This paper analyzes why philosophy of religion can surprisingly be considered a rather new field in Russian philosophy. While religion has played a major role in modern Russian culture, the philosophy of religion is still searching a precise definition of its object and domain. Initially, Russian philosophies of religion were inspired by Western influential works, whereas philosophy of religion is barely considered as distinct from theology. As such, philosophy of religion presents a double origin: in a wide sense, it coincides (...) with philosophy, while in a more specific sense its origins are to be found in the modern era. From this point of view, Spinoza is seen as a seminal author for this field of work. This conception is analyzed and used to draw some perspective for the development of philosophy of religion in Russia. (shrink)

There is a post-modernist myth that metaphysics has always been an exclusively Western heritage. This article refutes such a view by reviewing the many centuries of debate between Indian mind-body dualists and champions of reductionist physicalism. It also suggests the relevance of the Indian dualistic arguments for contemporary discussions of the mind-body issue.

The author’s goal is to weigh capabilities of theistic reason in regard to the problem of evil, and two formats of reasoning in this regard are strictly differed, i.e. attempts at building theodicies and defenses. The upshot is that while there is no doubt that the great multitude of evils and sufferings in the world are surely beyond reach of any theodicies, it is similarly doubtless that many sound reasons are suitable for countering atheist “evidential refutations”. Some new arguments are (...) offered to counterbalance Rowe’s “friendly atheism”, Draper’s “hypothesis of indifference”, and Schellenberg’s “argument from hiddenness”, along with analysis of wishful thinking underlying all of them. (shrink)

One of the most fascinating phenomena in the cultural and spiritual life of Russia in the last decade and a half has been the fact that, after seventy years of the official state-implanted materialistic atheism, the witness of the Bible about our world is openly and widely discussed by scholars and theologians. This paper will survey certain features of those debates in which Orthodox authors participate, and also aspects of the understanding of the Hexaemeron (The Six Days of Creation) that (...) are not reflected in those debates but which are brought to light by several eminent Russian theologians of the XIX century and which to my mind have a great significance. (shrink)

The author enters an already old dispute, that is, whether a countеrpart of the notion of philosophy could be encountered in the traditional India, upholds the view that the term ānvīkṣikī (lit. “investigation”) was nearest to it and traces its meaning along the texts on dharma, politics, poetics and philosophy properly. Two main avenues to the understanding of philosophy’s vocations in India have been paved in the Mānavadharmaśāstra, along with the commentaries thereon and by Kamandaki, the author of the Nītisāra (...) (as the knowledge of Ātman) and in the Arthaśāstra and the Nyāya texts composed by Vātsyāyana and Uddyotakara (as a metascience helping the other branches of knowledge bear their fruits). Therefore philosophy in India as well was regarded as the duality of ideological and methodological constituents, while the emphasis on analytic practice in the definitions of ānvīkṣikī (Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy as a practice is also referred to in this context) paves a good promise for comparative philosophy. (shrink)

It is an issue of already longstanding significance in philosophy of religion after John Hick, that is of differing models of religious consciousness, in the frame of interreligious relations which is tackled in the paper but it is done on the basis of the texts of a concrete philosopher and the narratives around his figure. One of the most eminent Naiyayikas, Udayana, is singled out, as the author of the very renown composition in verse Nyāyakusumaňjali offering arguments for the existence (...) of God in the framework of polemics with the anti-theistic schools and the anti-Buddhist fundamental compendium Ātmatattvaviveka, along with the stories about his very resolute and victorious struggle against Buddhism in the epoch of the latter’s final extirpation from India. The author comes to conclusion that the features of exclusivism, inclusivism and gradualism are detected in his texts and traditions around him and, therefore, any univocal authentication of his attitude to otherwise-minded and those of other faiths is impossible. While participating in the supplantation of Buddhism from India, Udayana displays very resolute exclusivism. When he addresses the educated audience sermonizing his philosophical theism, he uses purely inclusivistic strategy of uncovering implicit knowledge of Īśvara even with those very far removed from the truth. And when he attempts to locate Nyāya on the map of philosophical world-views he uses gradualism as “philosophy of ascent” of the truth from lower to higher levels. As is impossible as well to mark out of his attitudes the so-called pluralism considered by Hick as fundamental advantage of Eastern religions over the Western ones. Comparativistic parallels along with differences and some specification of the main categories of interreligious relations are also offered in the paper. (shrink)

In this paper I consider two books of Vladimir Shokhin, a distinguished philosopher in Russia, on philosophy of religion and philosophical theology as one project aimed at drawing the demarcation between these two disciplines. In what follows I will present Shokhin’s project and show briefly how it fits in with the current discussion on the topic, then, draw some consequences from his position, and make some critical notes, and at the end I will briefly present some my (...) views on the problem of drawing clear lines of demarcation between philosophy of religion and philosophical theology on the basis of the following questions: what is the topic of the disciplines, what are their methods, what are their guiding lines, and who may exercise them? (shrink)

Rassemble, pour l'essentiel, les textes moraux du philosophe.

Answer set programming (ASP) is a form of declarative programming oriented towards difficult search problems. As an outgrowth of research on the use of nonmonotonic reasoning in knowledge representation, it is particularly useful in knowledge-intensive applications. ASP programs consist of rules that look like Prolog rules, but the computational mechanisms used in ASP are different: they are based on the ideas that have led to the creation of fast satisfiability solvers for propositional logic.

This is an expository article about the solution to the frame problem proposed in 1980 by Raymond Reiter. For years, his “frame default” remained untested and suspect. But developments in some seemingly unrelated areas of computer science—logic programming and satisfiability solvers—eventually exonerated the frame default and turned it into a basis for important applications.

This is a review of some of the definitions of the concept of a stable model that have been proposed in the literature. These definitions are equivalent to each other, at least when applied to traditional Prologstyle programs, but there are reasons why each of them is valuable and interesting. A new characterization of stable models can suggest an alternative picture of the intuitive meaning of logic programs; or it can lead to new algorithms for generating stable models; or it (...) can work better than others when we turn to generalizations of the traditional syntax that are important from the perspective of answer set programming; or it can be more convenient for use in proofs; or it can be interesting simply because it demonstrates a relationship between seemingly unrelated ideas. (shrink)

This article is in two parts, with part II to appear in the next issue of JAE (Spring 2013). Part I (with six sections), in this issue, has two related objectives. The first objective is to examine a number of key substantive, methodological, and science-practice issues related to the field designated here as empirical psycho-aesthetics. The second objective is to present an outline of its origin and discuss certain important features of several related fields—experimental philosophy, cognitive-science-and-art, (cognitive) neuroscience of art, (...) and neuroaesthetics. To a certain extent, the comparative goal is approached through the analysis of several recent significant controversies. Throughout the discussion, the .. (shrink)

Résumé L’auteur entend synthétiser le contenu et les principaux résultats de quatre étapes décisives du développement des études concernant les frontières. Il redéfinit les concepts, les méthodes et les domaines d’application de ces secteurs de la recherche. Il met surtout l’accent sur la période contemporaine, insistant sur la discussion des approches post-modernes. Le premier ensemble de ces approches insiste sur l’évolution des identités territoriales et sur les relations entre centre et périphérie, facteurs principaux d’établissement des frontières et de leurs fonctions. (...) Le deuxième ensemble souligne l’importance des facteurs géopolitiques, y compris les différences culturelles entre territoires voisins. Les considérations de sécurité interpellent massivement ce groupe qui cherche à expliquer les changements relatifs aux régimes frontaliers. Le troisième ensemble s’attache à l’influence des perceptions de la diversité du monde contemporain pour les élites politiques et pour les opinions publiques. D’autres approches, enfin, analysent les frontières à partir de la combinaison des facteurs politiques et institutionnels ainsi que des perceptions des réseaux transfrontaliers à plusieurs niveaux du territoire. (shrink)

This article analyzes the philosophical views of the Russian philosopher Andrey V. Smirnov. Smirnov has advanced and substantiated the idea that there exist at least two distinct ways of linking th...

Several key substantive, methodological, and science-practice issues that concern the field designated as empirical psycho-aesthetics were examined in part I (in the Winter 2012 issue of JAE) of this two-part article. Also presented was an outline of the discipline's origin and its relationship with elder and younger "sisters"—philosophical aesthetics, experimental philosophy, cognitive-science-and-art, (cognitive) neuroscience of art, and neuroaesthetics. The comparative goal was in part approached through the analysis of several recent significant controversies and debates.Here, in the six sections of part (...) II of the article, empirical work on various problems that are relevant to the discussion initiated in part .. (shrink)

The article is a study into the advent of the ‘systems approach’ in Soviet psychology in the 1970s. This arose mainly through the theoretical publications of B. F. Lomov, written after he had been appointed director of the newly established Institute of Psychology. These publications are examined as reflections of those interests related to the sociopolitical role of the director of this leading psychology institution, which was officially charged with building a common theoretical and methodological framework for all Soviet psychology. (...) The main goal of these texts, predetermined by the role of their author, was to advance a theoretical scheme that made possible a formal unification of the schools of psychology, and which at the same time promoted an image of psychology as a research field that was both capable of achieving practically applicable results and compatible with the new ‘big science’ trend. (shrink)

An increase in the level of strength endurance can be carried out during the period of a special preparatory stage in the annual cycle of training athletes. The present research proposes a periodization of shooters' sports training with the substantiation of the measures taken to develop such a motor quality as strength endurance. The aim of the research is to organize the training process in a way that the development of the motor quality, strength endurance, enhanced performance in shooting. Young (...) men of 13-15 years old engaged in educational training groups of children's and youth sports school on bullet shooting were selected to participate in the experiment. (shrink)

The doctrine of the “absence of the self” ( anātman ), which is the basis of the ontology of Buddhist schools of all possible orientations, in its application to practical activity implies the existence of such an organizing structure of cognition, which in its essence differs both from the orthodox systems of Indian thought ( āstika ) and from the correlationist ideas of modern transcendental epistemology. The research presents the abhidharma as a genre of Buddhist literature and a discipline of (...) Buddhist system of knowledge (Abhidharma) serves as a cognitive model producing such an image of the world from which the problem of “Self” ( ātman ) is eliminated. Such “elimination” does not mean the destruction of the “I” (ego, personality) at all, but proposes to consider it as an “assemblage”, a composition or autonomous wholeness composed of heterogeneous elements of different natures, each of which in turn is an “assemblage”, the relations between and within the individual “assemblages” being external relations. At the center of the research is the question: is it possible (or how is it possible) to have a strategy of cognition that would not assume as its basis the dichotomy “cognizing subject - cognizable world”, but would have as its goal the transcendence of phenomenal existence. It is argued that Abhidharma/abhidharma is a description of elements shaping the structure of which could be regarded just as such a cognitive strategy. The paper is based on the author’s experience of translating Asaṅga’s Abhidharmasamuccaya (4th century) and a large commentary on it, the Abhidharmasamuccayavyākhyā, attributed to Sthiramāti (6th century). (shrink)

This volume offers a wide range of both reconstructions of Nikolai Vasiliev’s original logical ideas and their implementations in the modern logic and philosophy. A collection of works put together through the international workshop "Nikolai Vasiliev’s Logical Legacy and the Modern Logic," this book also covers foundations of logic in the light of Vasiliev’s contradictory ontology. Chapters range from a look at the Heuristic and Conceptual Background of Vasiliev's Imaginary Logic to Generalized Vasiliev-style Propositions. It includes works which cover Imaginary (...) and Non-Aristotelian Logics, Inconsistent Set Theory and the Expansion of Mathematical Thinking, Plurivalent Logic, and the Impact of Vasiliev's Imaginary Logic on Epistemic Logic. The Russian logician, Vasiliev, was widely recognized as one of the forerunners of modern non-classical logic. His "imaginary logic" developed in some of his work at the beginning of 20th century is often considered to be one of the first systems of paraconsistent and multi-valued logic. The novelty of his logical project has opened up prospects for modern logic as well as for non-classical science in general. This volume contains a selection of papers written by modern specialists in the field and deals with various aspects of Vasiliev's logical ideas. The logical legacy of Nikolai Vasiliev can serve as a promising source for developing an impressive range of philosophical interpretations, as it marries promising technical innovations with challenging philosophical insights. (shrink)

This paper argues that there is only one proof for God’s existence in Avicenna, and only one way for establishing the proof within his metaphysical system. This metaphysical proof is essentially derived from a priori notions, among which the notion of existence has the central role. Avicenna’s proof is structured in such a way that all its concepts are either derived from the meaning of ‘existence’ or are connected with this meaning. In this sense Avicenna’s proof sets out a scenario (...) of discursive a priori knowledge established purely on considerations of fundamental ontological meanings such as ‘existence’, ‘existent’, ‘thing’, ‘necessary’, ‘possible’, ‘impossible’, ‘one’ and ‘cause’. (shrink)

Philosophy of law is philosophy about law. common critical ontology examines the structure of the world which is hierarchical and is composed of four fundamental levels; the anorganic being, the organic being, the psychical being and the spiritual being, where we meet the personal, objective and the objectified spirit. the new critical ontology is science in the strictest sense of the word and consequently goes out from the total experience. critical legal ontology examines the essence of law and states where (...) the law belongs; in the ideal world or the real world, and states its place in these worlds. it appears that the so far unsolvable fundamental question, i.e., the problems of law and power, and law and revolution are easily and "cum ratione" sufficient to be solved on the basis of this new science. (edited). (shrink)

Although the type‐I interferon (IFN‐I) response is considered vertebrate‐specific, recent findings about the Intracellular Pathogen Response (IPR) in nematode Caenorhabditis elegans indicate that there are similarities between these two transcriptional immunological programs. The IPR is induced during infection with natural intracellular fungal and viral pathogens of the intestine and promotes resistance against these pathogens. Similarly, the IFN‐I response is induced by viruses and other intracellular pathogens and promotes resistance against infection. Whether the IPR and the IFN‐I response evolved in a (...) divergent or convergent manner is an unanswered and exciting question, which could be addressed by further studies of immunity against intracellular pathogens in C. elegans and other simple host organisms. Here we highlight similar roles played by RIG‐I‐like receptors, purine metabolism enzymes, proteotoxic stressors, and transcription factors to induce the IPR and IFN‐I response, as well as the similar consequences of these defense programs on organismal development. (shrink)

structures, or interpretations, in the sense of first-order logic. In C+, on the other hand, a state is an interpreta-.

This article discusses the connection between the ideas of Fyodor M. Dostoevsky and Vladimir S. Solovyov on the need for cultural and moral transformation of those who would claim to participate in...

My dear Aleksandr!I have finally found some quiet time for a slow and attentive read of your article “The Beginning of the Black Notebooks.”1 I very much liked the article, especially for your trul...

The subject of this study is the participants in artificial sociality (humans and artificial intelligence (AI) tools) and communication between them. The first section analyses (using Luhmann’s methodology) communication as the basis of sociality. The second section shows how AI tools became social technologies in the framework of artificial sociality. The third section describes experimental communication between authors and AI tools (the case of ChatGPT). For the first time in the Baltic countries, the authors examined sociological, humanitarian, natural and technological (...) aspects of the functioning AI tools, which participate in creation of a new social reality for human society – artificial sociality. (shrink)

Recently, psychologists have explored moral concepts including obligation, blame, and ability. While little empirical work has studied the relationships among these concepts, philosophers have widely assumed such a relationship in the principle that “ought” implies “can,” which states that if someone ought to do something, then they must be able to do it. The cognitive underpinnings of these concepts are tested in the three experiments reported here. In Experiment 1, most participants judge that an agent ought to keep a promise (...) that he is unable to keep, but only when he is to blame for the inability. Experiment 2 shows that such “ought” judgments correlate with judgments of blame, rather than with judgments of the agent’s ability. Experiment 3 replicates these findings for moral “ought” judgments and finds that they do not hold for nonmoral “ought” judgments, such as what someone ought to do to fulfill their desires. These results together show that folk moral judgments do not conform to a widely assumed philosophical principle that “ought” implies “can.” Instead, judgments of blame play a modulatory role in some judgments of obligation. (shrink)