Category Archives: CORNERSTONES

From the Peace of Westphalia to Nagorno-Karabakh Problem

Summary

Tigran R. Yepremyan

Key words – Self-determination of nations, territorial integrity, sovereignty, Hugo Grotius, Peace of Westphalia, Peace of Utrecht, French Revolution, League of Nations, United Nations, Helsinki Final Act, Europe, Artsakh.

The paper aims to present the historical trace and the development of the idea of national sovereignty and the right of nations to self-determination from the Peace of Westphalia (1648) to Helsinki Final Act (1975). It tends to evaluate Grotius’ place in the context of the European enlightenment and the history of the formulation of the right of nations to self-determination. According to these approaches nations are constructed with common beliefs and organizational structures. Therefore, nations, i.e. the organized political communities, have the right to political self-determination. The Peace of Westphalia symbolized the transformation of the European-world order based on the hierarchical structures of medieval Christendom to the horizontal system of sovereign territorial states. The rising sense of national individualism was promoted by the Renaissance and Reformation. Meanwhile, the start of the secularization and its adjacent idea of self-determination entailed the principle of peaceful coexistence among legally equal members of international society, which found its fundamental expression in the Helsinki Final Act. Thus, socio-philosophical as well as geo-strategic incentives of the European nation building process are taken into consideration. In the time of the French Revolution new patterns of loyalty and national cohesion were created and new paradigms of identity formation emerged.

The paper offers a new interpretation of the historical trace and the logic of development of the idea of political self-determination and a comparative analysis of its enforcement history. Then, in the aforementioned context, it analyzes the case of self-determination of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (Republic of Artsakh), a successful European de facto state in the Eastern-most Europe. Therefore, one of the highly articulated features in the discourse of the Armenian leadership about Nagorno-Karabakh’s belonging to the European family and to the European international community is the notion that “Europe starts in Nagorno Karabakh.”

The process of the classification of art

Summary

Slavi-Avik M. Harutyunyan

Key words – M. Kagan, E. Kant, A. Baumgarten, Art -1, Art-2, Dichotomy of art, Cultural genesis, Ancient culture, Morphology of art, New era, Fine arts, Muse, mysticism.

The following article discusses various ways of the interpretation and classification of the concept of ‘art’ in the process of Cultural Genesis, from ancient times to the 18th century of the Kant system. Talking about the culture of Antiquity, the role of art in public life is mentioned, not only as an aesthetic phenomenon, but aslo its different functions are taken into account: educational, ideological, etc.. The interpretation of ancient authors about the role of music and poetry in the upbringing of a person is examined. The role of art in the formation of an ideal State in Plato’s philosophical views is emphasized. Certainlly, in antiquity art was not perceived as a mere phenomenon of culture, but inner division of different types of arts accured. Having analized E. Kant’s ideas (in the work “Critique of judgment”), eight different meanings, in which E. Kant uses the term “art”, the interrelationship between them (via constraint concept), as well as the basis of the morphology of Kant’s art are underlined. In the process of the present research scientific methods, adequate set of research tasks were used, in connection with its object and purpose: comparative analysis, synchronous and diachronous analysis, historical reconstruction method, method of systematic and structural analysis, etc. A special role played in the work the semiotic method.

Summary

Liana S. Sargsyan

Key words – manners, speech, surroundings, situation, speech forms, communication, language means, addressing forms, intonation, extralinguistic factor.

In this article characteristic features of the etiquette are discussed. The extralinguistic factors of the speech are presented briefly. This factors are surroundings, social role, behavior a specific area, traditions, facial expression, movement, etc. The main focus is on the nutreal situations of communication. In some cases conditions connected to the speech process such as those that can have a direct influence on that process also taken into consideration. Then specific situations are given separately (acquaintances, phone call conversations, greetings, farewell) and the corresponding speech forms.

In the context of linguistic turn

Summary

Davit R. Mosinyan

Key Words – history, historiography, world history, linguistic turn, narrative, analytical philosophy of history, White, metahistory, trop

The twentieth century philosophy is considerable, among other things, with the linguistic turn, which was intended to resolve the current confusion in philosophy. Linguistic turn declares that the only subject matter of philosophy is a language. That is the essence of the linguistic turn. Subsequently, it also took place in the theory and philosophy of history, because the history is presented as a linguistic text, which has its own logic. Therefore, the written history is not the description of the past, as it were, but is a text on a past built within language and its logic. Hayden White’s “Metahistory: historical imagination of the 19th century in Europe” is a work which marked a new stage in the theory and philosophy history, as it presents the history of historiography for the first time.

Summary

Siranush G. Hovhannisyan

Keywords – Contingency, necessity, stream of events, consciousness, subconsciousness, unconscious sphere, language, language variant, language mean of expression.

The article focuses on two fundamental concepts of philosophy -contingency and necessity. First, these two concepts are presented as events acting consecutively in an entire stream of events. There are two streams of events – the ones, composed of necessities only and others, comprising contingencies. Then, the role of this pair of notions is presented also in terms of linguistics. It is emphasized that contingency doesn’t exist objectively; it’s merely the perception of unpredictable necessity as a contingency. From this point of view we differentiate between three types of contingency- that of overall perception, that of general perception and that of private perception. The same can be said about language which although is developing due to contingencies , but is a system of necessities as an entity.

Part Two. Ernst Bernheim and psychophysical principle of causality

Summary 

Gevorg S. Khudinyan

Ernst Bernheim (1850-1942) is one of the most original figures of European historiography of the late 19th and early 20th century. By means of published books, he formed a specific system of knowledge concerning the theoretical problems of history. He continued and deepened the best traditions of anthropocentric knowledge of the history of Jo. Droysen, also resorting to the help of the principle of psychophysical causality, which was proposed by B. Spinoza and specified by H. Lotze. The particularity of Bernheim’s study of the relationship and interdependence of the two forms of psychophysical causation – mental and physical, as well as the three levels of their manifestation – single typical and collective, is to examine the history as a the development process. It was carried out in a number of double causality – the common causes and conditions and special conditions, including the fact surveyed as part of them.

Clarifying for himself the ratio of pair units of psychophysical causation, E. Bernheim took as a basis the problem of the particular historical review of their capabilities of transformation into functional reasons of development in the historical process, the study of mutual relations and the definition of the functional role of each in different conditions.

Basic elements of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s” universal hermeneutics” concept

Summary

Achot V. Voskanian

In his “Truth and Method” H.-G. Gadamer contra posed the concept of “universal hermeneutics” against the analytic methods prevailing in the humanities during the sixties of the last century. This paper is an attempt to present the basic elements of this concept in a systematic way. Special attention is paid to the notion of “Bildung” (the German for “education as a formation”). For Gadamer “Bildung” is first of all a formation, in which the result and the process are combined. It is not confined to the external goal of a simple knowledge transfer, since the formation of an individual passing the path to knowledge is itself the main goal. Since the implementation of the Humboldian concept of “Bildung” in the University of Berlin the classic education in humanities was seen as a universal value. Contemporary debates about the nature of university education (the paper considers the views of J. Habermas, M. Naumann, Jean-François Lyotard, on that matter) show the relevance of controversy, as reflected in the title of the main book of H.-G.Gadamer.

Part One: Johann Droysen and “Historica”

Summary

Gevorg S. Khudinyan

The article looks at the refinement process of new theoretical and methodological principles of history worked out by Droysen research while the crisis of objectivist epistemology was actual.

Separation and distinction of historiography from the undamental sciences, as well as the sciences of humanity was first held by Droysen in lectures which became the first expression of holistic theory of history. Their summary has been published under the name “Sketches on Historics” in 1858 and later, the monumental work of J. Droysen “Lectures on Encyclopedia and Methodology of history” was posthumously published.

Proceeding from the ideas of W. Wundt (the founder of psychology), Droysen probed that the main achievement of historian is not a simple reflection on “real” events of the past, but the establishment of their sign (Zeichen). Otherwise, it is not possible to cope with “the double subjectivism” of the author of the source which in its turn makes the historian to spread the principles of natural sciences on history.

Siranush G. Hovhannisyan

Summary

The article focuses on the connection between the objective reality, inner world of a person and linguistic system of signs. It presents how a person starts to recognize the real world, how a sensual world comes into existence in a person. Accordingly, we differentiate three types of human existence – perceptional, intellectual and physical. It is shown how the outer world is reflected in the inner world of a person and how it is designated. It is underlined that the part of a person’s existence which becomes complete due to perceptional existence is mainly designated by means of nonlinguistic signs. A linguistic sign is conditional when it has the mission of naming a big and continually growing feeling. Such an emotional experience may be designated also by a motivated sign, which will not be a linguistic sign any more. All the linguistic signs have only one nonlinguistic synonym – silence. Thus, we can conclude that on the one hand the continuously growing feeling can be estranged by adjusting to the corresponding linguistic sign and on the other hand it can be estranged by the one and only nonlinguistic synonym – silence. In the last case the appointer of the linguistic segment being estranged is quite reasonable.

Text, Narrative, Interpretation

Summary

Albert A. Stepanyan
The paper deals with the fundamental aspects of historical study and writing. The focus of them makes the personality of the historian being involved in cultural texts of the present and past. His dialogue with the «voices» of different epochs is one of the main components of historical reflection. In its turn, it motivates the scope and essence of the «questioning» of the past and opening the way to overpassing the imaginative ambiguity of the past and memory. This makes the real start of historical investigation comprising the activity of the historian from the verification of historical facts to their clustering in textual and narrative units. Only in this consequence, the interpretation of single events and large historical blocks are possible. They open the content and essence of history. And the historian gains ability of answering the fundamental questions of his investigation formulated far back by Herodotus – how, when, and why?