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Download Kronos - Philosophical Journal - Volume I

"Kronos” quarterly was established in 2007 as a project of a particular generation of philosophers all of whom started their studies around the transitional year 1989. “Kronos” soon became the largest philosophical journal in Poland. It is a new voice in Polish philosophy.
Poland at the turn of the 21^st century was and is an inspiring place for thinkers; it is an interesting vantage point for observing and studying human nature. It is a place which saw genocide and two murderous experiments – the Nazi and the Soviet – the aim of which was to create a new type of human being. A philosopher brought up in Warsaw is living in a city destroyed by Hitler and rebuilt by Stalin.
The place and the time when we started studying philosophy influenced our choices and interests. Perhaps a philosopher is nothing but an emanation of the place and time which shaped him. These factors no doubt explain our interest in Hegel and Marx whom we have read through the lenses provided by religious messianists (Fyodorov) or 20^th century prophets of the apocalypse (Kojève and Witkacy). The spirit of time and place prompted us also to study the Classics, to return in thought to Greece where – influenced by Heidegger and Nietzsche – we saw the eternally recurring point, where all history ends and every history begins.

KRONOS: 'Nihilism' is one of the most ambiguous philosophical concepts. What is your idea of it? Would you consider yourself a nihilist? Does nihilism totally exclude religion? What about Meillassoux's nihilistic faith fuelled by the inexistence of God?

In recent interviews with Philippe Petit and Alain Rubens, Pierre Legendre has once again illustrated what we consider to be the far-reaching significance of his work, not only for the scholarly study of mankind-in-history (or history-as-it-creates-and-recreates-mankind) but for the understanding of the unprecedented urgent and practical problems now confronting western societies...

Lacanian theory is used to explain culture, as Žižek and Salecl do, for example. Do you think it is a key to understanding contemporary culture?
I’m very suspicious, myself, of taking concepts that were developed in the clinical setting for transformative psychotherapeutic work and trying to apply them everywhere else. People are sometimes confused: they see that Lacan talks about paintings, films, and artworks of different kinds and they think that Lacan is therefore applying his own concepts to the artworks. It’s the exact opposite—he is looking to art to inspire him to develop concepts to use in his clinical work...

Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Bruce Fink, Dany Nobus, Paweł Dybel, Szymon Wróbel, Karol Irzykowski...

Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Avishai Margalit, Stanisław Grabski...

Alexandre Kojève, Nikolai Fyodorov, Quentin Meillassoux, Stanisław Brzozowski...

The conference Modernity and What Has Been Lost. Considerations on the Legacy of Leo Strauss was held at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków on June 4-5, 2009. The conference made an attempt to identify Strauss’s intellectual background and these problems which may be found in the foreground of his thought. The repudiation of a modern idea of homogenous, universal state (considered as an illegitimate synthesis of Jerusalem and Athens, i.e., the claims of Reason and Revelation) proves to be a pivotal point of his views. The world we live in, molded by science and historical relativism, may be described as hostile to human dignity or perfection, or abhorrent to those who love search for wisdom. Straussian teaching consisted in the steady effort to reopen the quarrel between the Ancient and the Moderns, as well as it refers to esoteric way of writing practiced by the most profound thinkers of the past which has been apparently forgotten in the last three centuries... [more]

F.W.J. Schelling, Ivan V. Kireevski, Jürgen Habermas, Jean-François Courtine, F. Scott Scribner, Alberto Toscano, August Cieszkowski...

On 22 April 2009 two of our editing staff members: deputy editor in chief Piotr Nowak and Rafał Kuczyński participated in an International Seminar dedicated to the Polish cultural heritage of the interwar period (1918 and 1939). The seminar was organized by the Vardo-Semminar Foundation, Polska Institut and Stockholm University and gathered numerous scholars and students from Stockholm University as well as invited guests from Poland.

Un Dieu vengeur a exaucé les voeux de cette multitude
Charles Baudelaire, Salon de 1859

In his recently published tour-de-force The Reformation of the Image, Joseph Leo Koerner discusses an early panel painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder. The painting, a crucifixion from 1503 now in Munich, is unlike any Cranach would later paint on the same subject. Cranach presents a radically oblique view of Christ that introjects a viewer into represented space, specifying one’s position “through the contingency of forms beheld as if at this specific place and time.” By manipulating point-of-view, the artist makes available the “subjective perception of an eyewitness” to the event depicted. The painting suggests a contingency involved in viewing Christ, as if one were to happen upon the scene... [more]

Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt...

Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Gopal Balakrishnan, Zygmunt Bauman, Krzysztof Michalski...

Plato, Seth Benardete, Leo Strauss, Roberto Calasso...

Friedrich Schlegel, Søren Kierkegaard, Mladen Dolar...

Nikolai Berdyaev, Rosa Luxemburg, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Marjan Massonius...

James Hillman, Maryla Falk, Rudi Visker, Edward Abramowski...

Luigi Pareyson...

Max Horkheimer, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Adam Mickiewicz...