ფილოსოფია ქართულ-ამერიკულ პარალელებში

Abstract

The article comments on the communication meaning of the word “philosophy” on the example of one historical case. Georgian diplomat and scholarly writer Gela Charkviani describes in his memoirs the meeting between US President George W. Bush (junior) and the second President of Georgia, Eduard Shevardnadze, at the White House in Washington. Shevardnadze called Bush’s last speech at the joint session of the Congress “philosophical and profound.” This facilitated two-way communication. How did two “non-philosophers”, politicians who were not specialist philosophers, understand the concept of philosophy? Why does the word “philosophy” have such a powerful communicative meaning? How did the meeting participants understand the essence of American pragmatism? According to the publication, the “social contract” should be based on pre-contractual, religious-ethical foundations, which are articulated in philosophy. Here, perhaps, was meant the superiority of practical philosophy over theoretical, as it was in Stoicism, in Kant ethics, in the pragmatic reconstruction project of Charles Sanders Pierce, William James, and John Dewey. We should also consider the tendency to transfer traditional metaphysics to the metaphilosophical plane.