Predrag Cicovacki

This collection of essays is dedicated to a recently deceased philosopher and humanist, Nalin Ranasinghe. His central philosophical and humanistic preoccupation was with the human soul. Not surprisingly, his greatest inspiration was Socrates' credo "Care for your soul," and the title of his first book was 'The Soul of Socrates'. In this and his later writings, Ranasinghe expressed his growing concern over the idea that the human soul has been highjacked due to the way our civilization has developed: the highest and noblest aspirations of our civilization have been replaced by our obsession with money, pleasure, and power. We now live in a time where we do not know who we are, nor who the people around us are. Despite all of the technical gadgets connecting us virtually, this is the age of disconnect and loneliness, as well as of the degradations of humanity. Ranasinghe insisted that the two keys for recovery are the self-knowledge of the soul and a continuous dialogue with others. We need to relearn how to relate to ourselves and others as unique individuals, not as objects for the satisfaction of our needs. Following his ideas, the twenty essays presented here are divided into two parts: "the soul in reflection" and "the soul in dialogue." The contributors come from various countries around the globe and work in different disciplines, and their chapters aim to revive our interest in the soul and the obscured core of our humanity. This book will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students of philosophy; however, the essays are written in a non-technical language, also making them accessible to the general audience.

We long to love and to be loved. We also fear love because we risk betrayal by those we love, or we betray them. Predrag Cicovacki's charming book, Luminosity of Love, uses the extraordinary love story of the great unconventional Serbian poet Laza Kostić and the vivacious aristocratic young woman, Lenka Dundjerski, as a starting point for a wide-ranging discussion of the nature of love, its importance in the Western philosophical tradition, and its relevance for living a meaningful life in our high-tech materialistic world of the 21st century. By combining real love stories and philosophical reflections on them, the author focuses on the moments of betrayal that bring us to a crossroads at which point we may choose to retreat from loving, and instead satisfy ourselves with substitutes for love. Alternatively, we may realize that our fear and sense of betrayal need not get the last word when it comes to love, and that we can aspire to transform ourselves into more caring and radiating personalities. Our struggle to realize this aspiration is a love story--the ultimate love story that should concern us. This book is a superb philosophical essay about the transformative power of love.

This essay opens by considering the values that we encounter in our ordinary experience. The essay then leads the audience toward a deeper understanding of values: in terms of values being instrumental or intrinsic, subjective or objective, changing or permanent. The essay then turns to outlining how and in what ways values exist. At this point, the essay introduces the thought of Nicolai Hartmann, who argues that values exist as ideal beings, which have a permanent existence independent of how the practical world is changing, and which have objective validity (although our judgments of values are usually subjective). Hartmann makes a central distinction between the two irreducible scales of values: according to their strength and according to their height. In the second part of the essay, the essay explains how we need both of these two scales to work together and how their work can be coordinated on the principle of “both X and Y,” rather than through the customary approach of “either X or Y.” In the concluding part, the essay illustrates how this complimentary relationship enables business and the humanities to join their resources, rather than to find themselves in constant opposition.

Dostoevsky's philosophy of life is unfolded in this searching analysis of his five greatest works: Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov. Predrag Cicovacki deals with a fundamental issue in Dostoevsky's opus neglected by all of his commentators: How can we affirm life and preserve a healthy optimism in the face of an increasingly troublesome reality? This work displays the vital significance of Dostoevsky's philosophy for understanding the human condition in the twenty-first century. The main task of this insightful effort is to reconstruct and examine Dostoevsky's "aesthetically" motivated affirmation of life, based on cycles of transgression and restoration. If life has no meaning, as his central figures claim, it is absurd to affirm life and pointless to live. Since Dostoevsky's doubts concerning the meaning of life resonate so deeply in our own age of pessimism and relativism, the central question of this book, whether Dostoevsky can overcome the skepticism of his most brilliant creation, is innately relevant. This volume includes a thorough literary analysis of Dostoevsky's texts, yet even those who have not read all of these novels will find Cicovacki's analysis interesting and enthralling. The reader will easily extrapolate Cicovacki's own philosophical interpretation of Dostoevsky's literary heritage.

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was one of the greatest artists of all time, but also one of the harshest critics of the contemporary art. In the conclusion of his controversial book, What is Art?, Tolstoy claimed: “The purpose of art in our time consists in transferring from the realm of reason to the realm of feeling the truth that people’s well-being lies in being united among themselves and in establishing, in place of the violence that now reins, that Kingdom of God – that is, of love – which we all regard as the highest aim of human nature.” In my paper I want to examine what Tolstoy means by that, and also how his understating of the purpose of art applies to his own works of art, as well as how it applies to some other contemporary works of art.

Mahatma K. Gandhi's dedication to finding a path of liberation from an epidemic of violence has been well documented before. The central issue and the novelty of this book is its focus on what Gandhi wanted to liberate us for. The book also provides an assessment of how viable his positive vision of humanity is. Gandhi revolutionized the struggle for Indian liberation from Great Britain by convincing his countrymen that they must turn to nonviolence and that India needed to be liberated from its social ills--poverty, unemployment, opium addiction, institution of child marriage, inequality of women, and Hindu-Muslim frictions--even more than it needed political freedom. Although Gandhi's legacy has not been forgotten, it has often been distorted. He is called "Mahatma" and venerated as a saint, but not followed and often misinterpreted. Predrag Cicovacki attempts to de-mythologize Gandhi and take a closer look at his thoughts, aims, and struggles. He invites us to look at the footprints Gandhi left for us, and follow them as carefully and critically as possible. Cicovacki concludes that Gandhi's spiritual vision of humanity and the importance of adherence to truth are his lasting legacy.

Structured to introduce the reader into all aspects of the philosophy of Nicolai Hartmann (1882-1950), this book aims to stimulate further interest into his thought. Once considered the most studious and systematic of all the German philosophers of the twentieth-century, this prolific author has been nearly forgotten. For many years a student and an admirer of Hartmann's work, Cicovacki argues that a closer look into Hartmann's ontologically and axiologically oriented philosophy contains a promise of a vital philosophical orientation, especially with regard to our understanding of the nature, place, and role of humanity in the larger world. "The Analysis of Wonder" - Hartmann's own definition of philosophy - is an invitation to the readers to challenge their preconceived and self-interested notions of reality in order to relearn to appreciate the always changing and conflicting world, in all of its complexity, richness, and sublimity.

This essay examines the significance of Kant's transcendental philosophy by focusing on the central metaphors used in his works. The four metaphors singled out here are those of the Copernican turn, the land of truth and the ocean of illusion, the starry heavens and the moral law, and of perpetual peace. The author emphasizes the strong and the weak points of Kant's philosophy that these metaphors reveals, and argues that these central metaphors work together and point toward the two essential concerns of Kant's entire philosophical opus: an active role of the creative subject in all forms of human experience, and the boundaries of the subject's creativity. Further reflection should not only reveal some other metaphors and their role in Kant's philosophy, but also clarify how he himself understand the nature of metaphors: Are metaphors the expression of our creativity, or of the limitations of our creativity?. Ovaj rad ispituje znacaj Kantove transcendentalne filozofije time sto se usmerava na centralne metafore koriscene u njegovim delima. Cetiri metafore su ovde izdvojene kao najvaznije: kopernikanski obrt, postojbina istine i okean iluzije, zvezdano nebo i moralni zakon, i vecni mir. Autor naglasava jake i slabe stane Kantove filozofije koje razotkrivaju te metafore i argumentise da, uzete zajedno, one ukazuju na dve centralne preokupacije citavog Kantovog filozofskog opusa: aktivna uloga kreativnog subjekta u svim formama ljudskog iskustva, i granice ljudske kreativnosti. Dalja refleksija bi trebalo ne samo da ukaze na neke druge metafore i njihovu ulogu u Kantovoj filozofiji, nego takodje i da razjasni kako je on shvatao samu prirodu metafora: Da H su metafore izraz nase kreativnosti, ili pak izraz granica te kreativnosti?.

U ovom radu autor prvo analizira razlike i slicnosti izmedju rata i terorizma, a zatim argumentise da su i jedan i drugi duboko nemoralni. Njihove razlike su mnogo manje znacajne od njihovih slicnosti, o kojih je glavna ona koja se sastoji u negiranju stanovista da je svaki ljudski zivot jednako vredan. To negiranje otvara put ka nehumanom i nasilnom tretmanu onih (neprijatelja, drugih) koji nisu toliko vredni koliko i mi, sto karakterise i terorizam i rat. Pored neprihvatljivih moralnih implikacija proisteklog iz takvog tretmana drugih ljudskih bica, dalja zajednicka i problematicna posledica terorizma i rata se sastoji u cinjenici da dehumanizacija drugih vodi, na kraju, i ka dehumanizaciji nas samih.