Καιρός (Kairos)

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ISSN: 2534-8442

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Now showing 1 - 18 of 18

An Essay on Metaphysics: Ch. 4
(Plovdiv University Press, 2024-09-01) Collingwood, Robin George
Anthropological approach towards transformations at the Maritsa coal region in Bulgaria
(Plovdiv University Press, 2025-12-15) Mancheva, Svetoslava
The aim of the text is to outline a picture of life under the conditions of transformations in the Maritsa coal region of Bulgaria. The lifeworld of local people is shaped by prolonged states of crisis caused by various uses of the environment, which lead to social, cultural, and ecological insecurity. Observations reveal dynamics in how such conditions are managed, reflected in the livelihood strategies of families and communities in the region. The study focuses on human stories, practices, and environmental knowledge in the context of the Green Deal.
Aphoristih
(Plovdiv University Press, 2024-09-01) Nanev, Atanas
Beauty enhancement: boundaries and vulnerability
(Plovdiv University Press, 2024-09-01) Kolev, Ivan
The text reveals problematic perspectives related to the quest for the amplification of human beauty. Statistics are briefly presented showing the rise of cosmetic procedures, plastic and aesthetic surgery. The need to recognize and delineate healthy boundaries of appearance enhancement is emphasized. It is highlighted that the awareness of beauty service users about risks and vulnerabilities is not at a satisfactory level. The text includes studies and analyses by experts and researchers in various fields: medicine, ethics, sociology, psychology and philosophy. Vulnerabilities arising from the increased interest in beauty enhancement include risks to physical and mental health, a tendency towards low self-esteem and a lack of sufficient love for one's own body, the danger of becoming addicted to beauty enhancement through various methods and procedures, and susceptibility to external influences, including the socio-cultural environment and the digital world. The main contribution of the text is that it provides an accurate overview of the vulnerabilities associated with beauty enhancement, warns of the need to set healthy boundaries to beautification, and suggests directions for future research on the chosen issue.
How does the language of social media form a common being?
(Plovdiv University Press, 2025-12-15) Dafcheva, Maria
The question of how the language of social media forms a common being has turned out to be especially interesting in contemporary times. In the present article, I will focus on it. Social media gives us the opportunity for constant and continuous communication in real time, provides us with access to all types of information, and is an inseparable part of people’s lives. This happens through the mediation of language. We use language every day, but we do not think about how it forms and, at the same time, determines our being. Our idea of the world is directly reflected in the meaning that we put into words and the way in which we communicate. Language is conditioned by the rules that we follow, even if we do not always realize it. In this sense, the text is positioned on the boundary between philosophy of language, ontology, and epistemology.
Human vulnerability and socio-political contexts
(Plovdiv University Press, 2024-09-01) Simova, Olga
This article examines human vulnerability in relation to the changing socio-political context of the contemporary world, resulting from the undermining of the established international order in recent decades as a result of Russia's large-scale war against Ukraine, military actions in explosive areas such as the Middle East, and the hybrid warfare that dictatorial regimes and terrorist organizations are waging against the free world. The poles of confrontation are outlined, broadly labelled as the global ghetto versus the global city. The second part presents the two largely contradictory discourses - modern and postmodern - within which human vulnerability in the Western world is thematized. Several themes of the discourse critical of modernity are presented, such as 'structural violence'; the specific identity of minority groups and the demand for specific rights; and postcolonialism and anti-colonialism, which require policies that contradict those derived from the modern discourse and promote ghettoization both within individual societies and in the world. The hypothesis proposed in this article is that war, especially open war, clarifies dividing lines and challenges a rethinking of emphases in defining human vulnerability.
In search of energy citizens or how field research took place in "Maritsa-East"
(Plovdiv University Press, 2025-12-15) Gavrailov, Gavrail
The article describes some methodological features in the preparation and conduct of a field study in the Maritsa-East complex area in the winter of 2024. The emphasis is on the opportunities for structuring successful research strategies through the mobilization of social capital in local media networks, environmental and civic activists, and municipal and regional symbols. An analysis is made of the use of a research alibi by introducing semiotic sabotage in the preparation and conduct of interviews. The mass perception of the energy citizen is summarized, and the process of democratization of energy production is analyzed in the context of the green transition in the coal region.
Life and social transformations in the context of the green transition
(Plovdiv University Press, 2025-12-15) Kisikova, Maria
This study is an attempt to examine issues related to the challenges posed by climate change and the current policies that address them. These challenges provoke public unrest related to the social dimensions of transformation (loss of financial income, security, and social status). This text is based on field ethnological research conducted in several localities in the southeastern coal region. The case presented shows a life trajectory marked by a sense of constant change (uncertainty) in the context of ongoing social and industrial transformation. Through it, I will attempt to reveal the possibilities of the ethnological approach in the study of current issues related to the coal transition and the Green deal, the understanding and interpretation of life choices in the context of macro-processes and policies.
Persistence of everyday categorizations against renewal through induction
(Plovdiv University Press, 2025-12-15) Mineva, Martina
The text explores the issue of the persistence of everyday categorizations of citizens from the "Maritsa East" coal basin region during the period 2024–2025, based on interviews conducted within the project "Future Trapped in a Carbon Past", DUECOS, PU. Based on my conceptual connecting of Harvey Sacks’ concept of “protection against induction” and Lyotard’s interpretation of legitimation within language games as a method (a problematic inspired by late Wittgenstein), the argument is made that in a number of utterances stabilized social categories can be identified, which, as stable categorizations, are linked to legitimating strategies that block the potential for a praxeological inductive refutation, and, consequently, for the renewal of social experience. The study traces how specific linguistic constructions – especially quantifications through “everyone”, “no one”, “always” – operate analogously to Sacks’s anti-modifier modifiers which legitimize praxeological boundaries of categorical, and thereby social, immutability. Based on an analysis of fragments from the interviews, a typology of strategies is proposed: some oriented toward maintaining the persistence of categorical explanations, and others toward inductive practices, related to rethinking, specifying, personalizing, and proposing new life trajectories. In this context, “de-paralyzing possibilities” are conceived as discursive transitions that activate the potential for biographical transformation and the unfolding of alternative regimes of legitimation.
Silence at last
(Plovdiv University Press, 2025-12-15) X.V.
The archives of the Bulgarian News Agency – history, status and prospects
(Plovdiv University Press, 2025-12-15) Sevova, Desislava
In the report proposed by the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA) on the topic "The Archives of BTA – History, Status and Prospects" the following topics and issues are presented and developed: Institutional origin, content, and organization of the BTA archives and functioning of the archives in the e-environment. In order to acquaint you with the establishment of the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency in 1898, as a special service for the delivery of telegraph messages for events abroad at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Denominations (MIA), the different periods of the Agency's functioning, the first bulletins issued, the first director, and so on, to the present day are reflected. The status, structure, and functions of the Bulgarian News Agency today, with the relevant normative and sub-normative acts on the basis of which it carries out its activities, are also noted. With regard to the organization of work with the archives in BTA, a general characteristic of the individual archival arrays, types of archives, their content and features is made. For the first time in the history of BTA, a specialized structure, the Archives and Reference Directorate, was established, which covers the activities of storage, preservation, reporting and registration, access, use and digitization of archival documents from all arrays in the Agency. In order to preserve, access, use and promote archival documents, BTA has joined the National Recovery and Resilience Plan for the implementation of the investment Digitization of Museum Collections, Libraries and Archives, providing for a phased digitization of the various archival arrays with a deadline up to 2026.
The dilemma of proper names
(Plovdiv University Press, 2024-09-01) Beshkova, Anna
The purpose of the present text is to present the specific function of proper names. Therefore, I will initially consider the now classic concepts of the meaning of proper names, which could be divided into two main types - referential and descriptive. I will analyze the problems that each of them not only solves but also creates. In conclusion, I will present an alternative pragmatic approach to avoid the difficulties that have arisen.
The problem for understanding: limits of the language models used by artificial intelligence
(Plovdiv University Press, 2024-09-01) Zhelyazkova, Denitsa
The article examines some of the most advanced language models used by artificial intelligence. It tries to answer the question, to what extent is understanding by artificial intelligence possible when using them and what are the limitations before it.
The Problems of Philosophy: ch. 4
(Plovdiv University Press, 2024-09-01) Russell, Bertrand
To a Possible Technological Gnosis
(Plovdiv University Press, 2024-09-01) Penev, Galin
The article considers some gnostic motives in transhumanist writers whose ideas about the future of society were denounced as an antihuman utopia. The roots of this movement are closely related to the project of modernity and the author tries to reveal some aspects of the gnostic inheritance of the last three centuries. The technological growth is driven by the anthropocentric worldview and made nature just a resource store. Nature must be transformed, and human nature too: eugenics instead of ethics.
Tracing the мemory: “Mini Maritsa-Iztok” in the Archives of the State Security Service
(Plovdiv University Press, 2025-12-15) Asparuhov, Valentin; Pendzhekova-Hristeva, Rusalena
The article examines archival documents of the State Security Service (DS) related to the “Mini Maritsa-Iztok” industrial complex during the 1960s and 1970s. Through an analysis of materials from literni (code-name) files, it traces how agent–operative and counterintelligence activities influenced organizational–managerial and technical–engineering decisions and challenges within this strategic energy sector. The study presents specific examples illustrating the mechanisms of surveillance, control, and institutional intervention exercised by the DS.
Vulnerability at the Beginning of Life: moral issues around artificial wombs
(Plovdiv University Press, 2024-09-01) Pendjurova, Gergana
Human beings are born with an inherent vulnerability, they are always in danger of being born impaired or not born at all. Today's technologies seek precisely to remove this vulnerability and to enhance the human being. Ectogenesis may be the key to providing protection against the inherent vulnerability of the unborn human being, but it itself brings with it many ethical conundrums.
Тhe Janus-faced abductive inference
(Plovdiv University Press, 2024-09-01) Mineva, Martina
The text offers an analysis of the problem of the abductive inference’s internal limits, attempting to extract the theoretical charge of the metaphor about Janus-faced abduction, offered by John Kaag. This problem is put into consideration through Charles Peirce's dual definition of abduction simultaneously as both a process of forming explanatory hypotheses and the only logicaloperation that presents new ideas. It is emphasized that: by going through 1) taking into account the praxeological turn in logic (20th century); 2) making sense of an analogous metaphor in Ernest Cassirer, which refers to symbolic forms; and 3) turning to an attempt to analyze Kepler's discovery of the shape of the orbit of Mars as the most emblematic example of abductive inference (as Peirce points out), it is possible to think the theoretical charge of the metaphor of the Janus-faced abduction. The results of the investigation are presented summarized with the highlighting of the following problems: 1) the modal conflict of the forbidden obligatory; 2) the weak incommensurability; and 3) the dynamics between forma formans and forma formata.

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