Algis Mickunas – författare

This volume details the philosophical propositions of technology, illustrates its impact on various facets of social life, and demonstrates how the disruptive effects of technology can be reduced by providing it with a new philosophical base. Philosophical principles that will help to foster the responsible use of technology are developed. The contributors deal specifically with the ways in which technology shapes a person's view of politics, capital punishment, education, health and illness, work, communications, and the human body. They argue that technology tends to deanimate these aspects of life, thereby purging society of its creativity and spontaneity. Collectively, they suggest ways in which this trend can be reversed by the creation of a socially responsible technology.

Existential philosophy has perhaps captured the public imagination more completely than any other philosophical movement in the twentieth century. But less is known about the phenomenological method lying behind existentialism. In this solid introduction to phenomenological philosophy, authors David Stewart and Algis Mickunas show that phenomenology is neither new nor bizarre but is a contemporary way of raising afresh the major problems of philosophy that have dominated the traditions of Western thought. The authors carefully lead the reader trough the maze of terminology, explaining the major problems phenomenology has treated and showing how these are a consistent extension of the traditional concerns of philosophy.In concise, uncluttered, and straightforward terms, the history, development, and contemporary status of phenomenology is explained with a copiously annotated bibliography following each chapter. Nothing in print combines the extensive introductory materials with a guide to the massive literature that has been produced by phenomenological and existential studies.

Each Yearbook provides an annual international forum for phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy in the spirit of Edmund Husserl's groundbreaking work. These respected philosophers have contributed essays on a wide range of concerns: Rudolf Bernet - Husserl's Transcendental Idealism Revisited; Ian Angus - In Praise of Fire - Responsibility, Manifestation, Polemos, Circumspection; Dieter Lohmar - Husserl's Hesitant Revisionism in the Field of Logic; Torsten Pietrek - A Reconstruction of Phenomenological Method for Metaethics; Renaud Barbaras - Sensing and Creating - Phenomenology and the Unity of Aesthetics; Christian Lotz - Recollection, Mourning and the Absolute Past, Husserl, Freud and Derrida; Karlheinz Ruhstorfer - Adieu - Derrida's God and the Beginning of Thinking; and Rosemary R. P. Lerner - Husserl vs. Neo-Kantianism Revisited - On Skepticism, Foundationalism, and Intuition. This book also includes: Sebastian Luft - A Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Spirit - Husserl, Natorp and Cassirer; Heribert Boeder - Truth in the First Epoch of Philosophy; Marcus Brainard - Epoche and Epoch in Logotectonic Thought; Edmund Husserl - Tobaccology (German/English); Johannes Daubert - Notes from Husserl's Mathematical-Philosophical Exercises (1905), ed. and intro by Mark van Atten and Karl Schuhmann (German/English); Dorion Cairns - On Eugen Fink's ""The Problem of Husserl's Phenomenology"".

The encounter between Japan and the West posed a question as to whether there can be any mutual understanding between such seemingly different civilizations. Japanese intellectuals came to Europe to study Western thinking and found that the prevalent positivism and pragmatism were inadequate, and turned to phenomenology as a way of dealing with awareness, unavailable in other Western philosophical trends. Japanese opened a “dialogue” with such thinkers as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger; this text is an explication of this “dialogue.” From Zen to Phenomenology opens the essential dimensions of transcendental phenomenology and the way of Zen in order to disclose the conjunction between these two “schools” of awareness. The research offered in the text traces the origins of Zen to the Buddhist Nagarjuna, presenting his arguments that all explanatory claims of awareness are “empty”. In Zen, the phenomenon of emptiness is a “place holder” depicted as basho where anything can appear without obstructions. The task, in the text, is to show how such a “place” can be reached by excluding claims by some Japanese and Western scholars as to the “aims” of Zen. The introduction of “aims” is equally an obstruction and must be avoided, just as an attachment to a specific Zen “school” is to be discarded. Phenomenological analyses of time awareness show the presence of a domain which is composed of flux and permanence such that both aspects are given as empty “place holders” for any possible reality of any culture. The awareness of these aspects is neither one nor the other, and hence can appear through both as “primal” symbols fluctuating one through the other. If we say that everything changes, we encounter the permanence of this claim, and if we say that everything is permanent, we encounter an effort to maintain such permanence – both disclosing a “movement” between them, comprising a “place” for any understanding of a world explicated in any culture. This is the domain where Zen and transcendental phenomenology find their “groundless ground.”

The ad image has become the focus of ad research, and to a certain extent this is justified. To understand how the ad image is received, the tradition of advertising creators, planners and buyers have asserted it is based on memory. Specifically, it is rooted in affective memory in which the unconscious plays a role. The other side is cognitive, where the image may be received, but less affectively. Today, neuroscience is being deployed to validated current findings in order to prove advertising legitimization. The biggest companies are involved in the business of using technological reading of biomedicine to validate claims. However, the theoretical apparatuses remain the same as before. This book demonstrates a short critique of the theories and technology trending within the industry and demonstrates how the industry should be looking at the phenomenological foundations of memory as a body kinesthetic engagement before the image.

The debates concerning global terrorism focus on “radical Islam” and the way it can be “moderated” or pacified by appeals to its peaceful side. These debates include the discussion of the clash of civilizations, tolerance and its limits, and military means to defeat the perpetrators. Such cultural clashes appear in various parts of the globe, including India, Pakistan, and even among sects of the same civilizations. This monograph explores the nature of these cultural clashes and the resurgence of global terror to look at a more fundamental set of issues, including the misguided search for truth, resulting in Western post-modernism and “post-truth,” spanning the globe in the guise of multi-culturalism. The analysis of this context leads to questioning the basic composition of civilizations, their compatibility, and radical differences, leading to a dimension of awareness that has not been addressed by scholars studying civilizations. What is at issue is the inevitable “anarchistic terror,” which includes most unpredictable acts by “unsuspected” individuals, not only from Islam, but also by those emboldened by a specific mode of awareness. This level “dissolves” the various claims that the fundamental clash is among civilizations and points to two, modern, Western levels of this dissolution: literature and theory. The former calls for the collapse of anything resembling features of the world that are accessible to human awareness. The second level places the world at an arbitrary service for human “needs.” The result is made manifest by the claims from anarchistic terrorists that the modern West is “Satanic” and destructive of the created order of all things, which is a totally anarchistic point of view, while the answer from the modern West points to the fundamental anarchism of those who terrorize “Western” ways. The analysis of this context shows that both sides are anarchistic and face an inevitable collision without any possible justification. The collision is designed to unfold into a final domain that requires an “ontological” account of how such a collision in human life is possible, without relying on previously inadequate explanations. The text includes contemporary “turmoil” in global relationships, the various trends toward “autocracy” and “strong man” solutions to our predicaments. Such tendencies appear in the phenomenon of the conjunction of state and religion, so well pronounced in Russia, in Confucian China, the Middle East, the United States, and in European nations. It is to be noted that such solutions do not depend only on personality cults, but above all, on “legitimating” their stories. The point is that such stories are equally anarchistic.

The usual notion of incarceration suggests specific locations in a given society: prisons or, in gentler form, psychiatric institutions. This notion will be incorporated in the text in various and much broader contexts. We investigate civilizations and their specific cultures in terms of their compositions which may “incarcerate” a person without specific facilities: More recent and still continuous examples are Fascistic and Communist empires, or traditional autocratic and theocratic systems. In addition, there are civilizations which, while open and democratic, might exclude various groups from participation due to education, race, or class status—and such exclusion may not be regarded as “incarceration.” One prevalent form of autocratic incarceration is the control of education and literature available to the citizens. There are other forms which subject a group, or an entire civilization, to “incarceration” due to colonialisms and their usual “monological” imposition of totalizing discourse as a criterion for what is civilized and what is not, all the way to what is human and what is not adequate to be regarded as human. The monological form also applies to totalizing discourses in modern “sciences” and technical fields, offering “explanations” of every facet of human behavior. The trend is a push for “education” only in technical fields. It is also imperative to investigate the various contemporary trends in cultural theories which propose multi-cultural “methods” without attending to the issue of the illogical nature of such methods. Finally, we address the current debates of global migrations, immigrations, and the issues as to the status of persons caught in such movements with regard to “legal” questions. This issue is confronted by the emergence of “populisms” and “nationalisms” worldwide, and a usually avoided question, “Why there is a denouncement of the West by members of various civilizations and their cultures, and yet the demand that only the West should welcome “the others.”

The usual notion of incarceration suggests specific locations in a given society: prisons or, in gentler form, psychiatric institutions. This notion will be incorporated in the text in various and much broader contexts. We investigate civilizations and their specific cultures in terms of their compositions which may “incarcerate” a person without specific facilities: More recent and still continuous examples are Fascistic and Communist empires, or traditional autocratic and theocratic systems. In addition, there are civilizations which, while open and democratic, might exclude various groups from participation due to education, race, or class status—and such exclusion may not be regarded as “incarceration.” One prevalent form of autocratic incarceration is the control of education and literature available to the citizens. There are other forms which subject a group, or an entire civilization, to “incarceration” due to colonialisms and their usual “monological” imposition of totalizing discourse as a criterion for what is civilized and what is not, all the way to what is human and what is not adequate to be regarded as human. The monological form also applies to totalizing discourses in modern “sciences” and technical fields, offering “explanations” of every facet of human behavior. The trend is a push for “education” only in technical fields. It is also imperative to investigate the various contemporary trends in cultural theories which propose multi-cultural “methods” without attending to the issue of the illogical nature of such methods. Finally, we address the current debates of global migrations, immigrations, and the issues as to the status of persons caught in such movements with regard to “legal” questions. This issue is confronted by the emergence of “populisms” and “nationalisms” worldwide, and a usually avoided question, “Why there is a denouncement of the West by members of various civilizations and their cultures, and yet the demand that only the West should welcome “the others.”

The text presents arguments, demonstrating what domain belongs to philosophy and what areas are ""unphilosophical"" and at time ""antiphilosophical."" The ""unphilosophical"" systems are claims are based on the notion--even if not explicit--of ""man as the measure of things,"" while the unphilosophical"" trend consists of pronouncements whose veracity is not to be questioned. Since philosophy, in principle, is a quest for rational justification of any claim, then its questioning of those pronouncements leads to the denouncement and, in principle, forbidding, destruction of philosophical writings and philosophers. The argument is extended to disclose that both mentioned trends end up in ""metaphysics of the will"" wherein the human self-understanding as not only the measure, but also the ""creator"" of all things through the scientific-technical, is hence isometric with the antiphilosophical trends and its pronouncements of the supremacy of the will of the creator. At this level, modern ""philosophical"" trends become identical with the metaphysics of the will--divine complex.Counter to this trend is the philosophical classical tradition whose first principle is ""fallible reason"" and resultantly a demand and a duty to contest every claim, to find arguments for and against any position and its claim to the ""only truth."" Philosophy demands not only arguments, but a direct evidence in unhindered and uninterpreted phenomena--leading to the denial that ""man is the measure of all things."" The text purports to explicate--at the end--an ontological position that is also epistemological in order to encompass the classical notion of the primacy of the perceivable things of the world, but also of the principles of their space-time unfolding. At this level, there is a critique of the principles of ""first philosophies,"" both in their ontological and metaphysical forms

The text presents arguments, demonstrating what domain belongs to philosophy and what areas are ""unphilosophical"" and at time ""antiphilosophical."" The ""unphilosophical"" systems are claims are based on the notion--even if not explicit--of ""man as the measure of things,"" while the unphilosophical"" trend consists of pronouncements whose veracity is not to be questioned. Since philosophy, in principle, is a quest for rational justification of any claim, then its questioning of those pronouncements leads to the denouncement and, in principle, forbidding, destruction of philosophical writings and philosophers. The argument is extended to disclose that both mentioned trends end up in ""metaphysics of the will"" wherein the human self-understanding as not only the measure, but also the ""creator"" of all things through the scientific-technical, is hence isometric with the antiphilosophical trends and its pronouncements of the supremacy of the will of the creator. At this level, modern ""philosophical"" trends become identical with the metaphysics of the will--divine complex.Counter to this trend is the philosophical classical tradition whose first principle is ""fallible reason"" and resultantly a demand and a duty to contest every claim, to find arguments for and against any position and its claim to the ""only truth."" Philosophy demands not only arguments, but a direct evidence in unhindered and uninterpreted phenomena--leading to the denial that ""man is the measure of all things."" The text purports to explicate--at the end--an ontological position that is also epistemological in order to encompass the classical notion of the primacy of the perceivable things of the world, but also of the principles of their space-time unfolding. At this level, there is a critique of the principles of ""first philosophies,"" both in their ontological and metaphysical forms

This book is a condensation of critical essays in contemporary culture within the context of European phenomenology, employing its own self-critiques in order to demonstrate the methodological and experiential dimensions of the logic of culture.The essays are neither a part of foundationalism or foundation-less. Rather the experience of the space-time movement—logic of permanence/flux, stasis/flux, and the permutation of enhancement/reclamation and of permanence/flux and permanent/permanence—are critical for opening cultural studies to civilization and cosmological (world) investigations. The contemporary world of globalization, with boundaries becoming rather insignificant and the intermixing of global expressions, requires broader and more-encompassing observations.This book will be of interest in the social sciences and in comparative studies in the humanities, for programs in cultural studies, and in courses emphasizing cultural systems such as physical anthropology.

This book is a condensation of critical essays in contemporary culture within the context of European phenomenology, employing its own self-critiques in order to demonstrate the methodological and experiential dimensions of the logic of culture.The essays are neither a part of foundationalism or foundation-less. Rather the experience of the space-time movement—logic of permanence/flux, stasis/flux, and the permutation of enhancement/reclamation and of permanence/flux and permanent/permanence—are critical for opening cultural studies to civilization and cosmological (world) investigations. The contemporary world of globalization, with boundaries becoming rather insignificant and the intermixing of global expressions, requires broader and more-encompassing observations.This book will be of interest in the social sciences and in comparative studies in the humanities, for programs in cultural studies, and in courses emphasizing cultural systems such as physical anthropology.

Events in the contemporary world are available through a great variety of media and most of them consist of images, seemingly reflecting some “reality”. Yet there is no clear understanding what constitutes reflection, image, cultural symbolic designs and who is the reflecting Self. The text investigates the difference between visuality, images, vision and the different concepts of reality which are at the base of our understanding of the great varieties of means for reflection – from theological to technical.

This book takes the form of a dialogue. It presents two authors, specialized in the phenomenologу, posing questions to each other and offering complex answers for critical discussion. The book includes both presentation of different communication schools and philosophizing on the issues of communication. The authors debate numerous topics by providing the definition and etymology of communication, examining the limits of communication, and using a poli-logical base of communication. The issue which pervades all domains is that of mediation: how things, such as identities, styles, and bodies are mediated by culture, history, and tradition, and what the limits are of such mediation. This question leads to more complex issues of “mediated mediations” such that an explication of one medium is framed by another medium, leading to a question of meta-language as a fundamental, unmediated medium. This involves some fine points of mediation: perspectivity, discursivity, ethics of communication, ideology, private and public. Throughout the mutual, interrogative dialogue, the authors touch upon, but avoid the daunting commitment to, a theory of metacommunication, as well as the “transcendental” problematic of accessing the numerous theoretical, thematic, and historical aspects of communication.

This book takes the form of a dialogue. It presents two authors, specialized in the phenomenologу, posing questions to each other and offering complex answers for critical discussion. The book includes both presentation of different communication schools and philosophizing on the issues of communication. The authors debate numerous topics by providing the definition and etymology of communication, examining the limits of communication, and using a poli-logical base of communication. The issue which pervades all domains is that of mediation: how things, such as identities, styles, and bodies are mediated by culture, history, and tradition, and what the limits are of such mediation. This question leads to more complex issues of “mediated mediations” such that an explication of one medium is framed by another medium, leading to a question of meta-language as a fundamental, unmediated medium. This involves some fine points of mediation: perspectivity, discursivity, ethics of communication, ideology, private and public. Throughout the mutual, interrogative dialogue, the authors touch upon, but avoid the daunting commitment to, a theory of metacommunication, as well as the “transcendental” problematic of accessing the numerous theoretical, thematic, and historical aspects of communication.

The book’s focus is on freedom of speech and what content can place it in jeopardy. The sources, discussions and limitations of free speech, the relationship between ideology, freedom of speech in the media, and public issues are analyzed. From historical point of view, the citizens of more or less democratic societies assume freedom of speech as a basic right to challenge dictatorships, totalitarianisms and authority of any kind. Freedom of speech cannot be understood without the fundamental principles of democratic society, including a tolerance of others, their right to express various and unique opinions, open to challenge by others, and requiring mutual respect. Three domains for social responsibility concerning freedom of speech are addressed: practical, ecological and creative.

The book combines philosophical depth with a wide and deep discussion covering the essential existential challenges humanity is currently experiencing. Russia''s brutal aggression, which has shaken the world and is trying to destroy Ukraine, has led to a new wave of the global arms race, increasing and multiplying the problems caused by climate change. Thinkers, philosophers, and scientists of many countries are thinking about what awaits humanity if it does not wake up‑if it does not begin to rethink its path of civilizational development fundamentally. What can help to throw off the shackles of the ideology of economic growth and expansion of consumption? What can help to realize that humans are not the arbitrary rulers of the planet, eating irresponsibly and suicidally its juices, without gratefulness to the earth and sky for the opportunity to settle, live, and bud? Wars and plagues, in their own way, "postpone" the possibility of such a universal vision because it is necessary to deal with daily challenges with existing "means", including weapons. Still, at the same time, they are increasingly pointing to the necessity of a systematic civilizational transformation. Therefore, ecology is not simply caring for nature and the environment in this book but a broad philosophical and cultural anthropological approach that calls for new thinking and promotes civilizational transformation. The book calls for resurrecting and actualizing the global awareness, spirituality, and holiness that lies in the cultural heritage of humanity, which has been overshadowed by modern scientific and economic rationality, forcing nature, man, and life with countable recyclable resources. The book highlights the civilizational significance of primary awareness (planetary, cosmic, spiritual). It shows in various aspects how important ritual human activity based on the understanding of holiness and divinity is, guaranteeing social order and harmony in the world, society, and the human spirit. The people of earlier civilizations knew how to communicate with the gods and the powers of nature. The knowledge they accumulated must help us overcome the entrenched nature-culture divide that supports the illusion of man''s arbitrary technical omnipotence. The manifestations of such knowledge revealed in the book are concretized in their own way by considering the current problematic nodes in the plane of integral consciousness or integralism, taking into account the logic of modern capitalism. Algis Mickūnas and Žilvinas Svigaris play their philosophical instruments, surprisingly harmoniously complementing each other in such a way that they inevitably involve the reader‑no matter what his or her philosophical or cultural powers of imagination and life experience are, each will inevitably refer to his or her own topic of reflection. After all, global challenges and problems are already in each of our homes.