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| 1 | Teaching the history of philosophy requires actualization; visual studies provide a distinctive asset for such actualization. The history of philosophy should be conceived as an exposition of a series of issues, each of which can be modeled visually, and more complex models can be reduced to simpler and more precise ones. Each philosophical thesis can then be presented as a use of the view of philosophy itself: the metaphor of sight in Western philosophy turns out to be not only the common denominator of methods, but the semiotically optimal justification for any method new to the listeners or to a professional philosophical readership. The use of images produced by artificial intelligence then proves to be productive for such instantiation. The lecture shows how the history of philosophy and science was not only the exploration of new objects with the help of ontological tools, but also the ontologization of whole areas of consciousness, including imaginary ones. In this way, the discovery of the world was also the discovery of the mirror of one’s own consciousness. Descartes put this experiment in its purest form by establishing an ontology of science. Unlike the usual accounts of new European rationalism, which emphasize the priority of experimental science over theoretical generalization, the lecture provides a more complex view. The Renaissance virtue destroyed the correlation of the ontological tools of human self-justification with the worlds of nature and art, whereas Descartes only completed this destruction. But his voluntarism and teleology were rooted in Jesuit science, and the development first of the Baroque imagination and then of the Enlightenment imagination destroyed the initial self-evidence of Descartes as well. As in the Renaissance, its own ontological domain of signs emerged, only their number became unlimited, unlike the small set of them in the Renaissance rhetoric, and visual semiotics eventually devolved into a romanizing imagination. With the help of illustrations created by artificial intelligence, it has been possible to present in the lecture these complex vicissitudes of imagination and the formation of new ontological domains that can undermine or order other domains of ontology, including the ontology of pure consciousness. The lecture allows us to better understand both the main problem of ontology as a discipline of philosophy and the informational productivity of visual signs produced by artificial intelligence. Keywords: rationalism, visual research, artificial intelligence, ontology program, ontology of sign, epistemology, visual aid, philosophy of puppet | 801 | ||||
| 2 | This article addresses the persistent theoretical impasse surrounding the concept of the "classic" by diagnosing its roots not in contemporary cultural wars but in a deeper, unacknowledged epistemological rupture. It argues that the endless debates between canonical traditionalism and critical deconstruction share a fundamental correlationalist premise: the classic is invariably a human-centered phenomenon, a product of culture, history, and interpretation. To dismantle this premise, the article first performs a genealogical critique, exposing the historical shift from a pre-modern, metonymic paradigm to a modern, metaphorical one. Drawing on Foucault, Skinner, and White, it demonstrates how the classical text was transformed from an active, world-constituting agent (operating through the logic of contiguity and participation in a shared political reality) into a passive object of knowledge, requiring endless verification and explanation through the distancing lens of metaphor. This shift, it is argued, is the true source of the modern hermeneutic crisis. The core contribution of the article is its constructive proposal for an ontological turn beyond hermeneutics. It mobilizes the frameworks of Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) to redefine the classic in radically non-human terms. A classic work is not a repository of timeless wisdom but a specific type of object whose "classicity" is an emergent property of its mode of existence within a flat ontology. This property is analyzed through a synthesis of several key concepts: 1) Allusive Power (Graham Harman): the text's dense network of real relations with other object-terms, existing independently of human recognition. 2) Cosmotechnical (Yuk Hui) Plateau: the text's exceptional ability to form a stable, generative assembly with linguistic codes, material supports, and philosophical concepts, creating a durable ecological niche. 3) Resistance to Entropy (Ray Brassier, Eugene Thacker): the text's capacity to endure as a testament to cosmic indifference, its internal complexities and dissonances seen as scars from encounters with the "World-Without-Us." Consequently, a text's value is measured not by its humanistic meaning but by its "object-oriented vitality"—its robustness, connectivity, and complexity within non-human networks. The article concludes by outlining a positive methodological program for a "non-human philology," with practical protocols such as mapping allusive networks, analyzing the archaeology of the material carrier, and diagnosing internal dissonance. This approach offers a path for a genuine decolonization of the canon, not through moral inclusion but by recognizing the ontological equality of diverse, non-interchangeable cosmotechnical plateaus (e.g., Sanskrit epic vs. Greek tragedy). Ultimately, it calls for a shift from an ethics of human recognition to an ethics of respect for the opaque, non-human reality of the textual object itself, reorienting the humanities towards the study of texts as autonomous actors in a universe of things. Keywords: canon, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology (OOO), the non-human, hermeneutics, metaphor, metonymy, cosmotechnics, textural materiality | 122 | ||||