In debates about philosophical anthropology human beings have been defined in different ways. In Modern and Postmodern Crises of Symbolic Structures, the contributors view the human being primarily as animal symbolicum. They examine how the human being creates, interprets and changes symbolic structures, as well as how he is affected and impacted by them. The focus lies on the context of modernity and postmodernity, which is characterized by a number of interrelated crises of symbolic structures. These crises have affected the realms of science, religion, art, politics and education, and thus provoked crucial changes in the human being’s relations to himself, others and reality. The crises are not viewed merely as manifestations of dysfunctions, but rather as complex processes of transformation that also provide new opportunities.
Peter Šajda, Ph.D. (1977), is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. He has published monographs and many articles on the philosophy of existence, including The Kierkegaard Renaissance: Philosophy, Religion, Politics (Premedia, 2016).
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
1 How to Reform Humanism in the Post-human Era?
Yves Charles Zarka
2 The Struggles of the Individual in a Nihilistic Age: Kierkegaard’s and Jünger’s Critiques of Modernity
Peter Šajda
3 The Intertwining of Phenomenology and Philosophical Anthropology: from Husserl to Plessner
Jaroslava Vydrová
4 Under Interpellation: Phenomenology, Anthropology and Politics
Delia Popa
5 Feuerbach’s Conception of Theology or Philosophy of Religion as Anthropology
Jon Stewart
6 The Transformative Power of Art in “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth”
Jozef Majerník
7 The “Distraction” of Contemporary Art according to Yves Michaud
Róbert Karul
8 Czechoslovakia after 1989 through Arendt’s Eyes: from Pariahs to Strong Men
Dagmar Kusá and James Griffith
9 Notes on Phenomenology and Revolution
Michal Lipták
10 Performing the University
Ivana Komanická
Students and scholars interested in philosophical anthropology, humanism, social philosophy, phenomenology and symbolic structures, and anyone concerned with the critique of modernity and postmodernity.