Browsing by Subject "mind"

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Access status: Open Access ,
Immortality as a network of relationships. Experience of building a posthumous avatar on the lifenaut platform
(Wydawnictwa AGH, 2019) Nowaczyk-Basińska, Katarzyna
Based on an analysis of the American Lifenaut research project, I attempt to capture immortality created today as a network of relationships among human and non-human factors. Lifenaut was established in 2006 as a pioneering project in the field of creating posthumous digital avatars. The users involved in the experiment gather data on the www.lifenaut.com platform to retain their personality in a digitized form after biological death. Part of my work is reconstructive – I describe the assumptions of the American project and the main concepts associated with it, such as »mindclone«, »mindfiles« and »mindware«. In the second part I present theresults of my own avatar creation experiment and confront them with the sociological perspective of symbolic interactionism (G.H. Mead, H. Blumer) and relational sociology (B. Latour).
Access status: Open Access ,
Kierkegaard and the concept of negative dialectics of Theodor Adorno
(Wydawnictwa AGH, 2012) Krawerenda-Wajda, Katarzyna
The main subject of this paper is the influence of Kierkegaard's philosophy on the concept of Adorno's dialectics. This article is focused on the analysis of Adorno's work published in 1966 titled Negative Dialectics. Adorno's concept of dialectics, which is based on undefined experience, is broadly similar to the »negative« concept of existential philosophy of Kierkegaard. Although Adorno uses the Hegelian dialectics to expose the ways in which Kierkegaard's thoughts fall into idealism. Finally, Adorno adopts Kierkegaard's criticism of Hegelian identity of thinking. Adorno, in Negative Dialectics refers to Kant, Hegel Heidegger, but seldom to Kierkegaard. A careful analysis shows that a number of themes and concepts of its predecessor have been assimilated to his philosophy.
Access status: Open Access ,
Magic as a science of imagination in the work of Ioan P. Culianu (1950–1991)
(Wydawnictwa AGH, 2017) Moretti, Roberta
The powerful spreading of new technologies and the mass media civilization have had a subtle, stealthy effect on the human imagination, a process that has its counterpart in external reality, in historical changes and in society. The role of imagination through historical changes was extensively explored by Ioan P. Culianu, a Romanian historian of religions and specialist in Late Antiquity and gnosticism, whose research was brutally interrupted by his assassination on May 21, 1991. He was shot to death around midday inside of a toilet at the Department of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago where he was teaching. He was only 41 years old. One of his main books is Eros and magic in the Renaissance (The University of Chicago Press, 1987), which has been translated into many languages and is probably one of the most complex and interesting 20$^{th}$-century studies on magic. He points out that the working of fantasy was fundamental to comprehend magical processes in the Renaissance, since magic was primarily directed to affect human imagination through the manipulation of phantams (»images« in Greek). He has been also a pioneer in the study of the historical vicissitudes that caused imagination to change from a civilization based on magic, as in the Renaissance, to a modern one based on science. To the scholar, the transition from a magic-based society to a modern one is explicable primarily by a change in the imaginary. One of the purposes of this paper is to shed light on the work of Ioan P. Culianu, especially on his research on magic, which he carried out throughout his life. Particularly interesting are the articles published in the last period of his life (1990–1991), when he was trying to develop a new paradigm of knowledge in the Humanities, concentrating on the study of the mind. He was shaping an original but uncompleted theory where the »cognitive revolution« was to be applied across and beyond the contexts of human science.