Pepka Boyadzhieva – Social Engineering

Had there been more books like this one, Bulgaria’s socialist past would have been more past and less present. A study on the practice of a defunct political actor, Pepka Boyadzhieva’s book may be read as a warning of the dangers of any social engineering in which the plurality of perspectives, prospects and positions is ignored, socially significant values are subjected to the interests of one social group, and a single social order absorbs all others.

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Svetlana Sabeva – Refracted Sociality

The twentieth century faced thinking with a number of challenges related to events that left an imprint on the lives and memories of many witnesses and victims. The Holocaust, Chernobyl, the totalitarian regimes, the new forms of biopower and control became part of a collective experience that was almost impossible to articulate.

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Ivaylo Ditchev – Citizens Beyond Places?

A few years ago, in a review of Ivaylo Ditchev’s book From Belonging to Identity. Politics of the Image (2002; in Bulgarian), I wrote that its general focus can be defined as ‘interest in the metamorphoses of the modern age in the age of globalization, that is, in the age of deterritorialization and crisis of the nation-state when communities controlled by the nation-state increasingly give way to networks that do not belong to anyone’s territory’.

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Ina Dimitrova – Reflexivity and Social Ontology

In his Letter on Humanism, Heidegger recounts a story told by Aristotle. Strangers come to visit Heraclitus, only to find the famous philosopher warming himself at a stove. Noticing their dismay at his humble appearance, Heraclitus calls to them to come in, with the words, ‘For here too the gods are present.

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Martin Ossikovski – Shelters of Faith

Shelters of Faith is the product of an almost ten-year-long interest that began while Martin Ossikovski was still a student and which gradually evolved into an in-depth study of the problems in question. I find the choice of subject of the book to be fully justified and enriching the philosophical, cultural and political studies of the Middle Ages, which in recent years have been developing in Bulgaria too.

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A History of the Peoples Republic of Bulgaria. The Regime and Society

A History of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. The Regime and Society (edited by Ivaylo Znepolski) has not appeared in a void. The closest context of this impressive volume (716 pages) is the series of books published by the Institute for Studies of the Recent Past, most of whose authors are also the authors of the studies in the History.

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Ventseslav Kulov – Conceptions of Philosophy

Probably every teacher of philosophy will have felt somewhat awkward when having to explain to different audiences what their science is really about. There are different ways of getting out of this situation, depending on the skills of the teachers and the expectations of the audience.

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