This is a transcription of a debate on the concept of a person conducted in Moscow in 1983. David Bakhurst argues that Evald Ilyenkov's social constructivist conception of personhood, founded on Marx's thesis that the human essence is 'the ensemble of social relations', is either false or trivially true. F. T. Mikhailov, V. S. Bibler, V. A. Lektorsky and V. V. Davydov critically assess Bakhurst's arguments, elucidate and contextualize Ilyenkov's views, and defend, in contrasting ways, the claim that human individuals (...) are socially constituted beings. Issues discussed include: the concepts of activity and community and their relevance to the notions of mind and personhood; self-consciousness and its relation to personal identity; naturalism in Soviet thought. Translated from the Russian. (shrink)

Introduction. The influence of virtual reality on the processes of deanthropologization becomes an obvious fact of the development of numerical rela- tions that determine philosophical concepts in the direction of posthumanistic discourse. In this type of discourse, a person is reduced to a numerical operation, an intermediate procedural link in the network structure of a numerical relationship with other objects of the digital network. The purpose of the article is to identify the rela- tionship between virtuality and imagination, the distinction (...) between a virtual person and a vividly imagining one. Methods. The author uses the methods of decon- struction, which identifiy new philosophical meanings of established understand- ings of virtuality and related anthropological types, and the phenomenological method of studying the issues of virtuality and anthropological reality, forming new perspectives for studying the phenom- enon of virtuality through an appeal to the constitu- tive role of consciousness. Scientific novelty of the research. The scientific novelty of the study is represented by the discovery of a new anthropological distinction between homo imaginabundus and homo virtualis, implying on- tological differences of these types in their appeal to the subjective and objective constitutive role of consciousness. Results. If the anthropological type homo imagi- nabundus is vividly imaginative and is associated with the phenomena of authentic virtuality and sub- jectivity, then homo virtualis refers to inauthentic virtuality only as one of its possible variants without connection with the self—affecting component as such. Conclusions. Anthropological reality is in a state of bifurcation, from which it can emerge in several ways, the most likely of which will be the ways of deanthropologization in algorithmic flows and codes of the digital environment, or the way of preserving the phenomena of self-action, vivid im- agination associated with subjectivity and the field of authentic virtuality. (shrink)

The article develops the idea of forming postcapitalist social relations as a social revolution of an individual, which consists in the fact that popularity becomes a key advantage, the “possession” of which is a desired goal and a significant resource of political influence. At the same time, it is shown that this process leads to forming a new dominant stratum — personalities (“people with personality”): celebrities, popular bloggers, social media influencers, micro- and nanosignature. It is substantiated that the personaliat domination (...) is a consequence of contradictory social relations between the new aristocracy represented by the representatives of the personaliat and many people who do not “possess” a popular personality - the impersonaliat (“extra people”, “lower” precariat, those who turn out to be outsiders in the world of social platforms). This contradiction is associated with the rooting of a celebrity’s culture, which encourages a lot of people to fight for popularity and focus on finding advantageous differences from others in the process of self-realization. However, this struggle in the end for the overwhelming majority turns into an increase in creative competition and subtraction. Various new forms of subtraction that appear in situations of widespread self-realization are revealed. Accordingly, arguments are given in favor of the fact that in the context of the “personality revolution”, the truly left will be rather an alternative that will call into question the ways of solving social problems formulated by popular personalities. In other words, it will be possible to oppose the total pursuit of popularity with the projects of society, in which the person is relied not as someone who rises above the others, but as an involved person who values life in harmony with others higher than his own “I”. (shrink)

The urgency of the research is determined by the intensive development of new technologies as prospects for further development of society. Art accumulates intellectual, spiritual, material, and value heritage of previous epochs and determines the perspective features of the future. Vocal art is thereby one of the manifestations of individual ideological rethinking. Variety as a socio-cultural phenomenon combines different styles of music, genres, types, and aspects of professional music and vocal performance, which is important for the research in the context (...) of social rethinking of future social development. Objective of the article is to determine specifics of pop vocal art, its long-term development as an aspect of integration into society of the future. The article reflects the essential characteristics of the concept of pop vocal art and worldview perception of art as an aspect of the future society. In the process of research a method of abstraction, descriptive method, methods of analysis and synthesis were used in the theoretical substantiation and characterization of pop music as a vocal art. The method of generalization and systematization was used to determine the results of the research. The results became the basis for asserting the importance of pop vocal art in the further development of society. (shrink)

A new book has come out: "Entity", New Light on Science. The author employs contemporary scientific theory to prove the existence of both Physical World and Non-physical World The book is written in accessible clear Russian; 416 pages in a beautifil hardcover. Informative, challenging, fascinating. The book "Entity" is the best present you could give to any of your Russian-speaking readers. It will be extremely beneficial to everyone: general readers, students and scientists.

This article introduces the theological and philosophical thoughts of Lev Karsavin, who was one of the most creative representatives of Russian religious philosophy in the early 20th century. His conception was historically the last amongst the great systems of Russian metaphysics of all-unity. This conception gave an opportunity for developing an understanding of the relations between God and the world, and the act of creation as gift of God.

My reflections will have more of an interrogative than an affirmative character. And the questions will be posed not only to others but also to myself. At the outset let me broach two questions. First, why is this work ethic needed; and second, who needs it? And at the same time I should like to translate some of the general ideological and cultural problems that have been discussed here into the language of political economy and sociology. This should, it seems (...) to me, enable us more quickly to find the common language between our emotionally colored discussions about Russia and the "Western" understanding of it. Otherwise, regardless of whether we discuss our Russian situation from a Slavophile or a Westernizing point of view, what one always gets in the final analysis is that Russia cannot be understood with the intellect. And if that is so, then why all this "intellectual noise". (shrink)

The author proves that, despite the opinion prevalent among historians of psychology, the concept of “practical, sensuous activity” was present in Vygotsky’s work from the very beginning of his stu...

Tautology is interpreted as a necessary condition for the workability of an operations system. This condition suggests the following possibilities: the stable solvability of balance equations between available resources and requests for them; the calculation of potential and kinetic of the system together with the estimation of the contribution of every operation to the kinetic of the system; the construction of a deadlockless infinite cyclic process for performance of some works.

Postmodernism as a mythologem reflecting the remarkable shift that has taken place in contemporary Western culture as a whole entered the consciousness of our intelligentsia with the usual delay. This is not surprising if one bears in mind the constantly "lagging" character of our consciousness, which also colors in corresponding tones the whole of "Russian civilization," and if one believes that it is condemned to be always "catching up" and making up for lost time. Having arisen in the West as (...) a concept describing certain special characteristics of the latest architectural style that no longer fitted into the rather passé category of modernism, the concept of the postmodern was initially current, both in the West and in Russia, among people close to architecture. At that time it had not yet been able to acquire the "philosophical" subtext that is already felt in the book of Charles Jencks that came out in 1977 in Germany under the gaudy title The Language of Postmodern Architecture. (shrink)

The fundamentals of the Frankfurt school's conception of art were expounded in Horkheimer and Adorno's book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, where the "critical theory of society" appeared in the form of a specific philosophy of history—the history of bourgeois enlightenment, whose sources the authors trace to ancient Greek mythology.

The concept of activity focuses on the uniqueness of human social life, which consists of the fact that men purposively transform objective nature and social reality. The characteristic feature of the social life of human beings is that it is manifested only through their activity, which has various aspects and forms.