented to the overcoming of the crisis.

Scientism is dominant in the work of the American philosopher. The supe-riority of the method of physics is considered as a fact and it is consisted in ex-perimentalism, contrary to spectator theories of knowledge. According to the experimental science, the knowledge is obtained through deliberate institution of a definite and specified course of changes. The method of physical inquiry is to introduce some changes in order to see what other changes ensue. Experi-mentalism conjoins on the one hand with functionalism, because it rejects a strong conception of truth and on the other hand with action, because knowl-edge is considered as a mode of action and is judged by its consequences.

John Dewey projects the need for the development of the experimental method in social sciences, politics and morals. But in this request the limits of scientism come in being. He is unable to describe accurately what an experi-mental social science would be. Moreover, he is obliged to fall back to a natura-listic metaphysic, beyond his functionalist epistemology, in order to draw par-ticular values for his political philosophy.

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Anagnostopoulos Georgios

Socrates’ Response to the Challenges of Relativism and Voluntarism

Crises in philosophy probably are as old as philosophical inquiry itself. My focus will be a crisis in the early days of philosophy, one that seems to have con-fronted Socrates: the challenges posed by value relativism and voluntarism. I will examine Socrates’ response to them and the lessons to be drawn from it. A central aspect of the Socratic practice, i.e., search for definitions of values, could not even begin, if value relativism was possible. In Plato’s Socratic Dia-


logues the Socratic Forms—the objects of Socratic definitions—are in part con-ceived as the kind of entities that are immune to relativism. Socrates endows his Forms with an epistemic nature that shields them from relativism. However, I will argue that there are reasons, some given by Socrates/Plato, casting doubts on the claim that relativism cannot touch Socratic Forms. Against the subjectivist conception of values implicit in voluntarism, Socrates responds by insisting on the autonomy of values from divine wills and on their objectivity. Values for Socrates provide reasons for action or for having an attitude toward something which are external to any will; they provide external reasons. When such a view about ethical reasons in action is coupled with Socratic views on human motivation, they imply a strong determinism, which seems to leave no room for a role the agent’s own reasons could have in making choices in action. I will explore whether the Socratic framework can in any way accommodate what seems to be a desirable aspect of voluntarism—making ethical reasons one’s own.

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Apostolopoulou Georgia

Crisis and Openness During the last years, “crisis” belongs to everyday vocabulary. Nevertheless, it is a question whether society has the representative place for developing a real discourse on crisis. Developing such a discourse presupposes that society has at its disposal a representative centre of its identity. Can we define such a repre-sentative centre? The statements of the economic authorities, the public rhe-toric of politicians and journalists, the printed and the electronic mass media define the social situation in economic terms. In truth, our society is involved in a process of total economization. Consequently, the economic crisis is defined as the fall from the order of human affairs to disorder of them. Step by step, human life becomes defined in economic terms. No doubt, economic crisis has disastrous consequences for life plans and quality of life as well. In my opinion, this everyday rhetoric of crisis disguises some important aspects of uncertainty concerning the human condition. Philosophy cannot reduce the human condi-tion to economic terms. There are some other most important aspects in our culture that should be taken into account. Philosophical anthropology has ex-plored the dialectical structure of openness and power. Greek poetry and Jew-ish prophecy connected the uncertainty of human affairs with Right and Law.


Christianity universalized the concept of human and connected it love, solidari-ty and respect. In spite of inhumanity, overpower and alienation, humanity re-mains the hidden and fragile basis of social life.

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Badru Olufemi Ronald

Political-Economic Justice and Human Flourishing in Nigeria:

Towards an Argument for Necessary Conjunction The study is an exercise in political philosophy. Adopting the research methods of conceptual clarification, critical analysis, and reflective argumentation, the work makes a systematic attempt to affirm a close correlation between justice and human flourishing in society. To expound upon this position, the study makes three central claims. First, it is advanced that the human person is onto-logically a political and economic being-in-relation, who always desires flou-rishing on these levels in his/her association and interaction with the other in society. Second, to achieve this flourishing, it is further stated that the human person needs the institution of justice in society, and an adequate account of justice in this regard, according to Charles Beitz, is one that embraces the polit-ical and the economic. Third, given the earlier claims, the problem of the study is that the obvious deficit of human flourishing in contemporary Nigeria, which is amply instantiated by a high level of unemployment, demeaning poverty, and insecurity, is largely an epi-phenomenon of the inability of the leadership to properly institute political-economic justice within the State. Therefore, the thesis statement of the study is that the deficit of human flourishing in Nigeria could be positively and substantially addressed if political-economic justice is conscientiously instituted by the leadership within the State.

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Bartsides Michalis

Subjects in Crisis: Indebtedness, Money, Life Philosophy, although it constitutes the appropriate way of thinking at the limits, when and where the certainties of disciplines and theoretical approaches are shaken and disturbed, in the present situation turns out to be as yet quite pow-erless, even to offer an account usefully serving as an explanation and as a moral proposition within crisis. A lot is changing, but most importantly the ways of subjection of individuals and groups.

Aware of this situation, we choose an oblique philosophical approach to the crisis. We will focus on the historicity of modes of subjection, which may prove to be fruitful. We will move through the history of philosophy to look at the relevant narratives on the constitution of the subject. Such a trajectory is not chosen only in order to explain the developments in this debt situation, but mainly to examine whether the debt is a universal and total form of social rela-tionship. The wording of our title already establishes the existence of multiple forms of trans individual social relations and the corresponding forms of the subject. The foundation for this alternative choice is the genealogical study of the historicity of modes of subjection.

The first part will narrate this genealogy of the subject-man of modernity (Locke, Kant, Nietzsche), which will help us see that already at the beginning it was simultaneously a cognitive and moral subject, often actually the subject of indebtedness.

The second part will present and discuss an interesting contemporary the-ory about the “indebted man” as a condition of the current situation.

In the third and concluding part we will give some elements towards an al-ternative direction, drawing once more from the history of philosophy with the example of Spinoza.

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Bazac Ana

Conatus and the Worth of Life in a Time of Crisis My presentation aims at discussing the logical destiny of two concepts related to life: the conatus and the worth of life.

Indeed, the time of crisis challenges more than the ordinary time spent in a “normal” society where people have already arranged their duration, think that society would them supply a certain security and feel their condition as acceptable. In the introduction of my paper (and presentation) I obviously dis-cuss the above-mentioned notions as prerequisite to the understanding of the theoretical framework of the problem. Thus, what is a “normal” time? “Nor-mal”: from what standpoint? And rather, which are the causes generating a “normal” and extra-ordinary time, that of crisis? (And, obviously, what does crisis mean as a social de-structuring and fitting out?) Further, if the social re-presentations and feelings of people are not identical but reflect their social and ideological positioning, would there not be too continuity between the state of representations and feelings taken place in a “normal” time and their state in a time of crisis? Why and how the sentiment and strain in front of the crisis are detaching from the ordinary social feelings?

But my aim here is just to help to outline an answer to the problems sug-gested. The first concept, the ground of every inquiry upon the condition of man is that of conatus. As we know, according to Spinoza, “Everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its own being”1. Everything “is opposed to all that could take away its existence. Therefore, in so far as it can, and in so far as it is in itself, it endeavours to persist in its own being”2. The important question concerns the neglecting of this concept (after an interesting historical attempt to focus on) in the development of modern thinking and I try to ex-plain why.

Since every human person wants to persist – and this means to humanly manifest and be happy (i.e. not only to survive but to survive in the specific human/moral way, Kant must be added to Spinoza) – he/she arranges his/her life in order to realise this will (and human will) to live. But the social condi-tions are very important to this purpose. And a time of crisis worsens them even till the destruction of the possibility to deploy many persons’ own cona-

1. Spinoza, The Ethics, III, Prop. VI, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-

h.htm#chap03. 2. Ibidem, Proof.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm#chap03

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm#chap03


tus, attacking in a supplementary manner the life itself. Yet two remarks should be made: the first is that even the concept of life – and not only that of conatus (or the concept of life together with that of conatus) – had and have a historical and specific prestige, including because of the contradistinctions be-tween their deep meaning and the real life of a historical majority of (world) population; the second is that considering the time, we (but also the ordinary people) experience a passing from the meaning of time-receptacle to that of time-as-a-human-construction.

The worth of life is another concept whose history is significant. The im-portant feature here is its intertwining with the conatus. But its meaning mani-fests on two levels: that of the individual and that of society. I mention in this abstract only two aspects: for the individual, conatus means that he wants to live even when he suffers: he wants to last as much as it’s possible even when his life is not rich in creativity. There is also a contradiction between the worth of life given by society (by whom?) and the individual conatus and expectation of plenitude of life.

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Begzos Marios

The Interreligious Dialogue in the Frame of Contempo-rary Crisis

One way to face the crisis of the contemporary world is the dialogue between different religious traditions. We need to clarify the meaning of dialogue so that we are able to avoid any misunderstanding and furthermore any abuse of it. Then we have to point out the main areas of interest of such a dialogue for the sake of the contemporary world especially today when we experience a crisis. The interreligious dialogue is not a strict theological matter, but it is a perma-nent anthropological imperative. The starting point of every interreligious di-alogue is the problem of human suffering and the aim remains the freedom and the dignity of every human being.

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Blasko Andrew

Integration, Manipulation, Alienation The general issue addressed in the present discussion concerns the ways in which human interaction is determined by forces, processes, and media appar-ently beyond the voluntary control of individuals. The particular focus in this regard is the medium of power as it can be found not only in political systems, but in all interaction systems. It is argued that the exercise of power tends to result in the occurrence of particular types of interaction that have a signifi-cantly higher degree of probability than others. This in turn leads to the emer-gence of specific types of meaning that further propagate power and facilitate its exercise. Another aspect of the ubiquitous presence of power in human inte-raction is alienation, which expresses itself in its influence upon relation to self, the operations of the imagination, perception, and cognition, as well as possi-bilities for future action on the part of individuals so affected. Alienation from self and from others, an immediate consequence of the subjection of individual interaction to power, results in social life operating with a determining causality to the degree that social integration today constitutes subjection to power, the restriction or reduction of alternative ways of thought and action, and the per-petuation and expansion of alienation in both subjective and objective forms. The exercise of power within interaction systems also leads to a significant re-striction in the operation of the philosophical imagination. The hope is that an understanding of how such mechanisms operate may open up possibilities to reflect upon subjugation and identify means whereby it can be mollified to a degree.

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Bloechl Jeffrey

The Pre-Ontology of Religious Experience and the Crisis of Phenomenology

I accept the word “crisis” to designate a moment and a turning-point from which the meaning and course of future events are determined. I take as my point of departure the well-known difficulty that phenomenology has had de-fining religious experience within its exploration of the life-world. My concep-


tion of phenomenology is early Heideggerian, but I do not accept all of what appears to be the early Heidegger’s position with respect to being in the world toward God. Nor, however, do I accept various attempts to simply reverse that position by privileging phenomena that it has excluded (see Levinas, Marion). Rather, I accept the difficulty of the Heideggerian position as the expression of a genuine crisis in occidental philosophy, as phenomenology, where it is called on to interpret not so much a series of phenomena as an entire way of life that challenges its methodological premises. In order to explore a possible outcome of this crisis, I will bring some proposals from (Christian) theological anthropol-ogy into contact with a brief reading of some passages from Sein und Zeit.

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Boundas Constantin V.

Αληθεύειν και Κοινωνείν. The Hellenic Proposition for Life

and Culture and the Current Crisis of the Greek State in the Writings of Christos Yannaras

This paper is a presentation and a discussion of Christos Yannaras’s account of the crisis that shakes today the foundations of Greece. In this account, the eco-nomic collapse of the Greek state that robs its citizens of a prosperity that only yesterday could be taken for granted is not the great danger which is simulta-neously able to usher in a new and bright dawn. It is neither self-generated and self-sustained nor does it represent the summum malum. The essence of the crisis is not economic because the essence of the economy is not economic. The crisis is the epiphenomenon of the devaluation of all values minus the value of consumption, precipitated by the historical materialism underpinning both capitalism and socialism. It is the offspring of the black holes of moder-nity--relativism, pluralism, atomocentrism, cult of individual rights, moralities based on values and valuers, religions promising salvation and spiritual solace to the individual, representative democracies that are as paradoxical as the idea of square circles. But it is also the product of distortions proper to the Greek nation-state, cronyism (αναξιοκρατία), party-dominated society (κομμα-τοκρατία), state counting civil society as its own clientele ( πελατειακό κράτοσ), discombobulation of the educational system, loss of the diachronic treasure of language, and, at all costs, modernization through the imitation of everything


Western. However, from Yannaras’s standpoint, all these are mere symptoms. The formal cause of the Greek crisis is, he claims, the forgetting, indeed, the repudiation, of the uniquely Hellenic proposition for bios and culture that ce-mented the identity of being-Hellene from the classical Greek period to the formation of the Greek nation-state in the 19th century. Αληθεφειν και Κοινω-νείν. Αληθεφειν=Κοινωνείν. “Truthing” and Communicating. “Truthing” if and only if Communicating. This sense-bestowing proposition, the crown jewel of Hellenism, with its ontology of relations, its theory of becoming-person in the topos of the Other, and its emphasis on the community (the demos of the clas-sical and Hellenistic polis and the ecclesia of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine world), along with its epistemological conviction that aletheia is whatever koinoneitai, whatever is believed by all—the katholou—this proposition has been abandoned ever since the tiny free state, obeying internal and external pressures, chose to become modern by imitating the Enlightened West. Finis Graeciae! My paper maintains that the “yeast” and the “remnant” to which Yannaras appeals for the exit from the crisis and the critical ontology that he articulates in order to give this remnant a fighting chance depend on a ques-tionable blending of the fundamental ontology of Heidegger and the trinitarian theology of Maximos the Confessor. They depend equally on an (unavowed) apriorism, and, in the last analysis, on an apophantic stance that borders on aphasia. Nevertheless, my paper will also maintain that Yannaras’s insights are not to be discarded but rather reread and repositioned in the context of the writings of less existentialist and less mystical writers, for example, in the pro-longation of the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, Giorgos Kontogiorgis and Gior-gos Karabelias.

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Calchi-Novati Gabriella

Resisting the Contemporary (Semiotic) Crisis: The Anonymous Movement “as” Poetry

Poetry is language’s excess: poetry is what in language cannot be reduced to information, and is not exchangeable, but gives way to a new common ground of understanding, of shared meaning: the creation of a new world.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi1

According to Italian philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi what permeates our con-temporary biopolitical age is semiocapitalism, namely a ‘capitalism that makes signs, affects, attitudes and ideas directly productive’2. One of the most recog-nisable of these signs is the image of the contemporary multitude, such as the ones of those occupying Zuccotti Park. Semiocapitalism, however, seems to have reached an instant of crisis, for if we can argue that the images of gath-ered masses have become the signature of contemporary political and eco-nomic challenges to ways of life, it is also true that the very same images have been employed as a political tool to perpetuate the status quo. After all, as Bifo reminds us, ‘in a swarm it is not impossible to say “no”. It’s irrelevant’3. Bifo suggests that, at the very core of the European financial collapse, stands a col-lective semiotic crisis: ’social life has become a swarm’ in which ‘the word is no longer a factor in the conjunction of talking affective bodies, but a connector of signifying functions transcodified by the economy’4. Thus in order to overcome such a semiotic crisis, the philosopher advances the hypothesis that ‘poetry and sensibility’ should be employed as the means by which to subvert the suprem-acy of financial capitalism over the biopolitical sphere of affection and lan-guage5. In this paper I will try to develop Bifo’s theoretical suggestions further, by proposing that the Anonymous movement can be read “as” poetry (in Bifo’s sense), for it can never be reduced to “indistinct” information, but yet it still possesses a very “distinct” voice. Starting from the premise that ‘poetry is the

1. Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising. On Poetry and Finance (Los Angeles: Semio-

text(e), 2012): 147. 2. Franco "Bifo" Berardi, After the Future, ed. Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn (Ed-

inburgh, Oakland, Baltimore: AK Press, 2011): 5. 3. Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising: 16. 4. Ibid.: 19. 5. Ibid.: 13.


voice of language’6, I will show the ways in which the Anonymous, in its phatic nature, becomes, metaphorically speaking, poetry in movement. It actualises what Giorgio Agamben calls the voice, namely the point of contact between phoné (the mere sound) and ‘the I, the speaker’ (the I that is always more than just flesh).7 It is through the unifying signifier of the V-for Vendetta mask that the Anonymous has been able to signify a multifaceted social body in the very absence of such a body. The Anonymous has become the voice (aural as well as visual) of the crisis: an anonymous voice that, in its anonymity, clearly performs language’s excess, and just like poetry is not exchangeable, but instead ‘gives way to a new common ground of shared meaning.’ A resistance against the semiocapitalist swarm via the proliferation of ‘floating signifiers’8.

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Chiţoiu Dan

Between Paideía and Mystagogía: Formative Ideals and the Crisis of Today

It is more and more obvious that one of the major sources of today’s global cri-sis is the educational model, as it was inaugurated by the Humboldt University in Berlin at the beginning of the 1800’s. This modern paradigm of education showed its limits, due to the formation/information provided from a discipli-nary perspective. The result is a kind of conflict between the types of informa-tion received by student (like between the informations provided by Biology and those provided by Religion), and for sure that have consequences for the development of a congruent understanding of reality. In my paper I intend to discuss the practice of an alternative way of instruction, deployed in the Greek-Byzantine cultural model, and used in the Christian East to some extent even after the Fall of Byzantium. This kind of instruction had two levels, only first one being actually formal: exoterike and esoterike, or outer forming and inner form-ing. If on the first level the instruction was not very different from the classical Greek Paideía, the intention is different: to prepare for the second one. So, the

6. Ibid.: 21. 7. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (Minneapolis: Uni-

versity of Minnesota Press, 1991; 1982): 35. 8. Claude Lévi–Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. by Felicity

Baker (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1987): 62-63.


instruction on the first level was not meant to give information, but to build the apprehension of something beyond information. This training was intent to give access to an experiential attitude, to the authentic experience of self (and in a deeper sense, of God), based on the presupposition that the ultimate aspect of the human is Person, an entity unique and unrepeatable. The true experience of self and world is to be attained in a personal and unique way, something cannot be taught. So, the ‘training’ on the second level was rather my-stagogical, implying the initiation and not the information as main path. It is a type of cognitive experience which, I think it, should be now reconsidered and analyzed.

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Chryssafis Georgios

Corruption in Greece: Empirical Evidence and Theoretical Implications

Based on empirical evidence of the major corruption cases in Greece during the last ten years, I trace the phenomenon not only as a cause but an effect as well of the crisis. I indicate two types of corruption: the formal and the infor-mal, which indicate the material (=economic) and non material (=values) as-pects of the crisis, respectively. Its emergence (from the part of the implicated persons) and the public “acceptance” as something not only rational but rea-sonable as well, drive the theoretical problematic to additional definitions in the fields of accountability, responsibility, legitimacy, and personal, political and professional ethics and morals. This pathology of the public life in total, fits well on the idea that there is an overriding concern in the satisfaction of the collective conscience at a level of publicity, where occur the proceedings of legitimacy, the guarantee of rule of order and the defuse of the public.

On the other hand, the activity and rhetoric from groups of interest indi-cate an aspect of particularism, which hits the arguments of public interest, legitimacy and rule of order in a liberal democracy. I suggest that, in most of the cases, it contributes to the construction of the informal conceptions of cor-ruption, or a dormant aspect of it, since it arises on the threshold of corruption which may function as an “educational mean” or a “social example”.


I suggest that corruption in Greece stands as a peculiarity, not only due to its quantitative but to many qualitative constituents as well. These precondi-tions drive us to the theoretical problematic that I indicate in my paper.

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Cloke Jon

Europe and the Birth-Crisis of Ultracapital Building on work presented at the Dictatorship of Failure conference in Helsinki in November 2012, this examination of contemporary capitalism engages with crisis (κρίςισ) in the sense of ‘designating a moment of great importance’, a transitional phase in global capitalism brought about by what is frequently re-ferred to as the Information, Communications and Technology (ICT) revolution from the 1980s onwards. The analysis presented also examines the hermeneu-tics of the myriad ‘crises’ that have been proclaimed since 2007 as misinterpre-tations, deceits, following the tradition of Hermes as messenger and translator whilst simultaneously being a liar and a trickster –a memetic linguistics of ‘cri-sis’ is being perpetrated that conceals, rather than reveals, what is ‘really going on’ – these linguistics include the terms Sub-prime mortgage crisis, Eurozone crisis, Financial crisis, Debt crisis, Euro crisis, European sovereign-debt crisis, Credit crisis and, most recently, Cypriot financial crisis. There is a crisis, of course, but this analysis proposes that what is going on are the global birth pangs of ultracapital, born from intensifying actor-network tendencies of globa-lizing capitalism that have reached an inflection point since the 1980s. The criti-cal potential unleashed by advances in ICT since that time lies in the operatio-nalization of limitless cyber-space juxtaposed to massive micro-temporal dis-tanciation, despite claims that what Europe is experiencing is merely capitalism ‘doing its’ thing’ and that there is nothing unusual in the series of nationally-situated but globally-placed flows and processes that continue to trouble gov-ernments around the world. The revelation thus created continues to be simul-taneously destructive in the ‘real’ economy whilst creating a massive flourishing of the ‘financialized’ economy – all interpretations are simultaneously apposite, therefore; the ‘decline of the West’, a ‘crisis in European humanity’ and a very ‘dangerous turn’.

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Daremas Georgios

The Crisis of Philosophical Thought Within the Crisis of the Modern Bourgeois World

Modern philosophical thought undergoes a double crisis in the conception of the essential relation of part-whole. Firstly, there is the emergence of an atom-istic materialism that attacks the Scholastic idea of a divinely given and eternal idea of ‘unity’ in favour of an atomistically grounded aggregation of bodily (cor-poreal) existences. The resulting conception of unity in the form of the ‘species’ concept is under constant tension and the danger of decomposition. Husserlian phenomenology strives to field an alternative conception that gives primacy to the unity of the whole over its particulars and thus to save meaning and the sphere of ideality as an independent realm and prior to the contingency of the empirical order.

Nevertheless, the phenomenological attempt falters on the ground that it eschews the recognition of the necessary mediation of the materiality of lan-guage and of the text (and their effects) on the construction of meaningfulness and sense-making. Thereby the ‘singular’ is liberated once again from the con-ceptual ‘tyranny’ of subsumption under the whole and the a priori unity of the plural is definitively lost. Thus the stable basis of the order of meaning is desta-bilised and Western metaphysics undergoes a second structural crisis.

These paradigmatic shifts from the pre-modern dogmatic supremacy of the whole to an early modern logical primacy of the atomic paradigm and its methodological individualism and then to a phase of crisis where the phe-nomenological account resuscitates the sense of unity via the intuition of ‘spe-cies’ as the guarantee of the order of (identitary) meaning and then questioned in its competence to secure the self-identity of meaning by Derridean decon-struction, it is argued that such ‘crisis within crisis’ reflects the perennial crisis that the bourgeois order of social life undergoes from its inception. The bour-geois order is organised on the principle of individualism. It emerges out of the crisis of the traditional, feudal order and its authoritarian theologico-political constitution of the community (the pre-ordained unity of the whole) whose dissolution bourgeois individualism reinforces and ultimately subverts. The de-struction of the traditional communal ‘species-being’ by triumphant bourgeois individualism (the liberation of the particulars from any subjection to an over-arching collective authority) and its privatised civil society leaves bourgeois so-ciety exposed to its own self-contradictions, namely all-around ‘naked’ (unregu-lated) competition, and the inability to bind the singular individuals to any su-


pra-individual form of unity. This endemic crisis of bourgeois society where the idea of ‘humanity’ as a universal species-being has become obsolete, has re-sulted in cultural fragmentation and the loss of (essential) meaning capable to provide common life purposes and communal self-determination of societal members. This malaise of bourgeois life is reflected philosophically in decon-struction’s tensions expressive of the current postmodern capitalist society.

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Deligiorgi Alexandra

Judging Crisis and the Crisis of Judgment I. (Judging Crisis). The structural limitations to the endless accumulation of cap-ital per se that has been the primacy of our historical world-system for more than five hundred years, create a chaotic situation unpredictable in its trajecto-ry. Having built-in contradictions, the system can no longer survive as such, and reaches a point of bifurcation. At this point, according to the experts of social science, the systemic Crisis is identified to a period of transition full of conflicts, aggravated disorders and collapse of moral systems. II. (Crisis of Judgment). As the free will factor is crucial, during the transitional period of systemic crisis, exercising intellectual, moral and political judgment is necessary in order to have a clear image of what could be a better word, and how it could be come possible; but this is not possible without the reconstruc-tion of the existent system of knowledge, given that this latter has completely devaluated the faculty of judgment and thus the factor of human creation, by giving priority to formal rationality which favors logistics, reductionism, frag-mentation, or abstract schematisation. On these terms, the way out of the sys-temic crisis is related to the search of a substantial rationality able to pose the choice of ends under a criterion of ultimate values opposed to the logic of mere profit.

We will examine the formation of reflective subjective judgments evaluat-ing, justifying and legitimizing choices, decisions and actions at the basis of dis-cursive principles immanent to willing and feeling implied into reasoning and thus leading to possible errors, in connection with critical and theoretical analysis of the system and situation which need to be judged.

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Demetriou Kyriakos

Philosophic Radicals: A Precedent in Time of Crisis and Transition

The Philosophic Radicals were a group of largely utilitarian commitments, often eccentric individuals merging disunited elements, yet faithfully exponents of drastic political, constitutional and educational reform. Among them, we can enlist Jeremy Bentham and his immediate circle, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, J.A. Roebuck, George Grote and many others. Their era, the Victorian 19th cen-tury, was comparatively a period of intense social upheaval and rapid transfor-mation across the entire spectrum of life, science and politics. The Radicals have materially contributed to the implementation of the Reform Act of 1832, which introduced wide-ranging changes to the electoral system in England and Wales, thus energizing and modernizing in multiple ways the British political landscape. The period prior to the introduction of the “Representation of the People Act” was plagued by social inequality, abuse of rights, poverty of the masses, moral degradation and political corruption. If we reflect on those cir-cumstances as a supposedly historical analogue of present times, it might be intriguing to explore some of the key ideas of these Platonizing scholars, their aspirations, and generally their involvement in the reform movement through their conscientious activity of radicalizing moral and political life.

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Dimitriou Stephanos

Democracy, Political Autonomy and Crisis: A Democratic-Republican Approach

This paper sets out to explore the relation between democracy, Enlightenment thought and democratic political self-determination. By the term ‘Enlighten-ment’, it is understood the totality of theories that formulate any conception of social and constitutional order as well as the moral and political values and the normative principles within the frame of the theories of political liberalism and democratic republicanism (Kant, Mill, Rousseau) that could both produce a basis for a normative theory of democracy. This paper will also explore the tension between democratic political autonomy and self-determination, as


well as the practice and policy of financial liberalism (libertarianism) in the con-temporary fiscal and political crisis in Europe.

In particular, my aim in this paper is, first, to argue that there is an inhe-rent relation between the Enlightenment and democracy, a relation that, as such, surpasses their historical connection. Second, that this aforementioned relation is grounded on both Enlightenment’s and democracy’s specification via Kantian political philosophy and, especially, via those explicitly distinctive Rous-seaunean influences to the latter. Third, I will argue that this relation between Enlightenment thought and democracy is also a requirement for the implemen-tation of the demand for liberty and equality. In addition, I will also argue that it is not possible to explain the European crisis only as a financial one. It is needed to be dealt with as a crisis of democracy across Europe. This argument makes out a case for incorporating elements of egalitarian political liberal theory into the content of democratic socialism; it also supports the demand for radical changes, but, also, at the same time, the need for profound and essential social changes that will aim at lifting out the consequences of injustice, exploitation and the undermining of representative institutions. The main position of this paper is that the relation between the Enlightenment and the public use of speech elevates Aristotelian, Rousseaunean and Kantian political philosophy, as well as the republican elements of J.S. Mill’s democratic theory, to the funda-mental normative core of an innovative contemporary democratic theory. A republican theory of democracy – with reference to democratic socialism – could not but aim at the elimination of inequalities and exploitation. It should also seek to harmonize the free will of each with the free will of others, under the light of a universally valid rule of liberty that will have the effect of a gener-al moral law under conditions of equal liberty and autonomy. These conditions will enable the equal political self-determination of the citizens and, therefore, facilitate the satisfaction of the Rousseaunean principle of democratic self-determination of the people.

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Dimitrova Maria

The Social State Crisis Fueled by the Market Logic Still, the social state –and there is no a real state but the social one– is the civi-lizational form, which contributes mostly to the solidarity among the individuals and groups coping with their different particular interests. The transnational


market forces, however, decompose its capabilities of fulfilling this function as well as its potential to provide defence for the population and guarantee their security. The subjugating the state institutions by the market logic leads not only to their erosion but transforms them into a weapon turned against the citizens themselves. All human relations receive meanings only via calculation of gains and losses. In today’s world of market fundamentalism, this sort of cal-culation is the only global substitute for the previous ‘common sense’.

In the proposed paper, all these processes are analyzed both on domestic and international levels.

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Douzinas Costas

Resisting Philosophy: Greece and the Future of Europe From Kant and Hegel to Foucault and Derrida, revolution and resistance have been marginal philosophical themes. As we enter a new global age of resis-tance new forms, subjects and strategies of protest and rebellion have emerged. Do the world-wide resistances share common characteristics? Greece has been a testing ground of both new barbarism and new resistance and can help the beginning of an answer. A philosophy of resistance can help philoso-phy become the wisdom of rupture.

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Drosos Denis

Markets, Commons and the Dystopia of ‘Spontaneous Order’

The concept of ‘spontaneous order’, a notion coined by Michael Polanyi, has become after Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty, the shibboleth of neoliberalism. As opposed to constructed order (Taxis), spontaneous order (Kosmos) is sup-posed to denote the social order produced by market alone, without any gov-ernment directed plan or corrective intervention.


The sources of such an idea can be traced back to Mandeville’s paradox of private vices turned into public benefits, and to its critical reformulation by Adam Smith, into what he called ‘unintended consequences’.

Yet, Smith’s ‘unintended consequences’ was a complex conception of so-ciability, entailing an elaborated moral theory, based on sympathy and person-al recognition, in a perspective of modern rehabilitation of community.

What is distinctive about neoliberal radicalism, is the project of reducing all social relations into commodity exchanges, and deny any moral legitimacy to non marketized values. This seems to be a project of ‘cleansing’ market so-ciety from any common concerns and public values whatsoever. In this pers-pective, the state, far from staying out of the interplay of market forces, and safeguarding public interest, gets increasingly involved in economy, favoring not free competition but oligopolies, and promoting the concentration of eco-nomic and political power, invalidating in actu any assumption of ‘spontaneity’. In this respect, neoliberal ‘puritanism’ turns to be both historically absurd, and socially disintegrating.

As virtual economy grows more and more predominant over real econo-my, modern economic system becomes more and more vulnerable and crisis ridden. The resulting economic disorder is attended by social disintegration and a permanent moral crisis, which is less reminiscent of the Smithian dream of system of natural liberty, than of the Hobbesian nightmare of bellum om-nium contra omnes.

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Dura Ioan Damian Iulian-Constantin

From Old Age to New Age: Eastern Monism as a Reaction to the Ecological Crisis of the West

It is a fact the entire world, but especially the West, experience an acute eco-logical crisis. Besides the technical and economical solutions, it seems that it is necessary a profound paradigm shift which to encompass also the outlook con-cerning the Ultimate Reality and cosmology. Accordingly, the western paradigm is silently replaced with the eastern one: the belief in a personal, transcenden-tal God or Ultimate Reality, distinct from the world, declines in favor of the be-


lief in an immanent “life force” or “spirit”, in which all things have their exis-tence. This monism, brought up especially by New Age movement, is clearly inspired from the Eastern vedantic philosophy. In vedantic philosophy, and es-pecially in the thought of Sankara, who systematized the metaphysical princi-ples of monism, Ultimate Reality is ekam-eva-advityam (“one-without-a-second”). The monism of vedantic philosophy proposes an revalorisation of the universe, in the basis of metaphysical unity of the Absolute and what is mani-fested, as a response current ecological crisis.

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Ebijuwa Temisanren

Post-Colonial African Condition and the Quest for an Enduring Social Security

Recent discourses on the African condition, with few exceptions, have ignored a significant aspect of the crisis of post-colonial African states. This is that of how we can develop a viable system that can be used to organise our social and po-litical experiences. It is this challenge that has generated other problems in other spheres of our lives. These problems, in concert, have generated a feeling of disappointments and frustrations in the minds of people, which are largely responsible for social insecurity in political climes.

Specifically, this is what is responsible for parochial identities and commu-nal strives at the detriment of the evolution of a ‘universal culture’ that tran-scends primordial reasoning and engenders peace and good neighbourliness. But why have the political elites in today’s Africa unable to mitigate the chal-lenges of corruption, communal conflicts, gender imbalance and civil unrests among others and their attendant deprivation remain intricate, daunting and resilient in spite of the several attempts to overcome them? Or is it that the attempts are mere smoke-screen to confuse people the more?

This paper, therefore, will employ the analytic-descriptive method to inter-rogate the above and related questions that many scholars are wont to ignore. Hence, it is expected that this paper will initiate a perspective that will interro-gate extant interpretation of the nature of African predicament and its conse-quences for human security and global solidarity.

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Eliopoulos Panos

Crisis and the Challenge for a Noble Life in Ortega y Gasset

Ortega y Gasset, in La Rebellion de las Masas, recognizes a deep crisis in Eu-rope, in the 1920’s. Not a crisis of historical determinants solely but one that affects the current values of the epoch and the potentialities of the modern person. His reference to axiology principally aims at highlighting the philosoph-ical perspective of the noble life, a life that, as he upholds, is a life of “servitude for something transcendental”. The man, who is not vulgar, grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself, in the case that he does not already have a life of obligation and duty. This is life lived as a discipline: the noble life. In this context, Ortega equates the “common life” with a life of barbarism and juxtaposes it to a life of nobility so as to hold it, eventually, responsible for the deep crisis of his era. His exami-nation on the qualitative criteria, which should be supportive to the individual and collective effort for excellence, is taken from the point of view of vitalism and perspectivism, whereas it also confronts with the questions raised by the phenomenological approach of the common life. For Ortega, the revolt of the masses signifies their overall control and influence on everything, from politics to the value system and principles of society, as well as on the orientation of technological advancement and of science. The arithmetic but also moral, po-litical and cultural tyranny of the mass disassociates the human being from the awareness of the need of the subjectivization of the terms of his life so that his life could retrieve its authenticity. The value problem is a problem at the roots of the human existence. Only by restoring an authentic relationship with val-ues that will enhance his existential strife towards “vital potentiality” and ex-cellence, will man be qualified for a noble life.

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Estevez James

In Case of Emergency: The Obama Doctrine and the Ethics of Gloved Hands

This paper is primarily concerned with reconciling the dual problems of "dirty hands" and "many hands", respectively, with the principles of the foreign and domestic policies of U.S. President Barack Obama during moments of immi-nent crisis. The paper proposes to accomplish this by integrating and extrapo-lating five philosophical concepts: Rawls’ principle of publicjustification; Bar-ber's idea of strong democracy; Douglas' & Wildavsky’s cultural theory of risk; Kompridis’ practice of reflective disclosure; and McLuhan's & Postman's notion of media ecology. By applying this conflation to contemporary history, we can possibly create the necessary space for us to stretch beyond the scope of these two "problems" and resolve them by reaching an ethics of gloved hands: a mo-rally neutral democratic political precaution that is employed exclusively under "supreme emergencies." It is a metaphorical description of observed political action based on empirical evidence with prescriptive attributes. Thus, making it both theoretically sound and practically applicable. The doctrine of gloved hands is principally communitarian and generationally focused; motivated by deontological and utilitarian considerations, it is at once both dutiful and re-sponsible to those that have been, those that are being, and those that will be. Ultimately, the doctrine can help absolve public officials of the "guilt" and "blame" normatively associated with the practical exigencies of presiding over polities in the modern world. It enables them to dexterously insulate them-selves from, and expose themselves to, necessary dangers (both physical and political) as they orient through the mire of public life unsullied, giving them the necessary moral latitude to effectively and efficiently execute the duties of the public office entrusted to them. Methodologically the paper adopts a Ben-jaminian framework of interpretation, referencing the historical and literary record, with several remarks made by the President and his advisors, newspa-per articles, and other published material on the ethics and efficacy of: the tar-geting of alleged terrorists; the level of federal response to natural and man-made disasters (environmental and economic); and the implementation of U.S. foreign policy objectives abroad. Philosophically, the paper examines the na-ture and range of Executive power as defined by the U.S. Constitution, histori-cal precedent, and established sociopolitical, cultural, critical, cognitive, and ethical theory.

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Giannopoulou Archontoula

The Role of the Philosopher in Times of Crisis: Wittgenstein and Spengler

Wittgenstein rarely mentions Spengler in his writings, but there is some evi-dence that he had read Spengler’s Decline of the West and, though critical of its content, held it in high esteem. What were the elements of Spengler’s thought that caught Wittgenstein’s attention? From the point of view of methodology, it could be the radicalism one can find in Spengler’s morphological method of historical analysis. From the point of view of style, it could be the courageous expression of Spengler’s profound pessimism concerning the intellectual and artistic potentialities of his times.

Spengler considered himself to be a philosopher responding to a historical crisis in a practical and not a theoretical way. To him, the decline of the West-ern culture is a philosophical problem that has to be dealt with in the practical spirit of a politician who is interested in the actualities of his time. What is wor-rying is that his methodological concept of culture leads him to a conservative stance towards the phenomenon of crisis: one should courageously accept the decline of a culture as a necessity and strive to be a true expression of one’s cultural history.

Although Wittgenstein shares Spengler’s general pessimism with regard to the potentialities of his times, his own conception of the philosopher’s role is not conservative. The fact that Wittgenstein’s grammatical analysis “leaves eve-rything as it is” does not imply some sort of philosophical conservatism, as has been argued by several scholars. Wittgenstein’s anthropological remarks show us that there is a critical dimension in the philosopher’s task of making gram-matical distinctions. I will argue that Wittgenstein’s view of the philosopher’s role should be understood within the wider philosophical project of affirming an anthropological realism. In this sense grammatical clarification can be re-lated to the task of determining the domain of the subjective and objective constraints of human agency.

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Gitsoulis Chrysoula

The Looming Ecological Crisis Though public awareness of various ecological crises such as climate change have received a great deal of press over the last few years, other issues that are equally pressing, particularly loss of biodiversity and deforestation, are not re-ceiving the attention that they need.

Humanity depends on healthy ecosystems: they support or improve our quality of life, and without them, the Earth would be uninhabitable. Quite apart from their aesthetic, spiritual, educational, and recreational benefits, we de-pend on our ecosystems for water purification, enrichment of our soil, the crea-tion of oxygen for us to breathe, climate and flood control, pollination, and pest control. The biodiversity of our planet has proven to be an invaluable source of natural pharmaceuticals, including antibiotics, painkillers, and blood thinners. Yet human activities are rapidly pushing this biodiversity into extinction. What activities? To answer this, we must examine the nature of capitalist economics.

Mainstream capitalist economics presupposes a powerful laissez-faire ideology: that people should be completely free to make market exchanges as they see fit, that government should not interfere with market transactions unless force or fraud are taking place, that selfish behavior is good, because it leads inexorably by an ‘invisible hand’ to material growth, which is always good. It teaches us that poverty and the suffering of those who lose out in market competition are the lesser of evils – the price we must pay for growth and free-dom. Capitalists evaluate the consequences of their behavior within short-term runs; after all, they are not policy makers, and they won’t be around to reap in long term benefits, so it wouldn’t make sense from their perspective to take long term benefits or morality into their decision making processes. But it pre-cisely this short-sightedness of capitalist economics that poses the greatest danger to our environment. Disregarding external costs may be efficient for capitalists, just as slavery, or a system wherein the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, may be efficient in the short time for some, but this kind of short-sightedness is not efficient or fair for others, including future generations.

To avoid ecological collapse, governments need to focus their attention, and try to maintain equilibrium, in a more critical supply-demand equation than the standard monetary sort that capitalists focus on. The demand side is de-termined by ecological footprint. Reductions in population, individual consump-tion, and the resources used or wastes emitted in producing goods and services all result in a smaller footprint. The supply side is determined by biocapacity,


which is a function of the amount of biologically productive area available, and the productivity of that area. My paper will devoted to amplifying on this cru-cial relation, and the need to make it the focus of our attention to avoid eco-logical disaster.

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Glycofrydi-Leontsini Athanasia

National Crises and Self-Awareness in Modern and Contemporary Greece

Nations are both cultural and political phenomena; they are constituted by people that have an identity as part of a community related to the traditions and the history of the people in a region and to their common destiny. Accord-ing to Benedict Anderson the nation is ‘an imagined political community’; this view is close to the ideology of nationalism spread in the middle of the 19th century in the Balkans that had its impact in Modern Greece where the intel-lectuals experienced the sentiment of unity in an area that belonged to them. Putting aside the rhetoric of nation building developed during the pre-Revolutionary period, Greek intellectuals – after the establishment of the Greek State in 1828 and from the 19th century onwards till the middle of the 20th century – were discussing the nation’s solidarity and its future welfare, as well as ways so as to enforce national identity. These Greek intellectuals re-lated national identity to the notion of the continuity of Hellenism and its mis-sion in the world, arguing in favour of the view that Greece provides a bridge that unites East and West. They developed, therefore, a rhetoric that continu-ously repeated the importance of humanistic values and the relation of Mod-ern Greece with its past and its place in Europe. Over the period of the national crisis that followed the historical events of 1922, Greek intellectuals were dis-appointed and despaired; their attempts to redefine national identity pro-duced two tendencies, a nationalistic one and a universal one that were both expressed in their philosophical and literary writings. In more recent times, philosophers, having a strong sociological background, such as Panagiotis Kondylis and Cornelius Castoriadis, dealt mostly with the problem of civic life and culture, and argued that the postmodern crisis is a crisis of values, culture and institutions; they examined the effects that this crisis had upon the state, the individual and the society and linked it with the evils of capitalistic econ-


omy. But how is it possible to assess the recent economic crisis? Is it a crisis of consumerism and state institutions or a political crisis? Is it fair to say that we should “re-establish” the state by harshening individuals and by eliminating the welfare state? And what role are the intellectuals to play towards the new ‘ideology’ advocating the “re-making the New Greece” that has recently been developed by the pro-crisis rhetoric of politicians and other neo-liberal cen-tres; being European or Greeks, on the reckship of democracy and the state?

***** Goe Georganna

Conversion: Linear Perception of Time to Living Perception of Time. The New Dispensation

The living perception of Time is science specific for the Language of Mathemat-ics Pythagoras invented when he made the Language of Number and Image science specific for the cosmology taught by the ancient civilization of the Nile. The primitive notions are the Pythagorean Point and the Pythagorean Line. The Pythagorean science of Nature is the process for interpretation. As for the New Dispensation, that has already descended upon us. The date that was popular-ized is December 21, 2012. Of course we still create more than we consume. We also continue our uphill climb toward complexity guided by the Intelligence of Life. But it is our active creative responsible participation in Day One of Crea-tion that concerns us here. We live Life at Day One. There is no beginning and no end. There is only the Zero Point of Time where there is no Time at all. For every individual person we access the uniqueness with which every individual is born and that uniqueness is internally consistent with the person who belongs to the organically organized Collective One of We the People. With that double nature of Nature for every individual person we go forth. We use instinct, intui-tion, and heartfelt conviction. Only then do we go beyond the turmoil of our transition. Only then do we go beyond the uniform of conform codified by the written word of alphabet. Only then do we go beyond the infallibility of the analytic atheistic linear mechanistic materialistic perception that is now stan-dardized and institutionalized by both Church and State.

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Gong Qun

To Take Secularity as Sacred: Confucian’s Transcendent Spirit

The separated the sacred from secularity is the origin of all religion, and also is a basic feature of the religious life. Confucianism which does not like Western religions, not to separate sacredness from secularity and for the basic concept of God, holds an attitude that acknowledge god’s existence and not discussing

him. Confucianism, however, recognizes the concept of the heaven or Tian (天), to recognize the distinguishing between a gentleman and saint, which means that Confucianism also intrinsically includes a sacred or transcendent world. The Confucianism takes secularity as sacred, pursues transcendence in the mundane, and there is not distinctively boundary for the two realms of secularity and the sacred in the world. Tian Dao (Religion) and Ren Dao (Humanity) is same one principle.

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Goryunov Valery

Technosocial Anatomy of Crisis

The crisis is a rhythm disturbance of sustainable development, the transi-tion to its new turn. At each stage of the material and technical development there is a limit of growth. Society is doomed to eternal change of technological steps. At each stage, it reaches the maximum level of production and forced to switch to the use of a new resource base. However, each new production and technological transition occurs by means of increasing costs.

Exhaustion of natural resources is a natural cause of periodic crises. Un-stoppable growth of production leads to an increase in the mass of over-consumption and population, which deepens and intensifies the crisis. The cyc-lical mechanism is due to the periodicity of accumulation of excess production and mass consumption. Redundancy is a fundamental sociological category.

Excess weight of society is increasing. It means that safety margin is de-creasing. The more a man becomes a man, the more he is redundant. But there is no such resource based on which a human can stay in balance. Human-ity must rise across the board in order to survive.


Crisis means the exhaustion of material and technical base of society. Achievements of scientific and technological revolution became exhausted. We need a new technological breakthrough. However, there is no guarantee of conservation of the cycling classic look that is mandated transition to a higher level of development.

Outside of the social concept the crisis is meaningless. The main conse-quence of the crisis is a sharp reduction in the resources of life, and therefore, increasing social differentiation, the intensification of the struggle for survival at all levels of society.

The way to get out of the crisis is the way of innovation. Anything else will only mean social regrouping, softening of the crisis for some people due to its deterioration for others. Reduce the burden of crisis for all members of socie-ty, without sacrificing anyone, is impossible. The common factor to get out of crisis is to strengthen the regulatory role of the state, which implements cer-tain ideology.

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Gotovos Athanasios

Narratives of the Greek Debt-Crisis: Critical Pedagogy and the Rebirth of

Ethnic Thinking in Europe On the basis of texts written in German newspapers and magazines in the time between December 2009 and December 2012 about the Greek debt crisis (ex-planations, situation reports, remedies to be imposed) an attempt will be made to discover the deep structure of the anti-hellenic rhetoric in the dominant narratives of a typical European country and expose the myths behind it. Since the dominant narratives about the Greek crisis in Europe created already “counter-narratives” on the part of some Greek media and political speakers, specially focused on Germany and Germans for historical reasons, time has come for critical pedagogy to encourage more rational and scientifically based descriptions and explanations of the Greek situation in both societies.

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Grigoriou Christos

Parliamentary Democracy in Crisis. Thoughts on the Origins of Its Pathogenesis

and the Attempt Towards a Canonistic Re-conceptualization of It

The economic crisis that rages both in our country and in Europe in general has brought forward a considerable crisis of political representation. Democracy and its political personnel seems today to be bitterly, and I might add inauspi-ciously, depreciated. The political ascension of a militant antidemocratic party is only the most conspicuous testimony of a crisis that was already evident many years before the economic crisis broke out. The leading idea of the paper proposed is that modern democracy suffers from a kind of oblivion relating to its basic founding values, those of liberty and equality, and that its viability de-pends on the recovery and probably reinterpretation of these values. What I will try to do is to trace the source both of the oblivion and of the recovery in modern political philosophy. So, to highlight the basic steps my paper is going to take, I propose, first of all, to place the origins of democracy’s pathogenesis in a conceptualisation of it in economic terms and specifically in terms of ra-tional choice (I will present Down’s Economic Theory of Democracy and then, to consider two of the most eminent attempts towards a canonistic consolidation of democracy. I intend to refer to the work of Rawls and Habermas. The one founded his system on a revival of the contractual tradition, the other on a new appreciation of language as a foundation for philosophy. The one interests me for his attempt to strengthen the equalising aspects of liberalism and the other for introducing rational deliberation as the legitimising standard for politics and law.

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Grollios Vasilis

Challenges for the Marxian Dialectic by the 21st Century Crisis

The lecture will elaborate on how the concepts within Marxian dialectics – con-tradiction, determinate negation, non-identity thinking– form a negative dialec-tic with an open character that can open cracks in capitalism. Dialectical mate-rialism reveals that social forms are products of the perverted form of our do-ing, of our everyday activity. Thus, since the antagonism between capital and labor is in the essence of the social form, in the thing itself, contradiction is also in the essence of the social form and permeates our existence. The logic of the topsy-turvy world, as this is analysed in the 3rd volume of Capital, is therefore inherently dialectical since contradiction is in the essence of the inverted social forms Therefore, although economic categories and social forms appear to have a life of their own, they are in fact just manifestations of our doing.

***** Gungov Alexander

Mystification of the Current Crisis: Is There a Winning Move?

The mystification of the current financial, social, and moral crisis goes on three levels: financial technicalities, bio-ontological transformation, and cognitive manipulation.

1. Financial technicalities. Production of goods and services as well as their consumption is not pri-

mordially anymore; they are driven to a subsidiary position. The current society depends on two types of financial operations: a) extending credit, which is re-paid as debt and interest; b) speculative creation of money in the form of vari-ous derivatives. In the first case the goal is to secure an abundant number of debt payers; the second operation requires a transformation of individuals into statistical units for the sake of speculation.

2. Bio-ontological transformation. Individuals are not only striped of any civil status but they are not even used anymore as labor, conscripts, and consumers. Their main function is reduces to


statistical units opening the avenue for debt and speculative finance. The statis-tical units are manipulated directly in the sense of ‘election manipulation’ and indirectly in the sense of ‘brainwash’. The nowadays brainwash differs from classical propaganda in that it aims at effects common precisely for statistical as the so called mass privatization in the New Europe countries and the RF.

3. Cognitive manipulation. A number of absurd but highly fraudulent, although legal, techniques are

utilized: 1) the more one strives, the more difficult is to repay the debt and to abolish the financial serfhood—this is especially true on national level; 2) un-dertaking an action or refraining of doing so leads to the very same outcome; 3) seemingly reasonable actions are grounded on contradictory foundations.

Is there any hope for the statistical units? To look beyond the mesmerizing and subjugating absurdity of the main-

stream socio-political discourse and the actions it implies. But even this does not guarantee that ‘the statistics won’t be wangled’.

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Gupta Sandeep Bishnoi N.K.

Need to Manage the Thinking Behind the Thinking Whenever there is any intentional or unintentional suppression or subversion of “Reality (Truth)”, it results in confusion, conflict and crisis in man and socie-ty. The reason is simple ‘we don’t see reality; we interpret what we see and call it reality, and base our behaviour on what we perceive as reality, rather than reality itself’1. This truism is an inherent part of human personality. An-cient Indian scared text ‘Vedas’ describes it as “Yatha Drishti Tatha Srishti” meaning ‘as is your vision (perception) so is the world (reality) that you create’. The various crises (economic life concentrating on profits rather than on the real needs of the consumer, political self-interest spawning oppression and racism and a general loss of human values in society2) with which modernity is struggling today, can be easily understood in the light of the above truism and

1. Langton N and Robbins S.P., 2007, Fundamentals of Organizational Behaviour-

Chapter 2, Third Canadian Edition, Pearson Education Canada. 2 Kourie, C., (2006), “The Turn To Spirituality”, Acta Theologica Supplementum 8,

http://www.ajol.info/index.php/actat/article/viewFile/52310/40935.

http://www.ajol.info/index.php/actat/article/viewFile/52310/40935


addressed accordingly. Traditionally the creation was viewed as an ‘integrated whole – single point reality with multiple manifestations of the same in differ-ent shades’, however with the advent of modern sciences the creation started being viewed as a ‘fragmented whole – the material world is independent of the creation with no spiritual and intellectual existence. Under the mistaken belief that all mysteries of the creation can be solved through physical sciences, anything and everything that had subjectivity attached to it was re-jected. This led to the subversion of the ancient wisdom about time, space, matter, and causality and the redefinition of the concept of God, justice, love, power, and beauty3. Thus, in an environment driven by ‘nihilism’, it is not sur-prising that in the last 250 years a general loss of spirituality has taken place in society and man’s lower nature (kama - desire, krodh - anger, moha - attach-ment, lobha - greed and ahankar - ego) dominating all dimensions of life. Like various cosmic force that impact man, wealth, power and sex are also divine forces that manifest in this material world and are necessary for the fullness of life; but, ignorant of their propensity to chain man to his lower nature, man more often than not becomes their servant rather than their master4 as is evi-dent all around today. To arrest this decadence in the background of all the gains made by modern science in deciphering the physical laws and exploiting them for human benefit, the solution rests in focusing on the higher laws that govern the physical laws. And for this to happen, man needs to manage his ‘thinking behind the thinking’. Managing the ‘thinking behind the thinking’ re-fers to increasing one’s awareness levels (consciousness) as it is fundamental to one’s perception of reality, philosophy of life, thinking and action pattern. Drawing from the Indian wisdom (Vedanta – Sant Mat) this paper discusses how the creation has originated from an infinite spiritual energy source or re-servoir known as the Supreme Creator or Being (with attendant features of supreme energy, intelligence, refulgence and bliss), whose each constituent element (spirit-force) possesses prime-energy and has evolved all other forces (mental or physical) of nature by associating with media (physical or mental) of different kinds5. How the attributes of three grand divisions of the creation viz. regions of pure spirituality, universal mind and universal matter connect with the human soul, mind and body, and influence human behaviour. Why the creation is a closed system and its three divisions along with man are open sys-

3. Toffler, A (1981), The Third Wave, Pan Books Limited, London, p.110. 4. Sri Aurobindo, (1987:14), Money - The Mother and Letters on the Mother, SABCL, vo-

lume 25, Sri Auronbindo Ashram, Pondicherry. 5. Prof. Satsangi, P.S. (2006), “Systems Movement: Autobiographical Retrospectives”,

International Journal of General Systems, Vol. 35:2:127-167.


tems within it6. This paper will also focus on the concept of consciousness and how it helps man to experience higher truths step by step and transform him-self while continuing to lead a normal life in the midst of money, power and sex. When one attains higher awareness (consciousness) which is beyond the personal mind, the limits of ego, personal mind and body disappear and one becomes aware of the cosmic vastness. It is not that the ego, the body, the personal mind disappear, but one feels them as only a small part of oneself. One begins to feel others too as part of oneself or varied repetitions of oneself, the same self modified by Nature in other bodies. It leads to discovery, to fur-ther discovery and finally to the ultimate discovery i.e. reality”7. The Indian wisdom is not bound by religion, caste, creed, or gender, hence has universal applicability. With its ethics drawn from its metaphysics, it is a way of life that helps man to integrate the physical and metaphysical dimensions of life and simultaneously evolve materially as well as spiritually. It recognizes all human weakness and strengths and focuses on sublimating the weakness by making kinetic the divine forces lying latent in man. By changing the awareness levels, it changes the thinking behind the thinking. It believes that when man trans-forms, the environment around him transforms, which in turn sets the ball roll-ing for others to transform and ultimately the society.

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Hanson Jeffrey

The Logic of the Discrimen Rerum: Sin as Crisis Point in Kierkegaardian Anxiety

At two key moments in The Concept of Anxiety Søren Kierkegaard uses the Latin phrase “discrimen rerum”, which can be translated as “turning point” or “cri-sis.” There are two areas of concern where the notion of “discrimen rerum” proves itself relevant to Kierkegaard’s argument: the relation of possibility and actuality and the relation of different bodies of knowledge to one another, es-pecially the distinction between Christian and pre-Christian ethics. Sin is the

6. Prof. Satsangi P.S. (2008), On Systems Modeling of Macrocosm and Microcosm in the

Domain of Spiritual Consciousness; Expositions on Truth: From Vantage Points of Radha-soami Faith and Systems Science. Radhasoami Satsang Sabha, Dayalbagh, Agra.

7. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, SABCL Vol. 22, p. 315 & 316, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1970-75.


example par excellence of the “discrimen rerum” that affects both of these ar-eas. First, sin is not a possibility that awaits actualization in any given life; it is only in its commission. Sin understood as a crisis for human life is an inexplica-ble transcendence that does not precede itself as a possibility prior to its own actualization; it is an irruptive actuality. There is no “possibility” of sin other than one that can be retrospectively appreciated. Second, once instituted, sin as moment of crisis presents a challenge for ethical thinking, an intellectual problem. No ethical thinking uninformed by revelation can cope with sin as an actuality, with the stubborn fact of willful flaunting of the good. Sin is thus a crisis for ethical reflection as well. This is why Kierkegaard writes, “So when the single individual is stupid enough to inquire about sin as if it were something foreign to him, he only asks as a fool, for either he does not know at all what the question is about, and thus cannot come to know it, or he knows it and un-derstands it, and also knows that no science can explain it to him”. The crisis is thus a turning point where actual living and potential thinking meet without meeting; a crisis links—without reconciling—unthinkable actuality and real pos-sibility.

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Harciarek Anna

Crisis of Responsibility in Modern World. It’s Ontological and Ethical Consequences

Today’s crisis cannot be understood as catastrophe that has fell upon contem-porary societies. It is a result of specific actions, therefore to describe and to find solutions to this crisis it is necessary to take a closer look on people’s ac-tions that have led to present situation and to analyze them.

The most visible manifestation of crisis is tragic, economical situation of individuals and whole states. But this is only a top of an iceberg under which more fundamental crisis of values can be found. Action, especially on the ma-crosocial level that is taking place in the arena of politics, is always a value car-rier. It was quite clear to ancient thinkers and it was very openly expressed by Aristotle, who understood ethics, politics and economy as closely related areas of public life.

In this paper the emphasis will be put on responsibility, which should ac-company each and every action but this unfortunately does not take place,


therefore we can state that the crisis of responsibility is a component of con-temporary crisis. This has serious ontological and ethical consequences. The relation between responsibility and values is ambiguous. From one point of view, values are ontological foundations of responsibility but from another, in a specific meaning, responsibility itself can come under category of values. The second ontological foundation of responsibility is an identity of acting subject and subject that is responsible for action that has been taken. In present situa-tion we have to deal with clear lack of subject’s identity. Someone else acts, takes decisions and someone else bears its’ consequences. This results in fur-ther problems with violation of fundamental rights of citizens as individuals, such as right to self-determination which lead to loss of subjectivity.

Considering relation between values and responsibility, reference will be made to phenomenological approach to values presented by such philosophers as Max Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann and Roman Ingarden. Whereas, while dealing with identity of acting subject and responsible subject, John Locke’s, Derek Par-fit’s and Jeff MacMahan’s stances will be discussed as well as considerations of the scope of personalism, psychology and sociology.

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Hobeika Marie-Odile

Plato’s Myth of Theuth: Kriseis in Crisis In Plato’s myth of Theuth (Phaedrus 274c–275e), Socrates tells the story of Theuth the Egyptian god of arts, and Ammon the Egyptian king. Having in-vented the art of writing and many arts besides, the god Theuth comes to re-veal his arts, and offer them to the king’s people. About the arts of numbers and measurement, the king deliberates their good and bad points. Theuth saves the best art for last: writing. The god praises it by saying that it is a recipe for human memory and wisdom. In response, Ammon replies, “O man full of arts, to one it is given to create the things of art, and to another to judge (κρῖ ναι) what measure of harm and of profit they have for those who shall em-ploy them” (274e).

I show that the myth may teach us two important lessons about culture and memory in regard to crisis.

First, Ammon takes himself to be a judge, the krittein who distinguishes the implications that the arts will have on human minds. I take the exchange between Ammon and Theuth as a model of culture, insofar as it shows the dis-


cussion between artist and critic, and because it illustrates crisis as a call for judgment. Contemporary crisis has to do with a fray of culture: anonymity of artists, and democratization of critics. In elaborating on the myth and the word crisis, I will show, paradoxically, that today’s global crisis has to do with our in-capacity to judge (kriseis).

Secondly, the king distinguishes between memory and reminder, wisdom and conceit, concluding that writing is a recipe for reminders and conceits, not memory and wisdom. Our incapacity to judge is foreshadowed in the Socrates’ telling of the myth. We not only rely on written marks, but digital and portable marks. In effect, we like Socrates notes, ask questions of information, rather than of ideas (275c2).

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Hu Yeping

Identity Crisis and Metaphysical Being Nowadays people talk about crises, all kind of crises, such as, socio-economic, political, structural, systematic, ethnic, religious, regional, global, etc. One might ask "Where do these crises come from"? "Why could these crises happen now?" "What are the causes for these crises"? "Can we find solutions to these crises"? "Is there a way-out for humanity to avoid these crises?" Indeed, many explorations have been made in search of various causes for our contemporary crises, and many proposals have been suggested to solve them. In this paper I would like to explore some significant changes in understanding our identity in contemporary times; to attempt to point out how modern philosophical thought has influenced our way of thinking, knowing, acting and being, namely, who we are and what we are –a fundamental issue essential for finding solu-tions to these crises; and to see how the question of identity relates to meta-physics, the science of "being qua being".

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Iakovou Vicky

Which Space of Experience? Which Horizon of Expectation?

Reading the Crisis Through Ricoeur’s Lenses In this paper, I shall venture a reading of the present crisis through the lenses of R. Koselleck’s categories of ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’ as they are appropriated and reformulated by P. Ricoeur. According to Ricoeur, far from being a relation of polarity, the relation between space of experience and horizon of expectation is one of mutual conditioning and enrichment. The for-mer never fully determines the latter; and the latter shrinks with the impover-ishment of the former. Furthermore, a tension between them is the condition of possibility for history: the effacement of the space of experience or of the horizon of expectation as well as their fusion would mean the end of history. In this framework, the primacy of the horizon of expectation and the concomitant narrowing of the space of experience (among others, in the form of a rejection of the past) prove to be specific to modernity. And crisis in modernity is that situation where, instead of a tension, there is a schism between space of ex-perience and horizon of expectation.

After presenting in more detail Ricoeur’s account of the way in which ex-perience and expectation are (dis)connected in modernity, I shall address the questions of how the dominant discourse on crisis and the policies imple-mented articulate the relation between experience and expectation as well as of the meaning they attribute to this articulation.

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Islam Sirajul

Religious Conflict and the Crisis in Ways of Life: An Indian Perspective

India is a vast country with a vast population. The vast population follows dif-ferent cultures and religions and also belongs to different castes and sub-castes, races and communities. So, the national integration and social solidarity of India invariably depends on the integrity of its citizen’s lives. It is the individ-


uals who constitute a society or a nation. Society or nation is nothing without its individuals. The existence of individuals is a reality; whereas the society or nation is a myth. The nation exists because of individuals. Therefore, integra-tion of nation is only a mere manifestation of the integrity of the individuals. Further, in India, integration does not mean centralization. In India, it means unity in diversity in which the components and the whole are equally valid and mutually inter-dependent. India is maintaining its unity from the time imme-morial apart from its variegated nature in social atmosphere and people’s lives.

However, at present, India is facing with the problems of economic dispar-ity and rampant poverty; persistence of socio-economic inequality between and within the rural and the urban segments of the people; casteism, riots re-lated to communalism and religious fundamentalism; political populism and political exploitations. Socio-economic inequality in India is a heritage of long history. Inequality in India’s past was sanctified by the rigid caste system that had ordained professions by the accident of birth in a given family and jati. Feudalism is another big institutional factor contributing to inequality. The loopholes in land reforms and ceiling on agricultural holdings have retained much of ex-landlords. These conflicts can be expressed either through violent means or by non-violent means, including statements of discontent, requests to negotiate a new agreement, peaceful protests, non-cooperation and politi-cal activism.

It is worthy to mention that societies never remain static. Change comes about through a combination of changing circumstances and changing percep-tions. Examples of changing circumstances include population growth, migra-tion, technological developments, environmental change, exploitation of natu-ral resources and economic change. Examples of things leading to changing perceptions include cultural change, education, and greater access to informa-tion as well as greater awareness of basic rights and empowerment of previ-ously disempowered groups. Whenever there is change, the balance of inter-ests is open to question and may no longer be acceptable to one or another group, leading to conflict and crisis in the ways of life of the people. This should be regarded as a normal and expected part of life, particularly as the pace of change accelerates in many societies. Violence is an inefficient and de-structive way of doing conflict. By normalizing conflict, we can begin to learn to ‘do’ conflict less destructively and more efficiently. When conflict is seen as inherently bad and abnormal it tends to be suppressed. As a result, people outwardly accept a status quo that is privately unacceptable until the scales of change are tipped so far that they feel compelled to step into conflict –often with great emotional force. The greater and longer the suppression of conflict, the stronger the emotional force will be when conflict erupts. And the greater


emotional force, the greater the potential is for the conflict to be violent and religious tinge is most viable in India that directs her people towards the cul-tural clashes. As a result various unexpected conflicts have occurred in Indian society that is the disgrace of human civilization.

Generally, the idea of conflict flows from the dialectical nature of life and reality that presupposes that there is a duality of movement and change that defines all transformations in society, nature and life. The historical and dialec-tical concept of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis is at the theoretical base of this concept of conflict, as it sees conflict as part of the natural and social cycle of growth, development and evolution of society. Every conflict is rooted in the historical and dialectical processes of each society and the management of the same must be sourced from within the context of the variegated factors and forces that struggle for ascendancy and control of the resources of the society.

Thus a conflict that manifests at the religious level of a constitutionally secular state cannot be solved only at the level of the inter-religious dialogue or military surge because, it’s deeply rooted in the lives of its people. Issues of economics and social injustices and deprivation must be contextualized into the strategy for a solution. In India, it is not only a religious problem of extrem-ism or radicalism, but symptomatic of deeper levels of poverty at the educa-tional, mal nutrition, high corruption in economic and political levels generates its conflicts too. Military solutions to the problem cannot bring about a sus-tainable solution, it needs to mitigate or remove the over-arching challenges of religious fundamentalism from its society in disseminating the sense of toler-ance, patience, fellow feelings and true religious teachings. Only such a sus-tainable strategy can transform conflict and lead to the peaceful development of that particular society and its people.

There are many interesting and thought provoking points in the topic that will be focused in the full paper.

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Karabatzaki Helen

The Meaning of the Term Crisis as a Challenge to Ways of Life in Ancient Thought

from the Homeric to Hellenistic Times The term ‘crisis’ with its multiple verbal, nominal and other derivatives (κρί-

νειν, ἀπόκρισις, κατάκρισις, ὑπόκρισις, ἀνάκρισις, κριτήριον, e.c.) domi-nates ancient Greek texts, especially the philosophical and rhetorical ones. Ιt is found from the Homeric poems onwards as a basic term with political, social, psychological, mythological, and religious meanings. Crisis is substantially and methodologically related to the basic structures of the democratic city-state, such as the agora, the juries, agones, and ideologically with logos-reason in its inherent form as the main ontological feature of human species and its verbal and/or written expression as the means of truly or persuasively speaking.

In this paper I shall present a short analysis of some aspects of the mean-ing of crisis from the Homeric-mythological idea of judgment to the philosophi-cal vs. the rhetorical perspective of the classic times ending with the predomin-ance of the concepts of crisis and criterion in the Hellenistic times, with the Stoics confirming and the Sceptics denying them.

Our conclusion is that the meaning of crisis in the ancient thought, unlike the contemporary one, was mostly gnosiological, epistemological, and moral

offering challenges to ways of life (ὁδοὶ βίου), which were either opposing the main stream social and political life, as it was the case with Plato’s Politeia, the Cynics, and the Stoics, or in conformity to them, the case of some sophists, partly of Aristotle, and the Sceptics.

The contemporary perspective of crisis as impeding structural thread and need of change was not clearly evident, because behind the ancient Greek phi-losophy mostly lied the conception of the training and the application of right crisis as rational judgment and decision to every area of political, social and personal life.

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Karafillis Grigorios

Racism and Altruism in the Contemporary World

Racism constitutes a primordial phenomenon of individual and social life. Dur-ing the last decades, racism became powerful in a way that absolutely under-mines the real potentialities, the perspective and the life for millions of people. The interesting point is that although racism appears from the very start of so-cial constitution and has a permanent historical life, we face as a social matter only at the modern times as a social matter.

Racism is formed as a dogma in accordance with the same sense as an ethnic group is condemned as inferior than other from its birth, in the same way that another is superior for the same reason. We also think as a very important definition the one that accepts racism as something that doesn’t involve opi-nions and the rationality of ours or the opposite, but our needs, intentions and preferences, even our aversion for a race.

In this paper we also examine the identity and the function of altruism as a basic or selection behavior of the person, which is founded in the social impe-tus for philanthropy, in terms of love for the human being and the philan-thropic action. In addition, we censure and try to reprove if altruism is a result of emotional or either a rational obligation. If it also follows the evolution of the physical option. Consequently, we attempt to distinguish altruism to ego-ism and, moreover, we orientate to special perspectives of its improvement, for example, the option of groups. Altruism’s identity is characterized from the counter-poise relationship between the opposite sides.

The creation of a new society with genuine political and economic democ-racy is impossible without rooting out racism and strengthening of altruism.

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Karamitrou Katerina

The Philosophical Language of Dramatic Art as a Moral Vehicle Towards a Reading of Crisis and Self-Awareness. The Dialectical Embrace

of Dramatic Art and Philosophy as a Reflection and Challenge upon Crisis

The art of re-presentation, an inherited recollection is the superlative narration of life. An act of extreme leniency and compassion since, it suggests and wel-comes otherness. Through the imperishability of personified Logos, through that slight divergence from the universe, a divergence which the role instructs towards a scenic life by poetic license, dramatic art presents an entire relation to Philosophy. Tragedy is Man’s heroic vision, signifying the triumph of intellect against the measures of material –yle, against the defeat, the death of human

body. Tragedy, through the Aristotelian περιπζτεια, ἀναγνώρισις and περιω-δυνίες, extols the morally autonomous individual who envies, endeavours and reaches the divine and lays a mirror before human nature. Tragedy, the art of nostos, emanates from the alluring union between customs and rituals and it denotes the abrogation of the interval between divine and human. Dionysos, this androgynous, subversive, frantic God introduces otherness through the re-collection of a wild, rebellious civilization which reveals the invisible and per-forms the articulation of universal – sympantikos Word. Tragedy dramatizes knowledge offering thus, immunity to human emotion. Through the transcen-dental vigour of his myths, Dionysos unveils and betrays into an eclectic yet, demanding way, notions following the ancient traces of human nature, notions like geometry of pain, like guilt, like ontological grief, like identification of pas-sions, like transgression. The many-faced experiences of Dionysos, his legen-dary voyage–plous constitute a verification of human tragic lot. Dionysos sacred and sinful at the same time, represents Man’s archetypal image who desperate in his decline, is struggling and longing for his moral and intellectual uplift just like the God of tragedy is hunting for his epiphany. Through his rending–sparagmos, through his disguises, through his wild yet, precious identities, Dio-nysos regenerates life. The suffering–paschon God in his grievous voluptuous-ness wails in his rituals over his dismemberment which undoubtedly, is our dis-

memberment too. The tragic heroes virtuous – ἀγαθοποιοί, made of fine mar-ble–καλλιμάρμαροι, acting always, beyond convention, bearing that primordial stoutness of Myth, melancholy, a kind of temperate abnormality–eukratos


anomalia, that unprecedented nobility, that high – mindedness sculpture the image of the great Man. The magnitude of attitude, the conscious insubordina-tion, the unrivalled unselfishness of the tragic hero, his ravishing Prometheic struggle towards self – awareness lead to an ineffable awakening and instilling and constitute an alien- spectrum of the World, remote from the age of pru-dence (Antigone – Ajax – Hekuba – Oedipus – Klytaimnestra – Medea – Teire-sias). A philosophical reading on the anatomy of the unequalled, legendary, transcendental characters of tragedy is attempted at the present proposal aim-ing at a dialectical embrace which possibly depicts the protogenic force of ha-martia, the womb of crisis, the primeval want and yearning of the individual to resist and confront – even, in vain – what surpasses Him. J. P. Euben defines tragedy as a diorama, a festivity of sociopolitical procedures, besides, the tra-gedians were called educators – paidagogoi and the ancient Greek actor – hy-pokrites reaches down to the arena with a prize – άθλα nothing but a laurel wreath. The ideological and political content of Drama is a spring of inspiration and moral speculation for the educator – theatre – paidagogue and the stu-dent in the time of crisis.

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Karavakou Vasiliki

Paideia in Crisis: Arendtian Reflections on Education,

Culture and Politics Modern philosophy of education reluctantly admits that theory has lost its mo-numentality as there is no such grand narrative description of institutions and ideas. Broad is the disappointment due to philosophy’s inability to implicate itself in current educational, social and political practices, whilst there is an ever growing loss of interest in critical thinking and democratic education on behalf of those responsible for educational and social policy. The current crisis in edu-cation is encouraged by: (a) the dominant “banking” conception that treats the human mind as an empty container and education as a means to a measurable end; b) the fact that modern culture encourages a manageable and robust global blend of economics, technocracy and business that promotes productivi-ty and profit, cultivates consumptive subjectivities and promotes policies that disregard the democratic deficits they involve. This highly destructive blend


affects education, the future of democratic self-government and human ente-lecheia; and c) the broader crisis in modern political culture, responsible for shrinking the political domain or for distorting the meaning of “the political”. Should we consider the present predicament as the ultimate norm of educa-tion? In her well-known essay on The Crisis in Education Hannah Arendt offers innovative and uncommon arguments about the relation of education to politi-cal culture and shakes a lot of traditional beliefs regarding the limits and the potential of education. The paper suggests that we should bring back to the centre of our theoretical concerns and practical reforms the idea of critical ref-lection, capable judgment and informed citizenship. However, following Arendt, we should also stress that unless we address a number of thorny issues about the priorities of modern political culture, unless we re-appropriate a sense of a shared world, any critique of the inadequacies of education will hardly inspire any worthwhile educational reforms.

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Keeney Gavin

Gray (Areas) and Black (Zones) To bury false disciplines (to discipline the Imaginary) do we need another Ver-dun, which Capitalism would only be so happy to supply? Or is it possible to restore the immemorial coordinates of knowledge (and scholarship) by turning to the Holy Trinity of conceptual thought proper – that elegant, spare, wintry tableau that haunts all artistic production? Through T.S. Eliot’s bleak visions, operating in apparent reverse, we might “reach” Bonaventure’s reduction of art to theology – theology, not religion; and theology as Truth, not dogma. This communitarian spirit of intellectual austerities is the transitional state between gray areas (instrumental reason) and black zones (revelation). If it passes through subjective night, as Jacques Maritain suggests, it does so in service to the impersonal agencies of that anterior sky in which stars (and constellations, new and old) appear (and re-appear) out of no-where. “La vita nuova,” perhaps – but also a strange diminution in the analogical, for/toward the anagogical. Therefore, the strange, wintry, and wonderful – or, St. Bonaventure’s “a union without which all knowledge is empty.”

The essay surveys the bankrupt instrumental systems of knowledge that pass as disciplines today without offering any way out of late-modern nihilism. In fact, such disciplines are exceptionally nihilistic in their production of circular


and fashionable discourses of difference that actually produce nothing other than a momentary frisson of self-congratulatory liberal pathos. If Liberalism is generally having the strength of other people’s convictions, what is the path to a true sense of solidarity today for artistic and scientific disciplines with the dis-possessed and the impoverished other than through embracing an elemental and elective poverty of signifying agency?

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Kompridis Nikolas

Philosophy, Crisis and Democracy: What Do They Have to Do with Each Other?

That crisis plays a role in the life of philosophy and of democracy is hard to de-ny from a strictly empirical standpoint. It just is the case that every now and then philosophy and democracy go through some kind of crisis. Now if we think of such periodic crises as merely a contingent feature of the life of phi-losophy and of democracy, we would be disinclined to consider their possible normative implications. However, if we begin from the premise, the premise from which I will begin, that crises are an essential and necessary feature of the life of philosophy and of democracy, then we cannot but take seriously the question of what role crisis should play in the lives of each. What kind of re-sponse does a crisis call for, normatively speaking? Supposing that there is a compelling answer to this question, might it illuminate what philosophy and democracy should be? Might it illuminate the links between philosophy and democracy? Might it tell us something about how we should we inhabit the lives of each, how we should live philosophy and democracy? Thinking about how crisis, democracy, and philosophy might stand in some mutually illuminat-ing relation to each other also supposes that "crisis" remains a meaningful conceptual and diagnostic category. But what if the concept of crisis is itself in crisis?

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Koskeridis Konstantinos D.

The Pathogenesis of the City-state According to Plato in View of the Contemporary Crisis

The purpose of this paper is to examine the pathogenesis that leads the city-state to crisis according to Plato, inasmuch as the Athenian philosopher consid-ers that all the cities-states of his time “are badly governed”. His theories about the right way of governing, which are closely related to other aspects of his phi-losophy and mainly to his ethics, are viewed through the prism of his social and political optimism, since Plato never stopped believing that the political society can recover. Despite all the adversities he met, he never ceased offering theo-retical proposals for the betterment of the human things until the end of his life.

Our contemporary world is currently experiencing a multiform crisis (so-cial, political, economic, moral etc.). This crisis demands radical political deci-sions for its overcoming. Plato’s practical philosophy contains, in my opinion, certain valuable elements, which if were being taken into consideration by the political leaders of today, a better future could be dawned for the humanity.

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Kougioumzoglou Emmanouil Bitchava Giovanna

Ζῆν ἀλύπως καὶ κατὰ φύσιν: The Therapy of Passions in the Context

of Ancient Cynicism as a Way to Psychological Resilience and Self-awareness

The study of Cynical Philosophy, as “medicine” – only contemporarily has come to the point of interest, although scholars have already recognized and cited its contribution to novel therapeutic approaches (e.g. Cognitive Psychotherapy) and to major philosophical tendencies and Schools of Thought (e.g. Stoicism). Studying of it, meets difficulties: the fragmentation of the sources and the ten-dency of Stoics to attribute their principles to Diogenes, due to be reduced to the philosophical continuum: Socrates – Antisthenes – Diogenes – Zeno. Thus,


the Cynical Philosophy is liable to be put aside even in Nussbaum’s (1994) study, focused on the Ancient Philosophy as psycho-therapy. Despite she ac-knowledges Cynical Philosophy’s role in Philosophical Therapy; she omits it from Therapeutic Philosophy continuum.

This paper brings together Cynical Philosophy and Cognitive Psycho-Therapy, and illustrates the role and importance of philosophical principles both as potential mediators and outcomes. The range of Cynicism can be con-ceptualized along a range of dimensions including their aims: Psychological Re-

silience and Self-Awareness – to live painlessly (ἀλύπως) and naturally (κατὰ

φύσιν). Here, we pore over the therapeutic approaches of Cynics to the ther-apy of passions, throughout primitive and secondary sources and doxographical tradition, due to “re-constitute” the affiliations between Cynical Therapeutic Philosophy and the Philosophical Therapy.

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Koutsoumpos Leonidas

Crisis and Reflective Disruption

I put my hand, lets say, into my pocket to take my watch out. I discover that my watch is not there; but it ought to be there; normally my watch is in my pocket. I experience a slight shock. There has been a small break in the chain of my everyday habits. ... The break is felt as something out of the way; it arrests my at-tention, to a greater or a less degree.

Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being

It is most common that the term crisis is associated with negative connotations like economic recession, poverty, political instability e.c. These aspects of crisis are everyday affecting the life of many people around the world, as for example citizens of Greece. Without underestimating these difficulties, this paper analy-ses a more mundane, detached and abstract notion of the term. It sees crisis as the outcome of a disruption of the usual flow of life which can cause a thought-ful reflection on everydayness. This reflective disruption should be seen as a chance to rethink one's habits and readjust possible routes in life, having, thus, an inherent practical aspect of ethics. In order to illustrate this, a case study of an educational situation from the architectural design studio, will be provided.


There, one is able to see that disruption functions as a bracket that paren-thetically inserts an uninvited intervention. The bracketing of disruption, al-though defines a space, should not be seen as a closure, but rather an opening to a wider understanding of what is the point of every doing. The bracket of the disruption opens a metaphorical ‘space’ that can accommodate reflection about the practice that was just interrupted. At the same time, it provides the necessary time to reflect again on ‘the meaning of the practice’ or ‘what the whole thing is about’.

The various possible understandings of disruption are analyzed through a threefold analysis of the term: First of all there is generally the experience of being disrupted, ‘a shock,’ ‘a break’ or a discovery similar to the feeling when something is suddenly missing when it ought to be there. Second, there is the disrupted, the routine that acquires habitual and automated characteristics since it is part of the everyday activity, “a state of preoccupation” about things. Thirdly, there is the disruptor, the incident that occupies the educational activ-ity while it has stopped or paused “clothed as arrest, ‘felt as something out of the way,’ a jolt of force that reveals the moment without giving itself away –a non-transparent event.” In this sense, the discontinuity of this flow appears to cause a temporary ‘breakdown,’ a malfunction of the dialogue that appears as an obstacle.

The disruption to the flow is very similar to Martin Heidegger’s expression: ‘a deficiency in our having-to-do with the world concernfully.’ Disruption in this sense is a section of an established continuity. Koschmann, et. al. have associ-ated Heidegger’s expression with the general term of ‘breakdown’, since it re-fers to the disruption of ordinary ways of conducting our everyday activities that usually do not require our awareness. When these non-reflective practices are disrupted, the awareness focuses again back to the practice, by ‘lighting it up’ or offering ‘new views’ about it. Crisis then can be seen as a vital chance to reconsider praxis, to stand up and act accordingly according to the phronēsis that has been gained. Selected Bibliography Appelbaum, David, Disruption, Albany: State University of New York Press,

1996. Baker, Paul, and Janet Jones, "Benign Disruption in the Classroom: A Case

Study," Teaching Sociology 7, no. 1, 1979: pp. 27-44. Gadamer, Hans Georg, Truth and Method, Translated by Joel Weinsheimer &

Donald G. Marshall (Revised Translation), Second Revised Edition ed, London, New York: Continuum, 2004.


Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, Translated by John Macquire & Edward Robinson, Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 1962/ 1927.

Koschmann, Timothy, Kari Kuuti, and Larry Hickman, "The Concept of Break-down in Heidegger, Leont'ev, and Dewey and Its Implications for Educa-tion," Mind, Culture and Activity 5, no. 1, 1998: pp. 25-41.

Koutsoumpos, L., 2009. Inhabiting Ethics: Educational Praxis in the Design Stu-dio, the Music Class and the Dojo. PhD Thesis. University of Edinburgh, School of Arts, Culture and Environment.

Marcel, Gabriel, The Mystery of Being, translated by G. S. Fraser. Vol. 1: Reflec-tion and Mystery, South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine's Press, 2001.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962.

Smith, Daniel L., "Intensifying Phronesis: Heidegger, Aristotle and Rhetorical Culture," Philosophy and Rhetoric 36, no. 1, 2003: 77-102.

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Kuang Sanping Li Xiaomei

The Chinese Religions in the Context of Faith-Crisis in the Age of Globalization

1. Features of the Age of Globalization and the Emergence of Universal Faith

(1) Cultural Exchanges and Integration. Today, the development of globa-lization has stronger and stronger impacts on our social life.

(2) Cultural Boundaries Being Surpassed. It’s another important influence for globalization on people's social life to surpass the boundaries of ethnic cul-tures and strengthen global interdependence.

(3) Assimilation of the Style of Social and the Form of Culture. Another significant impact of globalization on people's social life is the assimilation of the style of social and the form of culture.

(4) Conflicts between Cultural Universalism and Particularism. while western scholars advocated cultural universalism and hegemonism, non-western scholars put forward cultural particularism.

(5) The Coexistence of Diverse Culture Systems. (6) Diversity of Culture and Universality of Faith.


2. Faith Crisis in Globalization Age (1) Faith Crisis in the process of Globalization. People in eastern or west-

ern countries, in modern or post-modern societies are now facing the same problem as faith crisis.

(2) Faith Crisis is aggravated by Market Economy. Market economy only focused on the best allocation of resources but not took the resource storage and sources into consideration. Thus, Blind exploitation and predatory energy intake, uncontrolled waste of resources and irresponsible environmental pollu-tion resulted in a worsening "ecological ethical issue". 3. The Chinese Religions as a Life-Style in Globalization Age

(1) Ethical Directions of Chinese Religions. First, political publicity of reli-gious ethics. Second, social regulations for religious ethics. Third, cultural iden-tity of religious ethics.

(2) Differences in Religious Cultural Traditions between China and the Western world. Chinese religions which emphasize religion entering the public sphere have had great significances in maintaining a harmonious society.

(3) Prospects of Religious Publicity in Contemporary China. First, we need to construct a harmonious society to accommodate the religious publicity. Second, we need to push forward democratic politics to promote tolerance to the religious publicity. Third, we need to further perfect our legal institutions to protect the religious publicity.

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Lekkas George

Soul in Crisis. The Negative Function of Desire in Plato’s Republic and in Epictetus’ Philosophy

In contrast to Plato, for whom the root of evil desires is found in the appetitive part of our multiple soul, for Epictetus the original cause of the evil desires of our single soul is located in our moral purpose. More precisely, for the Stoic philosopher, man, who is naturally good (‘gentle’, ‘affectionate’ and ‘faithful’), is governed above all by his moral choice. In this context, moral choice is not one part of the soul’s form or function, but its true self, through which man po-sitions himself positively or negatively in relation to the material world and the images it creates within us, which the Stoic philosopher calls ‘sense-impressi-ons’. The self guided by moral purpose is under its own control and it alone can


injure itself. This being the case, man’s enemy is situated in the hard core of himself which can only be perverted if he himself chooses to make base ‘use of sense-impressions’ or else to confront ‘external matters’ irrationally. Here, therefore, in contrast to Plato, the cause of evil desires (and of the undesirable actions that proceed from them) does not stem from the nature of our en-souled self but from its mistaken judgment in regarding things ‘not our own’ as ‘under our control’ and in wishing to falsely identify with them. It thus becomes clear that in contrast to Plato for whom the root of evil is situated in an onto-logical error, for Epictetus the true cause of evil lies in an error of knowledge. That is to say, according to Plato the soul is at the service of the body when its rational part submits to its two lower faculties (ontological error); but according to Epictetus the soul is at the service of the body when it mistakenly regards external matters as its own business and wishes to identify with them (error of knowledge).

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Leontsini Eleni

Guilt, Shame, and Morality: The Use of Emotional Arguments

in the Current Greek Crisis

Since the official beginning of the Greek fiscal and political crisis in March 2010, many arguments have been formulated in various ways and by various people (politicians, journalists, man of letters, academics, etc) in order to justi-fy the implementation of libertarian economic policies to Greek society. These arguments have varied in their rhetoric, justification, and source of origin. My aim in this paper is to focus on the rhetoric of the arguments that have, so far, tried to defend the libertarian policies implemented by the last Greek govern-ments but also by the governments of other European countries, focusing in particular on those that have appealed on moral grounds. Roughly, I suppose, there have been at least two sets of arguments of this kind. First, those at-tempting to defend the crisis either by justifying it (trying to explain its origins that are, according to their opinion, deeply rooted in Greek society and the corruption of the Greek people, or attributed to the crude and peculiar form of Greek capitalism that needs to be up-graded, etc) or by trying to discover its causes (trying to find the ones responsible behind it or by trying to induce a


sense of guilt to the members of Greek society). These arguments either claim that “we should see the crisis as an opportunity for change” or that there is no other solution to the crisis than the neo-liberal (libertarian) austerity measures imposed since “we are all responsible for the crisis”. It should be noted that arguments of both kinds have been expressed not only by conservatives and libertarians but also by part of the centre-Left.

Related to the above has been the line of thought introduced by some in-tellectuals (the most notable example being Stelios Ramfos who has written extensively on this since the beginning of the Greek crisis) that could be la-beled as ‘pro-crisis’ arguments endorsing, what I call, the ‘moralistic thesis’, according to which there is a deep spiritual crisis that lies within us whose cause has been our alienation from our intellectual past, our traditional moral values, and our involvement with consumerism. In addition, these contempo-rary moralistic arguments often attempt to appropriate Greek Antiquity mak-ing references to classical texts and Ancient philosophers, like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. My aim in this paper would be to analyze these moralistic argu-ments and to focus on the use of the emotions of ‘shame’ and ‘guilt’ put for-ward by these thinkers and at the same time to show the fallacies involved in the use of emotional arguments in general. Furthermore, I will also demon-strate how the appeal to the Ancients and the use of Antiquity is not only mis-leading in this case, but also deceptive.

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Leshkevich Tatiana

Philosophical Analysis of the Crisis Consequences in Russia

We should determine actual reasons for the negative tendencies of the crisis situation in Russia according to the way of life. Russia is considered to have chosen the model of overtaking modernization and course in the conditions of the vagueness. Hereby, four groups of problems causing these processes are emphasized in the research. First, the research turns to the analysis of the “myth” of self-organization by market. The imperative –“to be accepted by market”– generates a new form of dependence, new values and extraordinary principles, new orientations and strategies. Nowadays the specific processes in Russia are greatly determined by “shadow” economy, administrative barriers,


corruption and incompetence. In this context the people lose main sense of there life and professional activity. As a rule, they try to run away from the problems of the reality in different forms. On the one hand, it can be not only migration and emigration abroad but a collective struggle which may make life easier for them. On the other hand, it may be the escape to the sphere of the religion sects, esoteric, Christian mysticism, drugs and various forms of the so-cial-psychological dependences, where the people lose self-identity. Nowadays the main problem is the social adaptation. The modern thinkers would like to understand the real tendency and strategy of the ways of life in the new condi-tions. How is connected our values and aims to complexity and unpredictable reality? Philosophy investigates folk psychology, the phenomena of common sense, a faculty of the soul, “knowledge of the heart”, empathy, belief, virtue. The modern rational thinkers insist on the role of the human intellect in the act of choice and the values of the self-actualization. Thee emphasizes that the human activities based on achievements of science and technology have be-come the main acting force.

The second group of problems indicates a non-subject state of Russia, the absence of the real subject of transformations as the guide for future human activity. The mental image of the aim can be understood as an intensive direc-tional resource for actions. Here the question is one of the so call “human fac-tor”. Competence, intellect, high level of professional skills and social responsi-bility are all very important here. In Russia the priority of modernization is only proclaimed, but the inertia energy-raw materials scenario still dominates. The third position focuses on the regional peculiarity of the Southern Russia. There are both successful regions and subsidized backward regions on the territory of Russia. We can state a fact of loyal attitude towards the existing regime in spite of regional elites regenerating into local functioning clans. Finally, a very impor-tant negative factor is degradation of the country’s scientific potential and do-mestic science. The analysis of these factors can contribute to understanding the real consequences of crisis in Russia, it may be significant for human life and cultural development, for creative potential of humanitarian reflection.

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Li Jian-qun

The Criticism of Political Reconstruction in the Perspective of Risk Society

After human history came into a risk society, because highly developed indus-tries have broken down the original balance of the society, thus leading to the overthrow of causal chains and the reverse of the relation of matter and con-sciousness, and finally resulting in that traditional impolitic elements have po-litical roles, the political reconstruction has inevitably become a modern topic and theoretical focus.

However, it is not as easy as turning one's hand over to carry out polit-ical reconstruction at the background of the risk society because the paradox between risk accountability and responsible subject deficiency, democracy pa-radox, social insurance paradox and reasonability paradox make the political reconstruction have many difficulties in taking a step. By disclosing these para-doxes, the paper has provided profound enlightenments on the control and governing of the risk society in three aspects like attaching importance to indi-vidual benefits, the relation between “future” and “today” and vital interests of the people.

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Lian-fu Yan

From Intellectual Ethics to Family Ethics. A Comparison of Chinese and Western

Traditional Ethics Nowadays, with the crisis of ethics becomes more and more serious, it is useful for us to review Chinese Traditional Ethics. If western traditional ethics, which originates in ancient Greece, stars from conscientized cognition, takes sex-dispel-ling contract ideology and focuses on reductionist normative ethics, is reflected as intellectual ethics excluding the concept of family, ancient Chi-nese ethics, represented by Confucianism, is reflected as “family-based ethics ”,for which depart from the shelter-taking of the body, takes the ethic of dialo-gue between the husband and wife and focuses on genealogical and novelized


practical ethics. Within the contemporary context of disappearing “natural home”, weakening “family ethics”, and frequent occurrences of “running away from home”, when “intellectual ethics”, is showing its weaknesses in solving these problems, the rediscovery and reconstruction of “family-based ethics” can provide realistic ideological resources for people to extricate themselves from the plight of natural, social and personal ethics.

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Loizides Antis

John Stuart Mill, Liberty and the Art of Life In the third edition of A System of Logic (London, 1843 [third ed. 1851]), John Stuart Mill developed a notion of an art of living. Drawing on the Socratic-Stoic tradition of the ars vitae or the technê peri ton bion, Mill set the principle of utility as the telos or the first principle of conduct. This final principle of conduct aimed in unifying or harmonising one’s living around a central pursuit: the pro-motion of the happiness of mankind. This final end appears in Mill’s architec-tonic art of living as the justification and the controller (i.e., deciding which pur-suits are “worthy and desirable, and what is their place in the scale of desirable things”) of subordinate ends – Moral, Prudential, and Aesthetic ends – without itself being the sole end of all actions. But here is the tricky part: concluding his discussion on the “Art of Life”, Mill argued that more happiness will exist in the world, if people develop feelings that will make them “regardless of happiness”. In On Liberty (London, 1859), one finds a clearer picture of what Mill meant: “Among the works of man which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself.” This paper ex-amines what Mill’s view on what liberty entailed, especially with regard to life as an art: unless a social setting of liberty exists, no individual will be able to experiment with different kinds of life and find out first hand which kind of life promotes best the happiness of mankind, i.e., harmonising moral, prudential and aesthetics ends, in a kind of life which enjoys the higher pleasures.

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Ma Tianxiang

Modern Crisis of Chinese Traditional Philosophy, Behind Economic Development in the New Period

From the end of 80s in 20 century to now, Along with the economic policy changes, the productive forces liberated, the economy had been the develop-ment by leaps and bounds in China. People's standard of living is also in improv-ing. Corresponding to this the traditional thought and idea is facing great chal-lenges and crisis too.

The first is the change of the mode of production, lead to the change of ideas, including the traditional Confucian culture and Marxism. It shows distinct purely money worship, utilitarian tendency with the economy as the core, and the material rich goals. Hedonism diffused over society. The benevolent loves others, to serve the people, are dumping. This is the source of social and politi-cal corruption.

Secondly, the change of lifestyle, is leading to the loose of the family. Wor-ship of Heaven, the ancestor, Saint have also been fading. Inherent ethics order falls apart.

Lie in the following three aspects:

One, the ultimate level - holy profaned.

Second, Social level - mind or soul confused.

Third, Ethical level - moral missing.

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Maggini Golfo

“The European nations are sick; Europe itself, it is said, is in crisis”: Reflections on Husserl’s “Idea” of Europe

«Merely fact-minded sciences make human beings that are nothing but mere facts» – this is the emblematic formulation of the late Husserl’s ever-lasting attack on the historical development of modern science dominated by the ideals of naturalism and objectivism accused of being forms “of rationalism, of “enlightenment”, of an intellectualism which loses itself in theories alienated from the world”. But what does make this attack so powerful and with long-


lasting effects for phenomenological thought? The late Husserl’s critique of scientism and technologism (Technizismus) is closely linked with the theme of a spiritual “crisis” within the framework of a consistent, yet incomplete, phe-nomenology of culture, more precisely, of the European culture. The leading thread of Husserl’s critique is that the European crisis has its roots in a mis-guided rationalism.

Undoubtedly, the discourse on crisis is certainly not an originality of Hus-serl’s late phenomenological project: the end of WWI has triggered a series of diagnoses of the “crisis” viewed as a civilisational crisis, e.g. Spengler’s dis-course on Europe’s decline. Yet, all those diagnoses share one single element, that is, the negative appreciation of “crisis”. For the late Husserl, nevertheless, there is ambiguity as to the nature of the “crisis” as well as to its depth if we compare it to what other accounts of it are claiming. “Our problem of the cri-sis” is, of course, a situation of dissatisfaction, of distress, namely of “our Euro-pean distress”. But there is something additional to this degenerate state which links crisis to an intrinsic questionability as to the meaning or meaninglessness of science, philosophy, and of the European humanity as such: the negative turn of the overall European crisis may signify an existential catastrophe of the European man (existentielle Katastrophe des europäischen Menschen), but there are chances that such a thing could lead to a revolutionary Umwendung. In any case, the historicity of European culture in all its manifestations – science being the primordial one – should not be viewed neither in the terms of the habitual history of facts – Husserl’s attack on historicism is a well-known one - not in the terms of a historical a priori, as it brings about “a transformation of human existence and its whole cultural life.

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Makariev Plamen

The Role of Morality with Regard to the Legitimizing Function of the Public Sphere

This paper aims at a further clarification of the legitimizing function of the pub-lic sphere and, more concretely, at a differentiation between the “de facto” legitimization of norms and policies (including the use of methods of propagan-da, brain washing, media manipulations) and the “true” legitimization, which deserves recognition from any viewpoint. The author argues against the too


narrow, rigorous understanding of the “truly” legitimizing function of the public communication (by authors such as J. Rawls or J. Habermas) which equates legi-timizing public communication with public deliberation. He claims instead that the publically shared morality of the individuals and groups involved can serve as a criterion for making a difference between a “bad” and a “good” function-ing of the public sphere.

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Matthopoulos Demetrios Mantzanas Michael

Moral Values as Mentors to Contemporary Challenges Contemporary crisis is the result of violating moral values. Reassessing them could be the roadmap to guide our society towards its revival. Personal objec-tives frame the values that govern our daily life. Our inner self requires to be reframed under the auspice of universal moral values established early in so-cieties’ development. The shortcut to reframing our inner self lays on our abili-ty to interpret our surrounding. The interpretation is a mental operation go-verned by the genetic background under the influence of the educational and sociopolitical environment. Interpreting is an hermeneutical process that re-quires deep ethical consciousness so that the recipient of interpretation not to become obeisant of the interpreter. Interpreter’s reliability is reflected in his ability to balance between a mental relationship with the creator and the ad-dressee of interpretation. His moral values should be the equilibrium point. These are values that were developed at a time that humanity was closer to nature. We all have to render ourselves to our conscience, to recall these pri-mordial values, to reframe our liability in order to re-establish society’s ethical status. Under these conditions societies will be able to confront contemporary challenges.

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Mela Lia

The Crisis of Modernity: History, Tradition and Virtues The fragmentation of traditions in different theoretical schemes and incompat-ible forms of life is, according to MacIntyre, the cause of the crisis of modern society. Modernity is perceived as the worldview which stands critically against the traditional modes of thought and forms of life, therefore the individual is unable to self-determination and modern society has fragmented morality. MacIntyre’s historical project aims, through the rediscovery of the tradition of virtues, to overcome the crisis of modernity.

MacIntyre’s critique, focused on the problems of contemporary societies, ends up as a broader critique of the Enlightenment Project. He believes that the failure of the Enlightenment Project, the inability to replace tradition by a scientific, grounded on Reason, conception of the world and human society, leads to the emergence of relativistic theories.

The main thesis of this paper is that MacIntyre’s theory is itself inconceiv-able except within the enlightenment framework. His critique is best under-stood as criticism of Logical Positivism, as much as it is perceived as the peak of the Enlightenment Project. Its collapse leads to relativistic theories connected with Postmodernism. In that light, and in order to overcome the crisis of mod-ern society, a more moderate request for depart from the impasse, formed by both Logical Positivism and Postmodernism may be acceptable. However, this does not imply renunciation of Modernity, but rather the discovery within the Enlightenment of those elements that can help to overcome the crisis.

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Merantzas Christos

Claude Lévi-Strauss Going on a Journey to Byzantium: From Last Judgment to Paradise

The cultural description of heaven and hell, as referenced in St. Andrew the Fool’s narrative, dating back to the 10th century, or οn Byzantine/Post-Byzantine mural paintings explains the creation of a mutually opposing, yet multidimensional, system, where archaic classification styles are embedded. These styles construct a myth. They are inconsistent and significantly contradict


the cultural order. It is worth noting that the binary oppositions, known largely by the anthropological analyses of Claude Lévi-Strauss (i.e. heaven-hell, male-female, healthy-contaminated), that make up Christian spirituality have build the fundamental structure of a system compatible with Christian salvation. Therefore, the binary opposition of heaven and hell is a necessary requirement and a prerequisite to the Last Judgment. The anthropomorphism of heaven ex-cludes from the Last Judgment’s salvation all that is animalistic and everything that is subject to a racial or sexual ambiguity. Indeed, heaven’s anthropomor-phism is defined by the exclusion of alterity, of the demonic and the contami-nated. Hell hosts the animal species and its emotional anomaly and ascribes these as the figures of alterity putting them on the opposite direction away from humanity. So the ancestral animal origins confront the principles of hu-man reason, cultural civility and order. Within hell, the “bestial other” is either a demon or an anthropomorphic entity which is defeated because of torture and because of the loss of his physical integrity and able-bodied. Essentially only the humanness of heaven recognizes the supremacy of reason and only this element constitutes Christian salvation. Just like the dream of St. Andrew the Fool’s imaginary transition to heaven answers and then analyses life’s cul-tural differentiation so do the artistic realities of the Byzantine and the post-Byzantine Last Judgment. They expose a fundamental cultural division within the Byzantine world. On the one hand there is the purity of heaven (male) and, on the other hand, the contamination of hell (female). This division ultimately identifies the subjects that are esteemed in the Christian world’s hierarchical demarcation. As Judith Butler emphatically states, gender is produced under the authority of the heterosexual womb and all that the dipole excludes (e.g. ambiguity or erratic identities) enters the world of otherness.

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Misheva Vessela

Social Indifference, Social Exclusion, and Self-Alienation. A Symbolic Interactionist Perspective

The present discussion begins with a presentation and analysis of two sociolog-ical theories: the theory of social indifference (Rudolf Stichweh) and the theory of alienation. These two theories are compared and their observation positions analyzed. The implications of this analysis are then discussed from a symbolic


interactionist perspective, with a focus on the theory of self and socialization. It is argued that (1) the two theories have shared shortcomings that can be over-come in a symbolic interactionist theoretical framework; (2) a symbolic interac-tionist perspective concerning one of the least explored concepts of alienation theory, namely, alienation from self, not only adds to its explanatory power, but also opens up new possibilities for advances in symbolic interactionist theory itself. From the perspective proposed here, these advances paradoxical-ly demand a return to a forgotten theoretical heritage and an exploration of the paths not taken when Cooley's theory of self was subsumed under that of Blu-mer's presentation of Mead. This approach is also encouraged by more recent developments in psychoanalysis (Anzieu), which locate the theory of self on the agenda of modem symbolic interactionist research beyond both Freud and Mead. The more specific intent of this examination is to cast light on problems adolescents encounter today in making the transition from primary to second-ary socialization as well as on various ways in which they endeavor to resolve them.

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Moutsopoulos Evanghelos

Crises Along History: A Philosophical Approach The more the historical consciousness is aware of its probable incapacity to draw from its past, the more it seems to be subject to crises. In the light of what has been said, this statement that focuses on the consciousness of ap-parently incompatible data, may be exposed as follows: «The more the histori-cal consciousness is aware of its ability to draw out of its past, the more it is ready to overcome the crises which it may undergo». A society which would ignore any crisis often salutary for it, would merely be a society in slumber or on its way. It is unthinkable that the historical renewal of a society presuppos-es its death instead of its will to survive by assuming the continuity of its exis-tence through the continuity of its essence, so that it achieves its more being which it aspires to.

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Mukherjee Asha

Philosophy and the Crisis: An Eastern Solution? Philosophers have addressed the problems of crisis at almost every juncture of thought, though crisis may have been of different nature. But the 19th century Europe has faced a crisis in the sense that the Western history which was de-veloped on the foundation of thousands of years, i.e., culture, religion, philos-ophy and arts, was collapsing. The ground on which the human existence de-pended was totally shaken and the being of human existence became mea-ningless. The Crisis was indeed about Western Reason, the unchallengeable faith in Western Reason as the principle of reality and the ultimate criterion for philosophical inquiry. Marx too saw this as necessary consequences of the control of Western Reason the self-alienation of human from oneself in the mass industrialization.

It is almost accepted by everyone that the crisis originated and inbuilt in Western concept of reason. And if this is acceptable then the simple way out would be to work out a way to come out of the Western concept of reason. A number of attempts have been made by different thinkers in last three centu-ries by Western thinkers and especially by French thinkers but most of them are found unsatisfactory. Without going into the details of these attempts I raise the question whether the crisis is European as Husserl has discussed? If it is European then by implication we may draw a conclusion that rest of the globe does not have any crisis. Or even if it has it is not the same crisis which Europe has. But if the crisis is a universal crisis then we need to address it more seriously and find out the roots of the crisis before we try to solve.

We try to look at Eastern concept of reason to solve the crisis especially using K.C Bhattacharya’s ideas and propose Advaitin solution. We may quote from a very powerful modern Indian thinker which might throw some light: “all Western cultures have been reduced to the status of “objects” by being looked upon, that is, observed and studied by Western scholars in terms of Western concepts and categories that are treated not as culture-bound but universal in character. In a deep and radical sense, therefore, it is only the West that has subtly arrogated to itself the status of subject-hood in the cognitive enterprise and reduced all others to the status of objects.” (p. 63 Comparative Philosophy, Daya Krishana).

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Mylonaki Evgenia

On the Very Idea of a Way of Life: Ethics within the Current Crisis

What the current crisis has disrupted for us is, among other things, the way we talk about the way we do stuff. Take the way we talk about some of our shared practices. Before the crisis we would say "We never pay a visit without bearing gifts", "We help out our children even when they're old enough to support themselves", "We fight about who will get the bill", etc. After the crisis, the means of sustaining similar practices began to fall apart. In most cases we simply cannot afford to sustain the practices we thus talk of. What we do is threatened and so is the way we think and talk of what we do. As the current crisis deepens, we seem unable to think and talk of what we do; it seems as if we no longer know how to do what it is we do.

In his groundbreaking Life and Action1, Michael Thompson explores the connection between action concepts and the logic of life. On Thompson's view, the logic of life is delineated by the use of a special type of judgments: natural-historical judgments, as he calls them; roughly speaking, these are ge-neralities of the form 'x does/has/etc. A' which are not falsified by an x that does not do/have/etc. A, but which are normative for each individual x.

In this paper I will show that the way we talk about the way we do stuff should be understood as a species of natural-historical judgments. I will claim that in our case these judgments pertain to us not just as living beings, but as self-consciously living beings.

But this interpretation of the way we talk about the way we do stuff leaves it open that what these judgments gives us is nothing more than the social-conceptual scheme which organizes the material-empirical conditions of our life. In the second part of this paper I will revert to Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope2 in order to argue that when the natural-historical judgments that make sense of our shared social practices are disrupted, what breaks down is the very empirical-material structure of our life. In Lear's words, when the practice of making these judgments falls apart, there is a sense in which we can say that nothing happens. What the possibility of crisis like the current one shows is

1. Thompson, M., Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical

Thought, Harvard University Press, 2008. 2. Lear, J., Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, Harvard University

Press, 2006.


that the very idea of a way of life is a mythical idea. One that supposes that it makes sense to talk of a life that is available to us independently of the way in which we live it.

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Nguyen Tai Dong

Social Responsibility in Vietnamese Traditional Thought

In history, the Vietnamese intellectuals, regardless of their ideological stances and differences in interpretation of the world and human values, were united at the point on the importance and necessity of national independence, which serves as the most important premise for construction of a good and happy society. The nation as a whole recognizes clearly that only by being an inde-pendent, sovereign, free, and united, could Vietnam gain stability, development and felicity. The yearning for freedom, peace and self-reliance has been con-stantly manifested in the traditional thoughts of Vietnam.

Other basic concepts relating to the theme of national independence, freedom and peace were also addressed in the works of famous Vietnamese Buddhist monks and Confucian scholars during that period of national construc-tion. Apart from the thought on national independence, the thoughts of be-nevolence and righteousness are among the most important ideas of the Viet-namese traditional thought relating to the concept of social responsibility. So-cial responsibility is a concept from the West but the thought on social respon-sibility is prevalent in Confucianism. Confucius does not use “responsibility” concept, but he and his follows have a clear opinion about responsibility.

In Vietnam Confucianism, as well as in Chinese Confucianism, social re-sponsibility can exist only within the relationships between man and man. Man is human only in the arms of the others. Ethics cannot be separated from social-ity. Therefore, responsibility can serve as the basis for all relationships, the foundation for ethics. Humanity is the foundation of human relatedness. On the contrary, the relationship between man and man is steadfastly bound by responsibility.

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Nizhnikov Sergey

Faith as the Form of Reintegration

A lot of authors and thinkers of our days write of the actuality of faith. Richard Niebuhr, meditating over the present position and state of the mankind comes to conclusion that “the faith is the problem that has the utmost importance”1. From Russian metaphysical philosophy the loss of faith gives birth to society disease, leads to crises of culture and personality and tragedy. Since if there is no absolute value that is the goal of faith, then there is nothing to create and hence “the culture as concept is impossible”2.

The necessity of faith follows from the position of a man in the world and from the existence of consciousness as an integral phenomenon. Totally filled up consciousness is the divine consciousness, a human consciousness when being steadily deployed also increase the horizon and level of unidentified. For activity of a man in the world and for substantiation of moral he needs an abso-lute position that comes from supposition as if he cognized everything, he needs the concept of initial reason of every being, of absolute virtue. The faith meets these requirements.

The religious spiritual symbols, same as metaphysics categories represent such human ideals. And an ideal as it is the ideal by its nature is supposed to be treated on the base of faith that by the way, do not exclude knowledge. The faith in general demonstrates relation of self-consciousness of a man towards spiritual items inside his own consciousness. And in this aspect the faith does not contra-dict the reason but same as it finds its roots within a person’s ability for specula-tive activity that serves as a base for development of philosophy and religion.

The faith in this aspect is not just psychological confidence, bur fundamen-tal existential and metaphysical orientation. Dostoevsky describes it in the fol-lowing way: “Do believe till the last possible moment, let it be that all people in the world lost their faith and you are the only one who keeps it... “3.

The absolute faith, to the full its meaning, confirms that a person has ob-tained his essence, has disclosed it and understood its reality in spiritual medi-tation of the object of faith. Being representing himself before God in his pray a man through transcendence obtains his immanent being, his essence. The level of faith shows the ratio of deployment of the essence of a man. Bhagavad-Gita

1. Niebuhr R. Radical monotheism and western culture // Christ and culture. Selected

works of Richard And Reinhold Niebuhr. Мoscow, 1996, p. 227. 2. Florensky P.A. Compositions in 4 volumes V.2. М., 1996, p. 357. 3. Dostoevsky F.M. Volume 14. L., 1976, p. 291.


say in this connection: “In conformity with the essence of a man is his faith Bha-rat. A man is created by faith; he is same as his faith”4. The faith set the horizon of experience and cognition. In Russian philosophy there existed a belief that “the act of faith disclose the essence of things and gives birth to gnosis”5.

The task of philosophical comprehension of universal faith ontology is not only theoretically exiting but also extremely fascinating, when in the globalizing world a conflict of certain interpretations of faith occurs. And contradictions in spiritual sphere produce all other kinds of conflicts at the inter civilization, inter cultural and inter religious levels. Deployment of ontological, i.e. universal faith level will create basis for spiritual unity of mankind, the basis upon which can be solved the global problems of contemporaneity, «to unite spiritually disinte-grated mankind»6.

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Noutsos Panagiotis

“Philosophical Discourse”: “Speechless” or “Non-judgemental”

in the Face of the “Crisis”? It has sometimes been written that “the inadequacy of the Greek intelligentsia in the face of the crisis” entails its “speechlessness”. And if this general verdict is launched by some who seek to play Marx in place of Marx, the only thing that I can counter with is the codification of the polyphonic multitude of familiar interventions with the degree of “absence of judgment” by which they are pos-sessed. And, moreover, I am invoking Marx, who himself often countered the “Myrmidons of mediocrity”.

It is polyphonic (and not “aphonic”) that the mapping of the proposals for the creation of a “counter-proposal”, within and outside the Eurozone, ap-pears to be, with the “younger theologians of the crisis” in paroxysm, and with the commentators portraying society at home either as a “craft union” or as a

4. Bhagavad-Gita. Ashkhabad, 1951, p. 147. 5. Bulgakov S.N. Not evening-glow light. Мoscow., 1994, p. 59. 6. Semushkin A.V. Philosophical faith of existentialism and its claims for universal ideol-

ogy // Globalization and Multiculturalism / Edited by N.S. Kirabaev. Monograph. Moscow: Publishing House of the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, 2005, p. 242.


“pyramid”, with the “best people” enthroned at the “apex” and the “populists” gathering at the “base”.

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Olatunji Felix O.

Knowledge, Security Risks and the Crisis of Development in Africa

The thrust behind development is the focus on people as the ultimate objec-tive. Fundamentally, the discourse concerning development should be ex-amined from the purview of security in any society. It is a truism that devel-opment could only thrive when there is adequate security of lives and proper-ty. It is in an environment of peace and tranquility that development can take place; this is to say that security is ensuring a better today and a brighter fu-ture for the citizenry.

It is pertinent to note and understand from the outset the significance of knowledge-based society as the foundation of security in the quest of man to-wards authentic development. This means that security of lives and property is premised on the fact of adequate knowledge necessary for action. Thus, as one of the fundamental principles of development, human security for develop-ment is based on the level, attainment and utilisation of knowledge necessary, which will exhibit competence in ensuring peace, order and obedience to law.

This paper will, therefore, employ analytic methodology to examining and thematising that knowledge is a sine qua non for human security, in the at-tainment of authentic development in African states. This is because human security will also be a reality when there is good governance. It is expected that the intent of the paper shall be to interrogate the extent and the ways security would be struggled for, in order for development to be guaranteed.

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Omakaeva Ellara Badgaeva Darina

The Concept of Crisis Through the Prism of Buddhism The concept of “crisis” being often used in a variety of contexts loses its definite meaning and becomes a source for the philosophically-oriented essays. It creates a lot of issues when you try to use it correctly in scientific research.

Today we live in the 21st century, when the danger of destructive actions emerging on the emotional level is especially great. In our scientific age almost every aspect of life has been affected by crisis. “Crisis” is conceptualized as a phenomenon of the economic and political development calling unambiguously negative connotations associated with difficulty, danger and decline. As is known, the situation of crisis often is interpreted through the situation of ill-ness and death: in medicine it means a turning point in the disease, the sudden change from the best to the worst.

The role of the world religions in overcoming the crisis is the central theme of modern science. Therefore, the necessary baggage of modern man must be a proper understanding of religion. There is no doubt that all world religions have common problems beyond the purely religious, that can and should be the sub-ject of dialogue. In this regard, it is legitimate to question the role and place of each religion in the context of crisis. Rabindranath Tagore said: “If you close the door to all errors, truth will also remain outside”. So it is important not to close the problems but solve them. What is Buddhism's solution to this problem?

Buddhism is popular not only with his ritual, but first and foremost as a system of spiritual and moral values. So the proposition of the spiritual leader of Buddhists about the humanization of the economy on the base of moral val-ues is a perspective field of researches. He called to think of humanity as a sin-gle whole. All people are basically the same, our blue planet is one at all. The boundaries that separate us on political maps are secondary.

All the major world religions emphasize love, compassion, patience, toler-ance and forgiveness. But the reality of today's world is that the ethics in reli-gion is no longer adequate. The world is changing and it is time to find a way to think about spirituality and morality outside of the religion as a whole. We see how the meaning of “crisis” has changed for both classical and modern philos-ophy. An attitude to religious ethics has also changed.

Buddhism and science have much in common. After all, the Buddha him-self urged students to approach him critically, take nothing for granted, and to


conduct a thorough investigation and experimentation, to pass through mind, experience, as you test gold before you buy it.

Ethics and economics depend on each other to a considerable extent. One of the causes of the crisis is an excessive greed. Greed means using your money in a wrong way. And the second is the lack of a coherent picture of what is hap-pening. People only think about short-term results and not care about the long-term consequences. This is called ignorance.

The study allows me to assess the scale of Buddhism’s contribution to the understanding of the causes of the crisis, the search for ways out of it, as well as a fresh look at it, which undoubtedly requires new thinking. At such a time it is important to maintain inner peace and not to lose hope.

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Osei Joseph

How the Selfishness Ethics and Ideology of Ayn Rand Have Undermined American Economic Stability:

Analysis and Prescription from a Communal Ethics Perspective

Attempts by economic analysts among others to explain the ongoing economic crisis in the US and other free markets have been focused on the laws of supply and demand with little or no attention to the prevailing ethical principles and behavior of the stakeholders concerned. This paper argues that among the fun-damental causes of the crisis are the selfishness ethics and ideology proclaimed and spread by Ayn Rand, the ex-communist Russian–born philosopher and nov-elist who arrived in the US in 1926 and died in 1981. Her ideas have continued to spread not only through her novels, movies, philosophical papers, the con-servative media and economic institutes, but also through thousands of her faithful disciples, the so-called Moral Objectivists or Randians since the 1930’s. While Judeo-Christian and Western philosophical ethics since Aristotle de-nounce selfishness and extreme individualism as vices to be avoided in favor of altruism, Rand’s followers, including libertarian philosophers John. Hospers and l. Mises, have vigorously defended and advocated selfishness as a virtue while rejecting altruism, sacrifice, welfare policies, and aid to the poor as not only unethical but also irrational. This paper counters Randian Ethics and ideology by arguing that Rand’s argument is based on two serious conceptual errors.


First, it argues that her argument for egoism is logically incoherent on the grounds that Rand confuses ‘self-interest’ with ‘selfishness.’ Second, the paper also argues that Rand’s argument commits the false dichotomy fallacy for as-suming wrongly that a beneficial moral act cannot be simultaneously beneficial to both the moral agent and the beneficiary. To help end the economic crises, minimize the growing socio-economic gap, and to mitigate their negative im-pacts, this paper argues that the intervention of a communalistic ethic has be-come an imperative. The communal ethos of the Akans of Ghana, West Africa, will be utilized as a case study as it correctly emphasizes (without undermining individual rights) communal ethical principles including compassion and care, altruism, and distributive justice complemented by distributive justice - a key principle that has been missing from western philosophical ethics in general since Socrates.

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Ozoliņš Jānis (John)

The Rise of Four Global Crises: Economic, Demographic, Secular and Social

Although some might wish to argue that it is too alarmist to propose that the world faces four global crises and that these could be restricted to particular parts of the world, such as the developed nations, this seems false. This is be-cause nations are interrelated on many levels with each other and this makes such an argument difficult to sustain. It is true, nevertheless, that different parts of the world will be affected differently by these crises. This paper will concentrate on providing an account of these crises as they affect the Western world. The Global Financial Crisis, though largely considered to be over, is a symptom of the economic and ethical crisis facing the Western world in par-ticular, but also the developing nations of the world. It is proposed that the market economy needs to be regulated and that the common good should be recognised as the aim of economic activity. The second crises is the result of significant shifts in the demographics in both the developed and developing world. Migration, dropping birth rates and the ageing of populations are signifi-cant problems for many countries around the world. They are not uniform problems, however, affecting different countries in a variety of ways. It is pro-posed that these can be addressed through more positive action in support of


families, both social and economic. The third crisis for the world is the rise of a militant secularism, which demands that religion ought to be banished from the public arena, seeking to confine it to something resembling a private hobby. It will be contended that this is a mistake that privileges certain kinds of values, while devaluing others. The fourth crisis is social. It is argued that the absolu-tising of tolerance has led to some of the worst forms of political correctness in which genuine debate about issues is forbidden. The paper concludes that the four crises can only be managed if there is a change in values to a more com-munitarian understanding of the nature of the human being and his or her place in the world.

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Pantazakos Panagiotis

Rousseau: Nationalism vs Political Compassion Political debates developed in Greek Democracy between 1974, the fall of the military dictatorship, and 2010, the signing of the first memorandum for the financial stability of Greek state, were more vivid than these developed at the same time in the democracies of other European countries, not because condi-tions in Greece were dramatically different but because of the Greek people yearning for what he had earlier unwillingly denied the democracy and freedom of expression. Yet, the last three years, because of the multilevel crisis which hit Greece and upset not only the regularities of social organization- creating citi-zens with a sense of violent and sudden interruption of their entrenched habits- but also allowed to come to the forefront of Greek political life tents have no qualms to devalue open democratic debate and deified violence.

The struggle of the Greek people to effectively address the crisis and dy-namically entered a new more mature era can contribute decisively the study of philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau not only because the work of the “citi-zen of Geneva” clarified precisely some of the most discussed concepts of our time as nationalism, patriotism, political compassion, but also because Rous-seau connects the essence of democracy with the “general will” of the citizens, which should be clearly, as he says, distinguished from both the “will of all” and the “willingness of groups”.

Nationalism as well as patriotism and political compassion, observed in the literature, are some of many contemporary doctrines whose origins can be il-luminated by turning to the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Their coexis-


tence, could undoubtedly be classified, not only strange but controversial too, since, while nationalism divides peoples and leads them to hatred and totalita-rianism, patriotism and compassion unites and help peoples to live together peacefully by understanding each other’s needs.

In this paper I’ll focus upon those teachings of Rousseau that helped give birth to modern nationalism and at the same time explore their uneasy coexis-tence with some much more cosmopolitan sides of his thought, as patriotism and the rhetoric of compassion, which have helped shape democratic politics.

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Papageorgakis George

Karl Popper’s Optimism and Critical Rationalism as Antidotes for Today’s Global Crisis

Karl Popper was a top political philosopher and epistemologist who died 19 years ago. He did not live the world wide crisis that we are experiencing nowa-days, but during the 92 years of his life, he saw the human race suffering many hardships, wars and financial crises. Popper faced all these situations in a spirit of optimism. This optimism is reflected in his political philosophy, as well as in his critical rationalism, which is in favour of the open character of knowledge and defends the idea that we can make progress in science and therefore achieve a higher level of scientific knowledge only by looking on existing theo-ries with a critical eye and by using the method of conjecture and refutation.

My intention in this paper is to show that Popper’s paradigm might be used as an antidote to the multifaceted crisis of the difficult period we are go-ing through, since it exhorts us to mobilize critical thought in order to find new solutions and reject whatever was proved to be deceitful and destructive.

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Paschalis Vassilis

The Crisis ‘Out of its Humour’: Theorizing on the Jokes and the Caricatures

in a Period of Agony Apart from the social evils (harsh poverty, institutional collapse, dangers asso-ciated with the elimination of rational political discourse and the nostalgia of tyrannical modes of governing), crises may produce some positive outcomes, and the proliferation of all kinds of humour can be counted amongst them. The paper offers a consideration of the function of the humour and its modes in times of crisis, indicating also that the development of ingenious and cultivated forms of mirth can serve as possible antidotes to the dangerous ideological strains produced at the time.

Crises possess elements which many philosophers and theorists dissecting the concept of humour have considered as essential parts of it: humour in-volves a state of mind involving the experience of a distress, expressed in pecu-liar, even paradoxical linguistic or pictorial forms, which lead into the, complete or partial, dissipation of the negative emotional import. Therefore humour seeks a cognitive- based safety which is aimed against distress but which is also drawn from such an emotional state.

Moreover, humour signifies an “unexpected”/ surprise situation, which is typically conceptualized through the term “incongruity”, which allows for a great many different and interesting uses, some of which are employed and anatomized in the paper.

Caricature expresses almost all the standard humorous tropes, further emphasizing the power related strategies involved in it, starting from the Hob-bessian “diminution”. The paper attempts a closer look at these ways and their significance, and paradigmatic cases are proposed as means of illumination their function.

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Peonidis Filimon

The “Dirty Hands” Problem in a Democratic Context The “dirty hands” problem usually refers to situations where politicians are asked to make decisions that, although they aim at the common good, their implementation requires the use of morally reprehensible means. These situa-tions are usually regarded as unavoidable and give rise to pessimistic conclu-sions about the possibility of a decent political morality. My purpose in this pa-per is to situate the above problem in a democratic context and offer some thoughts as to whether “dirty hands” are more easily avoidable or controllable when power lies in the hands of the many.

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Pirovolakis Eftichis

Derrida and the Demand for an Economy of ‘Crises’ In ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’, Jacques Derrida thematises two seman-tic potentialities of the concept of ‘crisis’. Conventionally, a ‘crisis’ is a danger menacing the security of a given state of affairs. The first section will focus on the presuppositions of this construal, drawing on Derrida’s ‘The Economies of the Crisis’. It appears that, by identifying a crisis, one inevitably engages in a process of unifying the body suffering the crisis, the area of human activity the crisis concerns, etc. Even in Husserl’s ‘crisis of European humanity’ or in Habermas’s recent ‘crisis of the European Union’, a unity is tacitly attributed to a certain ‘Europe’, thereby underestimating all its internal divisions from which divergent interpretations of the crisis may arise. Arguably, the crisis is not equivalent for all Europeans, nor is it experienced uniformly. Moreover, this conceptuality presupposes the ability of a subject (individual or collective) as-suredly to decide on a teleological course of action with a view to overcoming the crisis.

While acknowledging the potential benefits of this dominant understand-ing of ‘crisis’, I will suggest, in the second section, that it involves a certain for-getting of ‘crisis’ in the sense of a ‘division’ or ‘caesura’ pre-dating any act of confident identification and decision. If ‘crisis’ etymologically points to an origi-nary moment of separation or an opening up of a chasm, that moment allows


for a difference and an uncertainty excluded by the subsequent moment of a definitive choice. Derrida maintains that one has to respect the undecidable or incalculable dimension of any crisis to avoid somehow reducing the other’s al-terity. His emphasis on the incalculable is not intended to undermine all en-deavours to overcome current difficulties by calculation and judgement. Rather, Derrida wishes to point out the limitations and injustices of such economico-political efforts particularly, and to make us more vigilant about the perhaps intentional suppression of alterity involved therein. The second sense of ‘crisis’ reveals and also respects a radical alterity that is instrumental in ex-posing the strategic calculations of those who exploit ‘crisis’ in the first sense by unifying identities, aims and causes. Hence the demand for an economy of ‘crises’.

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Polias Konstantinos

“Crisis” and “Critique”: Friedrich Schlegel’s “Happy Catastrophe” as

Hermeneutic Inversion of Rousseau

Modern rationality is characterized not only as the “epoch of Critique” (Kant), but also the epoch of “Critique and Crisis” (Koselleck). Whereas Rousseau's view of modernity points to the “Critique and Crisis” scheme, Friedrich Schlegel is very likely the first post-Kantian philosopher that uses in his άber das Studium der griechischen Poesie the concept of “crisis” to characterize modern rational-ity in order to offer in combination with the concept of an artificial “happy ca-tastrophe” (as the possible alternative to a natural 'unhappy catastrophe') a hermeneutic inversion of Rousseau's view. Schlegel's historical approach rein-tegrates “Crisis” to defend modernity as the “epoch of Critique” of rationality (I). Schlegel uses the concept of “crisis” mainly in its medical sense as a sign of a possible therapy and the concept of a “happy catastrophe” originating in the ancient theory of drama to analyze the modern history of “taste” or “common sense” (Kant's “judgment”), to diagnose its modern “fall”, to highlight the chance for a therapeutic liberation of its hidden potential from the impedi-ments of the past and to creatively intervene in informing its further change and progress (II). Following the project of a completion of Kant's “Critiques” Schlegel sets his scheme in structural correspondence to Kant's application of


the scheme 'despotism, anarchy, revolution' on philosophical discourse, while he further relates the aesthetic and moral revolution to the political revolution. This poses the question about a possible projection of Schlegel's scheme back to Kant and reveals an interesting historical constellation, since in Kant's private writings “crisis” is used in the same sense in relation to philosophical change and progress and in a way similar to Schlegel in relation to the French revolu-tion (III). From this background and using Schlegel's concept of “fiction” Schlegel can be seen as following Kant's conception of “defence” of the “Cri-tique” against its dogmatic accusers (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten). On the basis of the essentially practical character of this opposition Schlegel's intervention is shown to retain as a critical-dialogical device for keeping the question of “Critique” open its hermeneutic relevance for our own coping with crisis (IV).

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Poulakos John

Thus Spoke Nietzsche: Philosophy and Crisis The proposed paper argues that our ways of life are a function of culture, the result of our aesthetic sensibilities; as such any crisis in our ways of life is a cri-sis in culture. To make the case, I turn to Friedrich Nietzsche.

If we approach culture a la Nietzsche, as an organism to be examined in terms of its relative health and sickness, the philosopher becomes a cultural physician concerned with diagnosis, prescription, and prognosis. Significantly, Nietzsche’s own perspective on culture is predicated not on a set of idealistic criteria of perfect cultural health but on two historical examples: the Hellenic culture before Plato, which he finds the healthiest ever, and the European (es-pecially German) culture of the 19th century, which he finds critically ill.

When Nietzsche examines philosophy (the True) and morality (the Good) as two fundamental aspects of culture, his diagnosis is that philosophy ever since Plato has been on the decline because it has been infected by the “knowledge drive.” As such it has been asking how anything can be known rather than what is worth knowing for robust living. In a parallel vein, Nietzsche’s diagnosis of morality is that it attacks what makes culture possible. As he puts it, “it *morality+ sullies and suspects the beautiful, the splendid, the rich, the proud, the self-reliant . . . the powerful– in summa, the whole cul-ture”).


To address these two instances of poor cultural health, Nietzsche consults the pre-Platonic Hellenic culture and prescribes art (the Beautiful) as “the greatest stimulant to life” and the driving force behind any form of cultural achievement. In his words, “Culture can never start except from the centraliz-ing significance of art or a work of art.”

Nietzsche’s prognosis presents us with two possibilities. If culture is to be revitalized, it will have to complete the cyclical pattern of birth-growth-decline-decay. Alternatively, it will have to rethink its priorities and undertake the painful regimen of what he calls “the trans-valuation of values.”

Insofar as we are living out the implications of the maladies of the 19th century, the crisis in our ways of life can only benefit from what Nietzsche identified in his examination. Even if it be argued that our predicament differs considerably from that of the 19th century, the resources of the history of phi-losophy afford us greater purchase than those of speculation or prophesy.

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Pournari Maria

Crisis Theory and Theory of Knowledge The examination of the crisis needs to focus on its objective causes and opera-tions which are contradictory with individual’s consciousness. This analysis re-quires a theory of knowledge consistent with Marx’s wider theoretical work, suitable for the development of an account of those aspects left unexplored by Marx, in tune with contemporary reality, and appropriate to foster radical so-cial change. Within this framework, one area of a Marxist theory of knowledge will be explored. This concerns the relation between the crisis-ridden nature of capitalist economy with the subjective and necessary manifestations of these objective developments at the level of social consciousness. This requires the development of a theory of individual and social knowledge.

Individual knowledge is the view of reality from the perspective of the concrete individual. Social knowledge is the view of reality of social groups. Al-though knowledge is intuitively identified with individual knowledge, it is not quite evident how knowledge becomes an individual possession and how it is related to social knowledge. Despite the insights gained through the traditional social epistemology, there are still crucial questions unresolved. This under-standing emphasizes that knowledge is essentially social. However, while this is a useful insight, it is not clear how concrete individuals, who produce an indi-


vidual knowledge which is by definition different from any other individual knowledge, produce social knowledge. Despite the dynamic character of knowledge (outcome and process), it is not clear in what sense knowledge is different from information, nor how it is possible for contextual information to originate and apply in the minds of individuals alone. So the aim of this paper is to explore the links between individual knowledge and social knowledge under-taken in social contexts.

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Prelorentzos Yannis

Dealing with the Crisis via Contemporary French Philosophy

The sadness, the anger, and even the rage, expressed in various degrees by most people experiencing the actual crisis in Greece and other countries is to-tally understandable. In order to overcome such emotions, we need to under-stand ourselves, the main characteristics of the present global situation and the particularity of the actual crisis, so as to be able to implement the changes that the crisis requires. According to Bergson, we do not have the right to des-perate. It is necessary to approach ourselves and the whole of reality in terms of duration, change, becoming and tendencies; and neither in a static nor in an essentialist way. Creation and emergence of radical novelty (irreducible to a rearrangement of old elements) is a fundamental characteristic of enduring entities (souls or minds, living beings, societies, even matter) which are rather acts or processes. Instead of being attached to the past (or rather, to imaginary constructions of the past), we have to use, efficiently and rapidly, those parts of our past – both individually and collectively – that permit us to anticipate a solid future. It is important that we change our will, not only our ideas; a really difficult task. The recognition of human flexibility, creativity and freedom is necessary. Efforts, work and enforcement of our élan and vitality (admiration and love being necessary conditions for this) can either solve or eradicate problems that a mere intellectualist approach – due to diminished vitality – regard as insoluble or hard to solve. Nevertheless, some problems are not common to all and impersonal solutions are inacceptable. Against abstract considerations, one should pay attention to the uniqueness of every person, to the concrete way in which each individual deals with a problem and attempts


to solve it. As far as the possibility of imposing major social changes, one has to pay attention to the conditions of their realization in an era of neoliberal glo-balization and to search for a “New Renaissance” based on positive, creative and joyful projects, and not on sad emotions.

In this paper, the development of these initial thoughts presented above –which are part of an ongoing dialogue of mine with contemporary French phi-losophical thought – will be based on the arguments presented by various 20th century French philosophers and thinkers, such as Bergson, Sartre, Castoriadis, Deleuze, Misrahi, Serres, Lipovetsky, Gauchet, Michéa, Renaut, Généreux, and others.

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Presbey Gail

Crisis, Opportunity, and Community in Detroit

That Detroit is experiencing a crisis is all too apparent when one looks at statis-tics of the city noticing that population and income are going down dramatical-ly. This paper will look at philosophical theorist and activist (or in her words, “visionary organizer”), Grace Lee Boggs, currently 96 years old and still living in Detroit, Michigan. In her recent book, “Revolution or Evolution?”, she talks about the importance of studying Hegel’s dialectic, which helps her to see the positive and negative in everything, and that every crisis is an opportunity to create something new. She advocates a revolution, but not with its goal being getting more things; she wants a transformation of our society. For a philoso-pher influenced by Marx, she nevertheless coins a phrase that it’s time to “grow our souls,” meaning, the goal of our revolution should be to change our-selves. In a currently changing city that has a widespread reputation for being an economic wreck and a place of abandonment, Boggs sees the glass “half full” and concentrates on communities’ reclaiming their lands and neighbor-hoods through their coming together and weaving relationships that can re-constitute safety and flourishing.

This presentation is based on Boggs’ recent book as well as her news col-umns and group conversations with her. She says she has gone beyond “pro-test politics” (as she explains, “an endless rebellion against America would lead us nowhere”), in order to “involve people at the grassroots in assuming the responsibility for creating the new values, truths, infrastructures, and institu-tions that are necessary to build and govern a new society.” As philosophers


and educators, we are challenged by her critique of status quo education, in order to present philosophy in a new and different way.

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Proimos Konstantinos

Responding to the Post-war Crisis in Germany. Survival and Memory in Joseph Beuys’s Actions

Despite the fact that it has been already more than twenty years since Joseph Beuys’s Death, his Artwork continues to generate controversy because of the immanent problems it presents whenever there are attempts to install, cata-logue, critique or evaluate it. In this paper I first plan to briefly examine Beuys’s Critical reception by critics like Benjamin Buchloh and Yve-Alain Bois. After find-ing these critiques wanting I shall attempt to hermeunetically account for some of the simple and notorious works by Joseph Beuys like the Chair with Fat (1963) in order to show that a phenomenological reading is appropriate. By placing fat over the chair and by making thus this object unusable, Beuys re-veals the use –value of it, according to the deficient modes of concern that Martin Heidegger develops in Being and time. Putting the emphasis on the use-value of things to the detriment of their aesthetic contemplation, Beuys makes a point that the experience we acquire from use is artistically more fundamen-tal than the experience of aesthetic enjoyment. The priority to the use value of things demonstrates Beuys’s Memory and Steady concern with survival, hinted at with indices like thermometers and red-cross signs and pointing of course to the tumultuous recent past of Germany during the Second World War.

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Protopapa-Marneli Maria

Hellenistic Era: Affinities to the Present Political, Economical

and Institutional Crisis What happened during the last three decades of the 4th century in Athens, right after Alexander’s invasion and conquering of Greece and of all the known world?

How could specifically an Athenian citizen face and support this political change as a cultural event? The consequences of this incident confirm the be-ginning of the Hellenistic period, which lead from the decline of the Greek su-premacy to the sunshine of Roman Empire.

The political and social situation leaded finally to the transformation of the mentality of the citizen whose effort focuses on his own psychological as well as substantial survival as a human being.

From these crucial events a significant number of philosophers and schools arises, which intend to offer people the intellectual support to face the reality. In other words, political crisis functions as an intellectual laboratory as man, alone and unprotected, searches the way just to face danger and fear from a new point of view and by the discovery of an art of life (τζχνη βίου), offered to him through philosophy.

Philosophy influences to the man therapeutically by proving him that the cultivation of his intellect is the only way to live in dignity and to confront his-torical moments of social and political crisis.

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Psarros Nikos

The Emergence of Philosophy from the Crisis of the Homeric Way of Life

Although philosophizing, as conscious reflection on human self-consciousness, is an integral part of the human faculty of reason, the emergence of philosophy as an institutionally and socially discrete human practice is the result of con-crete historical processes that took place over a time period extending from the


8th to the 2th century B.C. and mark the transition from what I call the Homeric Way of Life to the Political Way of Life. The main difference between those two ways of life consists in the realization of the “Political Man” of the fact that the unity and the contiguity of the divine, the human and the natural aspects of life have been separated in the course of this transition and became existentially mutually autonomous, albeit hierarchically still interrelated. In contrast, the Homeric Man lived in a world, in which Deity, Man and Nature constituted an organic whole.

This transition that embraced the civilized world from the shores of the Mediterranean to the plains of China and from the deserts of Iran to the valleys of Ganges as well as a large part of north-eastern Africa was a multi-causal process and gave birth to the four major cultures of classical antiquity: the Chi-nese, the Indo-Iranian, the Jewish and the Greek/ Occidental culture.

Philosophy as a clearly defined social practice of dealing with this transi-tion was the specific answer of the people at the shores of the Aegean to the challenges of the decline of the Homeric World, a decline that was experienced by them as “crisis” in the double meaning of the term, namely as a “separation” that demanded a “decision” or “judgement”.

The specific answer of the emerging Greek/Occidental culture to the crisis of the Homeric Way of Life was not the issuing of rules and laws in order to putty the cracked unity of the world, but in trying to show that the experienced dissociation of the Homeric World in the three separate aspects of the Divine, the Human and the Natural was only an apparent one, and that “in reality” the world still remained a unity mediated by a metaphysical principle, which took in the course of the development of this unique way of explicit thinking many shapes: from the Thaleian “water” via the Parmenidean “being” to the Platonic and Aristotelian concepts of “truth”, “idea” and “form”.

However, overcoming the crisis by critical philosophical thinking does not mean that the resulting social state of affairs was free of seeds that initiated the next crisis that had to be overcome by more critical philosophical efforts – a circumstance that characterizes still the contemporary life, which is to a great extent the direct heir of the Political Way of Life that emerged from the crisis of the Homeric Society and reflects the true nature of Humanity and rationality.

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Pskhu Ruzana

Poetry as a Guiding Thread of the Contemporary World Life

The nowadays problems of the different cultures and traditions are connected with the search of identity on the one hand and looking for the adequate cos-mopolitan form of global citizenship. To keep one’s own cultural features (lan-guage, national traditions etc) and to include all contemporary achievements into one’s national mood of life is an important problem of a human being. There are different ways to resolve this problem: some of them tried to mini-mized the national/racial element and to make global form to become the pre-vailed over racial forms; some of them, on the contrary, try to hold the shapes of racial expression of being and to resist the global equalization of cultures. Everybody knows the first part of the famous sentence of Fyedor Dostoevskiy that “it is beauty that will save the world”. And the second part says “if beauty is kind, but is it kind?”. In other words, one can say “it is kindness that will save the world by its beauty”. But what is kindness of beauty? In 2001 year there was published Mary Midgley work “Science and Poetry” in which this English philosopher asks “how we can bring together our ideas of science and poetry within a whole that has a place for both of them”. In other words, the book is about personal identity and the unity of our lives. In this paper we try to show how poetry can impact on resolving such problems.

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Rantis Konstantinos

Neither Fate nor Decline. The Crisis of Modern Greek Society in Kostas Axelos and Panagiotis Kondylis

Modern Greek society currently experiences a crisis of an unprecedented kind, which is initially perceived as a debt crisis and not as a general crisis of our so-cial system and life-world. The origin of the crisis lies deeply in the constitution of the modern Greek state and the subsequent process of its rationalization. Both Axelos and Kondylis unexpectedly described the symptoms of the crisis of modern Greek culture and analyzed its effects upon Greek society. Axelos, by philosophically addressing the issue of Greece’s fate, focused on its tendency to


remain centred on the values of its own Hellenic past, preventing itself from being open to the modern world. Kondylis offered a rather sociological re-sponse in highlighting the sickliness of civic life in modern Greek society and ideology and regarded this responsible for holding Greece back from the devel-opment of an independent capitalistic economy. The two conceptions supple-ment each other, are both descriptive and adopt an evaluatively neutral kind of knowledge on the basis of their theoretical commitments. Hence, they both fail to take a decisive step in producing a normative theory. What is nowadays needed is another kind of a theoretical commitment, highly critical of the mod-ern predicament. Only such a critical kind of theory will succeed in bringing to light realistic options for overcoming all the forms of social injustice.

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Rashid Abdul

Crisis Responding by Philosophical Values in the Contemporary World: Pakistan Experience

Islamic Republic of Pakistan plays a vital role for the establishment of harmony, tolerance and peace in its society, as well as globally through the promotion of philosophical values. The majority of population is Muslim and have a rich her-itage of philosophy through Islamic philosophers.

As concerns Islamic philosophers, one of them, Imam Al-Ghazali, lived for nearly 55 years and spent most of his time reading, writing and teaching. Be-side this, he had to reply to thousands of letters which came from far and near asking for his juristic rulings and opinions. In his famous book “Ehya’a ul oloom” the great Muslim philosopher offers the remedies to the crisis for the social development of society. He includes special chapters for ethics in theory and practice.

Muslim philosophy believes in human unity as well as in the protection of life and property through philosophical teaching. He writes:

“O people your sustainer is one and your father is also one. Remember, neither a non-Arab has got edge of superiority over an Arab, nor an Arab over a non-Arab; neither a black man has got an edge over a white one, nor a white man over a black one because human being created only one man and a woman and distributed them in groups and tribes, so that they


could be recognized distinctly. To creator, he from among them is more respected and graced is more pious among them”

The government and civil society tries to implement those values in day to day life for the elimination of poverty, illiteracy and armed conflict which will be result oriented for Pakistan society as well as the contemporary world.

My paper will deal with the current Pakistan crisis and the response to it by philosophical values.

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Rigos Platon

The Crisis as Self Discovery: The Case of Greece’s of Greece’s System Values

They say a crisis is often an opportunity for self analysis and for attempts at re-form. Yet during Greece’s latest fiscal and economic crisis, which started in 2009 the so called memorandums that ushered the draconian measures that have brought about sky rocketing unemployment and as deep an economic contraction as has ever been seen by a western democracy; there have been few and feeble voices calling for a systematic analysis of what path Greece can take to avoid similar crises in the future. While a number of structural reforms have been suggested and imposed by outside forces; this paper claims that to avoid a repetition of past mistakes an analysis of Greek social values and how some may have contributed to the problems that brought about the crisis is needed. Can such values be changed.

More specifically this paper will focus on 1) Greek views on what consti-tutes success in the economic sphere; 2) Greek views of entrepreneurship and the private sector 3) Greek views of the influence of foreign cultures and economies. All three such sets of views are interrelated and will have deter-mine whether Greece emerges out of this crisis as a new confident nation not afraid to face the modern world without the help of a huge cradle to grave nanny state.

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Robinson Thomas

‘Managed Democracy’: A Temptation with a Pedigree In this paper I shall be looking at the ‘controlled democracy’ characterizing the Magnesia of Plato’s Laws, as a distant mirror of some current efforts to deal with a number of problems facing contemporary democracies of various types. I shall assess, among other things, what seems to me the strengths and weak-nesses of Plato’s suggestions in that dialogue on, among other things, the role and status of the ‘Guardians of the Laws’; of the citizens’ Council; of education and of the minister of education; of the so-called ‘nocturnal council’; of pu-nishment for various perceived forms of delinquency; and of women as active members of Society. I shall also be looking at the question of minimal and max-imal levels of wealth accumulation prescribed in the Laws, and comparing them with those propounded by Rawls.

At this point I shall look at what, if anything might be learnt from the bet-ter among the ideas propounded in the Laws in terms of some problems cur-rently facing democratic societies.

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Rose David

Crisis, Moral Errors and History In this paper, I intend to investigate the specific nature of moral crisis. Crisis here is understood as a crucial or decisive temporal moment which is unstable and characterized by a conflict awaiting resolution that will result in a critical revision of central values. Such crises are nearly always material or historical facts, such as the demand by women for the vote pre-1918 (in the UK), and the lobbying for the Abortion Act of 1967. In both of these cases, customary of traditional values were pitted against “progressive” or rational reasons. Given the ahistorical, universalist and monist nature of modern ethics, such crises are seen as a species of one of three errors: one, the conflict of interests with moral obligations; two, as badly articulated problems, but ultimately reducible to core moral values; or, three, the result of conceptual or metaphysical error (these three will be illustrated by examples). In other words, because ethics is


itself ahistorical and universal, crises must belong to the temporal world of change and hence incorporate some sort of error.

I wish to challenge this putative assumption, drawing upon the thought of both Hegel and Vico and their implicitly historical accounts of ethical reason-ing. Ethical crises may occur when the very concepts of our ethical reasoning are in need of revision and not just our articulation of them. So, crises do not occur when there is consensus about what should be done and how it ought to be done; nor do they occur when the welfare of individuals within a communi-ty is not at issue or threatened by moral obligations to specific values; nor when the values belonging to the culture of an individual are acceptable to that individual, he or she feels at home within these values. I shall outline three axes for moral consideration: coherence with centrally accepted values; consistency with individual and group welfare; and homeliness: the capacity of students to recognize themselves in the demands, burdens and benefits of a community. I shall then show that crises arise when these axes conflict and that reveals a need for revision and reinterpretation of a community's central values.

The aim of the paper is to show the value of moral crisis to the project of thinking in that the function as a motor of historical-ethical revisionism.

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Roumkou Eleni

The Thought of Kostas Axelos in an Era of Disillusion and Disappointment

The thought of Kostas Axelos is not only the pursuit of the multiple articulations which αrε imposed today in the bosom of modernity, among the great phi-losophical works of the past, Marxism and psychoanalysis, but also the attempt to join them in a question. in a saturated world of responses, Axelos puts ques-tions. Thinker, who escapes all short of schools and systems, Marxist, heir of Heraclitus and Heidegger, constitutes, in a dense and poetic language, a work labyrinthine, orientated towards a unified thought. The thought of the game (play) of the world where our lives, our thoughts, our values, our expectations, our illusions are tried..... Axelos, situates the questions of human existence, economic production and concrete society within the wider problematic of the world. His detailed study of Marx, profoundly influenced by Heidegger, is expli-


cit: Marx penseur de la technique : de l’aliénation de l’homme a la conquete du monde. For Axelos, Marx and Heidegger are thinkers of great crisis. “one speaks of the exploitation of the man and the other of the darkening of the world”.

Axelos is also concerned with the problem of ethics which is a central point in his work. He treated this question in connection with the modern despera-tion. For Axelos, ethics is rooted in all great original forces of life and world, the game (play) of earth, the poetry, the philosophy, the science. Today it is devel-oped as desperate conscience that real life is absent and nothing announces the dawn of a new world. Becoming problematic, ethics can neither be rejected nor replaced by a new one, also illusive. For Axelos, we can open it up to hiding possibilities of game, of life and death, of joy and desperation, of destruction and creation, of distress and dreams who are inscribed in the flesh of the world. Within the bounds of this desperation maybe it is time we learn to play-not only the game of every life, but the game of the entire world, to regain the innocence of heraclitian child.

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Sakellariadis Αthanassios

Using the “Wittgensteinian Ladder”:

Some Remarks on Consciousness and Metaphor Wittgenstein’s famous challenging passage (Tractatus 6.54) has been widely accepted by many scholars with a variety of philosophical interpretations. The aim of this paper is to support an alternative reading of the notion of con-sciousness along with the linguistic phenomenon of metaphor.

According to Wittgenstein, in using the term “ladder” we’re saying/ show-ing to the meaningful aspects of the concepts. Having this “method of philoso-phy” as a signpost we’re trying to approach the function of the consciousness. Has it been a metaphorical term or not?

The meaning of crisis which is the keynote concept of the conference, not only focuses on the debts and the crucial falls of our society, yet shows towards a serious critique coming from a set of judgments within a form of life (Lebens-form). The “spirit” of these judgments in being uttered in specific language games may be extended in order to provide new ideas and aspects to our nar-ration for the explanation of various concepts of the mind.

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Sargentis Konstantinos

Crisis and Progress in Kant’s Philosophy of History

Kant’s philosophy of history consists in discovering in the field of human action a progress of the species toward a final end. Due to the presence of radical evil in human nature, and since progress cannot be a matter of chance, Kant as-cribes the intention regarding progress to an instance beyond or above human powers. In this context, crisis in human relations arises as the necessary means used by this instance toward the final end. Yet, Kant seems to be inconclusive in respect to the identification of this instance, since he swings between “Na-ture” and “Providence”. This ambiguity reveals a series of further ambiguities concerning the nature of crisis, of progress, and of the final end.

By focusing on the notion of crisis, my aim in this paper is to show that we can deal with these issues if we take into account the fact that the teleological view of history is a perspective opened up by the reflective judgment, as pre-sented in the Critique of Judgment. There, Kant makes, among others, a dis-tinction between the “theoretically reflecting judgment” and the reflective judgment “in accordance with concepts of practical reason”. This distinction is originally made by Kant for the explanation of the difference between physical and moral teleology. Nevertheless, it also allows us to apply it to the philo-sophical reflection upon history in order to overcome the above-mentioned ambiguities.

Given this distinction, crisis can be seen from two different points of view. From the standpoint of “Nature”, it appears as social and political crisis rooted in “antagonism”, whilst from the standpoint of “Providence”, it appears as moral crisis rooted in the manifestations of radical evil. This twofold perspec-tive further enables us to interpret consistently the nature of progress in Kant’s philosophy of history.

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Silva José Filipe Pereira Da

Moralism of the Rescuers and the Morality of Rescuing in the Euro-Crisis

In the current sovereign debt crisis, the policies of austerity that have domi-nated the political discourse are justified by an economic expertise consensus. In addition, the appeal to this sort of measures has been justified in public dis-course by the notion of the moral inferiority of indebted nations – lazy Greeks, sunbathing Spaniards, speculative Cypriots. Austerity is therefore portrayed not only as the right economic policy but also as the right moral thing to do: the citizens of those countries need to be punished by having lived for too long well beyond their means. Most measures seem designed not because they are the most effective to solve the crisis and to prevent the spreading to other Euro zone members but to a large extent to inflict sufferance in the people of those troubled countries.

Ignoring the need to supplement further evidence as to what beyond their means entails and who is responsible for those means having been made avail-able – and whose purpose it served – this characterization seems to be efficient in distinguishing between two sorts of European nations: the justly wealthy North, undeservingly paying for the bailouts of the incompetent wasteful south. And it has served two immediate functions: to grant national support in the Nordic countries to certain type of liberal policies that have destroyed major parts of the welfare state, placing the blame in the irresponsibility of the south-ern nations, not on ideologically driven governments, and second in guarantee-ing low interest rates to countries in north Europe when borrowing from the markets. It is this second fact that explains that what seems at first sight to be against the self-interest of lending countries – the imposition of bailout terms that make the service of the debt impossible in some cases – pays of through historically low interest rates. But this is possible mostly due to the fact that this rhetoric of moral superiority manages to convince the markets.

In my paper I am interested in conserving two questions: one, what is the principle of morality underlying the rhetoric of ‘rescue by punishment’? I will try to discuss its possible sources and its theoretical justification. Second, how does this affect the obligation of the indebted countries to service their debts? I wish to consider some possible solutions to these questions from the point of view of moral theory.

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Sinha Ashok Kumar

Environmental Crisis: Challenges and Strategies to Achieve

Sustainable Development As per dictionary meaning, ‘Crisis’ is a phenomenon which leads to dangerous situation affecting an individual, group, society or the entire community. Change is a permanent phenomenon of world order. When the change takes place in positive manner with good results it leads to growth and development but when the change is negative it results into a crisis. Sometimes the imme-diate ‘good results’ caused by a ‘positive change’ turns ultimately into negative one, hence, this short term development or growth, which is unsustainable, creates a ‘crisis’ or ‘crisis-like situation’.

We are living in an era of globalization which has a motto of fast, high and sustainable economic growth rate at its core. The economic growth achieved during last few decades comes at a very heavy price-at the cost of environ-mental degradation. Indeed environment plays a very important role in devel-opment. An economic development, or for that matter any kind of develop-ment, let it be even spiritual or intellectual, depends upon environment. If we talk particularly about economic growth and development, it depends upon available natural resources and technology of that time and place. Trade takes place in accordance with difference of environment and availability of natural resources between two economies. Nature provides environment and life on the earth. Environment consists of living organism (e.g., plants, animals, hu-man being) and physical components. Nature also provides us many natural resources as environment. Human being gets a number of materials from na-ture to meet their basic needs are called ‘natural resources’. Thus environment decides the existence, growth and development of the economy and all related activities.

This paper aims to discuss the role of environment in sustainable devel-opment, environmental challenges, and strategies to meet the challenges.

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Sinha Neelima

Crisis of Post-Modernity: Nature and Remedies In its wider sense crisis is a situation of complex system which occurs due to poor or malfunctioning of the system and creates extreme threatening to the system, even for its existence.

There are two types of crises:

1. Natural Crisis, e.g., volcanic eruption, tsunami etc.

2. Man-made Crisis, e.g., Terrorism, war etc. This paper aims to discuss most vital man-made crisis of postmodern era. It is perceived that the post-modern era is facing three vital crises, namely

war, terrorism and drug-addiction. But in my opinion these are the three manifestations of a single crisis namely ‘moral crisis’ or ‘crisis of morality’.

To discuss nature and remedies of this crisis it will be essential to discuss

the characteristic features of post-modernity and its philosophy which

rests behind the moral crisis along with the nature of ‘moral obligation’

lacking which a man and entire society indulge into immoral acts.

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Solomou-Papanikolaou Vasiliki

Plato’s and Aristotle’s Response to the Crisis of Their Contemporary Polis

The polis was the typical form of community and the characteristic form of the state in ancient Greece, which, by common assent, nourished every distinctive feature of the Greek culture. From the last quarter of the 5th century B.C. on-wards the Greek world fell into a deep financial, socio-political and moral crisis, which was mostly due to the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.), which brought great evils upon the Greek poleis (city-states) and ushered in the beginning of their decay.

The afore-mentioned crisis left its imprint on Plato’s and Aristotle’s thought. Both philosophers experienced the loss of unity and the exaltation of passions within the political community, the degradation of morals, the rise of hedonism and individualism which, as ways of life, undermine political con-sciousness, the misdirection of the dēmos through the deceptive eloquence of


the demagogues and many other manifestations of the decadence of their age. Plato and Aristotle responded to this crisis in a spirit of optimism, since they shared the belief that things could ameliorate. The aim of this paper is to show how this optimism is expressed via the different aspects of their philosophy and how Plato and Aristotle tried with their doctrines to contribute to the restora-tion of the authority of the polis and to the overcoming of the deep and many-sided crisis of their time.

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Sougioultzis Paschalis

The Role of Dialogue in a Multi-lingual Europe: The European Crisis and Its Therapy

According to Gadamer

Un caractéristique de l’Europe qui essaie de constituer un ensemble unitaire est la diversité de la langue parlée des peuples qui la forment. Hans-Georg Ga-damer considère que la philosophie herméneutique, qui se fonde sur l’expérience langagière du monde, constitue l’approche par laquelle peut commencer et développer le rapproche des différences culturelles qui originel-lement constituent de différences de communautés langagières. Selon lui, l’Europe gagne de conscience de soi-même en conservant la multiplicité des traditions qui existent aux ses seins. L’événement le plus important est que les peuples qui constituent les porteurs de ces traditions différentes même si ils parlent de langues différentes expriment la souhaite s’ introduire dans en dia-logue en commun qui constitue la base de toute compréhension. Toute coexis-tence se fonde à la volonté des interlocuteurs parler une langue commune et avancer vers une compréhension en commune

Cette altérité nous conduit à des questions qui concernent nous-mêmes. A travers le dialogue on découvre tant l’autre que nous-mêmes pensant en même temps sur nos propres préjugés. Ainsi, l’insertion dans le dialogue devra présupposer une ouverture aux paroles de l’autrui dans le but de leur compré-hension et pas à la confirmation de nos préjugés. Ça veut dire que l’autrui pas seulement ne constitue le sein de mon autorité mais, par contre, il est un objet de respect et de reconnaissance.

Gadamer a prévu la contingence d’une crise qui approche à cause de la conjoncture économique. Cependant, il souligne que chaque crise élève un


processus de guérison et de restauration de tout déséquilibre au niveau du développement. L’avantage de l’Europe se trouve pour lui au fait auquel la cul-ture européenne s’est construite: qu’elle a décidé que les nations doivent vivre ensemble étant en dialogue. A ce fait se trouve aussi son avenir: à la mesure qu’on conserve un rapport dia-lectique on conserve la possibilité de coexis-tence avec autrui.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, L’Héritage de l’Europe, traduit de l’allemand par Phi-lippe Ivernel, Bibliothèque Rivages, Paris 1996.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Esquisses herméneutiques, essais et conférences, traduction de Jean Grondin, Vrin, Paris 2004.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, La philosophie herméneutique, avant propos, traduc-tion et note par Jean Grondin, Presses Universitaires de France, 1996

***** Soulez Antonia

“As if the life of the world was at a standstill…” (Musil), What Can Philosophy Do in Time of Crisis?

1. I will first elicit the economical argument: Crisis is when the economical

“system” cannot any longer be mastered. Who is right: Mr Jowett or Aristotle? The denunciation by Aristotle of the principle of production in view of gaining (K. Polanyi, The Great Transforma-tion, 1944). Distinguishing use and gaining.

2. The circle of the observer’s understanding of the (his) situation of being shipwrecked (See: Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer, 1979, in French: Naufrage avec spectateur, by H. Blumenberg). How to escape the wave of the crisis as Adorno describes it in his “Spengler after the decline” (1938)? A plea for re-evaluating, a hundred years later, the critique of culture from the point of view of the life of language and forms.

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Sozopoulou Maria

How to Discern the Genuine Politician in a Period of Crisis: The Case of Plato’s Statesman

Plato’s Statesman was written probably between 360 and 355 BC. This period, as Xenophon tells us in his Hellenica (VII. V. 27), was a period of “confusion and disorder in Greece”. The Greek poleis continued to be in a state of crisis, which was initiated during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.). For the overcoming of this persisting crisis Plato invests anew his trust in politics and his main pur-pose in the Statesman is to find the right definition of the genuine politician, so that, being aware of the elements that define the nature of the true politician, one is able to distinguish him from his imitators or otherwise deceitful politi-cians. The true politician, as Plato depicts him in the Statesman, possesses a scientific knowledge of politics, which enables him to conduct public affairs successfully, to assure the unity of the polis and to be the creator of a sound and happy political community.

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Sraman Ven. Dharmarakit

Educators in a Time of Crisis Educators now face the daunting challenge of creating new discourses, peda-gogies, and collective strategies that will offer students the hope and tools ne-cessary to revive education as a political and ethical response to the demise of democratic public life. Such a challenge suggests struggling to keep alive those institutional spaces, forums, and public spheres that support and defend critical education, help students come to terms with their own power as individual and social agents, exercise civic courage, and engage in community projects and research that are socially responsible. None of this will happen unless the American public refuses to allow schools and teachers to surrender what counts as knowledge, values, and skills to the highest bidder. In part, this re-quires pedagogical practices that connect the space of language, culture, and identity to their deployment in larger physical and social spaces. Such pedagog-ical practices are based on the presupposition that it is not enough to teach students how to read the word and knowledge critically. They most also learn


how to act on their beliefs, reflect on their role as engaged citizens, and inter-vene in the world as part of the obligation of what it means to be a socially re-sponsible agent. As critical and public intellectuals, teachers must fight for the right to dream, conceptualize, and connect their visions to classroom practice. They must also learn to confront, directly, the threat from fundamentalisms of all varieties that seek to turn democracy into a mall, a sectarian church, or an adjunct of the emerging punishing state. What the concept of teachers as pub-lic intellectuals references, once again, is that the most important role of teachers is not only to educate students to be critical thinkers, but also prepare them to be activists in the best sense of the term—that is, thoughtful and ac-tive citizens willing to fight for the economic, political and social conditions, and institutions that make democracy possible. The reason why public education has become so dangerous is that it associates teaching and learning with civic values, civic courage, and a respect for the common good—a position decidedly at odds with the unbridled individualism, privatized discourse, excessive com-petition, hyper- militarized masculinity, and corporate values that now drive educational policy and practice.

*****

Stavelas Apostolos

The Notion of Phronema as a Regulator in Life and as Countermeasure to Crisis

It can be broadly acknowledged that any form of crisis, personal or collective, financial or social, is a type of war occurring in the manner of a conflict, in which we are called to engage ourselves and react to it. It may also be con-ceded that any crisis has an impact upon the way of our thinking and that our ability to tackle with it depends upon our intellectual and emotional ground-work prepared in advance, often being called maturity. Additionally, no one can doubt, that any crisis entails certain changes in our personal or collective being, and that the very notion of crisis should be thought of as something oc-curring not exceptionally in the form of an accidental event, but as a natural step in the course of ordinary life.

It is within this conceptual framework, that the idea of phronema, over-whelms its modest and partial realisations in the sense of a high lifted spirit, of an emotional inclination or tendency, of an over-all wish, of a sense of right


judgement or of its being the starting point of varied sorts of bravery. While all these are just some of its qualities, phronema should be conceived as the most conclusive apparatus in our art of living, in the meaning of essential beliefs, principles and guidelines, which are constantly actualised in our practising life and are thus unalterable. It is the conclusive idea in which the core of our thoughts and the core of our actions identify with each other, by transcending the circumstantial while introducing into the former domain their vitality, last-ingness and durability. Phronema as a quasi bearer of our virtues stands as the ultimate precondition of freedom and is, thus, conceived as a crucial issue in relation to philosophy, especially ethics and philosophy of education.

*****

Stavridi Vana

The Crisis and the Role of Intellectuals in the Work of Karl Mannheim

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate the aspects of a theoretical project, which was formed during the interwar crisis, and aspired to become a proposal able to help overcome it. This project was formulated by Hungarian thinker Karl Mannheim in an era where the intensity and duration of the economic crisis led to a significant impact on the social as well as the theoretical and ideological field. Without any intention of identifying the current crisis to the interwar cri-sis, we think that in some aspects they are related, and in this sense certain da-ta and questions that applied then could do so today and could even contribute to the modern thinking concerning the crisis. Focusing on one symptom of this crisis, the one of "full and utter confusion" or better the "breakdown of com-munication", Karl Mannheim proceeded in forming a theoretical program that could help to eradicate it .This program involved the sociology of knowledge. According to the Hungarian thinker all worldviews/ ideologies are bound to the social being of the person who expresses them and reflect only a partial view of social reality. In this sense they are related but not false. To the extent that these ideas express or represent a sense of being they form only partial truths. Moving towards the synthesis of individual ideologies, Karl Mannheim intro-duces the method of relationism. On this basis the free floating intelligentsia will be able to associate each worldview to the social being, to isolate the true contents of each idea and to reconstruct them creating a comprehensive and


integrated theory that would efficiently and comprehensively express the social whole. However, both the interpretation of the crisis as well as the role that Karl Mannheim gives intellectuals provoked the criticism of representatives of critical theory. Taking account of this criticism we’ll try to discuss ways with which the project of Karl Mannheim could be rescued to the extent that he set in the new basis the issue of ideology and the practical aspect of knowledge.

*****

Stergioulis Charalambos Tsitsanoudis-Mallidis Nikoletta

Rhetorical Texts of the Fourth Century A.D. for Wealth and Its Loss

Vassilios, archbishop of Caesarea (330-379) and Ioannis Chrysostomos, archbi-shop of Constantinople (344/354-407) were exceptional speakers and distin-guished for their virtuous life. As authors they were prolific and their ergogra-phy impresses for the theological and plenitude style.

The bigger service Chrysostomos offered in the ecclesiastical oratory is that he achieved, more than anyone else, to upgrade the preaching in the level of high rhetorical art. The speech of Vassilios of Caesarea entitled “Speech to those who enrich” (P.G. 31, 277-304) and the speech of Ioannis Chrysostomos entitled “About wealth and poverty” (P.G. 63, 638-645), though they were pronounced the 4th century, acquire because of their content diachronic force and seem to be written just for the current season, the season of crisis.

In the present paper and after comparative examination of two texts, we describe: a) the way two bishops face the phenomenon of wealth and b) the way a person is compelled to face the problems that come out from wealth and the loss of it. Both the two ecclesiastical speakers insist in the equitable use of wealth and generally material goods.

Taking the occasion of the evangelic curtailments of “Good Samareitis” and the “Rich and Poor Lazarus” Vassilios and Ioannis Chrysostomos underline to the modern audience and all the later readers the useless of human effort for acquisition of wealth. Moreover they describe the consequences that suf-fers anyone who ignores the spirituality and cultivation of virtues. In addition, the paper describes the structure of two ecclesiastical rhetorical texts and


points out the resemblances and differences in the way of growth of speeches of two writers.

Besides we search the influences that the two Fathers of Church accepted from the ancient Greek thought and philosophy of Platon, Aristotle, Epicurus and others. In other words, the issue highlights their differentiations from tra-ditional authorities and the influence they spread to the later ecclesiastical writers.

At last, we present the rhetorical forms and the expressive practices with which the two speakers serve the rhetorical principles. All these allow to the readers to perceive the language of this two texts in their rhetorical dimension. The aim of their preaching is not the persuasion, but the course to the truth. This happens because “Preaching of Gospel” does not need any reasonable argument. All these explain how and why Vassilios of Caesarea and Ioannis Chrysostomos were able to deliver us topical, contemporary and pioneer texts, though these ones have been written centuries ago.

*****

Suleiman Ahmed Mohamed Ahmed

The Crisis of Mind in Anselm's of Canterbury 'Ontological Argument'

No doubt Anselm of Canterbury is justly considered as one of the most impor-tant philosophers and theologians in the Middle Ages, because he tried to de-velop a highly influential rational system of philosophical theology. In this paper I will attempt to show how Anselm used pure rational contemplation in order to prove and establish the existence of the Supreme Being, which actually de-pends on the ideas we have in our minds about it. This is the well known Onto-logical Argument. But as we will see, this attempt has brought a negative im-pact on the free speculative mind of the times, because it put it in crisis, out of which it could not be easily disengaged.

Anselm, of course, was not the only intellectual responsible for this gnosi-ological and metaphysical crisis, because it derives its roots from the patristic tradition, especially Augustine and the Neo-Platonists, being a crisis that arose from the attempt of putting Mind under the control of Faith. So Anselm is just a ring in the chain of philosophers from the first century A.D. onwards, who served philosophy as ancilla theologia, with the exception of some freeminded


thinkers, such as Duns Scotus Eriugena, who, though called heretics, foreshad-owed Renaissance, and tried to liberate Mind and Philosophy from the author-ity of the Church.

***** Tao Anjun

On the Moral Risks of Business Fraudulence Under the conditions of market economy, the moral hazard of commercial fraud is a common phenomenon in commercial operation. The objective cause of commercial fraud is the separation of the usage value and value embodied in goods in the market economy so that the purpose of the production of goods in the mind of the commodity producers is to achieve value or money; and the subjective cause is the motivation of the producers who want to get the illegal profit, that is, an attempt to fraudulently by commodity exchange and other economic activities to achieve their own illegal interests or profits. Adam Smith raised the assumption of the Economic Homo, whose main purpose is to get the self-interest when they enter the market, and motives of the Economic Homo are mainly the sake of self-interest, by the invisible hand of the market, led to benefit to others and society objectively. However, if the economic activities of the people through fraudulent means to obtain self-interest, impossible to prove that Smith's argument is valid, because this is not able to reach social consequences which Smith’s had thought, what is more, it will cause harm to others and society and suffered selves. In market economic activities of Economic Homo seeking to obtain interest fraudulently, lie in that there are people who are really trust and honest so that some one can do illegally in the name of honest fraudulently. This indicates that the dark side of humanity. People either by the means of legal and integrity, or fraudulent ones to meet the desire to pursue their own interests.

Experience has shown that, at any time in any society, there are always someone who are good faith, and there are some people who are fraud, which means no one can say all the people by now are true gentlemen. Our humanity has not been improved to such a point, then, how can we reduce economic fraud? In my view, if we face the fact of the dark nature of humanity in some way, we have to do more in the way of social system. Among other things, it is to increase the strength of the legal system to combat economic fraud in order to reach the point that one has to be afraid the consequences of his actions if


he wants to do so. After the exposure of the fraud scandals of Enron and WorldCom and others, there had amendment of the terms of the relevant laws in the United States which increased to fight against fraud activities intensively. This is because the hearts of those who are not in accordance with moral norm are of all utilitarian calculation. If the utility by fraud crime outweighs the punishing losses for the illegal crime, why people like not to do it? In this sense, to further improve the legal system and strengthen the rule of law, is an effective weapon for our combat against economic fraud, and reduce moral hazard. To strengthen and improve the legal system, as long as they can implement, it can make more healthy economic activity and rebuild the economic integrity. Long as we face the dark nature of humanity, and we will be sure that the integrity of the legal system and economy is inherently related.

*****

Tasis Theofanis

Democracy and Virtual Capitalism: On Image and Mortality in Castoriadis and Arendt

This paper discusses the interpretation of ancient democracy in Arendt's and Castoriadis' work focusing on the relation between the private and the public sphere. The critique formulated towards Arendt and Castoriadis is based on a distinction between zoe and bios as the two dimensions of mortality. In the context of this critique I’m developing a phenomelogical approach towards politics which includes a rereading of ancient greek philosophy in a framework of an ethics of self-improvement. I intend to argue that while Arendt correctly engages with the significance of mortality in the public sphere, she ignores the emancipatory potential of the private sphere which she conceptualises purely as a realm of necessity. I will argue that this, firstly, devalues the body of the subject and, secondly, gives false primacy to vision over other senses. The cri-tique I will develop is based on a distinction between zoe and bios that seeks to test imagination (defined here as a creative image producing activity) and extend the concept of work (defined here as activity in the production of a working on it self-concept). Regarding Castoriadis I argue that his main weak-ness lies mainly in the incomplete evaluation of the notion of work, which he perceives almost exclusively in the sphere of production and the neglecting of the importance of mortality for individual autonomy. Hoping to overcome


these weaknesses I offer a reinterpretation of the term epimeleia eautou to describe an activity of forming ways of living via the elucidation of a) structures of power inside and outside the subject and b) the subject’s self- creation. Epimeleia eautou is delimited by the mortality of the subject and contributes to its self- government which is a precondition for its participation in the public production of truth and exercise of power. Using the above the paper attempts to describe the significance of mortality in politics today and introduces the notion of virtual capitalism.

*****

Taylor James L.

Modern Subjectivity as Spiritual Crisis: Reading Foucault’s Backwards

Along with Nietzsche and Heidegger, Michel Foucault diagnoses modernity as a time of profound crisis. But unlike Heidegger, who views the forces of history as impassible, Foucault suggests that there is some action we can perform to overcome the encroaching nihilism. In his late work on practices of the self, Foucault tells us that the key to resisting the bio-political management of life is found in the self’s relation to itself, and specifically in the set of practices the self undertakes to participate in its own formation. This late turn to self-practices holds an important clue for a reinterpretation of Foucault’s work as a whole. By reading his earlier work in light of his later concerns, we can see that the crisis named modernity is brought about by a shift in self-understanding from an ancient way of relating to oneself that Foucault calls ‘spirituality’ to a modern way of relating in terms of science or knowledge. I will argue that this more adequate understanding of modernity as a ‘crisis of spirituality’ provides us, in turn, with an effective lens through which to view and respond to our contemporary crises.

*****


Tegos Spyridon

The Liberal and the Sceptic in David Hume

David Hume’s political philosophy is very often considered as part of the classic liberal political canon, especially regarding the issues of civil and political liber-ty. Simultaneously albeit on a different level, Hume is hailed as an early mod-ern proponent of skepticism and the question of the nature of his skepticism in morals and epistemology divide Hume scholars worldwide. However the ques-tion of the relationship between his alleged liberalism and scepticism, especial-ly in the field of morality, is rarely raised. Taking Hume’s essay The Sceptic as a starting point I explore the nature of such a relationship based on Hume’s cri-tique of the traditional role of philosophy in defining how we should live. In this context I also suggest possible links with contemporary reflections on scepticism and liberalism.

*****

Telios Ioannis

Crisis as the Aesthetics of Politics: Towards a Rancièrean Interpretation

The purpose of my paper is to put the notion of crisis in the perspective of Ran-cière’s concepts of politics and aesthetics. The presentation should unfold in three levels/stages: (1) undertake a brief presentation of the conceptual history of the notion of crisis, and thereby stress out (contradictory) characteristics as-cribed to it in the course of Western time1: especially emphasize the diachronic gist of the notion, which according to Koselleck, refers “to life-deciding alterna-tives meant to answer questions about what is just or unjust, what contributes to salvation or damnation, what furthers health or brings death” (ibid., p. 361). (2) It is exactly this inherent logic of a struggle between opposing alternatives that I wish to relate to Rancière’s understanding of the political/aesthetic as the reforming stage of antagonistic worlds.2 That presupposes an elaboration on

1. Koselleck, R. and Richter, M. W., “Crisis”, Journal of the History of Ideas 67, 2, The

University of Pennsylvania Press (2006), pp. 357-400. 2. Cf., Rancière, “The Aesthetic Heterotopia”, Philosophy Today (2010), 54, pp. 15-25:

20ff.


Rancière’s key concepts of politics and aesthetics. The elaboration should lay bare their operation as contingent occurrences of positive negativity3; their op-eration of dis-identification, of negating the present configuration of the sensi-ble by allowing the claim of new identities and new configurations of the sensi-ble. (3) Correlatively, I entertain the idea of deciphering crisis as an aes-thetic/political category by tracing down similarities with (and potentially sweeping away discrepancies in favor of) the Rancièrean perspective. This at-tempt should also bring into question the imports of crisis as either a teleologi-cal/eschatological or a mechanistic/structural occurrence in history, and con-trast them with Rancière’s anti-metaphysical understanding of politics as con-tingent.

*****

Tezas Christos

Plato, Aristotle and Today’s Global Crisis In the last 40 years, it has become widely accepted that the actual governance of the World is entrusted to the workings of capital “markets”. In such markets the players have been the owners of large financial capital firms and not the manufacturing, product producing firms of other times. In other words, we now have “Global governance” through banks ―and maybe just one bank― and by financial product Rating Agencies. Moreover, it has been accepted as normal for such markets to work quietly and in a multitude of ways to shape the values that would steer the rest of the world away from anything that would threaten their interests. The implication of this development is that the values held by such firms (namely profit maximizations) supersede all other values held, in-cluding those set forth by two great philosophers Plato and Aristotle. It is my contention that today's global crisis will be resolved (gradually of course and after valiant efforts), if the leaders of major states ever dare to challenge the values propounded by these financial firms and reassert Plato’s and Aristotle’s values for a healthy political life, values which I will try to present and analyze.

*****

3. Cf., Ranciere, “The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge”, Critical In-

quiry 36, 1, pp. 1-19: 2.


Theologou Kostas

The Physical Effects of Institutional Violence and Ideological Manipulation During Modern Liberalist

State Crisis A social, economic and political crisis offers an opportunity to recollect on as-pects and forms of violence that may not be generally accepted. This paper aims to clarify the concept of violence in an institutional framework and on the conditions of the human body.

The paper, thus, is on one hand a recollection on the phenomenon of vio-lence and especially the forms of resistance against state and institutional vio-lence in modern cultures; on the other hand it is a comprehensive recollection on the field of human rights, from a legal and ethical perspective. The double focus intersects the subjects of the rights and violence: the humans and their bodies; hence, the paper’s title includes the physical.

Because of the moral aspect of violence and the gravity of its effects war and violence rather consist of phenomena that eventually respond distinctively to the moral reproach, and disapproval. Those who condemn violence despite its origin do not take into account the criteria of just warfare and justified vio-lence; they seem to claim that they prefer to die (=morally) in obedience, than live (=immorally) in resistance.

Forms of violence in modern societies include: Genocide (e.g. in African countries’ civil wars, in Asian countries’ religious clashes etc), Women’s Rape (in War and Peace time, or in specific cultural milieux like Muslim societies), Pae-dophilia and Children’s work (in all cultural settings), Equality among handi-capped citizens (adults and minor citizens in education and employment), Ani-mal abuse (e.g. caged and drugged in circuses, fights in arenas, tortured during scientific experiments, terribly abused domestic pets, etc), Long-time Unem-ployment (e.g. recently in European countries even Euro-zone members) etc; the list is open to suggestions.

The above forms of violence allow for resistance (expressed even as a re-action of equal force) because they produce the same painful effects on the physical body of those who suffer the institutional violence of heavy taxation and unemployment (since they are potentially hungry, homeless, psychological wrecks, inclined to commit suicide and other unpredictable acts etc) with a physically raped human being.

*****


Vlagopoulos Panos

Crisis and Tradition in the History of 20th Century Music: The Schoenberg Case

Koselleck’s three semantic models by which he summarized the Be-griffsgeschichte of ‘crisis’ forms the basis for a re-description (in Luhmann’s sense of the word) of the Schoenberg case. I will focus on a. Schoenberg’s criti-cal approach to tradition as a manifestation of the ‘Second Viennese Modern-ism’, and b. the logical aspect of the twelve-tone system, an aspect related to a certain strand of this Modernism, the so-called Semantic Tradition (Coffa); the most salient features of the latter being anti-psychologism and the objectivity of thought (Frege, Bolzano). Hoffmannstahl in literature and Strauss in music (First Viennese Modernism) tried to circumvent their loss of innocence toward tradition by taking refuge to Neo*classicism, thereby succumbing to solipsism. Schoenberg, on the other hand, was mostly keen to safeguard the conditions of possibility of dialogue with both his peers and music history. He did that by ad-hering to the notion of a ‘musikalischer Gedanke’, a denizen of a Platonist/ Fre-gean ‘Third Realm’. Thus understood, his evolution can be described as taking him from early attempts to exhaust the potential of traditional musical lan-guage (Verklärte Nacht, Gurrelieder), to the heuristic quest for the unknown (3 Klavierstücke, 5 Orchesterstücke), and through the acute awareness of the Er-wartung and the Glückliche Hand, to the solution of the solipsism problem in the early twenties, with his Methode der Komposition mit zwölf nur aufeinander bezogenen Tönen. The so-called 'tonality crisis' (always in the words of others, but not Schoenberg's) meant actually a unique flourish of musical creativity leading twentieth century music in unimaginable -as well as unimagined-new territories.

*****


Zarra Iliana

Kasimir Malevich (1879-1935) Under Crisis: The Return from the ‘Non-objective World’

to the Figure during the Period between World Wars Kazimir Malevich in launching the movement of Suprematism in 1915 was ele-vated as one of the dominant figures of geometrical abstraction of the first half of the twentieth century.

After 1918 Malevich closes the circle of the production of suprematist works, abandons painting and is dedicated to the teaching and the writing of theoretical and philosophical works. At 1927, suddenly safer upon his return from abroad and several years of abstention, he returns also back to painting. However, he does not return to his non-objective art, but to the topics he had developed prior to reaching the abstract suprematism and along with these he reinstates the figure. In particular, these are works superficially similar to the geometrical figures of the peasant in the rural landscapes of the pre-revolutionary period, for the creation of which he had borrowed the expressive modes from the traditional art of icon painting. In fact , the works of the ‘second’ rural line, painted in the term 1928-1932, bear false datings (1909, 1910, 1913, and 1915), which date them back to his pre-suprematist phase. Nevertheless, the current figures do not, actually, bear any relation with those of the 1910’s. In these works there are shown humanoids, isolated or in groups, whole-body or torsos, able-bodied or without members, for the most part without features on the face. Α significant feature of the pre-War period is that now the figures are not occupied with any activity, they merely stand fro-zen still and their oval faces have dismissed any human feature with the con-sequence that no thought is exposed, no expression depicted, no mental state manifested.

In order to attempt anew an interpretation we have to take into account firstly the personality of the creator and the political context of these works. Upon consideration of the above, I claim that his mutilated humanoids were in a head-on collision with the principles of socialist realism not only as they insi-nuated the image of a vigorous young and bright hero he promoted. But, pri-marily as, due to their special qualitative properties, on the one hand they en-couraged the emotional response and simultaneously the absence of emotion. In conclusion, this series of works, signaling the moment just prior to the turn of Malevich to the art of the Renaissance and in combination to the effort of deceiving the hostile horizon of reception through the false dating, do not


merely express the dilemma or the oscillation of Malevich between the abso-lutist norm and abstraction. It is essentially a symptom of the crisis to which the artist is under due to his difficulty to preserve his creative autonomy.

*****


L I S T O F P A R T I C I P A N T S AGUAS, JOVE JIM S. Professor, College of Accountancy, University of Santo To-

mas, Manila, PHILIPPINES ([email protected])

AIGBODIOH, JACOB ALE. Professor, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma, Edo State, NIGERIA ([email protected])

AJAH, ANTHONY C. Ph.D Candidate, Department of Philosophy, University of Ni-geria Nsukka, Enugu State, NIGERIA ([email protected])

ALBANIS, TRIANTAFYLLOS. Professor, Department of Chemistry and Rector, Uni-versity of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

ALEXAKIS, DIMITRIS. Ph.D Candidate, Department of Philosophy and Social Stu-dies, University of Crete, Rethymno, GREECE ([email protected])

ANAGNOSTOPOULOS, GEORGIOS. Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of California San Diego, La Jolla California, USA ([email protected])

APOSTOLOPOULOU, GEORGIA. Professor, Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

BADGAEVA, DARINA. MA Candidate, Higher School of Economics, Moscow, RUSSIA

([email protected])

BADRU, OLUFEMI RONALD. Lecturer, Department of Politics and International Re-lations, Lead City University and Department of Philosophy, Saints Peter and Paul Major Seminary, Ibadan, NIGERIA ([email protected])

BARTSIDES, MICHALIS. Lecturer, Department of Philosophy and Pedagogy, Aris-totle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, GREECE ([email protected])

BAZAC, ANA. Professor, Polytechnic University of Bucharest, Bucharest, ROMANIA

([email protected])

BEGZOS, MARIOS. Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Theology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, GREECE ([email protected])

BISHNOI, N.K. Professor, Haryana School of Business, Guru Jambheshwar Uni-versity of Science and Technology, Hissar, INDIA ([email protected])

BITCHAVA, GIOVANNA. Ph.D Candidate, Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

mailto:[email protected]















BLASKO, ANDREW. Ph.D in Philosophy, European Polytechnical University and Uppsala University, Uppsala, SWEDEN ([email protected])

BLOECHL, JEFFREY. Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, De-partment of Philosophy, Boston College, Chestnut Hill Massachusetts, USA ([email protected])

BOUNDAS, CONSTANTIN V. Professor Emeritus, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, CANADA ([email protected] / [email protected])

CALCHI-NOVATI, GABRIELLA. Adjunct Lecturer, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, IREL-

AND ([email protected])

CHIŢOIU, DAN. Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaşi, Iaşi, ROMANIA ([email protected])

CHRYSSAFIS, GEORGIOS. Ph.D in Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

CLOKE, JON (JONATHAN). Lecturer, Department of Geography, Loughborough Uni-versity, Loughborough, Leicestershire, UNITED KINGDOM ([email protected])

DAMIAN, IULIAN-CONSTANTIN. Research Assistant, Faculty of Orthodox Theology, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaşi, Iaşi, ROMANIA ([email protected])

DAREMAS, GEORGIOS. Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Indianapolis-Athens Campus, Athens, GREECE ([email protected])

DELIGIORGI, ALEXANDRA. Professor, Department of Philosophy and Pedagogy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, GREECE ([email protected])

DEMETRIOU, KYRIAKOS. Professor, Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, CYPRUS ([email protected])

DIMITRIOU, STEPHANOS. Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Educa-tion and Psychology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

DIMITROVA, MARIA. Professor, Faculty of Philosophy, Sofia University, Sofia, BULGARIA ([email protected])

DOUZINAS, COSTAS. Professor and Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Hu-manities, Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UNITED KING-

DOM ([email protected])

DROSOS, DENIS. Professor, Department of Philosophy, Education and Psycholo-gy, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])


















DURA, IOAN. Research Assistant, Faculty of Orthodox Theology, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaşi, Iaşi, ROMANIA ([email protected])

EBIJUWA, TEMISANREN. Professor and Dean of the Postgraduate School, Depart-ment of General Studies, Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Oyo State, NIGERIA ([email protected] / [email protected])

ELIOPOULOS, PANOS. Adjunct Lecturer, Department of Philology, University of Pe-loponnese, Kalamata, GREECE ([email protected])

ESTEVEZ, JAMES. Ph.D Candidate, Miami Dade College, Florida International Uni-versity, Miami Florida, USA ([email protected])

GIANNOPOULOU, ARCHONTOULA. Ph.D in Philosophy, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, FRANCE ([email protected])

GITSOULIS, CRYSOULA. Adjunct Assistant Professor, City College, City University of New York, New York, USA ([email protected])

GLYCOFRYDI-LEONTSINI, ATHANASIA. Professor and Head of the Sector of Philoso-phy, Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, GREECE ([email protected])

GOE, GEORGANNA. Mathematician, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

GONG, QUN. Professor, Department of Philosophy, Renmin University of China, Beijing, CHINA ([email protected]/ [email protected])

GORYUNOV, VALERY. Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy, St Pe-tersburg Polytechnical University, St Petersburg, RUSSIA ([email protected])

GOTOVOS, ATHANASIOS. Professor, Head of the Sector of Education and Director of Graduate Programme, Department of Philosophy, Education and Psy-chology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

GRIGORIOU, CHRISTOS. Adjunct Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, University of Patras, Patras, GREECE ([email protected])

GROLLIOS, VASILIS. Ph.D in Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Pedagogy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, GREECE

([email protected])

GUNGOV, ALEXANDER L. Professor, Faculty of Philosophy, Sofia University, Sofia, BULGARIA ([email protected])

GUPTA, SANDEEP. Researcher, Dayalbagh Educational Institute, Deemed Univer-sity, Agra, INDIA ([email protected])



















HANSON, JEFFREY. Research Fellow and Lecturer, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, AUSTRALIA ([email protected])

HARCIAREC, ANNA. Ph.D Candidate, University of Silesia in Katowice, POLAND and Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

HOBEIKA, MARIE-ODILE. Ph.D Candidate, Department of Communication, Univer-sity of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, USA ([email protected])

HU, YEPING. Ph.D in Philosophy and Executive Director, The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, Washington, D.C., USA ([email protected])

IAKOVOU, VICKY. Lecturer, Department of Social Anthropology and History, Uni-versity of the Aegean, Mytilene, GREECE ([email protected])

IMAFIDON, ELVIS. Ph.D Candidate, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma, Edo State, NIGERIA ([email protected])

ISLAM, SIRAJUL. Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy and Reli-gion, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, INDIA ([email protected])

KARABATZAKI, HELEN. Former Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE

([email protected])

KARAFILLIS, GRIGORIOS. Professor, Department of Primary School Education, Uni-versity of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

KARAMITROU, KATERINA. Assistant Professor, Department of Primary School Edu-cation, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

KARAVAKOU, VASILIKI. Assistant Professor, Department of Educational and Social Policy, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, GREECE ([email protected])

KEENY, GAVIN, Ph.D Candidate, Deakin University, Melbourne, AUSTRALIA / Crea-tive Director, Agence ‘X’, New York, USA ([email protected])

KOMPRIDIS, NIKOLAS. Professor and Research Coordinator of the Institute for Democracy and Human Rights, University of Western Sydney, Sydney, AUSTRALIA ([email protected])

KOSKERIDIS, KONSTANTINOS D. Ph.D Candidate, Department of Philosophy, Educa-tion and Psychology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE

([email protected])















KOUGIOUMZOGLOU, EMMANOUIL. Ph.D Candidate, Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE

([email protected])

KOUTSOUMPOS, LEONIDAS. Lecturer (under appointment), School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, GREECE

([email protected])

KUANG, SANPING. Professor, The Research Institute of Marxism, Philosophy and Chinese Modernization, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, CHINA

([email protected])

LEKKAS, GEORGE. Adjunct Lecturer, Department of Philology, University of Pelo-ponnese, Kalamata and Hellenic Open University, Patras, GREECE

([email protected])

LEONTSINI, ELENI. Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, Education and Psycholo-gy, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

LESHKEVICH, TATIANA. Professor, Faculty of Philosophy and Culture Sciences, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, RUSSIA ([email protected])

LI, JIAN-QUN. Professor, Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Shaanxi, CHINA ([email protected])

LI, XIAOMEI. Researcher, The Research Institute of Marxism, Philosophy and Chinese Modernization, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, CHINA

LIAMPI, AIKATERINI. Professor, Department of History and Archeology and Dean of the School of Philosophy, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE

([email protected])

LOIZIDES, ANTIS. Ph.D in Philosophy, Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, CYPRUS ([email protected])

MA, TIANXIANG. Professor, School of Philosophy, Wuhan University, Wuhan City, Hobei Province, CHINA ([email protected])

MAGGINI, GOLFO. Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

MAKARIEV, PLAMEN. Professor, Faculty of Philosophy, Sofia University, Sofia, BULGARIA ([email protected])

MANTZANAS, MICHAEL. Assistant Professor, Ecclesiastical Academy of Athens, Athens, GREECE














MATTHOPOULOS, DEMETRIOS. Professor, Department of Environmental and Natu-ral Resources Management, University of Patras, Agrinio, GREECE

([email protected])

MCLEAN, GEORGE F. Professor Emeritus and President of the RVP, The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., USA ([email protected])

MELA, LIA. Assistant Professor (under appointment), Department of Political Sciences, Democritus University of Thrace, Komotini, GREECE ([email protected])

MERANTZAS, CHRISTOS. Assistant Professor, Department of Cultural Heritage Ma-nagement and New Technologies, University of Patras, Agrinio, GREECE

([email protected])

MISHEVA,VESSELA. Professor, Department of Sociology, Uppsala University, Upp-sala, SWEDEN ([email protected])

MOUTSOPOULOS, EVANGHELOS. Academician, Professor Emeritus and Former Rec-tor of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Academy of Athens-Research Centre for Greek Philosophy, Athens, GREECE

([email protected])

MUKHERJEE, ASHA. Professor, Department of Philosophy and Religion, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, INDIA ([email protected])

MYLONAKI, EVGENIA. Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Philosophy, University of Patras, Patras, GREECE ([email protected])

NGUYEN, TAI DONG. Professor and Vice Director of the Institute of Philosophy, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, Hanoi, VIETNAM ([email protected])

NIZHNIKOV, SERGEY. Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, Moscow, RUSSIA ([email protected])

NOUTSOS, PANAGIOTIS. Professor, Head of the Sector of Philosophy and Director of Graduate Programme, Department of Philosophy, Education and Psy-chology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

OLATUNJI, FELIX O. Professor, Department of Computer Engineering, Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomoso, NIGERIA ([email protected])

OMAKAEVA, ELLARA. Professor and Head of the Department of Linguistics, Cen-ter for Tibetology and Mongolistics, Kalmyk Institute for Humanities, Russian Academy of Sciences, Republic of Kalmykia, Elista, RUSSIA

([email protected])















OSEI, JOSEPH. Professor, Department of Government and History, Fayetteville State University, Fayetteville, North Carolina, USA ([email protected])

OZOLIŅŠ, JĀNIS (JOHN). Professor, School of Philosophy, Faculty of Theology and Philosophy, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, AUSTRALIA

([email protected])

PANTAZAKOS, PANAGIOTIS. Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Educa-tion and Psychology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, GREECE ([email protected])

PAPAGEORGAKIS, GEORGE. MA Candidate, Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

PASCHALIS, VASILIS. Assistant Professor, Department of Plastic Arts and Art Sciences, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

PEONIDIS, FILIMON. Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy and Pedagogy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, GREECE ([email protected])

PETSIOS, KONSTANTINOS. Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE

([email protected])

PIROVOLAKIS, EFTICHIS. Adjunct Lecturer, Department of Philosophy and Social Studies, University of Crete, Rethymno, GREECE ([email protected])

POLIAS, KONSTANTINOS. Ph.D Candidate, Athens School of Fine Arts, Athens, GREECE ([email protected])

POULAKOS, JOHN. Associate Professor, Department of Communication, Universi-ty of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, USA ([email protected])

POURNARI, MARIA. Associate Professor, Department of Primary School Educa-tion, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

PRELORENTZOS, YANNIS. Professor, Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

PRESBEY, GAIL. Professor, College of Liberal Arts and Education, University of Detroit Mercy, Detroit, Michigan, USA ([email protected])

PROIMOS, KONSTANTINOS. Adjunct Lecturer, Architectural Engineering Depart-ment, Technical University of Crete, Chania and Hellenic Open University, Patras, GREECE ([email protected])
















PROTOPAPA-MARNELI, MARIA. Director of the Research Centre for Greek Philosophy, Academy of Athens, Athens, GREECE ([email protected])

PSARROS, NIKOS. Professor, Institute of Philosophy, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, GERMANY ([email protected])

PSKHU RUZANA, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of the History of Philosophy, Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, Moscow, RUSSIA ([email protected])

RANTIS, KONSTANTINOS. Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Educa-tion and Psychology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE

([email protected])

RASHID, ABDUL. Professor Emeritus, University of Karachi, Karachi, Sindh, PAKIS-

TAN ([email protected])

RIGOS, PLATON. Associate Professor, Department of Government and Interna-tional Affairs, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA

([email protected])

ROBINSON, THOMAS. Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, Toronto, CANADA ([email protected])

ROSE, DAVID. Lecturer, Department of Philosophical Studies, Newcastle Universi-ty, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UNITED KINGDOM ([email protected])

ROUMKOU, ELENI. Ph.D in Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

SAKELLARIADIS, ATHANASIOS. Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Edu-cation and Psychology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE

([email protected])

SARGENTIS, KONSTANTINOS. Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy and Social Studies, University of Crete, Rethymno, GREECE ([email protected])

SILVA, JOSÉ FILIPE PEREIRA DA. Research Fellow, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, FINLAND ([email protected])

SINHA, ASHOK KUMAR. Professor and Head of the Department of Geography, Magadh University, Bodh Gaya, INDIA ([email protected])

SINHA, NEELIMA. Professor, Department of Philosophy, Magadh University, Bodh Gaya, INDIA ([email protected])
















SOLOMOU-PAPANIKOLAOU, VASILIKI. Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

SOUGIOULTZIS, PASCHALIS. Ph.D Candidate, Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

SOULEZ, ANTONIA. Professor Emeritus, Université de Paris VIII-Saint Denis, Paris, FRANCE ([email protected])

SOUKAKOS PANAGIOTIS, Professor Emeritus, School of Medicine and President of the University Council, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE

SOZOPOULOU, MARIA. Ph.D Candidate, Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

SRAMAN, DHARMARAKIT VEN. Researcher, Khon Kaen University, Khon Kaen, THAILAND ([email protected])

STAVELAS, APOSTOLOS. Researcher, Academy of Athens-Research Center for Greek Philosophy, Athens, GREECE ([email protected])

STAVRIDI, VANA. Ph.D Candidate, Department of Philosophy and Social Studies, University of Crete, Rethymno, Crete, GREECE ([email protected])

STERGIOULIS, CHARALAMBOS. Ph.D in Byzantine Philology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, GREECE ([email protected])

SULEIMAN, AHMED MOHAMED AHMED. Ph.D Candidate, Department of Philoso-phy, Education and Psychology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE

([email protected])

TAO, ANJUN. MA in Philosophy and General Manager, Anhui Huayi Equipment Technology Co., LTD, Anhui, CHINA ([email protected])

TASIS, THEOFANIS. “Marie Curie” Research Fellow, Académie Universitaire de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, BELGIUM ([email protected])

TAYLOR, JAMES. Ph.D Candidate, Department of Philosophy, Boston College, Chestnut Hill Massachusetts, USA ([email protected])

TEGOS, SPIRIDON. Lecturer, Department of Philosophy and Social Studies, Uni-versity of Crete, Rethymno, GREECE ([email protected])

TELIOS, IOANNIS. MA in Philosophy, Aarhus University, DENMARK ([email protected])

TEZAS, CHRISTOS. Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

















THEOLOGOU, KOSTAS. Lecturer, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, GREECE ([email protected])

TSITSANOUDIS-MALLIDIS, NIKOLETTA. Lecturer, Department of Pre-School Educa-tion, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, GREECE ([email protected])

VILA-CHÃ, JOÃO J. Professor, Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, ITALY and RVP Vice-President, Washington, D.C., USA

VLAGOPOULOS, PANOS. Assistant Professor, Department of Music Studies, Ionian University, Corfu, GREECE ([email protected])

YAN, LIAN-FU. Professor, Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Shaanxi, CHINA

([email protected])

ZARRA, ILIANA. Assistant Professor, Department of Cultural Heritage Manage-ment and New Technologies, University of Patras, Agrinio, GREECE

([email protected])







I N D E X

Aguas, Jove Jim S. 11, 122

Aigbodioh, Jacob Ale 12, 122

Ajah, Anthony C. 12, 122

Alexakis, Dimitris 13, 122

Anagnostopoulos, Georgios 14, 122

Apostolopoulou, Georgia 15, 122

Badgaeva, Darina 81, 122

Badru, Olufemi Ronald 16, 122

Bartsides, Michalis 17, 122

Bazac, Ana 18, 122

Begzos, Marios 19, 122

Bishnoi, N.K. 44, 122

Bitchava, Giovanna 59, 122

Blasko, Andrew 20, 123

Bloechl, Jeffrey 20, 123

Boundas, Constantin V. 21, 123

Calchi-Novati, Gabriella 23, 123

Chiţoiu, Dan 24, 123

Chryssafis, George 25, 123

Cloke, Jon 26, 123

Damian, Iulian-Constantin 32, 123

Daremas, Georgios 27, 123

Deligiorgi, Alexandra 28, 123

Demetriou, Kyriakos 29, 123

Dimitriou, Stephanos 29, 123

Dimitrova, Maria 30, 123

Douzinas, Costas 31, 123

Drosos, Denis 31, 123

Dura, Ioan 32, 124

Ebijuwa, Temisanren 33, 124

Eliopoulos, Panos 34, 124

Estevez, James 35, 124

Giannopoulou, Archontoula 36, 124

Gitsoulis, Chrysoula 37, 124

Glycofrydi-Leontsini, Athanasia 38,

124

Goe, Georganna 39, 124

Gong, Qun 40, 124

Goryunov, Valery 40, 124

Gotovos, Athanasios 41, 124

Grigoriou, Christos 42, 124

Grollios, Vasilis 43, 124

Gungov, Alexander 43, 124

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE: PHILOSOPHY AND CRISIS

134

Gupta, Sandeep 44, 124

Hanson, Jeffrey 46, 125

Harciarek, Anna 47, 125

Hobeika, Marie-Odile 48, 125

Hu, Yeping 49, 125

Iakovou, Vicky 50, 125

Imafidon, Elvis 12, 125

Islam, Sirajul 50, 125

Karabatzaki, Helen 53, 125

Karafillis, Grigorios 54, 125

Karamitrou, Katerina 55, 125

Karavakou, Vasiliki 56, 125

Keeny, Gavin 57, 125

Kompridis, Nikolas 58, 125

Koskeridis, Konstantinos D. 59, 125

Kougioumzoglou, Emmanouil 59, 126

Koutsoumpos, Leonidas 60, 126

Kuang, Sanping 62, 126

Lekkas, George 63, 126

Leontsini, Eleni 64, 126

Leshkevich, Tatiana 65, 126

Li, Jian-qun 67, 126

Li, Xiaomei 62, 126

Lian-fu, Yan 67, 126

Loizides, Antis 68, 126

Ma, Tianxiang 69, 126

Maggini, Golfo 69, 126

Makariev, Plamen 70, 126

Mantzanas, Michael 71, 126

Matthopoulos, Demetrios 71, 127

Mela, Lia 72, 127

Merantzas, Christos 72, 127

Misheva, Vessela 73, 127

Moutsopoulos, Evanghelos 74, 127

Mukherjee, Asha 75, 127

Mylonaki, Evgenia 76, 127

Nguean, Tai Dong 77, 127

Nizhnikov, Sergey 78, 127

Noutsos, Panagiotis 79, 127

Olatunji, Felix O. 80, 127

Omakaeva, Ellara 81, 127

Osei, Joseph 82, 128

Ozoliņš, Jānis (John) 83, 128

Pantazakos, Panagiotis 84, 128


Papageorgakis, George 85, 128

Paschalis, Vasilis 86, 128

Peonidis, Filimon 87, 128

Pirovolakis, Eftichis 87, 128

Polias, Konstantinos 88, 128

Poulakos, John 89, 128

Pournari, Maria 90, 128

Prelorentzos, Yannis 91, 128

Presbey, Gail 92, 128

Proimos, Konstantinos 93, 128

Protopapa-Marneli, Maria 94, 129

Psarros, Nikos 94, 129

Pskhu, Ruzana 96, 129

Rantis, Konstantinos 96, 129

Rashid, Abdul 97, 129

Rigos, Platon 98, 129

Robinson, Thomas 99, 129

Rose, David 99, 129

Roumkou, Eleni 100, 129

Sakellariadis, Athanassios 101, 129

Sargentis, Konstantinos 102, 129

Silva, José Filipe Pereira Da 103,

129

Sinha, Ashok Kumar 104, 129

Sinha, Neelima 105, 129

Solomou-Papanikolaou, Vasiliki

105, 130

Sougioultzis, Paschalis 106, 130

Soulez, Antonia 107, 130

Sozopoulou, Maria 108, 130

Sraman, Dharmarakit Ven. 108, 130

Stavelas, Apostolos 109, 130

Stavridi, Vana 110, 130

Stergioulis, Charalambos 111, 130

Suleiman, Ahmed Mohamed Ah-

med 112, 130

Tao, Anjun 113, 130

Tasis, Theofanis 114, 130

Taylor, James L. 115, 130

Tegos, Spyridon 116, 130

Telios, Ioannis 116, 130

Tezas, Christos 117, 130

Theologou, Kostas 118, 131

Tsitsanoudis-Mallidis, Nikoletta 111,

131

Vlagopoulos, Panos 119, 131

Zarra, Iliana 120, 131

philosophy and crisis, ioannina 2013-book of abstracts

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