The article aims to elucidate on the notion of philosophy of culture, particularly in non-Western societies. This is exemplified by the promotion of philosophy,with its advocates and approaches, in Filipino culture. In addition, it gives an account of a type of alienation that has had a profound influence upon the Filipinoexperience, philosophical thought and practice; the so-called dealienation of culture.

I am looking at a bird flying above my head and I barely see it; in the meantime I am talking to a friend of mine about my job. All these things: the bird, my friend, my job, even the ground beneath my feet, are outside of me. Yet, while I am living these objects, they are here, in my head. How can one explain this relationship,where something that is completely different from my being becomes a part of me? If something transcends my own nature, how can it be immanent, within my lived experience? How can I relate to something that is completely other than me? How can it ‘in-exist’ in my mind? Is there an original ‘me’ or am I always the result of my social life? Is the world in which I am living objective, or is it just mine? In this paper I would like to answer all these questions, focusing on the theory of intersubjectivity as it has been displayed by Husserl’s phenomenological method. In several instances, this method was defined by Husserl himself as a “‘sociological’ transcendental philosophy” (Husserl, 1968: 539), or even as a “transcendental sociology” (Husserl, 1966: 220), for it looks into the lived experience of the subject as if the subject were a transcendental intersubjective unit. The Husserliana volumes we refer to throughout this work are: the Fifth Cartesian Meditation (Husserl, 1982), which implicitly sends us to volume 8 (First Philosophy, second part & other important additions), and volumes 13 to 15 of the Husserliana (Husserl, 1973), which are dedicated especially to the issue of intersubjectivity. In what follows, I will focus firstly on the notion of intentionality, secondly on the constitution of the otherness and its objectivity, thirdly on the idea of ego and its life-world.

This article aims to show that so-called Mail Art (art distributed via the international postal system) is based on five paradoxes. These paradoxes, which correlateto how Mail Art is distributed and exhibited by means of changing technologies, its aesthetics, its democratic ideals, and its transnational character, explain howMail Art has emerged and been constructed as an artistic medium on the stage of world cultures. While the paradoxes of Mail Art are specific for this particular medium, I argue that all media types are more or less marked by inherent paradoxes. The fact that Mail Art includes all kinds of material, sensorial, spatiotemporal, and semiotic modes makes it an unusual art form, but here it is primarily meant to be an example of the ambiguous ways in which media types in general are delimited and defined.

Three lines of semiotic thought were developed by Greek culture: that of Medicine, that of the Arts of discourse (Logic, Dialectic and Rhetoric), and finally,that of Language, strictly speaking. Even though these three branches evolved in quite parallel terms, they only slightly influenced one another, which hindered the existence of a general Semiotics. However, this fact does not play down the reflection on Semiosis carried out by the Greeks.

Tourism industry is increasingly stripping traveling of one of its most fundamental anthropological and existential values: its being a laboratory in which travelerscan temporarily experience the disruption of their regime of sedentary belonging, protected by a plan of return. According to this perspective, non-touristy travelingis one of the best ways to test the limits of one’s tolerance to cultural diversity and acknowledge, as a consequence, the identity of one’s cultural and existential‘home.’ Yet, modern and contemporary travelogues mostly extol the traveler’s heroic capacity to overcome the limits of tolerance. Claiming that such emphasis stems from the colonial desire to domesticate and assimilate the world and its diversity, the article proposes to subvert this logic and to replace panoramic travelogues, dominated by the will power of subjects, with prosopopoeic travelogues, that tell the stories of how the things of the world, relics of centuries of civilization, reject travelers and their desire of domestication and conquest. As an example of this subversion, the article proposes a semiotic exploration of toilets, their variety, and their ‘cultural resistance.’

Translation is a fundamental part of cultural dissemination. Based on an empirical qualitative research, the first part of this article presents the effects that thewave of translations after 2005, the first of utmost importance in the Romanian cultural environment, engaged in the local literary field, and in the second part there are brought into discussion some important intercultural barriers in translation and promotion of literature abroad, such as defining literature in a different way, new forms of censorship or problematic semiotic codes of literature of revolt.

This paper is focused on the major contributions of the two main schools of semiotic thought in Russia during the 20th century. It considers cultural mythologiesof behaviour as the focal point of the Moscow-Tartu school and then proceeds to the pre-semiotic school of Russian thought, which dealt with the philosophy of the (divine) Name(s). Both traditions are linked by a common preoccupation with the human sign-vehicles-cultural, artistic, literary and religious. Russian semiotics of culture (the author’s life & biography considered as a peculiar kind of a sign-text) and Russian religious philosophy of language (philosophy of the Name) are the most unique scholarly offerings to have originated within the Eastern-European tradition of semiotics.

Batik industry, Indonesia’s traditional practice of dying cloth through wax resist methods, is considered an important source of intangible cultural heritage andprotected under UNESCO. The industry is very diverse and many different colors and motives are used. Research in this article focuses on Batik in Yogyakarta,Surakarta, Lasem, Tuban and Garut regions. This paper studies the connotative implications of Batik’s cultural significations that pass on from older to youngergenerations revealing the importance of visuality and touch in constructing meaning within certain cultures.

Hong Kong is a peculiar case for the study of cultural practices. One of the most Westernized cities in Asia, Hong Kong is, to many people in China, one ofthe most ‘Chinese’ places in the country. Hong Kong’s no-place situation presents an interesting example of the tensions within and without cultural systems and their relations to language.

A belief commonly held in linguistics and philosophy is that semantics is defined by syntax. In this article, I will demonstrate that this does not hold true for Turkish. A fundamental syntactical rule builds around the successive order of words or speech units in a sentence. The order determines the meaning of the sentence, which in turn is rendered meaningless if the rule is not observed. In a given language, if a sentence retains meaning without this rule being applied, then the rule cannot be said to determine meaning. Turkish, with its mathematical structure, is one such language. In effect, the degree to which semantics is determined by syntax varies considerably from one language to the other. If meaning is constructed through dissimilar means in different languages, then it is not possible to talk about a single theory of meaningfulness valid for all languages. Each language is uniquely determined, and is a reflection of its proper cultural background. A theory of language must take into account this cultural framework. In this paper, I shall deal with a different way of constructing meaning whereby syntax does not determine semantics, and present the linguistic possibilities it gives rise to.

Before one can speculate about a new world order and “a clash of civilizations”, or “the end of history”, it is necessary to develop an appropriate set of measures to compare human competition in world politics and economy. Components and the generic model of an autonomous civilization is defined for eight civilizations recognized at the beginning of the 21st century. Each component of contemporary civilizations is numerically estimated in order to construct the civilization index. A comparative analysis of 8 civilizations’ indexes is provided in order to define strategies for the civilization development within 3 zones of encounters: clashes, modernization, and westernization. Two layers of world civilizations are defined and the dynamics of world civilization at the beginning of the 3rd Millennium is modeled. Based on that dynamics, the challenges for civilizations and peoples conclude the paper.

These are reflections on Rev. Professor Hryniewicz’s substantial essay presented by an eminent historian of philosophy.

The paper attempts to show that Christian hope is not a product of religious fantasy. It finds today an ally in the dialogue with the natural sciences which started in recent years on the topic of the ultimate destiny of the world. The natural sciences have confirmed that the universe is doomed to physical annihilation. Humanity with its cultural riches, scientists say, is only an episode in universal history and doomed to perish. Hence, if the Earth is nothing more than an island of rationality in a cosmic void, then the only thing we can do is to keep up a heroic attitude worthy of human beings towards our own fragile existence. Contemporary science’s visions of the future are pessimistic: abundant, though short-lived, evolution culminating in a sense of final futility and the ultimate destruction of all life in the universe. Such forecasts question religion’s claims for the eschatological transformation of all creation. Christian eschatology does not accept, however, reductionist presuppositions about the very nature of reality. The universe contains levels of meaning far richer than what we have been able to discover sofar. Theology’s task is not to provide easy consolation, or generate false hopes. It has a good reason to avoid catastrophism, and maintain calm in its strivings to keep up our faith in God’s concern for the destiny of all His creatures. Theologians have to take a serious stand on the very concept of finitude, furthered by natural and social sciences. This, in turn, will require critical review of such concepts as the world’s future in God, hope and new creation. This effort must be undertaken in dialogue with the scientific views of the world’s finitude. Both sides are prone to stereotype judgements and shallow answers which must be corrected in consideration of the complexity of the issue at hand. Christian theology has to justify its claim to truth, but certainly not by launching battles with science. Christian hope shows the new creation not as annihilation and destruction of the old but as its ultimate transfiguration and salvific transformation. It speaks about the paradox of continuity/discontinuity in this new universe’s emergence. Special attention is paid in the paper to the “logical” structure of matter. If the world ofultimate events is, in fact, to be a new world of the resurrection, created by transition into new reality, then certain scientific suggestions and data on the present world’s processes could prove helpful in grasping the truly cosmic dimensions of Christian hope. Crucial here will not so much be particular data but rather a sort of meta-science allowing the deduction of general concepts from the detailed achievements of scientific research. Such generalized insights include today the following elements: 1) the dynamic concept of physical reality, 2) the relationality of its processes and, 3) a deeper understanding of the complexity of matter/energy as carriers of a specific information-bearing pattern. It appears that there are some similarities in science’s and theology’s strivings for a deeper understanding of the truth of reality, which continues to evade our theories and teaches us modesty. Neither method nor concept has yet managed to explaineverything. There exists no universal key to a comprehensive interpretation. The postulate to avoid reductionism in approaching the manifold richness of reality is addressed to scientists and theologians alike.

This paper examines various views—religious, scientific, philosophical—on the meaning and significance of world history. The view it defends is a phenomenological, non-metaphysical one, i.e., it is one that does not seek to understand history in the light of end-states lying beyond time and history but which seeks, rather, to lay bare the logic at work within the contingency of events. Taking as its focus the phenomenon of globalization, the paper seeks to make explicit the global ontology that is implicit in philosophical hermeneutics. The thesis it defends in this regard is that, to the degree that it prevails and by reason of a kind of “functional necessity,” globalization is capable of bringing into being a global ethic of mutuality and reciprocity.

In this article I offer an account of what it means for Universalism to be a metaphilosophy. I first argue that traditional philosophical systems and views suffer from two main defects. First, they are closed, in the sense that they have made their final judgment on what the world is like. Second, they are mostly Eurocentric; regardless of their attempt to be objective and universalist in their orientation, they express the European values, beliefs, and world views. As a metaphilosophy, Universalism is an open concept. It recognizes that our knowledge of the world is an on-going process of discovery. It does not attempt to synthesize or reject the variety of religious, ideological, and philosophical views and approaches; on the contrary, it seeks to provide a universal conceptual framework within which these views and approaches can thrive and dialogue with each other. The structure of this framework is made up of the universal features of nature and human nature. Accordingly the universal is not an ideal or natural or metaphysical essence of some kind. The universal is made, and it is made collectively by scholars from the different academic disciplines. This is why Universalism aspires to articulate the most comprehensive vision of the world. In this attempt it tries to grasp the highest fruits of all the achievements of the human spirit in religion, ideology, philosophy, and culture. I also discuss two more important features of Universalism as a metaphilosophy: co-creation and metanoia.

In the period from September 15, 2004 to November 15, 2004 there took place a 10-week philosophical seminar, which for some time has been organized every fall by The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy and The Center for the Study of Culture and Values—both institutions associated with The Catholic University of America in Washington.

Political relations in today’s world are in a deep, perhaps even radically threatening disequilibrium; similarly, humanity’s home—the Earth—is treated with disdain and contempt despite its increasingly angry protests. Moreover, the rules and principles by which most of the world runs its economic affairs and strives to “modernize” its life are founded on a set of market laws devoid of all social context and only serve to deepen the dangerous contrasts between small islands of wealth and a sea of humanity doomed to poverty and alienation.