CONTENTS - VOL. 13, NUMBER 1, JUNE 2003

SYMPOSIUM

THE PUBLIC & THE PRIVATE

EMIL VIŠŇOVSKÝ: Introduction

GIDEON CALDER: Thinking "Post-Foundationally" about the Public/Private Distinction
LESZEK KOCZANOWICZ : Civil Society as an Ethical Challenge (Paradoxes of the Creation of the Public Sphere in Post-totalitarian Poland)
ALEXANDER KREMER: What is the Origin of Obligation?
ZUZANA KICZKOVÁ:The Public and Private from the Feminist Perspective
GABRIEL BIANCHI: Public Sexuality and the Intimate Public (Postmodern Reflections on Sexuality)

ARTICLES

HEIDEMARIE UHL: "Culture" and/or "Society"? (On the "Cultural Studies Turn in the Historical Sciences)MARÍNA ČARNOGURSKÁ: On the Substance of the Way (Dao)

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ON THINKING "POST-FOUNDATIONALLY" ABOUT THE PUBLIC/PRIVATE DISTINCTION
GIDEON CALDER

E-mail: gideon.calder@newport.ac.uk

Does the notion of a public/private distinction survive the 'post-foundationalist' turn in recent philosophy and political theory? Distinguishing between metaphysical and normative senses in which the distinction has been made, this paper argues that the second is rather harder to sever from the first than those contemporary theorists who seek to avoid strong ontological claims would have us think. I take Richard Rorty's work as exemplary of a 'post-foundationalist' approach, distinguished by its constructive engagement with the 'metaphysics-free' rethinking of social norms. Notably, Rorty seeks to retrieve the public/private distinction in the process. In exploring curiosities about the conclusions he reaches, I argue, against them, that it is partly because of the ontological instability of any public/private distinction that a rigid adherence to it is morally and politically problematic. Given this, I suggest that the attempt to dispense with all foundational claims is harder to pull off than many have argued. Far from being a necessary move, it may hinder the development of the kind of genuinely nuanced account of subjectivity denied by the all-too-heavy influence of the Cartesian heritage.

pp. 7-19

CIVIL SOCIETY AS AN ETHICAL CHALLENGE
(Paradoxes of the Creation of the Public Sphere in Post-totalitarian Poland)
LESZEK KOCZANOWICZ

E-mail: leszek@post.pl

The author describes the meaning of the idea of civil society for the abolition of the totalitarian communist regime in Central Europe. He pays a special attention to the character of a public sphere under that regime, totally under control of the state, as well as to the agents of the opposition (such as the Solidarity movement) and their struggle for liberation and creation of a new democratic public life in Poland. The focus is laid on the ethical motivation of political transformation of relations between private and public. Trust and justice should lead the social reform and penetrate all spheres of social and political activity. The ethically based idea of civil society has been serving also as a blueprint for reconstruction of public sphere in Poland after 1989.

pp. 20-33

WHAT IS THE ORIGIN OF OBLIGATION?
ALEXANDER KREMER

E-mail: alexanderkremer@hotmail.com

The public-private distinction is often treated as a uni-dimensional, rigidly dichotomous and absolute, fixed and universal concept, whose meaning can be determined by the objective content of behaviour. Nevertheless, if we take a closer look at the distinction in diverse empirical contexts we find them to be more subtle, diffused and ambiguous than suggested. I am convinced that the boundary separating the private from the public shifts constantly, it is contested and historically bound. The public and private must be treated as multi-dimensional, continuous and relative, fluid and situational or contextual concepts, whose meaning lies in how they are interpreted and framed. The paper analyzes some of the moral dimensions of these concepts drawing on the concept of deconstruction.

pp. 34-43

THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE FROM A FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE
ZUZANA KICZKOVÁ

E-mail: kiczkova@fphil.uniba.sk

The present study is based on the conceptions of the gender-specific character of the private and public spheres. Western feminist discourse explores historical, political and social reasons for women's exclusion from the public sphere. In spite of the fact that the danger of eliminating women from the public sphere and in particular from political decisions has not vanished, the author focuses on another important aspect of gender specificity of the private and public. She identifies it as a "double burden" of women. The purpose was to reflect and analyze experiences of women from different socio-political contexts (during the building of socialism in Czechoslovakia) and to contribute to the knowledge of gender-differentiated power asymmetry. This aim required some methodological modification of the categories of the private and public, new investigations into different shaping of the identities of women and men depending on their existence in two different spheres as well as the naming of socio-cultural consequences of the female domination in some branches.

pp. 44-58

PUBLIC SEXUALITY AND THE INTIMATE PUBLIC
(POSTMODERN REFLECTIONS ON SEXUALITY)
GABRIEL BIANCHI

E-mail: bianchi@savba.sk

Sexuality has moved from the private to the public; what remains private, and, in fact, whose importance is growing, is intimacy. The prospects of a 'new' intimacy are being set under the circumstances of the dissolution of the universal morality. The challenges of our post-modern times are the challenges of moral self-constructing, building democratic intimate relationships, and finding suitable borders between the public and the private aspects of the-meanwhile radically politicized-sexuality.

pp. 59-75

"CULTURE" AND/OR "SOCIETY"?
(ON THE "CULTURAL STUDIES TURN" IN THE HISTORICAL SCIENCES)
HEIDEMARIE UHL

E-mail: heidemarie.uhl@oeaw.ac.at

Since the late 1980s, "culture" has become a key concept of a counter-move, no longer understood as a corrective, but as the beginning of a new "royal road" in the historical sciences as well. "Culture" has been almost a battle cry from the periphery of the established subject areas, closely connected with the debate about the "heretical" ideas of postmodern discourse or about the reception of poststructuralism and the linguistic turn. In this way, several years later, culture successfully contributed to institutionalization and legitimation strategy within the disciplines themselves-"Cultural science(s)" opened a clear way out of the legitimation crisis in the humanities. "Cultural science(s)" now became visible as a "magic formula" of a trans-disciplinary renewal of the humanities, as a programme for the overcoming of disciplinary boundaries, but also of the ever stronger differentiation within the subject. In German historical science, the reception of the cultural science paradigm has focussed on the dichotomy between the leading concepts of "culture" and "society". In this paper, the transdisciplinary agreement-fields of the "culture science turn" are not pushed into the field of vision, but the disciplinary differentiations and centres of gravity are considered, on the basis of the view that the variety and heterogeneity of the culture science paradigm is also conditioned through different disciplinary reception forms. The author attempts a move of the transformation of the historical science(s) under the concept of culture, the controversies over the theoretical focusing and socio-political potential of the "cultural science turn", and the consequences of this transformation for the self-understanding of historical science-from a historical social science to a historical culture science-should contribute to the formulation of the definition of categories in the opaque semantic field of "culture".

pp. 76-91

ON THE SUBSTANCE OF THE WAY (DAO)
MARINA ČARNOGURSKÁ

E-mail: kaocarn@savba.sk

The philosophical analyses of two recently discovered important ancient Chinese philosophical texts: The Guodian Laozi, (found in the tomb of an ancient Chinese aristocrat whose burial is dated between the mid-fourth and early third century B. C.), especially its third (until now unknown) part of Laozi's Dao De jing, with its original "theory of creation", as well as The Huangdi sijing (also until now unknown text), found in an ancient tomb near Mawangdui, especially its fourth book Dao yuan (A Substance of the Dao), refute an assumption that the early Chinese Taoistic texts are mainly ethical and political, but not essentially metaphysical texts. In accordance with this, the basic philosophical categories used in them, such as the Way (Dao), or its universal metaphysic substratum De, their cosmic and life energy qi, etc. have evidently the dialectic character of a non-immutable and non-homogeneous metaphysical substance which is in general an everlasting synergistic process of an unending bipolar dialectic energy of being. This process is, in itself, immanently creating and liquidating the whole Universe (=Heavens) on the base of Yin-Yang dialectic bipolarity of everlasting changes.
The author of this paper wants to demonstrate this process by using some special examples from both newly discovered Chinese Taoistic texts and in accordance with it also the unique philosophical value of classical Chinese metaphysic in the history of World philosophy.

pp. 92-102

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