An ongoing seminar on Production and Causality, Productivity and Reproduction: Conceptual Constructions and their Repercussions in the Contemporary World
(Institute of Philosophical Sciences, The Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)

ANNOTATION

George Angelov:

The seminar’s task is to outline and to submit to discussion some of the basic conceptualizations of the production and the productivity (the critical, the dialectical, the hermeneutic ones, these of critical rationalism, postpositivism, etc.); to juxtapose their advantages and shortcomings; to analyze the extent of their application to some topical problems of science and the contemporary societies. As well as to reply to some of the following questions:
• To whom does productivity belong – to nature, to the subject, to be-ing, to humans, to the imagination, to the community, to technique, to simulation, to the spirit?
• What is the specific categorization of the types of pro-duction (Her-stellen) – creation, origin (genesis), creativity (poiesis), making (techne), production (Herstellung, Gestell), constitution (establish-ing of the community or the state), discovery (foundation, innova-tion in science, philosophy), etc.?
• What characterizes the relationship between the various ways of be-ing, fixed up in the transitions at the becoming and the annihilation – for instance between Ready-to-hand (Zuhandeheit) and Present-at-hand (Vorhandeheit), between Dasein and Being-with (Mitsein), between the Dasein, the living creatures, fenced in their environ-ment and the most-existing of the existing entities (God).
• What is the status of the new forms of knowledge (cognition) and education, influenced by the new means of visualization and con-veying of information? Is there a new capability, which is to be re-sponsible for a presumable new form of constitution and synthesis?

Assen Dimitrov:

Provisional exposition of some of the ontological aspects of production:
• What is the difference between physical causality and production?
There is no production in the physical universe. Production however comes forward as a result of the evolution of the physical universe. Why and how did this happen?
1. Why has it been necessary to nature to start producing at all?
2. How could nature start producing in the conditions of a determinis-tic physical causality?
3. What is the ontological effect of a process of production? Unlike the effect of a standard physical causal process? Is there a difference at all? What is it?
4. In what way and does the nature of the single entity, as well as that of the universe as a whole, change in the presence of the ontological fact of production?
• What is the ontological nature of production?
1. Production as an ontological mechanism of acquiring of new capa-bilities, new possibilities, by being.
2. Production as a process, most generally speaking – of learning.
Nature, by itself, is unable to produce. It order to start producing, it has to acquire new capabilities. Its new, synthetic, constructive capabilities are neither a fruit of an ‘intelligent design’, nor of an emergent evolution – two approaches, which presuppose more than they can explain themselves. Nature acquires its productive capacity through “learning”. The way of “learning”, as a possible solution to the origin of life, to the intelligence, to the evolution problem, to the ontological nature of production in general.
• The problem about the production of knowledge.
While production is a process of learning, the opposite is also true. Learning, the acquisition of knowledge is not some immediate intuitive, naturalistic process. It is a process of production. In particular, it will be emphasized on the application of cognitive tools, as long as tools are some-thing totally escaping out of the scope of the classical cognitive subject-object relation, where they are totally absent as a member enjoying full epis-temological rights.

Overview
of Dr. George Angelov’s presentation
Uncovering of Understanding vs. Faculty of Imagination:
Figures and Limits of Productivity
November 27, 2008

The presentation by George Angelov was focused on the nature of productivity. Built up on the opposition between Kant’s critical analytics of the faculty of imagination and the existential-hermeneutic construction of the uncovering of understanding (enowning of being), it claims that produc-tivity is not specified through a requirement for a result. This, unexpected at first glance, statement is based on the phenomenological distinction between meaning and expression and the fulfillment (Erfüllung) of the intention as a noema, that is, as an intentional correlate.
The phenomenal (existential) confirmation of the presented treatment entails the conclusion that productivity does not consist in the production (of artefacts), but on the contrary—the produced appears only in the horizon of the productivity of the understanding. This means that the productivity above all bears the character of an uncovering of the understanding. This uncovering may have a logos-definition (scheme) or be hidden in the logos as a Secret, i.e. as a function of the intent.
Thus, it ought to be generalized that productivity can be related to a result, but in a proper sense it has the sign-trace as its correlate. As long as productivity is, on balance, a function of the intent (which means it doesn’t have a logos-character, but only a logos-expression), it is manifested either with a view to an artefact (scheme), or regardless of any result it acquires the profile of an enowning of the corridors of understanding.

Assen Dimitrov

Overview
of Associate Professor Dr. Maria Dimitrova
Heidegger and Levinas about the status of the produced
December 11, 2008

Maria Dimitrova has presented a unordinary interpretation on the sub-ject of the production and the produced. The emphasis was placed on the way of the comprehension of the produced—not as an autonomous and a completed entity in itself, but as a temporal projection of the horizon of meanings. Since in the final and the proper sense of the word, according to Dimitrova, the production should be understood as a constitution (produc-tion) of meanings, and the produced in the genuine sense is primarily the proper character (the identity), the other (person), the time and the language.
The interpretation of the nature of the production and the produced through the problem of the otherness is based on the understanding that the other (person) is not represented in advance, existing in itself (An sich) mo-nadic entity of sense. On the contrary, the other is a definition of the proper character; besides, as its innermost moment: the advent of the other is the event (enowning), which delineates the horizon and the contours of the proper character, the identity, and the other person.
In her presentation, Maria Dimitrova has traced out the ways of interpreta-tion of the produced by Hegel and Heidegger—through reducing of the other-ness to the proper character at the self-unfolding of the spirit or the being’s un-covering, opposing them to Levinas’ construction of the irreducible otherness. The understanding of the nature of the otherness outlines the possibility for the appearance of the meaning and the responsibility beyond the being. The self-revealing of the transcendence (the Person and the Word) and of the meaning in itself occurs in the horizon of the proper character. In such a way, it for the first time shapes this proper character, forms the personal identity, as well as the to-pology of the proper character and the otherness.

George Angelov

Overview
of the presentation on Production: an Ontological Outline
by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Assen I. Dimitrov
January 15, 2009

Abstract:
What is the difference between physical causality and production?
Between a subject and an object?
Why do we have desires and needs (while the objects don’t)?
Why do we have problems?
Why do we always find a way and means of their solution?
Why do the entities (as we ourselves) have meaning and make sense to us (while nothing has meaning and makes sense to the objects)?
These are the questions.
Here are the answers:
The productive capabilities are explicated;
A special subjective (inherent especially in the subject) capability for production doesn’t exist;
It is a matter of natural causal capabilities, which are expressed in a complex hierarchical ontological context.
Plan of the exposition:
1. Nature doesn’t produce.
2. Which are the productive capabilities?
3. A special subjective (inherent especially in the subject) capability for production doesn’t exist;
4. It is a matter of natural causal capabilities, which are however ex-pressed in a complex hierarchical ontological context.
Epilogue