No 1 (2015)

Human in man can be considered from ethical and metaphysical points of view. In metaphysical terms, humaneness stands for the free development of the creative spirit of man manifested in the totality of his being. The author considers man as an opportunity to become a man, to find humaneness. In other words, the man who is the aim and the project for himself, has yet to fulfill his potential in its otherness. This is a project of the self or sketch presence. The possible in man has not yet become the real existence, it is a part of his being which is slipping away from him every time. The man himself sets priorities and ways of achieving his humaneness. He produces a draft of his existence scheduled for construction in the future and corrected in the course of life. Martin Heidegger redefines the meaning of humanism, exposing it to criticism from the perspective of fundamental ontology. The author, having agreed with the principal statements of Heidegger's phenomenology, does not share some of its provisions, namely: the idea of the rule of thought by being, the thesis about man's dependence on the location of being, characterization of existence as human substance. In particular, the article argues that the human in man is determined not by being as such, but free choice of the individual. Man himself accounts for his existence, and it depends only on him how well he follows his essence, recognizing or rejecting the demands of being.

The article is devoted to the problem of conceptualization of the subject in the philosophy of liberation. Enrique Dussel develops a theory that would be a voice of the Other, excluded from the world system. At the same time, Argentinian philosopher broadly interprets the concept of Other . Thus, in order to analyze philosophy of liberation, we need to define this concept and bring up the question of whose position is Enrique Dussel trying to voice.

Understanding of Other depends on understanding of oneself and one’s own culture and is often obscured and blocked by ready-made definitions, assessments and standards of description. “Solaris” by S. Lem represents an extraordinary, “radical Other” that cannot be caught or conquered with final words and conclusions. Various modes of perception of Solaris analyzed in this article (distant - close, object - subject, repulsive - attractive) reflects common intentions, emotional attitudes of homo sapiens, and, among them, a deep-seated desire to get rid of incalculable Other as an irritating factor and a threat to human existence. Approaching to Other implies approaching both to oneself (better understanding and straightforward awareness of one’s personal history) and to almost impossible “horizontal” perception of the world where one can be with Other without attempting to make him/her manageable, predictable, hopelessly “one’s own” (existential recognition of Other).

A triangular reconstruction of the social dynamics of violence offers a means to bridge the gap between research on the micro- and meso-level dynamics of violent interaction on the one hand, and theories of power and domination on the other. The origins of this approach are found in the phenomenological programme of social science violence research formulated by German sociologists in the 1990s (Sofsky, von Trotha, Nedelmann, and others). Reconsidering their arguments in the framework of social constructivism, this article reconstructs violence as a triangular process evolving between «performer», «target» and «observer». Disentangling the dimensions of the somatic and the social shows, however, that these are not the fixed roles of agents, but changeable modes of experiencing violence. Violent interaction uses the suffering body to stage a positional asymmetry, i.e. a distinction between strength and weakness, between above and below, which can be exploited for the production and reproduction of social order.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the phenomenon of violence in the context of social space. The author considers the problem of alienation, which results in the formation of enclaves inside the territory. It facilitates actors on micro-sociological level to interpret their partners of communication as the ones who can pose danger. The author also notes that social space includes artefacts and traces of (non)presence of violence in the system of social relations.

Interdisciplinary character of contemporary social sciences leads to an idea of propertology - interdisciplinary teaching on property. Economics of property, sociology of property, law of property, political theory of property and others are among branches of propertology. Philosophy of property is to be considered as the first premise of propertology, setting methodological and theoretical basis for multifaceted research into this phenomenon. Structurally philosophy of property consists of the following sections: ontology of property, epistemology and methodology of research on property, axiology of property, ethics of a property-owner, - each of which forms its own area of investigation into property as complex system of social relations and attitudes.