ALBERT EINSTEIN’S CONNECTIONS WITH SPINOZA’S PHILOSOPHY The paper aims to analyze the influence of Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy on Albert Einstein’s work, in particular his physics. Einstein was a man of genius personality of contemporary physics, but we can see him as a prominent philosopher, too. He studied the philosophical works of Kant, Leibniz, Hume and other modern philosophers. But his most preferred thinker was Baruch Spinoza. Einstein knew very well Spinoza’s main book, Ethics. He accepted Spinoza’s concepts of human being (...) and the dignity of man in the history of the world. The concept of God proposed by the author of Ethics was very important for Einstein. Spinoza’s inspiring philosophy is present in Einstein’s vision of the universe and in his deterministic view on quantum mechanics. This problem is reflected in the paper too. Keywords: BARUCH SPINOZA, ALBERT EINSTEIN, CONTEMPORARY PHYSICS, UNIVERSE. (shrink)

Whereas much has been written about migrants’ visibility, the multiple and complex layers of migrants’ invisibility invite further exploration. Migrants’ in/visibility is not clear-cut: it differs across various locations and, as such, demands a comparative, intersectional analysis. This paper seeks to explore it by investigating how recent migrants make sense of their own appearance, as well as those of others they encounter in their new places of residence. Specifically, I inquire into the notion of femininity as it is performed and (...) perceived by Polish migrant mothers living in German and British cities. I discuss whose performances of femininity are visible and whose femininity is rendered invisible in the eyes of my research participants, and what implications this may carry for urban and migration research. Strikingly, the women I interviewed only seem to recognise white British and German women's performances of femininity for what they are. Non-white and Muslim femininities remain, at best, invisible or, in the not infrequent cases of racism and Islamophobia, are stripped not only of their unique gendered features, but of humanity altogether. As seemingly peaceful interactions in urban space do not exclude privately harboured racial, ethnic, religious and class prejudice, a feminist revision of encounters with diversity provides valuable insight into the structure of such metropolitan paradoxes, yielding new understandings of how racism, classism and sexism persist alongside ostensibly inclusive urban cultures. (shrink)

The conversion of the Nubian Kingdoms, by the missions sent from Constantinople in the sixth century, was followed by Byzantine influence on Nubian art. One of the most obvious examples of this process was representing archangels dressed in loroi. This paper aims to present the evolution of loroi in Nubian art. In Byzantium, they were ceremonial stoles worn on special occasions by the emperors or the highest dignitaries. The archangels were also clad in loroi, acting as high officials at the (...) celestial court. Interestingly, loroi were adopted only for the images of archangels in Nubia, not for the images of Nubian kings. At the end of the 10th century, the lower end of the loroi was expanded to a broader segment resembling the Byzantine thorakion, typical of female images. This could have added splendor to their garments, but could it have also highlighted the vague gender of the archangels? (shrink)

"Sin duda, la sociedad está cambiando a pasos agigantados, pues temas hasta ayer tabú están en la mente de todos y en las nuevas costumbres que se concretan en nuevas leyes ayer impensables, pero necesarias para abarcar costumbres ayer ocultas y hasta prohibidas, como el divorcio, la homosexualidad o el aborto. La economía, la política y la sociedad han cambiado, pero no acertamos con el rumbo adecuado para vivir todos mejor. Tampoco acierta la religión, lo mismo en Occidente que en (...) Oriente. Y no sabemos si está desapareciendo el cristianismo en Europa o quiere surgir un nuevo y mejor cristianismo inspirado en la sencillez del primitivo que enseñó Jesús en los Evangelios". El autor ha reunido en este libro un conjunto de reflexiones, originalmente publicadas en El País a lo largo de bastantes años, en las que mezcla la religión abierta a los nuevos tiempos con grandes dosis de sociología, economía y política. (shrink)

The article attempts to show how memory influenced the formation of the unique spiritual identity of Edith Stein, who was born and grew up in the religious tradition of Judaism, but as an adult became the member of the Catholic Church. What seems to be unusual in her religious self-perception is the fact that despite conversion, Edith permanently regarded herself as a Jew and firmly claimed that she constantly belonged to the Jewish community. Her mind-set was immensely influenced by the (...) image of Jesus as a devout Jew portrayed in the New Testament, zealously practicing the sacred rites of Judaism, as well as her later analysis of the Christian and Jewish ways of worship. Her study exposed a deep bond linking Christianity with Judaism and by revealing this bond Edith Stein evoked the forgotten truth about the Jewish roots of Christianity which is deeply rooted in the faith of the Old Testament and draws a lot from the richness of its tradition. Undoubtedly, this important link reminded by Edith Stein, raised and developed later by the official teaching of the Catholic Church, was possible because she remembered the religious tradition in which she grew up and which she experienced in her childhood. Memory, therefore, became the constituent that shaped her own spiritual identity, but also contributed to the reinterpretation of the identity of the Christian community. (shrink)

Magdalena Krasińska A Work of Music in Roman Ingarden’s AestheticsThe theme taken in this article is an ontological concept of the musical work of Roman Ingarden developed on the basis of phenomenological aesthetics. According to the eidetic reduction Ingarden rejects any colloquial opinions about how the existence of a musical composition, so that he holds that musical work is not the same nor the mental experience, or the performance, or to the music notations. Making a critique of the idealistic, (...) psychologistic and materialistic positions to explain how the existence of the musical work, Ingarden classified it as a object of purely intentional, where the musical notation is the ontological basis. Currently notation don’t allow for consolidation of all the moments of the work, especially not sound moments, so musical composition as every being intentional, is the scheme required to complete and define more precisely where are the ontological gaps; each performance of a musical work is the complete of potential spaces, specification of works. A few comments on so constructed theory publishes musicologist Zofia Lissa. The main objection against Ingarden is the fact that his concept aspires to be universal, while he created it solely on the basis constituted in the scores ‘classical’ works of modern European music, while ignoring other musical phenomena, such as avant-garde music or folklore. Finally raised is a matter of the ontology of newest pieces of music, belonging to the so-called popular music, that do not have ontological basis in the form of musical notation, what in view of the Ingarden’s theory does problematic the issue of their identity. Keywords: ontological concept of the musical work, phenomenological aesthetics, Roman Ingarden, identity of the musical work. (shrink)

The goal of the paper is to consider whether women are vulnerable or protected on the labour market during the pandemic crisis, seeking answers in the wider context of previous downturns and economic theory. In times of crisis, female employment is likely to be more susceptible to cuts, for several reasons explained i.a. by the flexible buffers hypothesis or sex segregation hypothesis. Since the pandemic crisis is still unfolding, many of its effects are still unknown but it can be expected (...) that the COVID-19 crisis may have an unequal impact on women and men. Additional challenges in this crisis can be found in the home. Gender effects vary across EU countries, however, it is essential to develop at both the European and national level effective policy responses leading to gender balance in various dimensions. (shrink)

The article entitled “Perfect Memories in Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn” explores the fallibility of memory as presented in Another Brooklyn, a novel by an African American author Jacqueline Woodson. The text presents the idea that personal memories change due to the passage of time along with the new experiences of an individual, and relates it to the studied novel. Special attention is given to different dimensions of grief and loss presented in the analyzed story. The mourning after the loss of (...) loved ones is explored through the use of concepts such as Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief, the selective amnesia and the idea of continuing bonds. The process of growing up is also briefly considered as a mourning process over losing the innocence and safety provided by childhood. Further, the article presents the hardships of growing up without a mother in an unsafe neighbourhood, the loss of vital friendships and the search of a better life - all introduced through the recollections which occurred after a significant passage of time and the accumulation of experiences which lend themselves to the change of the mindset of the main character. (shrink)

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has upended lives and thrown the taken for granted into disarray. One of the most affected groups were teachers and students, faced with the necessity of school closures and—where logistically feasible—an urgent shift to emergency remote instruction, often with little prior notice. In this contribution, based on an online survey involving participants from 91 countries, we offer a perspective bridging the two groups, by investigating the role of teachers' demographics and professional adaptation to emergency (...) remote teaching in their perception of how their students were coping with the novel situation. The resultant model explains 51% of variance, and highlights the relative weights of the predictor variables. Given the importance of teacher perceptions in the effectiveness of their instruction, the findings may offer valuable guidelines for future training and intervention programs. (shrink)

It was in the mid-twentieth century that the independent theatrical form based entirely on improvisation, known now as improvisational/improvised theatre, impro or improv, came into existence and took shape. Viola Spolin, the intellectual and the logician behind the improvisational movement, first used her improvised games as a WPA worker running theater classes for underprivileged youth in Chicago in 1939. But it was not until 1955 that her son, Paul Sills, together with a college theater group, the Compass Players, used Spolin’s (...) games on stage. In the 1970s Sills made the format famous with his other project, the Second City. Since the emergence of improv in the US coincides with the renaissance of improvisation in theater, in this paper, I will look back at what may have prepared and propelled the emergence of improvised theater in the United States. Hence, this article is an attempt to look at the use of improvisation in theater and performing arts in the United States in the second half of the 20th century in order to highlight the various roles and functions of improvisation in the experimental theater of the day by analyzing how some of the most influential experimental theaters used improvisation as a means of play development, a component of actor training and an important element of the rehearsal process. (shrink)

The article explicates the main fields of hermeneutic research activity of Alicja Kuczyńska in which Neoplatonic inspirations, Renaissance models of life, and the values and traditional paradigms for understanding aesthetic categories that are dominant within them—such as image, creation, fiction, and mimesis—are viewed against the background of the phenomena, transformations, and problems that are unique to our own times, thereby providing old frameworks with new forms of philosophical relevance. Kuczyńska’s research topics, i.e. beauty, love, the anthropological dimension of creativity, the (...) role of imagination, and deification of creative personality gain revised interpretations, in which the accent is placed on creative activity and its value-creating dimension consisting in the transcendence of everyday reality. Characteristic of her research attitude is the tendency to consider philosophy and art in the context of transcending the finite dimension of being and undertaking anew and in different ways the effort to reach what is infinite, unconditioned, lost, truly existent in the Platonic sense. Kuczyńska’s research of this tendency takes on the dimension of positive valorisation of the state of “being in between” and exploration of artistic figures of “ascending.”. (shrink)

El artículo explora el antiidentitarismo del marxismo abierto, una corriente contemporánea que propone un sujeto crítico negativo que rechaza las definiciones. Cuestiono si este antiidentitarismo se limita a la abolición de la identidad de clase o si incluye otras identidades ligadas a otras opresiones. Expongo que los teóricos del marxismo abierto tienen una postura insuficiente y ambigua al respecto, que además no es coherente con sus propias pretensiones. Propongo que el antiidentitarismo del marxismo abierto solo es coherente si busca abolir (...) todas las identidades. Esto lo realizo a partir de establecer paralelos con el feminismo y la teoría queer. (shrink)

En las últimas décadas, las redes sociales virtuales se han convertido en espacios centrales para los/as jóvenes. Allí comparten información, se comunican con amigos/as, conocen gente y muestran su vida cotidiana. El enfoque dramatúrgico de Goffman ha sido ampliamente retomado para estudiar las prácticas on line de los/as jóvenes. Sin embargo, han sido menos frecuentes las investigaciones orientadas a comprender las normas que organizan el comportamiento juvenil en los espacios virtuales. En este artículo, analizamos las prácticas de presentación del sí (...) mismo que realizan en Instagram jóvenes estudiantes secundarios de clases medias altas de La Plata (Buenos Aires, Argentina), con el objetivo de identificar las reglas y los significados detrás del uso de esta plataforma. A su vez, buscamos comprender de qué manera los/as jóvenes se relacionan con estas reglas de comportamiento y con la presión de los/as pares para formar parte de espacios de sociabilidad on line. Para esto, a partir de un enfoque metodológico cualitativo, que combinó entrevistas biográficas con observaciones virtuales de publicaciones de Instagram, indagamos en las prácticas para mostrarse e interactuar on line de 27 varones y mujeres de entre 15 y 18 años. A partir de nuestra investigación, identificamos dos regulaciones principales para mostrarse en Instagram, asentadas en la imagen corporal y el estilo de vida. En relación al tipo de imagen corporal que se debe mostrar, encontramos una tendencia a la reproducción de estereotipos de género, donde se destacan la importancia de la delgadez, principalmente entre las mujeres, y de la musculatura, entre los varones. Con respecto a los estilos de vida, las regulaciones identificadas se orientan a la imitación de la vida cotidiana de personas famosas, enfatizando la importancia del consumo, la belleza y el entretenimiento. (shrink)