Епистемология

The article analyzes allegories and metaphors in Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law.” The literary text is interpreted through the philosophical lenses of Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, Slavoj Žižek, and Gershom Scholem. The central motif of the “door” is explored as a symbol of access to law and as a dual phenomenon of transcendence and immanence. The ambivalence of law is examined as well. On the one hand, it is read as a sacred, inaccessible authority (in the eyes of the man from the country). On the other, the law is interpreted as an intrusive force in everyday life (as exemplified by the judge’s repeated incursions into the painter’s studio). The present analysis links Kafka’s vision of law to the structural ambiguities of the legal system and the tension between legality and justice.

The following text attempts to reconstruct the notion of the highest good in the first two parts of chapter “C. Morality” of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” – “The Moral View of the World” and “Dissemblance.” The main argument of the present article is that Hegel does not reject or negate Kant’s propositions on the highest good or the notion itself, as many scholars claim, but instead – he realizes its Aufhebung by integrating it into the logic of the dialectic. The analysis presented here shows that, by means of the strong rhetorical language used in these most dramatic pages of his fundamental text, Hegel focuses on the contradictions, reached by his predecessor from Königsberg and finds a path beyond them. Closely following their logic, he presents a new level of their complexity. His aim is to track the developments of thought and to open new aspects and possibilities for further approximation to the maximum of the highest good, which is itself a moral experience of the philosophical thought.

The article aims to historically reconstruct the political context in which Heinrich von Kleist wrote his novella “Michael Kohlhaas.” The juridical layer of the text is interpreted as a reaction to the introduction of the Napoleonic Code in the Prussian Lands during the Napoleonic Wars. The study reads the analyzed novella as a form of resistance to the unification of all legal systems required by the Code, following the intricacies of the injustices to which Michael Kohlhaas falls victim. In the article, other examples of similar cases of “unification from above” are provided. One of them is “In the Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka. The other regards the suggestions to use AI in legal action. For the analysis, the concept of “interpretant” of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce is applied. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “use” is also employed to explain the constantly changing and actualizing text of the law

The text offers a psychoanalytic reading of “The City & The City” by China Miéville, whose Marxist theory of international law is reflected, refracted, and further complicated within the framework of the novel. The literary work is examined as a narrative that questions the conflict between the real and the ideological dimensions of a law. The latter, on the one hand, reifies and fetishizes space. On the other, it compels the interpellated subjects to deny and “un-sense” the world around them. The analysis foregrounds the contradictions between the repressive and emancipatory dimensions of the legal system.