The category of a national interest is one of the most popular notions used in international relations. It has a polysemic character and is differently interpreted by various scientific perspectives. The purpose of this article is to provide a brief analysis of selected approaches of the theory of international relations to defining interests and correlating the interpretations of national interests of the Russian Federation performed on their bases. The choice of case study concerning the foreign policy of the Russian Federation (...) is not accidental because in countries aspiring to gain world power the concept of national interest is raised while explaining the motives of decisions taken by their leaders exceptionally often. In this article, Russia’s interests will be discussed in reference to the annexation of the Crimea and Russia’s actions towards Ukraine. Those events vividly show the specificity of defining the national interests, based on one hand on the pursue to being a powerhouse and understanding the interests in the category of power and, on the other hand, resulting from the political identity of Russian elites. As a result, an assessment of the scientific utility of selected theoretical paradigms and their use in the analyses of Russia’s foreign policy will be outlined. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The sources of religious tolerance but also of religious nationalism in post-soviet Russia can be found basically in the group identification of nationality and religion. In crisis situations, the historical religion of the Russian society - Orthodoxy - becomes the criterion for identifying the national identity. However, despite the fact that the majority of Russians in our times consider themselves Orthodox, many of them are not believers. The observable effect of the “external belief” results in the fact that the (...) religion tends to become a matter of personal choice and an individual value. It assumes a nationalistic function and to become an ideology. As a result, the political elite considers religion as a means of achieving different non- religious purposes. The Russian Orthodox Church, the official church, is compelled to take this fact into consider- ation and even support it. This is why religious intolerance and religious nationalism in modern Russia are often directed towards religion. (shrink)

The paper discusses the philosophical and historical doctrine of the Russian philosopher and historian George Petrovich Fedotov. The author focuses on the analysis of imperial issues in the works of G.P. Fedotov, especially of his views on the cultural history of the Russian empire and the essence of imperial project in Russia. Fedotov reconsiders the historical experience and revolutionary catastrophe of Russia and searches for the foundations of the social and cultural processes determining the events of Russian history. (...) Fedotov’s works offer a variety of interpretations of the political and cultural phenomenon of empire. This reflects his evolution as a philosopher of history: the focus of his vision shifts from the Medieval Rus to the Empire of Peter the Great, then to the collapsed empire of Nicholas II and finally to the USSR. Fedotov’s concept of Empire evolves into a timeless cultural-philosophical phenomenon but originates from the historical description of the centralization of power in the feudal monarchy of Ivan the Terrible. The evolution of the philosophical and historical views of Fedotov is influenced by the changes of his attitude to the historical conception of Klyuchevsky. In the 1940s Fedotov considers the empire as a universal idea. The concept of empire proposed by Fedotov gives an understanding of the Russian historical development, especially the causes of the decline and fall of the Russian Empire. Fedotov associates the cause of the salvation of Russia with the study of ancient Russian culture, in which he founds a moral and political ideal of the “Republic of Saint Sophia.” The paper shows heuristic potential of Fedotov’s cultural and philosophical ideas on the vocation of spiritual elite and the creative role of personality in the process of nation-building. (shrink)

The study explains the perception of the nation in the political thinking of Svetozár Hurban Vajanský, which is founded on primordialist starting points and has a holistic character. In this context, the relationship between the nationally conscious elite and the people is analysed in more detail. The ambivalence of Vajanský’s political thinking is evident in the fact that, in many ways, he formally promotes Ľudovít Štúr’s original idea of unity, but, within Slovak political discourse, he promotes the idea of (...) programme uniformity. Subsequently, this becomes a source of cultural and political isolationism. This fact is complemented in parallel by reflecting the primary acculturation importance of the national elite in developing the national consciousness of the population. Vajanský also incorporated the idea of Slavic mutuality into the national emancipation concept of developing Slovak national identity. Its content is in line with Štúr’s ethnic romanticism. The historicist concept of the development of Slavs under Russian protection also appears in his thinking. Vajanský’s Russophilism was, thus, loosely tied to the ideas of Russian Slavophiles and the idealising perspective of the Slavs’ civilisational mission, who were to form a new, more spiritual and culturally advanced, civilisation circle compared with the morally declining nations of the West. (shrink)

The article deals with the concept of the Russian national type of personality by G. P. Fedotov. The author finds the connection between Fedotov’s views and the theory of moderate social constructivism, according to which the formation of nation by elite can be successful only if it comes in accordance with geographical and historical ‘landscapes‘. Russian type of personality is seen as a unity of two polar characters - ‘the muscovite‘ and ‘the intelligent‘. The author points out that Fedotov (...) considers culture as a main factor in the development of history, which makes the very existence of intelligentsia the most important condition of solving many social problems in Russia. (shrink)

Doctoral programs at U.S. universities play a critical role in the development of human resources both in the United States and abroad. This volume reports the results of an extensive study of U.S. research-doctorate programs in five broad fields: physical sciences and mathematics, engineering, social and behavioral sciences, biological sciences, and the humanities. Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States documents changes that have taken place in the size, structure, and quality of doctoral education since the widely used 1982 editions. This (...) update provides selected information on nearly 4,000 doctoral programs in 41 subdisciplines at 274 doctorate-granting institutions. This volume also reports the results of the National Survey of Graduate Faculty, which polled a sample of faculty for their views on the scholarly quality of program faculty and the effectiveness of doctoral programs in preparing research scholars/scientists. This much-anticipated update of such an essential reference will be useful to education administrators, university faculty, and students seeking authoritative information on doctoral programs. (shrink)

While Russian political parties appear to be institutionalizing to some degree at the national level, they are surprisingly absent at the regional level. This is a result of the dynamics of Russia's dual economic and political transition. Regional elites prefer a “partial reform equilibrium” in political institutional development so that they can avoid widening the sphere of accountability for their decisions in order to protect the gains they have made in the early stage of the economic transition. Strong political (...) institutions—like competitive political parties that penetrate the periphery—would render transitional winners more broadly accountable to wider societal interests as well as to national political actors. The argument suggests that the territorial penetration and further institutionalization of Russia's party system are not necessarily inevitable. Under the conditions of dual, simultaneous economic and political transitions, elites may prefer an equilibrium of political underinstitutionalization to preserve their early winnings from the economic transition. (shrink)

The heritage of civilizations in geopolitics is progressively used to consolidate the vision of a multipolar world and, thereby, to establish its important place in the arena of international affairs. Civilizational heritage and civilizational imagination become increasingly important geopolitical factors which begin to shape the relations between China, Russia, Turkey, the United States and the European Union. In global politics during the last decades, in one way or another, Samuel Huntington’s ideas of the interactions between civilizations and their development (...) externalised with the stress on the increase of civilizational conflicts. These ideas made great impact on political elites of main world powers. The author of this article—drawing attention to the importance of cultural and especially religious factors for civilizational processes and the interactions between civilizations, which were also raised by Huntington—examines the peculiarities of the Russian and Turkish civilizational and geopolitical discourses, and connects to those discourses the current geopolitics pursued by the political elites of these countries. The promotion of the current role of the civilization and its geopolitical legacy highlights the uniqueness of civilizations and creates an effort to strengthen the civilizational imagination and to use the civilizational imperial experience and its cultural heritage in current political events. The Russian discourse is characterised by the historical anti-Western and anti-European attitude of Eurasian Messianic civilizational distinctiveness, while the Turkish rhetoric is characterised by the elevation of the imperial Ottoman Islamic cultural and political heritage. Both the discourses are linked by an imperial mentality, orientation towards a multi-civilizational and multi-polar world as well as the demand to create a new world order in line with such an emerging worldview. The article also discusses some of the ideas prevailing in the European Union that underpin the policy of creating a post-national European cosmopolitan community. However, such discourse lacks a cultural, civilizational as well as religious heritage, which brings people together and can form a long-lasting sense of civilizational community. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the ideas of religious and political identification of modern Russia and the USA. The main conceptual positions of Russian and American philosophers, political scientists, and theologians are presented. These ideas create the specific axiological unity of American and Russian forms of culture and civilizations. The search for national idea and cultural identification is presented in the article from the position of national and international security of the USA and Russia. The author pays attention (...) to original concepts of American philosophers, which have developed new «typologies of God». From this point of view God exists in human being in the new «technocratic» or «political» qualities. The conclusions about the priority collaboration of Russia and the USA in cultural spheres are made. (shrink)

The work of the French Lithuanian Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, describes a perceptive rethinking of the possibility of concrete acts of goodness in the world, a rethinking never more necessary than now, in the wake of the cruel realities of the twentieth century—ten million dead in the First World War, forty million dead in the Second World War, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Soviet gulags, the grand slaughter of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” the pointless and gory Vietnam War, the Cambodian self-genocide and (...) many an attempted extermination from the face of the earth of entire nations of indigenous peoples. The list of horrors goes on and on—daily holocausts that do not distinguish between the civilian and the soldier, the guilty and the innocent, those deserving of life and those less deserving. (shrink)

At IAPS Ljubljana conference (September 2007) Dag Vidar Hanstad and Sigmund Loland presented a paper on elite-level athletes' duty to provide information on their whereabouts, to decide between two opposing positions: is this WADA demand justifiable anti-doping work or an indefensible surveillance regime? They concluded that on moral grounds this regime is conditionally acceptable, the condition being the acceptability of a general framework and objectives embodied in anti-doping global legislative foundations (the World Anti-Doping Code). But, as they said, principled (...) objections against the system have more universal relevance, which has to be taken seriously . To take this ambiguous and intriguing conclusion a step further, I propose a legal rather than ethical approach, from the aspect of constitutional and international human rights law, and the possible clash of two legally acknowledged values - the concept of elite sport without doping, and the concept of individual human rights. This conflict between ideological or moral values and the legality of individual rights is not a novelty. This paper presents three instances of this conflict: Bernard de Mandeville's differentiation between public and private values; Eug ne Sue's parallel legal and civil morals; and the contemporary moralisation of law which conflates legality into morality. The subordination of legality to morality has potentially dangerous consequences: here, Agamben's 'state of exception' comes to mind, with his analysis of potestas and auctoritas. However, in the case of sport and the war against doping, the origin of power is not in the nation state; it originates in civil society's non-governmental national and international bodies recognised as autonomous sources of legal order. (shrink)

Concussive injuries to the head and brain are relatively common in the National Football League. This is not news, since the issue has been covered in many articles in the popular press and many news specials on television. As an NFL offensive lineman for 13 years, I suffered a huge number of hits to the head — an estimated 215,000 at least. Nevertheless, I have fared better than many of the players of my era: many suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy. (...) For example, some of my fellow Hall of Fame players from that era, Mike Webster, Jim Ringo, John Mackey, and Joe Perry, all suffered from CTE and all are now deceased. I count myself lucky that the main malady affecting me after those many blows to the head is a 60% hearing loss in my left ear — probably due to undiagnosed concussions and particularly to thousands of head slaps by defensive players, whose first hit after the snap was often a right-handed blow to the helmet's open hole over my left ear. (shrink)

By means of an initial examination of nineteenth century modern warfare, primarily in Italy and Germany, this article argues that, in the early twentieth century, a number of military models of attack were put in question, particularly during the First World War. Investigating the origins, development and deployment of elite troops throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by way of Heidegger, amongst others, the article attempts to reveal both the continuities and the changes relating to the military techniques and (...) temporalities of elite troop offensives. It reflects on the consequences of the use of elite troops from the early twentieth century onwards and the ensuing new military order for modern warfare and for the infantry in particular. The article concludes with a historically and philosophically informed discussion of the contemporary materialization and employment of United Nations ‘rapid deployment forces’ in Bosnia and elsewhere. (shrink)

Sobre la base de la teoría de “los mejores” de J. Ortega y Gasset el autor trató de investigar el papel de los estratos superiores de la sociedad, de la élite nacional en la modernización del régimen político en los principios de la democracia y la poliarquía. Fue revelado el papel en los procesos del gobierno y la administración del poder político y ejecutivo del aparato estatal, que consiste en los funcionarios públicos, profesional y moralmente preparados y capaces asegurar el (...) funcionamiento sostenible y soberano de las instituciones del Estado. En Rusia en el inicio del 2012 se comenzón las actividades socio-políticas llamadas en la ciencia política como la tecnología “de nacionalizaciόn” de las élites. Se produce una armonización de los intereses de los grupos políticos y empresariales de alto nivel social con los intereses del Estado y la sociedad civil. Fue realizado el análisis comparativo del impacto de las élites políticas de España y Rusia sobre la estabilidad política para garantizar el desarrollo socio-económico soberano de sus países. En la soberanía del Estado se refleja la plenitud de la autoridad governamental de los grupos sociales más altos, la élite nacional. Por separado se destacó la función de la élite político-militar como un aparato coercitivo legítimo, que asegura el bienestar del Estado democrático. Los modelos actuales de los regímenes políticos democráticos – no es una meta, sino un instrumento para lograr el bienestar del Estado y nación. Los acontecimientos en Rusia contemporánea comproban la actualidad científica de las obras del gran pensador J.Ortega y Gasset. (shrink)

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy resulting from head hits and concussions is an unfortunate illness that has affected numerous football players, especially in the National Football League. Many of my fellow players suffer from this problem, and many have died prematurely because of it. I make some suggestions for improving the situation for retired and current players.

Hugh Murray seems animated by two basic contentions. First, he believes that blacks and their liberal allies have acted irresponsibly by supporting the thuggish policies of the Nation of Islam and its leader, Louis Farrakhan. He states that this is “the era of Farrakhan,” and implies (without any evidence other than selected anecdotes) that support for Farrakhan among blacks is virtually unanimous. Second, he deplores the replacement in the 1960s of equal opportunity by affirmative action policies — promoted by “the (...) quota-racial-ethnic and gender preference lobby” — which he argues discriminate against more qualified individuals merely because they happen to be white or male. (shrink)

The Patriotic War of 1812 was a tremendous historical testing of our people against the world's most powerful enemy — the army of Napoleon. The treacherous invasion of Russia by the Napoleonic hordes called forth in our country a feeling of hatred for the foreign conquerors, self-sacrifice and heroism. The people as a whole rose to struggle against the invaders. Alongside the Russian Army there were numerous folk levies and guerrilla bands, all with the single motive of freeing their (...) homeland from the foreign conquerors. Whereas Napoleon's was a war of conquest against Russia, the War of 1812 was, from the very outset, a just war of national liberation for their country on the part of the Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian and other peoples. (shrink)

The XIX International Panarin Readings, convened on December 23, 2021, were dedicated to the memory of Professor Valery Nikolaevich Rastorguev (1949–2021) from the Department of Philosophy of Politics and Law at the Faculty of Philosophy of Lomonosov Moscow State University, who was a long-standing organizer and initiator of these readings. The Panarin Readings, initiated in 2003 following the demise of the notable Russian philosopher and political scientist, Alexander Sergeyevich Panarin, have now evolved into an international forum. Since 2008, the primary (...) venue for these readings has been the Department of Philosophy of Politics and Law at the Faculty of Philosophy of Lomonosov Moscow State University. The central theme of the conference’s plenary session was Russia’s national identity amidst strategic instability. The summary encapsulates key insights from over two dozen plenary reports presented by a diverse group of scholars, politicians, publicists, and theologians from various countries. These presentations highlighted both the challenges faced by modern states in preserving national identity and the crucial need for the scientific community and policymakers to pay close attention to this issue. (shrink)

The author reviews the collective work Military Sciences versus the Science of War in Austria and in Russia. The reviewed book considers methodological and ideological problems of modern war and its aspects. The author draws attention to several topics, which are important for understanding modern war. The reviewed work is analyzed from the point of view of its contribution to the development of the philosophy of war. The author focuses on the peculiarities of classical researches on war, pays attention (...) to the conceptual and categorical apparatus, conducts a comparative analysis of thoughts and judgments of Russian and Austrian scholars, shows their conceptual vision of everything related to the war. The article considers the approach to the modern science of war. The possibility of its exclusion from the historical process is analyzed. The main factor preventing the elimination of war is a strong social inertia. Analyzing concepts and categories of the philosophy of war, the collective work discussing the art of war, strategy, and the meaning of war. Strategy, even being divided into military and political one, is a part of the art of war. The review’s author considers the views on philosophical foundations of war of Russian and Austrian scholars, who are in search for moral basis for countering this social and political phenomenon. It is noted that analyzing the views on the nature of war of scientists in Austria and Russia, the political ambitions of their nations should be taken into account. The monograph emphasizes that an effective opposition to militarism should be based on an analysis of its nature and the real historical situation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 10.2 (2000) 175-188 [Access article in PDF] Scope Note 38 Bioethics Resources on the Web * Once described as an "enormous used book store with volumes stacked on shelves and tables and overflowing onto the floor" (Pool, Robert. 1994. Turning an Info-Glut into a Library. Science 266 (7 October): 20-22, p. 20), Internet resources now receive numerous levels of organization, from basic directory listings (...) to elaborate "links" (cross-references to other Internet documents) that flash and glow in the dark. In many ways, the Internet functions as a direct extension of the traditional library. Following linked references across various sites is an electronic version of browsing library stacks, and the serendipitous discoveries made while "surfing the Net" recall the wonders of physically going "book-to-book." Although many of the Internet's best aspects augment library strengths by eliminating physical distance from sources, Net resources pose unique problems for researchers. It is not always clear who is responsible for the content of Web documents, when the document was produced, or how often (if ever) it is updated. Internet resource tools, then, must enable researchers to identify appropriate resources and to evaluate what they find when they get there. Web Research as Taking "Snapshots" Given the Internet's visual nature and fluid content, the process of conducting research on the Web has been likened to taking an informal picture of information on a specific date at a particular time. This metaphor also conveys the "zoom-in" aspect of searching through Web pages by going from general to specific categories. In the first section of this Scope Note, National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature (NRCBL) staff present a snapshot of bioethics resources taken during the spring months of 2000. Entries are divided into the categories of directories, electronic journals, full-text documents, news/current awareness, and teaching resources. In the two subsequent sections, this series of categories is repeated for entries on a specific topic within bioethics-genetics-and again for general search and evaluation tools. Where a Web site may contain pages applicable [End Page 175] to more than one category, multiple entries are made for that site with appropriate information for each category.Much as telecommunication advances have strengthened the relationship of patients and providers as partners, the dynamic nature of the Internet acknowledges that the researcher functions as a librarian whenever accessing the Web. It is our hope that BIOETHICSLINE and the other NRCBL databases not only will enable researchers to search the Web more efficiently, but also will help them to evaluate what they find when they get there. Bioethicsline on the Web: An International Plan in Progress Once only available through libraries, the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), the funding agency for the ongoing development of the BIOETHICS LINE® database from the Kennedy Institute, has provided free Web access to that database of 63,000 citations since September 1998 through Internet Grateful Med. Plans are now underway to eliminate such specialty databases and incorporate all citations into PubMed (for journal articles) or LOCATORplus (for book-like materials and chapters in books). Both of these databases are likewise available at no cost on the Web. In the transition to PubMed and LOCATORplus some features of BIOETHICSLINE that presently are available may be lost. Researchers are encouraged to contact the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature with search requests or for search strategy assistance with either the current or the future system ([email protected]).The inclusion of bioethics citations in PubMed and LOCATORplus will have several advantages. First, unique keywords from the Bioethics Thesaurus will be considered for inclusion in Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the indexing vocabulary for PubMed and LOCATORplus, thereby enhancing retrieval of relevant clinical literature by offering more precise terminology covering ethical issues. Second, it will be easier to identify foreign-language materials, which are not currently included in the scope of BIOETHICSLINE. Third, the updating schedule will become more frequent. On the other hand, there may be some loss of searching precision because certain specialized features... (shrink)

The Enlightenment has often been written about as a sequence of disembodied 'great ideas'. The aim of this book is to put the beliefs of the Enlightenment firmly into their social context, by revealing the national soils in which they were rooted and the specific purposes for which they were used. It brings out the regional divergences of the Enlightenment experience, shaped by different local intellectual and economic priorities. At the same time it also shows how central concerns were shared (...) everywhere, and how the writings of certain key areas came to be influential elsewhere. The thirteen essays, each written by a historian specialising in the particular country, examine national contexts from Sweden to Italy, from Russia to North America. As well as focusing attention on the interplay of thought and action, ideology and society, the book offers important insights into the place of the intelligentsia in the modern world. (shrink)

The article reveals the characteristics of entrepreneurship development in the conditions of modern challenges. The aim of the research is to analyze the prospects of entrepreneurship development in both global and national dimensions. A critical analysis of the content of scientific literature of modern scientists, whose works are dedicated to the study of the peculiarities of entrepreneurship development in the conditions of modern challenges, indicates the insufficiency of their study in the period of the Covid-19 pandemic and the escalation of (...) Russia's war against Ukraine. The relevance of the researched topic is determined by the importance of studying the trends in entrepreneurship development and the factors that determine its prospects in both global and national dimensions. The methodological basis of the research is a set of the following methods aimed at solving the respective tasks: analysis and grouping – for the distribution of the countries worldwide based on directions of entrepreneurship development management, according to the level of GDP per capita; survey – for the distribution of countries worldwide based on the opportunities for starting own business in the next 6 months, level of entrepreneurial activity at the early stages of business establishment, consideration of social consequences by entrepreneurs, and familiarity of entrepreneurs with the goals of sustainable development; methods of analysis, tabular and relative differences methods – for determining the state of entrepreneurship in Ukraine; cartographic and graph-analytical – for determining prospective business expectations in Ukraine in 2023; generalization and analytical methods ‒ for summarizing conclusions and recommendations regarding the obtained research data. The scientific novelty of the research results is a scientific-methodical approach. The application of the approach allows obtaining a set of conclusions regarding the prospects of the further development of entrepreneurship in global and national dimensions. These findings can serve as a basis for developing further recommendations to stimulate its development. The obtained research results can be valuable for entrepreneurial structures and government organizations that pursue their own objectives in assessing the prospects of entrepreneurial activities in the conditions of modern challenges. (shrink)

The notion of science as a stratified system is clearly manifested in the markedly uneven distribution of productivity, rewards, resources, and recognition. Although previous studies have shown that institutional environments for conducting research differ significantly between national science systems, disciplines, and subfields, it remains to be shown whether any systematic variations and patterns in inequalities exist among researchers in different national and domain specific settings. This study investigates the positioning of citation elites as opposed to ‘ordinary’ researchers by way of (...) examining three dimensions of concentration (accumulation of publications and citations, specialisation, and institutional concentration) in biology, economics and physics in Denmark and the UK. Across all three dimensions, we put Richard Whitley’s bipartite theory to the test, suggesting a nexus between the intellectual structure of a discipline and the configuration of its elite. The study draws on a dataset of researchers who published most of their publications in either physics, biology, or economics over the 1980–2018 period and with at least one publication in 2017–2018 while affiliated to either a British or a Danish university. We find higher degrees of concentration in the UK compared to Denmark, and that physics and biology respectively display the greatest and lowest degree of concentration. Similar patterns in disciplinary differences are observed in both countries, suggesting that concentration patterns are largely rooted in disciplinary cultures and merely amplified by the national context. (shrink)

In the contemporary spiritual and moral situation, a question reverberates—sometimes obscurely, sometimes more distinctly—which may be phrased as follows: Will each of the nations of the world perform its singular part in the symphony of human history, or will unison, pale uniformity, the impotence of mankind's cultural forces prevail? This question, put bluntly, leaves no room for dubious speculations, since uniqueness is an inseparable component of the values that are currently being affirmed as universal human values in the contemporary consciousness. (...) But the concrete realities of the world situation are such that they inevitably make the task of preserving this uniqueness extremely complicated. Hence, a self-awareness of one's own specific nature remains relevant. That awareness cannot, of course, establish itself without turning to history, without an in-depth development of the conception of the cultural-historical process that would answer the questions of the place and the tasks of a particular community within the universal whole. (shrink)

The present article is an attempt at a closer reading of Ivan Ilyin’s relationship to fascism. This is explored primarily through a selection of articles in which Ilyin wrote in positive terms of Italian fascism, and in one case also of German National Socialism. The author of this article first presents a summary of relevant historical and biographical information, revealing that although Ilyin praised fascism in his articles, his personal experience of German Nazism was negative. This is followed by an (...) examination of Ilyin’s own concept of fascism, concluding that it in fact derived from his understanding of the Russian White Movement. The examination focuses on three selected aspects, key notions for both fascism and Ilyin’s philosophy: the principle of the leader, the idea of the elite and the notion of chivalry, and nationalism and anti-Semitism. This analysis demonstrates that Ilyin drew upon idealized versions of these concepts, as integral parts of his projected utopian vision of a future Russia. (shrink)

This article examines the evolution of Lev P. Karsavin, the connection between the philosopher’s historical perspective and his ontological constructions, his postulation of the personhood principle of being’s organization, and the common mindsets of the philosophy of all-unity. The author of this article distinguishes between reflections on the future found in Karsavin’s pre-emigration work and the image of the future he creates within the framework of the Eurasianist paradigm. This article presents three variants of representation of the future: the universal, (...) the national-cultural, and the state. The author analyzes the image of the future associated with the coming-to-be of the All-One Humanity, its transformation into a truly symphonic person, and show how this image turns into a concept of the future that affirms the self-development of national culture. The prospect of developing Russia-Eurasia as an ideocratic and statist state that acts as a form of manifestation of the national culture represents the final stage of this evolution. (shrink)

Global reproductive landscapes and with them cross-border routes are rapidly changing. This paper examines the reproductive routes and choices of fertility travellers from China to Russia as reported by medical professionals and fertility service providers. Providing new empirical data, it raises new ethical questions on the facilitation of cross-border reproductive travel and the commercialisation of reproductive treatment. The relaxation of the one-child policy in 2014 in China, the increasing demand for ART exceeding the capacity of national fertility clinics and (...) the difficulty of accessing treatment with donor eggs concomitant with a growing economic power of the upper–middle class are shaping the ART industry in Asia in new ways. A new development is Chinese citizens increasingly seeking ART treatment in Russia, which has a long-standing practice of ART governed by a liberal legislation. Furthermore, as China prohibits the export of gametes, Chinese fertility travellers rely on acquiring donor gametes once starting treatment abroad. Clinicians in Russia report three strategies amongst their Chinese patients: One group is using donor eggs of women of Asian appearance living in Russia or is hiring women of resembling appearance from third-party countries to donate their eggs in Russia to create resemblance in their offspring. Another group is buying white donor gametes to create Eurasian mixed children and thus ‘enhance’ their offspring. Providing novel empirical data, this article informs ethical deliberation and raises imminent questions for further research in this understudied geographic region and on cross-border reproductive treatment. (shrink)

Liberal-Democratic changes in the Russian Society have brought a number of acute problems threatening national security and leading to converting Russia into a peripheral socio-cultural system («national self-identification crisis»). Scientific research shows that the main indicator of the said crisis is not only the critical economic differentiation of people into the «poor» and «rich» Russia (with the different ways of life, needs, mentality) but also spiritual degradation, spread of aggressive – depressive syndrome (growth of hatred, feeling of injustice, (...) loss of meaning of the life, anger, melancholy, hopelessness, loneliness etc.). Twothirds of the citizens (74.9%) interviewed in 2006 think that their social status does not correspond to their personal achievements in education and professional abilities. One of the main reasons of their distrust towards the government bodies is insufficient professional and cultural level, absence of unity of a word and business. It is worth mentioning that books and articles of scientists and ideologists who resist Western liberalism are freely published, but you can hardly see these people close to the President. Russians are openly and secretly under pressure of ideas propagandizing negative past which undermine national self-identification, national pride for the great history of their country. The original sphere of influence of Russian language and Russian culture is shortening under the press of mass-culture. Meanwhile, 67% of Russians expressed their negative attitude towards massive Western cultural expansion. The Futureof Russia is in safeguarding national intellectual and spiritual values, Science, education and in supporting the person of work and creativity. (shrink)

The analysis of historical literature allows to consider profoundly the development of national culture and science of the 18th-first half of the 20th centuries and the formation and change of different historical concepts. With the analysis of historical periods that are highlighted in the research, general trends in the changing of paradigms about Russian historical development were concluded, which were translated to mass historical consciousness from the beginning of the 18th century up to 1917. The periods were closely connected with (...) the specific political, historical and economic changes in Russian Empire and with the dominance of certain textbooks during this time. The books were selected because of a number of factors: their inclusion to the school curriculum, the number of publications, the equal number of textbooks devoted to different historical periods. For the analysis were used 19 textbooks, schoolbooks for different courses of secondary schools and primary schools. All the sources of educational literature were grouped into two concepts - officially-state and the liberal. Each publication was highlighted the dominant concept as a base for the whole textbook. There is also a characteristic of the concepts that are presented chronologically. The analysis represents school history books as an important source for the formation of state policy in the representing of Russian history, and, that is more important, for creation of the concept of the state of Russian history. (shrink)

This study examined individual, task, and environmental constraints that influence the career progression of youth Brazilian elite basketball players and the probability of reaching Novo Basquete Brasil and to determine if the association of the relative age effect is a key factor in the career progression. The sample consisted of 4,692 male players who were registered to participate in at least one U15, U17, or U22 youth Brazilian basketball championship between 2004 and 2018. Athletes who reached a high-performance level (...) were coded like NBB players. The birthdates, height, body mass, playing position, geographic region, club, competition category, and team performance were retrieved from the official data archive of the Brazilian Basketball Confederation and the National Basketball League. The maturity status was estimated using the predicted age at peak height velocity. A binary logistic regression examined the influence of each characteristic on the probability of a youth Brazilian basketball player to reach the NBB. The receiver operating characteristic curves and the associated area under the curve were used to assess the discriminant ability of the model. The taller and younger players not selected early into national teams, without specialization by playing position, who participated in U22 national championship, migrated to the southeast region, and remained in the formation process over time have a greater chance to reach the NBB. The ROC curve demonstrated an AUC of 93%. A combination of individual, task, and environmental characteristics influences the sport career of a young Brazilian basketball player in reaching the NBB. Further, early-maturing athletes have a greater chance to reach higher performances. RAE influences lower-level categories, but not a “NBB player's” career progression. The coaches, stakeholders, and practitioners should perform a holistic evaluation of sport talent in terms of a constraint-based theoretical model with the aim of avoiding bias produced by the maturational status and RAE in the youth Brazilian elite basketball. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 14.1 (2004) 47-54 [Access article in PDF] Ethical Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research*(A Recommended Manuscript) Adopted on 16 October 2001Revised on 20 August 2002 Ethics Committee of the Chinese National Human Genome Center at Shanghai, Shanghai 201203 Human embryonic stem cell (ES) research is a great project in the frontier of biomedical science for the twenty-first century. Be- cause the research involves (...) the use of human embryos, it triggers serious debate on ethical issues. Opponents consider the embryo to be an early form of human life that should be respected and not destroyed. However, the majority of scientists support embryonic stem cell research, believing that it offers good prospects for the treatment of diseases that have remained incurable until now and so will benefit humankind. The Ethics Committee of the Department of Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of the Chinese National Human Genome Center at Shanghai seriously discussed the ethical debate initiated by embryonic stem cell research. We concluded that we should support the scientists of our country in actively carrying out human embryonic stem cell research for the noble cause of "medicine being a beneficent art." For the healthy and orderly development of human embryonic stem cell research in our country, we put forward the following recommended Ethical Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research as a reference for leaders, administrative departments, and related scientists. Preface Article 1. Human embryonic stem cells are the primitive cells that play the main role in the growth and development of a human body. These [End Page 47] primitive cells have the potential for infinite proliferation, self-renewal, and multi-directional differentiation. If scientists can discover the mechanism of differentiation of human embryonic stem cells, it will be possible to induce differentiation of human embryonic stem cells to form various types of human cells for clinical cell therapy. If human embryonic stem cell research can be integrated with modern biomedical engineering techniques, it also will be possible to make repair and replacement of human tissues and organs a reality. Article 2. There are two ways to classify human embryonic stem cells. One way is to classify them according to their potential for differentiation. There could be three kinds of stem cells: totipotent stem cells, pluripotent stem cells, and unipotent stem cells.A totipotent stem cell has the potential to develop into a whole individual. It can differentiate into the more than 200 cell types in the whole body, construct any tissue or organ of the body, and finally develop into a whole individual. The fertilized egg and the cleavage cells at the very early stage of embryonic development are totipotent stem cells.A pluripotent stem cell has the potential to differentiate into many cell types derived from the three embryonic layers. However, it has lost the capacity to develop into a complete organism.A unipotent stem cell is derived from the further differentiation of the pluripotent stem cell. It can differentiate only into one cell type such as a hematopoietic stem cell, neural stem cell, and others.The other way is to classify human stem cells according to their source. There could be two kinds of human stem cells: embryonic stem cells and tissue stem cells (also called adult stem cells). The former involves experimentation with embryos, which has serious ethical implications. Ethical issues associated with the latter are mainly expressed in the various opinions regarding the allocation of health resources. Article 3. Human embryonic stem cells are the group of cells called the blastocyst inner cell mass during the early stage of embryonic development. They are the main source of totipotent stem cells, and hence the focal and hot point in stem cell research. Studies on the clinical application of embryonic stem cells probably will involve use of the somatic cell nucleus transfer (SCNT) technique, which destroys the early human embryo. At present, the ethical and moral debate is very serious in human embryonic stem cell research regarding whether the research will develop... (shrink)

Background: Biomedical research nowadays is increasingly carried out in multinational and multicenter settings. Due to disparate national regulations on various ethical aspects, such as informed consent, there is the risk of ethical compromises when involving human subjects in research. Although the Declaration of Helsinki is the point of reference for ethical conduct of research on humans, national normative requirements may diverge from its provisions. The aim of this research is to examine requirements on informed consent in biomedical research in Germany, (...) Poland, and Russia to determine how each national regulatory framework relates to the provisions of the Declaration of Helsinki. Methods: For this analysis, we conducted a search of the legal databases “Gesetze im Internet” for Germany, “Internetowy System Aktow Prawnych” for Poland, and “ГAPAHT – Garant” for Russia. The search was complemented by a review of secondary literature contained in the databases Google Scholar, PubMed, Polish National Library, and eLibrary ru. We have identified 21 normative regulations containing provisions on informed consent in clinical research in all three countries. The content of these documents was systematically categorized and analyzed. Results: The normative framework in all three countries shows a strong commitment towards the core ethical principles of research envisaged in the Declaration of Helsinki. Nevertheless, provisions on informed consent vary between these three countries. The differences range from the method and language in which information should be provided, through the amount of information required to be disclosed, to the form of documenting consent or withdrawal. In the case of research on vulnerable groups, these differences are particularly visible. Conclusions: The identified differences can negatively impact the ethical conduct of international clinical studies. Attention needs to be paid that flexibilities within national regulations are not misused to undermine the protection of research subjects. Achieving global or regional legislative harmonization might prove impossible. Such lack of legal consensus reinforces the significance of the international ethical agreements. (shrink)