Two different value orientations with regard to nature are presented. The first orientation corresponds to the naturalistic worldview. It emphasizes the need for protecting the environmental order of things. The second value orientation situates our interests and desires above the imperatives of the nature preservation. Nature is grasped, first of all, as raw material to be more or less radically changed. The distinction of two value systems is relevant for our position not just regarding nature around us, but regarding human (...) nature as well. The current bioethical debates on therapy versus enhancement reflect the opposition of these two sets of values. (shrink)

This article analyzes problems related to Lev S. Vygotsky’s name. The motives behind the replacement of his original patronymic “Simkhovich” with “Semyonovich” are discussed, as well as the reasons...

Discussing ambiguities and paradoxes of Kant's treatment of the example of the murderer at the door, the article finds their roots in the absoluteness of Kant's moral requirements and ontological limitations of his practical philosophy. It identifies and examines socio-ontological and moral boundaries of Kant's moral philosophy.

This article disputes the possibility and reason for any general theory of revolution that claims to reveal the “essence” of this phenomenon without regard for the context in which any particular revolution occurs. The article describes revolutions as contingent and self-constituting events. Their triggers, but not their causes, are the dysfunctions of existing orders. Such events are a special kind of historical and political practice and are characterized primarily as the initiation of a mechanism that Kant called causation through freedom, (...) and the emergence of collective actors possessing the properties of a political subject. Such events are possible only in the context of Modernity, just as Modernity itself persists until and to the extent that it bears the imprint of these events, both in its institutional organization and in its historical memory. (shrink)

In the last 7 years, Russia has seen deep changes in all spheres of political and economic life. Some new realities have appeared in Russian medicine as well. This paper tells the story of how these changes came about, what kind of unusal situation were created, and how these situation are recognized in professional and public debates.

Non-classical science gives a very specific answer to the question of scientific errors and their epistemological value. But for all the specificity of this answer, it casts light on a problem that remains with us century after century, the historically constant problem of truth and error—one of the most fundamental problems of knowledge. At first sight, these two poles have always stood opposite each other, like good and evil, beauty and ugliness. But moral and aesthetic theories have long since left (...) behind this initial conception, and shown that the two polar concepts are in fact inseparable. As regards truth and error, their indivisibility has only become apparent in the context of non-classical science. Truth has ceased to be the absolute contradiction of error. Contemporary science finds it to be something relative, inseparable from its opposite pole. But the non-classical, retrospective approach, a re-evaluation of the past of science in the light of its present, and indeed even more in the light of its prognosis, its future, allows one to see that scientific truths that are adequate for the object of knowledge always reflect only one side of the objective world, a world which has an infinite number of sides. The irreversible process that leads from relative error to relative truth has an absolute character: an irreversible process of generalization, concretization and complication of a Weltanschauung that more accurately reflects the infinite complexity of life. (shrink)

In our times, when the pace of economic, scientific and technological, social and cultural change calls to mind the relativist velocities of contemporary physics, Einstein's criterion begins to be applicable to the historical process itself; movement can be recorded (and consequently the notion of velocity acquire meaning) provided an adequate reference system is available. Where science is concerned, such systems have always existed: historians have brought out the increase in adequate knowledge in the past by comparing it with present knowledge, (...) which then offered a system of absolute reference. But now, the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, molecular biology and the radical transformation of standards of value in all cultural areas have made like absolutization of contemporary ideas impossible. Today ideas furnish no more than a point of departure for non-classical retrospection which, as Jaurès said, seeks the fire, not. the ashes, in the history of science. But: the fire of science, its dynamics, its movement, is inseparable from its value, its effect, its psychological ‘accompaniment.’ Contemporary science, with unprecedented dynamism, is distinguishable from classical science by its far more emotional coloring. It lays bare not only the logical collisions of knowledge but also the emotional collisions. Einstein called the history of science the ‘drama of ideas.’ A drama which sometimes turns into a tragedy. The tragic sense Lorentz was aware of in the crumbling of old conceptions is easily perceptible in the remark he made when he confessed he would have prefered to be dead before the structure of classical physics collapsed. For Erenfest the tormenting experience of a personal inability to understand the positive bases of non-classical physics was also tragic and, according to Einstein, was what drove him to suicide. Einstein's own dissatisfaction tor thirty years while he strove in the field theory alone to find a stable universal conception possessing more complete ‘internal perfection’ than the then existing solution, was again tragic. The real characteristic of the collisions of non-classical science, however, is their ambivalence: the tragic notes blend with the optimistic perception of irreversible general progress in knowledge. The collisions of knowledge and this optimistic perception together sound a very complex chord, major on the whole, but with minor harmonics. (shrink)

Modern epistemology adopted the idea of historicism, of the historicity of knowledge and the self-consciousness of the cognizer. The research, undertaken within cultural–historical epistemology, also spread in the context of the prevailing tendencies in the sphere of modern epistemology. The specificity of this type of epistemology is related to a special interpretation of the history of cognition. On this interpretation knowledge represents a cultural phenomenon that has an existentially-symbolical meaning for the cognizer. Therefore this type of epistemology returns us to (...) the dimension of knowledge, which has in fact been lost today. It returns us to the original antique notion of knowledge as “good,” as something that changes the person who acquires it. And here in this context comes forth such a feature of knowledge as its integrity. At the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Russian philosophers turned to the problem field of “integral knowledge,” the core of which lies in the unity of the integral and cognitive, which is reflected in the concreteness of knowledge. Such an understanding of knowledge enabled the articulation of a number of ideas that enriched European traditions of socio-humanitarian research and influenced the development of semiotics and structuralism both in Europe and in Russia. The ideas of R. Jakobson that stimulated the structure-semiotic research in the first half of the twentieth century are very well-known to world humanity science. Yet their epistemological potential is related to the idea of the integral knowledge. The epistemological turn towards historicism in semiotics in Russia was accomplished by G. Shpet. Jakobson communicated with Shpet at the Moscow linguistic circle in the 1920s. They both referred to the ideas of Husserl, and, as Jakobson acknowledged himself, he borrowed many ideas from Shpet—in particular, the idea of semiotics. Shpet’s helped implement the idea of “integral knowledge” that opened a perspective of the analysis of knowledge as an open symbolic sign system. This methodological approach appears to be especially topical nowadays in the sphere of humanities, which scientific character does not exclude historicism. The ideas of Russian philosophers, then, provide a productive context immediately as well as long-term prospects for developing the methodology of the humanities. The concepts that prevail in modern methodology accentuate the historical relativity and the outer social determinacy of scientific knowledge. Meanwhile the problem of the cultural–historical status of the humanities and the problem of addressing the idea of “integral knowledge” become increasingly topical and allow the transfer of the epistemological search for the conditions and the landmarks of scientificity. (shrink)

This article demonstrates the unique role of the Russian philosophical tradition in the formation of an individual’s self-consciousness and attempts to overcome the limitati...

It is not by chance that the title of this article paraphrases Gustav Gustavovich Shpet’s article “The Skeptic and His Soul”. Is Stavrogin a skeptic? Yes, and the novel Demons is a narrative...

I found Shpet's article "A Work on Philosophy" [Rabota po filosofii], which we present to the reader's attention, in the Shpet archives stored in the Lenin State Library and passed it on to the editorial board of the journal Logos, where it was published by I. Chubarov. The small circulation of that journal makes it appropriate to republish this text, which is of major importance for an understanding of Shpet's philosophical position and provides a good clarification of the subsequent logic (...) of development of his conception. Although the article is unfinished, there is no reason to lament this fact, since all of its basic ideas and their logical development were realized by Shpet in subsequent publications. A whole series of his works is devoted to grounding and affirming so-called positive philosophy, the basic features of which I would like to clarify. (shrink)

The conception on which the affirmative philosophy of G.G. Shpet rests can be called hermeneutic phenomenology. The choice of this term demands explanation. Shpet's basic hermeneutic work, Hermeneutics and Its Problems [Germenevtika i ee problemy], was completed in 1918. At the time hermeneutics was understood usually as the art of grasping the meaning of a text. It is worth noting that this art was quite specific. It consisted mostly of a set of psychological techniques for "penetrating" into the internal world (...) of the text's author. The techniques were empathy, sympathy, immersion in a historico-cultural world, and imaginative penetration into the author's creative "workshop." Understood in this way, hermeneutics was a psychologically loaded research method. And if it is treated only in that way, the recently coined term "hermeneutic phenomenology" is in respect to content internally contradictory. As I see it, Shpet fully realized what conclusions could follow from this. Nevertheless his fundamental aspirations are connected precisely with the idea of unifying hermeneutics and phenomenology. This is possible because words have a complex structure . The sense of a word is objective and can be known by nonpsychological methods. The art of comprehending the sense of a text must inevitably include semiotic methods as well as logical and phenomenological techniques. They are aimed at comprehending (studying, researching, but not "grasping" or "sympathizing with" the objective, internal sense of the text. All the other elements of the sensible structure of the text are overlaid with the psychological peculiarities of the author and historical and social conditions. They are external factors that influence the sense of the text in a distinctive way and, without question, must be taken into account and included in the investigation of texts under the general heading "conditions of understanding," which are comprehended by the historical method. The psychological and historical methods in hermeneutics were historically conditioned research techniques, scientific means of comprehending sense under conditions when semiotic means were not yet developed, contemporary logico-semantic techniques were not available, and the phenomenological method was not yet invented. For this reason hermeneutics is reducible conceptually to a mere psychological art: it was only forced into being this by the lack of technical instrumentation. Moreover, the psychological hermeneutics of the nineteenth century may be called without any exaggeration the historical variant of hermeneutics in general. (shrink)

The genesis of classical science was accompanied by a transition from logical to mathematical analysis. This change did not mean a rejection of Aristotle's canons of logic; it was simply that these canons became inadequate. They underwent a certain generalization and, in the course of this, came closely to approximate mathematical analysis, the foundations of the calculus of the infinitesimal. Classical science no longer took as its point of departure the notion of motion from "something" into "something," as did Peripatetic (...) physics and cosmology . The initial concept is motion, considered from point to point and instant to instant. This kind of differential notion of motion was clearly expressed by Kepler when he wrote: "Where Aristotle sees direct oppositeness between two things, with no mediating links, there I, looking at geometry philosophically, find a mediated opposition; so that where Aristotle employs a single term, ‘other,’ I use two: ‘larger’ and ‘smaller.’". (shrink)

The article is an attempt at the reverse engineering of conceptual architecture and logic of David Bloor's Strong Programme (SP) in the sociology of scientific knowledge via explicating key resources and interpretative techniques for constructing it. To do this I show how problematic is a conventional interpretation of the SP as a radicalization of Kuhn's theory of science and as a sociologization of epistemology. This problematization allows me to put anew three questions concerning the SP. In what sense it is (...) post-positivist? In what sense it is sociological? Does it belong to social epistemology? To answer these questions I set myself four tasks. First, Bloor’s theoretical position concerning the Kuhn-Popper debate is located. Second, I point to and present Mary Hesse’s network model of science (NM) as a crucial theoretical source for the early SP. Third, I analyze in detail how Bloor interpreted and appropriated NM. Finally, I show what theoretical and methodological effects this interpretation had for the SP as presented in 1976. The general layout of the conceptual architecture of SP is modeled on the Hesse’s NM. It combines the principle of correspondence and that of coherence and sees the language of science as a network of predicates and laws segmented by contingent and empirical boundaries and not a priori logical divisions between theory and observation. But Bloor creatively interprets and appropriates NM by the double move of generalization and specification. Whereas Hesse’s NM refers to the functioning of scientific language, in Bloor’s hands, it comes to describe human learning in general inscribed in psychological processes (perception and thinking). As a result, SP is based on a form of psychological empiricism that sees science as a two-storied building. The first floor (perception) ensures correspondence and the second one (thinking) provide conditions of coherence. SP of 1976 is a specific model for the sociological segmentation of the second floor. (shrink)

A vast literature has been devoted to the Dialectics of Nature and dialectics in Capital. There is a considerable number of works in which the connection between the philosophical generalization of natural science in the Dialectics of Nature and the philosophical aspects of the economic categories in Capital are analyzed. I should like to touch upon only one aspect of the problem — that aspect which pertains to certain new problems in philosophical and economic thought. Reference is, first, to the (...) new, unprecedented role of philosophy and natural science in the period of the scientific and technological revolution under the conditions of the unification and planning of science and, second, to the unprecedented dynamism of the economy today. This dynamism requires a radical rethinking of categories, and that rethinking, in turn, requires a return to the fundamental categories of Capital. (shrink)

A vast literature has been devoted to the Dialectics of Nature and dialectics in Capital. There is a considerable number of works in which the connection between the philosophical generalization of natural science in the Dialectics of Nature and the philosophical aspects of the economic categories in Capital are analyzed. I should like to touch upon only one aspect of the problem — that aspect which pertains to certain new problems in philosophical and economic thought. Reference is, first, to the (...) new, unprecedented role of philosophy and natural science in the period of the scientific and technological revolution under the conditions of the unification and planning of science and, second, to the unprecedented dynamism of the economy today. This dynamism requires a radical rethinking of categories, and that rethinking, in turn, requires a return to the fundamental categories of Capital. (shrink)

When we discuss skepticism, we generally mean a certain philosophical movement with a fundamental basis in doubt. At the same time, the history of philosophy gives us another highly productive, met...

Russian philosophy is “a sphere of conversation” in which thought is “divined”. It is a realm of search for “universal meaning” and “cultivation” of historical reality. Such a “conversation” around the work of Dostoyevsky took place in the 1920s among philosophers (including members of the Free Philosophical Association or Volfila in its abbreviated form). The theme takes on added significance at the hands of Ya. E. Golosovker and S. L. Frank whose intellectual affinity manifests itself today in the way they (...) interpret Kantian motives in the work of Dostoyevsky. Reflecting on “the logic of imagination” Golosovker draws attention to the fact that the concrete-metaphysical method of seeing the world is not identical to the amphiboly of Kant’s reflexive concepts. He made it the central theme of his book, Dostoyevsky and Kant, immersing the philosophical component of the novel The Brothers Karamazov in the context of Kant’s antinomies. The later Frank took up the subject of Dostoyevsky’s worldview in response, as it were, to the discussion of the problem of cultural crisis at Volfila (including at meetings “In Memory of Dostoyevsky”). Following Yakov Golosovker, Andrey Bely, Aron Steinberg, Semyon Lurie and others, he continued the discussion of the crisis in its organised forms. In this context, too, Kant is a significant presence. For Frank, as for Golosovker, Dostoyevsky’s world view has a “concrete-metaphysical character”. They come to this conclusion reflecting on the problem of freedom as seen by Dostoyevsky who sought to overcome Kant’s antinomies. (shrink)

The authors discuss two interpretations of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology: by Lev Shestov and by Gustav Shpet. While each of these thinkers followed his own path, they shared an idea of historicism typical of Russian philosophy, a historicism related to the existential dimension of the human being. This article suggests that the interpretation of historicism in the tradition of “positive philosophy on Russian soil” was fruitful for the development of phenomenological topics in Shpet’s and Shestov’s hermeneutics.

We continue the research of the relation $\hspace {1mm}\widetilde {\mid }\hspace {1mm}$ on the set $\beta \mathbb {N}$ of ultrafilters on $\mathbb {N}$, defined as an extension of the divisibility relation. It is a quasiorder, so we see it as an order on the set of $=_{\sim }$ -equivalence classes, where $\mathcal {F}=_{\sim }\mathcal {G}$ means that $\mathcal {F}$ and $\mathcal {G}$ are mutually $\hspace {1mm}\widetilde {\mid }$ -divisible. Here we introduce a new tool: a relation of congruence modulo an (...) ultrafilter. We first recall the congruence of ultrafilters modulo an integer and show that $=_{\sim }$ -equivalent ultrafilters do not necessarily have the same residue modulo $m\in \mathbb {N}$. Then we generalize this relation to congruence modulo an ultrafilter in a natural way. After that, using iterated nonstandard extensions, we introduce a stronger relation, which has nicer properties with respect to addition and multiplication of ultrafilters. Finally, we introduce a strengthening of $\hspace {1mm}\widetilde {\mid }\hspace {1mm}$ and show that it also behaves well with respect to the congruence relation. (shrink)

In this article we reveal the common conditions of modern social philosphy, which theoretical discourse is subordinated to critical discourse, as distinguished from the canonical I. Kant’s, G. Hegel’s, M. Heidegger’s, M. Sheller’s J.-P. Sartre’s philosophical theories, which are bonded with the development of positivist epistemological, historical, ontological or anthropological presuppositions. We will talk about tree main conditions: 1) decline of theological definition of subject, 2) mechanism of repetition, 3) interdisciplinarity. In the first case, we will discuss transition from subject (...) definition through the God to his definition through the figure of Other, which allows philosophers as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche or Sheller expose metaphysics with consistent methodological criticism. In the second case, we will talk about forming of critical discourse establishing itself as the extended analog of psychoanalytical revealing of unconsciousness content. In the third case, we will examine interdisciplinary approach, assuming combination of different methods possible to increase this criticism and put empirical borders of its theoretical presuppositions. (shrink)

The following two theses constitute the theoretical core of all epistemic conceptions of truth: (1) The concept of truth can be explicated in epistemic terms (e.g. in terms of justified assertability under ideal epistemic conditions, ideal coherence, ideal consensus etc.). (2) The assumption that there could be truths which cannot, in principle, be known to be true is false or even absurd. The book scrutinizes theses (1) and (2). It contains discussions of the truth-theoretical approaches of Peirce, Putnam, Dummett, C. (...) Wright, Apel, Habermas and others, offers an account of the speech act of assertion, a critique of deflationism about truth, an analysis of the concept of fallibility and a discussion of Fitch's paradox of knowability. Im Zentrum epistemischer Wahrheitskonzeptionen stehen die folgenden beiden Thesen: (1) Der Wahrheitsbegriff kann durch epistemische Konzepte idealer Begründbarkeit, Behauptbarkeit, Kohärenz oder Konsensfähigkeit expliziert werden. (2) Die Annahme, es könnte wahre Aussagen geben, die prinzipiell nicht als wahr erkennbar oder doch begründbar sind, ist falsch oder sogar sinnlos. "Wahrheit, Begründbarkeit und Fallibilität" unterzieht diese Thesen einer kritischen Prüfung. Neben der Diskussion wahrheitstheoretischer Ansätze von Peirce, Putnam, Wright, Apel und anderen enthält dieses Buch eine Bestimmung der normativen Relevanz des Wahrheitsbegriffs für Behauptungshandlungen, eine Kritik des Deflationismus, eine Analyse des Konzepts der Fallibilität sowie eine Diskussion des Paradox of Knowability. (shrink)

The formalism of (±)-frequency parts , previously applied to solution of the D'Alembert equation in the case of the electromagnetic field, is applied to solution of the Klein-Gordon equation for the K-G field in the presence of sources. Retarded and advanced field operators are obtained as solutions, whose frequency parts satisfy a complex inhomogeneous K-G equation. Fourier transforms of these frequency parts are solutions of the central equation, which determines the time dependence of the destruction/creation operators of the field. The (...) retarded field operator is resolved into kinetic and dissipative components. Correspondingly, the energy/stress tensor is resolved into three components; the power/force density, into two—a kinetic and a dissipative component. As in the analogous electromagnetic case the dissipation theorem is derived according to which work done by the dissipative power/force is negative: energy/momentum is dissipated from the sources to the K-G field. Boson quantization conditions are satisfied by the kinetic component but not by the dissipative component of the retarded K-G field. (shrink)

Neuroconstructivism is a hybrid of two incompatible philosophical traditions: a radical idealism insisting upon the free activity of the Subject; and a radical materialistic anthropomorphism, which ascribes inherent properties of humans (e.g., the ability to construct) to nonhuman objects or body parts (e.g., the brain). The two traditions can be combined only by obscuring or confusing the basic notions.

A set of axioms is presented defining an ‘analytic Zariski structure’, as a generalisation of Hrushovski and Zilber’s Zariski structures. Some consequences of the axioms are explored. A simple example of a structure constructed using Hrushovski’s method of free amalgamation is shown to be a non-trivial example of an analytic Zariski structure. A number of ‘quasi-analytic’ results are derived for this example e.g. analogues of Chow’s theorem and the proper mapping theorem.