Vladimir Lukic

This paper examines the compounded threat that post-truth populism poses to the foundations of deliberative democracy. While most scholarship treats populism and post-truth politics as separate phenomena, we argue that their convergence creates a distinct and more corrosive force—one that combines epistemic distortion with political exclusion. By conceptualizing post-truth populism as more than the sum of its parts, we offer new insights into its impact on democratic legitimacy and the conditions for public reason. Making use of Rawlsian terminology and principles, we contend that post-truth populism must be seen as an unreasonable doctrine that compromises the ethical and epistemological basis of deliberative democracy. The paper explores the consequences of this characterization and concludes by examining strategies to counteract these challenges while preserving the core principles of liberal democracy.

The contemporary public sphere is full of fantasies about the good old days when “men were men and women were women” and “the world made sense.” And while it is easy to discard these proclamations as empty nostalgia, the motivations and underlying normative facts behind them not only are philosophically complex but also help explain the broader social importance and political implications of longing for the past. This paper aims to analyze the phenomenon of nostalgia from the perspective of the recent debate on moral change. The main ambition is to explain how changing moral frameworks may lead to a crisis of intelligibility among sections of the population who, for different reasons and to differing degrees, have not adopted the prevailing moral outlook and have been “left behind” by the evolution of shared beliefs. We use two main models of moral change. One is derived from Alasdair MacIntyre’s theoretical opus and uses his notion of “practice” as an evolving normative system of rules and beliefs. The second uses Michael Freeden’s morphological analysis, showing how the relationships between “core” and “peripheral” concepts change over time in any complex set of beliefs. Both theories are capable of explaining how, on an individual level, a loss of meaning can occur when a given person gets “out of sync” with broader social-normative developments. This theoretical model enables us to analyze both the ramifications of nostalgia and the problems and dangers associated with it when it becomes widespread.

This paper argues against Galen Strawson’s criticism of the narrativist identity thesis. Strawson points out that the narrativist thesis fails to portray those with an episodic perception of themselves. I claim that episodicity is rather problematic and that we should question the validity of this notion. The first step in this goal is to decipher Strawson’s basis of the self which is an amalgam between the cultural and social and is perceived differently by different people. Afterwards, I will try to use the claims derived from Strawson’s basis and apply the critique of his method. I pose a question about the relationship between episodic and diachronic and, ultimately, argue that both culturally and biologically, assuming the diachronic aspect of the self is necessary, apart from the very small number of cases. In this sense, the main conclusion is that Strawson’s thesis is limiting but does not pose a valid alternative to the narrativist identity thesis.

This paper deals with the notion of intelligibility crisis in terms of conflict and harmony. Namely, we will analyze the notion of intelligibility from MacIntyre’s philosophical opus and apply it to the historical case. Intelligibility, according to MacIntyre, is the notion which provides us with contextual meaning and embeds our actions with sense within the specific tradition. Intelligibility crisis is the term that is coined to provide a descriptive account of the phenomenon when we cannot connect ourselves with a new social context in which we find ourselves in. To further elaborate on this and apply it onto an example, we shall use the historical case of the Yugoslavian nation. We will provide analysis between three different contextual narratives – pre-Yugoslav narrative, Yugoslav narrative, and post-Yugoslav narrative. After applying the notion of intelligibility crisis onto this historical case study, we will notice how people of one social narrative lose intelligibility by going into another social narrative. Furthermore, we shall consider the notions of conflicts and harmony as those that are connected to intelligibility. The main argument from the descriptive state of things which was offered would be the following – conflicting sentiments arise when we are not in harmony with the narrative within which we have attained intelligibility.