The Humanitas publishing house invites you on Saturday, March 2, from 4 p.m., at the Humanitas Bookstore in Cișmigiu, to a meeting with Andrei Cornea, Cătălin Avramescu and Grigore Vida about the volume The Khazar Tournament: Against Contemporary Relativism. Access is free, subject to availability, based on a reservation through Eventbook.
In an increasingly skeptical and relativistic world, where everyone wants to “have their own justice and truth”, we lose our moral and intellectual criteria and are no longer able to face the critical moments of our lives and history. How can one fight with dogmatism, with fanaticism, with autocracies, with anti-liberalism, with conspiracy theories? How can we reconstruct a real hierarchy of values by harmonizing our individual beliefs? The method that Andrei Cornea chooses “offers a way to discern between systems, values, philosophical and cultural positions that does not presuppose an a priori judgment”. The title evokes the story of the Khazar khan who must choose between Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The new edition of The Khazar tournament is added, preceded by a foreword, and supplemented by six polemical essays.
“Immune to any temptation of substantialism, follower of a metaphysics of the penumbra and the approximate, Andrei Cornea seeks a way out of contemporary relativism – to which that of the ancient sophists seems rather benign – that does not bring with it a return to essentialism , nor to confirm those who believe that “only a god can save us”. The answer is found where we least expected it, right before our eyes: in practices, which, as if strengthened by every failure of theories, see themselves further from the road. In this field of tacit knowledge, Andrei Cornea finds the universal, intersubjectivity and that rationality capable of resisting relativism; they are undoubtedly the ingredients of Platonism, but this time it is a Platonism of the sublunar world. Not only that this book, more than a quarter of a century since its first edition, anticipated the discourse so fashionable today about practices. It also proved to be a true organon which, working invisibly as a good practice, led the author to develop a philosophy of the secondary which now takes, however much he dislikes the term, a systematic form: Penumbra (metaphysics), The Khazar tournament (methodology), exception(anthropology), with an excursion into the history of philosophy (A History of Non-Being in Greek Philosophy).”, says GRIGORE VIDA
