Journal articles on the topic 'Metamorphosis of thinking'

In this paper, an interweaving of the concepts of metamorphosis, developed by Ulrich Beck, and the scientific thinking style of Ludwik Fleck is suggested. Due to our own relevant preliminary work, it seems obvious to bring these two concepts together for the purpose of a theoretical connection useful for linguistics, especially for discourse linguistics. After a short introduction (1) and a review of the state of research on Fleck’s theory of cognition (2), the core term “metamorphosis” is semantically determined (3), and comments are made on the relevance of the concept. This is followed by an analysis of Beck’s The Metamorphosis of the World, which focuses on the concept of metamorphosis as he sees it (4). Here, the linguistic relevance of the concept is emphasized, which Beck mentions explicitly. This is followed by a section on Ludwik Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (5.). Here, comments are made on Fleck’s thinking style and on the thinking collective. On this basis, the synthesis of Beck’s and Fleck’s ideas is sought (6.), a directed perception with a view to social metamorphoses. This can best be done linguistically using the discourse-linguistic multi-layer analysis (DIMEAN), as proposed by Spitzmüller/Warnke. DIMEAN is presented accordingly, and subsequently modified for the analysis of linguistic manifestations of metamorphosis (6.1). Using the example of various linguistic metamorphosis phenomena from the discourse around the German federal elections of 2017–2018, the applicability of the combination of Beck’s and Fleck’s ideas is then tested (6.2). The article concludes with a summary and perspectives for further research (7).

In recent years, interdisciplinary research, including folklore, ethnography, linguoculturology and other disciplines, has been expanding. The complex study of materials related to various sciences ensures the complementarity of the fields of science, contributes to a deeper and more systematic understanding of the phenomena of language and culture. In particular, the comparative study of the specific motives and methods in the discourse of mythological traditions and fairy tales in folklore texts serves to determine the way of thinking, mentality and imagination of different peoples. This article is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of metamorphosis, which is reflected in the folklore of the peoples of the East. Metamorphosis is the transformation of any being or thing, form or species into a new, different form and type, as well as an unusual change in something. Metamorphoses rely on the most ancient mythopoetic ideas and reflect their unique characteristics. The article comparatively studies the application of the method of metamorphosis in the myths, legends, epics and fairy tales of the peoples of the East, the universal and different aspectsof metamorphoses. The types of metamorphoses, their ways of occurrence, causes, factors and peculiarities are also described.

This interview with Ulrich Beck was undertaken in late August 2014. At this juncture Beck was preparing what was to be his final book, The Metamorphosis of the World (2016). The conversation is reflective of Beck's thinking around the theory of metamorphosis at that time and represents his views on the underlying dynamics of social transformation and the mobilizing power of global risks.

The call to transform the growth society lacks an analysis of the human will. Problematically for degrowth, the enactment of this so-called will to transform has undesired matter-energetic consequences. Every act of transformation requires matter–energy, adding to the cumulative throughput of societies. To revert the ecospherical metabolism from a state of overshoot to one of degrowth, a metamorphosis in being is proposed. Building on Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, the article invites degrowth practitioners to become releasers by waiting for the unexpected and then to prepare for the expected, the collapse of civilization. A practice of releasement, where meditative thinking resides, is considered as an effective way to counter the destructive will to transform, and hence contribute to degrowth.

The article deals with André Malraux’s (1901–1976) comparative theory of art. He, a French intellectual, novelist, and philosopher developed an original philosophical approach to art works and their transformations in time which has still a significant impact to contemporary comparative studies of art. The idea of metamorphosis expresses Malraux’s radical turn from classical academic aesthetics and his closeness to existential philosophical and aesthetical thinking. It reinforces the concept of the imaginary museum and provides a more philosophical background. Each culture perceives and accepts the art of other cultures according to its own viewpoints in a process which is defined by Malraux as metamorphosis. The full significance of metamorphosis appeared in modern civilisation—the first which collected art forms from any period and place. The work of art lives its own life deliberated from history and its consequential postulation of human permanence. The metamorphosis is the key to Malraux’s humanist metaphysics of art.

This month, your students will learn scientific facts about one of the most fascinating and numerous insect species on Earth—butterflies! These integrated word problems encourage students to use critical thinking and problem-solving skills as they learn about butterfly life cycles, biology, and migration. For additional interesting information about butterflies, visit http://www.kidsdiscover.com/spotlight/metamorphosis-kids/.

Abstract ›Moved‹, ›Shocked‹ and ›Transformed‹. Current Time Diagnoses as Seismographs for a Metamorphosis of Educational Thinking and the Question of ›Higher Education‹ This paper engages with time diagnoses and their impact on educational thinking. Since Ulrich Beck’s »Risk Society« (1992; »Risikogesellschaft« 1986) at the latest, such time diagnoses are shaping educational discourses with their contributions to understanding social change in the present and anticipated future. Against the backdrop of Andreas Reckwitz’ concept of ›singularity‹ and Hartmut Rosa’s interpretation of ›resonance‹ – two quite different approaches to recent change – this article asks for educational figures in both of them to highlight possible starting points for future theoretical approaches in education.

This study aims to develop digital-based comic media on students' critical thinking skills on high-class metamorphosis material. This type of research uses Research and Development (RnD). The research instrument used questionnaires and tests. The subject of this research was conducted by a validator (a media expert lecturer, a material expert lecturer and 2 homeroom teachers). It can be concluded that the quality of comic products as a learning medium for critical thinking skills based on validation results by expert lecturers and practitioners. The final result of the comic media feasibility assessment on each component is that the content, material and media feasibility components are categorized as 'Excellent' by experts and practitioners, making it very feasible to test.

This article examines the connections between 1960s student protests, particularly the occupation of the University of Tokyo in 1968-9, and 1980s cyberpunk film in Japan. I argue that these films, while critical of the student movement, aim to reclaim and transform the utopian spirit that motivated them. Using the global 1960s framework, I situate Japanese cyberpunk film within the wider debates of this decade, particularly those concerning personal liberation and affluence. Using Tom Moylan’s concept of the critical dystopia, I demonstrate that utopian thinking does not disappear after 1968 in Japan but undergoes metamorphosis in these films.

Path dependence, used in social sciences to model phenomena of various natures, provides an opportunity to reflect on how knowledge about the past works. In the new millennium, the ethos of history and its role in the lives of people occupy a large place in transdisciplinary research programs and discussions, in which not only historians, but also philosophers and representatives of all sciences, without exception, participate. It is connected with rethinking the conceptual foundations of historical knowledge and the formation of a new historical culture. The article discuss- Path dependence … 15 es modern controversial trends in the epistemology of historiography related to the problems of historical dynamics and such basic concepts for historical knowledge as historicity, historical time, and the politics of time. Analysis of avant-garde trends in intellectual culture allows us to show how changes occur in the understanding and production of the historical. In the context of a rapidly changing world and a radical renewal of temporal experience, the discovery of the politics of time, the rethinking of historicity, and the search for high-quality historical time clarify the specifics of modern historical research, which is born at the intersection of theory and practice. Culture affirms the idea of the performative role of history and historians in our time. Historians do not just study the past; they participate in forming historicity and the temporal regime in which they live, helping people analyze life situations, make decisions, form the rules of communication, and create "institutions" as basic cultural structures that determine life in the present and allow them to find resources for thinking about the future.

This paper focuses on the urge of young people to find a purpose in their lives and make them more meaningful by insisting on the uniqueness of every individual. It is ba-sed on the analysis of two films: Professor Kosta Vujić’s Hat (directed by Zdravko Šotra, 2012; based on the novel by MilovanVitezović) and Dead Poets Society (by Peter Weir, 1989). This journey is made through resisting and  ghting against rigid rules of the educational system. The metamorphosis is infiluenced by two extraordinary teachers who give their students motivation and support. We will also consider the role of a teacher in the modern society and the possibility to switch from an ordinary lecturer to an exceptional leader, who encourages these students to look at life from different perspectives by making them question common thinking patterns.

This article discusses a philosophical experience that occurred through observing and writing an account of a philosophy class with this question in mind: What can a literary work/reading evoke as an experience of thought in a philosophy class? We attempt to answer this by reflecting on how the act of literary reading can constitute a proponent bias to initiate an experience of thought, common thread of a dialogue that will drive the entire conversation. To this end, we dialogue and delineate a parallel path, based on a comparison between the account of this experience in a municipal public school and the transformation/metamorphosis of a butterfly. We then seek to convey through poetic language a lightness, an invitation to fly, to enable us to leave the ground and inhabit the air that literally gives voice to a first grader, probably autistic, who had spent the last six months in regular classes, but who did not speak in public. We see experience as Larrosa (2011) does, as something that affects, that passes through, “this that happens to me,” while we adopt Kohan’s (2016) view of thinking in public schools as one of the mandatory paradoxes and primary purposes of education. In so doing, our goal is to present philosophy for/with children as a real possibility to enable leaving a cocoon, the bringing to fruition of a cycle of metamorphosis from childhood or from education itself in/to thought. This article thus argues in favor of the importance of philosophy in education, since it literally provides the opportunity to stimulate thought.

The phenomenon of anti-urbanism has accompanied the process of modernisation since the emergence of modernity. The city, the modern metropolis played a vital role in this transition from premodern world to modern era. The metamorphosis of archaic structures, including the fields of economy, society and thinking, are inevitably associated with tensions engendering aversion against the city. Anti-urbanism appeared sporadically everywhere, as a continuous tradition, it emerged at two remote corners of the world: in United States and Germany. Hungarian anti-urbanism of the interwar period had been motivated by the shock of the disintegration of the “Historical Greater Hungary”. The motif of guilty city emerged in the atmosphere of scapegoating: Budapest appeared as incompatible with Hungarian national character. These ruminations about the role of city were embedded in a special context mixing city-philosophy, cultural criticism, German-origin crisis philosophy, political philosophy and national characterology. It was a peculiar mixture in the Central European region: Hungarian interwar thought, from this respect, follows the regional patterns.

One of the most peculiar texts of French Romanticism is Jules Michelet’s today little-read tome, L’Insecte (1857), a fascinating forerunner of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. In Book 2, Chapter 8, entitled ‘De la rénovation de nos arts par l’étude de l’Insecte’ [On the renovation of our arts through studying insects]. Michelet writes there already of two themes that are central to the panorama of intersections between natural history thinking and architectural thought and practice outlined in this essay (itself an interim report on a much longer research project). Here I can take up only some key episodes in the veritable explosion of interest throughout the long nineteenth century (1789 to 1914), and after 1850 in particular: in inorganic and organic nature as sources of inspiration, models even, in the quest to confront the challenges not only of modern society and construction but also of the yearning for a modern style in architecture, and the issue of the new ability to see rather than intuit the inner workings of nature. Michelet writes:

When Arthur Robinson published the first edition of Elements of Cartography in 1953, it marked a major change in academic cartography. Erwin Raisz’s General Cartography, first published in 1938 and revised in 1948, had been the standard text. Robinson’s book represented the metamorphosis in cartography after WWII and set the standard for the second half of the twentieth century. A review of the book’s contents through its 6 editions reveals the prevalent thinking in cartography during a dynamic period in the history of cartography. Through it we can trace changes from hand-drawn maps to the rise of GIS and remote sensing. Although Elements is no longer the major textbook, its impact was enormous. This paper traces the history of late twentieth century cartography through the pages of Elements of Cartography. A content analysis of all six editions of Elements of Cartography was done to determine the emphasis on various aspects of cartography. An analysis of Erwin Raisz’s two editions of General Cartography was also included in order to note the changes in content and philosophy from pre-war to post-war cartography.

AbstractHolocaust Theology, first developed by Jewish scholars, has had a definite impact on the Christian attitude with regard to Judaism. It made Christianity aware of its Anti-Judaist thinking and acting in the past, one of the root causes of Anti-Semitism and one of the factors that led to the Holocaust in Nazi-Germany during World War II. Similar forms of industrial killing and genocide did happen, however, elsewhere in the world as well. Most important of all was the ' metamorphosis ' of the Christian concept of God: no longer did God's almighty power and benevolent will for his chosen people dominate the theological discourse, but God's compassion for those who suffer and and the Gospel of Peace and human rights. Mission to the Jews was gradually replaced by Christian-Jewish dialogue. Both in mission studies, ecumenism and intercultural theology, theologians seem to have received the fundamental truth of the early patristic saying: There is no violence in God. This makes a new alliance of theology with the humanities possible on the level of academia and enables a critical stand of theology against the political power play causing the actual clash of civilisations.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the complex risks of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and their nonlinear influence on sustainable development. In the context of this global pandemic, this article shows the limits of “thinking national” and argues that metamorphization of national to cosmopolitan sustainable development is possible on the basis of overcoming national egoism with cosmopolitan survival. The article builds on the “the theory of metamorphosis” proposed by U. Beck (2010). Phenomena are analyzed through the effects of the “arrow of time” (I. Prigogine) and “methodological cosmopolitanism”. The main results are as follows: The risks of COVID-19 have mixed effects on sustainable development. On the one hand, they undermine the traditional approaches towards social security and sustainability, but on the other hand, there is a chance of establishing cosmopolitan medical cooperation in the struggle against viruses by passing from national biopolitics and national structures of sustainable development to cosmopolitan (global concerted) counterparts. The conclusion is drawn that in order to realize this possibility, it is necessary to re-discover the existing visions of sustainable development while taking into consideration the common struggle of nations against epidemics.

This article brings the writing of Marie Darrieussecq into dialogue with the philosophy of Catherine Malabou, exploring how both think the mutability and transformability of the body in relation to recent scientific and technological discovery and innovation. From the metamorphosis of a woman into a sow in Truismes (1996) to the cloning of human life in Notre vie dans les forêts (2017), Darrieussecq’s novels foreground the body as a site of constant change and reinvention. Meanwhile, Malabou’s interdisciplinary elaboration of the concept of ‘plasticity’ between continental thought and the biological sciences reveals all structures and forms of life to be plastic and intrinsically open to change, from the neuroplasticity of the human brain to the epigenetic development of organisms. This article presents both Darrieussecq and Malabou as writers and thinkers of plasticity, exploring how their respective plasticities develop through a relationship to science which is itself changeable and ambiguous. In different but converging ways, both suggest how science discovers and innovates with the plasticity of life, whilst often also controlling and manipulating this same plasticity in the context of late capitalism. More optimistically, this article proposes that Darrieussecq and Malabou also envisage a becoming plastic of the sciences themselves, liberating plasticity as a discourse of freedom as a thinking with science, literature, and philosophy.

Misconceptions/misunderstandings are a basic problem often encountered in topics in education. “Misunderstandings” commonly observed about evolution makes it difficult for biology teachers to teach this topic. Reasons that are related to teachers are a basic source of misconceptions. Misconceptions can increase incrementally if their source is teachers. This study aims to determine the nature and scope of nonscientific views about evolution in preservice science teachers. An important step in correcting misconceptions or misunderstandings is to first determine the frequently observed misunderstandings. This study investigates and compares the misconceptions of students who have completed an evolution course and those who have not. The results showed that an evolution course considerably decreased the misconceptions. The most frequently observed misconceptions were; considering evolution as the effort to bring living things to perfection, associating evolution only with Darwin, identifying evolution with metamorphosis, thinking that living things evolve to accommodate, and having only a human-focused perspective about evolution. The idea that believing in evolution is an alternative to believing in a creator; that it is not possible for someone to believe in a creator and, at the same time in evolution, or vice versa also appeared as a noteworthy misconception revealed by the study.

The article “«Christian yoga»? A few reflections on the Jesus’ Prayer and hesychasm” is a kind of commentary on the Polish translation of the article “Becoming what we pray...” by Michel Plekon that is presented in the same issue of periodical “Kultury Wschodniosłowiańskie — oblicza i dialog”. Author tried to remind the most important facts and figures connected with the history of the Jesus’ Prayer and hesychasm. Moreover, there are described controversies concerning the physical method that was used by some hesychasts during practice of the Jesus’ Prayer. Additionally, one can readabout the role of the heart in Orthodox theology and prayer tradition of Eastern Church. This role can not be overtaxed because from the point of view of Orthodox theology, the heart is the centre of human being, person. It is not only the physical organ, not only the area of emotions and affections but also the space of intelligence, thoughts and wisdom. But most of all, the heart is the place of mysterious meeting of God and man. In the secret hall of human heart a man can fell silent presence of Transcendence, can fellthe real epiphany of God who unceasingly waits for metamorphosis of human being’smentality, thinking, reason, activity, emotions, relations, who waits for transformation of the whole man.

In this paper I intend to show that Merleau-Ponty’s conception of movement as primordial expression, whereby movement is a shaping force that can be discerned in the forms it creates, allows us to go beyond the superficial definition of movement as “change of place” and discover its most essential characteristic: that is the expression of a motion—intrinsic to feeling—which can take on the form of either a generative thrust or an act that traces out and sheds light on the reserve of shapes that everything we have felt has silently traced within us. My argument will unfold in three main stages. First, I intend to show that from Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on pictorial movement there emerges a richer and more refined definition of movement that brings together the two meanings of Aristotelian dunamis (δύναμις): potentia passiva, or being acted upon, and potentia activa, or tending towards act. Second, I will show that this particular understanding of movement allows us to uncover the lived dimension of movement that is intrinsic to sense experience and enacts the metamorphosis of our impressions into the expression that reveals to us the carnal obverse [envers charnel] of our experiences of the visible world. Finally, I will show that this particular understanding of movement proves to be a strategy for thinking of both the emergence of sense within the flesh of the world and the advent of history that unravels at its heart.

Jean-Paul Sartre, in describing the realization of his freedom, was often inclined to say mysterious things like ‘I am what I am not’, ‘I am not what I am’ (‘as I am already what I will be …, I am the self which I will be, in the mode of not being it’, ‘I make myself not to be the past … which I am’.) He was therefore plainly contradicting himself, but was this merely a playful literary figure (paradox), or was he really being incoherent? By the latter judgment I do not mean to reject his statements entirely (like many of his Anglo-Saxon contemporaries); for I believe there is an intimate link between contradiction and freedom, as I shall explain in this paper. But a minor thing we must first have out of the way is the suggestion that Sartre's language was just a rhetorical trope, designed merely to express some banal platitude in a bemusing way: ‘I am not yet what I will be’, ‘I am no longer what I was’ are sane and sensible, for instance, but cannot be the meant content of Sartre's sayings, since, while they would indeed describe the reform of some character, they would be appropriate only before or after some metamorphosis, not, as Sartre clearly intended, in the midst of some process of riddance and conversion, whether radical or otherwise. Yet, in the turmoil of such a change, ‘I am not what I am’ (or the everyday ‘I am not myself’) still, surely, cannot be true, and if that is the case, Sartre must be being inocherent, and therefore, obfuscating and deliberately obscure, and hence, it seems, must properly be rejected by all right and clear thinking men.

Translation is the cornerstone of many scientific studies. This is a multifaceted niche in the literature, because translation studies as a phenomenon is due to the ambivalence of perception and judgment. Many writers and literary critics have substantiated this topic in their research. For example, M. Rylsky, R. Gromiak, A. Tkachenko, M. Lanovyk. This paper focuses on only one aspect of the mainstream, namely the study of translation from a related language, as it seems that this type of text reproduction may cause less difficulty compared to translation from distant languages, but de facto hide many obstacles on the way to the perfect metamorphosis of the components of the text. Through I. Drach’s interpretations it is possible to trace the uniqueness of his idiosyncrasy within the colorfulness of the Ukrainian language and linguistic realities. Purpose: to investigate the comparative aspect on the material of Russian-language transformations of I. Drach’s poetry: comparison of art worlds, receptive strategies of narrators, the role of translations and the mediating language between the author and the recipient. According to the set purpose the following tasks are allocated: make a comparative analysis of I. Drach’s poetry and its Russian-language transformations; to investigate the level of completed translations, distinguishing between positive and negative aspects; to define the role of «pseudo-friends of translators», creolisms, untranslatable realities and translation compensations in interpretations of Ukrainian-language poems; to investigate whether the translation tries to preserve the so-called spirit of the original, whether it adapts the poetry to the level of another language, thinking, national psychology; determine the extent to which the balance between the transformation of architecture, rhythmic melodies, associative, metaphorical and symbolic systems of the original is preserved.

Excavation of Etton, the first British neolithic causewayed enclosure with waterlogged deposits, cleared the interior by the end of 1986. As well as making a cautionary tale as to how different two halves of a seemingly homogeneous site may be, the final areas force some re-thinking of just what this, and other, causewayed enclosures actually were.

The article is devoted to the transformations of society in the era of globalization. The global world is seen as a consequence of the successful implementation of the world-historical the Project of Modernity. Its completion results in the loss of its intellectual authority and historical effective- ness. The principal quality of contemporary society became its globality. The paradoxical phenomenon of the world, that had ceased to be a reality, became an integrative shape of the global transformations. Visibility took the privileged place here. The degradation of reality is analyzed in its main forms: dematerialization of reality; decline and destruction of human sensory experience; destruction of the alive contacts with living beings and the capacity to empathize with somebody; the loss of the space of the human existence space features of a stable, predictable, structured se- mantic order. The consequence of that is the destruction of the foundations of the communities and society as a whole, which is fixed by the notion of their «vagueness». The correlation to this social metamorphosis is a new anthropological format — the singularity, which provides for the theoretical abolition of identity as a way for defining a man. It means the loss of an individual’s predictability and its determination as a social character. The network is the way through which the singularities interact, and swarms are the natural form of their association. Swarm is a historically new, unstructured, but subordinated to common impulses union, which consists of points of activity of different intensity. The analysis of society is incomplete without taking into account its discursive-communicative nature. In the global world there is a decline in the discourses. The signs of that process are the lack of legitimacy in classical instances of the meaning (truth, good, beauty, etc.), the degeneration of thinking into mixing, changing criteria of significance (dominance of curiosity and impression), social degradation of the media. The main feature of these changes is the latest phenomenon of information power (the power of depersonalized information space and information technology — those modes of circulation and use of information that became a determining factor in human life in the globalized world).

This article dwells on consideration of Russian animalistic sculpture of the late XIX – early XX centuries, representing a new plastic thinking and figurative system. This important historical period, that was marked by the development of Russian impressionism in sculpture, had a fruitful effect on animalistic plastics. By this time, the animalistic sculptural genre, which had fully established itself in its stylistic figurative system, at the turn of the century had experienced something new. We are talking about fresh way o thinking and look as at the plastic itself as at the object of the image. Sculpture has never been of such a «dynamic» quality and the animal image in sculpture has never been perceived so fleetingly before. ЗHere is a figurative concept that encompasses all the fine lines of the semantic significance of animalistic plastics. It is characterized, first of all, by the fact that the image begins to acquire greater symbolic ambiguity and meaningful subtlety. The main purpose of this article is to пTo track the meaning and the novelty of impressionistic thinking in animalistics by the example of the works of A. Golubkina, P. Trubetskoy, N. Andreev, V. Domogatsky. It’s noted that the novelty of the impressionistic thinking in animal sculpture is based on a «movable» plastic and «metamorphoses» impressionistic thinking in animal sculpture is based on “movable” plastic and “metamorphoses” of the sculpture shape and the process, which takes place in animalistics, reflects a significant side of the development of Russian sculpture of the late XIX – early XX centuries, opening up new perspectives and solutions.

The emergence of Industry 4.0, also referred to as the fourth industrial revolution, has entirely transformed how the industry or business functions and evolves. It can be attributed to its broadening focus on automation, decentralization, system integration, cyber-physical systems, etc. Its implementation promises numerous benefits in terms of higher productivity, greater volatility, better control and streamlining of processes, accelerated enterprise growth, sustainable development, etc. Despite the worldwide recognition and realization of Industry 4.0, its holistic adoption is constrained by the requirements of specific skills among the workforce. The personnel are expected to acquire adaptive thinking, cognitive and computational skills, predominantly in the area of information technology, data analytics, etc. Thus, the universities that laid the foundation for future talents or trends in society have to adapt and modernize the existing programs, facilities, and infrastructure. This reshaping of higher education in consonance with the vision of Industry 4.0 possesses its opportunities and challenges. There are, of course, a multitude of factors involved and they need a reasonable assessment to strategically plan this metamorphosis. Therefore, this work aims to explore and analyze the different factors that influence the progression and enactment of Industry 4.0 in universities for sustainable education. For this purpose, a systematic approach based on a questionnaire as well as a SWOT (strengths (S), weaknesses (W), opportunities (O), and threats (T)) integrated with the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is adopted. The questionnaires are administered to university employees and students (or stakeholders) to assess their viewpoint, as well as to estimate the priority values for individual factors to be included in SWOT. The AHP is implemented to quantify the different factors in terms of weights using a pairwise comparison matrix. Finally, the SWOT matrix is established depending on the questionnaire assessment and the AHP weights to figure out stakeholders’ perspectives, in addition to the needed strategic scheme. The SWOT implementation of this research proposes an aggressive approach for universities, where they must make full use of their strengths to take advantage of the emerging opportunities in Industry 4.0. The results also indicate that there are fundamental requirements for universities in Industry 4.0, including effective financial planning, skilled staff, increased industrial partnerships, advanced infrastructure, revised curricula, and insightful workshops. This investigation undoubtedly underlines the importance of practical expertise and the implementation of digital technologies at the university level to empower novices with the requisite skills and a competitive advantage for Industry 4.0.

Covid 19 Pandemic and Environmental Crisis: Critical IssuesResumo O artigo discute as questões críticas que emergem da catástrofe provocada pela pandemia do covid19. Trata-se de uma crise, ao mesmo tempo sanitária, ambiental e econômica, questionando os fundamentos que regem a sociabilidade. O esvaziamento dos serviços coletivos públicos em favor do setor privado, principalmente, em relação ao sistema de saúde e a visão econômica da natureza, reduzida a estoque de recursos, estão na origem da falta de uma resposta adequada ao problema. Essa constatação aponta para a necessidade da reconstituição do comum, como cimento da sociedade, e da compreensão ecocentrada da natureza, como serviços ecossistêmicos para as condições ambientais para a reprodução da vida. Essa tomada de posição significa pensar um outro modelo de economia que parte de que a natureza é um limite aos processos produtivos, impondo-se, como consequência, levar em consideração, nos cálculos, a entropia e os danos provocados por esses processos. A necessária metamorfose do nosso tempo exige, na verdade, uma mutação antropológica radical na concepção vigente do homo oeconomicus e a emergência do homo communis.Abstract The article discusses critical issues that emerge from the catastrophe of the covid19 pandemic. It is a question of a crisis, which is, at the same time, sanitarian, environmental and economical, questioning the basis that manages the sociability. The emptying of the public collective services in favor of the private sector, mainly, concerning the health system and the economic approach of the nature, reduced to a stock of resources, are at the origin of the lack of an appropriate answer to the problem. This remark points out the necessity of the reconstruction of the common, as the foundation of the society, and the ecocentric understanding of the nature, as ecosystem service for the environmental conditions to the reproduction of life. This point of view means thinking other pattern of economy which departs that the nature is a limit to the production processes, imposing, consequently, having in consideration the calculus of the entropy and the damages of these processes on the budget. The needed metamorphosis of our time demands actually radical anthropological change on the in force conception of the homo oeconomicus and the emergency of the homo communis.Key Words: Pandemic, Sanitary Crisis, Environmental Crisis, Ecocentrism, Ecological Economy, Homo Oeconomicus.

The article examines the role of value conglomerate currents in sections of willing machines inthe philosophy of G. Deleuze and F. Guattari. The movement and current of value conglomeratesthrough the person turned away from God is refined and formed. Accordingly, the essence of theconcepts introduced by the philosophers of the «wanting machine» and «body without organs»is clarified. It is noted that the specificity of the terminological apparatus of the collaborationof philosophers is built on the defined ontological plane of diversity and the dichotomouscontradiction of mental and schizoid judgments, where meaning loses the usual forms of logicand is replaced by singularities. The dichotomy of singularities was developed by G. Deleuzein the treatise «The Logic of Meaning», during the study of planes of meaning in the worksof L. Carroll. It is established that the desiring machine becomes the presentation of the basiccomponent of the person - as an organism, mental thinking and unconscious consumption. Havingthe constituent organs of activity, a person is unconsciously formed into a willing machine, thatis, a person moves at will, which is modeled in his instructions for using his own organism. It isnoted that the machine that desires is not just a symbiosis of spare parts, which can be noticed inthe philosophy of G. Deleuze and F. Guattari in the first place, but is a machine that constantlydesires, even when something sucks in itself. Desire pushes the machine to interconnect withother machines, so it becomes a slave of its own desires, and the range of these desires expandsand then narrows like a pendulum oscillation. The desires themselves are irresistible, so someof them are controlled by capitalism and psychiatry through the structure of a society of control,digitization and detritorialization. It is the machines that desire to do everything by the body, butit causes the body to suffer, because the body is already a concept of docking, levers, standards ofconnection, moral regulators of the superconscious. It is determined that the body without organscomes into conflict with the wanting machine, because the body searches for the cause of sufferingin the presence of organs, and therefore removes them, becomes sterile. However, philosopherspoint to the constant repetition of motions not only of the desiring machine, but also of the bodywithout organs: decipherment returns to digitization, the body being filled by the organs of desire.The processes of constant return are deteritized by capitalism. Value conglomerates themselvescombine into the horrible twin of God and the devil, good and evil. The minority replaces themajority. An example of the metamorphosis of a minority homosexual into the majority of LGBTpeople is given. It is stated that the most valuable conglomerates are embedded in the ontologicalmetamorphosis, not in the dualism of the pairs of good and evil. The values themselves are definedas the lines of cutting a person through the pendulum movements of the jacket of good and evil,and therefore, as such, they are not internal to the wanting machine. The model of movement ofthe flows of value conglomerates, which is represented as a continuous cutting of the lines of thegood and evil desires of passive thinking machines, driven into the judgment of the social systemby the method of psychoanalytic compulsion, is defined. In this model, the face of God is alwaysturned away from man, and the desire of man crosses God as if sewing him to his own judgment.

Universal service has a pivotal role in market liberalization and competition on both sides of the Atlantic. It is central to the European thinking on markets and public service and is an inevitable element of market liberalization and sectoral competition rules. The universal service aims at preserving the public service in a competitive environment. The paper analyzes this cornerstone of the European thinking from a comparative and trans-sectoral perspective, demonstrating that the concept of universal services should be fundamentally re-conceptualized in EU electronic communications and energy regulation.

It is well known that Jacques Derrida emphasized the idea of an essential cohabitation between philosophy and architecture, declaring: "The Collège international de philosophie should provide the place for a meeting (rencontre), a thinking meeting, between philosophy and architecture. Not in order to finally have them confront each other, but to think what has always maintained them together in the most essential of cohabitations." This paper addresses in particular a hypothesis about the metamorphoses of this meeting that, from unity of architectonics and principles, becomes multiple and of another nature. So there is a reevaluation in terms of limits and passages; in other words, in terms of opening up. The first meeting can be considered as a metaphorical game of mirrors in which each presents itself as prevailing over the other forms of knowledge - one as the science of theory, the other as a science of techniques. This ordered and oriented posturing will collapse at the same time as the disappearance of a finite cosmos. In this dissolution, architecture and philosophy have recomposed themselves to deal with the space and time of inhabited milieus that affect not only the constitution of the gaze, but also a transformation of the world. It is examined how their interface is a heuristic structure of questioning.

<p><em>The renewal of Islamic thinking continuously develops from time to time in Indonesia. This research tries to answer two main problems, they are: how are the reasoning or ideology developed by Liberal Islam Network (LIN)?; and how are LIN’s main ideas and their metamorphoses? The research applies qualitative method with hermeneutic approach. The data is collected by library research or text documentation. The data is collected on August 18^th to August 29^th 2015. The research finds that the ideas of Liberal Islam Network show significant liberal signs. From the ontology of text, in reading religious text, LIN’s assumptions are “the critics over the truth”. LIN applies humanistic approach in reading the religious texts. This is confirmed by LIN’s defense toward human’s dignity. From the aspect of theoretically analytical tools in reading religious texts, LIN applies social sciences, which are socio-historical analyses. LIN uses symbol or semiotics analyses to read the religious text. The main notions of LIN are: First, Islam changes, it is not static; second, context is the first and history is the latter. Here, in reading a religious text, LIN wants to place context (socio-history) proportionally; third, LIN intends to hold God in our ground and history. The metamorphoses of LIN’s ideas are: firstly is to oppose theocracy; secondly is to endorse democracy; thirdly is to endorse gender equality; fourthly is to contextualize religious doctrines; and fifthly is to support pluralism and freedom of thinking.</em></p>

The present article gives a review of the book “In the Circle of Conservative Utopia. Structure and Metamorphoses of Russian Slavophilism” by the world-known historian of Russian thought and member of the Polish Academy of Sciences Andrzej Walicki, that was published in Russian translation one year before the death of its author. The book is based on the original author’s conception of Russian conservatism reflecting the national peculiarities of Russian philosophy in the 18th and 19th centuries. According to Walicki, the essence of conservatism consists not in the legitimism and protection of the existing social and state order, but in the certain worldview and thinking style that oppose liberalism and rationalistic philosophy of the Enlightenment represented as various concepts of conservative philosophic romanticism. Those concepts were reflected in the ideas of the Slavophils A. Grigoriev, V. Odoevsky, K. Leontiev, A. Herzen, V. Soloviev and others.

The following article considers a recurrent topic in contemporary political analysis: what is truth in times when reality is faked? The main theoretical basis of study is Foucault’s philosophy, particularly in light of his inquiry into the dynamics and functioning of power, along with his observation that power undergoes metamorphoses. In our present times, configured in terms of a historical condition in which truth has come to reflect individual interests and behavior has been monetized and disciplined by the appearance of the individual in social networks, the figure of the thinker is weakened to give way to the replicant. In such conditions (favoring the replicant), critical thinking is submerged and “thought” appears as an outdated gesture, falling increasingly into disuse. It is therefore the body of this individual – conceptualized here as the replicant – that represents one of the most significant marks of power in the post-truth era.

Digitalization of society has ambivalent consequences: there are new benefits (‘smart’ technologies, artificial intellect, multiple knowledge), but at the same time digital risks and metamorphoses that traumatize the behavior and thinking of people, alienate them from social ties and life-worlds. These processes have become a challenge for sociology and other social sciences that strive to develop new approaches, among which the digital and humanistic turns are the most relevant. The author aims at (a) analyzing the impact of digitalization on the production of metamorphoses and side effects on society and man, which are related to new complex risks and manifest challenges to sociology; (b) developing the contours of the conception of ‘the digital turn in sociology’ and identifying its essence in comparison with other, previous turns in sociology - linguistic, risk, cultural, etc.; (c) proposing the means that allow to overcome or minimize the side effects of the existing type of digitalization - the author argues for the demand to move sociology in the direction of the integral use of the instruments of the digital and humanistic turns. The article considers new challenges to mankind and scientific knowledge as determined not so much by the very process of digitalization, but by its existing type based on principles of formal rationality, pragmatism, and mercantilism neglecting, in fact, life-worlds of people. This type of digitalization is not ‘universal’ and can be changed by an alternative humanistic trend of digitalization. In order to begin establishing the humanistic trend of digitalization scientists should integrate the theoretical instruments of the proposed digital turn with other interdisciplinary turns and especially with the humanistic turn.

The author analyzes the post-Cold War international arena thoroughly, be delineating one by one Us different systemic, geopolitical, hegemonic, and strategic metamorphoses. The emergence of a fragmented transnational subsystem — the social component of the international System — has made this era fertile ground for third-wave conflicts, i.e. cultural conflicts or shocks between civilizations. The lack of any recognized leadership and the collective exercise of the system's governability may lead one to observe that armed violence is being waged by means other than those of major inter-state wars. In such a context, one may deduce that emphasis on the concept of collective security is working to the detriment of defence-minded thinking and to the benefit of strategies for active and very early conflict prevention. The entire realm of strategy is thus open to a wide-ranging, Worldwide arena. The main consequences have been an end to the old custodial arrangements of geopolitics, thereby transforming NATO in Europe, and a renewed activism in Asia, where the trend is towards creation of a specific security subsystem. These transformations of the international System have brought about metamorphoses in the notions of enemy, boundary, conflict, and power. Such changes also highlight the « rationality deficit » now affecting the System and the proliferation of the notion of « meaning », which is everywhere lacking in consistency. The shifting of the security dilemma to the subnational, internal level has accordingly resulted from the breakup of nations and the decolonization of empires. The author concludes that it may prove useful, even valuable, to try and identify the normative elements of the post-Cold War international System and to outline, however imperfectly, the new distribution of international power. The reader will also find afresh look at the doctrinal debate about international System theory and about the epistemology of the discipline that deals with it.

AbstractThis article suggests that the presence of talking animals in the Apocryphal Acts of Paul, Peter, Thomas and Phillip, examples of Christian prose fiction, shows a Christian intervention in a wider cultural discussion taking place in the period about human self-understandings and identity. The hierarchical thinking of ancient culture consigned many humans to animal status. Two second-century narratives, Apuleius' Metamorphoses and the Greek Onos, through their depictions of a human suddenly transformed into an ass, suggest that authors of the period used this image of an animal-man to reflect on what it would be like for someone to lose his or her place and voice in society (as those reduced to slavery did) and suddenly find oneself in the position of an animal, treated as less than fully human, as so many people in this period were. The Apocryphal Acts through their motif of talking animals worked to unsettle traditional status structures. Their representation of speaking animals figured a message of universal inclusiveness and equal participation by all species in the Christian community and worked to challenge the contemporary social hierarchy that devalued some persons in the society as too akin to animals.

The article deals with the problem of the formation of the environment as a complex eco-socio-natural space of an environmentally oriented person. The purpose of the article is to reveal the two-way influence of nature and man on the state of the environment and the ability of the individual to adapt to all kinds of natural metamorphoses based on their needs. The authors argue that the formation and development of an environmentally oriented personality is a key aspect in the formation of an eco-social and natural space. Balance environmental, moral and spiritual and social and economic needs of modern society, the harmonious coexistence with nature, the integration of rational nature management and stabilization of ecological conditions become prerogatives in the design of the surrounding environment of a modern human-centred sustainable development ecosociology. The article suggests criteria to evaluate the influence on the formation of an eco-social-natural space ecologically oriented individual operating your eco-thinking, aspiration to the organic nature of natural processes and the implementation of major social functions. In turn, the formed eco-social and natural space becomes a generator of cultural processes of an environmentally oriented personality.

The history of the painted image has involved various metamorphoses from cave, to architecture, to easel and most recently the radical hybridisation of expanded multimedia forms. Through each age the shedding of one aspect of the image; ritual, spirituality, portability, has resulted in a shift from sacred static images towards profane ephemeral events. This transformation has intensified over the last century where the repeated announcement of the death of painting has seen painting reborn as a mode of radical self-questioning. This paper takes an overview of painting's morphology by way of Martin Heidegger's discussion of picturing and representation in his essay “The Age of the World Picture” (1938). By focusing on the history of picturing, an understanding of “original aesthetics” and its apprehensions can be developed, for comparison with contemporary art in its “post-medium condition”. The new ontological paradigm of contemporary art therefore demands another discourse, a “post-aesthetics” that overcomes the subjective bias of modern philosophical aesthetics in favour of a primary relationship to things and their mode of presence in the world. As a result, contemporary expanded painting is shown to be a radical revision of art, a moment of ontological “presencing” favouring spatial environments and temporal events that reveal “what is” and “what matters” in a contemporary techno-scientific age. As a result ontological aesthetics could indicate what is good at the boundary between people, communities, technology and the earth, in short, a politics of being. In the politics of being, which is most appropriate to the expanded work of art, politics is linked to the polis, the place where culture emerges into a world, and where things unfold according to the sense of possibility that a world grants. Art is intimately involved in an alternative politics of being when it poses another way of dealing with beings, people, objects, and things, that result in new economies and temporalities indicating the possibility of something beyond our habitual understanding of the world. Expanded painting as the exemplar of contemporary art is an ontological cut in our understanding of art and the world. It slices through the contemporary understanding of presence and delivers a monstrous thickness, no longer supported by a surface as substrate, but instead compelled by the phenomenal experiences of the world, and is thereby multiplied exponentially and existentially. Santrauka Tapyto atvaizdo istorija apima įvairias metamorfozes, pradedant urvais ir baigiant architektūra, molbertais, o pastaruoju metu – radikalia išplėstinių multimedijų formų hibridizacija. Bet kuriame amžiuje nunykdavo tam tikras atvaizdo aspektas; ritualai, dvasingumas, portatyvumas sakralius statiškus atvaizdus pakeitė profaniškais trumpalaikiais įvykiais. Ši transformacija suintensyvėjo pastarajame amžiuje, kai buvo pakartotinai paskelbta, esą tapyba mirė, atgimstant tapybai kaip radikaliai saviklausai. Šiame straipsnyje pateikiama tapybos morfologijos apžvalga, remiantis Martino Heideggerio apmąstymais. Susitelkiant į atvaizdų istoriją, gali būti išplėtota „originaliosios estetikos“ ir jos suvokimo samprata, lyginant su šiuolaikiniu menu ir jo „postmedijine būkle“. Todėl nauja šiuolaikinio meno ontologinė paradigma reikalauja kito – „postestetikos“ – diskurso, įveikiančio subjektyvų moderniosios filosofinės estetikos šališkumą pirminio santykio su daiktais ir su jų buvimo pasaulyje būdo atžvilgiu. Iš to išplaukia, kad šiuolaikinė išplėstinė tapyba pristatoma kaip radikalus meno peržiūrėjimas, ontologinio „esamumo“ akimirka, palaikanti erdvines aplinkas ir laikinius įvykius, atveriančius „tai, kas yra“ ir „tai, kas vyksta“ šiuolaikiniame technikos ir mokslo amžiuje. Tad ontologinė estetika gali nurodyti, kas yra gera ties žmonių, bendruomenių, technologijų ir Žemės ribomis, trumpai tariant, atskleisti būties politiką. Šioji yra pati tinkamiausia išplėstiniams meno kūriniams; politika yra susieta su polis – ta vieta, kurioje kultūra iškyla į pasaulį ir kurioje pagal pasaulio teikiamą galimumą skleidžiasi daiktai. Menas yra glaudžiai įtraukiamas į alternatyviąją būties politiką, iškeldamas naują būtybių, žmonių, objektų ir daiktų santykiavimo būdą. Tai lemia naujose ekonomikose ir laikiškumuose nurodomą galimybę kažko, kas yra anapus mūsų pasaulio įprastinio supratimo. Išplėstinė tapyba kaip šiuolaikinio meno pavyzdys yra ontologinis įtrūkis mums suprantant meną ir pasaulį. Ji aptinkama suprantant šiuolaikinį buvimą, yra labai reikšminga ir nebėra palaikoma paviršiaus kaip substrato; veikiau įtikinamų fenomenalių pasaulio patirčių, taip dauginamų išoriškai ir egzistenciškai.

Abstract At the symbolic centre of every Dickens novel is the roaring fire of a domestic hearth. Readers of Dickens frequently related clustering in familial groups around a fireplace, sharing in the fire’s uncertain pools of light and warmth while they read the text aloud. And within the texts themselves, the Dickens fireside has been seen as an idyllic space of conflict resolution: as Alexander Welsh has put it, “if the problem that besets” Dickens “can be called the city, his answer can be named the hearth.” This essay seeks to remember the materiality of the fireside alongside its more symbolic evocations. Comparing Dickens’s representation of the coal fuelling the fires of A Christmas Carol (1843) and Our Mutual Friend (1865), written over twenty years later, and taking in several short fictions published in Household Words in the intervening decade, it shows that Dickens often based plots of fictional transformation on the fantastic metamorphoses embodied in the lump of coal itself. While there was something exuberant about this change in the 1840s and 1850s, when Britain’s plentiful coal supplies were frequently imagined as tokens of a divine plan favourable to British industrial and imperial expansion, the darkening mood of Dickens’s late fiction chimed with contemporary fears about the waste and depletion of resources and the increasing competitiveness of the global markets. Most importantly, however, throughout his career the material dimension of coal offered Dickens both narrative possibility, and representational trouble. So important was it to his social vision that he often overlooked the cost of coal in his desire to keep his poorest characters warm, and in the 1860s he repeatedly ridiculed the national panic that Britain’s coal reserves might run out. Thinking about Dickens’s firesides as both symbolic and material spaces, fuelled by the coal whose history was of such fascination to the readers of Household Words, we see that the hearth was not only Dickens’s all-solving “answer” to the problems of the “city.” It was a space in which many of his most central concerns would sit in unequal, and unresolved, tension.

Et rids af Grundtvig-forskningen og dens stilling i efterkrigens Danmark. William Michelsen in memoriam [A sketch o f Grundtvig scholarship and its position in postwar Denmark. In memory of William Michelsen]By Kim Arne PedersenWith the death of William Michelsen a distinct era in the history of Gr scholarship reached its close, for he was the last surviving member of the small circle who (gathered in Bishop C. I. Scharling’s residence in Ribe for Gr’s birthday ) celebrated on the stroke of midnight the founding of The Grundtvig Society of 8th September 1947 [Grundtvig-Selskabet af 8. September 1947] which was to prove such an important initiative in Danish academic activity and in Danish culture more widely. In the forthcoming reinstatement of Gr in the mainstream of Danish scholarship and debate Michelsen was to maintain a long, unstinting and untiring involvement, both through his own scholarly output and through the encouragement, advice and criticism he offered to younger and rising scholars.Michelsen was markedly the product of his own background in a middleclass family linked over two generations with teaching, a liberal theological outlook and a quiet Christian piety in the home. Similarly, the motives and objectives of his involvement with Gr over his long working-life were distinctly responsive to the times through which he lived, and not least to the threats posed to democracy in the twentieth century by totalitarian regimes.Like others of his distinguished contemporaries, notably his lifelong friend Henning Høirup, he perceived Gr as »our contemporary« whose life-work remained of living relevance and should be accorded a functional place within the national cultural inheritance.Though not a theologian by formal education, Michelsen along with his generation came to be influenced by Karl Barth’s insistence that the revealed word of God must be the premise of any confession. This principle inspired his own studies of Gr’s thought-world, and particularly of Gr’s thesis of history, which in turn led him to see that religious idealism alone was not a sufficient response to the actualities of living in the present moment. Here he was also fairly clearly influenced by Hal Koch who, during the years of the German occupation of Denmark in the Second World War, was most instrumental in presenting Gr as his generation’s contemporary.With fellow-scholars such as Høirup and Regin Prenter, Michelsen found Gr’s authorship informed not only by Christianity’s radical profession of the forgiveness of sins but also, equally importantly, of a creation-theology which for them made it possible to harmonise the modem world’s scientific awareness with a belief that life and the universe were created by God. His contribution to the anthology Grundtvig og grundtvigianismen i nyt lys [Gr and grundtvigianism in a new light] (1983) is a key discussion of Gr’s conversion in 1810 and Gr’s relationship to Søren Kierkegaard. Various of Michelsen’s writings set forth Gr’s historical perspective as being based upon a mosaicchristian view, in a consciousness of Gr’s shift from faith to knowledge, from church to school around the critical year 1832. The view that he and Kai Thaning constitute opposite poles misrepresents the affinities and distinctions carefully drawn by Michelsen himself (‘Brev til en Grundtvigforsker’ [Letter to a Gr-scholar] in Dansk Udsyn 1964,443); nevertheless, his analysis of Gr’s universal-historical work formulates a significant challenge to Thaning’s reading of Gr and demonstrates the sense in which Gr was, as Michelsen later wrote in Grundtvig Studier 1983, ‘Sin samtids kritiker’ [Critic of his own times].After early work on H. C. Ørsted, Michelsen wrote his doctoral thesis, published as Tilblivelsen af Grundtvigs historiesyn [The formulation of Gr’s view of history] (Copenhagen, 1954). During this period (1941) he married Signe, niece of the Greenland explorer Knud Rasmussen who was herself an authority on Greenland and collaborated in translating Gr into the Greenlandic language. His doctoral thesis was based on an examination of the works Gr is known to have studied in his formative years (though he has been criticised for exaggerating the cohesion of the sources of influence upon Gr) out of which Gr shaped a view of history which was not a learned construct or theory but a conscious expression of the picture he formed for himself of existence.Michelsen depicts Gr as standing in opposition to the contemporary compromise between Christianity and romanticism, and as allowing the biblical perspective of history to model his own exposition of history.Characteristically, when his doctoral thesis was eventually overshadowed by the work of Sigurd Aa. Aames (1961) with its different approach, methodology and findings, Michelsen responded constructively (Grundtvig Studier 1962). Meanwhile he had been extending his own exploration of the way in which Gr’s Christian view of history developed after 1810, in Den sælsomme forvandling i N. F. S. Grundtvigs liv [The strange Metamorphosis inNFSG’slife] (1956). His two studies together raised issues-concerning for example Gr’s relationship to Lutheran tradition, his view of the divine image in man, and affinities between Gr and Kiekegaard’s existential standpoint - which ought to have generated a greater scholarly response than has been the case.Many of Michelsen’s articles in Grundtvig Studier remain indispensable items for students and researchers. He made a distinguished contribution to the great catalogue of the Grundtvig archives in the Royal Library, Copenhagen. Much work (in which his son Knud collaborated) on the transcription of unprinted Gr manuscripts and the identification of textual correlations illustrative of Gr’s philosophical thinking remains unpublished - though the big two-part introduction to Gr’s thought as reflected in his Danne-Virke (Grundtvig Studier 1985-86) to some extent compensates for this. Michelsen’s appointment (1968) to a lectureship in Aarhus University, in fulfilment of Professor Gustav Albeck’s desire to give Gr a central place in Danish studies, coincided with turbulent times which he did not find easy, but the fruits of his teaching are seen in the long series of fine articles by his pupils in Grundtvig Studies, of which he became an editor in 1969, scrupulously active to the last. In 1997 he was honoured by the Grundtvig-Selskab upon its Fiftieth Anniversary. He was an active participant in the newly-founded Grundtvig Academy in Vartov, in 2000.With William Michelsen’s death a notable Christian humanist and scholar has passed on. May his memory be held in honour.

Background. Choral work of American composers of the second half of the XX century is characterized by new qualities that have appeared because of not only musical but also non-musical factors generated by the system of cultural, historical and social conditions. Despite of a serious amount of scientific literature on the history of American music, the choral layer of American music remains partially unexplored, especially, in Ukrainian musical science, that bespeaks the science and practical novelty of the research results. The purpose of this study is to discover and to analyze the peculiarities of the historical formation and identity of American choral art of the second half of the twentieth century using the the works of famous American artists as examples. The research methodology is based on theoretical, historical and analytical methods, generalization and specification. Results. The general picture of the development of American composers’ practice in the genre of choral music is characterized by genre and style diversity. In our research we present portraits of iconic figures of American choral music in the period under consideration. So, the choral works of William Dawson (1899–1990), one of the most famous African-American composers, are characterized by the richness of the choral texture, intense sonority and demonstration of his great understanding of the vocal potential of the choir. Dawson was remembered, especially, for the numerous arrangements of spirituals, which do not lose their popularity. Aaron Copland (1899–1990), which was called “the Dean of American Composers”, was one of the founder of American music “classical” style, whose name associated with the America image in music. Despite the fact that the composer tends to atonalism, impressionism, jazz, constantly uses in his choral opuses sharp dissonant sounds and timbre contrasts, his choral works associated with folk traditions, written in a style that the composer himself called “vernacular”, which is characterized by a clearer and more melodic language. Among Copland’s famous choral works are “At The River”, “Four Motets”, “In the Beginning”, “Lark”, “The Promise of Living”; “Stomp Your Foot” (from “The Tender Land”), “Simple Gifts”, “Zion’s Walls” and others. Dominick Argento’s (1927–2019) style is close to the style of an Italian composer G. C. Menotti. Argento’s musical style, first of all, distinguishes the dominance of melody, so he is a leading composer in the genre of lyrical opera. Argento’s choral works are distinguished by a variety of performers’ stuff: from a cappella choral pieces – “A Nation of Cowslips”, “Easter Day” for mixed choir – to large-scale works accompanied by various instruments: “Apollo in Cambridge”, “Odi et Amo”, “Jonah and the Whale”, “Peter Quince at the Clavier”, “Te Deum”, “Tria Carmina Paschalia”, “Walden Pond”. For the choir and percussion, Argento created “Odi et Amo” (“I Hate and I Love”), 1981, based on the texts of the ancient Roman poet Catullus, which testifies to the sophistication of the composer’s literary taste and his skill in reproducing complex psychological states. The most famous from Argento’s spiritual compositions is “Te Deum” (1988), where the Latin text is combined with medieval English folk poetry, was recorded and nominated for a Grammy Award. Among the works of Samuel Barber’s (1910–1981) vocal and choral music were dominating. His cantata “Prayers of Kierkegaard”, based on the lyrics of four prayers by this Danish philosopher and theologian, for solo soprano, mixed choir and symphony orchestra is an example of an eclectic trend. Chapter I “Thou Who art unchangeable” traces the imitation of a traditional Gregorian male choral singing a cappella. Chapter II “Lord Jesus Christ, Who suffered all lifelong” for solo soprano accompanied by oboe solo is an example of minimalism. Chapter III “Father in Heaven, well we know that it is Thou” reflects the traditions of Russian choral writing. William Schumann (1910–1992) stands among the most honorable and prominent American composers. In 1943, he received the first Pulitzer Prize for Music for Cantata No 2 “A Free Song”, based on lyrics from the poems by Walt Whitman. In his choral works, Schumann emphasized the lyrics of American poetry. Norman Luboff (1917–1987), the founder and conductor of one of the leading American choirs in the 1950–1970s, is one of the great American musicians who dared to dedicate most of their lives to the popular media cultures of the time. Holiday albums of Christmas Songs with the Norman Luboff Choir have been bestselling for many years. In 1961, Norman Luboff Choir received the Grammy Award for Best Performance by a Chorus. Luboff’s productive work on folk song arrangements, which helped to preserve these popular melodies from generation to generation, is considered to be his main heritage. The choral work by Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) – a great musician – composer, pianist, brilliant conductor – is represented by such works as “Chichester Psalms”, “Hashkiveinu”, “Kaddish” Symphony No 3)”,”The Lark (French & Latin Choruses)”, “Make Our Garden Grow (from Candide)”, “Mass”. “Chichester Psalms”, where the choir sings lyrics in Hebrew, became Bernstein’s most famous choral work and one of the most successfully performed choral masterpieces in America. An equally popular composition by Bernstein is “Mass: A Theater Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers”, which was dedicated to the memory of John F. Kennedy, the stage drama written in the style of a musical about American youth in searching of the Lord. More than 200 singers, actors, dancers, musicians of two orchestras, three choirs are involved in the performance of “Mass”: a four-part mixed “street” choir, a four-part mixed academic choir and a two-part boys’ choir. The eclecticism of the music in the “Mass” shows the versatility of the composer’s work. The composer skillfully mixes Latin texts with English poetry, Broadway musical with rock, jazz and avant-garde music. Choral cycles by Conrad Susa (1935–2013), whose entire creative life was focused on vocal and dramatic music, are written along a story line or related thematically. Bright examples of his work are “Landscapes and Silly Songs” and “Hymns for the Amusement of Children”; the last cycle is an fascinating staging of Christopher Smart’s poetry (the18 century). The composer’s music is based on a synthesis of tonal basis, baroque counterpoint, polyphony and many modern techniques and idioms drawn from popular music. The cycle “Songs of Innocence and of Experience”, created by a composer and a pianist William Bolcom (b. 1938) on the similar-titled poems by W. Blake, represents musical styles from romantic to modern, from country to rock. More than 200 vocalists take part in the performance of this work, in academic choruses (mixed, children’s choirs) and as soloists; as well as country, rock and folk singers, and the orchestral musicians. This composition successfully synthesizes an impressive range of musical styles: reggae, classical music, western, rock, opera and other styles. Morten Lauridsen (b. 1943) was named “American Choral Master” by the National Endowment for the Arts (2006). The musical language of Lauridsen’s compositions is very diverse: in his Latin sacred works, such as “Lux Aeterna” and “Motets”, he often refers to Gregorian chant, polyphonic techniques of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and mixes them with modern sound. Lauridsen’s “Lux Aeterna” is a striking example of the organic synthesis of the old and the new traditions, or more precisely, the presentation of the old in a new way. At the same time, his other compositions, such as “Madrigali” and “Cuatro Canciones”, are chromatic or atonal, addressing us to the technique of the Renaissance and the style of postmodernism. Conclusions. Analysis of the choral work of American composers proves the idea of moving the meaningful centers of professional choral music, the gradual disappearance of the contrast, which had previously existed between consumer audiences, the convergence of positions of “third direction” music and professional choral music. In the context of globalization of society and media culture, genre and stylistic content, spiritual meanings of choral works gradually tend to acquire new features such as interaction of ancient and modern musical systems, traditional and new, modified folklore and pop. There is a tendency to use pop instruments or some stylistic components of jazz, such as rhythm and intonation formula, in choral compositions. Innovative processes, metamorphosis and transformations in modern American choral music reveal its integration specificity, which is defined by meta-language, which is formed basing on interaction and dialogue of different types of thinking and musical systems, expansion of the musical sound environment, enrichment of acoustic possibilities of choral music, globalization intentions. Thus, the actualization of new cultural dominants and the synthesis of various stylistic origins determine the specificity of American choral music.

The relevance of the article is determined by the appeal to the debatable issues of stylistic differentiation of the works by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel as the French musical culture leading representatives of the late 19th and the first third of the 20th centuries. The research reflections about the connections betwen Debussy and Ravel on the principle “for / against” have not subsided for more than a hundred years. This testifies to the special urgency of this problem and the need to search for modern approaches to understanding the artistic identity of two brilliant contemporaries.Scientific novelty. For the first time, the multidirectionality of the composing strategies by Debussy and Ravel is indicated through the the concept of style in its interdisciplinary philosophicalcategorical status and the explanationof its functions of identification and communication in the general cultural understanding (O. Ustyugova). For the first time the difference between the cultural phenomena processes integration in the era of modernism into the new artistic wholes, with unique properties, which is appropriate to define as “Debussy’s style” and “Ravel’s style”, is revealed.The purpose of the article is to reveal the multidirectionality of the composing strategies of Debussy and Ravel through an appeal to the main stylistic functions of identification and communication in general cultural understanding (O. Ustyugova); to designate the non-coincidence of channels of integration of cultural phenomena in the era of modernism into new artistic wholes, which have unique properties such as “Debussy’s style” and “Ravel’s style”.The research methodology includes the use of historical, stylistic, comparative methods.Main results and conclusions. The existing musicological literature emphasizes the influence of romanticism, post-romanticism, impressionism, symbolism, neoclassicism, Art Nouveau, moderne style on the formation of the individual style of Debussy and Ravel. Each of these directions had a certain reflection in the work of composers. However, let us try to highlight in the conceptual space of the many-sided “isms” of the cultural context of the era of modernism the hidden sources of the deployment of the creative intentions of the both brilliant contemporaries. We will choose the fundamental work of E. Ustyugova “Style and Culture: Experience of Building a General Theory of Style” (2003) as a methodological basis for this. E. Ustyugova proposes to go beyond the understanding style as a “migratory structure” (term by J. Rebane) and a convenient “classification tool” (J. Burnham) in structural and typological studies of art and move on to a comprehensive study of the essence of this phenomenon. For this, according to the researcher, it is necessary to carry out two analytical procedures. The first is based on the awareness of the experience of the mismatch between the object and the subject. The second involves considering the style in the aspect of intersubjective communication.With this view on the problem of identifying the patterns of formation and development of cultural phenomena, it is not the nominative parameters and the “herbarization” of genrelinguistic units that come to the fore, but the comprehension of the multilevel subject-object relations that formed these phenomena; “live reproduction” of the matrix of the world perception as channels of communication between the “I” and everything that appears as “not-I”.The creative paths of Debussy and Ravel represent diferent creative strategies. The “pure meaning”, unspeakable by words and free from all earthly, to which Debussy aspired, creates parallels with the texts of symbolist poets and destroy the boundaries between “I” and “not-I”. In the fundamental monographs of French researchers dedicated to the composer an idea has long been entrenched: the composer’s creative laboratory was poetry, and Debussy’s address to the poetic word throughout all his creative decades constantly expanding the semantic horizons of his “artistic realities”.Debussy’s spiritual intentions merged into a single sound-glow in the indivisible space of being. The word in all its dimensions (from literal to metaphysical) indicated the stages of the process of dissolving the personal “I” and going beyond (au-délà) the established forms of artistic expression. Therefore, various kinds of the names (or “afterwords”, as in the Preludes), epigraphs, numerous super-detailed directions remained an integral part of an integral sound structure. His musical language, destroying the connections in time between the past and the future (rejection of the system of functional gravities that should be “stretched” in musical memory), created a certain correspondence (“here and now”) with the phenomenon of being.Hence the following characteristics of the composer’s musical works: 1) the impeccable construction of the whole, which is “thought out to the smallest detail” (E. Denisov), subtle multilevel “correspondences” and symmetries; 2) total thematization of texture (K. Zenkin); 3) selfsufficient semantic expressiveness of the “pure sound forms” (K. Zenkin), which became the embodiment of “an agonizing thirst for undeniably pure” (S. Velikovsky).These properties of Debussy’s style open up the possibility to get into the spiritual dimensions filled with pure beauty, which so attracted the followers of Baudelaire. Using the typology of teh subject-object relations proposed by E. Ustyugova, Debussy’s style can be attributed throughout the paradigm of hidden subjectivity. Debussy was well aware of his “non-romantic” position.The artistic aspirations of Maurice Ravel more clearly resonate with the creative attitudes of Art Nouveau artists, who were looking for new forms of plastic expressiveness mainly in spatial forms of art. It seems that it is with this direction that a special feeling of the plasticity of the musical material and the entire musical composition as a unique phenomenon is associated, which determines the composer’s creative credo.The concept of “plasticity” indicates such a connection between coordinated phenomena, which appears through the reincarnation (transformation) of a certain material substance, when we keep in memory its output characteristics. Ballet works and the reliance on dance genres (and more broadly, various types of plasticity of gesture and movement) reveal the hidden basis of the composer’s thinking. This approach allows one to re-evaluate Ravel’s connections with the ancient heritage (it is symptomatic that the composer called his first “adult” work, devoted to the press, “Antique Minuet”) and to understand the meanings of constant antique reminiscences with which he filled his life.Like a real dandy who lets the vibrations of the world pass through himself, Ravel is sensitive to them and “cuts off” random, “ugly”, “unnecessary” ones. Hence — the special beauty of the artistic structures created by the composer. They are built not in a “filtered” ideal-beautiful dimension, but in the space of shimmering opposites (the corporeal — free from the corporeal, the familiar — the unknown). Ravel’s inherent tendency towards the graphic relief of the melodic line creates parallels with the “famous lines of Art Nouveau” (Fahr-Becker Gabriele) and is especially distinct, characterizes the composer’s later works.The non-everyday register of semantic reverberations of what is happening in the process of metamorphosis in the composer’s music (his plastic questioning about the existential nature of the source material) demanded a special listener’s responsiveness. Mistifications, hiding behind a mask, playing with the listener are Ravel’s usual communication strategies. Therefore, according to the typology of the subject-object relations proposed by E. Ustyugova, we can speak here of the paradigm of “open subjectivity”, which is characterized by the direct orientation of the subject towards himself. Hence — the principle of auto-citation characteristic of Ravel. The quintessence of its use are the composer’s later works — the opera Child and Magic, as well as the Piano Concerto in G major — the Dandy summa summarum of the composer’s previous career.The game of “correspondences” (Baudelaire) was manifested by composers in various ways and conditioned various channels of communication. Debussy makes the semantics of sound education a semantic unit, appeals to the listener with the expressiveness of the structure itself. Therefore he always emphasizes, appeals to the elite listener. Ravel, on the other hand, hides behind masks and theatrical illusions. He needs a listener who has a culture of distance (who owns wide meaning contextual fields). The contextual layers associated with musical texts express that “degree of distance” from the object of attention, which the composer himself chooses and whose parameters are constantly changing. Therefore, Ravel never turns twice in the genre, style or stylistic model he has already used.So, if the works by Debussy can be perceived “from scratch” because of their structural completeness and semantic tightness, then the works by Ravel require the listener to know the musical context and readiness to lay it out “fold by fold” (J. Deleuze) in new semantic projections.At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, French culture was looking for a means of creating a “state of resonance” (G. Bachelard) as an extraordinary impression, “awakening”, without which a person cannot take place. Debussy and Ravel moved in this direction. Therefore, only through the identification of all the “correspondences” of the era of a total change of creative guidelines and a departure from unambiguous stylistic “avatars” can one feel its essential discoveries. The study of the lines of intersection of the Debussy music and the Ravel music with various artistic phenomena of the past and the present illuminates certain reflections of the “style of the era”. However understanding the deep patterns of the creative manner of the two contemporaries requires differentiating the definitions of “Debussy’s style” and “Ravel’s style” and their further studying.

Recognition of regional features, outlining of the contours of regions, tendency to regionalize ethnic, economic, cultural and state-administrative space, and strengthening the ideology of regionalism in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, that is Serbia and Montenegro, appear as a practical and political but also as a theoretical problem which includes and combines several scientific disciplines. The phenomenon of regionalism is not contradictory although it is primarily expressed through the numerous conflicts of interests rivalry and antagonisms of political subjects. The problematic side of the phenomenon of regionalism includes the result of an extremely negative and existentially tragic experience of the several years-long disintegration of the complex Yugoslav state. During the partition and disintegration of the second Yugoslavia, there also happened the disintegration of the Serbian ethnic area Growth, support and instigation of regional tendencies occurred in the historical circumstances of secession and did not stop in the post-secession period. Particularization and segmentation of political area, as well as the disintegration of the former state, did not occur in accordance with the norms of internal and international law. Legality was late and was achieved within the transformation of power reflected in the changed territorial policy of the dominant alliance of great powers. The entire past decade was characterized by an extraordinary metamorphosis of political space. Secession trend had the territorial features which included the change of borders and had been long in the focus of the global geopolitical attention. Territories were divided and made smaller. Intensive territorial dynamics within the external silhouette of the de-stated SFR of Yugoslavia resulted in the creation of several state and quasi-state political formations. Former republics became semi-sovereign states. Dispersed and displaced Serbian ethnos was configured in the three territories: in the Republic of Serbia - from which Kosovo and Metohia were amputated and placed under the UN protectorate - in the entire Republic of Montenegro and in the Republic Srpska, located in one part of the former Bosnia and Herzegovina. Demopolitical result of the geopolitical destruction of the Serbian ethnos was a great movement of the Serbian population from the west to the east, and its concentration in the territory of the Republic of Serbia this implied that the Serbs were expelled from their millennia-long abodes in Croatia, parts of Bosnia and from Kosmet. The geo-economic result of the same process was the devastation of the national economic strength west of the Drina and in the southern province. Economic regression occurred also in the national parent-land state. Balkan re-arrangement of the spheres of interest in the post-bipolar period was in 1995. fixed by the interest arrangement of the great powers known under the name Dayton Peace Agreement. Redistribution of the territories from the destroyed state occurred in the post-communist period with the expansion of west-civilization structures to the European east Westernization of the eastern part of Europe, or entire Europe as the other pole of the global West, could be characterized as a dual mega-regionality. Namely, the west is composed of Europe and America; on the other side, there is the global East or its hybrid variation Eurasia. With the disappearance of their common state and its framework, south Slavs found themselves in the seemingly independent, and actually client states. Western delimitation of the south Slavic area moved from the Yugoslav borders towards a wider Balkan demarcation. One could say that the revitalized notion of the Balkans became a new, in many aspects obligatory framework for regional thinking. The Balkan macroregion is further determined by the intentions to expand the European Union. One of the Euro-centric concepts, which is being experimentally employed precisely in the Balkans, is the establishment of the so-called Europe of regions in the peripheral areas. On the other hand, even though the process of the disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation appears to be irreversible, the superordinate Euro-American factor does not give up the possibility of the mezzo-regional initiatives, cooperations, associations and integrations. This "middle" level of dealing with the specificities of the Yugoslav region is related to the states and nations from the former Yugoslavia, or the so-called West Balkans. Naturally, it is not the tendency to revive the silhouette of the previous state, but certainly there is a noticeable intention to achieve a regional linking of the related, now semi-sovereign territories which sometimes belonged to the same state framework. The fourth level deals with microregionalism, that is the relation between the different areas in the newly-created states. It is interesting that the regionalist discourse is mostly cherished exactly in the ethno-heterogeneous Serbian area, although other Yugoslav states also have or had regional tradition and mixed population, like, for example, Slovenia and Croatia Nevertheless, these former Yugo-republics are structured as mono-national states, so the regional policy and ideology of regionalism are still not in the first plane. Regionalism within the newly-formed states could be supplemented with the micron level implying specific sub-regionalism of the highest degree, within the larger regions in the same state. This could be illustrated with Backa, Banat and Srem inside Vojvodina, understood as the northern Serbian region, or Kosovo and Metohia in the south of Serbia, in the province with the same name. In the part of Serbia outside the provinces, similar things could be said for Belgrade with its surroundings, Macva, Podrinje, Sumadija, Raska District etc. Thus, when it comes to the present FR of Yugoslavia, all five levels of regional dynamics have a principled, but insufficiently studied significance. Mega-regional level is related to the mark denoting the global belonging to the West. Macroregional level deals with the European loyalty, that is inclusion of the FR of Yugoslavia into the continental European trends. This trans-continental and continental direction of inclusion implies a historical teleology of the relative eastern belonging to the absolute West, that is Euro-America, and the entrance into the full structure of the European Union. All the mentioned problems of recognition and characterization of the regional phenomenology in the political topography of the world are motivated by the tendency to achieve as clear as possible spatial-temporal national and state orientation The direction is related to the so-called safety dilemma of the nation and the country faced with the change of size and essence of one's own state, with the different geopolitical position and redefined foreign-policy priorities. It is also the case of the changed alliance policy, and the innovated strategy of integration into the old and new global and regional political structures. On the basis of the indicated components of geopolitical context, one could say that the phenomenon of regions and their cognate correlates {regionally regionalization and regionalism) should not be understood exclusively through the legal categories of international law and the so-called constitutional solutions, that is administrative division of the state territory. Actually in the analysis of regions and regionalism in Serbia and the FR of Yugoslavia it is necessary first to discuss the pre-normative or meta-le-gal factors in the creation of the regional issue within the national and state issue, which have the form of the unsolved political problem. Meta-legality is located within the domain of the international relations and geopolitic. Meta-legal or pre-normative factors of the formation or recognition of regions and regionalisms deal with the possibility of the political constitution of the Serbian, that is Serbian / Montenegrin (still Yugoslav) society. Since the unique state area was destroyed in the four-year secession wars and there occurred significant demopolitical changes, war migrations, forceful displacements and expulsion of the population - the ethnic character of many areas was also drastically changed. At the same time, the post-secession existence of the FR of Yugoslavia could be also viewed through the optics of the state residuum. The remaining Serbia or Serbia (temporarily) without Kosovo is certainly not an equivalent for the Serbian ethnic space, nor for the entire Serbian lands. It is not even the FR of Yugoslavia, as a dual con federation of the Serbian / Montenegrin nation. Geopolitical reduction of the SFR of Yugoslavia to a residual creation of the FR of Yugoslavia was not deduced from the legality sui generis, but resulted from a conflict, the defeat of integralism and the victory of separatism, as well as from a new triumphal configuration of power. The impulse implying the statism of the collective rights from the former complex federal necessarily-multinational level was transferred to a lower mononational level. Therefore, the regionalist ideology in the post-secession reality of the residual state almost inevitably, as a tendency, nears the separatory particularism. Even the lost national state and the state entirety are openly denied within the requests for the territorization of the collective rights of various minorities. Naturally these requests do not carry the primary features of the development of democracy. On the contrary, in the majority of cases this implies the rise of parish and tribal consciousness prone to narrow-minded separation. Thus the post-secession requests for the regionalization are often just a slight rhetorical mask for real separatism. For example, they are expressed through the pseudo-national separation of Vojvodina from Serbia, as well as Montenegro from Serbia, or through the establishment of state-like entities in the territorial tissue of Serbia Alleged arguments are found in the unfinished disintegration of the SFR of Yugoslavia on the one hand, and in the prevention of the creation of the so-called Greater Serbia, even within the diminished Serbia That way, even in the post-secession, reduced Serbia one could easily recognize the tendencies of federalization and confederalization, even the amputation of its remaining state space. Additional arguments for the crawling secession and prolonged territorial destruction are found in the ideology of globalization and world trends of relativizing territorial integrity and state sovereignty. On the other hand, the idea about the principled insignificance of borders in Europe without borders, as well as Europe of regions, is emphasized. Thus, it is obvious that the new state and regional delimitations and demarcations are in contradiction with the vision of the trans-statal and trans-national integrity of the European continent. In Serbia itself, me problem of the restructuring of regions is determined by the inherited and unchanged triple division of its territory into the central part and two autonomous provinces in the north and south. Thus every idea for regionalization (expert, party, leader's, NGO and the like) faces the inherited, too narrow constitutional framework and easily slides to the federalization or confederalization of the Republic, and in extreme cases to the independence and sovereignty of ethnic, religious, linguistic and other minorities. Roughly put, the tendencies for territorial separation from the Republic of Serbia still exist in several neuralgic and unstable areas or regions. In Vojvodina, the presented tendencies have the character of a meaningless internal - Serbian autonomy, autonomism, latent separatism. Authentic Serbian autonomy lost its original character long ago and deteriorated into an internal national re-statism. On the other hand, in the furthest south of Serbia, in Kosmet, the UN protectorate is established, but the region is actually occupied and thus the status of the Province is "frozen". In the three municipalities in the south of Serbia, with the relative Albanian majority, Albanian separatism smolders within the platform of the so-called east Kosovo. In the Raska region (Sandzak) there are also strong tendencies for separateness on the religious-ecclesiastical, so-called Bosniac platform, with religious solidarity, and ethnic and territorial unity of all Bosniacs. In the meta-legal or pre-normative situation - which most often denotes political and geopolitical context implying interests, power and force - the inclinations for territorial design are faced with the conflicting ideology of regionalism. Therefore, the constitutional-legal solutions of the former, present and future regions, generated within the self-created legality which does not respect meta-legal, political and geopolitical impulses regardless of how aestheticized and "humanized" they may be - at the end face the practical impossibility of realization.

The research discusses the Jewish images found in The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka and its interpretation. It aims to prove that the utilization of Jewish images within the novella shows the author’s underlying critique towards Jewish Orthodoxy’ ways of thinking, particularly the way they regard the Holy Scripture. The data used in the research are taken from Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, in the form of words containing plot structure, characters and characterizations (including dialogue and actions), metaphors, symbols, and allusions, which represents a certain Jewish value within Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. The data are then analysed with Freudian Psychoanalysis, supported by external data such as the background of the author and information about Orthodox Judaism. The result of the research concluded that, in The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka demonstrates that in front of the unquestioned and oblivious masses of the divine law human is hopeless; just like Gregor who ends up dying an unjustified death.

The selection of Machiavelli’s letters presented here would like to project a narrative of his metamorphosis from political thinker into creative author. The two facets of his thinking intersect in his famous letter from December 10, 1513 in which he claims he is writing The Prince. It appears the work had already been completed by this point, needing only slight additions. Naturally, the narrative projected here does not exclude the existence of everyday letters saturated by sexual themes, nor does it mean the total absence of political analyses in his later letters. However, in 1513-1514 there is an evident thematic turn in the correspondence, and it supports the editorial intuition that Machiavelli himself would accept this reading (and editing) of his letters.

This essay seeks a new approach between philosophy and neuroscience inspired by the recent ontological turn to think about one of the affects modulations across the contemporary sociopolitical scenario. In this regard, it theoretically triangulates the appropriation of Spinoza's philosophy by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio and the reception of Damasio's neuroscience by philosopher Catherine Malabou, taking Gilles Deleuze as a connecting point between these perspectives. It proposes to think the concept of destructive plasticity as a metamorphosis in the organism that, shocked by some traumatic event, turns to a new configuration that deactivates its somatic markers and ends up taking a form of disaffection. Finally, it concludes by bringing this figure closer to what Achille Mbembe, taking the death drive as central concept for thinking necropolitics, names as "lumpenradical".