The article clarifies the main meanings and senses of the term “agreement”. The author compares the concept of “culture of agreement” with the concept of “culture of consensus” which has a close meaning and also with the concept of “culture of disagreement” which has a contrary meaning. Moreover, the author’s definitions of the concepts “culture of agreement” and “culture of disagreement” are suggested in the article.

The present papers brings up Cassirer’s idea of philosophy through the few and scattered remarks that he makes about non-European traditions of thought. While Cassirer’s philosophy of culture theorizes symbolic functions through an examination of symbolic forms, he only implicitly talks about culture as such. However, since culture is the unity of symbolic forms and in and by itself a cultural form, culture is always related to other cultures. And hence, one culture is not the sole possible and implies – to cite Wilhelm von Humboldt – a particular Weltansicht. So, firstly, how does Cassirer’s philosophy of culture relate to what is always present as its background, i.e. to European culture? And, secondly, how does his notion of philosophy relate to the cultural setting that it emerges from? To address these question, two paths seem possible: on the one hand, the top-down analysis from his philosophy of culture through to a determination of cultures based on different, but complementary modes of symbolization; and on the other hand, a bottom up analysis by beginning from Cassirer’s own comments and thoughts on non-European traditions. Since this path is rather unsystematic, it can serve as a counter narrative to Cassirer’s own systematic position. While both paths are pertinent and not mutually exclusive, in the present paper only the bottom-up analysis will be discussed.

General opinion argued that one important cause of social conflict is globalization, in which there is cultural globalization as new cultural centre. This opinion has origin in existence of the risk of cultural imperialism raised as a cultural centre. That is, a strong culture usually had the trend to impose hegemony to other peripheral national cultures. Nevertheless, the cultural imperialism always bears the economic and political motives. This is the very cause which leads to politico-cultural conflict. Therefore, in essence, cultural hegemony is also the very economic hegemony and it serves the economy. Thus in fact social conflicts are often the contradictions, but these contradictions could lead to conflict only when they are pushed to political and economic interests level, and then they are the truly economic and political conflicts and not cultural ones. Therefore, in essence, there are not purely cultural conflicts, but culture is only the medium for politico-economic conflict. There may be various kinds of solutions for the problem of conflict: the economic solutions, the political solutions, the social solutions and the cultural ones. Here we refer to cultural solutions to show how important the culture is for the problem of conflict and the social development. In doing so, we want to assert that cultural liberty is a basic condition for preventing conflict, and multiculturalism is a feasible solution for avoiding the risk of conflict. Finally, we concluded that a true global culture cannot lead to conflict and cannot annul cultural diversity, it also cannot lead to the imposition of centre on periphery. It only can lead to contradictions in diversity, but these are the dialectic contradictions between centre and periphery, that is the contradictions which lead to development. And these contradictions could lead to conflict only when they were manipulated by political speculations and profit-seeking spirits. And thus, global culture is a culture which has the more important and deep meaning than it is conceived now in many countries only as the mass culture.

It was the integration of mythos, ethos and logos that determined the unity of Hellenic culture. The mythos of ways of being in the world gave determination to the ethos of ways of acting in community and the logos of accounting for what went on in the world. The primary expressions of this integration were the divine enlightenments of the poesis of interpretation which were acted out in public performance. The disintegration came with the pluralization of cultures in the Hellenistic period, when there were acknowledged multiple cultures, and even as early as Plato, Isocrates and Aristotle, rhetoric and argument displaced mythos as the basis for logos and ethos. In the century gone by we have seen several anti-mythical movements that have been adversarial to cultural integration. Religious fundamentalism rejects mythos in favor of literalism. Positivism rejects mythos in favor of empiricism. Existentialism rejects mythos as “bad faith”. But, as Jaspers’ critique of Bultmann’s de-mythologicalization project made clear, each of these moves amounted to an attempt at re-mytholization of our ways of being in the world. Alasdair MacIntye early exposed how the integration of mythos, ethos and logos were rooted in performance. Later, in After Virtue, he lamented their disintegration. Berdyaev’s retreat to The New Middle Ages and Tillich’s embracing of the notion of a “broken myth” offer their resolutions, but no comprehensive plan. The Jew who continues to enact “we were together in the land of Egypt” and the Christian who “sups with the risen Lord” still ritualistically cling to a performance of a mythos in our secularized post-modern age, but find little carry-over to ethos and logos. The search for meaning remains the task of integrating mythos, ethos and logos in performance

The emergence of philosophic enterprise is linked directly to leisure. And since most academic disciplines ultimately trace their origin to philosophy, it can be said that most disciplines are, by extension, consequences of leisure activities. The implication of this is that leisure is the most important factor in the development of academic disciplines in general and philosophy in particular. Despite the role of leisure in the emergence of philosophy, philosophic interests in leisure are few and far between. This paper adopts the phenomenological method of investigation as it exposes the extent of philosophic disinterestedness in leisure. It examines a number of reasons that are responsible for this absence of interest. Standing on the principle of reciprocity, this paper argues that philosophy owes duty to contribute to leisure in its conceptual development and in the clarification of its benefits to society.

“Chinese values” is a concept defined in relation to “American values,” “Asian values” and the “Washington Consensus.” It is a product of the long-term development and evolution of Chinese society’s value system and constitutes the conceptual representation and theoretical enhancement of the complexity of current Chinese values. This paper will analyze the historical formation, evolutionary logic, pluralistic framework, underlying reasons, and inner grounds of present day China’s complex values in a multidimensional context that involves history and the present as well as China and the world, looking at the synchronous coexistence in modern China of diachronic conflicts. That unfolded over several hundred years in the course of Western modernization. Our contention is that present day China’s complex value reality and value concepts should be approached by using complex ideas and techniques. In the dynamic process of integrating manifold clues and multiple changes, we will vigorously safeguard “Chinese interests,” reasonably fulfill “China’s responsibilities,” consciously seek a “Chinese path,” soberly respond to “expectations of China,” consciously break down “China’s problems” and appropriately demonstrate “China’s confidence,” in order to better perform the positive function of philosophy and social sciences in interpreting and guiding the development of society.

Our lived and mental space and life is the intensive basis for our external social world – where order is maintained is the form of state apparatuses, politics, sciences, etc. It is clear that these intensive processes can be available for tracing only by a thinking which is not representative and which does not mirror our narcissistic image of ourselves. Thinking which does not operate in terms of habitual bias, where “habit [serves as] a principle which cannot invoke experience without falsifying it, or without, at the same time, invoking fictitious repetitions.”1 In my paper I will point out the structure and the possibility for freedom of subjectivity in contemporary representation-mediated culture and how it is related to Deleuze’s conception of philosophy and thinking.

A philosophy of culture without a social theory is insufficient. We have to acknowledge cultural-based respectively cultural-bound perception and relativity of social life go hand in hand. The surrounding world is not autonomous of the human being, but constructed or produced by human mind. But it is not the single human mind which constructs, creates or builds ‘world’ or ‘reality’. Everything man deals with can be seen as his ‘second nature’ or: ‘culture’ created by man. I want to prove my hypothesis by comparing Cassirer’s cultural philosophy with Berger/Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge. I am going to illustrate similarities between both: I show that the purpose of institutions established by the process of institutionalization Berger/Luckmann describe is not exclusively to legitimate or stabilize society’s current structure. Institutions have got a value of their own; in other words: as culture. Essential is the comparison of Cassirer’s concept of symbolic formation resp. mediacy of perception and his underlying theorem of symbolic pregnancy. On the level of the terminology I can prove evidence of great affinity. The social theory of Berger/Luckmann and their theory of institutions can be seen as missing parts of Cassirer’s cultural philosophy. I am able to demonstrate that the theory of Berger/Luckmann as cultural philosophy supplements Cassirer’s ‘Philosophy of Symbolic Forms’ with two crucial points: Berger/Luckmann supply a theory of sociality and add a ontogenetic perspective to the process of ‘culturalisation’.

The assumption, that perception is symbolically mediated, is the fundamental thought of Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945). Cassirer shows in his philosophy of culture that humans in different cultures differ in the way they ‘form’ symbolically. In language, myth, art and other forms humans provide themselves symbols to ‘explain’ the world. Each form is a way to see the world form a specific angle. To focus processes of symbolic forming in different cultures means to try to understand mankind in its intercultural character. That implies that Cassirer’s theoretical approach could be helpful to remedy deficiencies in sciences that do empirical research on cultures. Indeed all humans create culture through Symbolic Forms but cultures differ in the way they use the different Symbolic Forms. Unfortunately Cassirer’s attempt is received more by philosophers than by empirical cultural scientists. Still a lot of research on transculturation processes is lacking in a theory of human culture. From a philosophical anthropological point of view you may ask: What are single field researches and culture comparisons good for if there is no perspective on humans included, which says something about the human as an animal symbolicum? I would like to add: How can philosophers of culture in particular operationalize Ernst Cassirer’s ‘Philosophy of Symbolic Forms’ in order to help empirical cultural studies to remedy the lack in theory of culture in general? I will make a proposal.

Despite of the fact that walking is the most natural motion of a person and walk is a wide-spread phenomenon of human life, it is mostly out of the philosophical interest. It seems that walk is connected with thinking and philosophizing ob ovo. In the paper we aim to state inseparable connection and two-way influence of walking and thinking, moreover, of walk and philosophizing. Walk is interesting at least from three points of view: walk is a very specific manifestation of social, cultural and communicative activity; walk is a certain style of life of philosophers and of ordinary people, so to say, in “personal” dimension; walk and walking is one of the basic metaphors for the description and research of the thinking and discourse processes. In order to conceptualizing this “philosophy of walk” it is possible to use the known frame of binary oppositions. We can use in the analysis such oppositions as “inner–outer”, “order–confusion”, “consonance–dissonance”, “slowness–bustle”, “possibility of cessation–rashness”, “purposefulness–pointlessness”, “objective–means”.

While a particular cultural tradition is the context within which human nature is embedied or embodied (or being concretized and determined), the rich variety of cultural tradtions demonstrates the manifestation of human creativity in interpretating and developing human nature. Though cultural traditions are different but they are equal because they all share the common root of human nature as the original (and common) source for their specific (and therefore different) interpretations and developments of human nature. This is the very foundation of inter-cultural dialogue, in which different cultural traditions are to participate equally to contribute to forming the common culture of humanity and to the cause of peace and development of Humanity.

Since there is no full translation of Prison Notebooks, Chinese Gramsci study is still fragmentary. Scholars in China only investigate one or some aspects of Gramsci’s thoughts based on the translated works, not as a whole, for the reason of absent materials. At present, most of Gramsci’s translated works in China are political, therefore, his non-political works, especially the cultural thoughts, in some sense, are less regarded. In this paper, I argue that the absence of cultural aspects of his thought in Chinese edition needs to be changed. The cultural Gramsci is worthy to be carefully examined. Gramsci had ingeniously predicted the importance of language and hegemony in the contemporary world. Now it’s time for us to pay more attention to his insights.

The content of any national culture consists of the contributions made by its greatest minds (‘geniuses’): writers, artists, scientists, teachers, reformers, etc. As a rule, all the geniuses were on the border of cultural environments, they were influenced by other cultures and mainly due to this influence they have made contributes to the native culture. Reasoning from the concept of culture as a sense-bearing form of human existence and taking into account contradictory nature of the tendencies of the modern culture development, the author considers one of these tendencies which he defines as “a condition of metaculture”. In the state of metacultural dialogue, each culture has an opportunity to use creative achievements of other cultures reflexively to develop itself. In this condition the culture reveals its dependence upon ethical creative work of a personality. Consequently, creative gift becomes the basis of its existence. Under such conditions metaculture can be presented as a sphere of creative work of the personality at the borders of cultural environments.

In the structure of art there are repeated elements, such as integration and differentiation, generalization and individualization, statics and dynamics and others. This phenomenon is explained in different ways. Cyclic character is often connected with economy, with its prosperity or decline. Other authors explain this phenomenon as “inner will” characteristic to art. In the synergetic context art is a self-developing system and it is proved by systematic repetition of its firm conditions. Change of these conditions occurs in the period of bifurcation when new types and styles of art appear. In modern aesthetic practices «elimination» of an image of a man from art happens sometimes and that is breaking with classical art. However return to classics is inevitable because art is anthropological by its character.

Der moderne Begriff der „Kultur“ entwickelte sich im 18. Jahrhundert in Europa. Bis in die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts wurde das Wort „Kultur“ als Singularetantum verwendet für die kulturelle Entwicklung der gesamten Menschheit. Erst in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts verbreitete sich der Plural „Kulturen“ mit dem Singular „Kultur“ im Sinne einer einzelnen Kultur in den Geisteswissenschaften. Für die Kulturphilosophie ist zu fragen, ob diese auf dem Begriff der „Kultur“ als Singularetantum oder dem Begriff der „Kulturen“ aufzubauen ist.

En La obra de arte en la época de su reproductibilidad técnica, Walter Benjamin refuncionaliza la noción de valor de Marx para introducirla en el vocabulario de la estética, pone énfasis en que este ámbito no se desvincula del histórico-político-social, y afirma que lo político se juega incluso de manera más decisiva justamente en ámbitos que le son aparentemente ajenos, como lo son las prácticas artísticas. La formulación que Benjamin hace de los conceptos valor cultual y valor exhibitivo para explicar la historia del arte a partir de estos polos contrapuestos, así como para hacer una crítica de la experiencia estética, de la sensibilidad y de las prácticas artísticas en el contexto de la reproductibilidad técnica, permite poner énfasis en la función política que el arte adquiere en dicho contexto, y no únicamente una estética.

La propuesta relaciona los modos de vida de pueblos y naciones con la respuesta al problema axial que enfrenta hoy la humanidad: la cuestión ecológica. Esta cuestión no se limita a la preservación del medio ambiente oa la sustentabilidad de los recursos del planeta. Precisamente, porque setrata de una cuestión, nos hace responsables de la dirección que damos a losacontecimientos; acontecimientos que se configuran a partir del ejerciciode nuestra libertad y de las modalidades sucedáneas del poder con quehistóricamente la realizamos. En esta práctica de lo humano, en la que nosva el futuro, cabe distinguir, empero, niveles de responsabilidad. Así, valepreguntarse hoy, otra vez, con Søren Kierkegaard, si tiene sentido para loslíderes mundiales actuales la distinción entre bien y mal, o si, con la ayuda delos filósofos, los juegos retóricos y los giros estratégicos han ocupado para ellosel lugar de la ética. Por ello en el trabajo se asume la responsabilidad ecológicacomo compromiso existencial ante la vida, esto es, garantizar para la propiaconciencia que la vida vale la pena de ser vivida, que toda vida tiene sentido enlas decisiones y acciones cotidianas efectivas. Esta primera actitud ante la vidasupone otra disposición espiritual, la de la presencia del otro como condiciónde posibilidad de ser en el mundo. Soy y existo desde el otro. Otro son los otrosseres humanos y también la cultura que los sostiene, porque la cultura incluyelo que suele llamarse naturaleza. Pero ésta es solamente inteligible a la luz delos valores que conforman la cultura; no es ajeno a ella ni se le opone.

El concepto “identidad” ha sido sumamente cuestionado entre los científico sociales, especialmente debido a las consecuencias genocidas de posturas nacionalistas que Gellner (1991) llama “nacionalismos virulentos”. Asimismo, la discusión teórica generada a partir de temas como el multiculturalismo y la interculturalidad, han vuelto a poner en la mesa de análisis el concepto de “identidad”. Por tanto, se han asumido diversas posturas, algunas de las cuales han llegado hasta la descalificación total del concepto y de cualquier término que pudiera aludir a él. Dado que en Latinoamérica se ha discutido el tema enfocado sobre todo a los grupos indígenas y a los mestizos, se ha llevado a cabo una reflexión que permita cuestionar y proponer conceptos que favorezcan la comprensión de la realidad cultural que implica el pertenecer a una determinada colectividad. Para lograrlo, se ha elegido la deconstrucción derridiana como método. Así pues, se parte de un breve análisis semántico y posteriormente se plantean cinco tensiones que constituyen algunos de puntos principales de debate sobre tal concepto, las cuales en realidad se encuentran imbricadas, pero para efectos heurísticos, se revisarán por separado. Se concluye con un ejercicio de aplicación del “no concepto” derridiano: la “différance”, para concluir la reflexión.

The human being initiates determinability of being and non-being, violating integrity in this definability. One of the concepts that define the culture in the field of human relations is a “measure” which regulates and restricts both internal and external communication. The explication of the measures ratio as a philosophical category and the measure as a cultural phenomenon can understand the single nature of the human cognitive act. We observe a variety of forms of understanding of the universe, caused both by a variety of external world in its entirety, and the complexity and depth of the inner world of person. In this interaction of undivided in essence “two depths”, some third thing is born, namely, something that enriches the human being and improves the world; the language of cognition is born as ratio. Within the limits of our discourse, as an example proving the community of human beings, existential foundations of the reflection, I offer an explication of the concept of “culture” in Chechen language. The analysis of the concept reveals the depth of the latent determination in the culture of the nation, grounds of culture in general and shows that the basis of Chechen ethnos are the links that give birth to society. “Measure” is the determinant of transformation of masses to a cultural community.

The world-view universals are the categories which accumulate the social experience obtained during the historical development, they enable man of a particular culture to value, comprehend and perceive the outer world. We can distinguish the world-view universals formed on the basis of 1) the subject-and-object relations which lead to creating such philosophical categories as “space”, “time”, “chance”, “necessity”, “measure” etc.; 2) the intersubjective cooperation and the interaction between man and society which generate such notions as “man”, society”, “good”, “evil”, “beauty”, “duty”, “justice”, “liberty” etc. The peculiarity of the world-view universals is determined by the fact that they have both an abstract general meaning which is invariant in different cultures and some specific meanings which correspond to the national and ethnic differences of the definite cultures. All this influences on the forming of the humanities.