Purpose. The article highlights the demand for critical thinking in everyday life at the present stage of development of globalized culture and emphasizes the role of philosophy as a source of rationality. Philosophizing, which is determined by the psychosociocultural matrix, sets the toposes, vocabulary and rhythms of meaning making, their preservation and transformation. The purpose of the article is to concretize the practices of socio-cultural communication, primarily through the social institute of education, where individuals interact with the psychosociocultural matrix of (...) philosophizing, which mediate the general and individual level in philosophical culture. Theoretical basis of the study are cultural anthropology and phenomenological methods. Originality of the study: based on the philosophy of intersubjectivity, we actualized the rational grounds for formation of adequate judgments in modern culture at the level of everyday life. This justifies the inevitability of the spread of various forms and types of philosophical education, philosophical thinking, ideas and values developed in philosophical communities beyond the narrow circle of professional philosophers. This implies the systemic involvement of philosophers as professionals of meaning-making in solving problems in various non-academic fields – politics, economics, law, etc. The formation of skills of philosophical critical thinking in the process of preparing young people for active civil life is no less important aspect of this. Conclusions lead to an understanding of the existential importance of philosophy and philosophizing and the need for organized forms of knowledge transfer such as the Faculty of Philosophy of the Classical University. There is a mutual interest and interaction of the general culture of society and philosophy as a special kind of culture. Because philosophy actively configures other forms of culture, contributes to the creation of sociocultural identities precisely because of its ability to conceptually reproduce the core of the psychosociocultural matrix that underlies the existence of all these different forms within one society. The sociocultural macro level of philosophical spiritual practices is formed by the psychosociocultural matrix of the philosophical tradition, which retains its longevity from the emergence of philosophy and goes through its history, demonstrating the features of the national reception of philosophy as a national-specific embodiment of sociocultural macro level of the psychosociocultural matrix. (shrink)

The discussion about the impact of agricultural biotechnology on Africa is deeply divided and contains widely diverging claims about the impact of biotechnology on African farmers. Building upon literature on the ‘good farmer’ that highlights that farmers identities are an important factor in explaining the success or failure of agricultural change, we argue that the identity of the farmer is an undervalued yet crucial aspect for understanding the debate about the impact of agricultural biotechnology on African farmers. In this article (...) we therefore investigate what farmers’ identities are implicated in the arguments about the impact of biotechnology on African farmers. We aim to identify the main fault lines in different accounts of the African biotechnology farmer by analysing the identities ascribed to them in two prominent cases of controversy: the debates at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg and the discussion about the impact of biotechnology on smallholder farmers in the Makhathini flats in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. Our findings demonstrate that arguments about biotechnology are informed by diverging conceptions of who the African farmer is, what is important for the African farmer, and what role the African farmer has in relation to agricultural biotechnology. These findings remain relevant for current discussions on gene editing technologies like CRISPR-Cas. Openly discussing these different views on the identity of smallholder farmers is crucial for moving forward in the biotechnology controversy and can inform future attempts to elicit the farmer’s voice. (shrink)

Here we shall employ the term "classical" to denote situations in science in which all propositions satisfy all the laws of classical logic, including that of excluded middle. This means that if x is a proposition of a given field of science, then the following statements will be true in regard to it: "either x or non-x," "either x is true or non-x is true," "x is either true or false." The emphasis here upon the law of excluded middle is (...) associated with the fact that criticism of this law is the basic content of nonclassical criticism of classical logic. (shrink)

Immersive virtual reality (VR) emerges as a promising research and clinical tool. However, several studies suggest that VR induced adverse symptoms and effects (VRISE) may undermine the health and safety standards, and the reliability of the scientific results. In the current literature review, the technical reasons for the adverse symptomatology are investigated to provide suggestions and technological knowledge for the implementation of VR head-mounted display (HMD) systems in cognitive neuroscience. The technological systematic literature indicated features pertinent to display, sound, motion (...) tracking, navigation, ergonomic interactions, user experience, and computer’s hardware that should be considered by the researchers. Subsequently, a meta-analysis of 44 neuroscientific or neuropsychological studies involving VR HMD systems was performed. The meta-analysis of the VR studies demonstrated that the new generation HMDs induced significantly fewer dropouts and VRISE. Importantly, the commercial versions of the new generation HMDs with ergonomic interactions had zero incidents of adverse symptomatology and dropouts. Solely, HMDs equivalent to or greater than the commercial versions of contemporary HMDs accompanied with ergonomic interactions are suitable for implementation in cognitive neuroscience. In conclusion, researchers’ technological competency, along with meticulous methods and reports pertinent to software, hardware, and VRISE, are paramount to ensure the health and safety standards and the reliability of neuroscientific results. (shrink)

This collection of essays is addressed to the growing number of philosophers, classicists, and intellectual historians who are interested in the development of Greek thought after Aristotle. In nine original studies, the authors explore the meaning and history of "eclecticism" in the context of ancient philosophy. The book casts fresh light on the methodology of such central figures as Cicero, Philo, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, and Ptolemy, and also illuminates many of the conceptual issues discussed most creatively in this period.

Various interrelationships between two-valued and many-valued logics are examined in . In the present article we propose to discuss questions bearing on these interrelations which have either not been clearly identified as philosophical in that book, were not given sufficiently detailed explanation, or were not touched upon at all.

Настоящая книга является первым отечественным систематическим исследованием античной этики. Полнота рассмотрения философско-этических учений сочетается в ней с их оригинальным толкованием.

Analogy is an important cognitive process that has been researched extensively. Functional accounts of it typically involve at least four stages of processing ; however, these accounts take the way in which the base analogue is understood, along with its relational structure, for granted. The goal of this paper is to open up a discussion about how this process may occur. To this end, this paper describes two experiments that vary the level of relational complexity across exemplars. It was found (...) that relational recognition tasks benefit from increased complexity, while mapping tasks suffer from it. (shrink)

The rediscovery of Hellenistic philosophy in the English-speaking world over the last thirty years has rejuvenated the study of ancient philosophy, and reinforced its significance for contemporary philosophy. Rather than being dim reflections of Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics and skeptics—and perhaps less often, the Epicureans—have turned out to be brilliant critics, giving us, for example, nominalism, propostional logic, a cognitivist account of the emotions, a causal theory of knowledge, a sophisticated form of skepticism, and several more refined versions of (...) eudaimonistic virtue ethics. The two works under review, both collections of essays from the 1970s to the 1990s, represent a selection of the major contributions to this rediscovery by two of its initiators. (shrink)

Spinoza (1632-1677) writes in the fourth proposition of the third part of his masterpiece, the Ethics (1677), the bold statement that self-destruction is impossible. This view seems to be very hard to understand given the fact that in our western world we have recently been confronted with an increasing number of suicides, all of which are - per definition – ―actions of killing oneself deliberately‖. Firstly, this article aims at showing, based on the last chapter of the first part of (...) the Cogitata metaphysica (1661), that Spinoza might have applied the mechanical analogy of a body in motion in his views on life. This interpretation allows to resolve the paradox of suicide in Spinoza. Secondly, this paper gives a new interpretation of one of the three categories of suicide (the ―Seneca category‖), which the Dutch philosopher distinguishes in E4p20s, making a link with his definition 39 of timor. (shrink)

This research implements a recent evolutionary-based algorithm of equilibrium optimizer to resolve the constrained combined economic emission dispatch problem. This problem has two objective functions that represent the minimizing of generation costs and minimizing the emission of environmental pollution caused by generators. The proposed algorithm integrates the dominant criteria for multiobjective functions that allow the decision-maker to detect all the Pareto boundaries of constrained combined economic emission dispatch problem. In order to save the effort for the decision-maker to select the (...) best compromise alternative, a cluster study was carried out to minimize the size of the Pareto boundary to an acceptable size, representing all the characteristics of the main Pareto frontier. On the other hand, in order to deal with the infringement of constraints, a repair algorithm was used to preserve the viability of the particles. The proposed algorithm is applied to solve the standard 30-bus IEEE system with 6 generators to validate its robustness and efficiency to produce a well-distributed Pareto frontier for constrained combined economic emission dispatch problem. Compared with other studies, good results in solving constrained combined economic emission dispatch problem are obtained and a reasonable reduced Pareto set is found. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

From the Editors:Such was the topic considered by members of a new discussion club, "The Free Word" [Svobodnoe slovo], along with specialists from the Institute of Philosophy, USSR Academy of Sciences.