The first issue of "Philosophy" for 2024 has a diverse content in four sections, and the journal remains true to its vocation of developing the dialogue between philosophical inquiries coming from different horizons. Most authors in this issue explore significant contemporary phenomena. Vigilant and innovative, they develop new questions and approaches that the challenges of the time demand from philosophy. At the same time, they rely on the history of philosophy and ideas, which allows them to look at these phenomena at a distance and to consider them critically from a higher, more generalised viewpoint. Our authors mediate a careful and detail-oriented dialogue between philosophy, on one hand, and anthropology, political and judicial sciences, philology and musicology, science and technology - on the other. This dialogue best embodies the universality of philosophy.
The first category is dedicated to metaphysics. In it Alexander Kanev reconstructs and critically discusses the energetic metaphysics of Dimitar Vatsov, one of the most important events in Bulgarian philosophy in the first decades of the 21st century.
The authors of the second category examine the challenges that new forms of publicity pose for philosophy. An international team of researchers, led by Albena Taneva, offers an original conceptual framework and various practical applications and perspectives of the shared society theory. Stoyan Stavru examines the concept of “revolving ownership” as a metamodel in creating and structuring models of ownership and extends a philosophical challenge to the "unshakable" postulates of property law through a distinction between yang- and yin-ownership and the need for balancing them.
The third category includes authors who reveal different dimensions of philosophical anthropology. Marcus Knaup exhaustively presents the basics of Edith Stein´s Philosophical Anthropology, accenting its innovative nature. Through careful analysis of central to the Indian tradition texts, Milena Bratoeva examines the place of "desire" in the Ancient Indian understanding of the person, as well as the role of the relationship erotic – ascetic in forming principles and behaviour norms.
In the fourth category the authors focus their attention on aspects of the contemporary development of new music and new rhetoric. Angelina-Ogniana Gotcheva examines the works of two contemporary classical composers in light of Heidegger's "Being and Time" and poses the question of philosophy's influence on contemporary music. Neli Stefanova follows the changes in the new rhetoric, which strive to turn it to logic of practical philosophy.
Lastly, Nina Dimitrova presents another Bulgarian philosopher's - Dobrin Todorov's - significant research, where he not only critically analyses profoundly and severely the new scientific and technical "worldviews", which pose danger to humans and throw humanitarian knowledge in a crisis, but also offers ways to exit this crisis through active countermeasures against such dehumanising tendencies.
Prof. Vladimir Gradev, DSc.
Editor-in-Chief of the Philosophy journal



