This book is a philosophical-historical examination of the influence of the knowledge of China imparted by the Jesuits on the thinking of the German Enlightenment in the 18th century.
The word Anthropocene, referring to a new era of humanity’s uncontrolled exercise of power over the Earth as a geophysical unit, could be translated using a cognitive metaphor as “the Age of Loss”. ...We have gained such power that we are unable to adjust or even fully track its manifestations. The relation between loss and power is continuous in all the basic areas of materialization of socio-political concepts: in politics, in economics, in law and the judiciary, in legislation, environmental protection, etc. The philosophy of loss and power is inseparable from economic concerns. The entirety of Western civilization is built on the economic calculus of profit and loss, whose results are directly transformed into decisions of power made by the administrative, political, ownership and power-broking elites. The environmental and climate crisis is therefore also a crisis of privilege of one group over others. The question for politics is which political means can one use to achieve a state of uncorrupted voluntary depriviligization. This level of prosperity will itself be the subject of environmental self-limitation, being presented as “loss”. It will be posed as a political problem with the intention of depoliticizing the subject and inequality of civilizations; precisely in accordance with the posed political problem of democracy, which has already uncovered the basic connection: liberalism won’t make a poor country rich.
Defining the problem: how political philosophy becomes environmental political philosophy. It is assumed that political philosophy is not represented by a purely conceptual analysis of basic ...political categories (justice, equality, freedom, etc.), but by everyday and habitual political decisions and the actions that follow them. The aim of transforming political philosophy is to articulate it as an instrument of change in the management of society. At the present time (Anthropocene) nature cannot exist as a technological program. A closed, clear, obvious and unambiguous ontological determination of nature is not admitted in its specifically capitalist construction. Context triumphs over nature, and it is only the context of the appreciative economy that puts the terms “nature” and “value” in context.
Few of the statements penned by philosophers have become as infamous as the “God is Dead!” of Friedrich Nietzsche. This study is not concerned with the reasons why this phrase is so popular. Instead, ...I would like to delve into the prehistory and partial genesis of the concept, something Nietzsche adopted from a previous tradition. Apart from known examples of theses on the death of God by Hegel, Schelling or Jean Paul, I will shed light on some of the confusion surrounding the phrase deus est mortuus in Mediaeval Christian liturgical literature and mysticism, with roots reaching back to Neoplatonism. The goal of this study is to point out that this phrase about the death of God had no significant constitutive meaning for Nietzsche but was, instead, a relatively common literary and rhetorical topos among other culturally diagnostic expressive elements. Nietzsche used it as an illustrative shortcut when describing the intercultural processes of his time, with no ambition to originality, instead, with the clear intention of shaking up the (non)thought of the comfortable bureaucrats and legalistic petit bourgeois of Germany in the late 19th century.
Leibniz was not the one to discover China, as far as Western culture was concerned. His historical contribution lies in the fact he presented Europe and China as two distinct ways of contemplating ...the world, as fully comparable and resulting in types of societies at the same high institutional, economic, technological, political and moral level. In this sense he saw China as the “Europe of the Orient” and as such susceptible to investigation by the same tools of natural philosophy which Leibniz knew from the environs of European scholarship. He was the first representative of the classical school of European philosophy to knowingly reject Eurocentrism. Leibniz followed the intentions of learned missionaries in his understanding of the Christian mission as a cultural and civilisational task, a search for mutual agreement and connections, in favour of a reciprocal understanding.
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