imeon Evstatiev’s monograph “Religion and Politics in the Arab World,” bearing the subtitle “Islam in Society,” treats the complex relationship between religion and politics in the historical development of the Muslim societies.
Книгата на Светла Маринова Към политическата икономия на разказите за миналото в германската история на социологията е рефлексивна, в смисъла на Пиер Бурдийо, история на германската социология, написана …
Прочутата мисъл на Симон дьо Бовоар – „Една жена не се ражда жена. Тя става такава.” – е вдъхновила различни интерпретации, както поетични, докосващи се до фините струни на женското себеусещане, така …
Ведрото на Нютон срещу дървото на Декарт е детайлно, внимателно историко-философско изследване на мисълта на двете най-жалонни за формирането на модерната наука и научен светоглед фигури. Подобно на …
Пред последните десетилетия полето на изследванията върху висшето образование толкова се разшири, че вече обхваща повече от 20 отделни дисциплини и няколко десетки специализирани списания. Тази научна …
През страстите около Левски Мария Тодорова разказва българската идентичност. Всяка нация има своята „метафорична спойка”, чрез която можем да я разберем; необичайното в българския случай е …
Everyone who read Roumen Daskalov’s monograph about the Bulgarian Revival[1] must have been waiting impatiently for his new book, From Stambolov to Zhivkov. Major Debates in Modern Bulgarian Historiography Daskalov declares at the very beginning that he has written a history of Bulgarian historiography, or a history of Bulgarian historiographical discourse, where he is concerned not with the historical reality (the past) but with its historiographical representation (the history written about the past).
Knowing exactly what you are saying when you use a particular word or expression is something very important not only in everyday but also in scientific communication.
ccording to a popular notion, philosophy in Bulgaria today is characterized primarily by the fact that it was highly ideologized for a long time and will take a long time to break with ideology. On the other hand, in Bulgaria history of philosophy holds a stronger position than original philosophical research.
Work on Concepts covers a significant period of scientific work (the thirteen articles that make up this book were written from 1996 to 2010; one of them, ‘Work on Concepts’, is published here for the first time). In this book Hristo Todorov addresses a wide range of issues related to the central thematic motif: elucidating the uses of concepts in politics, science, and philosophy.
Maybe because of my own memories, I approached the book Childhood under Socialism expecting to find a happy childhood in it too. I was in that highly sentimental mood of remembering, best illustrated by propositions such as ‘Whatever childhood memories you may have, they are always nice, sweet and true!’ (to quote a comment from the visitors’ book of the Inventory Storehouse of Socialism exhibition, p. 173).
My encounter with Milena Iakimova’s book coincided with my arrival in a new city. I read Sofia of the Common People in my first weeks in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while I was getting used to the strange sounds and colours in my new apartment, looking for a new kindergarten, picking out new foods in the store, memorizing the local traffic regulations, browsing a new library, meeting new people and learning the structure and rules of a new university.
Had there been more books like this one, Bulgaria’s socialist past would have been more past and less present. A study on the practice of a defunct political actor, Pepka Boyadzhieva’s book may be read as a warning of the dangers of any social engineering in which the plurality of perspectives, prospects and positions is ignored, socially significant values are subjected to the interests of one social group, and a single social order absorbs all others.
The twentieth century faced thinking with a number of challenges related to events that left an imprint on the lives and memories of many witnesses and victims. The Holocaust, Chernobyl, the totalitarian regimes, the new forms of biopower and control became part of a collective experience that was almost impossible to articulate.
A few years ago, in a review of Ivaylo Ditchev’s book From Belonging to Identity. Politics of the Image (2002; in Bulgarian), I wrote that its general focus can be defined as ‘interest in the metamorphoses of the modern age in the age of globalization, that is, in the age of deterritorialization and crisis of the nation-state when communities controlled by the nation-state increasingly give way to networks that do not belong to anyone’s territory’.
Twenty-five years of academic political science in Bulgaria is probably not long enough to make serious generalizations. But it is long enough to identify trends, to establish parallels, to single out achievements.
At a time when narrow specialization has become quite characteristic of philosophy as a discipline, it is only natural that one would be surprised to find a book titled Theory of Philosophical Development (hereinafter abbreviated as TPD).
One can say with certainty that Momchil Metodiev’s book is the first comprehensive study on the subject in Bulgarian literature.
In his Letter on Humanism, Heidegger recounts a story told by Aristotle. Strangers come to visit Heraclitus, only to find the famous philosopher warming himself at a stove. Noticing their dismay at his humble appearance, Heraclitus calls to them to come in, with the words, ‘For here too the gods are present.
Shelters of Faith is the product of an almost ten-year-long interest that began while Martin Ossikovski was still a student and which gradually evolved into an in-depth study of the problems in question. I find the choice of subject of the book to be fully justified and enriching the philosophical, cultural and political studies of the Middle Ages, which in recent years have been developing in Bulgaria too.
A History of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. The Regime and Society (edited by Ivaylo Znepolski) has not appeared in a void. The closest context of this impressive volume (716 pages) is the series of books published by the Institute for Studies of the Recent Past, most of whose authors are also the authors of the studies in the History.
Probably every teacher of philosophy will have felt somewhat awkward when having to explain to different audiences what their science is really about. There are different ways of getting out of this situation, depending on the skills of the teachers and the expectations of the audience.
The context in which this amazingly comprehensive study is situated is the identity crisis of Bulgarian philosophers after 1989. More than twenty years later, the questions about the assessment (and self-assessment) of philosophers in Bulgaria as well as about their work during the totalitarian era remain quite sensitive and controversial.
In Journal extime, Michel Tournier makes the following analogy between literature and photography:
The smaller the aperture, the larger the depth of field, that is to say, the sharper the background will be. Conversely, a large aperture brings the subject into focus and blurs the rest of the picture.
Since his death, and in the conditions of democratization in Russia, Merab Mamardashvili has become an object of special interest. He is no doubt one of the most widely discussed philosophers today.
Dimitar Vatsov’s book is so provocative that it allows one to speak as much of it as through it. This is what I shall try to do now, where in a number of cases in speaking ‘of’ I will inevitably be also speaking ‘through’ it. I will begin, however, by speaking ‘around’ it.
