Issue 01
Table of Contents
Ethics and the Nature of Humanity
p07 Essay: “Finding Reality: The Great Task as Moral Duty”
Starting from the claim that “we live in a fantasy world,” Elliot Belmadani (Germany) argues that most of the suffering we cause others is unintentional — the by-product of an egocentric, subconscious distortion of reality rather than bad will. Drawing on confirmation bias and Kant’s notion of the “Hang zum Bösen,” he distinguishes reality as an external fact from reality as a moral orientation we can only ever approach, never fully reach. The essay’s central move is to reframe “finding reality” not as an achievable goal but as a Telos — a permanent duty of self-reflection owed to the autonomy and dignity of others. Against the objection that not everyone has equal capacity for self-reflection, Belmadani insists the duty is gradual, not perfectionist: morality itself depends on the ongoing effort to see other people as they truly are.
p15 Essay: “The Critique of Transhumanism in Magnifica Humanitas” Taking Pope Leo XIV’s 2026 encyclical Magnifica Humanitas as its starting point, Jacub Piechaczek builds a secular case against the transhumanist idea that human worth should be measured by productivity and efficiency. He contrasts Silicon Valley techno-optimism with Byung-Chul Han’s critique of self-exploitation, arguing that a society organized around output cannot deliver the equal recognition that real happiness requires. The essay then turns to the transhumanist account of progress itself, questioning whether technological acceleration is compatible with treating humans as ends in themselves rather than resources to be optimized.
Haikus of Changes and Periods of Transition
p36 Haiku collection — Sante Diomede A short set of haiku built around the quiet disorientation of modern life, from Sante Diomede (Italy) — a single, image-driven meditation moving from blooming olive trees and extinguished constellations to the mundane crush of an overcrowded bus, catching transition as something felt in the body before it’s understood in the mind.
p37 Haiku collection — Antonella Del Re Two linked haiku from Antonella Del Re (Italy) that pair grief with domestic stillness — a wounded heart beside a silent wardrobe, a pomegranate’s quiet symbolism — before pivoting to laughing children building snowmen beside a bride in white, holding loss and celebration in the same small frame.
Perceptions of the Self, Time, and the Human Experience
p39 Essay: “The Flower of the Infinite: Conceiving the Knowing and Social Subject after Blaise Pascal” Beginning with Pascal’s image of the “thinking reed,” Dario Postolovski (North Macedonia) traces how human dignity emerges not from our place in physical space but from the organization of thought itself. He brings Schelling’s philosophy of nature into dialogue with Pascal, arguing that thought is one of nature’s own modes of self-expression — nature becoming conscious of itself through us. The essay closes on an unexpectedly communal note, drawing on St. Basil to argue that self-realization is inseparable from generosity: hoarding wealth or knowledge for oneself is, on this reading, a failure of the very self-consciousness the essay set out to defend.
p47 Poem: “Did You Know That Green Beavers Built Dams in The River of Laughter” A surreal, image-dense poem by Gabrielja Vodic (Croatia), presented at the Philosium Makarska Symposium in May 2026. It moves through burned voices, drowned heralds, and rivers of laughter and ash, favoring atmosphere and accumulation over straightforward interpretation — closer to a fever dream than an argument.
p50 Essay: “Why We Should Not Stop Thinking” Also anchored in Pascal’s “thinking reed,” Klara Kaczmarek (Poland) asks whether thought is really what gives human life its dignity — and whether thinking can, on its own, deliver a truthful grasp of reality at all. She brings Heidegger’s account of “what calls for thinking” into contact with Pascal’s near-mystical confidence in reason. The essay ultimately defends thinking as a duty rather than a guarantee: an imperative that promises no certainty but remains, in Kaczmarek’s account, the only honest response to the fact of being conscious at all.
p59 Essay: “Am I Bound By A Past Self’s Promise?” Using the thought experiment of an eighteen-year-old’s vow revisited a decade later, Ojasva Nigam (India) works through Charles Fried’s contract-based ethics of promising against Derek Parfit’s argument that personal identity is a matter of degree, not an unbroken thread. If enough psychological continuity has been lost, is the person who made the promise still around to be bound by it? The essay resolves this into an “Inheritance Model” of promise-keeping — treating an old commitment less like an unbreakable chain and more like an inherited family business, one that deserves respectful evaluation before it’s kept, changed, or gently let go.
Perceptions Critique of Structures of Power, What Defines Freedom, External Forces, and the Individual
p69 Essay: “A Tale of a Prisoner” Opening with Szymborska’s lines on the word “Nothing,” Isabel Barona Velásquez (Colombia) uses Foucault’s account of discourse and power to ask what freedom can mean for someone entirely defined, in the eyes of the state, by the language used to describe them. A prisoner’s shifting relationship to that language becomes the essay’s central case study. Rather than treating power as simply repressive, the essay follows Foucault in showing how discursive constraints also open unexpected room to maneuver — resistance, on this account, works within language’s limits rather than by escaping them entirely.
p81 Essay: “On Freedom, Determinism, and the Human Condition” Isidora Popović (Slovenia), an IPO 2026 Honorable Mention, takes on one of philosophy’s oldest arguments — free will versus determinism — through Kant’s account of freedom as the “bridge” between reason and the elective will, then tests that account against Sartre’s more radical claim that freedom isn’t something we have or lack, but simply the way we exist. The essay doesn’t try to settle the debate so much as map its terrain clearly, showing how apparently opposed positions — a deterministic universe, a radically free subject — both struggle to fully account for the ordinary human experience of choosing.
Ethics in Geopolitics, the Effects of Technology, Epistemology
p91 Essay: “The End of History: For Real This Time” Revisiting Fukuyama’s famous thesis, Pēteris Zvirgzdiņš (Latvia) — writing in a piece first published in Tvērums No. 12, Laiks (Time), Rīga, December 2025 — argues that the real “end of history” isn’t liberal democracy’s final triumph but the collapse of a shared, coherent record of events: a world drowning in information yet starved of consensus about what’s actually happening in it. The essay connects this to AI-driven information overload and the risk of a “neo-medieval” fragmentation of knowledge, where different groups no longer share enough common reality to even disagree productively.
p99 Essay: “Knowledge and Society in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: A Baconian Perspective” Dominyka Mauliūtė (Lithuania) returns to Francis Bacon’s founding claim that “knowledge is power” and asks what Bacon might have made of large language models and algorithmic mediation. AI, on this reading, both fulfills Bacon’s dream of universally organized knowledge and radicalizes the risks he warned about. The essay is especially attentive to the opacity of modern AI systems — their tendency to produce confident answers without transparent reasoning — as a new and distinctly Baconian danger: knowledge without an accountable knower behind it.
p107 Essay: “The Great Experiment of ‘Order’: A Devil’s Case for ‘Chaos’” Adopting the voice of a devil’s advocate, Tridip Patir (India) argues that political order is not humanity’s natural state but a fragile, temporary suppression of an underlying condition of chaos. Surveying egoism as the true engine of individual and political behavior, and tracing the historical collapse of monarchies, theocracies, and democracies alike, he questions whether Enlightenment and Hegelian visions of eventual harmony — a “Geist” reconciled with itself — were ever more than noble fictions. The essay’s central move is to strip away the assumption that structure is inherently valuable, treating even Plato’s philosopher-king as an idealized illusion rather than a viable solution. Rather than resolving the tension between order and chaos, Patir ends in deliberate resignation: not despair, but an absurdist acceptance that political systems are inherently entropic, and that peace, when it appears, is only ever a temporary reprieve.
Philosophy of Sciences, the Structure of the Mind, Means of Logic and Reasoning
p120 Essay: “Do You Need to Study Maths to Understand Philosophy?” Caroline Giraud (France) traces two attempts to make philosophy as rigorous as mathematics — Leibniz’s dream of a “universal characteristic” that would resolve arguments by calculation, and the twentieth-century rise of analytic philosophy under Russell’s influence. Her answer is a careful “not required, but genuinely useful”: philosophy doesn’t need mathematical training to be done well, but the discipline of logical rigor that mathematics teaches — precision of concepts, validity of inference — sharpens philosophical argument wherever it’s applied.
A Word from the Founder
“Dear readers, for Issue 01 we set no theme. We simply invited young thinkers to write about whatever mattered most to them, and they answered from more than a dozen countries. The result is a mix of voices: essays on moral duty and technology, a prisoner’s story seen through Foucault, a promise made at eighteen, haiku and poetry beside rigorous argument. Behind every piece is a Philosium chapter, a symposium, or someone submitting for the very first time. Thank you to every author for thinking out loud. I invite you to read slowly, disagree generously, and keep thinking.”
