Corneliu Bilba

The purpose of this article is to show that the crisis of democracy in post-communist countries is an aspect of the more general crisis of society, being connected to the difficulties of modernization. Starting from the example of Romania, without making a case study, I show that corruption constitutes a set of unfavorable conditions for the rule of law, and that the source is the destruction of civil society by totalitarianism. Nevertheless, a retrospective look at the modern history of the region reveals that the destructive effect of totalitarianism is imbued with some specific cultural traits. It turns out that corruption (abuse of entrusted power) had destroyed democracy long before the establishment of communism. This possibly proves that corruption is a problem of social mentality, being linked to other unfavorable conditions, which are part of a long history of political domination.

This article analyses some aspects of the critical discourse on the reform of the university. Some critics of the neo-liberal reform state that professionalization cannot be a goal in itself of the university because it nullifies the condition of the university of being sans condition, that is autonomous. The author of the article agrees with the notion that there are negative consequences of professionalization on formation and research. However, he shows that the professional orientation of the university is not new, as the radical critics of the neo-liberal perspective believe. Moreover, the radical critics of the current professionalization do not refer to the professionalization of the university in the socialist societies that employed Marxism and economic nationalism. This should be analysed because in the globalization era China meets the demand of the global market with a type of higher education based on the professionalization of the university in a political system controlled by Marxism, though open to the market. As a consequence, the critical stance towards the negative consequences of neo-liberalism is not honest as long as it does not analyse the problem of the negative consequences of the Marxist egalitarianism on the idea of university.

In order to fully understand Michel Foucault’s archeology of knowledge it is necessary to put it not only in the context of the discourse theories of the French school, but also in that of the linguistic theories of science. On the one hand, Foucault rejects the representational theory of scientific language. In his analysis of the discourse of the human sciences, with its complicated definition of the statement, he aims to show that we cannot limit the language of knowledge to a vocabulary. On the other hand, Foucault’s approach is a serious challenge to structuralism because it is impossible to analyze the language of savoirs without taking into account the statement’s correlate. If the discourse of sciences is an artificial vocabulary created by means of the purification of the natural language, Saussure’s semiology could not compete against the conceptual dynamics of representational semiotics, and should admit that, in the cognitive usage, signs are representations. Therefore, Foucault admits that the statement has a correlate, that this correlate is not a physical object and that it functions as a historical structure of the discourse. This structure can be seen as a norm; the changing of this norm cannot be identified but in the archive and its description is always retrospective, structural and archaeological.

Este artigo propõe uma reflexão sobre a tradução filosófica ao levar a cabo uma análise da tradução em romeno – da responsabilidade do próprio autor do artigo – da Filosofia Política de Eric Weil. Essa análise tem um objectivo duplo. Por um lado, mostra de que forma a linguagem de Weil obedece à condição de estranheza do discurso filosófico referida pelos Teóricos da tradução. Logo à partida – e de forma mais decisiva do que noutras filosofias – a filosofia de Weil situa-se num campo interlinguístico, o que coloca problemas especí­ficos à sua tradução. Por outro lado, esta análise mostra quais são os tipos de dificuldades que se encontram quando se verte a filosofia de Weil na língua romena. Essas dificuldades prendem-se quer com a proximidade linguística entre o romeno e o francês (corre-se o risco de simplificação), quer com o estado (ainda) precário do vocabulário filosófico, quer com a ausência de algumas palavras (o que impõe a infeliz necessidade de recorrer a descrições).

Gadamer’s view on truth and understanding does not offer a real solution on Dilthey’s problem, because it involves a concept of language that doesn’t admit the communication between text, action and history in the same time with the constitution of a field of autonomous significations. Gadamer denies Dilthey’s naïf objectivism and the representation-language, but he can not rebuild, on an other level, the reference. Thus, the historical sciences should adopt the model of poetical language, considered as non-referential, but it would be better to find resources in a non-ostensive referential language. Such language is the narrative one, if it is considered from the point of view of contemporary theories of linguistic and semiotics, which admits the idea of text’s world. According to these theories the analogies with the text world make possible a reconstruction of action. This direction was followed by Paul Ricoeur, who found a solution on Dilthey’s problem avoiding the naïf objectivism without compromising the spirit of gadamerian reflection on understanding.

Theories of justice are marred by a permanent state of conflict because they express prejudices whose source lies in the lifeworld. One may regard these theories as interpretations of the concept of justice. Assuming a strong meaning of “theory,” one can legitimately ask if it is possible to reduce a theory of justice to its underlying paradigm. Several different paradigms coexist in modernity; the tension between them has intensified with the advent of political ideologies. The newest paradigm of justice is global justice. Yet the epistemic status of all theories of justice is ambiguous. A theory of justice is true to the extent that it is right, and false if it is not. This applies to Rawls’ theory, as well.